More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

by Bernardo Kastrup

‘Because self-reflective access to a layer of cognition requires back-and-forth associative interconnections between this layer and higher layers. Without them you can’t think about your thoughts or inquire critically into your own hidden beliefs.

‘Your challenge now is to find a way to reconcile the following two truths: mental contents, on the one hand, are the behavior of mind-at-large, much like a vibration is the behavior of a guitar string or a dance is the behavior of a dancer. On the other hand, myriad mental contents exist simultaneously in mind-at-large, without requiring time or space to co-exist. In summary, mind-at-large expresses itself to itself through many simultaneous, overlapping behaviors.’

This is what gives you your sense of reality: you “forget” that, through your imagination, your own beliefs generate what you perceive. Because of this amnesia, you find yourself inside and subject to those beliefs.

‘Belief, when experienced from within, generates a reality. Looking behind belief, in turn, gives away the secret and reveals the imaginary nature of this reality. Consensus reality is the belief you humans, as a species, don’t look behind.’

We don’t eat a nice meal, make love or travel to beautiful locations just to understand or make sense of something. We do these things because the experiences themselves imbue our lives with a kind of timeless meaning, independent of comprehension. We are the vehicles through which God both experiences and understands Itself.

‘There are myriad tangles in mind-at-large, myriad cognitive realms, universes. Yours is but one among countless others. The truths you take for granted—the laws of classical physics, the rules of classical logic—aren’t fundamental, but reflect one among many circular belief systems … The most fundamental reality is a form of emptiness pregnant with infinite potential …’

‘These vague, ambiguous ideas and feelings are a kind of wave of possibilities that percolates upwards through our cognitive structure, getting filtered according to the expectations and beliefs in higher layers. Then, whatever possibility survives the filtering congeals in the form of a concrete, classical reality at the level of clusters.’

‘if the ordinary world around us suggests its reverse side—that is, God’s perspective—then the world is a symbol of something transcendent. It points to what God thinks and feels when conceiving the universe into existence.’

The vibrations of mind-at-large are themselves symbols of its own intrinsic—but forever elusive—nature. They reflect that which vibrates, as the notes produced by a guitar string reflect the intrinsic nature of the string.’

‘Love nurtures but also smothers, depending on the dose and perspective. And death is part of the dynamics that keep the universe unfolding. The “perfect,” deathless world your ego fantasizes about would be a world in which nothing truly evocative happens, like a movie without a villain. Luckily for you, egos don’t run the universe; they just observe and question it.’

‘This immediately raises the question of what death feels like from the perspective of the dying …’ ‘You tell me,’ he challenged me again. ‘Right. Well, if entering the world means a change of perspective from conceiving to dreaming, then exiting it must entail the opposite change: from dreaming to conceiving.’

As one becomes more apt at uncovering the magician’s tricks—that is, more lucid of one’s own underlying cognitive processes—one begins to realize that the magician does it all for love. The tricks are gifts that allow one to express, interact with, and feel the full potential of one’s own mind in the form of imagined sensations, feelings, thoughts, insights, etc. It is this recognition of the trick as a gift of love that opens the door to the next and final stage of belief: when one finally realizes that the magician is not an external agency, but an aspect of oneself. His love for his subject stems from the fact that the magician is his subject.

Combined with your own view, the result was what we may call a “deep-well loop:” a self-referential loop that connects the symbolic inside-out with the non-symbolic outside-in perspectives of a reality. The experience of a deep-well loop is extremely rare, for it requires the spontaneous formation of new, far-reaching vertical chains of associations across many cognitive layers.

If you were to righteously proclaim that classical logic is self-evident, you would simply betray your unquestioned belief in it. Indeed, any attempt to logically prove the validity of logic would just make the circularity of the whole thing rather painfully explicit, wouldn’t it? The very same rationale applies to your classical physics. The only reason classical physics appears to be more grounded by external references is that it flows largely from the cognitive category of perception, as opposed to abstract thought alone. Yet, perception is just as mental as abstract thought.

Life is about depth of experience—how hard you love, how intensely you explore, how sincerely you express yourself—and insight—how deeply you inquire, how discerningly you ask questions. If our culture as a whole truly recognized this, the world would be a very different place.

Thus pay attention to life, For truth expresses itself only through its own fictions. To discern truth in fiction: here is the cosmic conundrum!