The Magical Machine
Imagine that you have just been given a magical machine.
When you received it, you were asked to sign an agreement. You were asked to commit to use this magical machine several times every single day.
You were intrigued so you signed the agreement.
You’re told that this machine can transform any old thing into something completely different.
It doesn’t look like much, but you give it a try.
You feed it a rock and it comes out of the machine as a diamond!
Wow – this is extraordinary!
You feed it a scrap of paper and suddenly you have a brand new 100-dollar-bill.
What else can you use this machine for?
Next, you feed it an old broken computer and, sure enough, you now have a brand-new laptop.
WOW!
The possibilities seem limitless.
Imagine what you will be able to do with this magical machine.
The machine is making everything in your life more valuable, beautiful and vibrant!
You could get used to this! And you do get used to this. You think of many uses for the machine every single day.
But then one day, something terrible happens.
One day, when you feed it a rock, it spits out not a diamond, but an old piece of rubber.
Oh, no – that must have been a glitch. So you feed it a piece of scrap paper, and this time there is no $100 bill – this time all you get is a moldy scrap of newspaper.
Oh no!
By this time, your friends have been asking you for help, so you have several broken computers in your house. You feed it one of these and it spits out a brand-new laptop? No luck – this time it’s an old, leaking battery.
Oh, no – what has happened to your machine? It’s broken!
Now the machine that yesterday was making everything you fed it more valuable, beautiful and vibrant is now making everything worse, uglier and bleak.
What happened?
You race to find the instructions for the machine.
The machine instructions don’t say much – they say that the machine will transform one thing into another. It talks about the warranty (there is none) and it talks about the return policy (all sales are final). You’re about to give up when you notice some fine print. The very-hard-to-read fine print talks about a dial on the bottom of the machine.
You run to the machine and find the dial – sure enough, it’s there, but you can barely see it, much less reach it. Your fingers seem too big to get to it and it’s hard to see the settings! Eventually after a lot of effort, you are able to turn the dial.
Now you grab a rock and eagerly feed it into the machine. Out pops a beautiful ruby.
With some work, you switch the setting back and feed the machine another rock – and what do you get? An old piece of rubber.
Woohoo!
You have some control over the settings of the machine. You at least get some choice as to what type of transformation the machine will do.
If you have the power to transform a piece of scrap paper into either a rotting newspaper or a shiny 100 dollar bill, wouldn’t it be worth the effort it took to learn how to work that switch? Wouldn’t you make the effort to learn how to change that dial, no matter how hard it might be?
The good news is that you do have a magical machine every bit as powerful as that imagined one.
This machine is your mind. Your magical mind.
Our minds do take something as input and then spit something completely different out the other side.
And just like the magical machine from the story above, you absolutely do have the power to change the dial, to make adjustments. But also like the magical machine, it can be very hard to access and take quite a bit of effort.
Let’s think about this. Each day your mind receives massive amounts of input. Your mind might hear the message “I’m too busy today” from one of your friends and it might spit that message out as “I’m too busy today to spend time with you because I don’t value you.”
Maybe your mind gets fed a message from your daughter “You are driving me crazy today” but this magical mind transforms the message into “You are driving me crazy today – you are such a bad mom!”
Or maybe this magical mind hears the message “Honey, I’m worried about finances” but what comes out the other side is, “Honey, I’m worried about finances. You are a loser who can’t make enough money.”
We too often leave the dials on our magical minds on the wrong setting, and rather than using our minds to their full potential, we allow them to transform our everyday experiences into ugly and bleak thoughts.
We already acknowledged that it would absolutely be worth it, no matter how hard it was, to learn how to operate the dial on our magical machine so that we could have a machine that transformed everyday objects into more beautiful, valuable and vibrant objects.
Isn’t it just as important to learn how to adjust that dial on our magical minds so that we could have a mind that transformed everyday thoughts into more beautiful, valuable and vibrant thoughts?
So how do we find that dial on our minds?
That dial is directly related to learning how to challenge our deeply-held beliefs about ourselves and others. Once identified, these beliefs can be questioned, examined and ultimately transformed.
Let’s try out our magical mind again after the dial has been turned, after we have transformed just one or two of those limiting beliefs.
The magical mind now gets fed the message “I’m too busy today” and what comes out the other side is “I’m too busy today. Let’s try again soon.”
Now the mind gets fed a message from your daughter “You are driving me crazy today” and what it transforms into is “You are driving me crazy today. I’m having a really rough day and need to know you love me.”
Now this magical mind gets fed the message “Honey, I’m worried about finances” and transforms it into, “Honey, I’m worried about finances. Let’s figure this out together.”
Notice that the same messages going in now result in quite the dramatically different messages on the other side.
Transforming just a few of your beliefs can produce dramatically different results in your life. Doing this can transform your life from feeling bleak and ugly to feeling beautiful and vibrant.
Sure, it’s hard to operate that dial. But if you could have a machine that made diamonds out of rocks, wouldn’t you try as hard as you possibly could?
