More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

by Bernardo Kastrup

As such, the symbolic obfuscated mind is less constrained in the way it organizes its cognitive processes than the linguistic intellect.

As argued carefully in an earlier work, I believe that the logical constraints of the human intellect are very useful but ultimately arbitrary.53 After all, one cannot logically argue for the absolute validity of logic without begging the question.

Truth can be intuited even when it cannot be articulated in language. Such intuition is rooted in our broader obfuscated mind, which can apprehend—in symbolic ways—aspects of reality beyond the grasp of our self-reflective thoughts and perceptions.

Faith is the sincere emotional openness to the transcendent truths connoted by a story, beyond the superficial, literal appearances of the story’s denotations.

Plausibility is key for the images used in any religious myth. And plausibility changes with the zeitgeist and the views of a culture.

Perhaps plausibility is resolved by understanding the mythical as "as if" forms of relating to reality.

Cynically dismissing all religious myths is tantamount to closing one’s eyes to the shadows projected by truth.

Moreover, if one grants validity only to the world of shadows, a logical implication is that shadows with different shapes cannot be concurrently true. Since the transcendent reality—the place where these differences are reconciled—is intellectually dismissed, the differences in shape must imply true contradictions.

Because of its very nature, there are no arbiters of mythical veracity other than intuition. The validity of a religious myth is not decidable by the intellect. We may each see a different but equally valid projection—or shadow—of a transcendent truth in the form of the myth that best resonates with our hearts. As such, it is hopeless to try to identify a fully objective, dispassionate criterion for judging which myths are valid. Fundamentalism is untenable because it depends on there being just such a fully objective standard of transcendent truth.

Ultimately, we are each responsible for the sincerity, attention and discernment with which we listen to the whispers of our obfuscated mind.

The building blocks of facts and religious myths are the same. This may sound like a casual and insignificant point, but it suggests an astounding possibility: Could the ordinary events of life themselves be pointing to transcendent truths? Could nature be connoting something fundamentally beyond or behind what it seems to denote?

Even the mere fact that we sleep and dream—believing the dream to be real while we are in it—seems suspiciously like a hint about the transcendent nature of existence,

‘Holy art Thou, O God … of whom All-nature hath been made an image. … Holy art thou, transcending all pre-eminence … unutterable, unspeakable,’ sings the Hermetic myth.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, a twentieth century Indian sage, was less-than-cryptic about this idea: ‘When you see the world you see God. There is no seeing God apart from the world. Beyond the world to see God is to be God,’ he stated.74

This ‘something else’ may be trying to reach out to us by appealing to our interpretative capacities. It may be posing the question: ‘Here is consensus reality, the best representation of myself that I can produce. Can you figure out what it really means?’ The question isn’t necessarily rhetorical or redundant, for the ‘something else’ may not know the answer. In fact, we may be the means through which it hopes to solve the riddle. We may be nature’s best shot at coming up with the answer. We may be the ones responsible for helping the sun of self-reflective awareness to rise and illuminate this conundrum. For all we know, there is no other game in town.

The delusory myth of personal identity and separateness is at the root of human suffering. It is also at the root of our loss of contact with transcendence.

Indeed, suffering arises from the ego’s inability, yet compulsive need, to control the world. If it could dictate nature’s behavior, we would all be happy tyrants.

Whatever evolutionary pressure pushed the human organism towards self-reflection also rendered it vulnerable to the myth of separateness.

Moreover, because we cannot derive meaning from the outer realm without interpreting it, by rejecting interpretative effort the no-myth traditions may also mislead us towards the conclusion that consensus reality is meaningless.

Even if consensus reality is indeed an illusion, why does the illusion look and feel like this, instead of something else? What does this—in all its details and nuances—say about the fundamental nature of whatever is generating the illusion? Do you see what I am trying to suggest? Something beyond our egos must be giving rise to the illusion of consensus reality, in the same way that a loudspeaker gives rise to sound.

For the same reason that the sounds produced by a loudspeaker say something about the loudspeaker’s structure—even though the structure is incommensurable with the sounds—the illusions we call consensus reality may be saying something about a transcendent truth. If they are, it is certainly not futile to actively engage our capacity for self-reflection and inquire into the images of the world.

The true value of self-reflection is not in answering, but in asking. As we’ve seen above, the self-reflective but language-limited intellect will never be able to produce the transcendent answer to the riddle of life. But by progressively refining the way the riddle is posed—that is, the way the questions are asked—the intellect can nudge and guide the obfuscated mind toward increasingly more insightful answers.

The very existence of religious myths reflects humankind’s archetypal quest for liberation.

The past is a mental, intellectual construct meant to give context to your present perceptions. There has never been a moment in your entire life in which the past has been anything else; I challenge you to find one.

Our commitment to the objectivity of the past arises, thus, from self-validating mental processes. It survives because of our inability to notice how we deceive ourselves; our inability to become lucid of the many nuanced layers of our own mentation.

The sophistication and skill with which we trick ourselves in these circular cognitive games is dazzling. We imagine a future wherein we remember a past wherein we predicted a future that matches the future we are now imagining.

The present moment is an intangible singularity containing all existence. It seeds a cognitive ‘big bang’ unfolding in the human mind, whereby intrinsic attributes of the singularity are symbolically projected onto past and future, in the form of myths. These myths conjure up the volume and substantiality of experience.

The problem is not our experiences. The problem is what we make of them with our intellect. Instead of contemplating our experiences in an open and self-reflective manner, trying to sense their symbolic meaning in a way analogous to how a therapist analyzes dreams, we continuously search for external references in a futile quest to determine their ‘validity.’

‘It was just a dream’ is probably the most pernicious, damaging thing that good, well-meaning parents say to their children. It inculcates the notion that each and every experience is to be categorized as either nothing or other; that each and every experience must either be killed or exiled. By doing this, we surrender intimacy with our own lives and become estranged from ourselves. The insanity here is plain to see: an experience is never nothing; it comes from somewhere; it is formed and arises in some way; it reveals something; it is an integral part of nature at some level. And an experience is never an external tyrant: Where else could it exist if not in ourselves, the experiencers?

Ironically, thus, our neurotic attempt at self-preservation is precisely what causes the existential despair from which we succumb, as discussed in Part I. This is our present dilemma.

We have internalized so deeply the reflex to first categorize before acknowledging experience that it has become automatic. Unthinkingly, we spend much of our cognitive resources adjudicating ‘validity’ instead of heeding the symbolic messages that reality holds about ourselves. We are busy checking the provenance of the envelope instead of reading the letter. This is an arbitrary game and a tragedy unique to the modern and contemporary ages.

Consensus experiences live in a transpersonal cognitive space, instead of an individual mind. It is this collective momentum that motivates us to attribute more reality to shared experiences than to private reveries.

See that the only real value of any explanation or prediction is symbolic and that the only meaningful way to interpret them is as icons of the now.

But if I were to follow you down the hole and engage you there, on the terms, assumptions and internal logic of the cultural game, I wouldn’t be of any help to you. Any discussion at that level would just reinforce the ‘story,’ because it would be inherently circular like our ‘definitions’ of space and time, as well as the linguistic operation of the intellect.

Religious myths are, by and large, explanations and predictions. They do not correspond to facts outside mind, but neither do scientific cosmologies. The only value of any religious myth or scientific cosmology is symbolic. The only meaningful way to interpret them is as icons of the now.

The transcendent truths these myths point to are the truths of our own nature, for there’s nothing ‘out there.’ And it is the religious myths themselves that prime us for this realization. God’s birth in the world as the Christ, Brahman’s self-creation through the cosmic egg, Karora’s rise within his own dream, Nainema’s incursion into his own vision, all illustrate the self-referential nature of reality and, therefore, the internal character of truth.

A minor instance of this kind of projection can even be caught at work when we, for instance, colloquially refer to our own neuroses as assailing ‘demons.’ Thus, what seems to be the worship of external agencies is, in fact, a conversation with estranged aspects of ourselves through symbolic proxy.

As Swedenborg put it, ‘One should not omit the practice of external worship. Things inward are excited by external worship.’

The essence of a myth lies in its symbolic pointing at the internal truths of cognition; truths

When a house of worship begins to resemble a court of law, where the emphasis is on passing judgment and casting blame, one must wonder.

An individual mind is formed when a segment of mind-at-large collapses into itself, creating a point of dense, highly localized cognitive activity. This singularity subsequently gives rise to the cognitive ‘big bang’ discussed earlier. Each living being thus corresponds to one among countless such singularities in mind-at-large. A metabolizing body is simply what the singularity looks like from the outside.

Instead of a shared world outside mind, what we have is a collective part of mind that we don’t identify with and cannot control. Our perceptions and transcendent insights originate from this collective part, while our thoughts and fantasies arise in our personal mind.

Some things have to be believed to be seen. Ralph Hodgson

‘But isn’t your ordinary waking reality ultimately also a mental experience?’ the Other asked, in seeming awareness of what I was thinking. ‘All you can know about it is experiential. Whatever else reality may be, apart from your experience of it, is just an abstraction of your intellect, forever beyond your life.’

‘Your confusion arises from a fundamental inversion: it is your head that is in your mind, not your mind in your head.

‘What you are saying is that this realm feels so real to me not because it is material, but because the ordinary waking world I consider real is, just like this realm, mental …’

Reality is a feeling.

This realm is real not despite being in mind, but because it is in mind.’

Yet, the instinctive and concrete sense of “I” that you feel right now, which precedes and couches all your perceptions, thoughts, emotions and memories, is mind-at-large. This way, mind-at-large really is the felt you; it just isn’t your concept of you.

Only the dense internal associations of a cluster enable one layer of cognition to become an object of inquiry of another layer of cognition. In other words, they enable you to think about your thoughts. And only by thinking about your thoughts can you formulate the probing questions required to make sense of existence.

‘To change a belief system, you have to become lucid of the layers of cognition that underlie and give rise to it. In other words, you have to go at least one layer deeper than the layers where the belief system itself resides. And you have to do it in a critical, self-reflective manner.’