Are We Our Own Version of God?
When I was in the sixth grade, I discovered the anime known as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, an anime about the titular character Haruhi yearning to find aliens, time travelers, and espers to fulfill her desires of having an extraordinary world. We follow the protagonist, Kyon, as he somehow gets involved in Haruhi’s club known as the S.O.S. Brigade, where he encounters Yuki Nagato, Mikuru Asahina, and Itsuki Koizumi who turn out to be an alien, a time traveler, and an esper respectively.
As I went through the anime and read the first three volumes of the manga adaptation, esper Itsuki Koizumi said some things to Kyon about Haruhi that will stick with me forever.
“Basically, because we humans are here, and discovered the cosmos, and observe the world… the world exists. Conversely, if humans didn’t exist, the universe would never have been identified and therefore never exist either. In short, because there are humans, there is the universe. And if I may go so far, because there is a certain somebody. And as far as that somebody is concerned, this reality is no more than a dream. Building and altering it to her every whim is mere child’s play.”
And later on…
“One day, she thought to herself… ‘I want there to be aliens.’ And so Yuki Nagato is here. In the same way, she wanted time travelers and espers.”
“…Though she wishes for aliens and the like to exist, she also tells herself that they can’t possibly exist. Sure, her words and actions are eccentric, but… she’s your average human being, possessing logical reasoning.”
As someone who would later take interest in psychology later on in life, I’ve always thought the whole concept of controlling the whole world for your own self was pretty cool, and reading it later on as a 21-year-old made me ask something that maybe everyone has been thinking this entire time- are we our own version of God?
Is it possible that we can all be just like Haruhi Suzumiya, controlling the entire world with just our own thoughts and whims? A normal answer to that would be, “Of course not! Nobody can control things that are uncontrollable!”. And that’s a reasonable thing to say; after all, you can’t exactly control someone else’s thoughts or whatever is going on in the world today… or can we?
Have you ever had a situation where your mother is planning on taking a bath right around the time you were going to take a shower and prayed that she wouldn’t take such a long time? And the longer you thought about that, the more you pray that it won’t happen, and sure enough, your mother takes almost an hour in the bathtub? Weird, isn’t it? A quote from The Secret by Rhonda Byrnes goes-
“Through this most powerful law, your thoughts become the things in your life. Your thoughts become things! Say this over to yourself and let it seep into your consciousness and your awareness. Your thoughts become things!”
In other words, the more you think positive things, the more likely that positive things will happen- likewise with negatives as well. What gives? Is it just our vision on life, or is it just a mere coincidence? What about the negative disasters that go on in the world like hurricanes or wildfires- nobody can spin a positive outlook about those. How can we call ourselves our own version of God if those terrible things still happen regardless?
According to The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Dr. Joseph Murphy, the subconscious never sleeps and never rests, which may explain why we have dreams at night. And of course, dreams do have a deeper meaning than what we think. For example, a dream about your teeth falling out might mean that you’re fearful of becoming older, and a dream about being chased might mean that you don’t want to face something that might make you feel unsafe. Apparently, this isn’t the only type of power the subconscious mind has either.
Scottish surgeon Dr. James Esdaile performed over four hundred major surgeries on the eyes, ears, and throat using only a form of hypnosis called mental anesthesia. You might be thinking, “Mental anesthesia? That’s not even a real thing!”, and that’s probably true. But Dr. Esdaile suggested to all of his patients, in their subconscious minds, that they will not develop any infection or septic condition during the surgery. Apparently, it worked because Esdaile’s patients were recorded to have a very low postoperative mortality rate of two to three percent. How did this happen? Was Dr. James Esdaile some sort of God, was it the patients’ optimism that resulted in such a low mortality rate, or was it all just one big placebo effect?
You’re probably thinking to yourself, “This is stupid. Why would anyone think that they have the powers of a God? Why would they think they have the ability to determine things that are out of their control? Nobody’s a psychic!”. Of course not! No ordinary human is a God, and no ordinary human is a psychic. Why would anyone think that? Dr. Murphy claims that the reasons are a lack of confidence and too much effort. We don’t trust ourselves enough while obsessing about the things we want to the point of it interfering with other things in our lives. Wanting leads to anticipation, anticipation leads to excitement, excitement leads to thinking, thinking leads to obsession, and obsession leads to a dead end.
For example, let’s say that you’ve been wanting to get a good, well-paying job. You pray for it every night, and you constantly daydream about it. In fact, you think about so much that you forget everything else around you… only for that thing you’ve been dreaming about since the very first second to never come to you. What happened? Weren’t you supposed to get whatever you want just by thinking about it? Perhaps there was too much conflict going on in your mind. Fear and pessimism get in the way of you achieving your passions, but at the same time you’re not allowing yourself to relax when you obsess over your passions. Yes, you should think positively about getting what you want in life, but the more you obsess over it and the more you think about not getting what you want, the less you’re going to actually achieve anything- just like Haruhi Suzumiya.
Haruhi thought a lot about the aliens, time travelers, and espers being in her world; she obsessed about it a lot to the point of having some of her relations to others being impaired. And yet, her own pessimistic thoughts of there being no aliens, time travelers, or espers prevented her from truly achieving what she wanted- even though said aliens, time travelers, and espers were right in front of her the whole time, despite the fact that according to Itsuki Koizumi the esper, she is a god, and she does, in fact, control the entire world.
So to answer the title of this article, we could very well be our own version of God, controlling the world with every thought and desire just like Haruhi Suzumiya, or we just might be psychics, predicting what goes on in the world and the results after, just like Itsuki Koizumi.
