Growing up in a household dominated by an engineer father and a mother who topped her class in computer programming in 1969 was an exercise in the myth of American Rationalism. Everything that we did, I was made to understand, we did because it made the most sense. In a neat little bit of logical reductivism, we followed the most clearly thought-out path primarily because we had thought it out, and therefore it was the best. Not only that, but we had an intense pride in our rationality. For me, it was a tremendous comfort to know that nothing was out of our reach; we could explain anything about the world if we applied our minds to it. And when your father sits down and figures out how much the earth moves when you moved your matchbox car, you knew that this was not an idle fantasy. No wonder that Spock was my favorite fictional character.

Naturally, as the phrase “Magical Thinking” gained currency and prominence, my father leaped all over it. This was proof positive that the facts of science and the mode of logic were superior in every way. We didn’t require totems or symbols, and we certainly knew that what we thought about things had absolutely no impact on them in reality.

But our cats perpetually, and viciously, fought each other.

The magic of magical thinking is magic viewed from the outside, from the rational, from the scientific. It is a magic of perceived cause and real effect, wherein the self-proclaimed dispassionate observer declares that no, in fact, your reality is wrong. You may think that there is a connection between your mind and the world, but it just isn’t so. Application of the phrase can vary hugely, from cognitive development to the campaign for the presidency. The reality of what happened is here, but the victim of magical thought believes that the cause is over there. Beyond that, there is, in all contexts, a sense of ease, that thinking makes something so, and thinking isn’t that hard, is it? Deliberately magical thinkers, those that set up websites devoted to the topic, may make an almost-persuasive argument that thinking is in fact hard work that we can all bend ourselves to, but really it’s as easy as choosing the red pill. Our choice will create the reality.

This is the straw man, this magic of spooky action at a distance. For anyone who wishes, this facile definition becomes a powerful totem for all mystery, or for all enemies. After all, it’s plainly obvious that our mind doesn’t affect matter. Not even when, so very long ago, we bent our will to planting the first seed and nurturing it ourselves to fruition and eating something that would not have existed if our mind hadn’t conceived of it. For this is magic. Life is magic, and without magic we would not exist, for we are all products of human will.

Why, after all, did our cats have such tempers?

But leaving that all aside for the moment, what comes to mind when we think of magic? Harry Potter, perhaps? Frodo? Luke Skywalker? Witches and goblins and wands and spells and potions and fairies and power. Our mythology and our fantasy are filled with magic, be it the scrubbed and sanitized “Force” of the Star Wars universe or the straight-out-of-the-playbook wands-and-spells of Potter. There is an incredibly rich history of the occult, with taxonomies and stories dating back into pre-literate times. Many of these became inextricably woven into the fabric of our culture, with characters like Lilith living so close to the surface of one of the world’s major religions that you can feel her breath. All of the major myths that drive storytelling to this day have an element of magic, be it David and Goliath or Oedipus or Orpheus or Odysseus or King Arthur and Guinevere. There is something so powerful and important to us about magic that we keep returning to it, time and again, satisfied that there is where truth about our world lies.

If we paid attention to the cats, what might we have learned about ourselves?

For in all of these worlds, in all of this knowledge of magic we share with each other in song and tale, we know that magic is about so much more than mental cause and physical effect. Whether a self-proclaimed dispassionate observer can declare our beliefs about what just happened there is not even relevant. For we know that magic, in these stories, in our lives, is tremendously difficult, requiring immense force of will and totality of being. Because we know that if we don’t commit ourselves completely, then we will lose it all, for magic is not benign. It is not about spooky action at a distance; it is about what stands against us. Lord Voldemort. Sauron. The Emperor. Magic is about Right and Wrong. It is about Good against Evil.

Nowhere else in human experience do we have such clarity. What’s bad is Bad and what’s good is Good, and we always have that choice available to us. We can choose which reality we will live.

To the obsessively rational, all this is casually dismissed. It is, after all, fiction, just as it is ludicrous to think that our will has any impact on the world around us. The fact that our cats battled had no connection to the irrational anger that suffused our household, no connection to the resentments we silently directed at each other, no connection to the shattering breakup of our family. What the cats knew was that the logic of it all had fallen apart, and that there was no magic we knew or could acknowledge that could make things whole.

We could only think of magic rationally, sensibly, as is common practice in this post-industrial, post-modern, post-post world. And while the analysis of magical thinking that is in vogue today focuses on cause and effect, the emphasis on magical thinking that is likewise in vogue today focuses us on something far more dangerous. When we casually paint someone with the broad brush of “magical thinking,” we intend a cheap insult to the relative intelligence and reason of our target. But we have ourselves become so hideously ensnared by thinking magically that we cannot see the world any other way. This is the pure, unadulterated, black and white nature of magic itself transmuted into our guiding philosophy for this world, creating in our minds an unshakable belief in Right and Wrong and Good and Evil.

And this is a road fraught with peril. In the magical myths, We are Good. We are Right, and the Other is Wrong. But we have become a culture that believes this to be true of ourselves, where our enemies are not only opposing us politically or militarily, they … are … Evil. The corollary of this is to believe that we will most certainly win whatever we set out to win, because when, after all, does the guy in the white hat ever lose in the stories? But believing that we will win and that we are right is a far more dangerous offense than it may seem. For if magical thinking tells us that we created our reality, thinking magically prevents us from ever seeing that reality in the first place.

I don’t believe there is any pathway to being a human being that doesn’t involve a fair bit of struggle between magical thinking and thinking magically. After all, magical thinking is a developmental stage that we all pass through, and it seems an important one, at that. Thinking magically can also be thought of as a developmental stage, but increasingly, it’s one that we stagnate in, rather than pass through. Instead of recognizing that magic is a fascinating, joyous, mysterious subject, we cling to the shallow veneer of what it represents and allow that to color our perspective of so much of the world. Our ability to engage in this dialectic, to think rationally about mysteries without destroying the mystery is precisely that which defines our humanity. As soon as we lose either the logic or the magic, we’ve lost something profound.

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