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Painting by Adam Donaldson Powell: E>mc2

The importance of challenging established narratives, and of the necessity of them constantly evolving.    

At the heart of racism, social profiling, prejudice, and underestimation lies a common mechanism: the transformation of assumptions into unquestioned truths.

Humans create narratives because they help simplify a complex world. The problem arises when those narratives stop being treated as hypotheses and start being treated as facts.

A stereotype is essentially a story that has become rigid.

• “People from this group are less intelligent.”
• “People from that neighborhood are dangerous.”
• “Women cannot lead.”
• “Certain classes of people are naturally superior.”

These are not observations; they are narratives masquerading as truths.

Why challenging assumptions matters

Progress often begins when someone asks a deceptively simple question:

“What if what everyone assumes is true is actually incomplete, wrong, or only partly true?”

That question does not merely challenge an idea. It challenges the power structures, institutions, and identities built around that idea.

When assumptions are questioned:

• Individuals become visible instead of categories.
• Evidence becomes more important than tradition.
• Complexity replaces oversimplification.
• Human potential becomes less constrained by inherited labels.

In this sense, challenging assumptions is not simply an intellectual exercise—it is an ethical one.

Historical examples of narrative shifts

1. The abolition of slavery

For centuries, many societies accepted the narrative that some human beings were naturally suited to be owned by others.

This idea was defended by:

• Economic systems
• Political institutions
• Religious interpretations
• Pseudoscientific theories

Abolitionists challenged the foundational assumption itself:

What if no human being has the right to own another?

Today the earlier assumption seems morally absurd, but at the time it was considered normal and inevitable.

The narrative changed because people questioned what had long been treated as unquestionable.

2. Women’s suffrage and political rights

For much of history, women were considered intellectually and emotionally unfit for political participation.

The assumption was:

Men are naturally suited for public decision-making; women are not.

Activists challenged both the evidence and the premise.

As women gained voting rights, entered universities, and assumed leadership roles, the old narrative became increasingly untenable.

What had been treated as “common sense” was revealed to be a cultural assumption.

3. Scientific revolutions

The history of science is largely the history of questioning accepted truths.

Copernicus

The prevailing narrative was:

Earth is the center of the universe.

Nicolaus Copernicus challenged that assumption.

The result was not merely a new astronomical model but a profound shift in humanity’s understanding of its place in existence.

Darwin

The dominant narrative held that species were fixed and unchanging.

Charles Darwin proposed evolution through natural selection.

Again, the challenge was not simply scientific. It transformed humanity’s self-understanding.

Einstein

Before relativity, time and space were assumed to be absolute.

Albert Einstein questioned those assumptions and showed that reality was stranger and more flexible than previously imagined.

4. The civil rights movement

Segregation depended on a narrative that racial hierarchies were natural and justified.

Leaders, activists, and ordinary citizens challenged that premise.

Figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. argued that the existing narrative contradicted both moral principles and lived reality.

The movement did not simply change laws.

It changed stories:

• Who belonged.
• Who deserved dignity.
• Who was allowed to dream.

5. Mental health

For centuries, many forms of mental illness were interpreted as moral weakness, sin, or personal failure.

Over time, psychology and neuroscience challenged these assumptions.

The narrative shifted from:

“What is wrong with this person?”

to

“What experiences, biological factors, and circumstances are affecting this person?”

The change remains incomplete, but it illustrates how questioning assumptions can increase compassion.

Why underestimation is especially dangerous

Underestimation is often invisible because it appears reasonable.

History repeatedly demonstrates that societies underestimate groups before recognizing their contributions.

Examples include:

• Women in science.
• Ethnic minorities in academia.
• Working-class innovators.
• Immigrant entrepreneurs.
• Disabled individuals.

Underestimation functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy:

1. A group is assumed incapable.
2. Opportunities are restricted.
3. Outcomes reflect restricted opportunities.
4. The outcomes are cited as proof of the original assumption.

Breaking this cycle requires questioning the narrative before the evidence appears.

The deeper lesson: narratives are tools, not destinations

Every generation inherits stories.

Some are wise.
Some are useful.
Some are harmful.
Most are mixtures of all three.

The danger begins when a narrative becomes sacred—when it becomes immune to examination.

A healthy society does not destroy every narrative.

Rather, it continually tests them against:

• Evidence
• Experience
• New perspectives
• Moral reflection

Narratives should function like scientific theories: useful until reality reveals their limitations.

Why narratives must continuously evolve

Reality changes.

Knowledge changes.

Human experience changes.

A narrative that perfectly explained one century may fail to explain the next.

If narratives become fixed, societies become rigid.
If societies become rigid, they struggle to recognize new truths.
If they cannot recognize new truths, injustice becomes institutionalized.

Continuous evolution of narratives serves three purposes:

1. It protects us from dogma.
2. It allows previously unheard voices to enter the conversation.
3. It expands the range of what we believe is possible.

The history of human progress can be viewed as a sequence of narrative revisions. Each major advance—scientific, moral, political, or cultural—began when someone challenged an inherited story and proposed a better one.

The goal is not perpetual rebellion for its own sake. The goal is a culture in which no assumption is so powerful that it cannot be questioned, and no narrative is so complete that it cannot be improved.

A living narrative evolves.

A stagnant narrative hardens into ideology.

And when ideology becomes immune to challenge, it ceases to illuminate reality and begins to obscure it. That is why the continual examination, evolution, and sometimes revolution of narratives is not a threat to human progress—it is one of its primary engines.

Changing personal narratives through astral projection, focused meditation, visualization, and challenging science, history and religious narratives. 

N.B. These topics intersect psychology, consciousness studies, and theoretical physics, but they are often discussed in very different ways. It helps to separate what is known scientifically from what is speculative, philosophical, or spiritual.

1. How astral projection, focused meditation, and visualization can change perception and personal narratives

Focused meditation

Focused meditation trains attention by repeatedly directing awareness to an object (such as the breath, a mantra, or a sensation).

Over time, practitioners often report:

• Reduced automatic reactions to thoughts and emotions.
• Greater awareness of mental habits.
• Increased ability to observe experiences without immediately identifying with them.

From a psychological perspective, this can change personal narratives because people begin to recognize that thoughts such as “I always fail” or “I am not capable” are interpretations rather than objective facts.

Instead of:

“I am an anxious person.”

A meditator may start thinking:

“I am noticing anxiety arising.”

This subtle shift changes the relationship between the self and experience.

Visualization

Visualization involves intentionally imagining scenarios, outcomes, behaviors, or identities.

Athletes, performers, and therapists have used visualization because the brain often activates some of the same neural networks during vivid mental rehearsal as during actual performance.

Visualization can influence narratives by:

• Strengthening desired beliefs.
• Increasing confidence.
• Making future possibilities feel more attainable.
• Helping people mentally rehearse new behaviors.

For example, repeatedly visualizing oneself as a capable public speaker may gradually replace a narrative of fear with one of competence.

Visualization does not magically alter reality, but it can alter expectations, motivation, and behavior—which can indirectly affect outcomes.

Astral projection

Astral projection is generally described as the experience of consciousness leaving the physical body and traveling elsewhere.

Many practitioners interpret these experiences as literally occurring outside the body.

However, mainstream neuroscience typically explains them as forms of:

• Out-of-body experiences (OBEs)
• Lucid dreaming
• Altered states of consciousness
• Changes in body perception and spatial awareness

Whether interpreted spiritually or neurologically, astral projection experiences can be psychologically powerful because they may challenge assumptions about identity and reality.

People often report:

• Feeling less attached to everyday worries.
• Experiencing a broader sense of self.
• Reinterpreting life events from a different perspective.

Even if the experience is entirely generated within the mind, it can still reshape a person’s narrative about who they are and what is possible.

A common thread

All three practices can influence perception because perception is not merely passive observation. The brain continuously constructs models of reality based on:

• Attention
• Memory
• Expectations
• Beliefs
• Emotional state

When these factors change, the subjective experience of reality changes as well.

2. Why these practices sometimes become linked with ideas about time

Many meditators and people reporting astral experiences describe unusual experiences of time:

• Minutes feeling like hours.
• Hours feeling like minutes.
• Simultaneous awareness of past memories and future possibilities.
• A sense that time has stopped.

Psychology and neuroscience generally explain this as altered time perception rather than actual movement through time.

The brain’s sense of time is constructed rather than directly sensed like vision or hearing.

When attention, emotion, and consciousness change, the experience of time can also change dramatically.

3. How interest in time travel led some people to challenge Einstein’s relativity

Einstein’s contribution

Albert Einstein introduced:

• The Special Theory of Relativity
• The General Theory of Relativity

One surprising consequence is that time is not absolute.

Different observers can experience different amounts of elapsed time depending on:

• Relative velocity
• Gravitational fields

This phenomenon, called time dilation, has been experimentally confirmed many times.

In a sense, relativity already permits a form of “time travel” into the future:

• Astronauts age slightly less than people on Earth.
• Fast-moving particles survive longer because their clocks run more slowly.

However, this effect is usually tiny unless velocities approach the speed of light.

Why some people want to go beyond relativity

Relativity makes backward time travel extremely difficult.

Many enthusiasts and theorists interested in:

• Visiting the past
• Parallel timelines
• Instantaneous travel across vast distances

have looked for ways to extend or challenge relativity.

The motivation is often:

If relativity appears to forbid easy travel to the past, perhaps a deeper theory could allow it.

Proposed alternatives and extensions

Researchers have explored ideas such as:

• Wormholes
• Closed timelike curves
• Quantum gravity
• Higher dimensions
• Extra-dimensional cosmologies

Examples include concepts associated with the Einstein–Rosen Bridge and various quantum gravity models.

Importantly, these are usually attempts to extend relativity rather than discard it.

Most modern physicists view relativity as extraordinarily successful within its domain.

Fringe interpretations

Outside mainstream physics, some people argue that:

• Consciousness can move through time.
• Astral projection accesses different points in time.
• Meditation enables contact with future events.

These ideas remain speculative and lack scientific confirmation.

The subjective experiences involved can feel extremely convincing, but convincing experiences are not the same as experimentally verified evidence.

4. An interesting connection: narratives as a form of “psychological time travel”

There is a concept from cognitive science that is less controversial.

Humans routinely perform what researchers call mental time travel:

• Remembering the past.
• Imagining future scenarios.
• Simulating alternate versions of events.

Meditation and visualization can enhance awareness of this process.

In that sense, changing one’s narrative can resemble a kind of time travel—not physically moving through spacetime, but revisiting interpretations of the past and constructing different expectations for the future.

A memory from childhood may remain unchanged as an event, yet its meaning can be completely transformed decades later. The story we tell about the past influences how we experience the present and imagine the future.

So while astral projection, meditation, and visualization have not been shown to enable physical time travel, they can profoundly alter our experience of self, reality, and time—often by reshaping the mental models through which we interpret our lives.

5. Historical Narratives, Religious Narratives, and the Courage to Question

A deeper transformation of personal identity often begins when individuals recognize that many of the narratives they inherited were not created by them. From childhood onward, people are taught stories about their nation, culture, religion, gender, and place in society. These narratives frequently become so familiar that they are mistaken for objective reality.

History, for example, is often presented as a collection of established facts. Yet history is also a process of selection and interpretation. Countless events occur in every generation, but only some are recorded, preserved, and taught. The people who possess political, economic, religious, or cultural power frequently influence which stories become official history and which stories are forgotten.

This observation is sometimes captured in the phrase, “history is written by the victors.” While the statement is not universally true, it highlights an important reality: every historical account emerges through a particular perspective. What one generation celebrates, another generation may condemn. What one culture presents as a heroic achievement, another may remember as conquest or oppression.

Religion can be examined through a similar lens. Religious traditions often provide profound wisdom, ethical guidance, community, and meaning. Yet religious institutions are also human institutions, shaped by historical circumstances and power structures. Interpretations of sacred texts, doctrines, and spiritual practices have often reflected the social and political priorities of the eras in which they emerged.

Many critics have noted that formal historical and religious narratives have frequently been dominated by male voices. While the popular wordplay “His-story” is not the actual etymological origin of the word “history,” the phrase serves as a symbolic reminder that many historical records were produced in societies where men disproportionately occupied positions of authority. As a result, the experiences, perspectives, and contributions of women and marginalized groups have often received less attention within traditional narratives.

The significance of this realization extends beyond academic debates. The same tendency that shapes collective narratives can shape personal narratives. If individuals are taught from an early age that certain assumptions are unquestionable, they may internalize limitations they never consciously chose.

A person who never questions inherited beliefs may unknowingly allow external narratives to define the boundaries of their identity. They may accept limitations regarding intelligence, success, spirituality, relationships, or personal potential simply because those limitations were embedded within the stories they were taught.

Visualization, meditation, and other consciousness-expanding practices can therefore serve another function: they create psychological distance from inherited narratives. By observing thoughts, questioning assumptions, and exploring alternative possibilities, individuals gain the freedom to ask deeper questions:

Who benefits from this story?

Is this belief objectively true, or merely culturally accepted?

What evidence supports it?

What possibilities become available if I no longer define myself by it?

Such questioning is not an attack on history, religion, or tradition. Rather, it is an expression of intellectual and spiritual maturity. Progress in science, philosophy, and human rights has often emerged because individuals were willing to challenge ideas that previous generations considered unquestionable.

The ability to change one’s personal narrative depends in part upon the willingness to examine larger cultural narratives. When individuals learn to question inherited assumptions about reality, they begin to recognize that identity itself is not fixed. The stories that shape societies and the stories that shape individual lives are both subject to revision. In that realization lies the possibility of transformation.

6. The “spirit” of Einstein — questioning established assumptions 

One could argue that the common thread is epistemological: progress often begins when people question assumptions that appear self-evident. Einstein questioned assumptions about space and time; contemplative traditions question assumptions about self and consciousness; critical historians question assumptions about historical narratives. In each case, transformation begins not with certainty, but with the willingness to ask whether the accepted story is the only possible story.

— Adam Donaldson Powell