The other night my husband and I were discussing psychic phenomena and related curiosities with a skeptic friend. I enjoy these kinds of discussions very much because they force me to do some challenging mental acrobatics, to grapple with important concepts like doubt and proof and faith.
Sometime during the evening, our thoughts turned to telekinetics — spoon-bending, moving things with your mind, et cetera. Our friend said, “Moving things requires energy. How could something move if you weren’t applying energy to it?”
I pointed out that mental energy could be very powerful and, if applied correctly, who’s to say it couldn’t move things from a distance? I concluded my argument with what I believed to be ironclad fact: “After all,” I said triumphantly, “if we only use 10 percent of our brains, who’s to say what’s possible if we used much more of them?”
I got scoffed at.
Our friend challenged the “10 percent myth,” saying the claim is bandied about too much without any real evidence or backing. He said he doubted, very much, that it was true. I was flummoxed — no one had ever argued back on that point before — so we did what any self-respecting group of forty-ish Americans would do: We consulted the Internet.
Sure enough, my friend was right. Scientific American said so. The University of Washington said so. Even that sacred guardian of Internet truth and legend, Snopes, said so.
Yet I also know, from my work in early childhood development, that psychoneurobiologists have discovered that brain neurons are malleable — they can change and adapt according to input from the self and the environment. So although we might use all of our brains, our brains can also change. So I still contend that there is a possibility they can change in ways we’re not, as a species, even aware of yet, even to the point of bending spoons and lifting oak tables with our minds. I’m sure there are rules and structures and limitations governing how neurons can change (Saturn!), but for now I’d like to maintain my belief in at least the possibility of more than we know.
Interestingly, what the facts did, instead of dashing my hopes, was to bring me back to the sticky questions of faith, proof and doubt, to understand more about the nature of these things than I did before. I got, suddenly, how different people require different things for faith. There are a lot of people, our friend included, who require physical proof of things: “Seeing is believing”-type people. On the other end of the spectrum are the “I just know it in my heart”-type people — those who require no proof other than their own intuition.
These differing attitudes correspond to the Jungian typologies Sensate and Intuitive which, in turn, correspond to the astrological elements Earth and Fire. I would expect those heavy on Earth energy in their horoscope charts to require more solid proof of things and those with more Fire to follow their intuitive beliefs much more readily.
I think, though, that it is not an either-or question. We all have both Earth and Fire in our charts, requiring us to weigh which beliefs we approach from an Earthy perspective and which ones are more Fiery for us. Each of us carries a spectrum along which we fall according to the belief in question. Rare is the person who requires hard proof for everything, or for nothing.
What about you? Where do you fall on the spectrum? Do you require physical verification or strong intuition when it comes to, say, your beliefs about an afterlife? About God/Spirit/Divine? About human nature? About love?
How certain are you of your beliefs? What makes you so sure?
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