Magic All The Way Down

We're rarely very honest. We begin with a self-referential starting place and a few abstractions and then begin speaking about the whole we can't see, measure, or experience, often inventing clever variables when we realize we don't have the slightest understanding of how the system works.

As credulous creatures of sensation, we rely on minimalism to protect against seduction by appealing sounding systems, ideals, and abstractions. Demonstrative reality or nothing! Essentiality through simplicity -- the rest has a long and suspicious history of deception, failure, and unfulfilled promises.

We don't understand the universe or its mechanisms. We don't have a good collection of history or a coherent interpretations, and exclude all the interesting fragments outside unified dogma. We've never bothered with a realistic assessment of human nature.

The series of 'causes' faces us much more completely in each case; we reason, 'this and that must precede for that to follow' -- but we haven't thereby understood anything. The specifically qualitative aspect for example of every chemical process, still appears to be a 'miracle', as does every locomotion; no one has 'explained' the push. And how could we explain! We are operating only with things that do not exist -- with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces. How is explanation to be at all possible when we first turn everything into a picture -- our picture!
[Die Froehliche Wissenschaft]

Elves will appear and show you their magic actions that work behind the scenes, the living engine of the universe. If you dare, you can summon the spirit of the earth and it will patiently work through your social shields and untie constructed knots, debunking words before abruptly returning you to your earthly realm, unchanged in form except for lingering awareness, perhaps feeling too naked to repeat comfortable actions you know are false.