There’s an interesting term that people talk about a lot in books about how to write science fiction, which I used to devour as a teenager. They call it the suspension of disbelief. For some reason, this website about Audio/Video technology has a really good definition of it:

Term used to describe the phenomenon while watching a movie that the audience is willing to accept the movie as reality and believe the story for that time bringing the audience more fully into the story. Without a willing suspension of disbelief, the audience does not enjoy a movie to its fullest potential because it is viewed as a fiction or falsity in which case the audience does not relate to the movie and its characters developing emotions and feelings about it. The audience must be able to accept the film as plausible and possible - they must stop disbelieving.

Like so many things about science-fiction (and fiction as a whole), this lines up really well with religion. To my mind, this is the original condition with which a religious story-system must be approached, with a suspension of disbelief. That is, if you want to be able to “go along for the ride”. And then, at some mysterious point, suspension of disbelief can eventually give way to something they call “faith.”

My main question is, how are these two styles of participating with a story-system connected? How does one go from merely “not disbelieving” to “actually believing?” Also, when you “believe” in a story-system/religion, why does it have a different effect on you than it would otherwise?

A concept I think might help me figure this mystery out is something called “participation mystique,” mystical participation, which is attributed to a French anthropologist (I think), Levy-Bruhl. As far as I understand it, the term refers to this idea that in “primitive man” there was not perceived to be any difference between the interior world (mental, emotional - subjective), and the exterior world (physical - objective). This seems to relate very closely to what Jung calls projection, the natural process where you unknowingly project your internal contents outwards onto the world, situations and people around you. People also seem to connectthis concept to animism in religion. Animism is basically when you believe that spirits inhabit everything, from the landscapes to objects, to trees, etc. (A related more scientific-sounding version of animism is panpsychism, in case you’re interested)

I think this idea of participation mystique also relates to what happens when you “identify” with a character in a story. You start to sympathize with them in some way, because you can see some element of yourself in that character - or something along those lines. Here’s a little article asks a couple interesting questions about why we accept certain things to be “true” within fiction, while other elements might be too much for us, and will force us out of our suspension of disbelief, or our participation mystique with a story.

I wonder if the idea of participation mystique has, at its root, to do with how we experience life. That is, we only know what life feels like when we experience it through our own body/mind. Everything outside of us is a conjecture which is ultimately unknowable to some degree. And the way that we come to know and to create images of how other people experience things is by imagining ourselves into their shoes.

So then, maybe suspension of disbelief occurs because we imagine, on some intrinsic level without realizing, that the story we are hearing is happening to us. But then, if we hit a wall which is too different from how we are, or from what we expect, then we cease being able to really personally identify with the story.

Another way which we can help ourselves identify with characters in a story is through ritual. We can symbolically act out elements of a religious story-system. This helps us project ourselves into the story; or maybe rather helps project the story into us - I guess both are the same thing. Ritual allows us to imagine we are within a story, that it is happening to us, and helps us to feel what it is like to really be experiencing this thing as though it were happening to us, or that it were about us. Which may help to explain why “playing pretend” is such an important thing for kids to do. They will ritually act out stories in order to understand how it feels to be wrapped within them. So maybe “faith” develops once we have developed a sufficiently strong ritual identification with a story.

But then, you can also mechanically enact rituals without having any faith, or without “suspending your disbelief.” So yeah, hm. That throws a wrench into that part of my developing theory. Oh well. But wait, maybe this is just a symptom of what happens to adults who have forgotten (or been trained out of) how to “play pretend.”

Also, another idea that seems to somehow fit into all this is that whenever you receive a story from a source outside yourself (ie, you’re not spontaneously experiencing it, dreaming, or imagining it), you receive it through some ritual. That ritual receiving of the sacrament of story may be through listening, hearing, reading, whatever.

Anyway, yeah, these are just some preliminary thoughts. Not quite all strung together in a totally satisfactory way for me yet, but getting closer.