Misdirection, meaning

... and how to get out of our heads

There’s a lot of misdirection in the modern world. This is what I’ve been pondering this week. Back in my late teens I went to University for the first time to study Russian. What can I say? I was smoking a lot of weed at the time. I dropped out a few months later but I did learn something when I was there. I spent hours and hours on the sofa of my shared flat learning how to make a playing card disappear and then reappear behind my hand. It took a huge amount of perseverance to get my fingers to learn what to do and then develop the muscle memory required, but I can still perform the trick now–decades later.

I remember the feeling of seeing people’s stunned faces when I made the card disappear those first few times. I wouldn’t have lasted long in the Magic Circle though because, while I enjoyed the expressions of amazement I created, I found it impossible not to immediately reveal to my audience how I did the trick. Thinking I was being kind, I was always shocked as their expressions went very quickly from astonished belief to deflation and disappointment. As though I had conjured a beautiful spell in their minds only to break it again. I got the sense they were actually angry with me for what I had intended to be an act of generosity.

The truth, no matter how skilled and practiced, is just not as exciting as what we want to believe.

It’s not just card tricks where we are so content to hide in magical thinking. External validation is like a magic trick. We want to believe in it and spend our lives seeking to attain it but then, just as what happens when we learn how a card trick is done, deflation and disappointment soon swallow us whole when we get what we were aiming for. Conspiracy theories are forms of magic tricks too. The truth can’t seem to get a look in in comparison with the crazy explanations that so many people find compelling. It’s fascinating, don’t you think? There are countless other examples. The way we portray ourselves on social media makes a magic trick of our lives we want other people to believe in. While we must settle for the truth of how the trick is performed in our daily grind.

This line of enquiry reminded me of an amazing book I read years ago by a neuroscientist called Semir Zeki called Splendours and Miseries of the Brain. It looks at cultural expression through human history to try and understand what was going on in people’s brains. The bit that stuck with me that is relevant here is the blissful intoxication of unrequited love. This is a recurrent theme in stories from modern times in all cultures (over the last five hundred years or so) and Zeki explains that the reason unrequited love is so alluring is because it never has to deal with reality. Unrequited love is safer than the real thing because it means your imagination is free to live a perfect version of what your life with your dream love would have been. Actually being in love is much less bewitching because it has to deal with reality in a way your imagination does not. This, he says, is why the story recurs because it shows that our minds seek control. Our perfect idea of love is hard to let go of in the pursuit of a real one. Fans of Iain McGilchrist will see the battle here between the two hemispheres of the brain jostling for control of your life. The Right hemisphere seeking the possibilities of the unknown while the Left requires the certainty of what it can control. This goes some way to explain the cruelty of how our minds work because the point of love is that it is beyond imagining. I knew I was in love with my wife because being with her is way beyond anything I would have dared–indeed had the capacity–to dream up on my own. And this, surely, is the point of life too. We must develop the courage to leave the sanctuary of the certainty our minds imagine to find out what we are truly capable of.

A few months ago I wrote about how in the West we are all the children of Descartes living in our heads after he wrote ‘I think, therefore I am’. In contrast, indigenous thinking, according to the writer and academic Tyson Yunkaporta, would be expressed as ‘I’m located, therefore I am’. This is because people in indigenous communities see themselves as existing beyond their own skin and in the relation between them and the world, community and nature around them. And just as we intuit things from our own thoughts in a Cartesian manner, they intuit things from what occurs in the natural world too.

I’ve been reading lots about the evolution of consciousness recently because I find this kind of thing so exciting. The revolution of consciousness is the idea that the way we live in our own heads (and out of them) is continuously changing. And while we may be physically the same as our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago and capable of the same ways of being and thinking, they would have experienced the world very differently to us as a result of the way they saw themselves. Of course we assume our modern way is best because that’s how progress and evolution work, right? But it seems to me our way of perceiving life and the world has something missing that our ancestors took for granted.

We want to believe in magic because our lives lack meaning. We believe in conspiracy theories because they make us feel part of a community of likeminded people where we are respected rather than reviled. We all hope and pray there is something bigger than ourselves that we can’t understand because life seems so senseless otherwise. We want the safety of answers we can control. Even if we don’t understand them. But that’s because we have become disconnected from the truth of where we came from. We are lost and lonely in our own minds. Instead of feeling a sense of belonging in where we belong. As part of nature. Living in communities that cares for us and who we care for and take part in. Daring to live far beyond what we already know.

The paradox is surely that our rational way of perceiving the world and closing ourselves off from where we came from has actually left us wide open to the very thing we think rational thinking has enabled us to progress beyond. Magical thinking.

Thanks for reading and, as always, let me know what you think.

Dan