What would you say is the enemy of people’s creative experience? Some might say it’s the devil. And some people see the devil in other people.
I don’t believe in that. It’s clear to me that the enemy of a creative human experience is simply this: Ignorance. And with ignorance comes something else: Superstition. If you don’t know what is really happening, you tend to have superstitious beliefs about the powers at work in the world around you and superstitious ideas about how to deal with those powers.
Superstition is an ancient plague for humankind. There are many ancient stories of human beings placating the gods, trying to gain their favor. Famously, the Greeks believed that the Battle of Troy was caused by jealousy among the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. The Carthaginians sacrificed to their god, Baal Hammon, to make the crops grow.
Ancient people would sacrifice to gods to get on their good side, even to the point of child sacrifice, which took place around the world. It’s horrible to think about, but true.
The origin of Judeo-Christian culture was characterized by attempts to elevate the consciousness of people out of superstition, and out of the pattern of child sacrifice. That’s the story of Abraham, who was about to sacrifice his son, Isaac. He was on the brink of doing the deed when he realized that this was not truly what God was asking of him.
Moses preached vehemently against the sacrifice of Israelite children to the Canaanite god, Molech. Nonetheless, at times, the Israelites were lured into this ancient superstitious practice.
Exactly what is superstition? Merriam-Webster describes it this way:
1a: a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation
b: an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition
2: a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary
Does any of that sound familiar? Do you think we have any superstitions in today’s culture?
Here is how Stevie Wonder said it in his hit song “Superstition”:
When you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer.
The Israelite leaders, and the Jewish leaders who carried on their legacy, had some success in changing this pattern of consciousness. Nonetheless, what they presented to the people tended to be seen through the lens of superstition. And though the people were taught to love God, the ignorance that gripped human consciousness was a well-established pattern.
Jesus continued the battle to overcome ignorance and superstition. And what overcomes it? Knowledge.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32
When we know something, our ignorance of it is dispelled. And with it goes the superstitious beliefs that give power to forces outside us.
Jesus taught the origins of true knowing—love, and especially love for the ultimate Cause of all things, the Creator. When you know that ultimate Cause, the false conception of causation fades.
Jesus was not the first person to teach love for the supernatural. But previous to him, the ancient world bought into a fearful, superstitious love from afar. That kind of love was born from a sense of helplessness and victimhood. As you read the Old Testament, it is easy to see how ancient superstitious tendencies crept into the story. Often, the characters in the stories attempted to appease the wrathful tendencies of the supernatural in which they believed. That brand of love didn’t bring a person closer to the supernatural. People don’t come to know the Creator through that process. They remained ignorant unless they woke up from the superstitious mindset.
Jesus taught a love that brought a human being, and certainly brought himself, into an experience of closeness, spiritual intimacy, union, and ultimately oneness. This is from what people refer to as his prayer of intercession:
That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us.
John 17:21
Yes, he taught people to love. But more than that, he led people on a path to the fulfillment of their love for God—oneness.
Think about what happens when you truly love somebody. I’m not talking about loving a rock star or a movie star from afar. That’s an unfulfilled love. When you really love someone, and they love you, you draw close together. You join.
It works like that for any kind of love with another person. When you really love somebody, that love has the opportunity to be fulfilled. And how is it fulfilled? It’s fulfilled when we draw close to them and join with them. Depending on the relationship, so is the nature of the joining. Sometimes it is a joining together to start a business or some other creative project. And sometimes it is a union that starts a family. Whatever the relationship, where there is a fulfillment of love, there is some kind of spiritual intimacy and a joining.
In this process, we come to know another person. You probably don’t know all of them. But you know that part of them with which you have joined. You don’t just have opinions about them. You don’t just believe things about them. You know that part of them with which you have joined.
And that is exactly what Jesus taught related to the Creator. He taught a love that goes both ways. We don’t just love God and hope He takes mercy on us. As Savannah Guthrie says, mostly what God does is love you. When a person knows that, it ends superstition about God.
The knowledge that comes when love for the Creator is fulfilled in a person informs a person about themselves. Knowing they are loved in that way, a person can come to love and know themselves. They come to know themselves as Creator-consciousness in human form.
Then something else happens. Jesus puts it this way, quoting from the Hebrew Bible.
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Matthew 19:19
As that love is present and fulfilled, we know our neighbor. There is no longer a need for superstition or suspicion about them.
Perhaps we don’t usually think of Jesus as fighting battles, but he was confronting the ignorance and superstition that surrounded him. It was a battle that Abraham and Moses were fighting, and it’s exactly the issue that we’re facing in the world today. There is plenty of superstition and belief in things people don’t understand.
Christianity has done a fabulous job of changing Jesus’ teaching of love and knowledge to a teaching of having faith in something you don’t know. Have faith. Believe. You’ve got to believe.
Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law.
Galatians 2:16
These words were written by the Apostle Paul, less than twenty years after Jesus lived and taught. Much of Christian teaching through the centuries has been based on this undoing of Jesus’ teaching of the fulfillment of love and of the desire to truly know, replaced by a reversion to a belief in things you don’t know or understand.
If you know someone, do you have to believe in that person? Do you have to believe they exist? Do you have to believe who they are? You know who they are. If you have an experience of the Divine, you don’t have to believe in it. It’s rocking your world every day.
Without realizing it, Christianity reverted to the superstitious mindset of the ancient world—believing in things you don’t know—and carried it forward. And so that mindset has infected the thinking of the modern world.
Christianity introduced ideas that were foreign to Jesus’ teaching or to the Jewish culture into which he was born. It wasn’t until the 3rd century A.D. that the concept of original sin was brought to the world. And it wasn’t until the 6th century A.D. that crucifixes—statues of Jesus on a cross—were introduced into churches, recalling, at least subconsciously, the practices of child sacrifice that were so rampant in the world.
Along the way, people said, Hold the phone a minute. This isn’t making a whole lot of sense, and there’s more to life than believing in things that we don’t understand and having a superstitious way of living. We need to get real here. And so, we had the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment. They were fueled by the determination that we are supposed to actually know things. We should be able to look at the facts of the world in which we live and know what is happening. The scientists and philosophers of the day were unsatisfied with the way the Christian Church taught ignorance and superstition instead of knowledge of the truth. And so they left the philosophy the church had established to pursue knowledge and to find a new basis for human culture.
The United States of America was born out of the Age of Enlightenment. The Founding Fathers embodied principles born out of that massive cultural movement in the U.S. Constitution.
The human intellect became hyperactive, and often disconnected from the teaching of love that was central to Jesus’ teaching. But still, we can see the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment as a reaction to the way that Christianity often failed to lift Western Civilization out of the mindset of a superstitious world.
This ain’t working, folks. We need something that makes some sense. We’re thinking beings here. We need to use our minds to begin to understand the world in which we live.
So, the scientific method, and all it brought with it, was born. And somewhere along the way, people began to think, All this Christianity is not bringing love, empathy, and passion to the world. Jesus might have talked about love, but actually we’re at war here and we are not caring about people or respecting them. So, humanism arose.
The movements that emerged in the second half of the second millennium marked a failure of Christianity to bring forward the teaching of love and knowing that Jesus brought.
Today, we have great segments of the populace who have bought into superstition unwittingly—the tendency to believe in things that you don’t understand. And just because somebody told them something is so, they believe it. There is faith in authority by a population that feels vulnerable, victimized, and disempowered. Meanwhile, for many, the lessons of the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment are forgotten, and so they live in a fact-free world.
Presidential historian John Meacham spoke today about facing the darkness of contemporary American society. He said that if we don’t have the moral and imaginative ability and capacity to recognize what is in front of our eyes and what we can hear with our ears, then the central thesis of the American republic is at risk. He was speaking to the principles born out of the Age of Enlightenment that formed America’s spiritual DNA.
The supposition of this article is that ancient ignorance and superstition have crept into Western Civilization, challenging all that the enlightened awareness of spiritual regeneration has brought to this world. It is dressed up in new clothes. But there it is, all the same. And as John Meacham passionately asserted, we are called upon to see it for what it is.
What is the answer? Don’t buy into it. Allow the fulfillment of love to occur in our own human experience. And so, allow the fulfillment of the desire to truly know the reality in which we live—the reality of ourselves, other people, and the source of our own life and all things. This is the remedy.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32