IT’S TIME FOR MAGICAL LIES TO END

The phrase “magical thinking” has a bad reputation. It is associated with superstition, schizophrenia, hallucination, and other escapes from reality. If you seek a definition that is free of judgment, however, magical thinking is belief that a hidden cause connects events where no cause exists. Science has gone through a long, hard struggle to replace magical thinking with rational cause-and-effect, which is why we study sun through telescopes rather than worshiping it.

It is only reasonable for rationalists to get irritated when they see magic hanging around, just as it irritates atheists to see God hanging around. But there’s a sound reason for magical thinking to persist: without it, creation cannot be explained. Despite our modern devotion to logic and reason, when you look at any level of creation, powerful magic is at work. We accept as real countless things that are mind-made illusions.

Explaining the world depends on a set of magical lies that everyone buys into. Sometimes the lie is really a convenient fiction that accommodates our five senses. It helps to feel that your feet are firmly planted on the ground when in reality the Earth is hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour, forming a complex curve around the Sun that gets even more complex when you throw in the fantastic speed at which the Milky Way galaxy is traveling away from every other galaxy.

But more troubling are the magical lies that are necessary to keep false assumptions from falling apart, beginning with the most intimate activity we all pursue, thinking. No one knows where a thought comes from, even given the most intensive investigation into the brain. Thoughts are words in our heads, but brain cells don’t speak. Between the electrical and chemical activity performed by brain cells, there is an unbridgeable gap when it comes to turning that mindless activity into thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images.

Despite advances in genetics, no one knows how exceptional gifts come about, such as child prodigies in music like Mozart. No matter how deeply geneticists investigate DNA, a gene can’t play the piano, and the gene that gives a seven-year-old the ability to play a piano or violin like an adult is beyond explanation. This isn’t just a matter of gaps that need to be filled in. At every level, creation springs into manifestation out of nowhere. This is more than a casual observation—it is the root cause of magical lies.

Modern physics deals seriously with the issue known as “something out of nothing.” The something in question is the universe and everything in it. The nothing is the quantum vacuum state, which is the zero point of creation. In the quantum vacuum state, there is no time, space, matter, or energy. There is only the potential for those things. Why should this potential exist? How does it spring into existence as quarks, atoms, stars, galaxies, and human DNA?

The fact that no one knows is an unacceptable response. “Something from nothing” requires an explanation to give creation an origin story. Absent God or the gods as supreme creators, which scientists would dismiss as magical thinking, the current origin story among cosmologists is the Big Bang. It fits the facts, as a successful theory must, but one you probe inside the Big Bang, the emergence of ‘Something from nothing’ hasn’t been solved, which means that ultimately the Big Bang is a magical lie. It fills in an illusion where the reality is inexplicable.

It isn’t hard to see why magical lies need to exist— they turn potential chaos into order, they mostly conform to the five senses, which is reassuring to us humans, and they seem abstract enough not to disrupt everyday life. But this rationale is actually the height of irresponsibility, because it glosses over the crucial fact that we are the creators of the magical lies that fool us. The job that our magical lies are doing seems impressive if you narrow your vision down to science and technology. If it takes a lie somewhere deep in the human mind to create an iPhone, quantum computer, or smart TV, doesn’t success speak for itself?

Not if you recall that fact that no one knows where thoughts come from. That’s not a tiny slip. Without understanding the true nature of thoughts, you are destined to live helplessly with depression, anxiety, all manner of mental illness, violence, crime, war, and so on. All are fruits of the poison seed, our inability to know the human mind. The history of human pain and suffering is bound up in the magical lie that thoughts, even consciousness itself, are a given that should be accepted because there is no other alternative.

All magical lies were gathered under one heading in the ancient Indian traditions of Yoga and Vedanta, the heading of Maya, an all-pervasive illusion. Maya is a mental veil that keeps us from seeing our true essence, which is pure consciousness. The operation of this illusion changes from age to age, but the result is always to keep people from waking up. A convenient pop metaphor for this was the 199 Hollywood sci-fi fantasy, The Matrix. In its dark vision, the human race had become enslaved to supercomputers who created the illusion of normal life while at a deeper level all the biological energy of human beings was being tapped as fuel to keep the composers going.

The shock of The Matrix lay in how the moviemakers could distort and dissolve reality through digital special effects. Only two things are different in the virtual reality we are embedded in: first, that we are its creators, and second, that what we have created, we can also uncreate. We have time, space, matter, and energy, the basic setup of creation, because they are a critical part of our self-made matrix. Without them, existence is inconceivable, quite literally. As the product of time, space, matter, and energy, the human brain is confined by them. The brain radically limits what we can perceive.

Deepak Chopra, The writer is MD, FACP, FRCP founder of the Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global