In Praise of Incoherent Visions

How I came to see Magical Worldview and Materialist Worldview simultaneously

I've been a fan of Marie Kondo since about 2015; she is a personality who focuses on helping people make one's personal environment beautiful and functional. Her focus is determining whether objects in the environment "spark joy".

Though I’ve been familiar with it theoretically, recently, I've actually felt and appreciated the implicit animism [objects having spirits/souls], and it has led me to start to have real capability to see with a magical worldview, where objects have personality.

For example, to see if a book "sparks joy", first, you must take it off the shelf...and tap it smartly so that it can "wake up", because dormant books fall asleep. Then you can hold it lovingly, and feel what arises in your heart. This lets you know whether it sparks joy or not. If it doesn't, it is important to be polite to the book, appreciating it for its past service with sincerity.

Having had seen my child go through various stages of animism with stuffed animals, I have seen how powerful imbuing objects with personality can be. The stuffed animals would be engaged with completely differently without that! But something recently clicked for me where I find doing this appealing and useful; it’s building a deep relationship with an object.

I no longer feel of conflict between an animist worldview and a materialist worldview. It's like two lenses I can see through. One is not truer than the other, and both have circumstances of greater and lesser use. I don't see either one or the other alternatingly...it's as if they are superimposed, like looking through two different lenses with each eye. The superimposition is not blended into a single view, but rather has that same sort of slightly odd sensation where the two eyes are looking at different images, and part of the brain can sometimes be trying (unsuccessfully) to make the incoherent coherent.

This attempted resolution of incoherence, I find, can be relaxed, and the incoherence left as it is, magical worldview and materialist worldview, two incoherent visions arising in one space of perception.