The things you can’t believe… until you do

Some claims arrive at your ears and your whole nervous system throws up a wall. Your face tightens, your mind says “nope,” and you move on. Not because you’ve dissected the logic. Not because you ran an experiment. Because it doesn’t fit your picture of how the world is supposed to work. That’s the reflex most of us mistake for discernment. It feels like intelligence. It’s usually just the comfort of a familiar cage.

The cage isn’t metal; it’s plausibility. From childhood, we’re trained to color inside a line called “what sensible people believe.” It’s enforced by grades, by headlines, by who gets invited to speak and who gets laughed out of the room. Step too far beyond the fence and the social cost shows up fast: rolled eyes, subtle exclusion, reputation penalties. Your brain knows this. Long before you run logic, it runs threat assessment. “Is this belief safe for my standing with the tribe?” That’s the bouncer at the door of your mind. His name is Ridicule, and he works overtime.

There’s also a biological tax. Brains are prediction engines. They compress the world into a model so you can move through it without recalculating everything from scratch. That model saves energy, but it punishes anomalies. New ideas aren’t just “different,” they’re metabolically expensive. If your model has served you well enough, why pay the cost to rebuild it? So you reject the data to protect the map. It feels like wisdom. It’s often laziness in a nice suit.

Add incentives and the picture gets clearer. Media thrives on confidence, not calibration. Academia rewards publishable novelty, but punishes career-risking heresy. Platforms amplify outrage because it keeps you scrolling. Under those conditions, which ideas rise? The ones that are easy to sell, easy to package, easy to rally a crowd around. The quieter, inconvenient truths that don’t benefit a sponsor or a faction? They take the long road. You meet them decades late—after someone stubborn bled for them.

History is a graveyard of “impossible” things that were true the whole time. A doctor begged colleagues to wash hands and was mocked into an asylum. Another drank a beaker of bacteria to prove ulcers weren’t “all in your head.” A geophysicist said continents drift; experts laughed until the seafloor told on them. Scientists called meteorites “peasant myths” until a rain of stones fell in front of a French academy with too much dignity to ignore. A crystallographer was told “there are no quasicrystals”; he won a Nobel for finding them anyway. The pattern isn’t “genius vs. idiots.” The pattern is inertia. Systems defend the status quo because systems are made of people with careers, egos, and mortgages.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: we are those people now. We imagine we’d be the ones who listened to Semmelweis, not the ones who joked about his “handwashing obsession.” We flatter ourselves that we’d have seen the Wright brothers fly, not the journalist who thought it was a county fair trick. But your daily behavior—what you dismiss without looking, what you share without checking—reveals which role you’re playing. The human default is not to seek truth. The human default is to protect belonging.

And so some things remain “unbelievable” because belief would be expensive. Expensive to your identity, to your group, to your sense that you’ve been tracking reality well all along. It’s easier to keep the fence tight and label everything beyond it “conspiracy,” “woo,” or “nonsense”—labels that feel like evaluation but are usually just a fast-pass to stop thinking. Words can be weapons, but they can also be tranquilizers.

I’m not saying “believe everything.” I’m saying notice the reflex that keeps you from testing anything. There’s a difference between “That’s false because I checked” and “That’s false because it threatens my map.” Most people never get past the second line. They live inside a reality that works “well enough,” and they call that wisdom. Meanwhile, the edges of the map keep leaking. Synchronicities stack up. Data doesn’t quite line up. Someone they dismissed five years ago starts looking less crazy and more early. Reality keeps tapping the glass. They turn up the volume and call it discernment.

So how do you walk a narrower path—one that isn’t gullible or gated by fear? Start by rewriting your internal rules of engagement. When a wild claim shows up, don’t ask “Is this true?” first. Ask “Is this testable—by me, at low cost?” If it is, run the smallest experiment. If it isn’t, ask “Who benefits if this is believed? Who benefits if it’s mocked? Whose track record makes them worth fifteen minutes of my attention?” Trade outrage for curiosity. Trade infinite takes for one clean test. Your life is a laboratory or it’s a feed.

Next, practice holding two models at once. One where the claim is false, one where it’s true. Walk each forward a few steps. What would you expect to see in the world if each were the case? Then look. Most people never do this because it threatens identity. They don’t realize identity is supposed to be a tool, not a prison. It’s okay to be wrong in private as long as you’re becoming more right in public over time.

There’s a reason the first move in any ancient initiation wasn’t “believe our doctrine.” It was “wash, fast, go inward, and observe.” Purify perception before you stack conclusions. In modern terms, that means reducing noise so you can see signal. Sleep. Hydrate. Detox from the feed. Go long stretches without the constant adrenaline of other people’s certainty. Your nervous system will return to baseline. From baseline, subtle patterns emerge. From patterns, hypotheses. From hypotheses, experiments. From experiments, sober belief. Truth is a change in behavior, not just a sentence you nodded at.

We also need to stop outsourcing courage. There are no “they” who will approve your curiosity. If anything, the first responders to curiosity are always hecklers. That’s fine. The heckle is the price of admission. If a question has purchase in you, buy the ticket and walk in. The time between your first unpopular question and your first private result is the corridor where most people turn back. Walk through it. It’s shorter than it feels. And when your first result arrives, don’t make it a flag. Make it a stepping stone. Arrogance is a bad lab partner.

Here’s a clean mental model I use. Sort claims into three buckets: impossible, improbable, and misunderstood. The “impossible” bucket is actually tiny: math that breaks itself, contradictions that can’t exist in any consistent world. The “improbable” bucket is large: ideas that violate your priors but don’t break logic or physics. The “misunderstood” bucket is huge: things that sound wild because of sloppy language, missing context, or deliberate framing. Those are often the fastest wins. Ten minutes of exact definitions and most “crazy” arguments dissolve into “Oh, we’re not even talking about the same thing.” Precision shrinks monsters.

Language matters. “Conspiracy theory” isn’t an argument. “Science says” isn’t either. Science doesn’t “say,” it measures. Ask for the measure. “Experts agree” is often true and sometimes meaningless. Agreement can track truth or incentives. Ask what would change their minds. If the answer is “nothing,” you’re not talking to an expert; you’re talking to a priest. On the other hand, don’t make a personality cult out of the outsider who flatters your appetite for rebellion. Ask for their measures too. Demand receipts in both directions. Skepticism without symmetry is just team spirit.

Also—learn the feeling of a paradigm boundary. When you press against the edge of your current model, you’ll notice a cluster of sensations: irritation, boredom, an urge to mock, or a slippery “this is beneath me” vibe. That’s not always a signal that the idea is trash. Sometimes it’s a sign you’ve touched the seam where new knowledge will cost you an old identity. Breathe. Don’t run. On the other side of that seam is the territory you secretly wanted to explore when you started caring about truth in the first place.

Let’s talk about risk. Not every idea deserves equal time. Your time is finite; stakes are real. So build a simple triage: what’s the upside if true, downside if false, and the cost to check? A small, high-upside claim with a cheap test deserves attention. A large, high-upside claim with a costly test might deserve a staged approach: gather low-cost correlates first. A large, low-upside claim pumping your adrenaline but with no clear test probably belongs in the “not now” box. That’s not censorship; it’s stewardship.

And if you find yourself ridiculing more than you’re measuring, step back. Ridicule is sugar—hits fast, no nourishment. Measurement is protein—slower, stronger, changes your body. Imagine if you kept a private log called “Things I was sure were stupid that turned out to be partly right.” Start one. The humility will make you dangerous in the best way.

I get it. It’s hard to believe some of the stuff out there. The internet is a bazaar of brilliant signal and weaponized noise. But difficulty is not a verdict; it’s an invitation to level up your epistemology. The goal isn’t to become “open-minded” in the performative sense—saying yes to everything so you look enlightened. The goal is to become a precise instrument: open enough to let truth in, strong enough to say no to nonsense, and disciplined enough to do the work that most people skip.

If you accept that challenge, your life will change. Your friends will say you’ve changed. Some will peel off; the new ones will be rarer and better. You’ll stop arguing with strangers to score points in games you don’t respect. You’ll build a small, serious circle who prefer a clean result to a hot take. You’ll notice “coincidences” stacking where your attention goes because attention turns possibility into pattern. You’ll stop needing the world to approve your curiosities. You’ll start needing your actions to match your discoveries.

And the “unbelievable” things? Some will stay unbelievable—and that’s healthy. You’ll see why they fail, where they cheat, how they seduce. Others will move from laughable to interesting to obvious. You’ll wonder why you didn’t see them earlier. Don’t punish your past self for not knowing. Thank them for walking you to the edge. Then keep walking.

One last thing. The loudest forces in the culture are invested in your certainty and your despair. Certainty keeps you obedient; despair keeps you passive. Curiosity is the third door. It doesn’t ask for permission. It doesn’t wait for consensus. It does the work quietly, relentlessly, and then updates reality in public. That’s how the world changes—one person at a time, rediscovering that their mind is not a courthouse that stamps verdicts; it’s a workshop that builds instruments.

It is hard to believe some of the stuff out there. Good. Let it be hard. Let it cost you boredom, cynicism, and the cheap applause of your current circle. Pay the price in attention, in tests, in humility. On the other side of that tollbooth is a different kind of life. Not easier—truer. And once you taste it, you won’t be able to pretend that reflex is the same thing as reason, or that ridicule is the same thing as proof. You’ll know the difference. You’ll live the difference. And that—quietly, consistently—is how the unbelievable becomes your new normal.

I used to think it was all in people’s heads. Psychic readings, mediumship, “connecting with Spirit” — I lumped it all in the same category as lucky guesses and emotional fishing. I saw the frauds, the staged shows, the vague statements, and thought, that’s all it is. And for years, I held onto that skepticism like a badge of honor. I was the one rolling my eyes, dissecting every claim, poking holes in every so-called message from the other side. If I couldn’t see it, measure it, replicate it — it wasn’t real.

But something changes when the unexplainable starts happening in your life. At first, I ignored it. Little things — an image flashing in my mind before someone spoke it out loud, a sudden rush of emotion that had nothing to do with me but everything to do with the person across the room. Coincidence, I told myself. Then the coincidences stacked up. Too fast, too precise, too impossible to write off. I’d meet someone, and without a single fact given, I’d see their father’s old fishing boat in my mind, or the exact floral pattern on their grandmother’s couch from thirty years ago. And I had to ask myself — how could I know that?

I didn’t “decide” to become a medium. I didn’t chase this. It was more like Spirit kicked down the door and said, You’re doing this, whether you like it or not. And I resisted, because part of me still wanted proof. But the proof came. Not in the form of a lab experiment, but in the moments where someone’s eyes welled up because I described their father’s laugh exactly, or gave them a piece of advice they’d prayed to hear in private, alone at night. In those moments, the old skeptic in me had nothing left to say.

And here’s the thing nobody tells you — when you strip away the hype and the ego, this work feels like home. It’s not spooky. It’s not “special” in the Hollywood sense. It’s a natural state of being. It’s tuning into the signal that’s been playing in the background your entire life. And once you learn to hear it, you can’t un-hear it.

Now, I look back at my old self and realize skepticism wasn’t my real problem — fear was. Fear of being wrong, fear of being fooled, fear of stepping outside the comfort zone where the world stays explainable. But when you lean into the unknown, when you let the evidence speak for itself, you realize it’s not about convincing anyone. It’s about becoming a bridge between worlds, about offering moments of clarity and connection that heal something deep inside people.

I went from eye-rolls to goosebumps. From picking apart other people’s readings to delivering my own. And every time I do, I feel more certain — not just that Spirit is real, but that I’ve been part of this conversation far longer than I ever realized.

All this to say — the veil is thin, and it’s real. Not in some fairy-tale sense, not as a gimmick to sell you on fantasy, but in the way a door you never noticed can suddenly swing open and reveal an entirely different landscape. It’s not that everything “out there” is real — far from it. There’s noise, misdirection, and plain old human error everywhere. But that doesn’t mean the signal isn’t there. And when you find it, you know.

That’s the key: knowing. Not being told, not taking someone’s word for it, but experiencing the undeniable. That’s why discernment matters. Don’t believe everything — but don’t throw away the gold because you found it in a pile of dirt. The mind has to stay sharp, filtering hype and self-delusion, but the heart has to stay open, because real connection — with spirit, with higher intelligence, with the unseen — never comes to a closed door.

For me, I came at this with the skeptical mind of someone who doesn’t buy into easy answers. I thought mediumship, psychic work — it was all wishful thinking, confirmation bias, or worse. But the more I engaged, the more the evidence stacked up in ways I couldn’t explain away. The impressions that landed with laser precision. The validations I couldn’t have guessed. The feeling of “home” in a space I didn’t even know existed before. It wasn’t about wanting to believe — it was about no longer being able to deny.

And the more you walk this path, the more you realize: the veil isn’t some impenetrable wall. It’s gossamer. It’s mist. Sometimes you feel it ripple when truth passes through, sometimes you watch it part entirely. But you also see how easily it can be manipulated — by those who seek attention, by those who chase profit, or even by your own mind filling in blanks.

That’s why the old words still hold: Know thyself. When you truly understand the shape of your own mind — your patterns, your biases, your tells — you can tell the difference between what’s yours and what’s beyond you. You can stand in that delicate balance where your head and your heart are both engaged, where you can question without closing off, and trust without falling asleep.

Because the truth is, we’re built for this. The human soul is a bridge — mind and spirit meeting in the body, capable of perceiving both the material and the invisible. If you keep your compass tuned to truth, if you keep both curiosity and caution alive, you’ll navigate this terrain without losing yourself.

So no, don’t believe everything. But also don’t hide from the wonder that’s here. Explore. Test. Be willing to be wrong, and even more willing to be surprised. The greatest discoveries are never made by those who decided in advance what reality can and cannot be. Keep your mind sharp, your heart open, and your soul ready — and you’ll see for yourself. The veil is thin, and it’s waiting for you to look.