More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

by Bernardo Kastrup

any future, truly adequate philosophy of mind or science of consciousness will have to go through the study of religion, and in particular the comparative study of mystical literature.

Myth has historically provided context and perspective to our presence in the world and has enriched the lives of human beings since the dawn of our species. In a culture obsessed with literal truth and pragmatism, such as our own, the impoverishment of myth is increasingly—if only instinctively—felt.

In summary: none of what we call consensus reality, or the ‘real world out there,’ expresses meaning or emotion directly. Only in our inner realm do meaning and emotion arise. This may sound like a nod to existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, who considered the world senseless, as all meaning is admittedly projected onto it by us. But it is not what I mean to imply. The world is only senseless if one sees the outer realm as fundamentally separate from the inner realm, which is by no means an established fact. Indeed, insofar as we can know, outer and inner realms are simply different modalities of subjective experience.

And here is the key point: our mind needs a code to translate consensus images into thoughts and feelings. Without it, there would be no bridge or commerce between outer and inner realms. The inputs of this translation code are the images and interactions of consensus reality, as perceived by our five senses. Its outputs are the corresponding thoughts and feelings evoked within. Now, because our self-reflective mind operates according to linguistic patterns (an assertion I will substantiate in Chapter 3), the translation code takes the form of a mental narrative we tell ourselves; a story that implies particular correspondences between outer images and inner feelings and ideas. The translation code is thus a myth.

Indeed, the English word ‘myth’ derives from the Ancient Greek μῦθος (muthos): something said in words, like a story, speech or report. That we think of reality according to myths is even suggested by the Common Slavic derivative of the original Greek: мысΛь (mysl’), which means ‘thought’ or ‘idea.’ Therefore, the word ‘myth’ originally meant a story that evokes thought; not necessarily an untrue story, as it is often understood today. Throughout this book, I use the word ‘myth’ in this broader, original sense: myth is a story that implies a certain way of interpreting consensus reality so to derive meaning and affective charge from its images and interactions. As such, it can take many forms: fables, religions and folklore, but also formal philosophical systems and scientific theories. Clearly, a myth can be true or false without ceasing to be a myth.

Myth is the code that each one of us constantly uses, whether we are aware of it or not, to interpret life in the world. For instance, the ancient myth of astrology links daily events to celestial rhythms and cycles meant to explain the ups and downs of life.3 Myth is the very thing that allows the events of consensus reality to mean anything to us. A hard-earned promotion at work only means a life w...

Consensus reality is a realm of pure form. It triggers our myth-making capacity so to evoke thought and emotion within. Our role is to interpret the pure forms by projecting a myth onto consensus reality. The myth implies a way to translate pure form into meaning.

To say that nature is a mechanical apparatus without purpose or intentionality is itself an interpretation; a myth. The absence of myth would require a complete lack of interpretation or judgment of consensus reality. In the absence of myth, no analogies would be made between the cosmos and machines, and no judgments would be passed regarding whether existence has a purpose or not. One would simply witness images and notice the patterns and regularities of their interactions without commentary or conclusions.

The dominance of deprived myths is insidious and has severe consequences as far as one’s psychic health and relationship with truth is concerned. Yet, these consequences are usually overlooked in the first half of life, because deprived myths have a strong distractive power in that period.4 Young adults, in a natural attempt to self-affirm, are often distracted by the deprived myths of consumption, power and status. Many manage to continue distracting themselves almost all their lives and, in that sense, we live in an adolescent society. But once these deprived myths are seen for what they are, one needs a richer myth that does justice to the scope of life and imbues it with timeless meaning.

One always lives according to a myth, for a continuous interpretation of consensus reality is inherent to the human condition. The question is whether one’s chosen myth resonates with one’s deepest intuitions or runs counter to them.

The whole impetus of life is to transcend: to get beyond the separateness, insignificance and transience of the ordinary human condition through association with something timeless and boundless.

Our innate drive to transcend is a natural and legitimate response to the existential despair that characterizes the ordinary human condition, as powerfully described by the existentialist philosophers.

The impetus of human life is to transcend the limitations of the ordinary human condition and realize a form of eternal significance. Although transcendence can be experienced in mystical or spiritual states, the experience is almost never abiding and does not permeate one’s daily life.

Religious myths turn ordinary life into an abiding transcendent experience; a small but crucial segment of an epic cosmic drama. The boundaries between this world and a bigger world dissolve. There is no more ‘here and there.’ Instead, transcendence abides in the here and now. Religious myths provide the ground where the acorn can grow into the oak.

A religious myth can bring transcendence into daily life in an abiding manner. It can infuse ordinary aspects of life with enchantment and timeless significance, thereby saving the human animal from existential despair.

The transcendence that only religious myths can bestow upon our lives is dissipating fast in a globalized, pragmatic, cynical and market-driven society.

Consequently, authentic religious myths are now allowed no role in the mainstream, academically-endorsed worldview of our culture. The natural and legitimate psychic impulse towards transcendence has become artificially associated with ignorance, stupidity and weakness. Such marginalization of religion has robbed us of context and perspective. We now find our gods not on the altar, but in the bottle of alcohol, the football match on television, the new pair of shoes and the arms of the casual lover.

Because of the contemporary tendency toward cynicism and fundamentalism, we’ve marginalized our religious myths and made them small and flattened. Consequently, we’ve lost our connection with transcendence.

Traditional religious myths flood a community’s very environment and its inhabitants with transcendence. The temporal and eternal worlds become linked. Mere trees, animals and holes on the ground take on the significance of divine footprints.

A common motif across many traditional religious myths is the notion that the world is the imagination of a divinity. The divinity then enters its own imaginings, taking on a lucid, self-reflective state of awareness within it. It is this that brings concreteness to an essentially dreamed-up universe.

And that’s the challenge we have to face before we are able to allow religious myths to enrich our lives again: we can’t take seriously that which we don’t consider true. How can an inconsequential fantasy influence our emotional and intellectual lives? We aren’t children anymore. If a religious myth is just a fable it can’t possibly count, can it?

Religious myths are powerless if they aren’t seen as true. But unlike traditional cultures, we subject our mythical intuitions to the scrutiny of reason. Therefore, if our lives are to be colored by religious myths again, it is imperative that we rationally understand how and why they can be true.

Underlying our contemporary attitude toward religious myths is the hidden but far-reaching assumption that all relevant truths about reality can be directly captured by the intellect in the form of language constructs. In other words, we take it for granted that, if something is true, then it can be said.

For this reason, we have now become so accustomed to judging reality linguistically that we assume all relevant truths to be amenable to direct representation in language. In other words, we assume that if something cannot be unambiguously said then it cannot be true. We often judge people to be wrong simply because they cannot articulate their position coherently in words. How open are we, really, to the idea that there are essential aspects of reality that cannot be unambiguously represented in any language?

As Alan Watts put it, it’s a mistake to think ‘that one can make an informative, factual, and positive statement about the ultimate reality.’

Things are not as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated,’45 concluded Rilke.

These are transcendent truths, for they escape the boundaries of logic, time and space enforced by our universal grammar. And it is in regard to transcendent truths, as we soon shall see, that religious myths play an irreplaceable role. Indeed, while discussing the ‘incommunicability of the Truth which is beyond names and forms,’ Joseph Campbell wrote: ‘whereas the truths of science are communicable, … mythology and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination.’

Because our self-reflective reasoning is constructed in language, we assume that if something cannot be unambiguously said then it cannot be true. But truth does not care about the limits of human language. There are many natural truths that cannot be said and, hence, reasoned. These are transcendent truths.

The obfuscated mind, for not being restricted to such arbitrary constraints, can embody a much greater range of cognition than the intellect. Its symbolic character should be regarded, according to Carl Jung, as an ancient mode of thought that has been superseded—or rather, obfuscated—by the relatively recent acquisition of linguistic thinking.

The conclusion here is inescapable: to restore meaning to our lives, we must develop a close relationship with the transcendent truths symbolically unveiled by the obfuscated mind in the form of religious myths.

Establishing communication between the self-reflective intellect and our obfuscated mythical cognition can help us ease our modern anxieties and rediscover the meaning of life. By listening to what the obfuscated mind has to say, and then taking it seriously, we gain access to a broader, less claustrophobic apprehension of reality, life and human identity: an apprehension of transcendence.

As such, the symbolic religious myths produced by the obfuscated mind aren’t merely roundabout ways to refer to something literal, but the only pointers we have to a form of salvation. They aren’t less precise and redundant alternatives to literal explanations, but the only fair way to capture and communicate the transcendent aspects of reality. When seen this way, religious myths take on the power of literal truth: in the absence of the latter, they become the most direct, explicit, declarative, accurate and precise utterance of the truth.

Many religious myths reflect a culture’s intuitive apprehension of transcendent aspects of reality. They aren’t merely roundabout ways to refer to something literal, but the most direct and accurate utterance of transcendent truths. A religious myth is symbolic—never literal—because it emerges from the obfuscated mind.

I thus propose that, if a religious myth resonates deeply with your inner intuitions and survives a reasonably critical assessment of its depth, then you should emotionally—though not intellectually—take it onboard as if it were literally true.

Because an intellectual inaccuracy is unavoidable whether we emotionally take the symbolism of religious myths literally or dismiss them, the lesser inaccuracy is the logical way to go. Transcendent truths cannot be grasped directly and explicitly, so rejecting religious myths for the sake of a non-existing literal alternative is simply irrational. The dilemma here isn’t comfortable, but we must bite this bullet. If we don’t, we will be condemning ourselves to being forever insulated from a deeper reality and, therefore, effectively living out our emotional lives according to falsehoods and artificial constraints. How smart is that?

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

Emotionally, we either believe a religious myth or we don’t. If we don’t, the myth loses the power to bring transcendence into daily life. I thus propose that, if a religious myth resonates deeply with your intuitions, you should emotionally—though not intellectually—take it onboard as if it were literally true.

My proposal is that you allow your chosen religious myth to inform your emotional life as though it were literally true. However, I am not suggesting that you intellectually take it to be the literal truth. Doing so is tantamount to denying transcendence altogether, since it implicitly assumes that the corresponding truths can be accurately, unambiguously and completely captured in a language-based narrative. Moreover, taking a religious myth to be the literal truth at an intellectual level plants the seed of fundamentalism.

The symbolisms of different but valid religious myths are the shadows of transcendent truths.

However, if you intellectually take your religious myth to be the literal truth, you will be closing your eyes to the cylinder! You will be taking a shadow to be all there is to reality and dismissing that which is its source. This is as unfair to the transcendent truth as dismissing all religious myths; perhaps worse. In both cases, one is practicing voluntary blindness; closing one’s eyes to God, so to speak.

versa. Here fundamentalism is born: ‘I know that my religious myth—my chosen shadow—is right so yours can only be wrong.’ When the Christian myth is honored by being emotionally taken in as if it were the literal truth, Christians live lives of meaning and transcendent significance, escaping the madness of a materialist society and coming closer to truth. When it is intellectually taken to be the literal truth, countless innocent people die burning at the stake or at the point of the crusader’s sword. Perhaps even worse, millions wither slowly in the meaninglessness that results from forced ‘conversions.’

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.

In addition, it is conceivable that the comparative study of religion, as professionally done in academia, could help us recognize true religious myths by identifying the symbolic patterns typical of genuine intuitive insight.69 Through complementing our personal intuition with collective validation, this could ease the individual burden we now carry in navigating our religious life.

Allowing one’s chosen religious myth to inform one’s emotional life as though it were literally true does not mean that one should take the myth, intellectually, to be the literal truth. Doing so plants the seed of fundamentalism.

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?

no religious myth can be literally true. As such, all religious myths are literally false.

In the traditions of no-myth, the emphasis is on stopping the effort to interpret consensus reality, thereby relinquishing all myths. Instead of actively engaging with the symbolic activity of the obfuscated mind to understand its insights, the emphasis is on silence and stillness.

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.

The potential pitfalls of religious myths are well known and publicized in our culture. We have already discussed them earlier: when one adopts a religious myth intellectually as the literal truth, one not only loses sight of the transcendent reality one seeks, but also stokes the fire of fundamentalism. Moreover, the seeming implausibility of religious myths often renders them unpalatable, given our culture’s excessive emphasis on the intellect.

One can only attempt a rational, descriptive philosophy of the universe on the assumption that one is totally separate from it. But if you and your thoughts are part of this universe, you cannot stand outside them to describe them. This is why all philosophical and theological systems must ultimately fall apart.