Creating Reality

I was at a yoga teacher training 14 years ago during which the topic of positive thinking came up. A few different women (it was almost all women) spoke about how much “positive thinking” had affected their lives for the better. When they were done, I raised my hand and said something to the effect of:

“You know there were six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and the one percent most positive-thinking among them were 60,000, and it didn’t help them much. Even the one percent of the one percent most positive who must have been very very positive, were 600, and they too got murdered alongside everyone they knew.”

I don’t remember what if anything anyone said after that, only that it pretty much killed the “kumbaya” vibe they had been cultivating, which I guess was my aim, since it always struck me as phony.

. . .

I was talking to a friend last week about a book I was reading, called “Becoming Supernatural.” It’s a bit “self-helpy” for my tastes, but the author makes some interesting arguments. Essentially that matter is mostly empty space because atoms are mostly space (the nucleus, which has virtually all the mass, is tiny compared to the entire atom.) Everything is space, or more precisely electromagnetic fields, and the subatomic particles inside the matter are actually just waves until they are observed. “Reality” is mostly just waves which we solidify by observation, and the same is true for our internal reality.

When we’re in a contemplative state, just observing, not identifying or planning, it’s like we’re an unobserved wave, and it’s only when we snap back to “reality” of “I’m a man,” “I’m a woman” or “I’ve got a boring meeting at 10 am” that we re-particle-ize, so to speak. That you are in a state of possibility (wave) when meditating, and you are the particle when you identify with the specifics of yourself or your life.

And so you wind up with an identity that’s full of beliefs about yourself, your plans and your history, and those notions solidify themselves in your body in terms of stress, tension, etc. via biochemistry, and that biochemistry feeds your thoughts which in turn feed more biochemistry, and you become habituated to your patterns, your history, your identity and cut yourself off from new choices and possibilities. As I said, a bit self-helpy for me (and maybe I’m missing something in my paraphrasing), but an interesting way to conceptualize it.

So I’m talking to my friend about this idea of creating your own experience, so to speak, by not, for example, imagining how my run at the track will go like I normally would but simply committing to it, but without a picture, story or expectation. You just walk out the door, a couple blocks to the subway, observe the people, the cobblestones, etc. And I don’t mean imagining doing that as I am now while typing this, but each step as it’s happening. And in this way you create a different experience than the habitual one where you’re dreading the run and strategizing how to make its prospect less painful.

And he agreed that maybe we can create our own experience. Of course, that was when I told him the story of the yoga class and the 600 super positive Jews on their way to the gas chamber.

And he said, “Maybe the positive ones had already left.”

. . .

Growing up Jewish in New York, I was exposed to the sentiment that Holocaust 2.0 was maybe not imminent but surely something about which I should be worried. We weren’t religious, and I never experienced any kind of antisemitism (I’ve seen and heard some lately on social media and even in real life on occasion, but nothing that’s affected my life in any way.) And I always rejected that idea that I should be specifically worried about it.

But — and I can’t say if the Holocaust paranoia drove this — I’ve always thought about the people that died not just in the Holocaust, but also in wars or even via violence on the street. So many humans in history have met their ends in gruesome ways, in prison, in the gutter or at the hands of others. I’ve always had this sense that it could easily be me or my family as there was no basis for believing it couldn’t be so.

I had only a small taste of violence growing up, getting mugged, punched in the face on the street a couple times, chased by a gang with sticks and bats. I never got seriously injured, and in fact no one I know did, either, but there was a sense of menace back then that it could happen.

On the one hand, you could say if it happens it happens, and hopefully it doesn’t come to that, and let it go, but it raises the question of how much one should prepare, at what point should you leave. If the positive thinking Jews (and by positive thinking I don’t mean being in denial about what was going on in Germany, but in the sense of willing themselves a good life for which leaving was necessary) left, maybe my mental model was wrong, and those girls in my yoga class, naive though they might have been, were onto something.

Instead of seeing oneself as a statistic, at the mercy of probability given a shifting (often for the worse) environment, a wave waiting for the events of life to particle-ize oneself, so to speak, into the lottery of history, one might imagine a form of higher agency. Unlike ordinary agency which is the power to respond to one’s environment, maybe one creates it, whether via default (lottery of history) or by choice.

This has profound implications because it makes you not only responsible for how you act upon the world but also for how the world acts upon you. There is nothing to fear from what might happen because you yourself created the conditions, consciously or by default. And while there might be great suffering, real horrors and unspeakable cruelty, those episodes are all mutually brought into being.

Obviously that is not to say that there are no moral distinctions, that the Jews who went to the gas chamber were as responsible as the nazis who forced them. The default — letting the lottery of history play out — still involves ordinary agency and the responsibilities inherent to it. One has merely opted into ordinary agency (and its probability distribution) by not discovering the means of reality production at its root. And because most people are neither exposed to this possibility nor encouraged to seek it, they experience only the default. (And some even less than that as society encourages helplessness and increasingly confers status on those it deems victims, but that’s a topic for another essay.)

. . .

I don’t want to go too far afield trying to explain or describe what creating one’s own reality consists in or how one might go about it. I am no expert in this, and I’m not even positive it can be done in the sense I’m suggesting after reading (and likely misinterpreting) a book. Only that my old probabilistic view of the world wherein the influence you have with respect to your conditions was modest might be wrong. That even the idea it’s possible to opt out of virtually anything is more than just intriguing but liberating.