Do You "Believe" in Magic?

The Human Journey from Despotism to Gnosticism

We all have a strange relationship with believing.

Part of us wants to believe in beautiful things, envying the childlike faith that reminds us of a time before our loss of innocence. Yet we also long for proof, something real and tangible we can hold in our hands.

We often live at either end of the spectrum—hanging on by sheer faith or refusing to offer any credence without proof, but choosing a side robs us to the middle way possible when we understand the deeper root of belief.

How do we come back to the origins of faith to find peace with ourselves and others?

The Dangers of Belief

The space of believing is a tween—it’s not quite knowing, yet it causes our minds, hearts, and bodies to act as if we know.

It’s an inherently internal process, fine-tuned and nuanced to each individual.

You can’t convey or transfer belief to someone else… you must convince them. You cannot cause or create belief in yourself… you must be convinced. But whether we or others are convinced does not make something true, and trying to convince (or force others to believe) often ends badly.

This facet of the human psyche—the ability to latch onto ideas with vehemence, integrating them as part of our identity—has caused untold suffering.

Throughout history, belief has been weaponized by those who seek power and control to commit heinous atrocities. It’s been used to sway the masses, threaten the outliers, and impose value systems and compliance.

Belief creates cohorts where otherwise none exist; it offers a sense of security that can quickly become superiority when left unchecked.

There’s no other way to say it—fundamentally, belief is dangerous.

The Root (Word) of the Problem

Yet the origin of the word “belief” is the Proto-Indo-European root leubh—to care, desire, love.

We can imagine the long road this word must have taken to arrive at what it is today…

Once upon a time, long ago, someone fell in love with an idea. They cared about it. You might say, they believed it.

Long before we distorted and perverted the word belief, perhaps we didn’t need to convince ourselves that the things we believed were true. We could simply love them, without needing our beloved ideas to be true for them to hold value for us.

Love is absolutely personal. It’s not an objective value.

It would be ridiculous to seriously try to convince someone, “You should love this.” Though it’s wonderful when someone also appreciates the things we do, we don’t need anyone else to join us in our love to experience fulfillment.

So too, we can imagine belief began—long before proselytizing religions and despots with claims of righteousness—as something that simply brought us joy.

When we attempt to impose our beliefs on others, treating them as absolutes rather than preferences, something agonizing occurs. We diminish the value of our own love and appreciation by requiring that others participate.

Imagine if you were to demand that your friends love your child (or your partner, or your pet) the way you do? It’s an insane idea that would obviously cause strife. Yet that’s exactly what we’re asking people to do when we expect them to take on our beliefs.

The crux of the problem is that beliefs are naturally unprovable, and therefore what begins as a straightforward and well-meaning idea can easily pick up layers of distortion and untruth.

Restoring the view of belief as a deep love for a way of thinking is the most helpful view of belief I’ve ever heard. If you think about most people’s beliefs, you can really see that they love the ideas that they believe in. It’s when we start to think that we’re RIGHT just because we love something that belief quickly grows dangerous.

Belief vs. Gnosis—The Origins of Faith

The origin of any belief is almost always personal experience.

When something unprovable, like a Divine encounter or a personal transformation happens to us, we automatically develop a deep inner knowing about it.

From Late Antiquity (300-700 C.E.), this special kind of knowing was referred to by the Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge. The dictionary says that gnosis means “knowledge of spiritual mysteries,” but the reality of what it means to have knowledge of a spiritual Mystery is a knowing deeper than the mind. It’s a personal, indefinable, and often profoundly beautiful experience.

Gnosis is not something we believe. It’s something we know from personal experience.

Passing this knowing to another is difficult. Without direct, personal experience, people are forced to trust another’s word and interpretation.

In that moment, experience become belief.

Over time, this phenomenon becomes like a game of telephone played across the ages.

A Divine encounter can quickly become distorted and dangerous.

Gnosis & Magical Community

When it comes to questions of magic, I encounter a lot of people who simply don’t believe.

It makes sense, since we live in a world which has demonized magic as evil for thousands of years. More recently, the common perception of science is that it’s at odds with things that are not yet proven (which is what I say magic is).

Disbelievers have good reasons for their stance. And a lot of people over the years have been convinced that I’m stark, raving mad.

But the truth is… I don’t believe in magic.

I experience magic.

Gnosis is part of my everyday life, and this magical awareness has become deeply a part of who I am.

What I call “magic” informs the way I do my grocery shopping and my laundry. It helps me decide how to schedule my day and how to operate in my intimate relationships. It is the source of my career and the foundation of my joy in this life.

But I don’t need anyone to take my word about the reality of magic.

My experiences have value for me exactly as they are. The many skeptics and non-believers around me don’t bother or disrupt that.

What I love about this community is that we’re creating a cohort of friends who know and understand this magic from their own experience.

There are no words big enough… no way to accurately translate our phenomenal and subtle experiences of the Beyond. But we’re co-creating here a safe space to explore the conversation.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with belief, gnosis, and magic…

Gnowing & Growing,

Allysha Lavino