DOWSING FOR LIGHT

I’m on the latest medication to quit smoking (again). Like any med that works on your brain, there are bound to be side effects, and apparently this one includes mood swings. Granted, I haven’t been throwing the television out the window one minute and playing peek-a-boo with a ladybug the next, but I have noticed some changes. On one day in particular, I noticed that the way I felt emotionally seemed more like a reaction to the way I felt physically, which was similar to a bowl of room temperature oatmeal.

I spent many hours of my college life in Psychology classes. It was my major and I found it all very interesting. I still do. But one of the last classes I attended before graduating was “Physiological Psychology”. It explored the biological side of our behavior. So instead of explaining that little Bobby tortures puppies because he has father issues, this class showed how it was more than likely Bobby was getting too much of juice A in his noggin and not enough of juice B.

This class shined a whole new light on the world of Psychology for me and I became disenchanted by it. If it can all be so easily explained by chemicals then that field offered no mystery for me. That and I found out I’d need a least a Masters to get crazy-paid, more likely a PhD. I was done with it.

But over the years, being subjected to all the pointless arguments of God versus Science, Nature versus Nurture, etc., I’ve come to believe that no one is right. The magic is all still there, even if you can explain it with a few laws of nature. Ask any scientist and he/she will tell you we don’t know everything. And there are events and phenomena that the scientists can explain for the most part, yet these things still seem magical.

So if you tell me that the love a person feels is because chemicals in the brain “tell” us to feel it, I ask “So what”? It’s gotta happen some way, right? If a person proved he had telepathic powers only to have a scientist turn around and show that the telepath’s brain exuded invisible particles that entered someone else’s brain, grabbed chemically coded information and, through particle entanglement (look it up if you need to; interesting stuff), transmitted it back to the telepath….then so what? Why does magic have to be invisible, immeasurable, or inexplicable?

I know I can’t be the only person who fights the urge to yell “Alakazaam!” whenever I hit that remote-start button on my key fob.