Lab Report #19: In Defense of Magical Thinking
Findings from playing hide + seek with the universe
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Last week at the Lab we played with synchronicity. Our goal was to investigate whether we could engineer synchronicities – moments of unexpected, meaningful connection – by manipulating certain variables. Specifically, our strategies for inducing synchronicity involved 1) tuning our energy to receive cosmic deliveries, 2) being promiscuous in our search for correspondences, and 3) pairing up the sacred and the mundane.
For example, we played a game of domestic divination (try this at home!) – choosing something profound (a book of poetry, philosophy, spiritual wisdom) and something profane (a receipt, a product package, a clothing tag) with some loose correspondence (a visual, linguistic or other association). We then used the information on the profane item (various numbers such as prices, barcodes, nutritional facts) as an index to consult with our profound source material (corresponding page numbers) and get a second opinion on some personal matter of concern.
In a way, we were consciously trying on a form of magical thinking, choosing to believe that seemingly unrelated events, objects, and situations might have some some extra-causal association between them. For example, that a package of batteries can hold the key to the chamber of mysteries stored in Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, leading us to access the perfect bit of wisdom to advise a present family tension.
In today’s report, I’d like to offer a qualified defense of this form of magical thinking. This might seem like a dangerous thing to do in the current climate, as political polarization and conspiracy theories proliferate. The magical thinking we used for engineering synchronicities in the Lab are not really much different than the magical thinking QAnon believers practice when they “connect the dots” between the timestamp on a twitter post and a COVID-19 death count. We’re both seeking evidence to support a story of reality we believe or want to be true, by connecting seemingly unrelated forms.
Importantly, magical thinking isn’t only about noticing and inventing connections where none may previously exist to support a preferred model of reality. It’s also about hiding information from ourselves that we don’t want to see—things that would make our experience of reality more random, meaningless, uncontrollable, or upsetting.
It’s common to associate the notion of “societal progress” with the erasure of magical and superstitious thinking in favor of rationality, the scientific method, evidence-based, data-driven, objective, observable information. But all those things are really more complicated, language and number coded forms of the same mechanism that governs the simple forms of magical thinking and resulting experiences of synchronicity – the active making of connections between things. (Although, to be clear, sharing a mechanism does not make them the same).
When I was training to be a researcher in graduate school, one of my teachers suggested that two thirds of all research time should be spent seeking disconfirming evidence. The strategy is meant to work against our tendency to form models of the world very quickly, and filter out everything that doesn’t fit our inevitably simplified and limited explanatory schema. Our typical self-validating impulse affects what data we collect, which in turn determines how it gets interpreted, and what story of the world ultimately gets written and circulated.
As an apprentice researcher excited to contribute a new idea to the world of knowledge, I remember hearing my teacher’s command and feeling my entire body tense up in resistance. I wanted to prove my theory, not spend time looking for potential problems with it! But after illuminating the flimsy insides of the social research black box (both quantitative and qualitative) and reading many studies that conveniently found what they set out to prove in correspondence with a worldview du jour, I heeded her recommendation. I learned to enjoy it when my original expectations were challenged, and to follow the path of explanatory friction instead. As a personal accountability check, I developed two axioms about human cognition:
People make sense – to themselves!
Everything happens for a reason – that we invent!
Because our world is incomprehensibly complex, all sensemaking we do, all stories we tell about it are a form of magical thinking and self-delusion. Sensemaking is the process of making up a coherent story out of an ocean of ambiguity and uncertainty. That means that our understanding of reality is an ongoing accomplishment — a narrative that we keep telling and retelling ourselves. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t believe scientific experts or our gut response; rather I’m suggesting that it might be a good practice to observe how we are believing in the world.
I want to propose that consciously playing with magical thinking, such as by hunting synchronicities as we did in the Lab, can actually help us become more aware of the ways we are actively accomplishing our personal delusion. Whereas fanatical or fatalistic magical thinking is used to highlight our preferred data and hide unwanted evidence from ourselves in order to confirm our internal narratives, playful, self-aware magical thinking can instead reveal to us what we’re seeking to confirm and reject. Playing with magical thinking can make it meta.
We witnessed this phenomenon repeatedly in Thursday’s Lab. Everyone who shared the results of their domestic divinations found confirmation of either their desires or their questions (the desire to live the question for a while, to stay uncertain, is also a desire). How auspicious! Is the universe such a permissive parent that she tells us we can have anything we want, or is she polymorphous enough that if we hear a negative response, we can ask her again in one of her other forms, until we get the approval we desire? Hmm.
A friend once told me about going to New Orleans and visiting six Tarot readers on Bourbon Street until she finally heard the answer she wanted. LOL. Do you see that this is already a game we play with ourselves?
Another example: a long time ago, I had a favorite water canteen that I lost. I went back to the store where I bought it to get another. When I arrived there were multiple new colors of bottles to choose from, several appealing to me in different ways. I couldn’t decide whether to get the same color I had before (was it regressive to repeat it?) or something new (a chance to have a fresh new accessory?). I pestered the employees for opinions. One wise store associate finally asked me, what if I told you you couldn’t get the old color? and hid the bottle behind his back (hide and seek!). Immediately, I felt a pang of desire and regret. That’s the one I wanted. The orange one, the one I had before, the one I couldn’t have. Happily, I purchased it, and have since then often used the same heuristic when choosing between things: I give myself a false constraint, check for my gut reaction, and investigate it for what it reveals to me about my own desires. I play hide+seek with myself to my own delight.
When we playfully invite magical thinking into our lives by engineering synchronicities and then get an answer we don’t prefer, we can watch our response with curiosity, to observe how we accomplish our models of the world. Wow, it looks like I have a lot of resistance here. I guess I’m really attached to a certain outcome! or Hmm, I’m really working hard to stretch the potential meaning to tell me what I’d like to hear! Interesting!
Similarly, when we easily and effusively accept a particular perspective or prophecy, we can notice that too. Wow, this feels nice. It might mean I’m hiding something from myself, but I can just choose to swim in this feeling of cosmic confirmation for a while. It feels really good to experience such strong resonance!
By the way, hiding stuff from ourselves is okay. We do it all the time. The problem is forgetting that we are always hiding something, and believing the hidden thing no longer exists.
Everything is a mirror. It’s reflecting you to yourself. There are a lot of things you can’t see about yourself without a mirror (your face, for example!). It’s useful to look in the mirror. Magical thinking is a form of existential mirror looking that helps us more clearly see the things we are hiding from ourselves – our desires, fears, attachments, aversions. Use it as a tool! But don’t confuse it with reality itself. It’s a reflection. In this model, the experience is of synchronicity is just a playful wink shared between you and your mirror-self.
TWO OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEEPER PLAY!
1) THE PEOPLE’S ORACLE
Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to play the culminating game that I planned for the lab last week: The People’s Oracle! This game uses a crowdsourced collection of our synchronicities and symbolically rich dream and life fragments as a democratic divination deck.
Would you like to participate in this extended experiment to playtest The People’s Oracle? If so, please contribute your personal ANONYMOUS synchronicity content here. If enough people submit oracular wisdom for us to toss around, I will host an extra Lab to play the game and make a virtual app version that you can use to play solo! Wow!
2) GAMES WE PLAY WITH OURSELVES, 6-week series beginning October 6
I am very excited to have joined a stellar team of associates at the Deep Play Institute (DPI), a new non-profit institute dedicated to using play to explore life’s deepest questions! DPI is offering a really thrilling menu of programs this Fall – I want to take all of them myself (and maybe I will)! I’ll be leading a 6-week series called Games We Play With Ourselves that is a first of its kind intensive in the Ludic Liberation approach! Read more and register here.
Sending you cute cosmic winks.
Profanely & profoundly yours,
Natalia
Game Maker/Destroyer
Lab Report #19: In Defense of Magical Thinking
Re your oracle deck, I've been working with a friend on something a bit adjacent to what you described in your post! We have been sending art back and forth for a few months - we each make an image about 5 days a week, and gave it a little explanatory caption. Now we are using this collection of images and captions as an oracle deck. We ask a question, then randomly select an image, and randomly select a caption from a different image. It's been fun and revealing!