Magical Thinking and Maturation

     "Magical thinking is the attribution of causal relationships between actions and events which cannot be justified by reason and observation. In religion, folk religion, and superstitious beliefs, the correlation posited is often between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo, and an expected benefit or recompense. In clinical psychology, magical thinking can cause a patient to experience fear of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities. Magical thinking may lead people to believe that their thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. It is a type of causal reasoning or causal falacy that looks for meaningful relationships of grouped phenomena (coincidence) between acts and events." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking

     No matter how reasonable, rational, scientific etc we perceive ourselves to be, we all so desperately need some sense of control over our scary, brief, unpredictable life, that we all pretend, to varying degrees (some of us with violent desperation) that magic is real. A beautifully written memoir describing this phenomenon is Joan Didion's 2007 book The Year of Magical Thinking.
     'Magical', for me, is not a pejorative. Whenever we can't face life as it presents, we "change our reality" - how we perceive, understand and therefore respond to life, as we want to know it. There are many, many examples of this, from "failing to hear" a bit of bad news, to tenaciously clinging to a bed-time-story-like worldview.

     But as we mature, and to the extent that we're able to mature, by letting go of layers of pretense, armor, & filtered glasses between ourselves and reality, we face life directly, as intentionally evolving sentient beings. 

     Quality of Live: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/03/quality-of-life.html
     Awareness Heals: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2015/03/653-awareness-leads-to-spaciousness.html
     Our Journey: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2013/02/286-human-journey-from-simple-facts-to.html

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