Open-mindedness is healthy. But how much is too much?

How I balance openness and skepticism

The Meat Puppets, one of my favorite 1980s punk bands, summed up the dilemma beautifully: “Open up your mind, in pours the trash.”

I’m sure you’ve experienced some version of this. As soon as you open your mind to something like meditation or spirituality (for lack of a better word), you can find yourself having to sift through oceans of garbage before you come to the nuggets of actionable wisdom.

So how do you balance the need for open-mindedness—which is correlated with lower anxiety and increased professional success—with natural, self-protective skepticism?

In my experience, this is more art than science, but I will share two little mantras that help me walk this line. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, both of these come from my friend and longtime meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein.)

The first phrase is something Joseph picked up from the writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who talked about “the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Practical application: when you’re confronted with an idea you’re having trouble metabolizing, you don’t have to swallow it whole—but you can put your mind into a receptive mode, one where you can imagine the possibility that your view of reality might be limited.

As someone who has a history of reflexively rejecting ideas, I find bringing this phrase—“the willing suspension of disbelief”—to mind to be really helpful.

Of course, you don’t want to take this too far and become gullible, or an intellectual pushover.

So here’s another phrase that might provide some balance. This one Joseph picked up from his first meditation teacher, Munindra.

Quick backstory: one time, Joseph happened upon his teacher in a street market in India, fiercely haggling with a vendor. Joseph confronted him about it later, saying, “You are always telling us to keep things simple. So what was that about?”

His teacher replied, “I said, ‘Be simple,’ not a simpleton.”

I used these phrases to help me navigate through a tricky situation recently. In recent years, it’s come to my attention that many of my favorite Buddhist teachers have been consulting a psychic medium. I was so confused and curious that I reached out to the psychic for a reading. On today’s podcast episode, you can hear the results. It’s a special episode, produced in conjunction with our friends over on the podcast Search Engine.

There’s no meditation paired with today’s Search Engine episode, but tune in Wednesday when we officially kick off July with our new Meditation Teacher of the Month.

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Episode cheatsheet

This week’s episode cheatsheet looks a little different. Since this episode is more of a personal investigation than a traditional guest interview, we’re just including the timestamps and transcript.