TRANSCRIPT
I’m all for approaching the world in a logical, scientific way to look at reality. I believe in truth. I actually believe in absolute truth. However, that’s not all of my personality, and I do believe in this thing called superstition. I just, it’s been a part of my life, and I think a part of it really does come out of being a child who was at the mercy of all these different adults who were so screwed up. I was so powerless, and I needed to hold on to things that could somehow give me a sense of stability because my external world was so unstable. My parents were so unstable that relationships with me were unstable. They had unstable relationships with their own individual selves. They had unstable relationships with each other. They had unstable relationships with their parents. My school life was unstable. My teachers had unstable relationships with me. There was so much pressure on me to be perfect in order to get loved, to fit in. I didn’t fit in a lot, and I really had a lot of insecurities in myself.
Part of how I coped with it, and sometimes coped with it not the healthiest ways, was by being superstitious. I had a lucky number. I still have a lucky number. I would pray to unseen forces that I didn’t even understand, and I wasn’t even raised in a religious way. I had some beliefs that were just not based on any sort of objective reality, like praying and wishing and hoping. I think that there was a better world than the world I was living in, better than the screwed-up adults all around me, my screwed-up family system. That’s like I needed something better to believe in, and in a way, superstition really helped me.
Now, sometimes it really did get out of control. Probably in a way that if psychiatry had gotten their hands on me back then, especially with the modern definitions of diagnosis, I probably could have been called OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s like the fine line between superstition and obsession can be close, especially when one’s so-called obsessions or superstitions don’t follow a conventionally accepted religious tradition, like some of my lucky numbers and don’t step on cracks, and you have to do this thing a certain number of times. But I still have some of these qualities. I’m still kind of superstitious. I still have sort of the superstitious relationship with numbers sometimes, and they’re kind of important to me, and sometimes it helps me cope.
Now, I know I’m kind of painting this in a negative way, like, “Oh, I’m just using superstition in a sort of crazy way to control my stability, my unstable environment.” And maybe it’s true. Maybe I’m pushing my analytic skills on myself a little bit too much. But then there’s another part of me that’s like, you know, since I first got out in the world and started traveling alone and hitchhiking especially, and being often in nature and in strange places, living in the wilderness, camping alone, I look up at the heavens, and that’s a star. So, shooting stars, and I’d see the moon, and I’d see planets, and I just felt like I had a guiding star over me. I felt like somehow, in some way that I couldn’t explain, the world was loving me and it was taking care of me. And there was no real logical explanation for it. It was just an intuitive feeling that I was safe, and I don’t know where that came from. And it was kind of superstitious in a way, and I still have it.
I still have this weird feeling that somehow I’m being loved by the universe and I’m being taken care of. And that’s not to say bad things haven’t happened to me, and it’s not to say also that if some horrible thing did happen to me that all this feeling or having a guiding star couldn’t be stripped away. But I also say that some bad things have happened to me in my adult life. Horrible things have happened, and you know, I have lost some of that faith, but it keeps coming back. That comes back to that subject of faith, faith, faith, faith. It’s faith. Superstitious in a way? Is it superstitious to believe that the world is good, that the universe is good, that somehow the world loves me? Maybe it is.
I mean, I know there’s another part of me that looks up at the moon and says, you know, it’s just a big chunk of rock spinning around our chunk of rock, and our chunk of rock is spinning around this big star. And there’s a billion or a trillion or a billion trillion stars in the universe, probably with zillions of planets, and who knows? And it’s all just neutral, and there is no good and there is no bad. And part of me feels that philosophy, and there’s another part of me that’s like, you know, there is good. And I think even in a way, just believing in good and the value and goodness and the power of goodness, and somehow the goodness of the world and the goodness of humanity, the goodness in me, the innate goodness of the true self, not the neutrality of it all, not the objectivity and the scientific neutrality, but the goodness, the goodness of my guiding star, the goodness of signs and symbols out in the universe that may actually seem to be nothing, just could be my complete interpretation of putting meaning into something that’s actually meaningless.
But having purpose, finding meaning, feeling meaning deep inside, that maybe that’s superstition also. And somehow in me, I have it, and I don’t really want to get rid of it, and I like it. And even if it’s totally artificial and made just by me, and it’s just trying to have me put positivity and put value and, you know, smother meaning all over this existence that might otherwise be meaningless, I like it, and it helps me.
I think also what I think is by me feeling this way, by me living for this, living for the sense of value and purpose and believing in the goodness of myself, ultimately in the goodness of other people, even people who do really screwed-up things, and maybe their whole large orientation toward life is pretty screwed up too, underneath it, to believe in their fundamental goodness, their fundamental capacity to change, the fundamental capacity of our whole world to change, of our species to actually evolve, no matter how screwed up we have become and how screwed up more screwed up we may become in the future. Believing in this goodness, I don’t think it’s such a bad way to be.
And I don’t think some of my little peccadilloes of, you know, superstition and special numbers to me and special things that I do sometimes to make my world feel like it’s a little bit more secure, and sometimes it can feel so insecure, like even putting up videos where I take a risk and open my mouth and talk about things that people might shoot down and call me crazy and call me weird. You know, sometimes I’m even superstitious when I take a deep breath and count to 20 and press release, and the video goes out for the world to like or dislike, to consume or reject. Well, I think I’m gonna stick with it because it’s just, it’s just a part of me. And it’s just, I think also an honest acknowledgement of a different side of me that really is there, always has been there to one degree or other, probably likely always will be.