The Shiny Object: On Wanting to Believe

I was nine or ten. In the De Vargas bookstore, I pulled a slim volume from the shelf. Silva Mind Control Method. The title promised everything—power over matter, influence over circumstance, dominion through will.

I was disappointed.

The book wasn’t about controlling others. It was about controlling yourself. The mind as instrument. Responsibility as practice. It felt like betrayal—like reaching for a sword and finding a mirror.

But something else happened too. Something that didn’t announce itself until years later.

I got hooked.

Not on the promise of supernatural power, but on the premise beneath it: that the self was workable. That attention could be trained. That the mind was not a fixed prison but something malleable, something you could negotiate with. This became the throughline. Every book that changed something, every philosophy that actually altered how I moved through the world—they all circled back to this one idea: you are responsible for your own mind.

And yet.

There’s still something else pulling.

The metaphysical shimmer. The possibility of transcendence beyond the veil. Spiritual power accessible only to those rare enough, pure enough, disciplined enough to find it. It glints at the edge of vision like something half-remembered from a dream. A shiny object in the dark recesses of the mind that won’t stop calling.

I have no proof it’s real. None. I’ve read hundreds of pages about how it might be real, and I’ve read counterarguments, and the counterarguments are stronger. Logically, rationally, I should be able to close the door. Move on. Accept the material world as the only world.

But I don’t. I keep looking.

Why?

Because I want it to be true.

This is the honest answer. Not because I’ve found evidence. Not because something inexplicable happened that shattered my materialism. But because the world without transcendence is harder to bear. The weight of injustice, the prevalence of suffering, the machinery of oppression—it all feels slightly more bearable if there’s something beyond it. Somewhere the soul goes that’s not subject to physical law. Some realm where the hurt doesn’t reach.

I know this about myself. I watch myself seek it out. I watch my own confirmation bias at work like a magician’s hand performing the trick. And I cannot stop watching.

This is the strange loop: knowing that I want to believe so badly I might be fooling myself—and being unable to step outside that wanting to verify anything at all.

Because every instrument I have for knowing is contaminated by the same desire.

The brain. The mind. The consciousness that observes itself. I don’t know how they fit together or where one ends and another begins. The medical and empirical literature offers fragments. Theories. Maps of the territory that might be accurate or might be drawings made by the blind trying to describe sight. I haven’t found the study that breaks it open. Maybe it doesn’t exist. Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough. Maybe I’m too afraid of what I’d find if I really did look—because finding proof that it’s all illusion might be worse than the uncertainty.

So I keep feeling around in the dark.

Not frantically. Not desperately. But slowly, incrementally, the way humankind has always moved toward understanding. Stumbling. Correcting. Building on the work of others. The pace is glacial. The resistance is tremendous. The systems that profit from confusion will churn and churn. And maybe that resistance itself is the work. Maybe the friction of doubt against longing is how truth gets refined, the way stone becomes smooth only through the constant abrasion of water.

I don’t know if there’s a mystical plane.

I don’t know if consciousness persists beyond the skull.

I don’t know if the ineffable pull I feel—deep and silent and completely unreasonable—is the soul calling or just the ghost of that nine-year-old, still disappointed, still hoping that the sword he reached for might actually exist.

But I know I can’t stop reaching.

And I know that this not-knowing, this holding of both possibilities at once—the rational doubt and the irrational longing—might be the only honest place to stand. The only ground that doesn’t collapse under questioning.

So I’ll keep seeking. Keep doubting. Keep feeling the shiny object glint just beyond clarity.

Because to stop seeking would be to surrender the question. And the question, at least, is real.