You certainly accomplished this with this essay. Well done--I highlighted quite a lot of it. As I read it, Alan Arkin's not quite a memoir, Out of My Mind, came to mind because in the first chapter, he 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. I wrote a bit more about the book here: https://thetaoist.online/hermann-hesse-alan-arkin-and-marcus-meet-in-a-bar-to-discuss-philosophy-with-marcus-7582ce0bad14. You might enjoy it.

I've had in mind to write another essay inspired by other parts of the book. For example, he writes, "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."

Here's the context around that quote. There was a man in Brazil known as Arigo. He had no medical training. Through some metaphysical processes affecting both him and his patients, he was able to perform surgeries such as removing tumors from an eye with a pocket knife and no anesthesia, and the patient wouldn't even bleed. Arkin and his wife traveled to Brazil and interviewed many people and confirmed that and so much more about this man and his accomplishments.

Arkin had first heard of Arigo and his surgeries when a reporter showed him a 16mm movie filmed by some American doctors in the 1970s. Arkin recounts the following story just before the quote:

"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.'"

DJ, while I have you, I have a question. I haven't seen you read me in a while. I just checked and I see you are no longer a subscriber of mine. Did you unsubscribe, which I would understand, or did Medium glitch us, which I have discovered has happened with other subscribers?