IT'S TIME FOR MAGICAL LIES TO END

The phrase “magical thinking” has a bad reputation. It is associated with superstition, schizophrenia, hallucination, and other escapes from reality. If you seek a definition that is free of judgment, however, magical thinking is belief that a hidden cause connects events where no cause exists. Science has gone through a long, hard struggle to replace magical thinking with rational cause-and-effect, which is why we study sun through telescopes rather than worshiping it.

- Deepak Chopra

It is only reasonable for rationalists to get irritated when they see magic hanging around, just as it irritates atheists to see God hanging around. But there’s a sound reason for magical thinking to persist: without it, creation cannot be explained. Despite our modern devotion to logic and reason, when you look at any level of creation, powerful magic is at work. We accept as real countless things that are mind-made illusions.

Explaining the world depends on a set of magical lies that everyone buys into. Sometimes the lie is really a convenient fiction that accommodates our five senses. It helps to feel that your feet are firmly planted on the ground when in reality the Earth is hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour, forming a complex curve around the Sun that gets even more complex when you throw in the fantastic speed at which the Milky Way galaxy is traveling away from every other galaxy.

But more troubling are the magical lies that are necessary to keep false assumptions from falling apart, beginning with the most intimate activity we all pursue, thinking. No one knows where a thought comes from, even given the most intensive investigation into the brain. Thoughts are words in our heads, but brain cells don’t speak. Between the electrical and chemical activity performed by brain cells, there is an unbridgeable gap when it comes to turning that mindless activity into thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images.