A Wish upon a Star

Reflections on the Challenge

Whenever you notice yourself being drawn into a collective belief, place a hand on your head. Ask yourself what you would choose from within, and notice what you feel.

• Experience

  L had faced a clash between a customary religious gathering and an artistic commitment. Noticing the pull of collective belief, he had placed a hand on his head and asked what he would choose from within. He had chosen the artistic commitment and felt relief and liberation. On another occasion, he had chosen to observe a religious holy day because it held a deeper personal significance. However, when invited to join a gathering while dealing with important domestic responsibilities, he had again used the gesture. He had felt a strong collective pull but had chosen to continue with those responsibilities.

• Responses

  N asked whether L had felt guilt about declining the invitation, and whether his decision had represented freedom from collective belief. L replied that he had felt no guilt. He had valued the day’s introspective purpose and observed it personally, without feeling obliged to join a gathering. T valued the structure provided by religious observances. N emphasised the emotional power of communal practice and shared concentration. L acknowledged the depth of religious experience but felt that this did not necessarily require belonging to a group.

• Experience

  Following a bereavement, N had participated in religious observances much more frequently than usual. Within that setting, he had questioned how far he shared the collective belief. Although he had been welcomed warmly, he had noticed that a sceptical part of him remained outside it.

• Responses

  T recognised the experience of turning to a religious community in bereavement while feeling an outsider. She valued its provision of a place where loss could be acknowledged and expressed. N added that he had found the rituals comforting despite his continuing scepticism. Rational explanations alone had not answered his emotional needs.

Beelzebub’s Tales, Chapter 33

• Passage

  in former centuries the division into different castes proceeded from the consciousness and intention of several separate individuals there, while now this proceeds quite automatically without the participation of anyone’s will or anyone’s consciousness.

• Discussion

  N suggested that habitual patterns could recreate divisions between people even where there was a conscious intention to abolish them.

• Passage

  When, according to various chance circumstances, and wherever significant groups of them became concentrated and they exist together, then several of them—in whom firstly for some reason or other the consequences of the properties of the organ Kundabuffer had been previously well crystallized, the totality of which crystallizations in general gives to their common presences the impulses for what is called ‘cunning,’ and secondly, in whose hands at the given time there appear for some reason or other many different, what are called ‘terrifying means,’ or what they themselves call ‘weapons’—quickly set themselves apart from other beings and putting themselves at their head, constitute the beginnings of what are called the ‘ruling class.’

• Discussion

  N suggested that ideology could serve as a moral covering for the pursuit of power, with an absence of conscience allowing people to use violence to establish their authority.

• Passage

  these terrifying processes of reciprocal-destruction and of the destruction of everything already attained by them there, proceed partly from this, that in those periods when in their common presences the action of the cosmic law Solioonensius becomes evident, besides the already mentioned need for freedom, in them, on the one hand, the intensity of the action of the data for engendering constantly the impulse of ‘timidity’ before power-possessors automatically diminishes, which data has already become inherent in their common presences, and on the other hand the intensity of the action of that said strange being-data increases, which data provokes ‘hate’ in the given case in relation to the beings who belong to other castes.

• Discussion

  N understood the passage as a call to awaken to influences ordinarily unnoticed, rather than remain subject to reactions that could lead to conflict.