Feature: How To Invoke Magic: A Scientific Approach

TL;DR: Your thinking can dramatically affect your luck. I’m going to show you how.

In my early 20s, I lived a dangerous and lawless life.

I rode freight trains all around the United States. I spent weeks on platforms in old growth trees, to protest logging in our national forests.

I can think of five close calls when I could have died a horrible death. I literally dodged a bullet at least once. 

Through most of those years, I believed I was being guided and protected by a higher power. I even had a ritual to invoke that power.

Later, I went back to school to become a science teacher, and I became way more skeptical.

But apparently the “magical aura” didn’t go away when I stopped believing in it.

A Circle of Luck

Even though I’m not dodging bullets these days, I’ve continuously had extraordinarily good luck:

Conversations with random people which lead to unexpected opportunities.

Extra money showing up just when I needed it.

And did I tell you how I met my wife?

Years ago, I watched a movie called The Secret, which was all about using your mind to “manifest” anything you wanted.

I thought it was mostly bullshit. But I decided to test it out.

“Okay, Universe,” I said, “I want to date a hot, young Latina. She should be nerdy, she has to love animals and nature, and ideally, she’s a lot smarter than I am.”

It only took a few weeks to run into someone who checked all the boxes. It only took me six months to get the courage to ask her out. Today we’re married and together we “manifested” a small farm next to a national park.

I still don’t believe in The Secret. But I know your thinking can dramatically affect your life in ways that seem almost magical. I’m going to show you how.

A Scientific Approach to Magical Phenomena

There are some simple concepts in physics, along with some that are very weird, which seem to support many old ideas about luck and magic.

My favorite example is the inverse square law. It states that force, attraction, and energy increase geometrically as two objects move closer together.

This is the scientists’ version of the saying, “When you take a step towards God, God takes two steps towards you.”

When you’re actively moving towards a compelling goal (one with strong gravity, you could say), you begin to attract help, information, and resources in uncanny ways.

Another, stranger example is the way observing a phenomenon changes it.

For example, as soon as you try to study the movement of a particle, it ceases to have a detectable location. But as soon as you observe its location, it ceases to move.

It seems that your awareness of the physical world creates changes in the physical world.

And if that’s not magical enough for you, consider entanglement. Two particles could be separated by vast distances in time and space, yet their activity is perfectly synchronized.

I’m not a physicist, and quantum physics is a strange field that even the best scientists are struggling to understand. But an exciting picture is starting to form.

It seems you can attract things by reaching out to them, you can impact things by paying attention to them, and precise activity in one part of the universe can create precise activity in another part of the universe.

That’s the physics behind magical thinking. I’m encouraged by it, but I don’t understand it.

However, there are some more accessible concepts in psychology and neuroscience which also support the notion that your thinking affects your circumstances.

Mind Over What Matters

When I was 27 years old, I said out loud, “One year from now, I’m going to be living in Italy.”

I had no idea how I was going to make this happen. I didn’t speak the language or even know much about the country.

But I had become obsessed after my first double espresso, consumed at a bar in San Francisco adorned with Italian decorations.

Over the next 12 months, I seemed to run into coincidences everywhere. I met Italians, people who had been to Italy, people who spoke Italian or had useful expertise around Italian art and history.

Every time I went on a bike ride, I would pass a yard sale where there were maps, pictures, and books about Italy.

A traveling artist who stayed at our house for a while brought me a book on how to be an English teacher in Italy.

Each time something like this happened, I took it as “a sign that I’m meant to be in Italy.”

I won’t rule out that possibility, but it also could have been the result of the Reticular Activating System (RAS).

I’ve talked about this before. Your RAS is the part of your brain that chooses what’s important and makes sure you pay attention. It causes you to notice details about things you consider important.

As a result, you have many useful coincidences.

It turns out, those people, resources, and “signs” were there all along, but you didn’t notice them until they became important to your goals and interests. Then they stood out to you because of your RAS.

When you follow a deliberate goal-achieving program such as Changing the WIND, your RAS is primed to spot what you need to see and hear.

As you have more of these coincidences, your mood and excitement bubble up to new levels of excitement. You see, when you start to feel like the Universe has your back, when you believe there’s a power guiding and protecting you, it changes your physiology in positive ways.

Tool of the Week: Invoking Magic

1. Get clear on the big things you want in life. Use an exercise such as the Seven Gates (which I taught you last week) to go deep into your highest goals.

2. Every day, review those goals and remind yourself what you’re living for. This will keep your RAS attuned to what you really want. Write them down, or draw a quick picture that symbolizes your success.

3. Go for concrete images instead of abstract ideas. If you want to be a millionaire, don’t use numbers or a dollar amount. Use images and descriptions of all the things you’ll own and enjoy when you have the wealth.

4. Acknowledge the new ideas you come up with and the coincidences you experience that bring you closer to what you want. You want to encourage the RAS to give you more of the same.

5. If you’re comfortable doing so, bring in a Higher Power. This could be part of your religion, a form of energy, or maybe just a complex pattern of neurons firing in your brain. Whatever you believe in, imagine that power has your back and that you’re going to accomplish this amazing thing together.

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That wraps it up for this week.

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Jacob