One could also say that many people who suffer with certain issues /only/ do so because they've already successfully lied to themselves, and believed these less healthy lies.
Sometimes there are no exits, the commitment you mention doesn't take you anywhere good, you find yourself at the edge of mental sanity. Out of experience I can say there are periods where commitment to truth is literally life-threateningly dangerous.
You're welcome to suggest measures I should undertake to be more effective at getting to the truth in these matters.
Here's what I'm doing so far:
- Reading a wide variety of scientific sources across the spectrum of thought on these matters: Dr Bruce Lipton - pioneering stem cell biologist, now author and speaker; Rudy Tanzi - Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and researcher behind some of the biggest recent breakthroughs in Alzheimer's research; Lissa Rankin - mainstream physician and author; Bernardo Kastrup - PhD scientist, philosopher, author; Sir Roger Penrose - Physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science; Sam Harris - Neuroscientist/Atheist/Skeptic movement icon; Richard Dawkins - biologist & father of the modern Skeptic movement; Jerry Coyne of https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/;http://www.quackwatch.com/;https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/; Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. - Biologist and Author. Karl Popper - philosopher of science and leading contributor to The Scientific Method. Comparing points of view from all these sources with each other and with my own experiences and what I can establish from publicly available studies in science journals and papers published via NCBI.
- Conducting a variety of lab tests of physiological metrics over almost 10 years, including: blood pressure (was consistently high for a few months about 10 years ago, went low for an extended period around 5-6 years ago, and has been consistently optimal for the past 2 years); cholesterol (improving), blood sugar (normalising), iron & zinc (improving), hormones eg adrenaline, cortisol, thyroid (normalising), inflammation (reducing), white blood cell count (improving).
- Collaborating with acquaintances who have been afflicted with similar illnesses (chronic fatigue, auto-immune illness, depression, etc), particularly those who are strongly scientific/rational in their worldviews. Admittedly my own scientific background is merely limited to high-school chemistry/physics/advanced math, a career as a software developer (self-taught), several years working in the fields of agricultural science and secondary science education, and an upbringing by an electronics engineer father and a mainstream medical practitioner mother. But my most trusted fellow travellers in this journey are minimum Master's-degree qualified in science (one in biotech, one computer science), and are widely reputed as being among the best in their field.
But I sincerely want to be as effective as is humanly possible at avoiding delusion and finding truth; my qualify of life depends on it. Please be forthcoming with any suggestions.
By the way, your challenge is to refute anything I've said without succumbing to the "beg the question" fallacy. Ideally you'll avoid all the other fallacies too (particularly Ad Hominem), but "beg the question" is the trickiest and most important to avoid in this debate.
> You're welcome to suggest measures I should undertake to be more effective at getting to the truth in these matters.
I notice you don't mention double blinding any of these interventions. Have you tried that? How would you try that for something crypto-religious like meditation?
