The Spiritual Art of Changing Your Mind

It's hard being the ignorant one in my family. I didn’t realize the full implications of it at the time, but I married a person with a genius IQ. I thought my two master’s degrees surely could even the playing field, but not so much.

When we were taking a walk at dusk one day and I commented that it was the hour for deer to be active, Cath noted that deer were actually crepuscular animals. I didn’t see anything wrong with building our shed with the nails that came with the lumber from the company; but of course after a landslide on our property relocated the shed by 50 feet—and it remained intact—it was because Cath had insisted on using screws rather than nails. Although I am the licensed therapist, Cath has a better grasp of dialectical behavioral theory, internal family systems, and trauma resilience than I do. So as you can see, I’ve had to get used to being wrong—a lot. I bow to my partner’s superior knowledge in just about every area except Bible trivia and maybe classical music.

No one likes being wrong. It’s embarrassing, sometimes humiliating. And it doesn’t feel good. That is especially true in our capitalistic, individualistic culture where people excel and succeed and gain power by standing out, and by making ourselves seem bigger and better every day through continual increased productivity and growth. No one rewards us for owning up to mistakes, or realizing we had it all wrong. Our society does not suffer errors. Instead, from kids on the playground to the highest reaches of government, we are taught to cover up mistakes, put a spin on them, or blame someone else.

This aversion to mistakes has grown up in society hand-in-hand with entrenched belief systems. In our current polarized political and religious climate, leaders model for us that rather than listen with open-mindedness, the way to get ahead in life is to dig in on our already entrenched beliefs, even if it means making up “alternative facts” to support them.

Researchers tell us we get a dopamine hit whenever we process information that reinforces our existing beliefs. Confirmation bias is a real thing! It feels good to “stick to our guns,” even if we are dead wrong about them. Evolutionarily, this is an interesting phenomenon. But that is a story for a different day. Suffice it to say, for now, that we are neurologically wired and socially conditioned not to admit being wrong.

These concepts have gotten me to thinking recently not only about the gifts of being open-minded; but even about the gifts of being wrong. We need the latter in order to achieve the former. And while almost all of us think we are openminded, I would wager that few of us are as open-minded as we think we are. Think for a minute about the last time you changed your mind about something really important--more than changing your outfit or your order at a restaurant? Can you remember?

I don’t mean that we should be so open-minded that we abandon who we are, or that we are blown around by any “belief of the day.” Change is more a matter of degree. But I believe, without “aha” moments, or at least “hmm” moments, we stop growing and developing. When there is nothing new for us to learn, or for us to be astonished by, we actually cease to live in a way. So if we can’t be wrong, can we really be alive?

If we could get beyond society’s pressure telling us to deny mistakes and double down on our beliefs, life presents us with many catalysts for changing our minds about things. My list is by no means comprehensive, but here are a few of the ways I have changed my mind through the years.

1.    Formal education.

2.    Epiphanies—sudden revelations

3.    Being faced with new information that contradicts what I previously “knew”

4.    Creating a new internal narrative

5.    Engagement and relationships with others

All these categories overlap with one another and are intertwined. But for the sake of exploration, I’ve tried to come up with examples of each of these pathways to mind-changing.

EDUCATION

First—education. I am aware that many members of this congregation have invested their lives into the profession of teaching. When it works well, education opens up our minds in spectacular ways.

One small example for me occurred in 4th grade, when Mrs. Suggs was offering a science lesson about the essential role of water in our society, and some of the ways we wasted it. She shared a lot of statistics, but the one that grabbed me was that when I left the faucet on while I was brushing my teeth, four gallons of clean drinkable water went needlessly swirling down the drain. Somehow, in my 9-year-old brain, that information changed my life. From that day forward, I believe I can honestly say that I have never let the faucet run while I brush my teeth. If I brush twice a day, and allowing for a quarter of a gallon for rinsing my mouth after brushing, over the last 45 years I have saved more than 123,000 gallons of water since that science lesson. And that’s not including my parents and brothers, whom I also badgered to stop leaving the water running. What I love most about that story, though, is not how many gallons of water I conserved, but that that moment may have served as my first introduction to being a good human in relationship to this beautiful planet. That was the start of recognizing my responsibility to a spectacular but vulnerable Earth—a value I hold very strongly now.

EPIPHANIES

An epiphany is a sudden revelation—a seemingly unprovoked “aha” moment that comes when we least expect it. During my first job out of college, I had one of those epiphanies. I sat bolt upright in bed one night and realized that nobody really cared what my GPA was, and that in the bigger picture, it mattered very little. My entire four years of college I kept my nose to the grindstone, striving, studying, memorizing, and sweating my way to that 4.0. I had no narrative for myself other than “work harder so you can get ahead.” And the farther you go holding onto that perfect score, the higher the stakes feel not to let it drop. Now with my midnight revelation I realized it didn’t really matter. I likely would have still gotten that job with a 3.8, or a 3.4. I was a good person without that high GPA. Thanks to that epiphany, the first thing I did when I started on my master’s degree the following year was intentionally make myself make a B.

NEW INFORMATION

The third example of changing my mind shows up when I am faced with new information that contradicts my strongly held beliefs. Almost all my life I have been a staunch supporter of women’s reproductive rights. Abortion is never a simple decision, and I wish it didn’t need to exist. But I am a passionate supporter of women having control over what happens to their bodies. However, recently I’ve been reading a lot about disability justice, trying to expand my understanding of disability. In the book The Future is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, asserted that choosing abortion as a response to something like Down Syndrome might be seen as a form of eugenics, where we put more value on the lives of “healthy” individuals than those who happen to have a rearranged, missing, or additional chromosome. Isn’t it true that prospective parents may say “I don’t care if they are a boy or a girl, just as long as they are healthy.” What is that saying about individuals who don’t meet our narrow definition of “healthy?” What is healthy anyway?

I don’t mean to sidetrack us into a debate about abortion. What I want to convey here is that when faced with new information about a long-held belief, my brain has a choice to make. I could abandon my former belief, ignore the new information and dig in my heels on what I previously believed, or somehow wrestle with the tension between the two and try to find a way to integrate them. This latter option entails holding space for complexity and nuance, rather than insisting on clearcut “right” or “wrong” views. I believe that integration is the most challenging of my options, but also the most generative.

CREATING NEW NARRATIVES

A fourth example of changing my mind is in creating a new narrative. We are constantly making up stories in our heads about ourselves and others, and our brains are actually wired to fill in the gaps of our understanding with “assumptions.” But these assumptions about ourselves and others are fallible, and changeable. This is one of the tenets of psychotherapy—to reframe something we have always believed about ourselves, in order to see ourselves with a little more patience, grace, or objectivity. One example of this in my life was overcoming my own internalized homophobia so that I could accept myself for who I am. This was a huge leap, considering I feared rejection by my family, loss of my job, and exclusion from being able to get married. A lot of hours of therapy and numerous courageous “coming outs” were required before I could embrace a new self-affirming narrative of who I was in the world.

RELATIONSHIPS AND EMPATHY

A final catalyst for changing my mind is getting to know people who are different from me, to forge relationships. I shared with some of you here in this space several years ago about our curmudgeonly neighbor, “Homer,” who, among other things, started flying a Confederate flag during the 2016 election season. This horrified us, but we stopped short of confronting him. We didn’t feel able to address it in a detached manner and believed arguing with him would only make matters worse. Instead, Cath and I chose to try to connect with Homer and his family in positive ways. This began small—with smiles and waves as we met each other in the neighborhood. Then I learned that Homer worked for the same healthcare system that I did, so I started seeking him out, just to say hello, call him my neighbor, and make a comment about some non-controversial aspect of our neighborhood. He finally started recognizing me as his neighbor, and we would carry on brief awkward conversations about how tired we were from a long day’s work, or how we hoped it didn’t snow again this weekend. A couple of months later I saw an obituary in the paper for Homer’s mother. Cath and I sent some flowers to Homer’s family. The next week at work, Homer sought me out, came right up to me in my office and gave me a big hug, thanking me for the flowers and telling me we couldn’t know how much that meant to him.

Homer eventually took his confederate flag down. When I thanked him for it, he said the only reason he wasn’t still flying one was that he couldn’t find a new one to replace the old one. I was able to share with Homer that our Black friends were unsettled by that flag when they came to visit us, and he informed me that the flag should not “scare” anyone. He told me what the flag meant to him. We had to agree to disagree. But listening to his story helped me understand him better. And, we have kept talking, little by little building up a relationship based on whatever we can find in common— grief, hard work, and the challenge of changing seasons. In more recent years, we have also gotten to know the younger generation that is living with Homer and his wife. They brought a package to us one day when UPS couldn’t get all the way up our rutted gravel road, and Cath politely ignored the pistol on Shawn’s waist band. Last Christmas Cath got it in her head that we should make Christmas cookies—something we had never done—and share them with our neighbors. So, miraculously the concoctions were edible enough to share, and Homer’s family was included. A few days later, Homer’s daughter and son-in-law came up to our home to visit—not with a pistol this time, but dressed as Santa Claus and his elf.

This felt like a true triumph for us… not because we changed Homer, but because we built a bridge. Even though Homer’s family made changes, and we made changes, we learned it wasn’t nearly so important to persuade these people to remove confederate flags and lay aside weapons, as it was to build a relationship with our neighbors, to be able to see them as human beings, and maybe to help us all understand each other a bit better. I’m guessing that Homer’s family has had to open up their minds quite a bit to make space for those lesbians at the end of the road. In fact, their openness likely was the greater leap of the two households.

Metanoia is a Greek term used in Christian theology to express a fundamental change in thinking that leads to a fundamental change in behavior or living. We historically have relegated this to traditional understandings of “repentance” and “atonement,” but the word is much deeper and richer than that. I hope Christians do not limit themselves to having a singular “transformative change of heart,” once in life and never again. And of course this reversal is not limited to Christianity: Siddhartha recognized the limitations of materialism, and intuitively knew he should leave those comforts and live as an ascetic. After his awakening, with amazing new insight, he understood how wrong materialism had truly been because it separated him from others and from the earth.

Aristotle called this kind of sudden reversal “peripeteia,” which literally means a “turning around” and is pervasive in classical literature. For example, King Lear is taken in by his conniving daughters and persuaded to banish the only daughter who truly loved him. Finally, but too late, Lear realized that he had it all upside down. He listened to the wrong person and hurt the one who loved him. Although the play ends in so much tragedy, recognizing his error gave Lear some measure of redemption: he lost his sanity, but regained his humanity.

In his article “The Art of Being Wrong,” Henry Shukman suggests that the most crucial moment of metanoia, or peripeteia, is the moment when the old belief is released, but the new belief has not yet taken hold. Shukman says

the gift is perhaps not “to have seen something new, but to have seen through something old, and to have given up any viewpoint we may have had. … That’s where the real waking is—where there is neither the old dream nor a new one but just the marvelous shock, indeed the relief, of finding we had been wrong.”

I believe perhaps that space before we latch onto some new “truth” is the most sacred moment and the moment of spiritual growth—where we are suspended in not knowing. Too often, when we reject one belief, we immediately turn to a different belief, which we cling too just as tightly, until it too ends up being wrong–or just too limiting. Peripeteia can actually teach us to hold all beliefs more lightly, to recognize that if we were wrong before, we could very well be wrong again—or at least not as right as we thought.

This kind of reversal in our understanding can lead to deeper empathy, and even a radical connection to others and to the world around us. Each of us can only see the world through our own lens–as with the parable of the blind men describing the elephant. As our preconceptions are shattered, we embrace our own inadequacy and limits, which can prompt an explosion of gratitude, empathy, and kindness toward ourselves and others.

The spiritual art of changing our mind, of recognizing our fallibility, offers many gifts.

Fallibility gives us humility. If we were wrong about one thing, might we be capable of being wrong about anything? About everything?

Fallibility gives us empathy. If we can be wrong about anything, then might we be more patient with others we feel might be wrong about something (everything)?

Fallibility gives us freedom. If we can be wrong about anything, then the world takes on deeper beauty, mystery, and possibility. We can grow and change, even if by degree or over a long period of time. We are not stuck. There’s more out there for us

Fallibility gives us relationships. Genuine, meaningful relationships are so much more important than staunch adherence to some narrowly defined premise that eventually will turn out not to be as accurate as we once thought.

And, fallibility gives us life. Only in recognizing our limits can we grow and develop and free ourselves to think critically and hold our beliefs more lightly. Like the Buddha, we have the opportunity for enlightenment, or even just a series of “aha” moments that move us closer toward our potential as humans.

And yet, all this change is hard work. It isn’t guaranteed. Siddhartha could have just as easily stayed in his posh home and given alms to the poor. Humans are resistant to change. We have a fear of the unknown, and we crave a homeostatic environment. Often, we crave certainty. Or for some of us, just staying alive is so overwhelming that we don’t have the luxury of considering alternative theories about life.

So humans live in this paradox: We have to change in order to grow and stay alive. But we also resist and avoid change in every conceivable way. Life has to be this way, Shukman says, because we can never see more than we can see at any one time, and because the way we see things is always the gift and the problem.

A former supervisor taught me the invaluable lesson of “suspending my disbelief” when providing support to a confused or delusional patient. It’s amazing what surfaces when you really listen beyond what’s factual to find what’s true. That’s what storytelling is all about, right? I often think humanity would be in a better place if we told more stories and hurled fewer factoids at each other. I’m also learning, slowly, how to “suspend my belief” when speaking with people whose beliefs directly contradict mine. This helps me hear the feelings and needs underlying their beliefs, and hold open the possibility for my own growth. When Cath and I have a disagreement, she always disarms my mounting frustration with the phrase “I can see why you might feel that way.” And if we really want to make our conversation partner gleeful, Zag blogger Chris says we should practice saying these six words, in this order: “You were right. I was wrong.” He promises it gets easier over time if we practice, and it also helps remind us that we can still learn new things. If that seems too hard, we can always start with the simpler phrase, “I don’t know.”

I’ve done a lot of exploration about religious trauma, and what happens to folks who feel so wounded by their religious belief that they leave it altogether. One phenomenon I have noticed is that some people experience an extreme shift—from assuming their religion had all the answers to believing there was nothing at all true or redemptive about their religion. When our change of belief is purely a reactionary grasping at something opposite of what hurt us, we tend to open ourselves to the same harmful effects inflicted by the first belief, because we have not integrated the harm and learned from it and somehow integrated it into a new understanding of ourselves. This all-or-nothing craving for certitude sometimes drives us to claim a stronger stance than might be most healing and life-giving.

So maybe the greater spiritual gift is not in changing our minds, or even being able to say we were wrong, but in holding open a questioning space where certainty used to be.

This reminds me of the song “Closer to Fine,” by the Indigo Girls:

I'm trying to tell you something 'bout my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you’ve ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
It's only life after all.

Well, darkness has a hunger that's insatiable
And lightness has a call that's hard to hear
And I wrap my fear around me like a blanket
I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it.
I'm crawling on your shores

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There's more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine.
The closer I am to fine

Thank you for this opportunity today.

May we go forth and celebrate all the ways we discover we are wrong. And may we find the courage to let go of that elusive “definitive source” as we flounder our way closer to “fine.”