In my girlfriends closet there is a magical little box. Inside this box are neatly folded pieces of paper. On one of those papers is written in swirly handwriting a recipe for the perfect boyfriend, written years before I met her.
So how do I match up? Some of it describes me perfectly (handsome, funny, interesting), some of it does not (gentleman, modest, rich). Still I cannot escape the idea that my whole existence was retroactively created by this magical little box. That’s anyway what my girlfriend is convinced of.
This type of wishful thinking, where the goal is not just to have a nice, comforting fantasy, but to actually make it into a reality, has many names. Some call it manifesting, some call it magic thinking, some call it a “reality distortion field”. Many books have been sold, like for example “The Secret”, that promise the reader that a focused desiring can make miracles happen.
So… does it work?
On a first pass, the answer seems to be a sobering no. We do not live in a magical world; we live in a universe ruled by laws of nature, not human fancy. Pure thinking can perhaps inform and influence our own actions, which in turn have an impact on external reality. But there can be no short-circuit; thinking cannot directly influence this external, objective reality.
But is it really that obvious? Is this objective reality really so unbendable?
Let’s do a thought experiment. Close one eye and look around. What you see is a perfectly flat, two-dimensional representation of the world around you. Stop looking at things, and start looking at the picture itself. Notice the shape of the picture frame; a lying oval, its roundness disturbed by the intrusion of your nose. Try to look at what you see as if it were a strange modernist painting that you don’t know how to interpret. This is how a painter must see in order to paint realistically. Whenever I try to draw something, I’m surprised about how it never turns out the way I see it, but strangely distorted. Why does that happen? This distortion is in fact nothing but our interpretation of what we see. When we see a table from the side, we see a table that is about as long as it is wide. But we know it’s actually much longer. This conflict between our direct perspective and our spatial interpretation of it accounts for the weird distortion so often seen in children’s drawings (and drawings of adults who are bad at drawing).
So in the end, what do we see when we look around? Do we see objective reality, or do we see our interpretation of it? What would be left of reality when we take the human perspective away from it? There would be no grass, no trees, but just light hitting randomly distributed matter of different types.
If our reality is constituted by our interpretation of it, our thinking about it, would it be so crazy to believe that we can change it just by willing it? Or more importantly: is it possible to really change reality without believing that it’s possible to change it just by willing it?
I’m not taking any chances. I’m not happy with the world as it currently is, and my very limited power to change it. I have some ideas about how it can be improved, so I wrote them down in swirly handwriting, neatly folded the paper, and put them inside the magical little box in my girlfriend’s closet.
Maarten Schumacher 