#4 When Superstitions aren't so Super: Luke and Jen share personal experiences of transcending their own superstitious beliefs: Spiral Dynamics Purple Stage: CHAPTER 3

What happens when you realize that many of the superstitious views you grew up with aren't really all that super?

In this episode of Deep Play, Luke and Jen continue exploring the magical, animistic world view of the Purple Stage of the Spiral Dynamics, but this time the journey gets personal.

As children, most of us lived for years in a world where Santa could really visit every house in one night, stuffed animals had feelings, special shoes made us run faster, stepping on a crack could injure our mother's backs, and a kiss could make a scraped knee better.

But what happens when those magical beliefs get a little more complex and carried into adulthood, like culturally reinforced superstitions or religious stories?

Magical/superstition beliefs have the power to give humans of all ages security, imagination, hope, and a way of making sense of an enormous and confusing universe. Unfortunately these same beliefs often come with significant shadows, because they also have the power to instill deeply irrational fears and harmful behaviors.The truth is most of us never entirely leave that magical world behind. Adults still carry lucky objects. Athletes perform elaborate pregame rituals. We knock on wood. We notice coincidences. We feel certain songs arrive at exactly the right moment. We sense destiny in relationships. We sometimes wonder whether an unexpected event might be a sign to us from the heavens.

Luke and Jen explore their own personal experiences with Mormon magical beliefs and how they originated in Joseph Smith's early days of treasure seeking, seer stones, visions, prophecy, angels, folk magic, and religious experimentation, along with the remarkable spiritual laboratory of early nineteenth-century America that historians call the Burned-over District. And how generations these beliefs were passed on to us as children.

But this isn't simply an episode about whether those beliefs or Mormonism as a whole are true or false.

It's about what those beliefs did for us and generations of Mormons before us. They created meaning, identity, belonging, and made us feel as though we were at the center of the universe.

For Luke, losing that worldview as he deconstructed Mormonism over the last few years has been devastating. Eventually an even deeper belief began to collapse: the idea that God, the universe, or some invisible force was divinely orchestrating the events of his life. And when the universe stopped speaking, something frightening appeared in the silence.

Nihilism.

If there was no divine plan, no cosmic choreography, no invisible hand guiding his life, then what did any of it mean?

But perhaps there is a third possibility between complete faith in cosmic magic and the terror of nihilism. Maybe we can still experience relationships, nature, a sky filled with stars and deeply touching music that seems to arrive at just the right time without believing they were cosmically orchestrated just for us, but still find awe and appreciation for their existence in our lives.

Maybe a coincidence can still be meaningful without being supernatural. Maybe shared community ritual can connect us without controlling us. Maybe spotting symbolic meaning in life events can reveal something profound without being a literal sign from the universe.

Maybe we can experience awe, beauty, transcendence, intuition, mystery, and interconnectedness while still being willing to ask: How do I actually know what I think I know?

Perhaps development isn't a journey from enchantment to disenchantment.

Perhaps it's a journey from unconscious surrender to inherited beliefs and instead a transcendent awe and appreciation for the meaning we consciously ascribe to our personal interactions with the universe.