Tik Tok, Psych-K, and Magical Thinking
TikTok and modern self-help are full of promises of quick subconscious rewiring. Among the most popular is Psych-K, a method that claims you can “reprogram” limiting beliefs in minutes: strike a posture, repeat a phrase, rewire your mind. On TikTok, it spreads like wildfire, packaged as the fastest way to align the conscious and subconscious, the one-minute miracle that will change everything. The subconscious, in this vision, is treated like faulty software waiting for an upgrade. TikTok has become the instrument of “the latest and greatest,” a kind of news channel for quick fixes, especially for the younger generation and for anyone still under the spell of magical thinking. There is always a new secret, a fresh hack, a technique that promises transformation without the trouble of depth. And while there are known cases where such moments produce a lasting shift, they are rare. More often, something moves on the surface, flashes like lightning, then fades, leaving the deeper structures untouched.
“Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” – Sigmund Freud
I know this search well. For many years, I was caught in the same type of magical thinking. I was convinced there must be an ultimate technique for enlightenment, some hidden method that would finally deliver me into the wonderfulness of enlightened stardom. But this was only the self trying to get out of self — a pursuit that is impossible. What I didn’t see then is that the hunger for the ultimate technique is itself another form of magical thinking. And yet, that very pursuit took me deeper into the journey. Over time, what began as a desperate search for the perfect method gradually shifted. I began to realize that what I was chasing was not the technique, but the truth. And what revealed itself was not something more complicated or more advanced, but something at once simple and more profound: the willingness to turn toward what is, rather than keep running after the next promise of “shazaam.”
But the unconscious is not code to be patched. It is, as A. H. Almaas describes, a living landscape of absence, memory, and preverbal conclusions. To treat it as something that can be rewritten with affirmations or Psych-K formulas is to misunderstand its nature. Beliefs are not errors in programming but the residue of absence. They were formed when something essential was missing, long before the mind had language to describe it.
“When we avoid our holes,” Almaas reminds us, “we avoid the very places where our essential nature can emerge.”
Every limiting belief is born of an absence. When love, strength, joy, or value were not mirrored in early life, the soul experienced not just pain but emptiness. The absence is felt as a hole in the fabric of the self. Around that hole, the psyche builds beliefs, defenses, and identities to manage what cannot be faced. If love were absent, the hole of love forms, and the belief I am unlovable crystallizes. If support was absent, the hole of strength forms, and the belief I cannot stand on my own takes root. These convictions are not random distortions; they are survival strategies wrapped around emptiness.
Affirmations and Psych-K protocols try to plaster over these holes: “I am loved. I am strong. I am enough.” But the hole remains beneath, silently exerting its pull. This is why affirmations ultimately fail. If you must repeat “I am enough,” it already presupposes you are not. The very repetition reinforces the lack it tries to erase. Psych-K may feel different because it combines ritual, posture, and suggestion, but it still aims to overwrite rather than understand. And what cannot be understood cannot be undone.
Affirmations are simply the self attempting to free itself from itself. It cannot work.
Language and ritual cannot reach the root because the root is preverbal. These beliefs were formed in the infant’s earliest experience, in silent relational fields of presence and absence. No formula or affirmation can undo that. Awareness, on the other hand, does not overwrite. It reveals. When the hole itself is felt—without trying to fix it—the quality that was missing reemerges. The hole of love opens into love. The hole of strength opens into strength. The absence proves to be a doorway, not a defect.
To understand how these beliefs take hold, Almaas brings in object relations theory. Our earliest caregivers are internalized as “objects.” A rejecting parent becomes the inner critic. A frustrating parent becomes the voice of self-doubt. These internalized objects bind us to our holes. The rejecting object anchors the hole of love; the frustrating object anchors the hole of strength. They are the ghosts behind our beliefs, whispering in our own voice. Psych-K tries to silence the ghost with a new phrase or posture, but silence is not the same as freedom. To bring awareness to these internal objects is to see them as what they are: echoes of the past, not truths of the present. When they are recognized as echoes, their grip weakens. The belief built around them unravels. The hole opens, and with it the essential quality it concealed.
Real transformation is regressive. It does not move forward into new scripts but backward into the earliest layers of the psyche. These roots are preverbal, laid down before language, before reasoning, before conscious choice. This is why quick fixes fail. TikTok may flash a method that feels powerful in the moment, Psych-K may provide the ritual of change; however, language and suggestion cannot reach what was formed before language. Only direct awareness can meet the raw ground of absence where belief was first born. To encounter these roots is not to add something new, but to strip something away. It is to let go of slogans and concepts and allow the soul to feel what it has avoided: the emptiness, the hole, the absence itself. In that encounter, the absence reveals itself as presence.
The work, then, is not reprogramming but revelation. Not layering belief upon belief, but dissolving belief in the light of awareness. The questions that matter are not “How do I overwrite my subconscious?” but “What absence created this belief? Whose voice am I still carrying? What hole have I circled without daring to enter?” These are not questions with quick answers. They are invitations into the depth of experience, inquiries that lead backward into history and downward into essence. They require patience, honesty, and the willingness to be with emptiness without trying to escape it. Yet they also open the possibility of something more real than any affirmation or Psych-K session could ever offer: the reemergence of the essential qualities of Being.
TikTok promises speed.
Psych-K promises a method.
Affirmations promise control.
But all three leave us circling the same terrain.
Almaas points toward a slower, more difficult path: to turn toward absence itself. Not to replace it, not to escape it, but to know it. The hole is not a defect but a portal. Through it, we discover what we were searching for all along—ourselves. What first appears as emptiness reveals itself as fullness. What feels like absence opens into presence. The qualities we thought we lacked—love, strength, value—emerge not because we created them, but because they were always there, waiting just behind the veil of belief.
Neuroscience and Magical Thinking
Magical thinking and fantasy are not just whimsical mind-states. They ride on the chemistry of the brain. Dopamine fires when novelty appears, stringing coincidences into stories where “this happened to me for a reason.” Serotonin softens boundaries, and the ego inflates the result into a sense of specialness: “I am chosen, I am connected.” Norepinephrine charges ordinary events with cosmic urgency, while GABA loosens inhibition, letting fantasies flood the stage. Acetylcholine scripts inner theater, and glutamate lays down the memory tracks that turn imagination into “fact.” Together they create a neurochemical carousel that keeps the constructed self in motion, spinning storylines of significance and escape. In this way, the ego derives its sustenance from neurotransmitters, which serve as fuel for its continuity. What could be gateways to openness become glue for the fiction of “me.”
“The focused attention which occurs during spiritual practices like meditation and prayer can increase frontal lobe function … and down‑regulate the limbic system, which is linked to fear and the fight‑or‑flight response.” – Andrew Newberg (via Time)
Neuroscience in Service of the Soul
Yet the same currents can also flow differently. Dopamine can energize curiosity without attaching meaning to self. Serotonin can dissolve the rigid walls of separation rather than inflate identity. Norepinephrine can heighten attention to what is here, rather than dwelling on drama about what it means. GABA can relax the grip of distraction, opening the quiet of presence. Acetylcholine can clarify perception, grounding us in immediacy instead of rehearsal. Glutamate can encode impressions of stillness and essential qualities, supporting new ways of being rather than fortifying old illusions. In this shift, chemistry ceases to serve ego and begins to serve soul. The brain’s very wiring, once hijacked by fantasy, is reclaimed as an instrument of awareness. Here, neuroscience and spirituality converge: the same substances that once maintained the dream of self can participate in its undoing, allowing presence to shine without the scaffolding of magical thought.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and a student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. He is the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.