"Test Driving Beliefs" (Reprinted from MySpace blog, originally posted 1/10/05)

Have you ever done this? Am I just a freak? I often will "try out" a belief just to see where the intellectual path will lead. A few years ago, I tried believing that I was a character in someones novel. I did this for two weeks. It was creepy. I began to recognize foreshadowing. I was able to tell when a character would or would not be integral to the plot. Other plot devices began to surface, too.
When I was in 6th grade, my parents and teachers were certain that I was "LD" (learning deficient). I was almost held back that year. I decided that year that I would try believing that I was actually really smart. My grades immediately improved, my standardized test scores shot up, and by the time I graduated from High School, I was considered a "nerd" and didn't have to work at all to get good grades. This was a belief I decided to keep, needless to say.
I know you've probably heard a bunch of cliches about the "power of belief" but it really has merit. The trick is actually pulling it off. Its not easy to simply start believing something. Most of us get bogged down in little necessities like "proof" or "plausibility". The weird thing is that when most people tell me what they think of me, it's almost always what I'd imagined them thinking.

My train of thought has jumped its tracks and barreled down into a gully, leaving my ideas screaming and leaping off to safety. So this will have to end now.

The reason I'm reprinting this earlier post is that my train of thought these past couple of days has wandered back into these parts. It is not unlike me to ponder the nature of reality, so it's only natural that my long winded ramblings would eventually find their way back here. There's nothing like losing an entire train of thought. Or even worse, a mode of thought. I've almost lost the thread for recapturing the mode of thought I used to employ to shift my reality. I imagined being a musician, and became one, I imagined the kinds of friends I wanted to have and found them. Have I lost my ability to visualize? The mode of thought is key. There was a meditative state I could once regularly achieve where I felt as though I slipped out of some non corporeal constraint and could push at the walls to make them wider. Or as I wrote on 8/24/04:

"On some days it seems like my mind enters some other state. Like its going to burst at the seams. I feel like I can reshape reality, only to find out that it was really like that the whole time and I’m only just now seeing it correctly. A thousand stories and fantastic tales are born, live and die in my mind in a fleeting second. I reach but cannot grasp them, they elude pen and paper, and are gone faster than I can type.
When I dream I am falling, I never hit the ground. I never wake up either. I either take flight or land on my feet, unharmed. Sometimes when I wake up I swear I can fly but I just don’t remember exactly how. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to fall from sanity. I have seen the world of the sane, and I am not impressed."

As it turns out, the world of the sane I was never impressed with was never really the world of the sane. It is the world of the same. It is populated by those who fear treading on unfamiliar ground, or thinking in unfamiliar territory. Psychologists used to define insanity as "deviation from the norm". I say to lack deviation is to lack the ability to create ones own existence, or to fear straying from what one has learned from others into worlds of your own creation. I sense the parts of my mind that process thoughts that no words exist to describe. It feels good to go there. It is a part of my mind populated by processes that are not burdened by language. Language was key in humankind making a giant leap forward intellectually, because it allowed thoughts to be shared. But we, as a species, have lost the ability to think without thinking in words. Words slow down thought, and provide limitations. If you think in words, you cannot have ideas for which words do not exist. Often when I seek refuge in the wordless parts of my mind, I gain a sense of understanding that, of course, cannot be explained. And each time, some indescribable but very subtle shift in my perspective of the universe causes bells of familiarity to ring in parts of my brain that don't know how to express what it is that I now understand. I compare it to gaining understanding with someone you meet who doesn't speak your language. Perhaps the popularly labled "center for religion" in the brain is one of these areas that processes thoughts for which words have not been created, thus giving a sense of understanding that cannot be explained, and therefore a feeling of spiritual awareness. Perhaps this is just another chapter in my long struggle to unite the ideas from science and spirituality into some sort of otherwordly marriage of universal explanation. Or perhaps my ramblings have merely slipped past the boundaries of cohesion, and I've ceased to make sense of any kind.