Are you superstitious or scientific?

I want to begin by commending you!  Clearly, if you are here, you are truly committed to your growth and development.  And like me, you have a strong desire to discover the sense in the world.  People like you and me, when we don’t understand something, we know that it simply means that we have more to learn.  We also have a deep belief in ourselves that we are capable of learning it, given enough time and resources.

You’re probably also here because there is more you want in life that you haven’t achieved yet.  To be honest, I don’t feel that there is someplace we will finally “arrive” and be done with life.  I believe that for people like us, we will be looking to continue growing and achieving greater things until we leave this planet.  At some point, we reach the limit of what we already know how to do.  We still have these big goals but our results start to become erratic and unpredictable.  We feel that we are unable to control the outcome in our life as much as we used to.

At that point, people do one of two things.  Either they feel that life must, therefore, be due to some mysterious factor.  Or they realize that they simply haven’t yet learned the connection, but it is out there and they can understand it if they look deeper.

Let’s look at the first way – that life is due to some mysterious reasons.  Another word for this is “superstitious.”  At one point in the history of civilization, this was the norm for society.  People thought they had to do certain things just right or they would experience negative consequences.  For example, ancient people thought that spilling salt brought bad luck, and they would nullifying the bad luck by throwing a pinch of it over their left shoulders.  So in this way of thinking, someone might spill salt and then get an illness.  Those people would chalk it up to the salt spilling.  But one day, we discovered germs and how they work.  The salt spiller was exposed to a germ which caused the illness. 

The difference between these two ways of believing the world works is in the correlation with results.  When you find an actual reason for something, the results will correlate.  Superstitious actually comes from a Latin word that means “excessive fear of the Gods.”  And the definition of superstitious is: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, or a false conception of causation.

Superstition is where a lot of people still live – in the belief that life is due to some mysterious factors that they can’t influence with certainty.  But then there are other people.  These people, like you and me, when we are faced with inexplicable results, we take that as a call to deeper understanding.  If you really want something, you will have to keep learning and discovering.

There is an explanation, but that explanation lies at the next paradigm of living.  When scientists came across results they couldn’t explain through the laws they thought were correct, they sought out to find the next level of truth.  This led them to look at new realms of our world, and the same goes for us.  To gain a new understanding, we need to develop our awareness of new parts of ourselves.

I have a lot more on how to do this in my other posts, my courses, and my coaching program.  For today, I wanted to simply call your attention to this choice point.  Where are your results not making sense?  What will you choose – will you chalk it up to the salt you spilled last year or will you take it as an invitation to investigate more thoroughly?

I want to share a favorite quote of mine by Rainer Maria Rilke:  “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

This quote is huge for me.  I used to just try to logically understand the answer, and thought that once I understood that my life would change.  However, you also have to be able to implement the answer practically, which is what this quote says to me.  Take time to understand the concepts, but still longer is needed to actually live out the information you’ve understood.  This is wisdom, which evolves over time through our use of knowledge.

Keep the faith that the answers are there, and you can understand them and use them to create that life you want!  I appreciate that there are others who feel this way, and I have someone like you to have this conversation with.  Please send me your thoughts and comments!