Magical Thinking

Sometimes magical thinking saves lives. Other times it takes lives.

Here in the western world people might believe that magical thinking isn't useful. This isn't true. Whatever keeps people alive is useful. Whatever kills people or makes them crazy isn't useful.

It has been like this since the beginning of time.

The most extreme version that might explain what I'm talking about is when I went to India and Nepal in 1985 and 1986 with my family.

Also, (I was raised in a very unconventional mystical Christian religion) so I was raised in a way that some of your point of view would be "Magical thinking" on some levels.

As I grew up I made up my own mind about a lot of things (which is what we all should do) but many are too afraid to ask the right questions. However, I was always taught to ask the hard questions and to be brave about whatever the truth actually turned out to be. Many people I find cannot survive this sort of thing. However, I can.

So, from my own individual set of experience I see some people who are dogmatically scientific and think we don't have souls and the only thing that is real is our processes and when we die we are dead and when we fall in love it is just a bio-chemical reaction needed for mating and propagating the race.

However, on a certain level I see this kind of thinking "Didactic materialism" as "magical thinking" itself because didactic materialism is just as dogmatic and fundamentalist in it's own way as the most barbaric ISIS person cutting off people's heads every day.

So, my point of view is that in order to be a free thinker you have to be willing to ask useful questions. And often you can't ask the right questions without traveling the world and talking to people or just being around people who have a completely different cultural background to yourself.

So, in order to understand what it is to be a human being, you actually have to be one first. And to me a didactic materialist I must debate whether such a person is more robot or more human?

And likewise, is an ISIS person even sane? Likely not. So, maybe one must classify such a person as a suicidal homicidal sociopath and be done with it. Because at that point if you are going to kill everyone that doesn't think exactly like you then you are eventually going to have to kill everyone on earth which is basically human extinction. And I think most of you would agree that isn't sane.

So, let me give you the example of "magical Thinking" as I was exposed to it when I first went into India with my family.

I felt in some ways more at home on a personal level in India than I ever had in the U.S. Why is this?

I think in my case being as intuitive as I am was considered "Normal" in India when I was there in 1985 and 1986. So, I found I could talk to people about things most people couldn't talk about here. But there, since death is so near for everyone, what I wanted to talk about is very everpresent in their lives (at least it was in 1985 and 1986) when I was there.

My first experience regarding this was buying tickets for a train and realizing it was useless because everyone was hanging onto the outside of the train who had my kind of ticket. I found out that even though train tickets are cheap you can't use them unless you hung onto the outside of the train and ducked obstacles as they came by. This was amazing to me that people were allowed to hang onto the outside of trains and buses. It was sort of like Macho was completely out of control in this culture. But, over time it simply meant there were a whole lot of Indians in India and in some ways life was cheap. This was a lesson for me as someone coming from the U.S.

Next, I started to have amazing experiences. I think the most amazing of them all was I had been trekking with my wife and kids 50 miles through the Helambu region up to 10,000 feet in altitude down to about 5000 feet along rivers and across many many suspension bridges (there were no roads where we went then) and my wife had come to the end of what she could endure (even though she was always a really good sport (and an alternate in the Backstroke for the Olympics) when she was young. So, she started to cry when she got so exhausted finally she wet her pants and she kept crying one day.

Well, a taxi cab drove up a trail(no road just a trail) within a block of us. I said, "Oh my God! There's a taxi on the trail!" and it dropped off two rich Nepali businessmen on the trail in suits. I told my oldest son who was 14. "Go run down and hire that taxi if he is free!" The man was overjoyed! Because he had been paid well to take this rich businessmen to their mountain fastness up a trail and then we tied our backpacks to his roof rack (I think it was a toyota corolla or something like that) and we climbed in. This was "Magical Thinking" to the extreme only it was real and not imaginary. This was always happening. Some Miracle! all the time we were in India and Nepal.

And you know what it taught me? I learned that amazing things happen in this culture because they have integrated magical thinking with real life for 10,000 years. And it works for them with or without Western Medicine and Western Science. This was magical thinking in action every day while I was there.

And I have never seen as much manifested magical thinking as I did in India and Nepal and even Thailand out in the country.

Some cultures have integrated magical thinking so deeply into their cultures that it works for them. And not only for them but people who are open to the magic of those cultures like I and my family.

So, going to Asia and India and Nepal and Thailand and Japan was a blessing to my family and made us all true citizens of the world ever since.

So, I find as I travel the world that there is magic and there is science. And often they live side by side. You just have to be open to experience it in order to be blessed by it. Blessings are everywhere! Just be grateful! Because gratitude is truly the motor of Life!