The Law of Correspondence

This law refers to the way personal beliefs are shaped by general beliefs and philosophies often held in spiritual, religious or philosophical traditions. There may be no way to definitively “prove” a belief of this sort. So there’s an element of faith. But ideally, this faith is supported through personal experience. There’s an interesting game of discernment here, since a strong belief might easily influence ones mind enough that it shapes one’s experience of reality. This is the strange territory in which the placebo effect introduces uncertainty: if you believe a new diet will help you lose weight, then eating according to that diet’s rules may help you lose weight. Only - study after study has shown that the belief itself may be responsible for the weight loss; the dietary change in itself might not matter.  And this is the key: we can make belief work for us in this way. We can choose to give room in our life for a belief. With the diet example, buying different ingredients, cooking and eating differently. ) These are all ways of actively holding a belief (and therefore helping to enact the placebo effect). Embodying that belief in daily life and paying attention to the results.

It matters whether this law is manifested consciously or unconsciously. For example, if you’re taught to believe muslims are dangerous, your adrenaline might spike when someone in a hijab passes by. The shift in body chemistry may be entirely outside your control. So an anchor at Fox News is determining how your hormones operate. It’s very different indeed if you enact the law consciously. For example, you might start to notice there’s a glowing sense in the heart when doing a certain spiritual practice. Or a sense of stillness or vibration. As these sensations change and deepen, they provide internal feedback that something is happening. That feedback evokes more openness, more curiosity, more surrender into something new. And that feedback encourages persistence: something is happening, now’s not the time to stop. In other words, the sensations build belief in the efficacy of a given practice. From here it matters what the objective of practice is. If you’re meditating to directly meet reality, new sensations and images might flow through like weather without mattering so much in their detail. If you’re practicing to try to make something happen through belief, then sensations and images which support the belief can be called into the present moment. In this way, a person becomes a multi-dimensional expression of the belief - one that collects texture, depth and nuance over time. In other words, as the belief expands and takes on detail, it becomes more real. With the principle that outer and inner reflect each other, the belief becomes more real everywhere - not just within one’s own mind.