'RATIONALIZATION THROUGH COGNITIVE DISSONANCE' - highly under-rated, but most critical for all of us. This 'DISSONANCE' means that any information which is fundamentally inconsistent with a person's deeply entrenched beliefs will be automatically rejected. The person concerned will keep on rationalizing that his own beliefs have to be correct because it took years to learn. Beliefs are also connected with our emotions - and our central nervous system. That is why when we receive information fundamentally inconsistent with our own deeply entrenched beliefs we get very hurt and go into exaggerated and irrational, stubborn denial.

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There is also a physical and psychological response to receiving inconsistent information: increases the heart beat, the blood pressure goes up and some even start to sweat with anxiety and worry. Further, people who have deeply held beliefs will refuse to read and study any information which is likely to tell them that they have the wrong beliefs. They assume, with absolute certainty, that they are omniscient and infallible about their beliefs. For example, the mind of those closed minded-skeptics, extreme religious people and others with fixed inflexible deeply held beliefs will not allow them to even allow for the possibility that they could be wrong. So these are some of the people we afterlife investigators have to convince about the afterlife. Extreme examples: President Obama will never accept that he is wrong being a Democrat. The Pop le will never accept that atheism is superior to Catholicism. The Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan will never be convinced that the colored black people are just as intelligent as the white folks!

Further, psychology tells us that in addition to people having a powerful deeply emotional connection with their beliefs, they also could have a very serious problem with 'cathexis'. This refers to a powerful super psychological connection with anything - could be a belief, an idea or even cathexed to food and other physical things. The Buddhists thought up of this concept some 2,500 years ago - they call it 'attachment'. The Buddhists say that we have to completely detach from material and other things that impede our spiritual progress.