Magical thinking is attributing causal or synchronistic relationships between actions and events that seemingly cannot be justified by reason and observation.
In religion, folk religion, and superstitious beliefs, the posited correlation is often between religious ritual, prayer, sacrifice, or the observance of a taboo and an expected benefit or recompense.---Wikipedia
When I say that so-called spiritual practice does not lead inherently to awakening and often leads only to deeper and deeper self-hypnosis, I am making a point about the "expected benefit or recompense."
I can get my donkeys to go anywhere I like. All I have to do is dangle a carrot in front of their noses, and they will go wherever the carrot goes.
In spirituality, the carrot is salvation, transcendence, or so-called self-realization.
The expected benefit is escaping old age, mortality, and death.
The thing is, a donkey will not dangle a carrot in front of its own nose. Only humans are that foolish.
Q: To be honest with you, the way you talk and answer questions with a brutal candidness reminds me of Nisargadatta.
I do not know whether the guy was indeed in the "absolute" state, whatever that may be, but in the sense that he talks his points of view honestly and with a fiery intellect and sharpness, you and he are similar.
One of the reasons 4T is so lovable to me is that the simple logic and sense of your words make me laugh. I mean, it is so obvious, simple, and actually funny. I also laugh at the way you sometimes honestly tell the person how you see his behavior. Nisargadatta was the same.
A: All of us who find ourselves awake will express that understanding in whatever language we have available, however inadequate. I say what I say, and frankly, I do not expect to be understood. I speak only because I must, and who knows why?
I like to say, "Nothing is becoming anything. What is, is, and can be no different." Nisardadatta liked to say, "What you are, you already are." Or maybe it was Ramana Maharshi who liked to say that. No matter.
Nisargadatta came of age in a culture where terms like “the absolute” were commonplace and taken for granted, more or less like the word “God” in my childhood. But those are just words for the incomprehensible “continuous arising” (only a name--just words), which both Nisargadatta and I see as the experience of “myselfness.” That defies words entirely.
Words are part of that myselfness--part of mind, as I might call it--but only a limited part. My childhood intellectual diet included a large helping of rationality and reliance on the scientific method, and those influences can be seen clearly in my style of discourse. Nisargadatta? Not so much.
But language and childhood influences are just a fraction of the picture. If those influences are seen for what they are—imposed cultural indoctrination that is not “Truth”—then Nisargadatta and Robert appear to be very much on the same page:
“Stay without ambition, without the least desire, exposed, vulnerable, unprotected, uncertain and alone, completely open to and welcoming life as it happens, without the selfish conviction that all must yield you pleasure or profit, material or so-called spiritual.”---Nisargadatta
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Hello Robert. I had always associated the term "magical thinking" with schizophrenia. However, I like the way you use it, as it fits the mind's ability to trick itself with so much imaginary nonsense.. It seems that the fear of death is so fucking strong that we'll eat our way through mountains of bullshit just to avoid facing it...