Each Saturday morning, the latest Nature Briefing appears in my email inbox. Some weeks it’s not particularly interesting. Other weeks there is something that stops me in my tracks.

This post is about one of those times.

The author, Zack Savitsky, is a talented science journalist who was able to make the complexities and controversies of quantum physics understandable to me. (That’s no small feat!) In the process, he made some striking comments — striking because they sound almost as if I’d written them myself.

Well, that wise old voice in my head, anyway. My ordinary mind could never have come up with the things I learn in meditation, when I tune in to what I think of as my greater self and ask questions about my life, and about life in general. (Insatiably curious, I love to understand how things work.)

[The Game: hide, seek, find, laugh is a book of such meditations.]

The through-line of Savitsky’s article is that, according to quantum physics, reality is subjective.

Think about that for a moment. It means that you and I do not experience the same reality.

Of course, we’ll experience many things in such a similar way that we feel complete concordance between our two perspectives, and so the world we share feels fixed, stable, or at least knowable. But other times, we can’t even agree on whether a room is too hot, too cold, or just right!

No wonder there is so much disagreement and disagreeableness in pretty much every sphere of human life!

About a century ago — the field of quantum physics just blew out its 100th birthday candle — the leading lights of the day came up with calculations that revealed “a disturbingly fuzzy picture of reality, one in which certain properties are inherently unknowable and others take on different values depending on how they’re measured.”

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” Werner Heisenberg wrote after winning the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Savitsky goes on [emphasis mine]:

❝ Yet even today, scientists struggle to interpret what the theory implies about nature. […] The standard framing has an unsettling anthropocentric flavor, suggesting humans play some special role in shaping the universe.

Now, bolstered by a string of recent experiments, theorists such as Fuchs and Rovelli are leaning into the discomfort, emphasizing how observers do indeed create the world they inhabit. What’s at stake is nothing less than reality itself. ❞

. . .

In the prologue to Retreat: notes from a virtual mountaintop retreat, I describe an incident that makes this very point:

❝ Some time later, a man showed up at the hut, looking like I probably did when I first arrived: exhausted, defeated, and longing for solitude. We barely spoke, other than to acknowledge our shared journey. I knew that he needed to be left alone, just as I had done when I first arrived, so for the most part we didn’t interact.

But there is one incident worth mentioning which occurred shortly after his arrival. Cat appeared in the doorway of the hut, and I was astonished to see that the man was frozen in fear: where I saw my now-familiar companion (a domestic cat), the man saw a jaguar!

I found that fascinating. All a figment of my imagination, this incident was showing me, in entertaining detail, how my mind can conjure things to fear which are so far removed from reality, or from another’s experience, that they can turn a friendly house-cat into a fearsome wild beast. ❞

In telling Chris Fuchs’ origin story as a physicist, Savitsky shares the following anecdote [emphasis mine]:

❝ In high school in the 1980s, [Fuchs] attended a Texas Boys State summer camp at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. He hated the predawn calisthenics and the right-wing politics, but for one moment, fortune smiled on his sci-fi fantasies.

During his free time, he tracked down his scientific hero John Archibald Wheeler, a pioneering theorist of black holes, cosmic wormholes, and other strange children of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

In Wheeler’s vacant office, Fuchs found a manuscript draft with a passage that read, “There is no law except the law that there is no law.” ❞

. . .

I’d like to finish this little ramble about reality with the following Note from Retreat.

Love what you do

There is only one rule: love what you do.

This is the principle that creates worlds.

The simplest way is to do what you love.

Believing in something makes it true to you,

but it may not result in a reality that you like.

Drop the beliefs that don’t create the reality

you want to live in.

Create a different reality for yourself —

by doing what you love, by loving what you do.

Commentary

These notes follow on from the previous one about darkness, as this is the message illuminated by that particular period of darkness.

[I discuss that topic in a separate article, Another brilliant person dies.]

It is also about the axiom, “you create your own reality” — a hackneyed phrase that always bugged me because to me it was so manifestly untrue.

This phrase is often tossed about as some trite truism by those with no idea of its true meaning. And it is commonly uttered as a veiled accusation: “If you don’t like your life, then that’s on you, because you’re the one who created it.”

That never felt true, and I despised those who parroted this New Age nonsense for their smug superiority and callous disregard for the state I was in, which always felt outside of my control and not something I ever would have chosen to create if it were up to me.

The way I understand it now is that what I focus on, whether wanted or unwanted, and the beliefs I hold, whether affirming or limiting, create my perception of what is, because we primarily see what we focus on, and experience what we believe to be true.

We primarily see what we focus on,

and experience what we believe to be true.

During this meditation, I came to see that my habitual focus (on unwanted things) and the underlying beliefs have generally not been creating a reality that I’ve been enjoying. They have not created a reality in which I want to keep living.

Time to change all that.

Time to change my habitual focus to the things I do want, to Yes instead of No, as Cat might say.

[See Cat says: yes/no, yes/no, yes/no.]

Time to examine my beliefs and drop those that aren’t creating the reality I want to be experiencing. Most of them aren’t mine anyway; they were inherited from my parents, taught to me by others, or passively absorbed from society in general. They may not have become mine by choice, but now they remain mine only by choice.

My beliefs may not have become mine by choice,

but now they remain mine only by choice.

Thanks to this meditation, I’m in the process of creating a life I love by doing only what I love. (Well, mostly; I’m still working on the faith part…)

I learned more about the creative process a bit later. For now, it was enough to be “granted permission” (or so it felt) to do only what I love.

[A few months before my virtual retreat, and right after closing my veterinary practice for good (in every sense), I wrote this little note to myself: “Oh, how good it feels to not be doing something I don’t love!”]

It’s taken some breathtaking daring on my part, as this advice flies in the face of pretty much all I’ve known and been taught up to tis point. But I can’t go on as I’ve done in the past, and I have nothing to lose — and everything to gain! — so here goes…