The Science of Reality

A simple tool for unhanding Part X.

In case you missed it, I worked on a book with psychiatrist Phil Stutz, which comes out next week: It’s called True and False Magic, and its a book/workbook hybrid that’ll be like catnip to anyone who loves Stutz’s tools. (You can read more about it here: “True and False Magic” and “Welcome to the Maze.”)

“Pineal Variations,” Valero Doval. Valero did the key art for my podcast, Pulling the Thread, as well as the art for the cover of On Our Best Behavior.

One of the tools I’ve been practicing since Stutz taught it to me is called “The Science of Reality.” Central to Stutz’s philosophical model is the idea of Part X, which is somewhat equivalent to the Jungian idea of shadow. Stutz calls Part X the Avatar of Impossibility: It’s that part of you that wants to kill your creativity and give you problems you don’t need to have, and solutions to those problems that only make them worse. In Stutz’s view, one of Part X’s stunts is to convince you that certainty is possible and that it knows what will happen—Part X runs your mind like crazy ruminating on these outcomes.

In True and False Magic, he explains:

“In life, we must embrace a kind of ignorance—we must accept that we will never know if we are doing well or not. The point is to continue to choose to do good things in the face of no proof. Part X will try to convince you that it knows the future. The point of the science of reality is to write down your predictions so that they’re right in front of your face, and you can’t deny that they are what you thought. Then you can’t deny that 75 percent of the time, you are wrong.

“When I was twenty-nine or thirty years old, I had a lot of patients, but I always thought, I’m too young. I’m going to lose all my patients. Why would they want to pay me? I started writing these Part X predictions down with the date and time on index cards at my desk. Usually I would wait for ten days or two weeks before looking again and weighing my predictions against what had happened. These cards were like real Valium: They helped reduce a lot of my worry about the future.

“Make sure that you write your predictions down—you must do this so you can’t be biased. Most people, once they have a problem and they solve it, don’t want to think about the problem again. This gives Part X a tremendous leg up—so instead of making this a mental game, write it down. And don’t congratulate yourself: Part X will keep raising the stakes and raising the stakes again. You want to make yourself into a passive observer in the face of Part X claiming to have a lock on the future, a future that is going to be bad. You can’t fight that off by saying, No, you’re wrong, my future will be great. You say instead, I’m going to write down everything you predict, Part X, and we will look at those predictions together. Get Part X’s ruminations out of your head and onto a piece of paper.

1. Close your eyes and think of something in the future that scares you, or that you’re worried might happen.

2. Write down the Part X predictions. Write down everything you expect to happen as a result of whatever it is that scares you.

3. In a couple of weeks, read your predictions to see if any of this stuff really happened.

4. Sometimes Part X will be right; often Part X will be wrong. The point is not to convince yourself to be certain that Part X is always wrong, but to reveal that you don’t know, and that Part X certainly doesn’t know, what’s going to happen.

There’s theoretically more to this—it connects to the whole concept of faith and doubt, which is explored at length in the book, but it’s enough to simply use the tool as written above. Do it for a stretch: Write down your predictions, all your anxious ruminations, and then fact-check yourself in a week. I promise: You will be shocked by your predictions and how largely inaccurate they tend to be, though again, the point is not to disprove your intuition or undermine your faith in yourself, but to show you that you can’t actually predict the future—and neither can Part X. Doing life effectively—without wasting all your precious energy—requires embracing uncertainty, and moving forward anyway.

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