Visualizing vs Magical Thinking

Visualizing a specific, desired outcome engages the reticular activating system (RAS), which is the automatic mechanism inside your brain that brings relevant information to your attention. It allows background 'noise' to be tuned out, and it snags your awareness regarding possibilities for your goals and visions. Visualizations are open to be tweaked, adjusted to updated information.
They are upheld by feelings of gratitude and satisfaction. There is no requirement
that they be actualized. Instead, they are the beacons which guide the actions and behaviors toward achieving them.

For instance, regarding the Gulf Oil Gush, lending energy to a positive outcome is qualitatively different than blaming or getting hopeless. So meditating, praying, holding space, visualizing – all work to transform "disaster" into "potential." As a planet, this is a wake-up about our dependency on oil and the risks we are willing to take to feed our dependency (addiction). The vision of a clean world could lead us to address our addiction, i.e., reducing the usage of gasoline, plastics; more proactivity with recycling; less consumerism, more 'conservation-ism.'

Magical Thinking is more like a wish that is totally believed – the outcome is a certainty (in the person's mind). No actions are needed, as somehow, it will happen. There is usually an undercurrent of demand that it come true. Magical Thinking does not allow any permutations. They are generally rigidly held.

Magical Thinking would assume that the Gulf Oil Gush would just come right. It has too. Any other possibility is just too awful to contemplate.

And sometimes Magical Thinking comes true. (Though not nearly as often as visualizations with the power of action supporting the vision.)