Have you seen a magic show? Maybe you have watched the latest Talent show, where magicians play their tricks, maybe you have been to a show in real atmosphere in real smell and feel. Essentially, they illude us Infront of hundreds of others, and both of us know we are fooled.
Magicians when they bring out things, disappear things and change things in front of us, they often use the trick of distraction. How do they distract us? No, it's not by making us look at the celling until he changes his hands, they do this by making us focus on the things that he wants us to focus. Then with speed complete his trick! Ta da...
These days there are a lot of YouTube videos which will teach us how to do magic. Look at a few and you will be able to do your own tricks. However, I suggest before you, your mind, the greatest magician of all knew this all along. He focuses our attention while the life plays tricks on us.
Magicians trick us by focusing our attention on things he wants.
I will give an example how our mind tricks us and do the same.
Imagine you are building a house. Whenever you talk, with someone, whenever you walk on the road, you will notice houses. Whenever you look at the news, you will hear and remember things about houses. Which were there all those years, now only you are seeing them. As it is only relevant now. Mind influences what we see. As different people want different things, looking at the same house things they notice are different. Some will see the plants, some will notice the walls, some will notice the art on the walls, some will see the kitchen, or the television. But nobody can see it all. Too much information. It has to be selective and relevant. Maybe a defense mechanism of mind for information overloading.
Do you know who else use this phenomenon? Our Social media algorithms. They monitor us, using our past choices, guess what we want, and present it to us, uniquely individually adjusted material, so we are hooked.
So, what is the advantage of knowing this?
Think about it, our mind fools us daily, in front of our own eyes, by selectively showing us only what we want, shaped by our will. So, the truth, if it is there is always hidden from us, and we applaud to the magician. Maybe it won't help you today to build your house. But there is a big difference, between knowing you are fooled and not knowing, when we applaud to the magicians' tricks.
Thank you for reading A magician's trick - focused attention as a distraction - mindfulness.
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