On Testing

On Testing

A reader’s note. This piece moves through depression, anxiety, and a dark stretch of my own life, told in retrospect. If you are standing in that dark place right now, please don’t walk it alone. In the U.S. you can call or text 988 (the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or chat at 988lifeline.org, any hour of any day; outside the U.S., findahelpline.com lists a line near you. What follows is one person’s way out, found slowly and by circumstance. It is not a map for anyone else, and it is not medical advice.

To all the academics, scholars, philosophers, and professors. Once I thanked my high school teachers, because I had tried college twice and never finished. Now I’m in college again, at Maharishi International University, learning firsthand what I once knew only vicariously through my close friends: the value of having a good leader like these, late in life. You teach the future society how to live; fate will teach them how to be. Keep answering the call, even if that’s the test in your own head. You’re acing it.

I

When is the last time you tested your own ability to be human?

Is that too difficult of a question to answer? How about this: when is the last time you felt human?

Sometimes the darkness gets so deep, it’s as if the world is covered in a deep purple. But not the kind of purple described by musicians and artists. Or maybe it is.

Don’t forget, what looks like purple to me may not be purple to you, which also isn’t purple to the next person. You’ll never know what it looks like to me. Maybe my purple looks like your red.¹

Speaking of red. We all bleed the exact same color of blood. Not only that, they’re the same structural cells of blood. Not only that, the very particles that make up blood are of a kind that admits no individual identity at all: not merely the same type, but indistinguishable in a sense the physics takes seriously.²

Zoom out.

Life can be extremely confusing sometimes, and that purple can turn to black before we know it. Dark is a feeling that we share, not a color that we see.

Every once in a while, it helps to get the blood rushing (the flush of a hard laugh, a run, a cold morning) so we see color. It reminds us that we’re human on the days where we don’t feel like it.

Don’t ever forget this about pain, either: you’re only simulating the feeling of it. The brain builds it and hands it back to the spot that got hurt a fraction of a second late, which makes every one of us a time traveler.³ That’s true for physical pain, but what of emotional? That’s true for emotional pain, too.

At least in theory. Either way, it still hurts.

What types of rigors and limitations have you actually tested yourself against to see what you’re capable of?

Have you ever looked at a spoon and bent it like liquid with your mind?

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it.

But it’s easy: you just picture it happening over and over and over, and eventually it happens. Usually right after everyone stops watching.⁴

You’re already a time traveler; now you can add wizard to your résumé.

I know, I know. It’s crazy.

But wait. Is it crazy? Or does it just sound crazy?

II

There was a point years ago, during my studies, when I struggled with my own existence, but I still stuck with meditation every day.

Practicing. Asking. Learning. Asking. Praying.

Being answered.

I stood atop the mountain of my own mind and asked the universe: Why am I so depressed and anxious all the time?

The response I got was almost humorous in presentation, but mirroring in design.

“I don’t know, why are you?”

“Because a doctor told me so.”

Silence.

I had my answer.

I need you to hold a truth here. This was not a clinical cure by any scientific or medical standard. If you’re working with a doctor right now, keep working with them. This was circumstantial, and took many years of practice and what I can only call brain pattern analytics converted into repetition therapy to find my way out of the mess.⁵

I am very fortunate to have discovered that reality for myself. But this is not a call of possibility for everyone. It took me the better part of three decades to walk through that door.

But I know what a day looks like that has no sunrise afterwards. This much, I can assure you, because I’m human, and I came through it.

On some subconscious level, I know this is my last trip around the globe, my last time through the cycle of lives, in the grand scheme of things.⁶

Don’t ask me how I know; I’m going to respond like a child. Shrug. “Because.”

Be, cause.

Be the reason for effect; otherwise the time will leave you unremembered.

Sometimes we want to forget. Why? Because we fear we won’t be remembered?

Why not?

III

We’re going to do a Quantum Lens experiment (physics’ words for looking, tried on a life) and turn it toward your own phenomenology. The borrowed idea is the observer effect: that looking changes what gets looked at.⁷

The bottomless cup theory.

I’m going to describe a phenomenon, and maybe it’s something that’s happened to you, maybe not. Maybe it’s something you’ve heard someone else talk about in passing, but never gave it much credit.

Walk with me. No. Run with me.

You’re exhausted, thirsty. You grab for your opaque water bottle, and you chug. Blindly. When you picked it up, you felt roughly how much it weighed, maybe a couple sips.

Gulp gulp.

Maybe a couple more than you thought.

Gulp gulp. Gulp.

Wait… there’s no way there was that much water in there. Twist off the lid, and boom. Empty. But you can almost swear you felt the swish of water as you went to check, and still nothing.⁸

A small part of me believes that the things we “need” are given to us from beyond, when we’re turned toward the need with everything we have.

IV

Zoom out, and zoom back in time.

Let’s sit with Jesus and the story of the feeding of the five thousand.⁹

Who actually knew Jesus only had the five loaves and two fish? The people who observed it before it was distributed.

What if he was able to “convince” the apostles that there was more than there actually was, in an unseen dimension he could reach to? What if he could convince the crowd in front of him that the food supply was sufficient, and then careful equation was applied to distribute, but it was done so rapidly nobody noticed that…

Hey, I swear we only started with five loaves and two fish.

I’m not saying that’s what happened. I’m saying it’s possible.

Turn the Lens on the basket, and this is where I stop reporting and start proposing. In the physics, nothing about a basket of bread waits on anyone’s look, and nobody’s belief decides how much is inside.¹⁰ All I add to the old picture is that Intent changes outcomes. Picture everyone on that hillside facing somewhere: toward their own hunger, toward the neighbor, toward the doubt that five loaves could ever go around. He faced one way, all the way: feed them, it is enough. And he held the crowd’s gaze until they were facing it too. A crowd turned that way starts to act like it. Hands take a little and pass the basket on. However the bread got there, the hungry were fed. I offer that as a question.

It lasted because that is what an aligned act does. The facing got folded into the story, and every time the story is read with the same will behind it — feed them, it is enough — the reader turns the same way again, two thousand years downstream from the hillside.

The ripple has never yet reached a far shore.

Intent.

The way I read it, his wanting to feed the masses with an illogical amount of resources only allowed him to have just enough resources necessary to accomplish his philanthropy.

It’s always the exact amount. Where we always live just one step short of divinity, somehow divinity always gives us the last step we need to stand up while we’re here.

Call it God’s plan, the design, fate, call it whatever you want. It’s reality, and it’s subjective.

Then, Matthew and Mark both say, he sent the crowd away and went up the mountain by himself to pray.¹¹ Alone, up high, quiet. Prophet after prophet tells us to do likewise, and it is the same climb I was making every day on the mountain of my own mind.

Jung read the Book of Job as a test that turned back on the tester: in his reading, God came away more conscious for having met a man who would not stop being honest.¹²

But on the subject of testing, I’m no longer testing things I can’t explain. As of today, I can’t explain my own mind. So I’m done testing it.

Which leaves the test I started with.

I think you pass it every time the color comes up in your face on its own: a hard laugh, a cold morning. The same red as everyone’s.

Stop testing your limits. Feel human.

Notes

1. The inverted spectrum is Locke’s, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 2, chapter 32, section 15. His example is a violet that produces in one person’s mind the idea a marigold produces in another’s, and the reverse; “my red, your green” is the modern form of the thought. It remains one of the cleanest statements of why first-person experience resists third-person measurement. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

2. Electrons are identical particles, alike in every intrinsic property: swap two and nothing about the world changes, and the statistics that follow from this underlie the exclusion principle, and with it the shell structure of atoms that chemistry rests on. French and Bigaj, “Identity and Individuality.” Indistinguishable is not the same as numerically one. John Wheeler once telephoned Feynman with the idea that every electron is the same electron, running back and forth in time; Feynman took that idea less seriously than the part of it he kept, which pictures a positron as an electron going backward. Feynman, “Development of the Space-Time View.”

3. Pain is an experience the brain produces, not a direct readout from the nerves. In the International Association for the Study of Pain’s 2020 definition, pain and nociception are different things, and pain cannot be inferred from activity in sensory neurons alone. Raja et al., “Revised International Association for the Study of Pain Definition.” The lag of a fraction of a second, and the time traveler it makes of everyone, are worked through in Johnson, On Searching. “Simulating” is my word for this, and carrying the claim over to emotional pain is mine as well. A built feeling is still a felt one.

4. A joke, and it should be read as one. Nothing in physics licenses bending cutlery by concentration, and spoon-bending has a well-documented history as stage conjuring.

5. The author meditated daily through this period and took up Transcendental Meditation only years later. The account here is retrospective and personal. Meditation has been studied extensively; the evidence for modest effects on stress and anxiety is real but mixed, and one large review found moderate evidence on anxiety for mindfulness programs and no clear effect for mantra methods. Goyal et al., “Meditation Programs.” It is not a substitute for care for a diagnosed condition, and nothing in this passage should be read as a reason to change or stop a course of care. The reader’s note at the front says as much; it is said again here on purpose.

6. The line about a last trip around the globe is meant in the author’s own terms (a final incarnation, the last pass through a cycle) and not as a statement about the length of a life. It arrives just after a description of despair, and read quickly the two could be run together. They are not the same thought. The author is here, well, and writing; the resources at the front of this essay stand for anyone who needs them now.

7. In physics the observer effect is the disturbance a measurement makes in what it measures. The observer can be any measuring device; nothing in the physics asks for a mind. Turning the term on one’s own experience is a figure, and only that.

8. The bottomless cup is offered as a phenomenon people report, not as an anomaly. The likelier account is ordinary: weight estimation through an opaque wall is poor, and expectation shapes what the hand reports.

9. Apart from the resurrection, the feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle recounted in all four Gospels: Matthew 14:13–21; Mark 6:30–44; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:1–14. In each it is the disciples who report the five loaves and two fish before anything is handed out; in John it is Andrew, who points to a boy who has them.

10. This is a reading of a scriptural story through the Lens, offered as interpretation and not as an account of what occurred. On no established interpretation of quantum mechanics does belief select an outcome, and an object the size of a loaf has no lasting superposition to select from; it is entangled with its surroundings almost at once. The claim made in the body is the framework’s own, and it is put as a question: that Intent, the way a person faces, shapes outcomes. In the framework’s functional each person enters with a strength and a facing, and the room’s shared direction is gathered from all of them. Johnson, On Explaining. What can be said without the framework is smaller: what a crowd is brought to expect shapes what it does, and what it afterwards reports.

11. Matthew 14:23; Mark 6:46–47 (NRSVue). John 6:15 has him withdraw to the mountain alone but does not mention prayer. Reading that withdrawal as the stillness meditation practices is the author’s.

12. Jung, “Answer to Job.” Jung reads Job’s ordeal as a crisis in God’s own consciousness, answered finally by the incarnation. The reading is Jung’s and much disputed; it is borrowed here for the picture of a test that turns back on the one doing the testing.

Bibliography

Feynman, Richard P. “The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics.” Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1965. NobelPrize.org. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/feynman/lecture/.

French, Steven, and Tomasz Bigaj. “Identity and Individuality in Quantum Theory.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 2000; substantively revised 2024. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-idind/.

Goyal, Madhav, Sonal Singh, Erica M. S. Sibinga, et al. “Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-Being: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.” JAMA Internal Medicine 174, no. 3 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Explaining. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21154523.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Searching. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20759556.

Jung, C. G. “Answer to Job.” In Psychology and Religion: West and East, translated by R. F. C. Hull. 2nd ed. Collected Works of C. G. Jung 11. Princeton University Press, 1969.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Clarendon Press, 1975. First published 1690.

Raja, Srinivasa N., Daniel B. Carr, Milton Cohen, et al. “The Revised International Association for the Study of Pain Definition of Pain: Concepts, Challenges, and Compromises.” Pain 161, no. 9 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001939.

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