"That's just make-believe", adults sneer at children. As if 'make-believe' is in any way childish.

I'm going to make you believe otherwise.

If you look up the phrase "make believe" in an etymological dictionary, you'll see it has a childish origin, or rather an origin having to do with children: it originally meant children's chatter. This was back in the 1700s. By 1824 the phrase had taken on its modern connotation of a sham, a fake.

You'll forgive me if I don't see the immediate connection between children's talk and fakery. Children are honest in a way that threatens adults. They have to be taught that some truths are unwelcome. Cue Jeff Foxworthy:"Gramma, why do you write on your legs with blue magic marker?"

Oh, I get that we're referring to the stories kids tell themselves and each other. Fairy tales, right? Can't be real?

I wouldn't be quite so sure of that. 

Let's first look at that phrase "fairy tales". 

Fairies are even more culturally ubiquitous than dragons. Persia's got 'em. Russia's got 'em.  African folklore teems with fairies. And of course you find them throughout Europe, particularly in the British Isles. Many Indigenous cultures have fairy-like creatures baked into their histories, and those histories go back farther than we can see. Fairies were old when Sanskrit was young.

Are you prepared to say fairies never existed anywhere? Might they exist still?

Maybe if you make believe.

Those are two of the most powerful verbs in any language. And of the two, believe is the more powerful. After all, you have to believe in what you're making to make it properly. 

“There are those who say that seeing is believing. I am telling you that believing is seeing.” ― Neale Donald Walsch, Home with God: In a Life That Never Ends

I've been hearing the phrase "seeing is believing" for roughly ever and even as a kid it made no sense to me. People see things all the time and don't believe them.  They either don't know how to conceptualize what they see or they don't want to admit what they see, often aspects of both.   But if you believe something, well, we even say "that's how I see it", don't we?

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We all live in a yellow submarine giant anomaly in human history in many ways. By pumping out over 135 billion barrels of ancient sunlight, we have created machines to do the world of humans and animals, and entrusted more and more of our world to those machines, to the point many people wouldn't know how to begin to live without them. (I strongly suggest some meditation on what you might do if you wake up tomorrow and there is no internet or cell service. Imagine it doesn't come back. Think hard about that. I'm not going to guarantee we'll experience it, but it's a distinct possibility. Do bear in mind that without the internet -- which power plants throughout the world rely on -- you won't have electricity coming out of your walls for more than a few days. If your cellphone is a brick, how do you communicate with friends and family?)

But it's not just technology, it's the rationalist mindset that technology engenders. To be clear, this waxes and wanes with civilizations -- our Enlightenment was by no means the first scientific flowering, nor will it be the last -- but it was almost certainly the biggest, and for a century now it's been boosted by global media that no other set of cultures could dream of. 

Because our era is not just hyper-rationalist but also lacks nuance, it is necessary to repeat that there is nothing wrong and a great deal right with science and rationality. To a point. That point is when science stops telling you observable facts about your day to day existence and retreats into abstraction (time, the one thing we all experience passing, is supposedly an illusion...) Or when it posits human constructs on to the universe at large, such is that the universe is expanding because of course it is, that's what good things like humans do, right? Go forth and multiply? That's been gospel for a while now and it could very well be completely and totally wrong. Rationality becomes  rationalization and at that point it's worse than useless. 

Science is a large set of narratives about the world. Where experiments can (ahem) be reproduced, they tell us fairly trustworthy things about observable Reality. 

Observable reality is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of [....] fraction of all that is. About thirty five Ten Thousandths, in fact. And to the point of this meandering essay: that thirty five ten thousandths? We're all creating it. Along with whatever parts of reality we can't see that are directly or even indirectly affected by what we're creating. 

If you really meditate on that a while, that we are all creating reality, a few things become at least more plausible. One, I think you'll agree we've left science in the dust. We're in the realm of the mage, the "imaginator" who creates reality through concerted will. I mean, we're all doing this, but only a comparative few do it consciously, which is to say by make-believe. 

Two, it posits a theory about fairies and dragons and who knows what else. Where belief in something is strong enough, could it become visible? Could belief, which is undeniably a potent force, tear away some of the veil between us and All That Is? 

That has a beat to it.

The third thing I think of... whatever parts of reality we can't see that are directly or even indirectly affected by what we're creating. That feels kinda ominous. That intimates the prospect of Spirits (take your pick of terms for them according to your belief system -- and if you persist in utter rationalism, can you accept Forces, with or without the capitalization?) Remember, we're all in a dark woods here, and our light can pick out thirty five of the ten thousand trees in this forest. What's lurking in the shadows? There may or may not be aliens in outerspace, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts there are aliens everywhere in innerspace.

And four, the power of story becomes palpable. Because as Wagamese says above, "All that we are is story". 

A tale is told. Do you know the etymology of the word "tell"? It's an ancient word that once meant "spell". As in a spell that is casted.

Magic.

Make-believe.

Tell a tale often enough and well enough and it becomes a cultural myth, and those have power to shape action for centuries. 

Now consider how broadly "story" can be defined. I can tell you a story, yes. I can show you a story, dance you a (comically inscrutable) story, or cause you to hear a story in tones of music. I've had culinary stories prepared for me that are the stuff of legend, both dishes and whole meals. 

THE TRUTH IS WE'RE TELLING  A STORY WITH OUR EVERY THOUGHT, WORD AND DEED.

Still think make believe is childish? I hope not.