Brief Thought #3: Subjective Reality and the Bible

Before I started actively maintaining this website again last December, I read all the articles on Steve Pavlina’s website. Among the most thought-provoking were his series about subjective reality, the law of attraction, and intention and manifestation. If you search his site for these terms, you’ll catch up quickly on the subjects. It’s been a while since I read them, so I may not represent them exactly the way he would, but here is my take on them. According to the model of subjective reality, nothing exists outside your own consciousness (at least nothing subject to proof). This is opposed to the objective reality model, which holds that things exist outside of anyone’s perception. These models are like two opposing religions. Belief in either requires an act of faith, and neither is necessarily entirely right or wrong. They are just models.

Similar to the model of subjective reality, the law of attraction, and intention and manifestation, state that we attract the things which we think about and dwell on, and indeed our beliefs affect the realities we attract. Steve did an experiment where he and his readers attempted to manifest one million dollars simply by putting out the intention to receive it from the universe. At the last update, they believed they had manifested 4 million dollars, all of which could not have been expected nor predicted from their life circumstances at that time. It worked out to about $3400 per person, on average.

These metaphysical concepts are not inconsistent with the experience of prophets and saints in the Bible. Many were able to perform miracles due to the strength of their faith. Others could not achieve the miracles because their faith was too weak. Peter walked on water for a little way because he believed he could. When he started doubting, he sank. As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. A mountain is no match for faith as a grain of mustard seed. None of us have been alive long enough to know, “objectively,” that all of the ancient mythologies were not true. Every culture on earth tells of increasingly miraculous things happening as the events move back toward pre-history. It may be that what we now call impossible, was once commonplace simply because there was a large enough body of people to believe in it. YHWH’s prophets used their prayers and their intentions to routinely manifest things which are generally agreed to be impossible today.

I am a big fan of science and technology. But as we place increasing reliance on things we can see and predict formulaically, we lose touch with the unpredictable and unfathomable things of the supernatural realm. In so doing, we may put up hedges between us and YHWH (or insert your favorite deity). The ancients certainly had some science and technology. They could predict the seasons and the movements of the stars. So science and religion are not necessarily antithetical to one another. But for all the reliance we place on things that we consider to be scientific facts or laws, we should be willing, at the appropriate times, to suspend disbelief and accept the unexpected; even the impossible. Quantum mechanics provides a partial bridge toward the explainable and the unpredictable in life. These things are all worth our time and attention to study.