Magical Thinking

In another year, the date will be 2 22 22. Will something special happen on the day when the 2’s all come up together? Will something special happen on this day when we are only one digit off from full numeric alignment? Let’s imagine Yes.

Let’s imagine that today something special will happen but that it might not occur in any recognizable form. Like the small event that happens early in the novel, the significance of which is only revealed toward the end. And only later do you get to look back over what has happened and say ‘Oh, now I get it, that was the turning point.’

It’s kind of a lovely feeling, when the brain rearranges the furniture of the mind and a new room, a new life is created. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and all that. These maps of the mind that masquerade as the world we live within. This life that is invisibly co-created in each moment.

Our understanding is only ever partial. Our small conscious minds alive in the middle of the vast cosmos. The vast cosmos alive in the middle of our small conscious minds. Outside only appears because of inside. Inside appears only because of outside.

My Zen teacher used to say ‘Subject needs object. Object needs subject.’ There is no self, no perceiver without something to perceive. I know myself only when I meet something that is not myself. The thing perceived, the object, is a mutual creation arising spontaneously in my neural circuitry as I receive bits of information from the world around and within me.

In Buddhist philosophy this mutual creation is called dependent arising (pratitya samutpada). It’s a fancy word for the natural and subtle process of awareness. (One that has been supported by current brain research – see once again Lisa Barrett’s How Emotions are Made)

But back to the notion that we might imagine that something special will happen today because we are only one digit off from all 2’s in the numeric writing of today’s date. Of course, this is a silly notion based on superstition and magical thinking. Why would all 2’s be any different from any other random combination of digits?

We could also say that any numerical (or other) representation of the date of today is magical thinking. Days don’t really contain numbers. The first day of the year is just another rising of the sun, albeit usually a cold one for those of us in the northern hemisphere. February is just eight letters strung together that we have agreed, here in the English speaking world, that refers to a series of days that come after January.

When we look closely at time and language and the myriad social agreements that we take for granted, it all gets pretty squishy. The whole world, it turns out, is pretty much a magical and jointly agreed upon construction. So why not appreciate and play along with this ongoing impossibly and constantly constructed universe?

For my part, I will set reason just a little to the side today and keep my eyes open and my senses alert for something really special—some intimation of radical change coming, some sense of a hitherto unrecognized gift or talent, some precious aspect of life which I never noticed before.

And I suspect the looking (not even the finding) will take me through the wardrobe to Narnia once again.