Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart

Magic is central to Doty’s work and in some cases literal: as a young boy, Doty loves magic tricks, and it is the act of entering a magic shop that introduces him to Ruth and changes the course of his life. However, Doty also routinely uses the idea of magic in a figurative sense, most commonly by describing the meditative techniques Ruth teaches him as a form of magic; in this context, venturing “into the magic shop” means exploring the latent capabilities of the mind.

The rationale for likening meditation to magic seems obvious at first glance. Ruth describes her technique as “[a] kind of magic that you can’t buy in a store [...] that will help you make anything you want actually appear” (23), and in many ways, the events of the book bear this description out. As Doty achieves success after improbable success, visualization comes to seem like a “trick” that allows practitioners to conjure whatever they like out of thin air. This, however, is not the attitude of the work as a whole. To see meditation primarily as a conjuring trick, Ruth says, is to overlook the importance of grounding visualization in compassion.