I Was Described as Doing Superstition
I Was Described as Doing Superstition
And With That I Delightfully Discover a Pair of Nonsense Word Stand-Ins For Cancellation Language
Playlists
Spotify.
YouTube Music.
YouTube Talk.
Superstition, A Gateway Word into the Unreasonableness of Reason
In my last essay I describe my encounter with the energy of Ganesha — there was no image let alone a ‘cute’ elephantine one in that experience — and with the anthropomorphised energy of my gout as a kind of caricatured femme fatale — Alicia or, in Sanskrit Aleysha. Aleysha is laziness, one of the nine obstacles to meditation described in Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras. See
It Ends in An Egoistic Rabbit Hole and Ganesha's Encounter with Lazy Gout
🙏 If this essay gives you some pleasure, and/or an ‘aha’ benefit, become a paid subscriber. 🙏
🙏 Thank you. 🙏
I was very surprised when perspicuous Tereza Coraggio, in the closing of her comment to that essay, shared her concern that her telling me that I was expressing a form of superstition might have power enough over me to cause me to withdraw a belief ‘that is working for me’ and thereby trigger in me a gout attack. See below. It got me thinking about superstition. That is how this exploration into reason got started, initially. And as I investigated this I found myself doing my best to not-think about it for reasons that will become clear as this unreasonable essay continues. As I explored this puzzle I found a lot of juicy and fun stuff. And, for me, it shone some light into some of my subtle shadows, including at least one important one from aspects of the New Age woo-woo of my childhood and youth.
Coraggio’s Comment:
… What I suggest is that people define what words mean to them (and I took no offence that you were defining it for everyone, I don't think it's a useful term, myself). And then, the other person can translate into another term if that's not their definition. If I were to take spiritual-bypassing and New Age in your context, the word I'd substitute is superstition. They're both superstitions that if certain rituals — physical or mental — are performed, it will make good things happen or prevent bad. The proof that the mental construct is right is in what happens in the body or the world.
I think what you're describing with Ganesh[a] is a different form of superstition, and I hesitate to say that because it's working for you! If you withdraw your belief in it, will the gout come back? I'd like to think no. But I don't know. — Tereza Coraggio’s comment (my emphasis)
The rest of Coraggio’s comment that preceded this is also very interesting. I was genuinely surprised at her usage of superstitious, though, so that is what opened up this exploration.
Initially the surprise I felt was that she had expressed a rather superstitious belief in her own word-power. She expressed concern that her debunking my superstition by labelling it could unsettle me to the point where I lost my mental Dumbo-feather and that that would cause Alicia, the gout, to come back. So, with these thoughts I wanted to look at my surprise and why I felt that the way she had used ‘superstition’ here was… what? Incorrect? Suggestive of something unseen behind the syllables? True — whatever that means? A shadow projection or the shadow projection’s hook? Itself a form of by-pass? Confusion how spiritual by-pass has ritual to ‘make good things happen’ whereas my conception of spiritual by-passing is marked by ‘bad’ things happening? Something else? Even itself being a superstitious usage, as I thought I understood her definition of ‘superstitious’ in the beginning. I’ll see. I have some preliminary ideas as I begin to initiate my look and I expect to find some new and unexpected ones.
So, To Begin At The Beginning: What Is The Actual Definition Of Superstition?
I was surprised at what I found because it turns it that ‘superstition’ is a form of nonsense word. By that I mean it is a word that doesn’t have value, or more accurately has a negative value because its use creates or continues confusion by creating a false-dichotomy. What came to my mind immediately is the word ‘woke’, which does the same thing because it has a very similar kind of ‘truthiness’ energy, albeit with a slightly different mechanism. I wrote about ‘woke’ here:
It Was Fun While It Lasted”.)
superstition (noun)
1. when you believe in things/ that you don't understand/ then you suffer/ superstition. — Stevie Wonder
2. a belief or beliefs, not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, that events may be influenced by one's behaviour in some magical or mystical way.
3. (archaic) excessive nicety; over-scrupulousness. — wiktionary
4. belief that is not based on human reason or scientific knowledge, but is connected with old ideas about magic, etc.— Cambridge Dictionary
5. a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge, in or of the ominous significance of a particular thing, circumstance, occurrence, proceeding, or the like.
6. a system or collection of such beliefs.
7. a custom or act based on such a belief.
8. irrational fear of what is unknown or mysterious, especially in connection with religion.
9. any blindly accepted belief or notion. — Dictionary
10. a belief or way of behaving that is based on fear of the unknown and faith in magic or luck.
11. a belief that certain events or things will bring good or bad luck. — Britannica Dictionary
12. a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation.
13. an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition.
14. a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary. — Merriam-Webster
15. the belief that particular events happen in a way that cannot be explained by reason or science.
16. the belief that particular events bring good or bad luck. — Oxford Learner’s
17. an irrational belief in the significance or magical efficacy of certain objects or events (e.g., omens, lucky charms) or a custom or act based on such belief.
18. any unscientific belief accepted without question. — APA Dictionary of Psychology
19. wrong belief in something.
20. belief in something wonderful, supernatural, in fortunetelling, in signs, etc. — InfoScipedia
21. superstition is when one person has the belief that the other person's belief is wrong, and neither knows anything about it from the place of knowing. — shanti in personal correspondence.
Etymology:
superstō (Latin): super- over, above; stō - to stand, to stay, to cost.
1. to stand over or upon.
2. to survive.— wiktionary (My emphasis throughout.)
The Reasonable Stand of Standing Reason and Superstition on their Heads as Gibberish
So there we have it. Everyone here reading this can with confidence know and trust that each of us will clearly understand and so express and receive the meaning of ’superstition’ appropriately: it is to stand over or above someone else with our reasonableness because of the other’s lack of it. And thus it is at its core the deserving-undeserving schismogenic energy. On the other hand, pragmatically, now that we are lucky enough to be living in the age of fluid definitions, it is possible we can make our own definitions of it! And in babbling our solipsistic superstitious pabulum remain gleefully ignorant that we have abetted the Babel-philes who know that confusion of language is a key to creating (narcissistic-like) cognitive compliance.
And I am confident, that by the end of this essay, I will be one of those Babel-phile agents and create my own nonce definition. After reading the above list, it is likely going to be too difficult a temptation to resist, because temptation, like all other human compulsions, is much much much more powerful than our frightened and jittery, nervous and constricted, moralistic and preachy, reasoning mind that inflates itself with its own reasons and other irrational rationales to be completely and hypocritically superstitious and unreasonable even to, or especially to, itself.
And thus this journey’s first surprise was to laugh because all of these definitions (except maybe Wonder’s and shanti’s) are the assertion that reason stands over the unreasonable. What these definers don’t seem to see is that that stand is itself unreasonable because no where has the reliability of reason ever been logically proven by personal or social or collective experience — let alone by rhetorical discourse or even science(TM). As noted above, any of our emotions and/or compulsions can at any time, and often at the most inopportune times, simply, easily, laughably trump reason as if it doesn’t exist.
I am very tempted to state that ‘superstition’ has, in usage, been a gibberish and rhetorical device that like ‘emotional’ has been used to demarcate a shadowed limit of conversation or argument. And with that it is a far far less useful word or concept than ‘spiritual by-passing’. The latter describes the process of usually unconsciously choosing to remove oneself from full responsibility for life. That abdication is hidden behind something good that this way came: yoga, veganism, political activism, religious conversion, publication deal, marriage, post graduate degree, twitter accolades, etc. And that that by-pass, or unconscious abdication of personal responsibility, reveals itself in embodied ways as made manifest in addictive behaviours in one’s own actions and intolerances of the actions of others. As well as substance addictive behaviours these can be expressed in the form of words or other behaviours that often (always?) include blaming and complaining and the hidden and ubiquitous bully Stockholm syndrome language I describe in detail in
Unseen Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a MisSpelled See of Words.
And the former, ‘superstition’, is a verbal method of using an unconscious condescension or contempt to blame or denigrate another as unworthy of ‘rational’ consideration. And/or it is a means to abdicate from oneself personal responsibility in the moment in order to obviate the courage it takes to listen. In Coraggio’s case here it was to suggest that my thinking that ‘spiritual by-passing’ had an irrationality hence irrelevancy leaving it ‘not useful’ because she linked my description to an irrational ritual of behaviour that had created a physical effect rather than having understood that it was my verbal description of an experience. There was, for me, no ritual about it beyond sitting for meditation. And her designation further disregards my experience.
Are There Any Experiences in Life That Can Actually Be Considered Reasonable?
And a particularly interesting challenge for us is that ‘experience’ is, of course, almost always in the process of enacting the irrational. Hence, by the definitions above, my experience and perhaps almost all experiences, are at their core superstitious — and this time that includes Wonder’s definition because we don’t understand how this body works beyond some sophisticated superficialities and gaslighting bullshit of a solid science(TM) that keeps changing its truth to fit the politics of the day.
And I love how funny this is, the challenge of words to describe reality: With this argument I have confirmed Coraggio’s assignation because all experience is, by the definition of superstition, superstitious. So she is correct. And at the same time I have partially refuted her assignation because her perception of her power to upset my belief is an irrational superstition most of the time — except when it isn’t. It looks to me that the amusing circularity of this ‘logical’ argument is rooted in the root of ‘superstiion’: because to stand above or over from a place of inferred reasoned logical superiority creates separation while standing on an irrational faith in one’s own reasonableness in an interesting form of tautology.
Where Lies Reason? Why, It Lies Everywhere in Memory and so it isn’t Anywhere. Or Is It Just A Lie?
And with that, this superstitious journey into the belly of the objectionable idle/ idol elephant begins with a bang: reason is a lie. A superstitious lie, to be more precise.
‘What about science(TM)?’ you may want to call out. I’ll look at that briefly starting with some startling discoveries from neuroscience on the unreasonableness of our (mis)perceived source of reason. Then I’ll dip into allopathic medical(TM) madness as an epitome of reason’s idiotic inadequacy.
The reasoned mind believes that it is conscious, makes conscious choices. Bruce Lipton, the epigeneticist describes how modern neuroscience measurements are revealing that at best 95% of our decisions are ‘irrational’, deriving from the unconscious and most of them are from pattern recognition and regurgitation. And, to make conscious decision-making even less reasonable, it turns out that neuroscience measurements show that at least 50% of our memories are in fact significantly if not completely in error. We run mostly on automatic (aka samskaras) unconsciously relying on patterns regardless of the validity of their track or depth or origin and act as if we are seeing the truth and self-define ourselves as ‘reasonable’.
In a small synchronicity while writing/ editing this I listened to David Charalambous on Apr 2nd re-iterate the same ‘problem’ with slightly better numbers: he said that neuroscience shows that only 90% of decision making is unconscious from what he calls the adaptive unconscious. His interview with Tess Lawrie is very interesting and powerfully uplifting, in part because he has some pragmatic tools we can use to stop projecting our unconscious patterns and to empower effective communication with those even more unconscious than ourselves: ‘Mind Control: Who Makes Your Decisions?: It Is Easy To Spot Other People's Biases, But Can You Spot Your Own?’
This ‘reality’ begs the question: who isn’t superstitious? And yet that isn’t the ‘end’ of the reasons that reason itself is superstition and in its superstitious nature quietly negates the value of reason and superstition in a way that delightfully relegates them both to nonsense words. By ‘nonsense’, in this discourse, I mean words that at the very least create confusion and division in discourse. Of course a ‘big’ version of that is that almost everything we experience as reasonable is, or becomes, if not the story or narrative of our lives it becomes the grist of our narrative mill and ruminations. And those are often linked with patterns of behaviours that in some (many?) cases can be unconsciously ritualistic such as with compulsive disorders, phobia prophylactics and mimetic behaviours such as blaming/complaining and scapegoating that have recognisable patterns.
Truth as Pattern Adherence or Something Else
And if there is truth somewhere, it may go back to the yogic principle that truth is where change doesn’t happen: since everything changes, and we have a terrible time seeing what’s there on top of the changing landscape of our lives, perhaps the significant truth is change. The reasoning mind doesn’t like that and pretends it can control change, fix it in space-time and/or memory patterns, or perhaps patterns of often false memory. And isn’t that what the transhumanist oligarchs are looking to do, fixing themselves in a truth of a perception of time by either ‘fixing’ or eliminating everything and everyone that moves that isn’t coded by algorithms and plugged into computer interfaces? And aren’t the singularity cause-célèbres rising up within the so-called medical freedom movement doing the same thing? I have the fixated singular truth! You have to listen to me!
What About The ‘Reasonableness’ Of Reason In Our Life Experience Of Technology And Science?
Reason strikes out there, too. From my life experience and observations the faith in reason in science is an absolute superstition of the worst kind. It can be reasonably argued, perhaps, that it was the use of ‘reason’ in science that has created and built amazing technologies. It is great and reasonable that I am writing on this computer from an electrical source, both of which I don’t really understand and that I really love using, and with that have aligned myself with Wonder’s definition of being superstitious. And even this ignores, however, how often irrational superstitions such as dreams or intuitive insights were involved in various key inventions and understandings. (The inventor/ developer of lithography for example, William Blake, was taught lithography by the ghost of his dead brother. A major leap of understanding in molecular structure was made by chemist August Kekulé from a daydream. Even the integers, our numbers which are the source of science, are irrational. See Number and Time:Reflections Leading Towards a Unification of Psychology and Physics by Marie-Louise von Franz and/or God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History by Stephen Hawking. Or the delightful and funny way that mathematician and philosopher Raymond Smullyan playfully skewers the reasonableness of logic and reason even within mathematics.)
And so if reasoned science has significantly built itself on irrational constructions, what about its constructions? It is the reasoned puerile-superstitious mindset that gleefully uses those creations as the means to kill millions quickly or slowly either with weapons of mass destruction or with medical poisons that destroy individual immune systems with time. MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) - was to give the name of insanity to an action, and a potential to that action to ostensibly ascribe a reasonableness to that insanity by creating or naming it. Really? Do we superstitiously believe that naming is the most powerful act of reason because reason’s bedrock is its superstitious faith that in the beginning was the Word? Or even number, as some anti-god people might argue?
Life Science, the Sciences of Life as Exemplars of Superstitious Acts and Acting Out: More Scientism(TM), the Current God of So-Called Reason
At the time of my grade school dissection of a distorted version of a dead frog pried out of a jar filled with dead frogs infused with formaldehyde I thought ‘Wow! This is insane to think that by killing something and cutting it up I will know how it is alive.’ How right I was, and yet the entire allopathic medical science(TM) is structured on this insanity.
Like many it took the overreach I experienced in the age of convid to see more clearly and broadly how superstitious were (are?) the medical mouthpieces and those listening to them. Why superstitious? Because the medical propagandists created a theatre of mass hysteria that they believed would get (nearly) everyone in the world injected with a ‘good-for-you’ poison — despite a thirty-plus year history of failed flu injections, poisonous wonder-drugs and faked pandemics. And, to the few watching this craziness, it turned out the propagandists and their handlers were mostly right. Those who watched or experienced the butt-end of the actions initiated by the irrational belief in the convid white-coated scientism(TM) saw with some shock and distress how ‘reason’ had been obviously distended unrecognisably into something that was anything but reasonable.
Everyone walking around, both with and without a so-called medical mask, are doing so because they think that that is the reasonable thing to do. That is a superstitious belief in reason.
And so that is no different than superstition as defined above: once again the belief in reason is itself a superstition. And that it is superstition is easily proved throughout history and perhaps no more powerfully than in the last few years with the continued recommendations and acceptance of those recommendations to mask and to further inject toxins directly into the body despite obvious ‘rational’ evidence of their lack of efficacy and/or outright harm. (When I asked a very intelligent friend if she understood that viruses are so small that the pores of her mask cannot keep them out, she replied ‘Yes. I know. The mask helps me to feel safer.’ She looked a little abashed with having forsaken reason for the reason of scientism(TM).)
Back To The Flying Elephant In The Circus: The Allopathic Doubling Down on Feather-Brained Blindness
Coraggio’s comment infers that the mind is so powerful that my changing a belief, or losing my religion, will bring about a return of gout because it was only a superstition that had cleared it out of my bawdy-house in the first place! And so she ascribed a superstitious belief to the New Age derived mind-belief in her own mind’s ability to affect my body via changing my beliefs as if it was natural! Again, this is an expression of superstition that appears to be not actually understood as such. Was that part of the adaptive unconscious, or the unconscious shadow speaking?
Or, OMG NO! did it come from the real measurable science of the placebo effect and science(TM)’s efforts to nullify it?
Is it ‘just’ superstitious New Age mind-fuckery to think that the mind has the power to heal and hurt? [Headshake.] Nope. And with that, we go deep — well, maybe not that deep — into the joke of allopathic medical scientism(TM)-reason, a kind of irrational mind-fly in the wine of medical scientific(TM)-reason: ‘Ah waiter, please, I see a placebo in my wine.’ ‘Shhhh. If you aren’t careful you will get its attention and it will run away into a double blind and become a nocebo’.
And so health-science(TM) is superstitious because its people use reason to spend billions to eliminate from their ‘reasonable’ scientific experiments the problem that the belief of something will create the cure. And they don’t even talk in any significant detail about the ‘problem’ of nocebo when a white-coated pronouncement of illness or death is more deadly than the disease. Thus we have superstition, as defined above, scientifically confirmed by ‘rational’ scientism(TM)’s own efforts to nullify how the mind’s belief, irrationally, superstitiously, and measurably affects changes in health. And they double-down on their superstition with the belief-faith that double-blinding and mathematical statistics can magically override that ‘problem’.
The placebo effect infers, strongly, that Coraggio’s superstitious belief that she could debunk my superstitious mind is actually founded and ‘grounded’ in the very ‘reasonable’ science(TM) of placebo science(TM)! And the history of cults, as well as the Milgram and Asch effects too. It would seem that if I superstitiously conferred on her enough authority then her words could indeed screw with my mind! Now I’m rotfl! So, New Age mind-fuckery is also science(TM)?!!? Now, isn’t that enough to induce enough nausea in me to want to vomit.
For many years I’ve been critical of how the reasonable mind with its infatuation with arbitrarily delimited logic and attachment to words is able to superstitiously deny reality in ways even less obvious than the double-blind denial-acceptance of the unreasonable undeniability of the repeatability of placebo effects in testing: placebo is real, so we will deny its reality as a healing/killing modality by blinding our selves to it as an act of materialistic scientism(TM) reason. [Headshake.] Now that is the superstitious belief in both the ‘science(TM)’ and the irrational mind as confounder of science(TM). Just because ‘reason’ has given the irrational the name ‘placebo effect’ does not actually negate the placebo effect as being a measurable attribute of mind and that that affect is strengthened by the ritual of white coats and/or degrees on the wall and/or stethoscopes and/or recommendations. (Milgram’s experiments on how the ritual of science was able to convince reasonable people to electrocute subjects with bad memories. Or Asch’s conformity experiments on the power of social mimesis to create the willingness in people to state what they know to be untrue.)
The High Smell of New Age Elephantiasis, Modern Phlogiston, is in the Air
Coraggio’s awareness-concern that how she considered her use of word-power to have the power to usurp my deluded superstitious power is the very same New Age horsepucky mind-fuckery that me and my sisters were filled with at home by that synchronistically named mother, Terry. So, the two Terries have the power to affect my personal power and discount my bodily experience of that power by their use of words to upset my insubstantial superstitious mind. And at the same time my mind is so strong that any negative thought might create the end of the world or, less catastrophically, hurt someone near me or give me gout. Crazy! In other words the claim is that my superstitious belief has the strength to change my experience and is so weak that another’s superstitious belief in their own strength and my weakness will wreak havoc in my life. Or the lives the others, as was a huge mongered fear by Terry, my so-called mother. For the curious, you can meet my version of Terry, my mother, in my two after-she-died letters:
Who Were You? Asks One Version of A Chronic Nose-Picking Son
And
Freud and Kinsey are Dead! I’ll Manga¶ Out the Inflated Penis’s Envy of Edie’s Puss
Phew! Let’s Clear out the Smell of Phlogiston and Return to the Experience of Synchronicity
And some other synchronicities popped up as I continued to work through my ideas.
One synchronicity around that came up on Sunday the 31st of March before I sat down to edit this. I began to listen to Jasun Horsley’s podcast “Jobcast # 22 … with Thomas Sheridan”. Sheridan opens by describing pagan ‘sorcery’ as fundamentally the enactment-experience of the concentrated mind to affect physical reality. He refers to experience as proof of its reality and gives an example from his youth. To me his example was unconvincing of that principle, per se, because his described experience was more aligned with my experience and understanding of synchronicity than of an example of the power of the concentrated mind to effect change as I understood his description of the principle. However, synchronicity is the experience of the body in a time-event that cannot be reasonably attributed to a material-only ‘reasonable’ cause and effect. A bit later in the conversation Sheridan opines that the convid narrative and actions defy logic and reason and that their explication can only be clarified outside of the highly constricted lexicons of logic and reason:
~1:15:01 [Sheridan:] I learned so much about the world [with the orchestrated roll-out of the ’scamdemic’]. But I found that I could not rationalise any of it using my model of the universe that remained in the world of logic. I … literally [went] into the worlds of science fiction and mythology to find any kind of lexicon to even talk about it.
[Horsley:] So, but surely that was part of your lexicon, though, if you are practicing magic?
[Sheridan:] Absolutely! But I was able to convey it through my v-logs to thousands of people out there. And they found it very useful too. So that was one of the most practical things that ever happened to me in terms of [an experience of] magical education. I was able to take the [non-rational or superstitious] parts of it that helped transcend the gaslighting [of scientism(TM)’s reason] that’s imposed upon us…. Jasun Horsley, slightly edited.)
What is a Short History of Debunking Reason?
He’s not the first to make this claim about the failure of ‘reason’ to properly explain the experience of life. I love how Martin Luther put it, although some will find it sexist and foul. In my mind I see him spitting, slamming his hands on the podium, body shaking and hair standing up on end, as he struggles to keep his irrational rant against reason reasonable, hoping to keep humans from inflating themselves by the use of reasoned thinking that their reason has made them into gods. And, for some reason, his highly emotional cant likely had the opposite effect and strengthened people’s belief in reason because would a reasonable person really be swayed by his spittle-laden melt-down? (I have no way of knowing if my image of Luther spitting his hatred inciting rant against reason existed or not. It is the image in my mind and it does bring a smile to my face.)
And he isn’t alone:
The examples are legion and it is tough for me to stop with these quotations, and so… compulsively, irrationally, improperly, I won’t. Stop I mean.
In our delusion ridden world a truth is so precious that nobody wants to let it slip merely for the sake of a few so-called exceptions which refuse to toe the line. [Lol! Perfect description of placebo.] And whoever doubts this truth is invariably looked on as faithless, so that a note of fanaticism and intolerance everywhere creeps into the discussion. [The (indirect) killing of Semmelweiss by his peers for suggesting that doctors wash their hands after handling dead bodies in order to reduce the high death rates of birthing mothers and their babies.] (par 156, C.G. Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, 2nd Ed. Vol. 16 of the Complete Works. New York: Bollingen Foundation.)
And:
[Man, however, errs when he forgets] what he draws into his sphere and with what he fills his consciousness. For he has not created the mind, it is the mind which enables him to create; it gives him the impulse, the sudden flash of insight, endurance, enthusiasm, and inspiration. But it so penetrates the human being that man is sorely tempted to believe that he himself is the creator of the spirit and that he owns it. In reality, however, it is the primordial [irrational] phenomenon of the mind that takes possession of man, and in exactly the same way as that which the physical world appears to be the willing tool of his purpose but in reality tears man's freedom to shreds and becomes an obsessing idée-force. The mind threatens the naïve man with inflation…. The danger becomes greater the more the outer object captivates our interest and the more man forgets that, hand in hand with the differentiation of our connection with nature, there is to also go a similar differentiation of our relation to mind, in order to create the necessary equilibrium (pp212-14, C.G. Jung ‘The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales,’ The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Cited in Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates, and Other Historical Figures by Marie-Louise von Franz, Boston: Shambhala, 1991, p.122.) (Click here for a long extract from Dreams.)
Still behaving impulsively or compulsively, I close the quotations with a collage and a well known adage and the big problem of the mind’s puffery of being mind-full of itself:
The mind is a wonderful servant and a terrible master (ancient adage). The problems of mind cannot be resolved at the level of the mind, is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s paraphrase of Einstein’ statement that ‘No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it’.
And There Is So Many More Tales Of The Superstition Of Reason!
With neuroscience’s confirmation of Jung’s observation that consciousness is little more than a cork bobbing on the ocean of the unconscious, what would that ‘altered’ level of consciousness be that is going to ‘solve’ the ‘problems’ that the conscious reasoning mind rationally created and continues to create? (I don’t proffer an answer! What a great question.)
And I didn’t even include any of the brilliant unreasonableness of reason quotations in the important book Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West by John Ralston Saul, or his other important and fun book, The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense.
Going Mindless and Nose Picking Returns to Embody Something Being By-Passed!
When I was irrationally drawn to write about my doing superstition I thought this would be a relatively easy essay. I had some ideas and expected some surprises. I didn’t expect it to become so big. And I am, to be honest, shocked to be once again plagued with compulsive and irrational nose-picking. And yet over the last three weeks I started picking at myself again after that picking had stopped soon after the Dear Terry epistles to my dead mother last year. And this essay is now past its second deadline in part because I have found myself falling into unusually heavy sleep-demanding tiredness for no obvious reason shortly after sitting down to write. And several times I have slept for more than 10 hours straight without interruption, not even to pee. I now understand that this is a way my body is processing (‘digesting’ in the Ayurvedic language) something that I had previously by-passed that is looking to be cleared away or lit up in my shadows.
Why? What? It turns out that these are questions that my mind cannot effectively answer. With having gone around and editing this irrational bramble of egregious thinking many times by now, I understand with the awareness of my body that the answer is that Coraggio’s comment had, as she has done before, helped me at a profoundly deep level in my shadow as I continue to remove the trauma of the childhood familial and societal narratives and dramas. My removal process has been my writing and my sadhana which have been recently effectively augmented with weekly sessions with a local magical energy healer I’ve been seeing for a few months.
As I was wrestling with these ideas, and before I had made the connection to Terry’s New Age mind-fuckery and placebo effect as similar superstitious mind insanity and grounded reasonableness, as discussed above, I felt I wanted an outside opinion on the direction my writing was going. I wanted a perspective that was beyond my mind’s ability to address let alone provide advice. After all, problems created in and by the mind cannot be cleared at the level of the mind. So I consulted the I Ching, as I’ve been doing for closing in on forty years. This allows me to ‘spiritually’, or perhaps energetically, mindfully by-pass my mind’s need for my smallness.
Yes, my examinations of self have reached a clear understanding that one of the most prominent and perhaps dominant characteristics of my mind is for me to be kept small enough for my mind to contain me. And with my mind’s cleverness its demands and processes are usually well hidden by various tricks of reason and rationalisations. I have also come to understand that this is one of the main tools of what in the Buddhist, Hindu lexicon is called mara. I understand that mara masterfully uses my mind to keep me in smallville because of the mind’s inability to see, let alone understand, that there is a completely irrational life-energy beyond the mind that has created in my life endless personalised and completely irrational synchronicities that hint at an unknown affinity with infinity reached by something in me that is not the mind. And with the I Ching I have superstitiously actively chosen to mindlessly align with a tool that directly uses synchronicity to help me see what is the life energy-moment for me at this time.
And so, as is my I Ching practice, I respectfully, ritualistically, superstitiously and reasonably approach its energy-personality (no anthropomorphised imagery for me here) with a written exploration of what has prompted me to go mindless. Here that is.
I Ching
Question: dear I Ching, Duke of Chou, King Wen, I am come to you tonight after having followed my curiosity on the official definitions of superstition. After a bit of confusion about what I found I now find myself laughing at them as defining a kind of inanity word, albeit a slightly pernicious one for two reasons. It looks to be a rhetorical device that allows its user to by-pass argument similar to how the phrase ‘being emotional’ can be used. And it is a subtle and brilliant mechanism of spiritual by-passing! And in an amazing synchronicity earlier today I read Tessa Lena’s essay that explores group scapegoating versus personal responsibility, which is her wonderfully expressed exploration of a form of group spiritual by-passing. See ‘Artificial Spirits and Collector’s Mind: A Giant Trap: Introducing A Concept, Sending Away The Talking Points’ (April 5th).
After reading Lena’s argument it came to me that casting the spell-word ‘superstitious’ is a very subtle form of scapegoating. Which makes sense to me because scapegoating is absolutely a form of spiritual by-passing, ie, keeping ourselves blind to the possibility of being responsible for life instead of being victims of life that necessitates ‘blaming’ the scapegoat.
For some reason this lead my thought back to my realisation that the so-called fear of death most everyone talks about is one of the best-biggest mechanisms of spiritually by-passing our taking complete personal responsibility as adults of life. Hmmm. Odd synchronicity. Ryan called earlier tonight and during our conversation mentioned that he had watched Sri Sri Ravi Shankar direct people to take personal responsibility for ‘miracles’. From Ryan’s description, Shankar said that life is dynamic and active, and that just waiting for miracles after meditation or prayer is an abdication and abnegation of our responsibility to be actively participating in the miracle process (of life). Which sounds like what I’ve come to call ‘appropriate eccentric action’, which doesn’t happen when we don’t take responsibility for spiritually by-passing the life we are responsible for.
Also, I see a correlation between what Coraggio said to me — that I was being superstitious — and something that Jung observed about god-talk: it is about experience versus belief for or against ‘god.’ Paraphrased: to the one who has experienced god there is no conversation with the one who has not. To the latter it rests on the insubstantial foundations of belief and thinking.’ My being lumped with being superstitious suggests that Coraggio hasn’t experienced non-mindful life-energy (god?) in her body in the way I described my experience of it. Or, perhaps, the misunderstanding arose because my body-experience of Ganesha and Alicia were not of the mind and were thus expressing my body in a way that escaped my ability with words to express. Maybe words cannot express it. And thus that experience, when put into words, got mistaken by Coraggio for superstition. (I don’t know what is accurate, and I look forward to Coraggio’s response as I think of this exploration as a form of ongoing dialogue.)
What about the problem of an actual bodily experience of god-experience as distinct from something that is mistaken for a god-experience? My short answer is that the false experience is one that results in the constriction or diminution of life and/or of the joy of life, idea, vision and/or that creates the demand or compulsion that others are to toe some kind of line of truth or be dismissed as an undeserving that can be stood over as a victim of some form of shrill ideology or contemptible superstition. This is, fundamentally, the structure of cult: diminution of self and isolation from others with word-spells that absolve oneself from being personally responsible. And the well co-ordinated convid narrative was all about abdicating personal responsibility to the state ‘health-gods’, and in making everyone as small and powerless as possible with psychological tools and the threat of and actual use of force, regardless how much the WEF young leaders are lying through their teeth with forked tongues and two hearts about our experience of that reality.
So I come back to the root of this essay: what is superstition?
Anyway, Sage, as you can see I’ve been exploring ‘superstition’ and I would like your voice of non-reason to be included here so I can step beyond or around my mind’s desire for rationalised controlled reason: what is ‘superstition’? Quietly resting beneath that question is for your opinion on whether or not what I’ve been thinking about this has missed the mark or not. Thank you. (Casting was done with sticks, not coins.)
17. —— —— 13. ——O—— 25. ——X—— 17. —— —— 21. ————— 21. —————
#60. Pattern (Hinton); Limitation (Baynes); ☵ over ☱
becomes
#54. Home in Marriage (Hinton); The Marrying Maiden (Baynes) ☳ over ☱
#60 Limitation (from the Baynes translation, my significant edit):
… In relation to the moral sphere it means the fixed limits that the discerning clear-seeing set upon their actions — the limits of loyalty and disinterestedness. [Lol! What about putting a limit on how long this is!? Or, more to the point, how loyalty was being demanded by the health-oligarchs who had no disinterest in their actions. And their nearly unlimited use of language, image and repetition to overstimulate the eyes and mind into false-seeing.] … Judgment/ Success. Galling limitations are not to be pursued. [Hmmm. Will making this shorter be a ‘galling’ limitation to me? Using PS-RAP the answer is 'No.' So I continue. Above I noted that the epithet ‘superstitious’ can be a means to limit argument or dialogue. And maybe even a galling one to the recipient of its use to dismiss and separate. It certainly caught my attention, although I felt it was more with surprise and then curiosity than something truly galling. And, of course, for the 'clear-seeing', the galling limitations of the health-oligarchs was obvious and that the people of the world had moved from a relatively benign form of reasoned-superstition to one that was dangerous and a superstitiously reasoned life-threat to themselves and others. Likely most of the people who false-saw the plandemic felt reasonably sure that they would not ever in their lives participate in a Jim Jones's style of drinking the kool-aid or forcing with 'galling limitations' others or their children to do that too.] Limitations are both troublesome and effective. When we live economically in normal times, we are prepared for times of want. To be sparing saves us from humiliation. Limitations are also indispensable in the regulation of world conditions. We see that in nature there are fixed limits for summer and winter, day and night, and these limits give the year its meaning. [Interesting! Did the superstitious health-oligarchs use their reason and take this line of argument to rationalise and justify a genocide because the human population, obviously and reasonably required a 'seasona'l limiting pruning? Reason, like delusion, knows no bounds and, although unlike delusion, is always true to the self whether or not it has been confirmed by reasonable superstitious sycophants.] With limitation we also observe due measure. When someone imposes galling limitations upon his/her own nature that is injurious. And when someone imposes limitations on others, that creates rebellion. Therefore it is important to set limits even upon limitation. [Thank you, I Ching, for perhaps one of the most subtle and terse analyses of the convid narrative and the actions of the superstitious health-oligarchs and their superstitious targets, both of whom used active and aggressive reason, to impose and receive galling limitations, with a few rebelling as best as possible from under the barrage of censorship, public pillory and total societal cancellation.] The Image … Thus the discerning with clear-seeing/ Create number and measure,/ And examine the nature of virtue and correct conduct. A lake is something limited. Water is inexhaustible. A lake can contain only a definite amount of the infinite quantity of water; this is its peculiarity. In human life too the individual achieves significance through clear vision and the discrimination that knows to set limits. Therefore what concerns us here is the problem of clearly defining these discriminations because the ability to differentiate is the backbone of the integrity that empowers appropriate eccentric action. Unlimited possibilities are not suited to people; being born into life is to be a physically distinct expression of nature and, as with the lake, boundlessness would dissolve those distinctions. [Sri Sri Ravi Shankar gave an excellent satsang talk about the reality of human physical limitations and how failure to honour them creates dissipation and disorder.]
I Ching interruption: my imagination-memory jumped back to one of the key books in the expansion of my evolution in the understanding of synchronicity and the challenge of how to limit the dissolving inclusiveness of metaphor if everything is equal in the sense of New Age indistinct ’oneness’.
Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz in her great little collection of lectures called On Divination & Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance called this dissolution of the limits that create distinction ‘contamination’. Contamination is when everything is everything else and all distinction is lost. This is one of the more subtle destructive aspects of New Agism and likely gave some legs to justifying cancel culture and gender mutilations that are, in effect, to make everyone the same because for these brutal advocates of ‘sameness’ distinction is a violation of that sameness as equality. Jordan Peterson has strenuously made this ‘distinction’ argument societally with his observation that equality of outcome is tyranny and likely will not provide the results desired by the sameness warriors who cancel differentiation, obliterate equality of opportunity and with disregard, often contemptuously, condemn quality and qualification as a manifestation of evil patriarchal hierarchy that unfairly rewards the undeserving. This ‘problem’ has been well known and extant for hundreds of years, if not millennia. I like William Blake’s version: ‘One law for the ox and lion is oppression [tyranny]’ (plate 24, The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell.]
Back to the I Ching:
A person becomes strong in life, individuated, by respecting, honouring and enacting appropriately the requirements demanded of taking personal responsibility for one’s Self and all of one’s social structures and communities. The individual attains significance as an individuated free spirt by actively engaging with these limitations, by embracing, changing, reducing or growing them as appropriate and, with those actions, coming to know the determinants for what is the appropriate eccentric action in each moment. [Both superstition and reason are means to keep us from seeing what is there clearly enough to be appropriate in our actions.]
#54 The Marrying Maiden (from the Baynes translation, my significant edit):
Judgment / .../ Undertakings bring misfortune./ Nothing that would further. A girl who is taken into the family is to behave with caution and reserve. It is important that she does not take it upon herself to supplant the mistress of the house, for that would mean disorder and lead to untenable relationships. [A subtle allusion to ‘the terrible master, wonderful servant adage?] The same is true of all voluntary relationships between human beings. While legally regulated relationships evince a fixed connection between duties and rights, relationships based on personal inclination depend in the long run entirely on tactful reserve made possible with proper expressions of trust and respect between them. [No trust, no respect, no relationship! And this was for me the reality of hurting my body disrespectfully by allowing the mind’s control over the actions of my life that allowed or even encouraged spiritual by-passing and getting lost in patterned/ samskara bodily destructive addictive behaviours while being kept small. The mind does not, perhaps cannot, respect the Self that isn’t the master.]
Intimacy as the essential principle of relatedness is of the greatest importance in all relationships in the world. For the intimate union of heaven and earth is the origin of the whole of nature [and perhaps the original hierosgamos]. Among human beings likewise, spontaneous intimacy is the all–inclusive principle of union and that arrises naturally with mutual trust and respect. [No trust, no respect, no relationship. My personal integrity is to be aligned with the hierosgamos, the sacred marriage of inner spirt and body, of logos and anima, my inner spiritual energies of male and female. This is an irrational process that the disintegrating energies of reason and superstition do not want in order for the mind and its reasons to continue to act as a tyrannical master that demand of me to be small and to abdicate into nothing my responsibility to engage my power and express it appropriately. My development and expansion of a Psyche-Somatic Resonance Awareness Process (PS-RAP) created a trust-bridge to my body that took away from my mind the socialised conditioning that bestowed it with its finalistic, fatalistic, perfectionistic authority. The cornerstone of that I now understand, without mind and instead with body, is my expanding experience of integrity, integration, which itself is or expresses an intimacy with life that ‘reason’ and ‘superstition’ naturally preclude because they both create separation.] Image / ... / Thus the discerning with clear-seeing/ Understands the transitory/ In the light of the eternity of the end. Every relationship between individuals bears within it the danger that inappropriate language or actions may be taken that lead to endless misunderstandings and disagreements. Therefore it is necessary constantly to remain mindful of the end. If we permit ourselves to drift along with our patterned behaviours and truths we come together and are parted again as the day may determine. If on the other hand we fix our intention on an end that endures, we will succeed in dancing around the reefs of misunderstanding that confront us when creating intimate relationships with each other.
Wow! Thank you, Sage, for the great and subtle answer! And its appropriateness, which I’ve expressed as comments within the square braces. So I thank the something here that is far bigger than me for again helping me, via synchronicity, to see more clearly from a perspective outside of reason and superstition.
Penultimate Closing by Opening a Door into an Empty Room
And after that, there really isn’t too much more to write in this essay. So how to end it? Well, perhaps I’ll penultimately end with the lovely synchronicity I received today (April 10th) from Yoshiko. She sent me a recent uploaded podcast from the Michael Stone archive dated from 2011. This time the discourse is presented by two people, a man (not Stone) and woman: Mike Holboom and Christine Koch who give imaginative and powerful talks inspired by and on Chapter 15 of the Lotus Sutra, ‘Welling Up From The Earth’ for a text translation of the sutra, or here for video reading of it. Their talks kind of blew my socks off and I will return to their discourse once or twice more to appreciate it adequately.
~9:17: … The one who has never stopped loving you, even though you shout and scream. And belittle him. Even through his confusion, his laziness, his inability [with his advancing dementia]. What do you do with that? How do you forgive that, exactly? How do you forgive him for doing the one thing you could never manage? How do you forgive him for loving you, all these years? Maybe you decide it’s not the kind of love you want (Mike Holboom).
I won’t cite more from it here. Instead here is the link to the podcast for anyone interested. “Lotus Sutra, Part 16: The Empty Room”.
Ultimately, I Finish With My Return to Babel-philia and So My Nonce Definition of Superstition, and, also at Last, I Define Reason Too
Superstition (noun):
is the belief that mind and the body are separate and that the mind is somehow more powerful, important and spiritual than the body. Superstition allows for actions that poison the earth, and all its bodies for some kind of immediate benefit that denies the continuity of life outside of the mind except superficially as a juvenile plaything. It often betrays itself in various forms of hypocrisy and spiritual by-passing when it mouths such things as ‘I’m living/doing/acting for my children and grandchildren’ while expressing by action and words the opposite. Note that this is the same definition as for reason.
Reason (noun):
is the belief that mind and the body are separate and that the mind is somehow more powerful, important and spiritual than the body. Reason allows for actions that poison the earth, and all its bodies for some kind of immediate benefit that denies the continuity of life outside of the mind except superficially as a juvenile plaything. It often betrays itself in various forms of hypocrisy and spiritual by-passing when it mouths such things as ‘I’m living/doing/acting for my children and grandchildren’ while expressing by action and words the opposite. Note that this is the same definition as for superstition.Post script addendum.
By synchronistic happenstance, I wound up continuing my examination of ‘reason as superstition’ by examining what morals are. And in that examination I discover and conclude that morals are the enablers of reason, their pushers of the addiction of reason.
So the pernicious nature of reason extends out into the substrate of our society and, imo, suggest why it is we are using reason to kill just about everyone that moves, the insects and the planet we live on: it is the moral thing and reason loves being moral.
See
Morality is Reason’s Schismogenetic Superstitious Raison d’Etre
🙏 Thank you for reading.
If this epistle gave you some pleasure, and/or an ‘aha’ benefit, become a paid subscriber. 🙏
🙏 Thank you. 🙏
Playlists
Spotify.
YouTube Music.
YouTube Talk.
Song of the Essay
Laura Gibson - Come By Storm.
Lyrics
When my eyes survey the tree line I'll recall a voice And how I took great care with words All that was A picture was A poem was a poem Words were trees of brown of gold You were a place I had come to know If the dark falls early Would you come in the night Would you come with the morning Come by fire or come by storm When my days turn to gold Turn to gold And pull to the sky To the sky I'll recall the time I was more alive When I lose myself to words Did I die in your arms Or did I die alone? When the dark fell on me Did you come in the night Did you come with the morning Come by fire or come by storm
If you are interested in some genetics and other info about the placebo and nocebo effects, I wrote a series of posts which is linked in this post - https://www.peace-is-happy.org/post/exosomes-the-placebo-effect
Guy, you could have asked me what I meant by superstition. I would likely have told you about my asthma and how I know it's controlled by my mind, but in the midst of it, I can't 'psych' myself out of it. I suspect that the Advair I use is really no more than a placebo, a superstition. But if I were to acknowledge that, it might not work for me anymore. So I have this double-bind.
You had already said that your gout was controlled by your mind and not by what you ate or did. I saw us as equals in that, not me putting you down for my superior rationality.
But you have certainly confirmed the point I'm making in my Substack on, synchronistically, The Horus Gamos (YT published last night)--once a man decides that a woman is trying to dominate him, there's nothing you can do to change his mind because the act of trying to change his mind is seen as domination. I don't see any way for our communication to be healthy or fruitful.