The conflict between objectivity and subjectivity is too often viewed as just that: a conflict.

When I’m in a highly subjective experience, I try to ride the wave of that while staying objective about it. Which is basically describing the notion of being or staying centered. This attempt to stay level-headed can be said to be an attempt to offset the potential error implicit in experiences which are “our brain’s best guess of what’s happening in the world.”

There is, it seems to me, a counterpoint to this attempt to stay even-keeled. Which is, in our attempts to stay objective in highly subjective experiences, we often tend to somehow marginalize the experience itself, and what it revealed. We excuse or water down its value in our rush to ensure we are maintaining objectivity.

Perhaps another way of saying this is, “When I have a powerful, even mystical experience, I want to be careful not to make it more than what it was. Because ‘what it was’ is all I can truly report. On the other hand, I want to be equally cautious that in my rush to be objective I don’t squash what actually took place.” Because that’s equally unfair.

In a sense, this wavering one way or another is similar to the conflict an open-minded person encounters in a close-minded person. The open mind will consider the closed mind position, but the closed mind position won’t return the compliment. The idea being that even within our own minds we set up conflicts when we try to tame the subjective to the point that we close ourselves off to the experiences.