There’s a funny thing that happens when you spend enough nights staring at the stars. Not looking for constellations, not trying to find Orion’s belt or count satellites as they drift by—but actually thinking about what’s really out there. Past the atmosphere, beyond the moon, beyond the neat diagrams in science books. You sit with it long enough and eventually the human mind bumps up against something it can’t quite hold: infinity.

Most people treat infinity like a poetic flourish—something you write in a love letter or whisper dramatically in a movie. But real infinity is far less romantic and far more unsettling. The moment you let your mind touch it, even lightly, the tidy rules you cling to begin to wobble. Because if something is truly infinite, then every outcome you can imagine—and every outcome you can’t—sits side-by-side with the same exact probability.

Think about that for a moment.
In an infinite system, the rarest possibility is no rarer than the most obvious one. The improbable becomes inevitable simply by virtue of having endless time to occur. Statistics, those comforting little percentages we use to rationalize life, melt into irrelevance. Odds become meaningless. Predictability becomes a fairy tale we tell ourselves to stay calm.

Infinity doesn’t just stretch space or time—it stretches meaning.

And yet, despite living in a universe shaped by this concept, the average human brain doesn’t collapse under the weight of it. And that’s because the mind is the greatest filter ever invented. It has to be. If you saw reality in its unfiltered entirety, you wouldn’t last an hour.

You don’t even see the world the “right way up.” Light enters your eyes upside down, fractured, incomplete. Then your brain flips it, fills in the gaps, deletes most of the noise, and hands you a curated experience it believes you can handle. The world you perceive is not the world that exists—it’s the world your mind has decided to show you.

And here’s where things get interesting:
If infinity contains every possible outcome, then the mind becomes the selector. The tuner. The lens that determines which sliver of infinite possibility becomes your lived reality.

You’ve seen this in your own life, though you may not have recognized it. You’ve had days where one bad comment in the morning made every traffic light feel like an insult, every stranger’s expression seem hostile, every minor inconvenience stack up like cosmic punishment. And you’ve had days where the smallest act of kindness—someone holding a door, a stranger smiling, a child laughing—made the whole world appear gentler, softer, more aligned.

The day didn’t change.
You changed.
Your focus changed.
Your tuner shifted to a different frequency within the same infinite field.

When people say “you see what you want to see,” they’re not being dismissive—they’re describing a fundamental truth of perception. You are not experiencing the world as it is. You are experiencing the world as your mind, shaped by your focus, chooses to interpret it.

If infinity holds every possibility, your attention is what drags one possibility into front-and-center experience. Your focus becomes the steering wheel in a sea without edges. And whether you realize it or not, you are constantly navigating.

Some say that means life is an illusion. I disagree. If anything, it means life is far more magical than most realize. You are participating in the shaping of your reality simply by deciding where to look. Infinity provides the raw material. Your mind sculpts the outcome.

And once you understand that… you begin to walk through the world a little differently. You begin to choose your thoughts with more intention. You notice that fear and hope feed on the same infinite well, and whichever one you feed becomes the one that steps forward. You begin to understand why two people can live the same day and walk away with entirely different stories. Why one person sees signs of doom and another sees opportunities. Why one person feels cursed and another blessed by the same set of circumstances.

It’s not delusion.
It’s selection.

Infinity is too vast to hand you a single fixed truth. So the mind hands you a filtered one—one shaped by your history, your emotions, your beliefs, and most importantly, your focus.

And the older I get, the more I’m convinced that the true work of being human—whether you call yourself a mystic, a scientist, or just someone trying to get through the day—is learning to aim your focus with care. Not to ignore the darkness, but to choose the light often enough that your internal compass doesn’t lose its way.

Because if everything is possible, the question isn’t “What will happen?”
It’s “What will you choose to see?”

And that, my friend, is where the real magic begins.

— Daniel MacBayne