August 1st, 2025 | RYAN TYLER

Three Mystical Ideas Easily Explained By Human Stupidity

No, lazy bones. You can't bend reality with your thoughts alone.

Before you put all your eggs in the manifestation and meditation baskets to make millions and put food on your table, consider how most of these ideas stem from misinterpretations of science and basic bad memory. Or, before you consider taking drastic steps to break out the matrix, take a few minutes to consider that you're not really living in a computer simulation at all.

The Mandela Effect: When Misremembering Becomes A Matrix

Let’s start with a very human truth: our memories suck. We misremember birthdays, grocery lists, and entire family vacations. But instead of admitting that our brains are lazy and error-prone, we decided to invent a phenomenon to spiritualize our forgetfulness. We call one of those things The Mandela Effect—the internet’s favourite excuse for being wrong.

This term comes from the idiotic belief that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s. He didn’t. He was released in 1990 and went on to become South Africa’s president. But people remember his death. They claim to vividly recall news reports, national mourning, even televised funerals that never happened. And instead of concluding that maybe—just maybe—they confused Mandela with someone else or misremembered their childhood TV experience, they say reality has shifted. 

No. It's just that memory is not a hard drive—it’s a messy sketchpad smudged by time and imagination.

But the Mandela Effect didn’t stop with Mandela. It metastasized into a collective game of “find the glitch” in the matrix, turning every misquote and logo change into proof that the Matrix's code has rewritten itself.

People insist that the Berenstain Bears were once spelled Berenstein, and claim childhood books as proof—books they no longer have. Then there's the famous Star Wars line: “Luke, I am your father.” In The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader actually says: “No, I am your father.” But “Luke” made it easier to parody, so it popped up in Tommy Boy (1995), where Chris Farley dramatically wheezes into a fan, saying, “Luke, I am your father.”

That joke cemented the wrong quote into public memory.

The same thing happened with “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” supposedly from Snow White. But go back and listen. The line is “Magic mirror on the wall”. Yet everyone remembers the first version because it’s easier to say and shows up in nearly every pop culture spoof from Shrek to Saturday morning cartoons.

There’s a psychological term for this phenomenon: confabulation. It’s when the brain fills in memory gaps with plausible-sounding fabrications. Not lies—just inaccurate reconstructions. Humans don’t store facts like filing cabinets; we store impressions, feelings, fragments. And when multiple people have similarly faulty memories (which makes sense in a media-saturated world with shared culture), they start reinforcing each other’s false recollections. Put that together with parodies and eroneous recreations on the internet, you get mystical ideas that these are all glitches in some simulated reality.

It’s not interdimensional slippage. It’s groupthink with a bit of nostalgia.

The truth is, the Mandela Effect is not evidence of a broken timeline—it’s proof that humans are narratively driven and cognitively lazy. We like neat stories, dramatic quotes, and shared experiences. When the world doesn't line up with our collective misremembrance, we invent quantum folklore to feel better about being wrong. We mythologize our own forgetfulness instead of facing the unbearable reality that our minds are full of holes—and we’re all just patching them up with duct tape and old movie lines.

The Observer Effect: Science, Not Sorcery

Now let’s turn our attention to physics—because this is where the New Age crowd really starts foaming at the mouth. The Observer Effect is one of those misunderstood scientific terms that got kidnapped by spiritual influencers and online mystics.

You’ve probably heard about how particles behave differently when they are observed. Therefore, your thoughts must shape reality. Sounds profound, right? It’s also complete garbage.

The actual Observer Effect in quantum mechanics has nothing to do with you watching particles with your third eye or manifesting outcomes with your positive vibes. It has to do with how we observe particles—not the act of observation itself. Measuring particles at the quantum level requires tools. Those tools—like lasers or electrons—interact with the particles and affect their state. That’s it. The particles aren’t shy. They don’t care if a PhD is in the room or if you're meditating on your couch drinking mushroom tea.

The measurement process, not your consciousness, is what interferes.

This misconception goes back to the infamous double-slit experiment. When electrons are fired through two slits toward a screen, they behave like waves, creating an interference pattern. But when we try to measure which slit the electron goes through, the interference pattern disappears and the electrons behave like particles. Cue the mystical conclusions.

What changes isn’t the particle’s behaviour because of awareness—it’s that the method of measurement itself disturbs the system. The photon or detector used to observe the particle actually bumps into it and alters its path. Think of it like trying to measure the temperature of soup with a frozen spoon. You’ll change the temperature just by testing it.

Yet people keep misinterpreting this. Suddenly, every manifestation coach is quoting Heisenberg and Schrödinger without a clue what any of it means. They’ve latched onto the mystical-sounding ambiguity of quantum theory and turned it into a religious doctrine about thought-shaped matter.

Like religion, it’s seductive because it places the ego at the center of the universe. If reality reacts to your attention, then you’re not just a person—you’re a god in training. But science doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The universe isn't waiting for your consciousness to make up its mind. The Observer Effect doesn’t prove we’re living in a thought-powered hologram. It just shows that measuring really small stuff requires care and that our tools, not our minds, can disrupt what we are looking at.

So, no, you didn’t change the outcome of your day because you “collapsed the quantum field”. You just left your keys in the freezer again and now you’re late for work.

Morphic Resonance: The Lazy Explanation For Inevitable Ideas

And now for the final mystic mess: Morphic Resonance. This one’s a favourite among alternative thinkers who are desperate to prove that the universe has a psychic Wi-Fi network connecting all living minds. The theory, coined by Rupert Sheldrake, suggests that once something is learned by a few, it becomes easier for others anywhere in the world to learn. He claimed that once a rat in a London lab learns a maze, rats in New York start figuring it out faster. The implication? Memory and learning aren’t stored in the brain alone, they “resonate” in some kind of collective field.

Sounds romantic. Almost beautiful. Also, it’s complete pseudoscience.

Let’s demystify this with two words: inevitability and probability. The idea that multiple people can independently invent the same thing isn’t proof of spooky telepathy. It’s what happens when enough information reaches enough minds trained to think in similar ways. It’s not mysterious that calculus emerged from both Newton and Leibniz. It’s what happens when two brilliant men, living in the same century, absorb centuries of European math and ask the same questions. The groundwork was already laid—they just put the final pieces together.

It’s the same with inventions. The telephone? Both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied for patents on the same day. The lightbulb? Edison didn’t invent it in a vacuum—dozens were working on it and he refined the best designs. Light bulbs are not much more than a copper wire conducting and converting electricity. Their eventual discovery was inevitable. The airplane? The Wright brothers get the credit, but inventors in Brazil, France, and Germany were right on their heels.

The wheel probably got discovered multiple times around the globe due to how basic its concept really is. Pyramids? My toddler's first building with Lego was a pyramid. It's the most intuitive and basic way to build. It's such a rudimentary concept, a toddler anywhere on Earth can figure it out.

This phenomenon is called multiple discovery. It’s been catalogued for centuries. It doesn’t require a morphic field. It requires a world where people have access to similar data, face similar problems, and apply similar reasoning. The bigger the population of educated thinkers, the more likely two of them will solve the same problem simultaneously. It's the law of probability.

Morphic Resonance, however, gives the comforting illusion that knowledge floats around like radio signals waiting to be absorbed by the open-minded. It removes the need for work, logic, education, or evidence.

It’s also a brilliant way to erase the role of culture, language, economy, and environment in shaping discovery. If two tribes develop agriculture independently, it’s not because they are psychic cousins—it’s because they both needed to eat more than their environment could naturally provide. It’s survival, not synchronicity.

The human mind loves stories of mystical coincidence because they make us feel connected, chosen, or enlightened. But behind every “magical” moment of synchronicity is a pile of historical data, cultural influence, economic pressure, and pure logical deduction.

Mysticism As A Crutch

At the heart of each of these mystical ideas is a deep, almost existential discomfort with uncertainty, error, and limitation. We don’t like not knowing. We hate being wrong. And we loathe the idea that we are not in control. So when our memory fails us, we blame the timeline. When science confuses us, we misread it as magic. And when people invent the same thing, we assume the cosmos whispered it to them simultaneously.

But these aren’t examples of higher consciousness or spiritual evolution. They’re case studies in human stupidity—or, more charitably, human pattern-seeking gone rogue. We’d rather believe we’re chosen, interdimensional dreamers than admit we watched Tommy Boy and misquoted Darth Vader.

The mystical allure of these ideas comes from their simplicity. They’re easy. They explain the unexplainable without asking us to learn anything. But that’s not enlightenment, that’s intellectual laziness in a robe and sandals.

The real magic isn’t in the Mandela Effect, observer-based realities, or psychic invention beams. The real magic is that we can explain these things... if we’re willing to give up the fantasy and embrace the chaotic brilliance of human stupidity.