Roger,...it's be awhile,...glad to see you chime in.
I personally don't feel the discussion is about "open-mind" but the distinction between sciential, cerebro-centric, psyche, Head-mind, and sapiential, cardio-centric, thymos, Heart-mind.
Fortunately there are litmus tests, that when understood, one can readily see if they are in the Head or the Heart,...for example, thinking, senses, lower emotions are conditions that can never enter the Heart, so if one is thinking, sensing, feeling lower emotions, then one can tag it, like one tags thoughts in meditation, so we can develop an alternate relationship with the conditions that are obstructing the Heart-mind.
It's kind of like Christian faith. The Bible says “prove all things” 1 Thess 5:21. So to prove one's faith,...to prove you are not a False Christian, the Faithful can accept Jesus’ litmus test for determining the true christian faithful, as published in the canonized text,…Mark 16:16-18. A true Christian, “the man who accepts baptism,…will be able to drink deadly poison without harm”.
Otherwise its just spiritual mediocrity. As Ken Wilber said:
"To dare to even speak about radical transformation, let alone call other people to a higher level, is against the unstated rules. And of course, one's definitely going to be put in one's place for doing something like that. But unless the possibility of genuine transformation is actually declared, unless one is willing to demonstrate it publicallyand to call other people to the same, no one is even going to know that it's possible. And than unknowingly, everybody's going to be participating in the conspiracy of mediocrity.
The conspiracy of mediocrity is basically the conspiracy to express your own ego instead of transcending it or letting go of it. The idea has become "if I can really emote and express my self-contriction with sincerity, I'm somehow spiritual". Actually, people who are involved in this boomeritis even deny the importance of Enlightenment or Awakening, because that's saying some states are higher than others - and we shouldn't be so judgemental. But guess what? Some states are higher. And so the entire raison d'etre gets tossed out because it offends the pluralistist ego.
The spiritual experience, which ideally should be a stepping stone to less ego and greater transparency, has become a victim of our therapeutic culture, where we don't make judgements because that would hurt egoic self-esteem, and so all we do is embrace, console, and celebrate the personal self. Spiritual practice has become nothing more than a form of therapy where self-acceptance rather than ego-transcendence is the goal. And the problem is that therapists are basically pimps for samsara. They want to hold onto the egoic self-contraction and make it feel good about itself.
This conspiracy of mediocrity is very unfortunate. The great promise of the human potential movement was very straightforward - there are higher human potentials. Now, from the therapeutic culture, people say, "wait a minute. you're saying there are higher potentials, so does that mean I'm lower? because that can't be right". All of a sudden it implied a judgement, and nobody's allowed to be higher because that means someone else is going to be lower. And you're not allowed to call anybody lower; therefore nobody's allowed to be higher.
So the Human Potential movement got derailed and was replaced by this therapeutic self-expression, self-acceptence movement, which catastrophically prevents higher transformation and mystical breakthroughs. What is missing in the New Age Community is real intellectual vigor. Under the therapeutic culture, if you feel good, you're enlightened. That is mediocrity, and a conspiracy toward mediocrity."
In our current therapeutic society people don't want to see that what they thought was meaningful may actually be meaningless.
Gee,...I must have C&Ped that 5 or 6 times in the past 8 years,...guess its an oldy but goody.
Eza