“Dost thou reckon thyself only a puny form, when within thee the universe is folded?”
~The Imám ‘Alí
This summer I took my boys on a vacation to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It was a long road trip from Portland, Oregon, and for me, the final leg of a longer journey. Monterey Bay symbolized for me independence and the ability to give the gift of travel to my boys, who patiently supported my years through grad school, internship, and early career. You see, it was the first out-of-state place that I took my boys to sightsee since my divorce, four years prior. I had been a stay-at-home mom for almost a decade and was trying to figure out how to escape an unhealthy marriage and still support my children, one of which had just started kindergarten at the time. I had an aging bachelor’s degree and little work experience. After sitting across from my attorney and listening to him rattle off the statistics of single mothers who live in poverty after divorce, I went home determined that I wouldn’t be included in the next round of stats and that I wasn’t going to settle for a minimum wage job. Part of my plan would have to entail furthering my education to begin a professional career. Living upstairs in the guest room of my own home, I set a goal to figure out by the end of the week what I would do to change my circumstances.
Inspired by a combination of scripture and quantum theory (yes, you read that right…), I prayed and imagined how I wanted my life to look. I was just beginning to realize that the power to transform my life lay in my own thoughts, beliefs, and actions, intermingled with supplicating prayers for God’s help and guidance. But ah you say. This is rather contradictory and leads to the age-old religious question of will of God versus will of man. What if His plan was different than mine? And what kind of control do I have over my own life if an omniscient being is directing our lives according to His desires, knowing what is best for us? I couldn’t see God as a universal puppeteer and I couldn’t believe in a God-created universe that wasn’t connected intimately and ultimately to its Creator. The only thing that made sense to my belief system was a God-conscious theory of reality— that the interconnectedness of the material and spiritual universe regulates our lives in ways that are difficult to fathom.
So allow me to get my geek on to explain: quantum weirdness has scientifically demonstrated that consciousness creates and influences the physical world. In a famous experiment called the “double-split experiment”, researchers discovered that the mere presenceof a conscious observer actually changedthe behavior of an electron particle. Scientists walked away shaking their heads because the experiment pretty much obliterated everything they thought they knew about the physical universe. The implication of the experiment are far greater than what I or anyone can comprehend really, but it does impart the realization that simply through consciousness, we can exert power and influence upon the physical world. This means that sitting around a campfire and singing Kumbaya to evoke a sense of unity is minor stuff compared to our actual interconnectedness and what we are capable of.
Science has shown that the adage, that we create our own reality, is literally true. And the various religious Scriptures of the world have promoted this idea for centuries through various forms of prayers, teachings, and meditative contemplations. Ask, and you shall receive. I think one could argue that although God is exalted above the station of humans and He is incomprehensible to us in the way we want to try to understand concrete things, we are connected with God as a ripple is connected to an ocean. This is truly a gift and miracle from God to exert our own will and direction in our lives through our own thoughts, and take the life He gave us to fashion something beautiful and amazing.
Believing that science and religion can be experienced together and works hand in hand, four years ago I began the journey of changing my thoughts, focusing and concentrating on the end result that I wanted: that I would find a way to keep my home and similar lifestyle for my children, that I would start a career in my 40s, I would work on healing my mind and body and reclaim my sense of self, and take my children on a simple family vacation to show them this beautiful and amazing world we live in. And if I could go back and tell my younger self anything, it would be to dream big and focus on the positive, because it is from within that our reality unfolds.
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