Magical thinking

I'm told I have magical thinking, I think this is because for me pretty much everything is alive and has some kind of agency, hense my sewing machine hating me or computers hating me. As I've always been aware of the awareness of the awarenesses we share our world with, it's perfectly normal to me and weird that others don't know this.

One of the things I don't get is why magical thinking is a problem?

Why is it even called magical thinking?

Who does it harm?

I'm told that my perceptions aren't real, and I ask why? Why are your perceptions so limited that you don't know this, isn't this a problem for you and not me?

Am I the only one for whom the world is alive and that we move through a world filled with other conciousnesses, often very different from our own?

Parents
  • This is how i see the world since ever… I have never thought it’s a problem or something wrong. Looks like I’m not alone and I consider my inner world a beautiful place that compensates a lot what comes from outside. This “magical thinking” may also make me appreciate what I have. When others throw things out, I always consider how I can fix it or reuse it. 

  • I'm so glad I'm not alone with this, all my life people have told me I'm mad, bad and wrong, over imaginative and need to "grow up", I think it's something that's led to a lot of heartache over the years as people can't see the beauty or the value of things. People's reactions to me when not negative or hostile, tend along the lines of making me magical and like I have all the answers, I'm not a guru and being treated as one never ends well as they soon find out I'm human. It's often hard enough just being a spiritual person, people have such strange ideas and confuse it with organised religion, which for me it isn't.

    I think there's lots of confusion about quantum physics, I get the impresion that if you asked two quantum physicists the same question you'd get 6 different answers. One of the best explainations of it I saw was a show by Ken Campbel, it should still be around somewhere on the internet.

    That's another thing, the internet, where is it if not in a different dimension?

Reply
  • I'm so glad I'm not alone with this, all my life people have told me I'm mad, bad and wrong, over imaginative and need to "grow up", I think it's something that's led to a lot of heartache over the years as people can't see the beauty or the value of things. People's reactions to me when not negative or hostile, tend along the lines of making me magical and like I have all the answers, I'm not a guru and being treated as one never ends well as they soon find out I'm human. It's often hard enough just being a spiritual person, people have such strange ideas and confuse it with organised religion, which for me it isn't.

    I think there's lots of confusion about quantum physics, I get the impresion that if you asked two quantum physicists the same question you'd get 6 different answers. One of the best explainations of it I saw was a show by Ken Campbel, it should still be around somewhere on the internet.

    That's another thing, the internet, where is it if not in a different dimension?

Children
  • We are including that in the magic too. Einstein was a magical thinker. And Newton. This is about the power of intentional thinking. so it's about thought, Ergo "I think, I doubt, I am." ,

  • Cosmo, for me it's not a belief, its how the world is and how it's always been, like you I'm a bit of a skeptic about quite a lot of things and I ask questions, but I always come back to reality being that which I can stub my toe on and for me my perceptive world is something I can stub my toe on.

    Alienatedhuman, What is grown up? How does one manifest grown-upness? There are lots of people of all neurologies who cry and display emotion when the situation seems to other not to warrant it. I think there's too much emotional policing, about what's right or not, by what and who's criteria is something not right? Looking at how emotionally blunted some people are makes me wonder at the rates of psychopathy in the general population and how people are trained to blunt their emotions, especially men and boys, all the the "big boys don't cry" stuff. All that emotion has to go somewhere, I wonder what the societal effects are? Could it be why we see so much violence commited by men? Violence is much more socially acceptable in men and boys than in women and girls, I wonder what the world would be like if we were all allowed to feel what we feel, when we feel it, if we were all encouraged to be more emotionally literate? There are various problems with gender based ideas of social appropriateness, the one probably most familiar to us on this site, is they way that ASD in women and girls has taken so long to be recognised, its socially acceptable for girls to be shy, so someone struggling with social interactions, is seen as performing to a "good" sociaetal model rather than one who kicks and screems. Also women and girls being seen as lacking in femininity if they show high levels of intelligence.

    I think we're lucky to live in a world that's increasingly aware of societal injustices and different neurologies and ways of being.

  • No problem. Glad you found it interesting. 

  • Honestly I often feel like I’m not fully grown up… because of my inner world or my problems with emotions, it’s like I cry even in public if it’s too noisy and crowded, or at work if it’s a new job, because there is everything new and it’s also often too much noise and light. I do my best to hide but often somebody sees me crying and then they laugh at me or just tell me to not be sp sensitive. 

  • Really interesting! Thank you for explanation. For me English is also not my first language, but I understand what you write. 

  • Also, I kinda envy you lol. For me, the situation is the opposite, where all around me are people with 'magical thinking' and I'm the scientific one and people tend to not like me because of it, because I'm skeptic and I like to challenge them. For me, I think people are missing the real beauty, science. I think the real world is already beautiful and bizarre and people are missing it...I've been scarred by religion and misinformation throughout my teenage years and used to be mean towards people who were not scientific like me, but as you can see, now I'm different and try to always be compassionate; I don't understand you and we wouldn't be close friends probably, but I still love you for just being human.

    That said, I would like to say to everyone, please be careful with spreading misinformation as it caused me a lot of pain when I was younger. Try to distinguish between your 'beliefs' and 'facts and science', 'belief' is when there's no proof for it and you simply like believing in the thing, 'science' is when there's proof for it. 

  • Ok, so I'm not a quantum physicist but I'll try my best to explain what I think gets mixed up with things in magical thinking a lot, it's the observer effect. In quantum physics, the particles seem to react to being 'observed' (bear with me, I might not be accurate all the time since this is not my field of study and I'm not a native English speaker), it's almost like the particles jump into existence when they are 'observed', when there's a 'viewer'. This is where magical thinking can mix up; people will think that their own awareness and consciousness is making things appear or turning things into reality, but in fact, when scientists use 'observe' ,it means more like 'measurement', it means more like: particles, for example photons, interacting with what's being 'observed' rather than a consciousness being present. It's not about the consciousness, it's about the interaction of particles. This is how I learnt it from Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'll link a short video below.

    youtube.com/.../69nbsWSjvOg