What Is The Nature of Superstition, and is it Deadly?

Why does one create an image about oneself?

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One has an idea, a symbol of oneself, an image of oneself: what one should be, what one is, or what one should not be. Why does one create an image about oneself? Because one has never studied what one is, actually. We think we should be this or that: the ideal, the hero, the example. What awakens anger is that our ideal, the idea we have of ourselves, is attacked. And our idea about ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we are. But when you are observing the actual fact of what you are, no one can hurt you. Then, if one is a liar and is told that one is a liar, it does not mean that one is hurt: it is a fact. But when you are pretending you are not a liar and are told that you are, then you get angry, violent. So, we are always living in an ideational world, a world of myth, and never in the world of actuality. To observe what is, to see it, actually be familiar with it, there must be no judgment, no evaluation, no opinion, no fear. - Krishnamurti, Collected Works, Vol. XII,246, Choiceless Awareness

What Superstition and Belief has in common is that they spring from the background of our past emotional experiences. But mainly it is based on the emotional desire to alter my thoughts and feelings to ignore anything disturbing and to pursue anything that is rewarding or pleasurable.

Haven't you noticed superstition expressing itself whenever there is a holiday or government ceremony or organized-religious rituals? People just go along with it because they are afraid what would happen if they don't. People believe out of fear of what would happen if they didn't believe. When the mind does something purely because of being afraid on an emotional level, then that is superstition and tradition, which is fueled by ones emotional-imagination.

Why have we been encouraged through emotional tradition to fight for self-importance, to ruthlessly compete to become better than another or to submit to serving some form of belief, ideal or opinion? Everyday, are we not being pressured into choosing to emotionally identify with some symbol, person or ideology? To bow down, obey or accept something that is dysfunctional that can only produce imbalance, disharmony and destruction is to be responsible for the maintenance of fear and conflict.

The society is an external display of our psychological state of affairs. Just like what is being displayed on a computer screen is based on the internal programs, our minds are responsible for our conduct in our daily relationships with every person and thing that we come into contact. Traditional authorities in society use emotional messages to guide our thinking and feeling. Emotions are driven by our desire to achieve, acquire or fulfill, and the FEAR of failing to do so. Where there is psychological desire, there must also be FEAR, as well. We have been trained to emotional belong to a group, symbol or image. So when various leaders coerce us to pretend to be something that we are not, through emotionally attaching ourselves to an ideal, belief or dogma, we are doing so out of the psychological FEAR of being socially shunned by our community. So most people conform to the status quo.

Psychological Fear is both internally and externally destructive. While growing up, various people in our lives either complimented or insulted us. These emotional memories accumulate and are later retrieved through our emotional imagination. So whenever we find ourselves in a disturbing state of being, traditionally, we have been encouraged to cover up, ignore any feelings or thoughts that we don't like. To do that, you need a placebo to distract your mind away from being in touch with itself whenever its in emotional pain. Enter ->> BELIEF born out of the FEAR of being in touch with oneself. These emotional concepts try to replace the reality of your state of mind with an artificial reality that one has come to accept as being only real. Whenever this artificial reality is questioned, it becomes hostile and belligerent. Once the false has been accepted as the truth, the mind is then warped, distorted and in conflict with itself and the world around itself.

Is Not The Essence of Psychological-Tradition Superstition?

Organized religions are based on an emotional formula that has been handed down from some mysterious, spooky source that was imagined into existence. Emotional imagination is simply the opposition to facts. If I actually feel sad, for instance, that state of being is the essence of my being. It is a fact. Then, our emotional response is to either like or dislike my state of being. If I like it, I will try to hold onto that thought or feeling for as long as possible. And if I dislike it, I will try to disassociate myself from myself by going into my past emotional experiences to emotionally concentrate on and attach myself to old feelings or thoughts that gave me delight (in an effort to bury the fact that I'm in emotional pain). Emotional pain only happens whenever we want to get rid of a state of mind that is uncomfortable. The struggle to get rid of a state of mind means that the mind is attacking itself, without realizing it. So that invites people from the external world to attack you, too. Like a magnetic pull, whatever in happening within the mind must be mirrored out in your external world.

So whenever we get to a point where we are so emotionally uncomfortable in our skin, people have steered us toward a dogma, social circle of power or swamp yourself in mundane tasks or work. Tradition dictates that we never get into real contact with our minds on an emotional level. That is strictly forbidden. It is allowed to use any formula to deal with our emotional side of our being, but not to make direct factual contact. Why? Simply because a mind that is in touch with itself cannot be manipulated or destroyed by another.

When the mind opposes its factual state of being, it is being contradictory. This why people rarely do what they say they will do. There is a never-ending internal struggle going on in the emotional being of most people. The image, facade or mask that people emotionally project is just like a ventriloquist's dummy that has an opposite message from the ventriloquist (who is also pretending to be totally unrelated to the dummy that it is holding). In reality, there is only the ventriloquist and the dummy is the contradiction, hypocrisy. Emotionally, when we feel something that we don't want to feel or think, that reality is the ventriloquist who then tries to escape from himself by believing that he or she is the opposite state of mind. So when people talk to each other, usually they are putting on a show just like a dummy. So when they say they believe this or that, that is merely a mask covering up their true feelings or thoughts.

In other words, we are existing in a world of make-believe and pretense of being fair, orderly or benevolent. For the most part, people are violent either secretly or openly. A mind that is out of touch with its actual state of being, is in a state of disintegration and abnormally rapid decay. It operates like a drug addict that craves to be high and to hide from painful realities. So it makes up an emotional concept or submits to a traditional ideal that has been blindly followed for a long time. Either way, such a mind is contradictory and is in competition with the facts of life. So friction, chaos and discord is the common foundation running right throughout the human world of its emotional imagination (a.k.a. Ego). It is this very foundation of conflict that most people devote their energy towards. Superstition is based on the false principle of “the majority rules” as being fair and moral. But nothing could be further from the truth. After all, since the majority of people are out of touch with the reality of their own minds, then when the group makes a decision, that decision is limited to ignorance and destruction.

If something has gone on for a long period of time, superstition and tradition respects it. Superstition and tradition is the emotional worship and servitude of the past, which is time. Since people have been operating like this for a long time, the vast majority like to assume that it is normal and moral. That is also false. The consciousness of humanity has reduced all of its mental energy down to doing one thing – maintaining psychological ignorance through superstition, tradition and fear. A mind that runs away from itself and hides in a make-believe is afraid of itself, is divided against itself. Once the mind is divided, it is then conquered by superstition and tradition. Such a mind has become a puppet, a play thing to be remotely controlled and ultimately obliterated. Why? So that the pretense of outer circumstances is more powerful than inward circumstances can take the credit for overpowering your life. But in reality, the mind guts itself first, then the outsiders conquer your body and property.

Remember, it is a fact that nobody can be conquered without first dividing your mind against itself, first. As long as the mind is in touch with the facts about whatever it thinks and feels without running away into its imagination of opposition against the facts, then ones mind is not in fear nor can it be intimidated by large groups of people who say that believing is a good thing and that you must do it or else your life will be trashed and your after-life will be horrible too. All of this is fear-based in order to trick your mind into running away from being in touch with itself. Then once your mind is divided against itself, you can be victimized by others. So the emotional blind obedience to be a traditional and superstitious robot that carries out its programming without question is what all ruling people and institutions are seeking from all of us. Because their very existence depends on it. A parasite can't survive without a host to feed on right? Well, emotional imagination is a parasite that withers away when you don't give it support because you can detect that it is malfunctioning. Imagination is relevant only for material survival, not for psychological comforting.

Why is just about everything that is advertised is founded upon emotions, and does that have any connection with Superstition & Fear?

Over the years, I have tested many Internet marketing systems of making money. And, every single one of them are centered around an emotional idea or a belief. Internet marketing affiliates are always being pressured to blindly agree, support and promote the systems emotional ideology along with the physical products and/or services. Nobody questions the validity of promoting any belief whatsoever. Hardly anyone questions exactly what a belief or any psychological concept really is. It's pure imagination based on your desire of greed that easily acquiesces to promote a make-believe thing along with a real product or service. After all, how did humanity start believing? It was out of fear and ignorance about itself and its environment, right? Whatever the human mind cannot understand, it makes up something and then begins to praise it. After several generations take up the traditional pattern of accepting falsehoods and holding them up to being reverent, it becomes an automatic habit to just play along with the way things are set up and to never question it. The most fearful will seek to hurt or kill you if you expose anything false about the false thing that they hold up to be true.

Just because a lot of profit was made by those who set up these money making systems, that does not mean that the profit was obtained, honestly. When you encourage people to emotionally conform to any ideal, dogma or whatever you may call it, you are either knowingly or unknowingly spreading conflict, inequality and destruction. The mind has been molded for centuries to operate in conflict. It wants it to be a fact that there is no other way to function. Whenever someone points out the grave error of building your whole life on top of a faulty foundation of make-believe, nobody wants to hear that. Because, one is too afraid of learning a new way of living. Also, the mind has become twisted and deranged craving domination, superiority and playing “god” whenever you go to war and destroy lives. The mind has become comfortably numb to its cruelty and pretense of loving its inner circle of so-called friends and family.

Therefore, most people like to pretend to be something that they are not. Every kind gesture or deed is to conceal acts of violence and cruelty. The only way to be genuinely kind is when the mind is Loving itself by seeing itself as it is, not the way it would like itself to be. Being in touch with your whole emotional being is the highest form of honesty, harmony and benevolence. So long as the mind is being contradictory by pretending to be virtuous by trying to live up to a bunch of emotional concepts, the mind is fighting The Truth, which is self-hatred that is incapable of Loving itself or anyone else.

So when some inventor of a money-making system instructs me to promote his emotional belief about his products or services, I see that is poisonous and I give a disclaimer that states that I am not promoting or endorsing any philosophical claims or beliefs and that I'm only offering the products and/services that do no harm to our health, economy or environment. And, I state that no amount of wealth can make anyone happy or psychologically balanced and secure. Only self-awareness from moment-to-moment in ones daily life can bring true serenity of mind. If having lots of money was the key to happiness then nobody who was rich would have ever committed suicide or used their money to further the slaughter of human beings over the centuries.

That is why “The Venus Project” that's being promoted on You Tube, is a hoax. Their philosophy in a nutshell is that people are violent because they don't have adequate physical security. So “The Venus Project” is pretending to be humanity's salvation. It will scientifically gather all of the planets resources and regulate it. Then if anybody displays violence, they will be quarantined and chemically dissected to figure out how to medically sedate that person and strip out their thoughts and feelings that are hostile. They think that the scientific method is the panacea for all human problems. It has been tried by the Russian government and failed. The Ancient Greeks have tried to formulate a peaceful society. But, it is impossible to bring peace from the external environment into the internal emotional realm.

The emotional realm can only be observed, holistically, through communing with ALL states of mind that arise in any present moment of ones life. Each mind has to do that for and by itself. Just like nobody can eat for you, sleep for you, use the restroom for you, nobody can observe your emotional state of mind for you, either. Human mind can never be saved by another person or group of people or any drug. The act of Love is Holistic Self-Observation. There is no substitute for that one fact. They can build perfect machines, but our mind that is at war with itself will use any form of technology as a means to destroy itself. Why? Simply because the only thing that will stop our minds from operating as a WMD is for it to be in full contact with itself and to understand that thinking cannot change itself. It can only deceive itself while it destroys itself, if it does not clearly see itself without introducing an opposite ideal born out of its imagination. Imagination is a detriment whenever its inherent limitations are not thoroughly detected and understood.

Is it not possible to conduct business matters without introducing emotionalism and traditional social-superstition?

In order to go beyond a psychological thing, one must study, examine or observe the obstacle or problem. The reason why our problems appear to be fixed in stone is because we have been emotionally compromised through punishment and reward – just like how dogs or circus animals were trained to act in a certain way to get fed. They give out medals, awards, trophies as emotional indicators that you are doing what is expected of you. But when you brutally compete against others to try to prove that you are superior (which is purely emotionalism), you are doing your part to destroy our entire species. The emotional mind only builds just so that it can contradict itself by destroying whatever it builds. By smashing things to pieces, it gives an emotional sensation that one is mighty and a force to be reckoned with. It's all a great pretense in order to cover up the fact that the mind is imploding in on itself, emotionally.

The less the mind is in touch with itself, the more destructive it becomes. If you will examine closely, you will see that everything is set up to keep the mind distracted away from truly being in touch with itself. All of the pretending to be happy, at peace, etc. is nothing but an elaborate smoke screen to conceal the fact that the mind is at odds within itself and it is isolated and lonely. The more the mind pretends by promoting make-believe ideals while it is doing business, the more it is spreading inequality and social misery. The mind cannot be free of its social pretending until it faced the absolute fact that it is, in fact, pretending. Now if an Internet system does operate the way it is advertised and you test it out to see that it does, there is no need at all to say that you believe in this money making system. The reality speaks for itself. I don't need to believe that I am full after eating a meal. My full stomach is the fact that speaks for itself and I don't have to believe in any fact. Either a thing exists or it does not exist and believing does not alter it one way or the other.

Belief was born out of the fear of not understanding how things work. But when the mind observes things directly, that very observation of the thing being observed tells its story. And if your mind is not blocked up with imagines, it can be in touch with the reality. When the mind is in touch with any fact, it is not able to fear it, anymore. Also people are emotionally insecure so they are always greedily seeking other people to worship or praise them. If a mind is learning about itself through sensing everything that it is thinking and feeling without trying to change what it is thinking and feeling, then the mind is whole and does not crave any form of flattery. It is happy to operate anonymously because it is the constant perceiving of itself, factually, that makes the mind whole. A thing that is whole can no longer feel the urge to seek emotional compliments from anyone. That becomes childish and meaningless.

Hence, such a self-aware mind can only offer the material or physical aspects of a product or service and leave out the pretense of believing. Imagination is being abusive when it is used for anything other than mechanical purposes. I use an image to make a recipe for a meal, or plot a route to travel somewhere, or when I speak or do financial calculations, etc. But whenever imagination is used to soothe your emotional state of being, the mind is dividing itself into fiction versus fact. And since the emotional mind's condition (of either being divided or whole) is the foundation of human survival, a cracked foundation is unstable and is not able to support the building (which is your physical/material needs). War destroys physical security. But the way that certain groups get to keep the resources that they have is by scapegoating other groups of people (who are mentally divided against themselves). They become the fall-guy so that other privileged groups of believers may keep their ill-gotten gains (through using an emotional belief to materially profit).

Is not superstition contradictory to facts?

Isn't it trickery to persuade people to buy something by using emotional phrases to lure the buyer to your product or service? Is that not secretive psychological warfare? So doesn't that mean that emotional deception is what is actually being sold, more so than the material product or service? In essence, the service or product is irrelevant. What is the target is your mind being crippled so that it can no longer perceive reality for itself. It is emotionally blind to itself and is being led. The Emotional Self prefers to focus on the inconsistencies of others in order to ignore their own contradictory emotional state of being. Superficially, the Emotional Self may have different styles of clever, cunning ways of pretending to help improve people lives while doing business. So they tell their affiliates to blindly accept that they are using fair and ethical business practices. That, after all, remains to be seen as one actually does business with them. Actions are facts that expose whether or not the business or company is operating properly or not.

Whenever a group of people get together, then their superstitions drive their conduct. One of people's greatest superstitions is that, “I must emotionally conform or else I wont survive” (if I'm cast out of the emotional-social circle). But why not question the validity of what most people have superstitiously accepted as being “normal”, “the greater-good” or “justifiable”? Simply because this emotional pattern has existed for such a very long time, we automatically obey without question, right? Therefore, our mind degenerates while it believes or desires to presume that it is emotionally secure. Plus, there is the assumption that, “Because I am psychologically secure, then I must also be physically secure, as well.” However, that is a false premise.

Whatever condition the emotional part of our being is in, it has a direct impact on our material or physical elements of our lives, too. So if the emotional-mind (the entity that “likes” & “dislikes”, that chooses to ignore or concentrate on about how we personally and deeply feel about ourselves). It is this area of our being, which also happens to be the very foundation of our entire being, that must be clearly and accurately observe. It is this communion of awareness of false-thinking that our mind is having with itself that awakens Wisdom, Clarity and Harmony. As long as our mind is blind to its inherent limitations, which is that it is only capable of self-destruction whenever it tries to fix itself through using itself. Itself is emotional-based memory that cannot go beyond itself by fantasizing or believing that it has gone beyond itself. It is only emotional verbiage to think that one has gone beyond the parts of its nature that it dislikes. The TRUTH IS that thought cannot get rid of thought without complete destruction. So the emotional mind is still primitive because it still thinks that The Observer (Thinker) is different from The Observed (Thought). But if you will examine your mental responses you will see directly for yourself that your thoughts are YOU (The Observer/Thinker). That is the reason why the emotional-mind cannot fix itself through using emotional past images to misdirect ones mind into jumping to the conclusion that it has escaped from the part of its nature that it dislikes. This is self-deceit and brings about destructive behavior with world, with society.

Human relationships are based or rooted in whether or not one is aware of ones entire psychological nature. If the mind is not directed in contact with itself, it is in a state of disintegration, degeneration and chaos/disorder. So the behavior will reflect the fact that the mind is out of touch with its whole nature. So the foundation of our lives is imploding in on itself and it is ripping up the material world (our ecosystem).

But, the tradition of maintaining the Superstitious Mindset is what most people in the world are obsessed with preserving at all cost – even if it means the total destruction of the world. The Superstitious Mind is not concerned with understanding anything about itself. It wants to keep making dangerous problems in the material world so that we ignore the maker of all these thousands of problems. The greatest hoax is that people are trying to resolve problems. But they resolve problems through conflict, which brings about a brand new set of additional problems to replace the previous problems. These problems are made and attacked just to put on an elaborate show that there are “good guys”, “heroes” or “saviors” that are protecting our species. But, this is a not true at all.

The Superstitious Mind presumes that to oppose a bad thing automatically makes the one who opposes a so-called “good guy”. The Superstitious Mind is not free to question, “Is opposition the problem?” We've been tormented into accepting that we must choose between the emotional opposites. But, the problem is this... Your whole emotional psyche is opposite because you emotionally respond through “like” & “dislike” towards your private feelings. However, YOU are ALL of your feelings and thoughts. So whenever YOU emotionally choose to identify with one emotion, then your subconscious identifies with the rejected thought or feeling. That means that the Superstitious Mind is divided against itself. So whenever it says that it wants to fix a problem, its other side subconsciously sabotages its superficial mind. And, that is why problems keep increasing and are getting more and more complicated.

The Superstitious Mind is all about “Reward” & “Punishment” in order to try to achieve an emotional self-image of being better than other people. Egotistical fulfillment is the origin of ALL Human problems (including those problems that have damaged our biosphere). The Superstitious Mind is programmed from thousands of years ago to never truly understand/detect its entire nature. There is a enormous pressure of psychological or emotional fear that hinders the mind from examining itself, without manipulating the examination in order to fulfill its emotional desire. In essence, The Superstitious Mind is Emotional Desire that refuses to clearly see itself. It avoids being holistically aware of itself by choosing to concentrate on one side of its nature and to ignore the side that it dislikes. This brings about contradiction, hypocrisy and disharmony/imbalance.

By realizing that my mind is both positive & negative, then the mind is free to clearly see that there is nothing to choose, since I am both “Day” & “Night” or that I'm “Heads” & “Tails” of ONE EMOTIONAL-COIN. In that Neutral State of Awareness, then the negative & positive expressions of my mind do not clash because The Holistic Self-Observation pays equal attention to either side of the psyche. So the Holistic Self-Awareness communes with ones Entire Mind.

So whenever news reports present themselves as something to choose between, you will clearly see the hoax. You will see that you are being asked to emotionally choose between a villain and a villain who pretends to be “good”. The so-called Dragon Slayer is nothing but a wolf in sheep's clothing. The villain and the hero both want our species to think that conflict is the solution to our misery. But all conflict does is add to it. The most deadly conflict is the emotional battle within our minds because it is the one fueling all of the external conflicts in the material or physical world. Until the psychological war ends, our external world shall be constantly under attack.

Are you anything in yourself?

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Questioner: If I have no image of myself, then I am nothing.

Krishnamurti: But are you anything anyhow? [Laughter] Please don't laugh, this is much too serious. Are you anything in yourself? Strip yourself of your name, title, money, position, your little capacity to write a book and be flattered and what are you? So, why not realize and be that? You see, we have an image of what it is to be nothing, and we don't like that image; but the actual fact of being nothing, when you have no image, may be entirely different. And it is entirely different. It is not a state that can be realized in terms of being nothing or of being something. It is entirely different when there is no image of yourself. And to have no image of yourself demands tremendous attention, tremendous seriousness. It is only the attentive, the serious, that live, not the people who have images of themselves. - Krishnamurti, Collected Works, Vol. XV,196, Choiceless Awareness

The nature of Superstition is to protect its ignorance by resisting understanding itself. It resists being clear about its emotions. Emotions are fighting against itself. The nature of Superstition is to be influenced by fear based on desire. Once you desire an emotional outcome, you simultaneously fear not being able to get what you want. Fear blocks the mind from being in touch with itself because it is trying to ignore anything that the mind dislikes about itself. So the mind lies to itself. If it feels weak, it pretends to be courageous. The pain disguises itself to itself by pretending to be the opposite of what it is feeling or thinking. But all things born out of its opposite is still the essence of its origin (pain). Mind can never escape from itself. To do so, is a suicide mission.

Whenever the Superstitious Mind is challenged with facts, it simply uses emotionally dramatic tactics to side step anything that may expose and/or embarrass it. The Superstitious Mind is a Slave and Imprisoned by its own emotional fear. The entire world is made out of Superstitious Traditional Fear. The mind can only try to ceaselessly escape into delusions (called beliefs, opinions, etc.), or the mind is in direct contact with its emotional responses of any daily challenge. But, there is no third state of being. One is either in touch with reality or one is not. The Superstitious Mind struggles to remain ignorant about what it is doing to itself.

All of these conflicts going on are vortexes trying to suck our minds into taking sides of the conflict. To choose is to be in conflict. Conflict IS the only problem. When I'm asked to choose between a villain and a so-called hero, I see that there is nothing to choose because whoever wins the fight will create another form of tyranny and despair. Because, the problem is not overpowering someone or group that is being cruel. There needs to be an end to problems through understanding exactly what is causing conflict, choice or resistance to observe emotional pain. In physical pain, the goal is to remove the pain as quickly as possible. But in emotional pain, pulling away only exasperates the pain because our mind IS that pain so when it tries to avoid pain it is trying to avoid itself, which is impossible. The innate function of the mind is to commune and understand all of its emotional responses. It can't do that if it picks pieces of its nature to be aware of and ignore the rest. That psychological ignorance is the very root of all Human problems of living.

The only reason why the Human Race is under physical assault everyday is because each Human is seeking emotional permanent comfort through lies and self-deceit, either knowingly or unknowingly. This ambition to fulfill a fantasy that emotionally comforts you, is the reason why there is physical covert attacks all around us. And everywhere you go, you are being pressured into taking sides and choosing to emotionally identify with a race, nation or any dogmatic cult or ancient religious organization, then you are a part of this disintegrating world. To step out of this dimension of horror takes no time. You either see what you are in each present moment or you are in a state of self-destruction, psychologically and ultimately, physically. Either stay asleep or wake up now!