Maragtas

I am sick of being told that I do not have a open mind. Long ago I wrote about the difficulty of having a truly open mind--or even knowing what this means. I called it 'the elusive open mind' (Blackmore 1987) because I know, after years and years of struggling with competing beliefs, searching for evidence, and looking deep into my own motivations and fears, that having an open mind is not easy. To me an open mind means this--that you are prepared to change your mind if the evidence suggests you should. This sounds simple, but is not. It is a balancing act between having a mind so open that it changes every time the wind blows, and so closed that impossible standards of evidence are required to change it. It is a world away from the kind of 'open mind' that critics love to flaunt--the kind that really means 'If you agree with me you have an open mind--if you agree with scientists you don’t'.

Sympathetic co-experiencing of the hero's life means to experience that life completely in a form compeltely different from the form from which it was, or could have been, experienced by the subiectum of that life himself. Co-experiencing in this form does not in the least strive toward the ultimate point of coinciding, merging with the co-experienced life...A sympathetically co-experienced life is given form not in the category of the I, but in the category of the other, as the life of another human being, another I...It is essentially experienced from outside.