Imagination, Deception, It's Role in Our Humaness & the Mess We're In

4/21/2025

Something I’ve pondered for many years is the role of our beliefs and their relationship to our reality. That may seem like a simple statement, but it is a very complicated one, one that we often don’t think about, and it is fundamental to understanding the situation we find ourselves in now. My first musings on this topic began as a teenager when I read novels and disagreed with my English teacher's interpretation of a literary work. I found myself at odds with the established way of thinking about things, and I noticed patterns that didn’t fit the orthodoxy. I often got in trouble for this.

Ultimately, I was kicked out of my Great Books class during my senior year on the first day, when the teacher asked the question, “Is there a God?” My answer was perhaps there is a God for those who believe and there isn’t for those who do not. My point was that our belief systems create our reality.

She was very annoyed by this and said, “You are either pregnant or you're not.”

I said, “You can’t apply physical laws to the metaphysical,” which meant that the universe is quantum, complicated, mysterious, and doesn’t always function or follow our understanding of natural laws. I was 17 years old and not conversant in quantum mechanics, but on a deep, intuitive level, I knew that one can not apply the same rules to the mysteries of the universe as one does to an apple falling from a tree. This was a fallacious argument on her part. One that I ultimately won as popular science caught up with my observation that the universe is reactive, subjective, and responds to expectations.

Scientists discovered this influence when they studied quarks. Those who believed the particle would penetrate glass had that experience—those who thought it wouldn’t reported those findings. After examining the data, scientists found that the particles themselves were indeed responding to the scientists' thoughts and expectations. This information gained popularity in the 1990s as science reporters began to inform the general public about the research being conducted in laboratories worldwide.

But this is not just about the subjective nature of consciousness and its interaction with the material world, but a more subtle point I want to make