There was once a promotion where you had to collect bottle tops from fizzy drinks, and under each bottle top, there was a picture of half a car. But it was always a picture of the front of the car. It was extremely rare to complete the picture by finding the back of the car. Well, I am the back of the car, the missing part. The only one in the world.
- Listen to Massive Attack “Unfinished Sympathy”
One rainy day, I went for a walk around the city with my assistant. We actually had some things to do, but we decided just to walk around. He was quite new; he had only been working for me for about two months, and he noticed that I looked at the city differently. I wrote about it in my book “Paradox” and tapped into this topic before, but I just want to draw your attention to it again. A person walks down the same street every day, but he never walks on the opposite side of the road. This person lives in St. Petersburg or any other city. This is a paradox, and I showed it to my assistant, and he was stunned as he realized it. I told him:
– Look, there are way fewer people on this street. It seems like people don’t really walk here. Have you ever walked here before?
– Nope – and this guy is from St. Petersburg.
I showed him the city from a completely different angle. I explained to him that after I visited the place of power for the first time, I woke up to a new perspective of the city. I felt like I was immersed in a parallel reality. You notice houses you haven’t seen before. You notice streets that you’ve never walked down. As we carried on walking, I said:
– That side of the street is where shut down, materialistic, ordinary people walk. Those people won’t walk on this side of the street where we walk.
And I show all of this to him, and he feels it, and he is shocked. Then something even more curious happened. We went into one church and then another, and he got spaced out. He specifically said “spaced-out”. So we went back to the car