Reading for significance, for an exegesis into the history of a word as though it sheds light on what the word does now--is not what etymology is for, and is superstitious as all get out, so why not: "-stition," from Indo-European root, "sta-," meaning "to stand," with derivative forms indicating "a place or a thing that is standing," and which evolve to include such standing "things" as dispositions, states of mind, circumstances of existence, and from which we get "steed," "stud," and "stallion," as well as "prostitute" and "destiny" and a whole world of things standing in between.
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"Super-stition," then, translates to something like "over-standing," as opposed to, maybe, "understanding," in which it seems (suddenly to me) that comprehension, agreement, sympathy, understandings, occur through acts of submission, a standing under, maybe even a standing down. To stand over, meanwhile, might mean to dominate, to impose, to conquer. I used to think "standing over" suggested "to worship what you've put upon a pedestal," and probably that's just as right as anything else I've said here, given that to love something in that ideal kind of way is to love it for your own idea of it, and not for itself. The monks are always saying stuff like that: "the more your intelligence resembles reality, the closer you are to the truth." Which in any case goes to demonstrate here that the overabundance in the word, "super," is its over-active fantasy life, the place in which the dreamer prefers the stations of the dream.
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from the Annunciation Notebook, notes from JL's "Philosophy of Living Being"
"The danger of living in interiority is to reject the body: in order to become a contemplative I must put aside my body, that is the temptation. A lack of realism. I who see, I who love, have a certain lucidity of the interior experience of myself: 'I think therefore I am'--a certain consciousness of his eye. His I. I exist. That discovery of that I is through my vital operations, body, which is receptivity. A receiving from reality."
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