I recently watched Chris Angel MindFreak doing an interview with Larry King. Chris said many things about his career and becoming successful as a magician.

Now that he has reached his goal of being a popular magician, he is less happy doing the job than when he was struggling to get there. 

Having everything just means that you have to work hard to maintain it. He works seven days a week and has no time for himself, or a family.

His advice is  to, take more time for yourself and not rush the journey. The journey is the fun part. Success is not what he expected it to be.

Chris creates illusions, he plays with peoples minds. They are tricks. The audience is a willing participant in the illusion. What you believe you see is not actually what is happening.

Chris, along with other magicians such as The Amazing Randi, has offered to anyone who says they have mystical powers, that he can explain exactly how they are doing it. They too are creating illusions, many for profit.

Everything in life is an illusion. Our minds create our world by assigning meaning to what our senses observe. By thinking we assign causes to the effects that we observe.

Our past is an illusion. We focus our minds on those explanations of events that suit us. If our outlook is negative then our interpretation of events will be negative.

At anytime in life, any event can be interpreted as either positive or negative, even the loss of a loved one.

As heart breaking as the loss of a loved one is, you can be thankful that their struggle with life's problems are over. And, if you believe in an afterlife, your loved one is there enjoying that afterlife.

That is not to say that you will not miss them or that you will not mourn them, only that you have accepted the loss. Acceptance allows you to get on with life.

Living in the here and now means that we we simply accept without prejudice or judgement whatever life presents to us at any given moment.

If our minds create explanations, then why not choose the ones that will make you the happiest. Having a positive outlook on life makes you more productive, makes you feel fulfilled, makes everyone around you feel better.

Happiness is an illusion. Love is an illusion. Fear is an illusion. Since all of these are just illusions and our minds create illusions of everything then, why not just create the best illusion for ourselves.

The only fear that is justified is the fear that you will lose your life. We have learned everything else from our parents, our teachers and our interpretation of our experiences.

We create explanations for events around us. We explain other people's behaviour as though we can read their minds.  We explain a car crash as though we know exactly what happened in the car itself.

What control do we have of our lives, if not our minds? We cannot control the minds of others despite what religion believes. Even the faithful each have there own interpretation of what each religious rule means. Each practices their faith according to the illusions they want to believe.

If you say that someone made you angry is that truth or illusion? Can someone control your mind? Have you given them the right to tell you what to think, how to feel, how you will behave?

Sure, your boss tells you what you need to do at work to accomplish a task, but does he tell you what to think about it? You probably think that he is bossy or worse. You decide what you think and what you say to him.

Your are responsible for your thinking, your feelings, your behaviour. You choose how you will respond to any event, whether it is someone not returning your smile, saying something that you allow to irritate you or a machine breaking down at the most inconvenient moment.

Scientists can offer explanations but, never completely solve the mysteries. Science is an illusion every bit as much as explanations we offer. Science is not all seeing. It is another perception. An attempt to explain cause and effect.

No matter how many mathematical equations they use to explain, the mathematical equations are no better than the illusion of the explanation. An abstract model can never be reality.

Birth and death are realities. What we perceive with our senses are realities. The sun rises and sets. The oceans ebb and flow. The seasons come and go. Creatures live and die.

We as humans want to know why all these things happen. We offer explanations.  We dream up reasons. We analyze causes and effects. None of these are real. They are manufactured models of reality.

Our minds are not capable of holding all the changes that occur so we make believe that some of the changes do not happen. Then we try to explain those limited things, as though our model of the world, the one we hold in our minds, the one we call abstract thinking, as though that makes them more real.

Reality is not a concept in our minds. Or, maybe it is. And concepts are illusions.

Take witnesses at an incident. Mythbusters on A&E  is a great way to learn what is real and what is not. The hosts of Mythbusters planned an incident without telling all their assistants. They hired actors to stage an argument about delivering a package to one of the hosts.

When the assistants were asked to recall any of the events to provide evidence for a court proceeding, none of them actually remembered anything significant that could be used in a court of law. It wasn't until they were hypnotized, that they actually recalled anything of importance, like tattoos and name tags.

The point here is that no matter how little you remember of an event you will try to explain to yourself what happened. You will draw conclusions and make judgements with very little real information.

So what do you see at a magic show? Only what the magician wants you to believe that you see. If he wants you to believe that he is flying, like Chris Angel does so often, then that is what you will see.

And, if you can believe that, what about what you believe about life? Even what I say here is based on a model. I know that I create models of life and offer explanations for what happens.

Don't be unhappy with life because it doesn't live up to your expectations, your illusions. Focus on the most common denominator. Be thankful that you have a life to be here to experience. From this viewpoint you can accept whatever life brings to you.

If life is an illusion, then choose the illusion that brings you the most happiness.