The enchanted forest
When you think about something, the world changes. Not reality itself, of course, just your experiential world—the virtual world rendered by your organism as an orientational interface for its conscious decision making. This live rendering changes and adapts in response to how you direct your attention. You can zoom into levels of detail, explore and highlight aspects and connections, or shift context for what you’re experiencing, suddenly to see it in new light. The forest you’re walking in can be transformed simply by reflecting on how you know the trees are made mostly from the carbon they capture out of the air, or on all the unseen things you know is going on underground, or on anything else you might know or suppose about nature’s intricate systems. If you know something about physics, you can conceptually zoom all the way in to the atomic level, adding an abstract sheen to your perception. If you know a story set in a forest, you can to some degree transport both yourself and the forest into that narrative frame by a simple trick of immersion.
You can’t keep everything in mind at once, so in order to keep the workspace of consciousness functional, the mind has to carefully manage its resources. As you call new things to your attention, the less relevant parts drop off the table of your short term memory, making them vanish from the world of your perception. This virtual world of the mind follows very different laws from the natural world! Things can just appear or disappear. You can travel anywhere in an instant, fly up to get a cosmic overview or crawl down to the molecularly intimate. And the world lives: Its saliency and level of detail breathes and shifts over time. It even speaks—usually just in whiffs, cryptic signs and other pulls on the sleeves of your distractable intuition, but in certain rare and peculiar psychedelic states of mind the world can literally take on personified shapes that talk to you, in words.
The mind truly has magic powers, a fact always on full display in the world it renders to our perception. It couldn’t be more in our face!—and yet, we normally don’t recognize its magic, because we tend to conflate our virtual world with reality, in some unreflected sense. When we explore the forest, the workings of our mind become transparent to us, and all we see is the constancy of the natural world, impressive but markedly not enchanted. In fact, all it takes to turn our surroundings into an enchanted forest is a shift of perspective to actively notice the astonishing dynamics of our reality-interfacing abilities. This perspective can revitalize experience for us; quite literally re-enchant the world. In a sense it is also empowering, because what you’re getting awestruck by is the workings of your own mind. Your mind is boggling itself!
There are many good reasons to make a clear distinction between our virtual worlds and reality, many of them dry and academic. Here’s one that’s anything but.