“It is a common fate of all knowledge to begin as heresy and end as orthodoxy.” Thomas Huxley
“We suffer to the exact degree that we resist having our eyes & hearts opened.” Adyashanti
OK, here's a classic example of "people in positions of power & influence" resisting with all their might something that revolutionized all our lives for the better:
“In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis, a doctor at Vienna’s General Hospital, noticed something important about the women and children he treated in the maternity ward. They died. Distressingly often. Semmelweis wondered if all of the autopsies he and his fellow colleagues performed on cadavers were somehow contaminating the next group of children and mothers they attended. So he developed a handwashing solution of chlorine and lime for physicians to rinse with between seeing patients. It worked. Infections dropped to below 1 percent on his ward.
But, among the other doctors, the reception was less kind. His colleagues mocked him, refusing to believe on principle that a gentleman’s hands could spread disease. Semmelweis himself could only offer up the vague concept of ‘cadaverous contamination’ to justify his protocol (this was several decades before the formal articulation of germ theory). The stress drove Semmelweis to a nervous breakdown. A bitter colleague had him committed to a lunatic asylum, where he was beaten by guards, and died of an infection that his very own handwashing technique would have prevented.
But Semmelweis’s legacy lives on, and not just in the grudging adoption of surgical hygiene. He’s also shaped the cognitive sciences, where the Semmelweis reflex – the idea that we habitually & often violently reject new evidence or new knowledge because it runs to counter to our preexisting articles of faith – has become a standby on the list of common cognitive biases.
Our cognitive biases hamper our ability to predict with any degree of certainty what’s going to happen next. That’s because the Semmelweis reflex kicks us out of accepting what is staring us in the face. We can’t wrap our head around it because it runs to counter to everything we hold to be self-evidently true.”
Jamie Wheal. “Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind.” Harper Wave, 2021.
Our current infatuation with dogmatic scientism (not legitimate science, but scientism as the latest 'opium of the people') blinds us to our own depth and ability to live a truly meaningful, peaceful life. As soon as we hear words like 'spirituality' or 'religion' or even 'depth' and "the Semmelweis reflex kicks us out of accepting what is staring us in the face."
“Were one asked to characterize (spirituality) in the broadest & most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the (direct experience) that there is an unseen order, and our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” William James, (paraphrased) “The Varieties of Religious Experience”
“The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working.
To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.” William James
“Too often, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, & the human tendency to put ourselves at the center.” Richard Rohr
“So much of our precious life force, our prana, our chi, our sacred energy, is spent on the Sisyphean task of pushing feelings away, trying to make them go 'somewhere else'... but where would they go? For even the Underworld is within us! So much creativity is released, so much relief is felt, when we break this age-old pattern of self-abandonment, go beyond our fearful conditioning, and try something totally new: staying close to feelings, not pushing them away, as they emerge in the freshness of the moment, looking for their true home – which is our own hearts. This is meditation: Breaking the cycle of fear.”
Jeff Foster
“Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.” Ram Dass
“That which is threatening to the ego is liberating for the heart.” Amaro Bhikkhu
"Once we have died to the false self,
we have a hope of getting out of our own way and
meeting the Holy One face to face.”
Mirabai Starr. “Caravan of No Despair. A Memoir of Loss and Transformation.” Sounds True, 2015.
“When the mortal mind appears, buddhahood disappears.
When the mortal mind disappears, buddhahood appears.
When the mind appears, reality disappears.
When the mind disappears, reality appears.” Bodhidharma
“May you experience each day as a sacred gift woven around the heart of wonder.”
John O’Donohue, “Imagination as the Path of the Spirit John O'Donohue”
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