You took that as ridicule? It wasn't intended as such.
>Would you mind giving an example of a specific situation
> where your heroine may apply this theory in real life?
Suppose our heroine is a staunch materialist, but she recognizes that
she's too up-tight and that it's not good for her health or for her
personal life. She decides to take up the practice of meditation. Her
instructor tells her that she needs to chanel kundalini energy
throughout her body in a certain way to activate her various chakras and
attune them in some prescribed fashion. Our materialist hero doesn't
think that there is any such thing as kundalini energy or chakras, but
she has good reason to believe that she will benefit from this kind of
meditation, so she visualizes the things her instructor tells her to
visualize, and after a while she can actually "feel" the energy coursing
through her body. It would be pretty tough, if not impossible to focus
her concentration sufficiently to acheive her meditative goals if she
had to keep saying to herself, "Okay, I'm just pretending this stuff is
real in order to reap the benefits of meditative practice. Even though
I feel it, I know that there is a physiological basis for it." She
could do that in conversation or in moments of normal introspection, but
there will be times when she just treats kundalini energy and chakras as
if they were real and drops all rationalization for doing so. When
she's meditating, she uses a different conceptual framework than she
does in other activities, and she doesn't get too worked up with worries
about how all her frameworks could be 'true' if they are incompatible
with one another.
Take care. -KMO