Your Belief Changes Reality

This is not magic. This is belief. Your belief makes things real. Let me explain.

This is not magic. This is belief.

Functionally, your belief makes things real. Let me explain.

If you believe in God, God is real. If you are validated by your surroundings that god is real, god is functionally real. It does not mean God exists, or is real. It means -- functionally -- he is real to you. Now you behave as though God is watching. You interact based on how God would want you to interact. You spread belief with your whole chest because it is moral and righteous.

Now let’s try another example. Ghosts. Ghosts are real if you believe they are real. This does not mean ghosts are real. It means that your belief in ghosts makes them real. Every time you hear a creak at night, then there must be a spirit in the hall. Every time your radio scanner says a coherent sentence, it’s an entity speaking to you. Every time you see that sign from your grandpa, then his spirit must be watching over you.

You are primed with bias.

This is not a bad thing as a whole. In fact, it can be a great thing. People believed that humans could fly. They dreamed it, they wrote it, they crafted it. We invented planes. Humans could fly, a feat no one thought could be real. Think about your favorite scifi media that dreamed of AI or cellphones and computers. Thoughts shape reality. Not because thoughts manifest, but because they inspire. A thought that is vocalized and spread enough becomes truth through tangible action. Maybe not today, and maybe not even by you.

Now, let’s look back at our reality. We are living in a time where reality’s veil has lifted in an unprecedented way. All of those conspiracies no one believed became reality. All of the strings of humanity were pulled. All of us were duped. We acted in a way that corroborated their narrative. We bought into their revision of reality. Because we believed it to be true that those stories were lies, and that it was more beneficial to argue on reddit than consider otherwise, we acted accordingly.

Belief is a powerful tool. It changes reality. That does not mean objective reality shifts. Objective reality does not matter when you live in an echo chamber that distorts your reality. This is how you get radicalized right-wingers who think that trans people are the pedophiles who stalk public bathrooms, and that POC want to kill white america. This is not reality. However, they do not engage with reality. They engage with the echo chamber -- an echo chamber we are learning with stark clarity was all manipulation tactics to begin with.

And this does not simply fall on the right. This is on the left as well. There was a narrative spreading around about how ICE is not a federally recognized authority, and in fact does not have any authority at all. That was never true. Another great and insanely ridiculous example is the election interference on tumblr in 2016 by Russian propagandists.

Both sides have been manipulated by bot accounts historically. We have seen in real time the exposure of bots, AI, and accounts spreading propaganda and hateful rhetoric from accounts that don’t even come from America. This was seen on twitter. This was seen on TikTok. This was seen on tumblr, reddit, 4chan, etc.

To think of things in terms of left and right is a failure of us as a people to begin with. This is not centrism. This is morality and ethics in a real, tangible world. If your ethics lie anywhere outside of “all humans were created equal and deserve equal rights,” then you have been co-opted. The wealthy have expertly pitted us against each other with flagrant unreality so that we will kill each other for them.

What is your reality? Does it really exist, or is it belief based on an echo chamber you never venture outside of? Why does the right want gun-control, and the left wants freedom of arms now?** This is mental flexing. This is setting us up to turn on our fundamental beliefs because of the distortion of reality. This is the wealthy laughing in our faces while we dance and perform for them, as we always have.

(**This is not to diminish or downplay current events. I am not stupid, and I do not live under a rock. I am aware of the dangerous and dark situations we are currently facing. I am using this as an example because it is simple, recent, and relevant. If I have to explain that what is happening in our country is disgusting and I do not support it, you did not understand my point.)

This also creates a foundation of confirmation bias, as I said. It’s like a haunted relic with a story attached to it that it is possessed and if you take a picture of it, then you will be cursed. You aren’t really cursed, but now every time something bad happens you will associate it with that “curse” because you took a picture.

Think of the occult. If you are a person who is primed to believe -- perhaps raised in, or interested in -- the occult, such as alchemy, witchcraft, blood rituals, etc; How do you behave? You behave as though it is fact. Now imagine that on a scale where you have infinite money and resources. You are able to prove that your magic is real. Not because it is real, but because you can make it real. You can control the narrative. You can control the people. You can functionally control reality.

The problem with belief is that when someone sets their mind on something being factual, it can be hard to come to terms with its unravelling. Sometimes, we do not want to admit that we were fooled, duped, or misled. Instead, it seems people would rather dig their heels in and defend their false belief with their entire being, as though it is a direct attack on them personally rather than an artful manipulation.

We don’t want to believe we can be misdirected and misled. We don’t want to believe that some things are orchestrated against us. We want to believe we are the exception. We are smarter than the others. We are special and unique. We buy into our own deluded narrative to feel important because reality is so painfully irrelevant. We are specs of dust on a spec of plasma coated in dirt and stone in a spec of the grand expanse of space/time.

We take away the chance for real magic and real understanding by deluding ourselves. We sell ourselves, our futures, and our potential far too short by just accepting the god of the gaps. We take away our cognitive credit by saying it was magic instead of the subconscious ability to read and compute body-language.

The subconscious is strange, and reality is far stranger than fiction if we pay attention.

Belief can be codified. Subliminals work. Not because they can program images in your mind and turn you into a sleeper agent, but because if they don’t give you the space and time to breathe and think critically, then you are always reacting on a gut based instinct that instantly puts you where they want you. This is why you must work 24/7 or else face eviction next pay-cycle. This is why the news is an onslaught of slop, misery-porn, rage-bait, and fodder. This is why they start wars and erode rights. This is psychology. This is mentalism at its finest.

Let me put forth an example: The Red Hammer Mentalism Trick.

The setup is simple. You ask questions at a rapid pace, and tell the participant not to take their time to think. Just answer quickly and gut-based.

The questions are as followed:

• What day is Christmas?

• What is 5 x 3?

• What year was 10 years ago?

• How many sides does a stop sign have?

• What are hamburgers made of?

• What side of the road do they drive on in London?

• Quick: think of a color and a tool!

You have just been subconsciously primed to answer “Red Hammer.”

Why?

• Christmas = Red association.

• 5x3, 10 years ago = irrelevant mental roadbumps to distract you from priming and keep you answering at a rapid pace.

• Stop sign = reaffirming the red association.

• Hamburger = “Ham” priming. This sets you up mentally to think first of the word “hammer” because you were primed with the word ham. The answer is irrelevant.

• London = Another mental roadbump, or another affirmation of the red association.

Why you will most likely answer “Red Hammer” is because of priming.

Priming can be used in a multitude of ways. Mentalism as an art has been co-opted by spies and agents because it works. It is the subtle art of manipulation. Now consider every ad you’ve ever seen. Every hit new show that Netflix won’t stop pushing at you. The color theory of every storefront you’ve ever entered. These things matter. It is priming reality. This is gaslighting on a global scale. We can no longer assume these things are unrelated or accidental -- they are not.

We have long entered an era of gut-based reactions. We are more likely to agree with opinions on a tiktok comment section than we are with what we initially may believe, or even what the facts clearly state. If it is an emotional echo of something you already felt to be true, your belief makes it true. You shape yourself to blend in with the distorted reality.

Now think back to genAI. These lines are blurred more than ever now. We cannot even tell what is real and what is fake, and even if you can tell the difference now, how will you do so in a year from now? Five years from now? This technology is only getting better, and doing it at a pace unimaginable. The next wave of unreality will be shaped based on your own bias, your own thoughts. AI will use the perfect narrative to sell you the expertly worded propaganda that turns us in the direction that those in power want us in. The narrative that has already been written by bad actors using humans and bots to sway our opinions can now do so at a much larger scale, in a much shorter amount of time, with much more hyper-dramatic realism than ever before. AI does not choose to do the most logical things. It chooses the reality that will elicit the response it wants.

We have been primed for this. We’ve watched movies and shows, read books and comics that primed us for this. AI uses the tools of narrative in fiction to manipulate us because at our core we are emotional beings who want to live a life in a movie -- a life more grand than the reality we are forced to live in and believe in. These tactics work because we want them to. They work because our reality is already distorted by the media and dog-whistles.

This is why we must consider the reality we are building for ourselves, the echo chambers we put ourselves in, and the people we choose to uphold and believe in. This is why we must shape ourselves to be ourselves, erase our insecurities and accept our shortcomings not as personal failures but “as designed” strengths that need to be reframed as strengths rather than weakness.

This is not a call to place blame on someone or something else for everything that you find to be wrong with you. This is a plea to shape your reality into something worth living in. Accept yourself for what you are and refocus on a better, brighter tomorrow. Not a reality that ends in biblically apocalyptic proportions.

If you believe that the world ends in war and famine, then it will. Not because it was destined according to some ancient text, but because you believed it so much that it became true -- because your actions always worked toward that end. If the bad actors with a lot of money and influence can convince you that the end times are here, you are more easy to control and manipulate. If they can convince you that they have favor with the gods, then they can control you. What are humans most commonly fearful of? Death. They can control you through your fear of death. If they can conjure a real fear in you, then they can control you through that fear.

And this is not a singular callout. My point is that if enough people believe it, and enough people who believe it work toward it, they have, effectively, “manifested” it. This is not supernatural and it never was. It was a story we unwittingly played a part in, and continue to uplift. But we have the pen; we are the authors, and it only continues so long as we let it.

It is okay to be tricked. It is okay to be wrong. It is not okay to continue to live your life the same way as always and pretend nothing happened when you know you were tricked. When you know you were wrong. That is how things stay the same. That is how things end in apocalyptic flames on a global scale.

There is no such thing as “the way things are,” or “this is just how it’s always been.”

We were told we could not change the narrative, and we believed it. We were told to fit in and stay in line, or else, and we did. We fell in line.

The only reality worth building toward is one full of unity, peace, and love. That isn’t hippy-dippy bullshit. It’s the one thing everyone wants. Perhaps singularly. Perhaps their biases have convinced them that some people do not deserve this, and perhaps some people don’t. If you ask me, the only people who do not deserve the good end are the people who want the bad end so badly they will destroy you to make it real. But that’s just me.

I believe there is a world where we get along. A world where we band together to bring peace and prosperity. Where we can focus on the things that matter -- art, music, science, discovery, companionship. A world where we can play in the garden of eden we were promised instead of the sodom and gomorrah we’ve been sold.

Perhaps we can never have a world without struggle -- for some reason we are convinced life only has meaning if we have to struggle for a good outcome. But if you believe in something different, and you tell enough people about it, then maybe one day that belief will be reality.

So dream of your version of the plane. Dream of a better world. Then make it happen. Because I am fucking tired of living in hell on Earth, and you should be, too.