Talk:Personal Reality/@comment-177.92.28.35-20141212155329/@comment-25431873-20141213050544

Ah, looking back, my comment didn't match my thoughts at all. Let me expand on it.

What I should have said is not that Espers create Phases on a smaller scale, but that Personal Reality is probably very similar or related to the creations of Phases. While we don't know the exact process, we know Phases occur naturally (I guess) by people's beliefs and perceptions of reality, aka religions (either by the number of believers or by the longer a particular belief is held). Magic Gods like Othinus can add layers to the world by changing the perspective or the perception (by her explanation of how she could make Touma the world's ennemy in Alpha). Looking at all that, Esper powers seem eerily similar to all this; the Curriculum open one's Personal Reality, which helps them have powers by deluding themselves into believing (simplification) or by their perception of the world change the real world. Adding that to Level 6 being theorically able to 'do God's calculations' and what we have seen a (Magic) God do...

I was going somewhere with this. OK, furthermore, we have Magicians drawing their power from an external source roughly consisting of external beliefs (the religious Phases), and Espers on the other hand accomplish something close to the bigger operation of creating Phases...

Right, that's it, my own opinion: I think a lot of stuff in the ToAru verse happens due to the human mind, or rather humanity's perception of reality, which what also allows some of them to change said reality. Let's presuppose that the Power Curriculum Program is actually activating something (a preexisting condition) that is already in the human mind (the article also notes it), and Academy City is only accelerating the process. For example, Gemstones are people for whom the Personal Reality activated naturally (natural mutation or jump in evolution?). There is also how Ollerus hypothetized that IB might be the collection of the unconscious hopes and the fears of all Magicians. Now, we know he is probably wrong, but his reasoning makes sense with all I have outlined. I think the human mind, or even Humanity's mind(s) has a big importance on the series' universe and metaphysics, maybe related to (due to the archetypes being introduced as of last volume) the psychologist Carl Jung's idea of a collective unconscious (that raises the questions of whether the Pure World is the Unus mundus, or something similar), or monopsychism. (If people here don't get that complicated stuff, or their articles give you headaches, think of similar concepts like Nasuverse's Alaya, Code Geass' 'gods', or Persona's Sea of Souls or Erebus).

Of course, I think my own theory has holes, like Gemstones, Artificial Heaven (it is made of AIM fields, not beliefs), and what happened to Baggage City (the dimension was the result of the supernatural battles, not minds). It's very vague, like looking through a dark glass. Only people like Aleister have all the cards on why the ToAru Verse is like it is.

Not sure if I expressed myself clearly, but I hope you understood my train of thought.