Close minded, am I?

A very good friend of mine made an statement that he couldn't believe that I was as closed-minded as an assertion I wrote made me seem to be. From the perspective he detailed, logically I can't refute this claim. I can even go so far as agree with it. Some might be saddened by this, I am not. I accept that I am a enslaved by my own prejudices, but that will not stop me from attempting to work within them to understand external ideas.

Perhaps I have not been clear enough about why I write this blog for everyone else to understand what I am creating here. This is not a search for universal truth, but an examination of my personal truth. That examination takes the form of looking at how I think and working through the process of how I reached the conclusions I have come to. I hope that being honest about the process and detailing it will allow others to point out the flaws and in turn allow me to further refine my understanding of the external world. Nobody should hold their breath while I do this, especially concerning matters of spirituality.

So what is my problem? Put most simply, I am the problem. To put it into an analogy, my thoughts are a faded teddy bear missing an eye. I know I should get a new one, but I love this one. It has been with me all of my life. I can see how it has been patched over the years and even the eyes have been replaced from time to time. I can identify why and when the repairs were necessary. I can even detail how they were done, but I still have the bear. I'm not even sure I could get a new bear, but I do believe I can make the old bear better.

The bear is a metaphor for my mind, which is made up of a collection of thoughts. These thoughts are the collection of ideas, prejudices, experiences, and conclusions I have collected over my life. Some live in the stasis of maybe, others are reinforced and solid, and some are scarred in by pain I am not ready to confront and heal.

I can know all this and still not overcome it. That is partly because of the undeniable emotional interference to actually doing so. We have emotional input tied to everything we have thought or done. With practice we can suppress or detach from emotional connection to the things we think and do, but this takes effort and energy that we can't always spare.

I enjoy and am often exhausted by working towards the goal of improving my thinking. However I am not fortunate enough to expend all of my resources towards that goal. I do think it would be a worthy expenditure, but the fact is we don't live in a society that wants to, or possibly can, support an individual to do so. Thus the process for me at least becomes retarded in growth.

In conclusion, know I have limits on how open-minded I can be. I do want to overcome them, but it has to take a backseat to the pursuit of functionality in our current societal framework. To quote Bill Maer- I'm crazy, not stupid.

Thanks for reading, hope you have a good day.