To know the Secret or to be Fooled .

Are you watching closely?

Every magic trick consists of three parts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge’ , the magician shows his audience something ordinary , a deck of cards, a bird or a man.

The second part is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes his ordinary something and turns it into something extraordinary.

Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it because you're not really looking. You don't really want to know the secret... You want to be fooled.

But you wouldn’t clap yet, because making something disappear isn’t enough, you have to bring it back.

That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the most difficult part , the part we call ‘The Prestige’.

The above lines are from the movie “The prestige”. Watch it to test if your brain cells are still working and good enough to work non-stop for 2 hours.
I am getting back to my habit of finding analogy for everything , universal language as Paul Coelho calls it. This might get a bit complicated from here.

The pledge: You meet a person or go to a new place. Only knowledge you have about it is what others say about it or what you assume about it . Its just in the first blink of your eye. It’s the first snapshot of your brain.

The Turn : Your idea shatters , you see white instead of black , you don’t see what you saw earlier. Every thing you assumed or expected goes wrong. You would be too surprised and shocked to react. You will be struck by either awe or grief.

The Prestige: Everything comes back, like a full circle. Like they say, history repeats itself. But how do you see it, do u see it the same way as you saw it during the pledge or do you learn the trick behind the turn.

The point is , are you looking for the secret or do you just want to be fooled?

What is the magic here? It’s the change in life.

Are you watching closely?

From The Devil's Workshop- "Practicing Practicality"

One phrase that had been coming to my mind very frequently. I wonder if that’s grammatically correct or not, but it’s practically true.

Imagine this. You wake up on a Sunday and you feel like sleeping again. Reason: you know that it’s Sunday. You might feel the same on Monday, but you actually wake up and go to work. This is where you practice practicality. Every Monday you wake up, you try to tell yourself that you have to go and work and it will soon be a habit. But this is not as easy as it is said.

I somehow discovered that it takes a lot of strength. Every part of us has a tendency to challenge a direct truth; we try to make our own rules. It’s an innate art that everyone is born with. Everyone is an iconoclast at birth. We state it loud with a cry. A cry so loud and shriek that rings a bell to everyone that you have arrived and that’s the first change. But then, you start to practice practicality. You walk into a crowd which offers you varied opinions and at the end of it asks you to choose and adopt an opinion. But you don’t have an option to make your own opinion.

This I believe is a very subtle process that you will not even be conscious of. This process has very interesting consequences, at one or the other point of your life, by extrapolating your past into future you figure out that some things are going to occur in a specific way or pattern. This is where you practice practicality again. You design your present based on facts from past and assumptions of future. There is something very logically funny about this, just check it out again, you have a concrete past and you try to build a present to make an assumed future, so what you would obviously end up with is the realization of the assumed future and thus you continue Practicing Practicality.