Why I Believe in Magic and Writing a Book About It

The world seems to be getting more and more incomprehensible, and reason alone doesn't seem to help us cope. Perhaps there are other ways to make sense of the mess. Here's a story and a confession.

This article feels like one of the riskier ones I have written. It could go two ways. Either many of you, ‘nerds’, who have been following my research and science-focused musings here will scoff and hit ‘unsubscribe’, or many of you might harbour similar dilemmas and experiences, and you’ll just nod along reading my little confession, relieved that you are not alone. Either way, it’s fine, I do have some things to say whose time has come (and an announcement to make), so here we go. Just a heads-up, this might get a bit long and personal and requires a backstory, so settle down and remember your email might cut the article short. If that happens, just click ‘read in browser’ when you hit the end.

I grew up in a family of doctors. Logic, rigour and rationality were the creeds upon which we built our lives. My dad is a surgeon, and his mantra was: “What cannot be observed or measured does not exist”. No one in my family was religious or spiritual in any way. They were all inquisitive and read extensively. Mostly non-fiction.

We had hundreds of books, jostling for space on crammed bookshelves in every room of our four-bedroom apartment. My maternal grandmother, who lived with us, always complained that our space was too small, but she, too, had a pile of books by her bedside. Still, new books appeared all the time. I only realised how unusual our book situation was when I visited friends’ homes and noticed how much more airy they were without all of the bookshelves everywhere.

When I was very little, I loved lying in bed with my father and sister and listening to him tell us stories about the origin of the universe, about galaxies, stars, black holes, about dinosaurs and how Earth came to be. Later, our favourite pastime became getting into linguistic debates about the origin or meaning of some obscure word and then ending up in front of the dictionary, the ultimate decider of the victor. The rare times I won these contests were some of my proudest.

When I was six, my father abruptly decided that the lie of Santa Claus had gone on long enough. He’d allowed this irrational narrative at the behest of my mother and grandmother to give us a taste of ‘childhood magic’. But I guess watching me believe in some made-up fantastical being really clashed with his pragmatic view of life. Or perhaps he was worried this might sow in me the seeds of some other, similarly irrational, beliefs.

Whatever the reason, one day he simply told me, “Santa Claus is not real. It is parents who bring their children gifts at Christmas time.” I remember perfectly how I was sitting in the kitchen, on this little stool, and the acute pain I felt in my chest, as if something very precious, very tender in me had been squashed. I cried for a long time. I was not upset about Santa Claus, per se; in fact, I’d already suspected it was quite unlikely that something as far-fetched as one man taking presents to kids all over the world in one night could be real. I was heartbroken because this piece of news meant magic didn’t exist. And that I refused to believe.

Unbeknownst to my family, I inhabited a secret parallel world filled with fantastical thoughts, images and happenings. I had dreams of faraway places, of oceans I’d never seen anywhere (but ones I would later visit and ultimately end up living next to in real life), of people in exotic lands who lived complex lives and adventures. Every night, I went to sleep to vivid movies in my head, and proceeded to have mighty quests in my dreams.

I was a daydreamer too - loved to lie down on the grass and watch clouds forming incredible shapes in the sky, or just sit on a rock in the woods, feeling its energy dancing on my skin.

I had an uncanny intuition for when the weather would change - I knew when the rain would stop on a rainy day or felt a storm was coming on a cloudless sky - and it always came - so much so that I playfully toyed with the idea that my very thoughts might impact the weather. I felt other people’s feelings viscerally, felt them in my bones, like echoes of the stories they would never utter aloud. I still continue to feel as deeply.

Most of all, I often had the strangest feeling in my childhood body that the whole world and our life itself was one big playground, just like the one at the centre of our square-shaped Communist block of flats - one fenced-up patch of concrete where tens of kids used to run every afternoon after school. I felt with absolute certainty that there was a deeper intelligence at work, greater and wiser than us all, and to it we were just kids getting some play time in the playground it had designed for us, before we had to go back to the real home we had come from. I was baffled that everyone else seemed to have forgotten this was just meant to be a game.

Every time that thought came, and it did come to me a lot, I wondered why everyone around me seemed to take life so seriously. I often wondered why my parents were so concerned with my school grades, talking about future exams and needing to ‘prepare for life’, why they seemed so stressed and so serious. I wondered why my dad disliked it when I tried to throw snowballs at him in winter and why we never did silly things, like goof around for no reason. I wished there was room for joy-for-no-reason alongside all the awesome intellectual stuff we did as a family, for I had this nagging feeling that life wanted us to be joyful and in awe at its magic. But I didn’t really have anyone to discuss these strange thoughts with, so I kept all my musings to myself.

I also wondered, as I grew older, why at school we were made to compete for grades by teachers who harshly criticised us when we got things wrong and openly compared us with one another. I wondered why we always had to learn what other people thought we should know, and why play was allowed for only ten minutes during breaks, but never during school lessons.

I wondered why all the compulsory readings we were given were realistic fiction, most of them dark and gloomy stories of a world filled with suffering and loss. I never received a magical realism or fantasy book as a school reading - though I adored such books and, to this day, these are my absolute favourite fiction genres (and movies) to delve into. I wondered why there was no room at school to just imagine things, or go out in nature and study outdoors instead of in a stuffy classroom, or create things for no reason at all. If we were all on the same playground of life, why couldn’t we just play more?

Later, in high school, I started keeping a journal, something I continue doing to this day and one of the biggest gifts I have ever given myself, the benefits of which I’ve written about before. That allowed an outlet for my rich inner life, and I carefully kept it secret from my family. There was plenty of talk in those notebooks about things I could not quite observe or measure, but which, nevertheless, felt very real to me, but perhaps might have been worrisome to them.

At about that same time, I came across Plato’s allegory of the cave, and I felt so deeply seen and understood that it felt life-changing. I felt that story was about me and about all the ‘strange’ people who just didn’t see life in quite the same light as those around them.

I feverishly started reading philosophy. I painstakingly worked my way through Nietzsche and a bit of Wittgenstein, adored Sartre and Camus, tried to wrap my brain around Kant (failed), and then discovered the early giants of psychology. Some I didn’t care much for, like Skinner, but others fascinated me, like Maslow, Freud, and finally Jung, and that’s where a huge love story (which continues to this day) began. Jung’s worldview spoke to me deeply; his concept of synchronicity felt like finding a name for that elusive dialogue with life I’d always experienced but had not had a word for. The value he placed on dreams and the profound role they play in our lives felt like vindication.

I became very involved in a philosophy club moderated by one of our most open-minded teachers in high school, and met other kids who were equally concerned with the deeper themes in life. I realised I was not alone. We came together every week to go down all sorts of reflective rabbit holes. We debated ‘serious’ intellectual topics, but also discussed other not-so-conventional themes like the role of the unconscious in our lives, mysticism, and different spiritual traditions. Between living in an overwhelmingly Christian country where Orthodox doctrine was compulsorily taught in school (asking our religion teacher what colour Adam and Eve were and how come two people gave birth to the whole of humanity and so many different races, did not make me too popular) and a science-focused family where religion was not discussed at all, there had been no room in my education for exploring world religions or spirituality, so learning about Buddhism and Sufism felt like a life-altering discovery.

Sadly, all this time invested in our deep teenage discussions counted for nothing towards our school grades and was entirely ‘purposeless’, so our parents started complaining that this was a distraction from the ‘real work’. I suspect they were also worried we might get some weird ideas they didn’t quite care for. The debate club died (I suffered almost as much as when I’d lost Santa Claus), but my realisation remained: these quirky, beyond-rational experiences I’d always had were legitimate, and there had been many intellectual giants in the world pursuing similar questions, so in my own small way, I might too.

I continued to keep these preoccupations private, and I forged ahead down the academic path, which I was quite good at and my hungry mind loved. I went to Uni and studied political science as a compromise, given that my family met my original choice of psychology with more than a dose of scepticism. I didn’t care much for politics and kept being drawn back to exploring the depths of the human experience, the depths of my own experience, but it felt safer to explore all of that in ways that were accepted and understood by the ‘establishment’ - be it academic and, later, as an exploration of learning and development in the workplace.

In college, I loved a boy who shared my quirks and was much more well-read than I was at the time. He was deeply curious about spiritual practices of all sorts and had no trouble embracing a worldview where magic and day-to-day reality coexisted, while I still felt that leaning into that mixed way of being was a betrayal of everything I had been taught. I was just beginning to grapple with reconciling rationality and transcendence when tragedy struck. He got very sick - a terrible sickness that shattered his mind, robbing him of all contact with reality, and eventually became the biggest loss of my life. It is a loss that still echoes now, 20 years later.

That pivotal event instilled a terrible (irrational) fear in me that any leaning into the non-rational might be one step towards losing my mind. I pulled away from any pursuit of anything that might have counted as ‘spiritual’ or ‘transcendent’ and firmly anchored myself in the pragmatism of life, as my parents had always done. I could not abdicate from my love of working with people and my obsession with learning and self-discovery, so I chose to pursue it in the most scientific way possible.

I became a professional soft skills trainer, then facilitator, and later trained as a coach, pursuing all possible credentials in my field - always concerned with doing things to the highest level of professionalism. Coaching, in particular, felt like a risky career decision, as it is still such a contested and unregulated profession. So I made sure to study it to the greatest depth I could, always grounded in the science. I also conquered every mountain the academic path had available - from a Master's and then to the Everest of the PhD.

Do not get me wrong, I’ve loved this path and continue to love it deeply. I believe there is incredible value in the rigour. I believe in the scientific pursuit. My heart bleeds when I see the current assault on science that seems to be permeating the global political discourse. I strove to anchor my practice in science because I believed and continue to believe this is an ethical obligation, and also believe the positive impact I’m seeking to make with my work will be greater if my approaches have been tested, peer-reviewed and validated.

And, at the same time, I will confess that this is only one part of me that I have allowed to inform my writing and my discourse in the public space. Every article in this substack and every article I have ever written in 15 years of regular blogging has had some anchor in science. I’ve always encouraged people to reflect, reason, and understand themselves more deeply as a pathway to growth and change, and strived to bring serious, rational and research-driven arguments for every one of my stances on human growth.

I’ve always steered away from the ‘fluffy topics’ and have been (and will continue to be) critical of the cynical money-making machine dressed up as ‘personal development’ and ‘spiritual enlightenment’. I don’t ever want to be part of that machine. I dread seeing people mix up a hodge-podge of spiritual-talk, add a sprinkle of pseudoscience and sell it as dogma.

Part of the reason I have never before written about my own relationship to transcendence has been a fear of inadvertently jumping in that messy bucket filled with ‘teachers’, ‘gurus’, ‘energy healers’ and a strange, confusing mix of genuine, dedicated explorers of consciousness and snake-oil salespeople. So, I’ve decided that it was much easier to stay firmly on the side of science and leave no room for interpretation.

That being said, I do believe in magic. Magic has played a pivotal role in my life, and I would not be where I am now without a host of mind-blowing moments of grace, deep intuition, synchronicity, serendipity, meaningful encounters with people who uncannily appeared at the right place and the right time, or night dreams that have helped me make big decisions or prepare for things to come - all of them mysterious, beautiful, awe-inducing and completely unexplainable through a rational lens, but no less real because of it. Which is why I choose to call all of these things - these little stirrings, these small (and sometimes big) wondrous glimpses of transcendence - Magic. And Magic is my top value in life, one that I’ve never spoken or written about before.

The reason I chose to share this now (and not without a huge amount of trepidation) is that I believe we have come to a point in our history as a species when we are both fully capable of mass self-destruction and on a sure path in that direction. I believe the wisdom to shift course won’t be possible unless we tap back into the magic that has been with us all along, stop wrestling with life and make peace with a world that is very much alive, despite our forgetting all about it.

Living in Australia for almost seven years has helped me discover the wisdom of people who have had the gift of carrying knowledge continuously over more than 40,000 years. Australia’s Indigenous people, a few of whom I am incredibly lucky and grateful to call friends, hold a worldview that is so radically different from the prevalent Western perspective as to feel like an alternate (and so much gentler) universe. Theirs is a world that speaks to us continuously, in small and big ways. A world that is vibrant and interconnected. Living and non-living, human and non-human alike, are enmeshed in a fabulous web of meaning.

They, like other First Nations peoples around the world, know the playground of life intimately and have never forgotten that we are all merely here to play, custodians of the playground until the next generation comes along. When we, humans, completely disconnect ourselves from this sense of being part of something much larger than us and start thinking we are the centre of the universe, some very bad things start happening. Just read the news any day and see what pathological disconnection and loss of higher meaning look like.

I see Magic as our ongoing dialogue with Life itself, but also with each other. Magic is what imbues this playground of life on Earth; it is written in the rules of this cosmic game we are all part of. We seem to be like actors who have overidentified with their roles in a play, and instead of merely simulating killing each other for the audience’s delight, they start doing it for real, and then proceed to set the stage, the theatre, and the public on fire. We have lost contact with the deeper meaning and beauty of the play we are in, and with it, we’ve lost ourselves.

If you have read to this point and worry I might start writing about energy healing and crystals next, you needn’t concern yourself. This substack will keep honouring the science and nudging your nerdiness, and there’s plenty of great research to still unpack and make sense of in the service of our growth. But, in writing this article and leaning into the vulnerability I feel as I lay down these thoughts, I also want to open up another door. One where I’m no longer afraid to explore the more mysterious aspects of life, those that I don’t have any rational explanation for, but ones that do seem to give life meaning, depth, and have helped me strive to become and remain a more compassionate, kinder, more alive human.

In my corporate work, I often hear clients talk about their ‘spiritual’ (I dislike this word for all its messy meanings, but use it simply for lack of a better one) beliefs or numinous experiences, remarkable encounters with the ineffable. They talk about life-changing dreams and strange moments of transcendence, or about moments of grace that have changed something profound in their worldviews. They speak of these things in coaching or sometimes in workshop breaks, but always do so with a bit of reservation. They are afraid to be judged or seen as weird or as ‘having lost it’. I never judge them, and most of the time, they find that others at work also share the same experiences. The discovery that they are neither alone nor weird brings relief and hope.

I’d love to make space on this Substack for these conversations, alongside the more nerdy ones. Magic is a huge part of how grown-ups grow up, so we might start exploring it more.

I also want to share with you that, in honouring my own relationship to Magic, I have been working on a fantasy novel. It is a story about a world that has lost its access to imagination and dreaming, and its painful path to reconnecting with them. A story about love and the transcendent. An epic quest for sanity and re-membering. A story about Magic, but also about human development. I’m in the middle of revising and editing what will be the first book of, likely, a series. If you are a fantasy buff (and like a good love story on the side) and want to put your hand up for being an ARC reader when the time comes, this is the community where I’ll first share the progress of this project.

This is something I’d never, ever expected to write; it is stretching me in incomprehensible ways and forcing me to build a bridge between two worlds that I’ve kept separate for 42 years. It’s a story that has come to me on its own, completely out of the blue and simply demanded to be written, so I listened. Because science and art can co-exist and feed off each other, just like Reason and Magic can. And likely because I might just be able to be both a nerd and a writer all at the same time - but that remains to be seen.

I’ll share more with you as I progress, but in the meantime, I’d love to learn about your own relationship to Magic. Leave a comment, share a story and lean into the quirky, messy, magnificently mysterious but deeply meaningful and inspiring side of life.

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