For those of you dealing with an emerging spiritual awareness heres some helpful advice from James Redfield on RESPONDING TO SKEPTICISM:Perhaps the biggest challenge to those of us beginning to live the new spiritual awareness is relating to skeptics. All of us, once we open up to the reality of synchronicity, find ourselves at times talking to someone who reacts negatively to our beliefs and directly questions the validity of our experiences. Although the skeptics are shrinking in number, there are still plenty of adherents to the old materialistic worldview who consider conversations about the mystical fanciful and unfounded. These discussions directly threaten their commonsense beliefs about what is real and rational in the natural world.The skeptics we run into seem to fall into two broad categories. The largest group is those who take a skeptical position not because they have thoroughly investigated the wide range of mystical encounters they are hearing about, but because they haven’t. They don’t have the time or inclination to look into such experiences, so they adopt the stance on the subject that feels safest: labeling it all absurd. Usually, these skeptics live and work among lots of doubters, who are critical of any new creation or assertion and who use ridicule as a means of gaining personal power over others. In that kind of environment, most people adopt a strictly conventional position to avoid conflict.The other type of skeptic we run into is the true adherent to scientific materialism. This is a person who might research to some extent the arena of mystical experience but who always falls back to the barricades of materialism, demanding objective proof of such claims. Arguments that mystical experiences have a consistent character over long historical periods or that thousands of unrelated people report the same thing or that statistical studies have repeatedly shown that intuitive and psychic ability is a natural occurrence, all fall on deaf ears.In dealing with skeptics, several approaches have proved to be effective. First of all, we must remember that a degree of skepticism is, in fact, important. All of us must avoid taking a faddish idea at face value and must look at any assertion about the nature of reality with a critical eye.Yet we must not forget that there is an equally important corollary to this principle, one that is too often forgotten: to stay open-minded enough to consider the phenomenon in question. Maintaining this balance between skepticism and openness is especially difficult when the phenomenon involves our inner psychology or spirituality.Two other important points are to always keep conversations friendly and to push toward areas of agreement. I would venture that almost everyone who now experiences perceptions of a mystical or spiritual nature was an extreme skeptic at one point in the past. In this sense, we are all ex-skeptics, and it may be important to remind ourselves again that the process of opening up to the mystical side of life is happening mainly through personal interaction; we see another taking seriously the idea of spiritual experience, and afterward we decide to investigate the matter ourselves.For this reason, we must take every conversation seriously. Our frank disclosure just might be the testimony that breaks a person’s entrenched position. And guess what? The reverse might also be true: the skeptic we’re speaking to might be correct on a given issue. Those of us who are exploring the potentials of human experience are doing nothing if we’re not committed to a two-way process of consensus building. We all have to listen to learn. It is open dialogue that ensures a widely debated viewpoint and keeps our perspective broad.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 00:17:54 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015