SUPERTITION

by Mario Sales, FRC,SI,CRC

Translated to english by Ir.: Airis Dantas Paraguassu

Superstition: Belief or notion not based on reason or knowledge that takes to create false obligations, to fear innocuous things, putting trust in nonsense, no rational relationship between the facts and the alleged causes associated with them; crendice, mysticism.

Dicionário Houaiss da Língua portuguesa, page. 2642, 2001, 1st ed.

“Guran: - Phantom, you shouldn’t go on this mission, it is so dangerous. If you insist I will cast a spell on you”
Phantom “- (Laughing) Guran, let nonsense. I'm a wizard. I do not believe in witchcraft. "

Dialogue between the Phantom, the Ghost who walks, and his faithful friend Guran, wizard of Bandar tribe, two characters from a famous comic.

The superstition or belief in supernatural powers of objects or things, numbers, or even in religious sacrifices, was always associated to poorer sections of the human race. Countries where poverty and social disorganization are highlighted are traditionally the cradle of cultures extremely superstitious, is example with Haiti, the Netherlands Antilles, and Central African countries like Nigeria, Zambia etc. Although it cannot deny the existence of a superstition socio-anthropology, close relationship between spiritual and material misery, this is not and never was the prerogative of poor countries.

We find powers of objects based cults and fear of such powers in every country on earth, both in the Nordic countries (with the revival of druids’ cult) as in Europe and the USA (with the Wicca cult advent).

Crendices are not only poverty product, but from ignorance, which induce to unfounded fear of damn or pyrotechnics effects of the most obscure rituals.

The superstition history is old. There are reports in the Bible of the worship of statues of gods, as the golden calf destroyed by Moses, or sacrifice of animals (lambs) in an attempt to please the God of Israel, in the Old Testament, and the proof that Abraham takes his own son for sacrifice believing be like obeying a divine command, arrested by an angel shortly before performing such barbarity. (Genesis 22:12)

Unfortunately, by a semantic imprecision in dictionary definitions, as we saw above this text, the term mysticism is related to this practice, making it clear that, in the rational people minds, all superstitious practices are mystical, worse  instead, all mystical practices are superstitious.

Well, mysticism is just an expression of man religiosity, beyond religion.

The necessity of a religiosity expression or some transcendental experience is in all living beings.

Even those who refuse to believe in the existence of a Supreme Being, Almighty; inundated by a rigid intellect, end up manifesting this search transcendental philosophy.

So, have, somehow, the necessity of religious, does not imply in superstition, necessarily.

The Rosicrucian Order and other mystical orders deal with this dichotomy.

Important part of its job is to clarify the distinction between knowledge and superstition, between occult and hidden, between mysticism and mystification.

The simpler example is the Magician and his cane: the difference between the true magician and sorcerer's apprentice is that the first knows that his power doesn’t came from his cane, but by himself, or on the other way, his power is not on wand, but in self.

This simple distintion, clear, illustrates the hard work that is the fight against superstition within the mystical means.

The alchemical process of turning an ordinary person into a mystic and then the mystic into a Magician can take more than one life and is a power key hard to get hold.

It is not a simple thing. The notion of simplicity in itself is a dangerous concept.

“Simplicity” doesn’t mean, in most time, evolution, but spiritual mediocrity

The "simple" soul gives more value to the symbols than what they symbolize.

So it confuses the candle, a lifeless object made ​​of wax, with the light it is.

The only way to undo this misconception is the careful, progressive education both mundane and mystical aspect.

The only human being is enriched with knowledge, even if this knowledge links the artistic sensitivity because, as everyone can understand, the art, especially music, is the most direct way to the realization of the Eternal.

Psychic, Psychological and Psychoanalytical

Superstition is usually so deep in our mind that we could not identify it and even reluctant to admit that we are superstitious.

The best professional to handle this is the psychologist, not a mystical school, since the psychic and mystical are mixed with the mundane psychological, in our mind, we do not see the separation between them.

Actually, undressing belief without the aid of a professional trained to extract the hidden causes behind behaviors is very difficult.

Freud, at psychoanalysis, spoke in deciphering the "grammar of the unconscious."

We think that we do certain things because we want, or we are as we are only why we are. According to that Austrian doctor, in fact in our familiar education relationship with our parents and people in a home environment, the childhood traumas associated, shape for us the foundations of our social behavior

What we think is free and personal decision, many times in fact is a result of education, unconscious programming of our minds that make us play behaviors of others (parents) as our own.

The only way to break this vicious circle is scientific knowledge, self-analysis or analysis with professional assistance and intellectual culture.

As we studied the behavioral psychology and understanding the mechanisms that make us the way we are, we become able to isolate the components of our personality and manage them better.

There is nothing wrong with looking like the father or mother.

The problem is when we reproduce behaviors without criterion for distinguishing between what is founded on our thoughts and what is just the product of habits understanding acquired.

Thus, with the aid of psychological knowledge, begins our personality deconstruction of and the study of its components: which part of us reflects the influence of our mother, which reflects the influence of our father, which reflects the influence of living with our grandparents, which part comes from our environment socioeconomic cultural, etc.

The importance is not to reproduce sufferings.

Some statistics show that children of divorced parents tend to have more difficulty in establishing stable marital relationships as well children of alcoholic parents, or tend to be alcoholics or marry alcoholics, reproducing the domestic environment in which they grew.

Thus prevented by education and self analysis we can avoid repeating situations as a consequence of simple programs that can be deleted properly informed of our personality.

The Terror Threshold

Similarly, conditioning of childhood leads us to believe in superstitions, and is not easy to distinguish when we have been conditioned to this. We repeat family beliefs for the emotional force that involves this kind of influence. Believe what my mother taught me to believe it is not only normal in our culture as part of our character education.

For further education we may refuse this or that condition, but we will never be totally cleansed of all the influences we receive in childhood, nor is rightly so because these influences that make us who we are, what makes us what we will be as become citizens students, etc.

We need to get rid of, rather, the bad part of this education and this conditioning, the one that leads us to believe in absurdities and power of dead objects, or even fear certain circumstances just because we have been trained for this. The most important part of a common man transformation into a wizard is the alchemical depuration of his mundane personality and the most important depuration part is self-analysis, the search for hidden motives in the subconscious memory. It is not an easy job. A professional psychologist can help a lot.

After all, we not only identify intellectual memories, but mainly emotional memories.

These will be mixed within us and undo this tangle requires patience, humility, time and skill.

Without this effort, unfortunately, true mystical pathway will be virtually impossible to be traversed.

On seeker mind will be so many conflicts, doubts, fears, he won´t have enough psychological energy to make the journey.

Never pass the first initiation because cannot beat the "Terror of the Threshold."

Terror, this is the key

The fear, the great light enemy.

It is the fear that make him invoke, in bizarre ceremonies, hidden forces that help combat threats frightening for him which distinguishes its back, no he realizes that is exactly the same fear, no perception by him that is exactly the same fear that causes these frightening hallucinations in his mind, making your life a living hell with anxiety and restlessness.

The psychologist will talk of childhood fears, not overcome: fear of loneliness in the cradle, fear of darkness, fear of unexplained pain.

Life to whom doesn´t have a psychology complete development is always scary.

This psychological immaturity is the basis for the superstition.
For the superstitious, for example, the mystic ritual is not an initiatory drama as a play mounted to create a certain state in the soul of the watcher.

The mystic ritual is not a means to an end.

It is the end itself

Repeating the image: candle is more important than the light it is.

SUPERSTITION´S PARADOXES

Superstition itself keeps some paradoxes.

First it goes against the self-esteem since superstitious thinks the objects that surround him are more important than him, things, therefore are more important than human being.

So he collects charms, crystals, small figurines, finding that the accumulation of these objects is much more important to have the power to improve yourself.

On the other hand, superstition terminating a sign of intense pride and haughtiness, because it makes the superstitious suppose, in possession of certain objects, he can command the creation around him, ie, the superstitious wants to control the divinity and all creation become more powerful than God.

It is common to see Nigeria´s tribes invoking spirits against their enemies, in a kind of convocation the astral body guard which in your order will perform some desire her.

This belief is represented in the story of Aladdin and the magic lamp, an Arabic version of the African cults.

In both situations, it invokes a being enslaved by some power to the one who casts, so it makes the caster what he thinks he cannot do. And made ​​the enchantment, the superstitious assumes that the ghost, quickly and efficiently will do their desire.

This is other superstitious characteristic

He believes that spirits which he is able to command, below it, so to be able to do for him what he could not or think cannot do.

Of course that these paradoxes which doesn’t resist at a simple analysis are not considered by superstitious

Their beliefs are so ingrained that we hardly come out into the light of knowledge with ease.

Superstitions are real vampires: they live in the darkness of our fears, suck our energy, feed on our fear and when exposed to the sun of truth, they crumble like dust.

Mystics and mystifiers

The superstitious are easy prey for unscrupulous beings, aware of their insecurities manipulate them with the intention of getting financial benefits or otherwise.

And for this the effort is not very big since just the domain of the word and some theatrical tricks to suggest a huge mass of people.

Hitler did this. Also others currently do.

The true mystic leader also has ability to enchant people with his personal magnetism.

Nothing differs quack unless your intentions in your heart which can not be contemplated.

A common man criterion, incapable of a more subtle distinction between them is the financial criteria.

Some feel that the true mystic never handle any material goods and many mystics have special care of this aspect, knowing the prejudice against matter that the Church implanted in the minds of all people over the centuries, paradoxically transforming material misery in the only sign of the dignity of a human being.

Because of this, mystics who don’t presented in tatters and not living in poverty and penury, face a lot of distrust of ordinary people.

And those which are in misery and penury, living in physical conditions and hygiene unworthy of a human being, attract the attention of many just because of that, regardless of the message they bring in his speech.

It is therefore a very difficult job of separating the mystic out of mystifier.

The strange thing is that whenever a charlatan like Simon the sorcerer of the Bible that thought he could buy with coins the mystical secrets of the apostles, at Pentecost, claiming that appears has a powerful knowledge and sell it to whoever wants to pay a large sum for it, there will be someone willing to buy.

It was like in those times and is still so today.

People are really strange.

Psychotherapy with the analysis of the concepts of value and correlations and prejudices we have about this or that category of behavior, would be useful in preventing us about errors of judgment that we can commit to the following standards such as "the poor is good and the rich is bad”, or like "ignorant people are more worthy to be "simple" than those who have great intellectual knowledge" which, being educated, inspire distrust.

The Initiatory Process as an alternative

What we conclude? That all mystic should have psychotherapy before been mystic?

It would be counter-intuitive, especially considering that psychotherapy as a therapeutic tool is extremely recent.

No mystic before psychotherapy advent could have done well, since there wasn’t this feature.

Before people examine themselves in search of increased self-knowledge existed religion and character education, forgers of solid spirits and balanced moral structures. It was other world. Can’t have comparasion. What we can say is that within those period limitations, religion and character education, whether in the family or at school, were the features of formation of a God-fearing person and devoted to the service of humanity. Everything is related. Surely once the men were no better than today. All this education of religion and faith did not prevent abominable social practices like slavery of blacks, considered natural until two centuries ago, or machismo that reserved the woman a secondary role in society.

Likewise the accuracy of the character did not prevent the hypocrisy in that period regarding morality and sexuality, or the ingenuity of rigid notions of what is good and evil is.

Yes, there was more character and religion, apparently, but it was a world, not only physically but psychologically primitive and naive than the one we know today.

Only an understanding existed at that time which could be used to raise the level of consciousness of the people, men or women, poor or noble, and still exists today, of course, the perfect way: the initiation process.

Initiations, with its appeal to the emotional, with his teasing intimate transformations, through symbols and rituals, remember the psychotherapeutic process, in its most important feature: go deeper than language and the intellect in the nature of being.

If psychotherapy works as a lay initiation, profane, initiation, in turn, acts as a sacred psychotherapy, esoteric.

If psychotherapy, with its methods of inner search, can be understood as a kind of profane initiation process, in turn have worked all these centuries as an esoteric psychotherapy.

Emotional stress is a holder of knowledge, is the cement between one concept and another. Merely intellectual concepts are not solid until you have among them the league of emotion, the human meaning of that information.

Be this emotional stress the need to respond to an academic challenge, be the fact that this knowledge means our survival, the fact is that all knowledge is consolidated coated emotion in us, be part of us.

Initiations use this concept. By initiation theatrical drama, the individual is taken, by emotional way, values ​​to realize that the intellect could not pass him. And the beauty of initiation, for its scenic wealth, he fixed more strongly these values ​​there learnt. Everything said for art, emotion, keep quiet deeper within us.

Unfortunately, superstition is also well. It was born exactly where we are more fragile and subject to psychological influence, in a word, the suggestibility: our family, our culture birthplace, the city where we were born.

When we persevere a superstition, give continuity to a type of behavior that came into us before we had critical instruments to say not what it seems to me correct, the scientific point of view or from the point of view of simple common sense. Because when we are children, all events are initiation, it marks us as emotional experiences, and learned by heart and not the brain, as it should be in childhood and as such should be in the initiation process. The marking that is in us is hard to take, like ivy that goes through the wall, and which only comes out if we break and deflate.

Mysticism x Superstition

So before mystics, we are human beings, we were children, we hear stories of our mothers and fathers and grandparents, and even with a solid educational background, This information is ingrained in us and it is very, very difficult to pluck them from our hearts.

We are therefore easy prey of such behavior, and not for the education, we would also be prisoners of charlatans of every kind. There would be charlatans if there were thirsty superstitious to be deluded. Building a balanced mind is difficult and requires time, but surely the end result is an impossible treasure to be bought or sold.

It is need to come to terms with this new development, overcome not only our ignorance, but also sacrifice some kind of knowledge that we have in us, not as a reeducation, but as a miseducation, one unconditioning of installed programs on us when we had no antivirus on our mental hard drive.

Every mind that can overcome the limits of superstition obtains such an important victory in evolutionary terms as lonely. No one can live by us or accomplish anything for us. The maturity teaches that everything that happens to us, Results of our responsibility and our choices. Shortcuts will always be in the proposed and we are free to try to go through them, but the real advantage of this road is to follow it to the end, learning with every centimeter covered.

Skip steps or assume that this is possible, through amulets or pacts with invisible beings, only delay us more and more and increase the time of the route.

Turn into a True Mage depends directly on emotional maturity and psychological and know that, like the comic book character says, the Phantom, the Ghost who walks, that a true wizard cannot believe in witchcraft.

So how can we finally conceptualize the basic difference between genuine mysticism, as practiced in various mystery schools and pure and simple charlatanism, superstitious we encounter every day?

Are somehow mystical, superstitious techniques?

This excellent and timely question is fundamental. The basic difference between a mystical technique and superstition is the same between superstition and scientific knowledge. What makes scientific knowledge is that it meets two characteristics:

1. Reproducibility: the mystical techniques should be played by as many as try to do so, provided that the necessary conditions for this are given.

2. Verifiability: A mystical technique must be tested and verified for authenticity.

No mystical technique should no longer be checked for their vaunted efficiency by anyone to use. It should not depend on faith, but reliable results achieved resulting in a consistent and repeatable way.

All mystic technique is reproducible and verifiable, not depending on mood or faith, so being able to demonstrate its efficiency by itself, whenever necessary. It is thus that the Rosicrucians are fed, through monographs received with a solid knowledge, based on the Rosicrucian Tradition, which will help them change the quality of their lives.

Monographs bring 2 types of information: the ones of education nature, that enhance our culture and sensitivity, and that ones of technical nature, that give us tools to carry out a more rich and dignified existence, the human and material point of view.

Without education, our mental rigidity and our beliefs would not accept the proposed techniques, considering the trite and improbable, but suitably flexible by developing sensitivity spirit proves more apt to try the new and refuses the old, that under no circumstances is better just to be ancient.

This is the most important function of Rosicrucian education.

And if psychotherapy can help in this educational process, we should not reject it, as we cannot sane refuse any resource that helps us improve our self.