Life as it is lived is situational. It’s relational. There’s openness for the possibilities beyond the ‘ordinary’ or expected. But some of that space lies in dimensions we ordinarily dismiss, and thus defect from.

What I mean is counterintuitive. It’s really easy to understand the idea, but embodying the actually available liberty is another matter ….

It’s something like this. It is often possible to believe something that is provably wrong… to have a narrative of explanation or identities… or relationships… that can be rationally proven to be wrong — and yet, you are or will be better off, or even have new opportunities for fulfillment, than you could or would have if you believed something ‘more rationally correct’.

Conversely, as is obvious, one can be ‘correct’ to utterly disastrous result. This is why being human is nuanced, rather than mechanical.

In fact, if you think carefully, it becomes apparent that there isn’t really any other way than being mostly wrong. Because although we believe things that are provable, and we wouldn’t want to dismiss such beliefs, many if not most of them are wrong from another important and useful perspective, or so incomplete or misconstructed that we are obliged to look deeper.

How does one look deeper if one is already ‘correct’?

So must of what we know that appears to be valid… isn’t as valid as we suppose… or its scope is far more limited than we imagine when we hear such truth stated or proved.

In fact, belief itself… isn’t really rational. We explore ‘as if’ positions in order to determine what to validate.

But my hope is to simply highlight that we are often, perhaps always, in situations in which rationality and provability have nothing to say. As if they were from another universe, that is only provisionally true in the manifold dimensions of actual situations involving humans.

I realized that there were many situations in which believing and acting upon a fiction (probably unconsciously) that is provably wrong is most of what we are doing. It’s necessary. We do it all the time. Sometimes, however, one might do well to believe something that seems impossible, because this has effects far beyond the subject of such a belief — this is the capacity to invent or restructure minds.

Whatever is actually going in is far too complex to be captured by the strangely ‘flattened’ ways of thinking (and reasoning) that supervene over our awareness and creativity. No one likes to admit it, but ‘as if’ beliefs… well, they’re actually the foundation upon which any objection would have to be raised.

What is the truth-status of ‘play’?