Let me give a personal example. I recently, for whatever reason, became enamored of the idea that I'd be well-advised to take up the ancient Chinese physical art, Tai Chi. Somewhere in my repository of unconscious beliefs was one which said that Tai Chi — along with the Taoist religion or philosophy with which it is associated — is an ideal road to physical and spiritual well-being. And guess what? Within days after taking up Tai Chi, I began to experience a physical and spiritual boost from it. It's been two months now, and the boost continues — as does the belief, now quite conscious, that this is exactly what Tai Chi is supposed to do for a person.
Of course, one interpretation is to posit that there are objectively powerful capabilities for the promotion of personal health hidden within the mind-body unit — the Chinese concept of the subtle body energy or Chi being one of them — which Western medicine is blind to. Tai Chi simply unlocks them.
Another possible interpretation is to go to the opposite extreme and say, in effect, that the benefits I'm getting are "all in the mind," basically meaning phony or not real. I'm deluding myself, in other words. My spiritual/physical health isn't really any better than before.
My interpretation lies somewhere in between. I say my predisposition to believe in Tai Chi has become a "self-fulfilling worldview" that has actually borne fruit for me. I'm really better off: healthier, happier. On the other hand, if I were to take someone whose wellness is in the same limbo state as mine used to be in and somehow coerce them into doing Tai Chi, despite having no predisposition to believe in it, I'll bet he or she would report few benefits.
Take a parallel case: Christian prayer. Though I am a practicing Christian — go to church regularly, pray the Lord's Prayer often — I have never developed a strong belief in the power of prayer. (Go figure.) Nor in the value of what I consider pious devotion. As I told someone just yesterday, I consider myself a very worldly Christian.
But I know lots of people who are truly devout, who pray a lot and feel their prayers are answered, and who believe they are in direct touch with God at every moment in their lives. And by the principle I outlined above, I assume that they are. God does touch them and lead them and answer their prayers constantly, in ways that I can only long for from afar.
In other words, we somehow manage to make our own reality. I make a reality for myself in which Tai Chi, seeking the Tao, and various other pearls of personal belief radiate out from whoever I actually am and give their opalescence to my world. My devoutly religious friends do the same, except that the pearls of their worldview are different from my personal pearls.
And here's the strange thing: that pearlescence, that opalescence, actually becomes a part of the reality we survey. In my reality, Tai Chi works. In the actuality of really, really devout Christians, prayer works.
It's magic! Belief is powerful. Worldviews are self-fulfilling.
The only problem comes when we, as is our wont, become convinced that our belief, our worldview, is right for everyone — because the fact that it works for us must make it objectively so.
Then we start pushing our belief system on others. Sometimes gently. Sometimes coercively. But pushing all the same. But that doesn't work.
Oh, it works for some other people, true enough ... because they have the same pearl of positive wisdom lying dormant somewhere within their personhood. Once it begins to imbue their reality with the same opalescence it donates to ours, one and all become even more convinced of the objective truth of their vision. They work even harder to push it on the rest of the disbelieving world.
But, again, that doesn't work. Not universally.
It only works for people that have the same pearls ripe for the unveiling.
The world would be a happier place if we could just get these things through our heads. Belief is powerful. Worldviews are self-fulfilling. But only for those who are ready to invest themselves in them.
By dint of what some have labelled "synchronicity," just after I wrote the above laying out my (shall I call it) "pearlescence principle," I came across a perfect example of it. In "Hail, Mary," TIME magazine's story about how Protestant Christians are taking a fresh look at the mother of Jesus, long revered by Catholics, we hear of Mary's being called First Disciple by latter-day Protestant "reformers." To wit:
Traditional commentary saw Mary's "Let it be" primarily as a statement of obedience. But [Princeton Theological Seminary's Beverly] Gaventa, and many who followed, heard in it a thought-through acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah made long before any other believer's. In a Christianity Today article, Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., paraphrases some of the original reformers, saying, "If she had not believed, she would not have conceived."
To underscore the key concept: "If she had not believed, she would not have conceived." That's it! That's my "pearlescence principle" in action. We can conclude that Mary nurtured within her personhood, albeit unbeknownst to her, a "positive pearl of belief" in the coming Messiah-to-be. Activating it by uttering her words, "Let it be," she empowered herself to conceive and give birth to that very Messiah. Accordingly, the pearlescence of Mary's idiosyncratic belief in her Son shone out and lit what was to become all of Christendom.
In view of which, I feel I ought to amend and extend how I define the "doubt" in my world of doubt. After all, I seem here to be enshrining belief, not doubt. But what I doubt, I am beginning to see, is the notion that any personal belief system or worldview — however many others share it — is objectively true.
Nor is it simply subjectively so. It's better than both of those: it's personally true.
Which means it feeds back somehow into objective reality and colors it from that person's perspective. In a sense, we make up — or simply make — our own world. The pearlescent light we ourselves cast, based on what we truly and deeply believe, is the light we see by.
It's something like Schrödinger's Cat, a thought experiment in quantum physics. In it, a live cat is put in a closed box with a mechanism that may (or may not) indirectly cause the cat's death by at any moment releasing (or not releasing) a radioactive particle as a trigger. We let the experiment run on its own for a period of time. After a while, we open the box and see whether the cat is alive or dead.
It is only at the moment we do so, Schrödinger proved mathematically, that the outcome is decided ... even though the release of the fateful particle and the death of the cat happened (if at all) earlier in time! Inconceivable as it seems, no other understanding is consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics.
Our observation of the outcome alone makes it real. Is that any screwier than Mary's belief in the Messiahship of her Son making itself come true?
So our mental activity — our observation, our belief — fabricates the very reality we exist in. It does so neither objectively nor subjectively, but personally.
As Alice said, "Curiouser and curiouser."
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