Help for busy minds…

Do you have a mind that won’t stop turning?

As a child, I wanted to be a nuclear physicist. I ended up studying Philosophy because I loved having my mind stretched in weird and wonderful directions.

I was good at Philosophy. It taught me how to think in every which way, and then back again.

It also drove me nuts.

If you have an overly analytical mind, now imagine this…

…Imagine that same overactive mind, but fully trained in logic, analysis, and scientific method.

…Imagine that mind once it becomes an expert in reason and rationality and constructing arguments,

…once it starts piling principle on top of principle, thinking its way into knots and contradictions and never finding an answer.

It’s not a pretty sight, I can tell you. It’s an even less pretty experience.

You see, philosophy teaches you how to think, and how to argue, and how to construct a perfectly logical and watertight argument. But it doesn’t tell you how to feel, intuit, or believe.

It has no place for trust or faith.

It doesn’t even teach you how to know, not really.

When I discovered magic, I let go of all notion of scientific method, of ‘proof’ of ‘objective evidence’ and even of rationality.

When it came to magic, all that had to go.

Heck, half the things I teach contradict the other half of what I teach!

If we try to science-ify what’s going on, we’ll end up creating theories, testable hypotheses, formulae, ten-step plans, and so forth. We’ll force up it all into a framework that isn’t suitable, a structure that will kill off everything that makes magic special, everything that makes magic work.

Thing is, there are some things you can’t work out with the thinking mind.

When your mind goes into overdrive trying to work something out, it’s usually a fruitless quest. When your mind finds a contradiction or a counterexample, it’s almost never relevant.

At times like this, all you need do is stop thinking and just feel.

Let go of your intellect altogether and trust.

This is why I call it magic.

Because it allows me to stop trying to work it out.

I can just let it just be. I don’t care two hoots whether there’s contradiction in my understanding, or that there’s no scientific explanation for what I do.

Magic works. End of.