We'll start here with the Talking Heads: https://youtu.be/5IsSpAOD6K8?si=aBoK1CtdbDVRKkOc

There was so much going on here, Sally. I think most on my mind, besides the aspects of the scourge of confirmation bias infecting the subject of your class in chaos, are things I read last summer in Alan Arkins, "Out of My Mind (Not Quite a Memoir)," which I highly recommend. I read all 100 short pages in one sitting.

"We hang onto our belief structures as if they are real and tangible things. These beliefs. These huge hunks of granite edifices in our consciousness upon which we base our lives. It’s enough most of the time that our beliefs comfort us, make us feel part of a group — help us get through the day, never mind whether or not they are true."

When faced with visual evidence of something that a friend of his refused to believe, the he describes this conversation:

"One night I showed it to a few friends, who reacted in awe, and afterwards, the wife of one of them said, 'Well, I refuse to believe this.'

'You refuse?' I asked with some incredulity.

'I refuse,' she repeated. She had been shaken by the film — that was clear. Her voice and emotional state made it obvious that she had witnessed not a piece of theatrical manipulation but an event. But she refused to believe it.

'How can you refuse?' I asked. 'I don’t understand. Either what you saw seemed real or it didn’t.'

'No, I refuse to believe it,' she repeated it again, but she went on. 'Because if I believe this I’m going to have to believe a lot of other things, and I refuse to do that.'”

That and something else you'll find interesting, is discussed in my This Vivid Dream Saved Esther Raab’s Life https://medium.com/channspirations/this-vivid-dream-saved-esther-raabs-life-ed37b1637d23, subtitled "A magical tale of synchronicity from the life of a Holocaust survivor and an unshakable and humble belief in the power of the unknown"

And then of course Sally, your poem saying that one has to learn to unconditionally love themselves, is the purest of universal truths. One really can't successfully love or have a relationship with another if one doesn't have that with themself.

PS: Back to Arkin:

"
In the first chapter, Arkin talks about several transitions from belief set to belief set over the course of his life and how with respect to each one he would have vigorously or comfortably tried to change the whole rest of the world to his way of thinking. He writes:

'After a few years of this, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to stop believing in so many things. I looked back and realized that for the first half of my life I’d been ready to change the world three times with three sets of beliefs, each one of which I’d outgrown and discarded, so it seemed a better idea to just shut up. I started to slowly let go of my needs for the rest of the world and began living more and more in my feelings and my intuitions and concentrating on the enormous faults within myself that needed addressing and correcting. As I did so, and it was a slow and painful process, I could see that whatever work I did on the inside was slowly taking root, making me saner, more patient, somewhat more compassionate and all of this began to affect a new view of the world which I tried hard not to concretize and make rules for. As a result, everything started to become more fluid, less frightening, and more surprising, both inside me and around me, and I started thinking maybe that was enough for a while. Belief systems, I started to realize, were wish lists. Things you’d like to be true. They were not immutable laws.'"

That's from my https://medium.com/the-taoist-online/hermann-hesse-alan-arkin-and-marcus-meet-in-a-bar-to-discuss-philosophy-with-marcus-7582ce0bad14