A Tale of Illusions and Self-Deception

"A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true."

Demosthenes

This is a true story from my college days in Taylor's about that one time when I looked up and saw Jesus Christ's face appear before my eyes. I was told that that would happen, and it really did.

There is one other character in this little tale and she was a classmate and a dear friend of mine. Let us call her Rachel. There is a few things you should know about her. Rachel is a petite, friendly, outgoing girl who was pretty much one of the guys. She is also one of the most intelligent students in my class and a brilliant conversationalist, but the most pertinent thing about Rachel is that she was very, very Christian. She frequently invites her heathen friends to church and churchy events. Her parents (I'm not kidding) forbade her to read the Harry Potter books because they believe J. K. Rowling glorifies witchcraft - but she told me she reads them anyway behind their backs. She rejects evolutionary biology and when I asked her how she reconciled her rejection with the Cambridge A-Levels Biology syllabus, she told me that she's only studying it to be successful in life and hence, "glorify God's name" - what ever that means. She was the first person I ever discussed religion with and she was very helpful when I was just starting out in my study of Christianity and the Bible.

So, this is how it went: I was in the library, sitting at one of the computers when I witnessed the face of her Lord and Saviour emerge out of the whiteness of the ceiling - like magic! I closed my eyes and lo, I could still see his face! It seemed to be seared onto the black of my eyelids, luminescent and ghostly. I wanted very much to share what I saw, and Rachel was the first and only person to jump to my mind.

"Hey, I looked up at the ceiling and saw Jesus!" I wrote in a text and sent it off. Her reply returned almost immediately.

"Oh my God, do you need someone to talk to?!" she asked. "I'm at church now."

Oh dear, that was not how I thought she would react. I had expected her to be sceptical; to suspect a bluff and to promptly call it. Then we would both laugh about what a terrible scamp I was. I was a devout Buddhist back in those days but if anyone messages to tell me that he saw Buddha, I only had two words to say: 'Yeah' followed by 'right'.

Anyhow, I wasn't lying. I really did see Jesus' (or at least, a bearded man's) face materialise out of thin air, but it was only after staring for 30 seconds at a special image featured in a webpage for optical illusions.

Stare at it for about half to one minute. Focus on the four dots in the middle.
After that, shift your gaze onto any blank, white surface - wall, ceiling or paper.

When done right, the effect can be quite startling. This type of optical illusion is called an afterimage, and you usually encounter it in your everyday life as the bright glow that seems to hover in your line of sight after looking at a bright light source such as the sun for few seconds. What happens is that the photoreceptors on your retina adapt or 'tire' and stop responding after being steadily stimulated over a period of time. So, when you divert your eyes to a blank surface, those adapted photoreceptors send out a weaker signal when compared to the ones surrounding it. Hence, the illusion of an inverted ghost image.

I told Rachel the full story of what actually happened. It's hard to tell if someone is annoyed, offended or disappointed through texts, but I assumed she was all of those things.

"I really thought you had a genuine vision," she said. I wonder if she had prematurely shared the good news of my miraculous sighting of the Messiah with her church friends. It would have been rather embarrassing, to say the least.

But suppose that I played along. Suppose that instead of coming clean on my little joke, I embellished my story further by saying that the vision came to me when I was praying (like she advised me to). I daresay she wouldn't find any aspect of my testimony wanting at all. All her life, Rachel wanted to, and do believe that the transformative power of Jesus' love is real. She had shared stories with me about unbelievers who had been "touched" while they were at church and subsequently converted to Christianity. The fact that Jesus actually appeared to me made perfect sense to her. From her point of view, it was like, duh.

She wouldn't ask, for example, how I knew how the historical Jesus looked like. She wouldn't ask if I was on any mind-altering substances at the time either, which was a very likely possibility since it's y'know, college. After all, she didn't even ask me if I was just joking or messing with her - and that was the first thing she should have done. If I had allowed it, she might even introduce me to her pastor and all her church friends, and all of them would no doubt celebrate my "vision" as a proof of the glorious powers of the Holy Spirit. I would bet good money that they wouldn't challenge me on my claim either.

This incident reminds me of the infamous Project Alpha orchestrated by stage magician and celebrity sceptic, James Randi in which he infiltrated two young amateur magicians, Banachek and Edwards, into a paranormal research program. The pair were trained so well by Randi that out of 300 applicants, they alone were selected as subjects. They managed to convince the researchers for four years through more than 160 hours of experimentation that they actually possess psychic powers. The kicker is that Randi actually told the two boys to simply confess if the researchers ever ask them if they were simply performing tricks. That question was never asked.

In fact, even after Randi publicly admitted that he the two youths were actually a plant of his, one of the parapsychologists went so far as to claim that Banachek and Edwards genuinely had psychic powers but were merely lying about being magicians. It's because he was so confident that he was too smart, too well-educated to have been so well and truly bamboozled.

Now, I have heard so many claims from believers about this miracle or that. I have heard stories about how the faithful would speak in tongues and get caught up in rapturous convulsions of ecstasy. I have heard about faith healers who had allegedly made the blind see and the lame walk. I have heard accounts of statues of the Virgin Mary weeping tears and crying blood; about Catholic saints whose bodies are incorruptible and would not rot. The believers claim that these are the proof of God's power, and that they couldn't all be hoaxes. But why not?

I wonder why they are so sure that they couldn't be hoodwinked since even in my limited experience, they have proven that they couldn't even see through the tiniest of tricks - or should I say, they wouldn't see through the tiniest of tricks?

It's so easy for anyone to be fooled when they want to be fooled so badly, and It's almost impossible to be sceptical about supernatural beliefs when they are your own supernatural beliefs. This is why when the faithful come to show me proof or evidence that their religion is true, I am always unimpressed. Over the years, I have grown quite familiar their standards for evidence.

Frankly speaking, they have no standards at all.

Would ask questions,

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