Great stuff, Graham. I feel honored and pleased that my comment became part of this fine follow up. There are more stories in Arkin's book that fit here. One reminds me of the story you tell here of the skeptic and the radio. Arkin's mom was the consummate materialist, which given the eastern mysticism that he began to gravitate to, didn't give them much to talk abiut after his dad/her husband died and they would fill the silence with trips to the mall. Then one day, out of the blue she says that Dad had come to visit her. Sat a few feet from her in the living room. Arkin writes:

"Was I about to have a new ally in my excursions into the intangible? Would we finally have something to talk about besides bargains? I knew I had to approach this very carefully, so I asked her as innocently as I could, "Did you believe this?"

"No!" she said. She said it firmly and with finality.

And that was the end of that. The door was closed and the subject never came up again.

It was a shocking and very funny moment and every time I think of it I laugh, but underneath there was a very profound thing taking place. I've seen it happen many times. If Mom had really taken in what had happened, really acknowledging Dad's appearance as an actual event in her life, it would have required her to make such a huge change in her view of reality that all of her belief structure would have had to go through a seismic shift. So she was happier keeping it as a secret event locked inside some sidebar in her view of reality. Something that she could refer to once in a while for comfort and then sequester away in a fold in her consciousness and not have to deal with it. Particularly with a son for whom her miraculous, but not far removed from the ideological yes, story was structure that he'd been working within for decades. And that was the end of that. She didn't want to discuss it."