Do you believe in magic?
Magic is only believed to exist in fairy tales, even though we experience it everyday. Magic is a combination of experience and faith.
The word magic comes from an Old Persian word (magu) that is said to have been derived from a Proto-Indo-European word /magh/ which supposedly means “be able”. Across the board, it seems like this word stems from an ancient reference to healers, whether they were mages, shamans, or soothsayers. It was believed that people could perform magic, when we know today that these people simply knew something that other people didn’t. They had detected a pattern in nature that allowed them to appear to have mystical powers.
Remember that group that believes the Earth is flat? Based on data retrieved from the of the five senses, how can one argue with them? We believe we are on a giant rock that is doing laps around a smoldering ball of fire. Somehow the fact that we know what the sun is, allows us to check it off on the list of “knowns”, and carry on about our day.
We seem to also think that: by having the ability to use a smart phone, we are filled with just as much information… but we don’t even know how they work. We’ve convinced ourselves that the stories of how things came to be are true. Look no further than the present moment to see how easily ‘listening to the experts’ can become an instance of blind faith.
Now, obviously I’m not saying we move into a geocentric perspective (again) nor am I saying we should believe those that say the Earth is flat. We could pretend either way. That is the magic of the Schrodinger experiment. We do not really have to mentally decide on one, nor do we have to agree. We can play. Play is magic.
Play is the place from which intuitive breakthroughs come from. We enter a state of flow that contains a world of possibilities yet to become manifest. We can use our imagination to consider them, instead of being decidedly sure that one or two will always be the right answer. This would help tremendously with constructing new answers to outdated questions.
We can apply this analogy of play and magic to modern constraints with an example that is familiar to most of us. Imagination has the same potential energy as money in a savings account. Although, it isn’t obvious unless I say “Creativity is more valuable than money”. That transposition of the word magic puts it in very human terms and we understand intuitively how this is the case. And, where we have to input energy into obtaining money, we know that we can gain energy from a creative breakthrough. All we have to do is take time to exercise the muscle through play.
It is starting to become much more obvious how important it is to be able to decide things for ourself, considering the current health crisis. Having a few years experience working in a health food store has been the source of great comfort for me. I know generally what my body needs and which supplements I could try. Though it is a process of trial and error, that is what play is for.
Within responsibility lies freedom. They might even be directly proportional to one another. In order to set out on road less taken safely, we’ll have to account for anything. Rather than having steadfast laws about how the world works, we should prepare toolkits of thought experiments to be used at our disposal. There’s no road map for a path to freedom, but there is a network of safe houses.
Originally written for Collective Journaling at The Stoa
