Why Superstitions

All humans have an innate desire to control things all around themselves even though it is not possible in most of the cases. When some thing is found to be beyond control, the person perceives through his/her imaginative power and may see anything based on his/her background and education. Faith in existence of ghosts is more prevalent in societies where children are traditionally told ghost stories to entertain them. Such stories when repeated many times get embedded in subconscious minds of the children. And whenever they find something beyond their normal perceptions, their sub-conscious mind takes control and makes them to perceive ghosts in forms of the characters of stories told to them. Similar perceptions are prevalent about Gods and Goddesses in many societies all over the globe. Such imaginary things are all superstitions taking roots from sub-conscious minds of the people.


Knowledge is directly related to control which means anything unknown is found to be beyond control. So, any thing unknown to a person may be perceived as any other thing which he/she knows or has heard about - real or imaginary.If the thing is beyond his/her knowledge of something real, his/her imaginative power makes him/her to perceive an imaginary thing This also leads to a superstition.


If you are in a particular set of mind at an instant, and somebody says something which does not become clear to you, you link the voice with your frame of mind and imagine the words related to that. So, a person wants others to say to meet his/her need at that moment and imagines accordingly. The person in this instance being a prisoner of his/her frame of mind, fails to exert any control on his/her organs to perceive the reality and goes by his/her own thought waves. Such temporary deficiency of control also leads to a superstitious imagination.


Neurons carry information signals in our bodies from one point to the other. All neurons on the way may not be healthy or tuned to isolate the real topical signals from other distractions and involvements of mind and so may carry many more signals, even undesirable at a moment. Such signals are often called as noise. Sch noises often limit our powers of perception and things look beyond our control and understanding. This leads to our misunderstanding the reality as something in our sub-conscious mind. So, such noises also lead to superstitions.


Thus, superstitions about God, ghosts, super-natural, extra-terrestrial, etc. are games played by our sub-conscious minds for various reasons.