PARADIGMS

Intention Creating Reality

[Chapter Three from Radical Knowing by Christian de Quincey}

When Darwin anchored the Beagle in a bay off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, clearly within sight of land, he and his crew rowed a small boat up to the beach where a troupe of wide-eyed natives, spears quaking in their nervous hands, waited. To the aborigines, Darwin and his men were gods. They had appeared suddenly and miraculously out of nowhere, out of the sea. The great naturalist tried to explain to his hosts that he and his men had arrived in that big sailing ship, and he gestured to the majestic Beagle riding the tidal surge just offshore. The natives were now convinced these visitors must be crazy gods—there was nothing out in the bay but waves and sparkling foam. The islanders couldn’t see the ship. They couldn’t see it because they didn’t believe it. A “canoe” of such enormous proportions was beyond their experience, expectations, and wildest imagination.

This story of Darwin’s invisible Beagle—whether apocryphal or not—illustrates an important psychological phenomenon. We can only perceive what we can conceive. The cliché used to run: “I’ll believe it when I see it”; now the twist is: “I’ll see it when I believe it.” The first version expresses a point of view embedded in conventional empirical science. It says, in effect, “If I can perceive and measure it with my senses, then it is worthy of my belief. Otherwise, I have to put it down to fancy, fantasy, illusion, hallucination, superstition.” It is a radically pragmatic, practical, and apparently commonsensical approach to knowing the world.

It is also out of date.

Discoveries in the frontier sciences of quantum physics, as well as in certain areas of psychology, neurology, and evolutionary biology, are ushering in a different worldview—a new paradigm. In this new approach, the fundamental “stuff” of the world is not solid, substantial material things—like particles, atoms and molecules—it is something more like fields of vibrating energy, or vortices in dynamic warps of spacetime. In short, the world is made of processes rather than “things.” And just what is it that is undergoing the processing? According to the current state of knowledge in physics, the answer is still one big question mark. For convenience, we call it “energy,” but really we just don’t know. And here’s the interesting point: To a growing number of scientists and philosophers it is beginning to look suspiciously as if the ultimate nature of the universe is much more akin to what we call “consciousness” than matter—at least a form of energy that tingles with sentience all the way down. A great physicist, Sir James Jeans, anticipated this topsy-turvy worldview nearly a century ago when he proclaimed “The universe begins to look more and more like a great thought, than a great machine.”

Of course, this is what the mystics and sages of many cultures have been telling us for thousands of years. They—like the Tierra del Fuegans—have always lived in a universe where spirit, not “dead” matter, has been the primary shaping force of reality. As areas of study such as transpersonal psychology open up to the storehouse of knowledge in “primal” religions and cultures, mind and spirit are being recognized as co-creators of reality. Similarly, many transformational psychotherapeutic systems—often confusingly labeled under the rubric “New Age”—also affirm the primacy of intention and consciousness as creative forces directing the unfolding of phenomenal reality. Matter and mind, it is becoming clear, are far more deeply intertwined than our old science and philosophy have led us to believe. In fact, belief itself—or, rather, the intentional power of the mind—seems to be able to reach into the heart of matter and play with the physical world in ways that rattle the old paradigm of materialism.

According to the new or emerging paradigm, reality is not a given—not an already pre-existing conglomeration of external “things” that we must perceive and adapt to if we want to survive. Reality, in the new view, is as much, if not more, “in here,” inside consciousness, and we create it from moment to moment. Of course, since everybody is engaged in the same god-like act of creation we don’t live in a lone and isolated private universe (where only our own consciousness is real, and everything else is just a creation of our individual mind). No, in this maddeningly non-linear, non-commonsensical point of view, everybody is creating everybody else. I am creating you as, simultaneously, you are creating me. We live in a mutually self-sustaining universe. We all contribute to the dynamics of a vast web of interconnected and interdependent nested systems; so although we are creators, we are also participators and, therefore, we still have to adapt to survive.

To say “You are what you believe” is almost a tautology in new-paradigm thinking. And although the thrust of research and theory on the frontiers of physics, psychology, and evolutionary biology seems to support this view, as a slogan for the “New Age” it is dangerously simplistic. We need to pay careful attention to what we mean by “belief.” As a prescription for life, the slogan “You create your own reality” by what you believe can set unthinking, uncritical and innocent minds up for some bloody-nosed confrontations with what philosopher A. N. Whitehead called the “stubborn facts” of experience. (And more than two-hundred years ago, U.S. president John Adams declared in a similar vein: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”)
Clearly, life is not so simple that all it takes is to choose to believe this or that and lo! so it turns out.

A Wave Model of Reality

It could be, of course, that our beliefs behave something like energy waves that ripple out from us and meet up in a world brim-full of other people’s beliefs. We may be embedded in a global network of interference patterns of beliefs, like ripples and wavelets on a pond after handfuls of pebbles have splashed through the surface. When beliefs coincide and slip into phase, they may amplify each other; when they conflict and contradict each other, they may cancel each other out. Yet, I can’t bring myself to believe it works quite that way.
For one thing, it is linguistically and philosophically problematic. As I pointed out in Radical Nature, spatial analogies and metaphors, borrowed from physics, for how mind works are likely to mislead us about the nature and operations of consciousness—particularly if we forget they are metaphors and begin to use them literally.

Our language is steeped in metaphors derived from the senses of vision and touch, and these dominate much of the push-pull descriptions of causality in mechanistic physics. I think it will serve us far better if we move away from the physics envy of “energy talk” and instead develop appropriate “mind talk” when exploring consciousness. When talking about the mind or consciousness, we should use words and ideas that refer to connections through meaning, not connections through mechanism. Energy talk about mind fails to account for the most fundamental characteristic of consciousness: its subjectivity. The feeling of consciousness has no objective, measurable, position in space. It is not even “nonlocal,” as some so-called new paradigm theorists often proclaim; it is, rather, nonlocated—it is not located in space in any way whatsoever, either as “fields,” “vibrations,” or “waves.”

But I question the “wave model” of mind for another, evolutionary, reason: If we claim that beliefs create reality through some wave-like set of interference patterns, then we need to be able to answer the following: What interference pattern of beliefs created reality before the first homo sapiens walked the Earth and wondered at the mystery of the stars? Do we accept that other non-human animals have beliefs? Do plants? And what created reality before the first living colony of “infusoria” slithered out of the primordial ooze?
And this brings us to the nub of the matter. I mentioned earlier that we must be careful about what we mean by “belief.” Even if we understand beliefs, in some metaphorical sense, to interact in something like the “wave-interference” model just described—we should keep in mind there are beliefs and then there are beliefs. Let’s look at this more closely.

We should distinguish first between wishes and beliefs, and between conscious and unconscious beliefs. Most of the time we don’t even know what we believe. We think we believe this or that, but under closer examination these conscious beliefs are usually riddled with doubt and even contradictory counter-beliefs. For instance, on a few occasions I was sure “This week I will win Lotto,” but when my numbers didn’t come up I could hear the echo of my counter-belief “Who am I kidding? I’ll never win a million dollars.” Deeper, unconscious beliefs such as this may be closer to the truth of who I believe or fear myself to be. On the “wave model,” the first type of belief is a kind of “wishful thinking” low in potency, and is easily washed out by the force of stronger, more potent—and at times, self-defeating—beliefs. It is these deeper, unconscious beliefs that mostly create our reality.

How Do Beliefs Create Reality?

Another important distinction is the difference between beliefs about the world—external-directed beliefs—and beliefs about ourselves. The first set concerns our assumptions about the environment in which we are embedded. According to the new paradigm, our beliefs can and do shape the alignment of circumstances we find ourselves in. If I really believe I’ll find a parking space on a crowded street, then somehow, miraculously or magically, it will be there when I turn the corner.

I choose this example, because it is a nagging exception in my own experience. I have tried it in the past, and was sure it worked against chance odds (hard to prove, but I believed that my belief made a difference). Mostly, however, I doubt my power to effect such results. I think that even if my beliefs have causal potency to directly affect the physical world, they would be canceled out or reduced to practical insignificance by the potency of the laws of nature, not to mention the approximately infinite number of competing influences from other people’s beliefs. It is not simply a case of “believe it and I’ll see it.” Many, many other factors are at work.

On the other hand, the second class of beliefs—the self-focused set—beliefs about myself, do have immense impact on how my life turns out. In this case, the potency of my beliefs is focused internally, within the system that I consider to be my “self.” Within this semi-permeable bubble universe, my deep beliefs can (and I’m sure at times do) dominate the behavior of my system. Here, my beliefs are not competing to nearly the same degree with the bombardment of contradictory and interfering external beliefs from millions, or billions, of other minds. That’s what my “boundary” is for (my skin-encapsulated ego, as the Taoist mystic Alan Watts poetically expressed it). It protects me, to a certain extent, from the pressure of the external web of “non-self,” from that infinite nested set of systems I call my environment.

Metaphorically, by a network of internal feedback loops between my thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, my beliefs set up a “signature vibration” within my self-system, and it is this “vibration” that ripples out through my boundary, connecting me to the world outside. Only to the extent that these vibrations—call them my “behavior” or “communication” if you like—trigger responses and feedback from the external web of environmental systems do my beliefs influence the reality beyond my skin.

Specifically, if my “vibration” is fear, for example, then I will act in a way that communicates, “I am afraid” to the world around me. People will respond, consciously or unconsciously, to these subliminal messages. And, for whatever reason, it seems that for the most part, people, like strange dogs, are programmed to react aggressively to the vulnerability of fear. Fear provokes fear or its defense: aggression.

Similarly, my fear will determine how I behave—and the consequences—even in non-interpersonal circumstances. Let’s say I’m walking across a bridge that is nothing more than a tree-trunk spanning a deep ravine. My fear may well fulfill my belief that if I step onto that moss-covered log I will slip and crash onto the rocks hundreds of feet below. I may simply choose a different behavior, of course, and stay put in safety (not noticing the boulder about to come unstuck just above my head!)

Beyond the simplistic “You see or create what you believe,” I suspect that there is, after all, an indirect relationship between what I believe and the reality I find myself embedded in. However, it is indirect. It is unpredictable and uncertain, and probably non-causal. I cannot know that a specific belief will necessarily determine a specific outcome in the world of external events.

There does seem to be a kind of synchronicity—sometimes—between processes inside my consciousness and events in the world outside (see chapter 9 “Beyond Energy”). But this is not a relationship I have been able to use to any advantage (such as winning Lotto). The best I can do, it seems, is to engage in letting go, slip into an alpha brainwave state, and flow with the structural coupling processes that synchronize internal and external reality. Action through non-action—wu-wei, as Taoists sages advised.

Locating The Diamond Truth

This same process of letting go seems to be necessary for tuning into the deeper levels of beliefs that shape our lives. Beneath the conscious and near-the-surface unconscious wishes and fears, other strata of beliefs run our lives. It takes work—a special kind of work that requires honesty and courage, integrity and authenticity—to excavate the core beliefs that create our destiny.
For most, if not all of us, many of these core beliefs are negative, and often self-defeating—primal wells of emotional stress, rooted in the existential void created from the rupture in our evolutionary continuum, from the lack of in-arms experience, explored in the previous chapter. These primal stresses erupt from time to time throughout our lives as “aftershocks.” We have to uncover these core beliefs if we are ever to liberate ourselves from their destructive power. Only when that work is done are we ready to move even deeper.

At a deeper level, our living organism is a system tingling with purpose and “evolved expectations,” a system designed for self-preservation, for reproduction and, ultimately, for self-transcendence (Pearce, 2002). Beyond our conscious beliefs, beyond even our deepest self-defeating primal beliefs, are what I call our “diamond truths,” our “cellular commitments.” These are our innate beliefs, the deep organic programming that underlies our sense of what is “right” for us—what German philosopher Martin Heidegger called our “thrownness,” and Jean Liedloff calls our “innate expectations.”

And just as each of us is a unique expression of our genetic code, inherited from the ancient flow of evolution, we are each, similarly, a unique expression of our cellular commitments—our “noetic code”—of our innate expectations (Carl Jung’s “archetypes,” and Aristotle’s “entelechy.”) These cellular commitments are the burning fuse of purpose that snakes through our lives, always focused on the explosive realization of our full human potential and eventual self-transcendence. Certainly, we all share a great deal of our evolved expectations in common; but we are also shaped by unique twists to our personal psychological templates.
Successful psychotherapy, I suspect, is effective when it focuses attention on this aspect of our core nature. This is where the life-affirming aspect of self resides, the self that connects us with the deeper evolutionary continuum of our entire species—and beyond, with all natural systems. Here is where our self connects with Jung’s collective unconscious and, ultimately, with the ineffable transpersonal, noetic experience of Self.

However, to call our core cellular commitments “beliefs” robs them of their power. A “belief” seems too static, too rigid, too passive, too cerebral, too self-righteous and dogmatic. A belief is vulnerable to refutation, and so tends to build up a structure of defenses. I prefer the word “intention.” When I intend something I summon up my whole being; it is a creative act. I engage with the world through my intention by creatively projecting something of myself into the ongoing stream of events in which I participate. My intention commits and contributes who I am to the world through my action. And although at times intention may be blocked and frustrated, it cannot be refuted or denied as long as we continue to recreate it.

Intention is sourced from the self, and directed outward. It derives its authority and validation from its own creative stance. In contrast, belief is validated (or not) by information from the world. Belief tends to freeze the ego that identifies with what it believes. Intention, on the other hand, is more an expression of who we are into the world. It expresses our purpose, and is more open to feedback than any belief we may hold. In my experience, the interaction between intention and feedback results in learning—the intending self adapts.

On the other hand, interaction between belief and the world typically leads to rationalizations and other psychological defense mechanisms to protect the presumed integrity of the ego that holds the belief. Think of how you sometimes feel threatened, as though your life or soul depended on it, if some cherished belief is challenged. Do you believe in God, in life after death, in the righteousness of your nation, in the laws of science, in the sanctity of marriage, in abortion, in the right to life, in the death penalty . . .? What happens to your sense of self if someone rigorously challenges such a belief? Is your first instinct to openly accept the challenge with a willingness to adapt your belief, or is it more likely to be an almost-reflexive defensive search for an even stronger argument to support your cherished belief?

Like choice, intention is a free existential creative act, a pouring out of the self into the world, contributing to the unfolding of reality. Belief is a fixed way of holding reality.

I also prefer “intention” rather than “belief” because it allows us to extend the metaphorical wave-model of creation back beyond the emergence of human beings. As concepts derived from language and reason, beliefs did not exist before there were human minds to concoct them. But this is not the case with intention. As I argued in Radical Nature, there is an ordering principle, a kind of mind, at play in nature at every level of existence—a co-creating complement to the chaos-inducing principle of entropy. This proto-psychism is consciousness in its most basic state—what philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called “prehension,” an elementary awareness that directs the motions of subatomic particles and atoms in their interactions (de Quincey, 2002).

Intention, then, is active throughout the entire span of evolution, from the simplest quantum entities to the largest superclusters of galaxies and the most complex nervous systems and brains. This view allows for the existence and evolution of the world long before the arrival of thinking beings who could believe in it. It also allows us to trace the long lineage or continuum of intentions, of innate expectations, way back to the origins of the universe.

We are, therefore, embedded in infinite layers of intentions that have shaped the long cosmic journey of our ancestral forms that led to us. We carry these purposes in our psychic templates as well as in our genes, and they spell out for us—through that mysterious system of feedback loops between evolved expectations and learned experiences—the unique phenomenon we call our “self.” These purposes are our embedded truths, our cellular (and our pre-organic) commitments that pull us through life—our “noetic code”—that connect us with the grand play of evolution here on our planet for four billion years, with the universe for around fourteen billion years, and with the cosmos for eternity and, perhaps, beyond. Intention is our creative contribution to the unforced, natural expression of these deep, embedded purposes. And in this sense, both our purposes and intentions transcend, while including, individual egoic identities.

As long as I’m aware that when I use the word “belief,” as in “core belief,” to include this sense of intentionality—as a statement of commitment and action directed at transforming my relationship with the world, and not as a statement about the world as it is—then I can use “belief” as a first-cousin synonym for intention. For example, I could translate the phrases “cellular commitments” or “innate expectations” to mean personal credo—the evolutionary fuel that fires all individuals, giving us our sense of uniqueness, and is the source of who we ultimately believe ourselves to be.
But there is a transpersonal credo, too—an archetypal vision that transcends any single individual purpose. For me, the most evocative expression of this transpersonal credo is captured in lines from a poem popular in the Sixties: Desiderata. They sound a little dated now, even a little embarrassing to quote, but they are the closest I have seen to a philosopher’s prayer:

You are a child of the universe;
no less than the trees and the stars,
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive [him/her/it] to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life
keep peace with your soul.

—Max Ehrmann (1927)

In this chapter, we have explored the potency of intention as a way to get a handle on how our “core beliefs,” or “personal paradigms,” contribute not only to understanding reality, but to how reality actually unfolds. You will have noticed that the roots of these deep beliefs or “cellular commitments” reach back far beyond the evolutionary emergence in humans of reason or intellect. A central theme of this book, as I have already mentioned, is that knowing who we are, and our relationship to the world, involves far more than what we can figure out through the powers of reason or can observe through our senses. Especially when we come to explore consciousness, we need to expand our repertoire of ways of knowing.

Without downplaying the importance or value of reason, we will continue in the next chapter to look more closely at the relationship between belief and experience, and see how we may begin, as individuals and as a culture, to move beyond an over-reliance on intellect, reason, and belief systems. We will open to a wider, richer spectrum of knowing—paying particular attention to the innate wisdom of feelings in the body.

Posted: 29 June 2004

Continue to the following chapter, Experience Beyond Belief.