Quotes about Magical thinking

SETH said:  Logic deals with exterior conditions, with cause and effect relationships.  Intuitions deal with immediate experience of the most intimate nature, with subjective motions and activities that in your terms move far quicker than the speed of light, and with simultaneous events that your cause and effect level is far too slow to perceive.

SETH said: The magical approach takes it for granted that the human being is a united creature, fulfilling purposes in nature even as the animals do, whether or not those puposes are understood. (pause.)  The magical approach takes it for granted that each individual has a future, a fulfilling one, even though death may be tomorrow.  The magical approach takes it for granted that the means for development are within each individual, and that fulfillment will happen naturally.  Overall, that approach operates in your world.  If it did not, there would be no world.  If the worst was bound to happen, as scientists certainly think, even evolution, in their terms, would have been impossible, of course - a nice point to put somewhere (all intently).

Seth can get irritated/frustrated with Jane and me.  This exerpt is from the private session of November 11, 1979:  "… the same kind of reaction, however, are involved in all activities, and it is sometimes frustrating for me that you cannot perceive the fascinating facets of any event.  You still - and I do not simply mean you two alone - do not feel the unsurpassable force that thoughts have.  You do not understand that they do form events, that to change events you must first change thoughts.  You get what you concentrate on."

SETH said:  Now when you understand that intellectually, then the intellect can take for granted that its own information is not all the information you possess.  It can realize that its own knowledge  represents the tip of the iceberg.  As you apply that realization to your life you begin to realize furthermore that in practical terms you are indeed supported by a greater body of knowledge than you consciously realize, and by the magical, spontaneous fountain of action that forms your existence.  The intellect can then realize that it does not have to go it all alone.  Everything does not have to be reasoned out, even to be understood.

SETH said: The natural person is to be found, now, not in the past or in the present, but beneath layers and layers of official beliefs, so you are dealing with an archeology of beliefs to find the person who creates beliefs to begin with.  As I have said often, evidence of clairvoyance, telepathy, or whatever, are not eccentric, isolated instances occurring in man's experience, but are representative of natural patterns of everyday behavior that become invisible in your world because of the official picture of behavior and reality. 

SETH said:  To me at least, poetry - like love - implies a magical approach to life, quite different from the presently accepted rational way of looking at the world.  That is, poetry brings out lifes little nuances.  It delights in forming correspondences between events that seem quite seperate to the intellectually-tuned consciousness alone, and reveals undercurrents of usually-concealed actions that we quite ignore when we're most concerned about thinking rationally.  Actually, that kind of vision contains its own spontaneous rationality, and often supplies us with answers more satisfying than purely intellectual ones.