If you're a serious intellectual the biggest slight you can give someone is to accuse them of 'magical thinking'. The term is synonymous with woo-woo hippies preaching 'love and light' – preferring to live in denial about 'reality' while they open their hearts in cacao ceremonies.
I get it. There are a lot of people out there who've read The Secret and are bypassing having to face uncomfortable truths about where they are through manifestation techniques and the like. But let's not write the whole thing off just yet.
Science and rational philosophy have notoriously struggled to answer the more meaningful and fundamental questions about the nature of existence. And the closer it gets – quantum physics etc – the more it starts to look, well, magical. Why? Because existence is nothing less than pure magic. Something existing, and something that's able to perceive and experience that, can't really be described in any other meaningful terms, no matter how many times you try to split the atom. Indeed, as part of that, thought itself, rational or otherwise, is magical; magic is both the currency and medium of thought.
Who's the magician?
Who's magic, is the real question? God's? Source's? These are personal interpretations I don't want to argue about and I would say are all on the same level of 'true' relative to whatever framework we're using. But at a deeper level, in all spiritual systems, we're all fragments of whatever that greater consciousness is. To not be a part of it would mean not to exist, and we clearly do in one way or another, even if only in an illusory dream-like sense. Something's reading a page right now.
So we all have a share in that magic as well. Whether we choose to recognise it or not, we're all acting as the magicians in our own lives and those of others, creating our own reality in every moment.
And it's not just a feeling. The hard problem of consciousness – the one David Chalmers named in 1995 – is that no physical model, no matter how complete, explains why there's something it's like to be a thing. Why neural firing is accompanied by experience at all. It's not that we haven't found the answer yet. It's that the question doesn't fit the format of the answer the mechanical model produces. The model explains behaviour. It doesn't explain the inside.
Then there's the perception side. Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at Sussex, has spent the last decade building the case that what we experience isn't a readout of the world. It's a prediction. The brain is a generation machine – it's constantly throwing models out and using sensory input to calibrate them. His phrase for it is 'controlled hallucination.' Not in the pathological sense. In the sense that what you're seeing, hearing, feeling, is actively constructed from the inside out, constrained by the outside but not determined by it. He says it plainly: 'We don't just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it.' That's not a metaphor. That's the mechanism. And it means the 'you' that's perceiving is doing more work than the 'you' that's being perceived. The magician is in the room.
And the entheogen research is catching up to what people have known for thousands of years. A 2024 study in Nature tracked people's brains before, during, and for weeks after a high-dose psilocybin session. The default mode network – the part of the brain that runs your sense of self, your narrative, your 'I' – desynchronised. The brain, in the lead researcher's words, 'fell apart.' And in response it entered a state of enhanced plasticity that lasted for weeks. The rigid structure loosened. New connections formed. The system reorganised around a different centre. Ayahuasca studies show the same pattern: decreased activity in the default mode network, increased connectivity between networks that don't normally talk to each other, structural changes in the posterior cingulate cortex that correlate with increased scores in self-transcendence. The 'other state' isn't a departure from reality. It's a different resolution. A different frequency. The same system, running a different programme.
None of this is proof that 'magic' is a valid physics. It's not. But it is proof that the mechanical model is incomplete. That the thing that's most obviously there – experience, perception, the inside – is the one thing the model can't generate. And that the states people have been calling 'magical' for ten thousand years are states the brain can actually enter, that produce measurable structural change, and that the research is only now beginning to map.
Conscious engagement
If we deny our magic, that's where we run into problems. 'It wasn't me, it was some billiard balls bumping into each other.' Or the stock market. Or your ex. We deny our agency and wonder why our lives and the world are a mess. Well, there are quite a few people out there who are quite happy to let that happen while they remember their own magic very well and profit from it. That's why it's so convenient for them to keep magical thinking in nutcase territory among the hoi polloi.
It's challenging to think that we have that kind of power over our lives. It means having to take responsibility for things. I'm not saying it's easy and we have all kinds of limitations, it's true. But with all things, it improves with practice.
Why it looks wrong
The problem isn't the logic, it's the oversimplification. We try and manifest a new car by thinking about it for a while, maybe even applying some techniques – make a sigil or something – and it doesn't work. We think that disproves its validity but what's being overlooked is mostly our own subconscious motivations and beliefs. The 'you' that's manifesting is much bigger than you think you are. It includes the inner child that never got what you wanted and built a whole framework for life around that. It includes the 'you' who's afraid to be seen in those flashy wheels because last time you were seen it wasn't safe. Even in a simple example like a car, there are all kinds of layers to unravel that get in the way.
The point is they're getting in the way whether you try to manifest something or not. Those limiting things you tell yourself and rules you made, those are spells you've placed on yourself, or that perhaps others have placed on you, that are operating whether you like it or not. That's not a reason to abandon magic. That's a reason to acknowledge it more fully and to train.
In my Guided Magickal Work sessions, we work with those negative influences and change the pattern. We release them so that the other work can hold. In this we're able to curate the algorithm for what shows up in your 'feed' to create the life you want.
Congruency
Intuition and logic aren't enemies. They're not mutually exclusive. In fact, the best test of whether something has genuine validity is when they both point to the same answer. There's a very good reason for that. They look distinct down here but at higher levels of perception they share a commonality. If you consider 'Source' or 'God' or whatever that divine consciousness is as the ultimate 'reality' then whatever's closer to that is more real. Here in the physical realm, we're further away from that than more subtle spaces, so in that sense we're actually the least 'real', which chimes with the Hindu perspective of 'maya'.
The reason dreams heal our psyche and we go mad very quickly without sleep is because we need time closer to that reality to recharge. Entheogenic plants also work by taking us into these other states to heal at a deeper level – a more 'real' level than we can access here. Similarly, we can access this space through the imaginal realms, and use our logical minds as tools in this space to influence things.
And what you begin to understand from 'up there' is that despite what our post-Enlightenment era conditioning would have us believe, we have access to many modes of thinking, logic is just a subset of that. To insist on logic and to deny the rest is like running only one app on your phone and insisting it's the best, while denying you have a phone at the same time. Not very logical.
Magical thinking isn't stupid. It's our natural technology for influencing our lives for the better. If you'd like to join me to delve in, I'm here.
