Do not kid yourself. This is no ordinary book. It is a tangle or reflexive loop in the brain of God. To invoke an image from Bernardo’s earlier book, Why Materialism Is Baloney, it is a whirlpool in the mercurial Ocean of Mind that, at any point, might suck itself into the same infinite and immortal waters. It is certainly not a book to provide your already overloaded life with yet more information or mere data. It is not about information at all. It is about the knower of any and all information. Read on, then, inside God’s brain, but be careful. You just might wake up God.
Jeffrey J. Kripal
J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion
Rice University
Houston, Texas
Notes
1 Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, eds, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, Erik Davis, annotation editor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 588.
2 Ibid., 717-8.
3 See: https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/social-sciences-and-humanities-faculties-close-japan-after-ministerial-decree
Overview
This book is a three-part journey into the rabbit hole we call the nature of reality. Its ultimate destination is a plausible, living validation of transcendence. Each of its three parts is like a turn of a spiral, exploring recurring ideas through the prisms of religious myth, truth and belief, respectively. With each turn, the book seeks to convey a more nuanced and complete understanding of the many facets of transcendence.
Part I will resonate especially with those who yearn for the richness that religious myths can bring into life, yet cannot get around the fact that these myths aren’t literally true. It tries to reach those whose souls are at war with their intellects. One of its goals is to restore the meaning of human life by helping the intellect give itself permission to accommodate the intuitions of the soul, without sacrificing reason or plausibility. Indeed, Part I puts forward the controversial notion that many religious myths are actually true; and not just allegorically so. It is the transcendent truth uniquely portrayed by these myths that our culture so desperately needs in order to understand the real. This transcendent truth, for not being amenable to words or equations, cannot be communicated through any other means—scientific or philosophical—but religious mythology. To make sense of all this, Part I attempts to articulate the nature of mythical truth in a manner that honors both religion and our skeptical rationality.
Part II pursues the next turn of the spiral by first taking a step back: while we all seek truth—be it through religion, science or philosophy—we very seldom inquire into the meaning of truth. What does it mean to say that something is true or false? What hidden assumptions do we make about the underlying nature of reality when we talk of truth? Tackling these questions is the journey of Part II. In its search for answers it leverages our direct experience of world and self to inquire into the nature of time and space, the framework where truth is supposedly to be found. It then concludes that our own inner storytelling plays a surprising role in creating the seeming concreteness of things and the tangibility of history. Finally, it points to clear echoes of its conclusions in many of the world’s religious myths.
Part III, as the final turn of spiral, is the pinnacle of this work. It brings all of the book’s core ideas together in the form of a modern, plausible religious myth. In laying out a complete cosmology for making sense of reality and restoring its transcendence, Part III highlights the critical role of belief in everything we take for granted. Indeed, it explains how deeply ingrained belief systems create the world we live in. Its narrative is based on the story of a modern explorer of consciousness who, during his participation in a secret scientific project, has a series of transcendent encounters. The metaphysics he brings back from these encounters integrates the themes of the book in one coherent framework. It also opens whole new horizons for the restoration of meaning and purpose to our daily lives.
Naturally, the optimal sequence to read this book is that in which it is presented: from Part I to Part III. Indeed, the ideas discussed in Parts I and II are meant to enrich the reading of Part III. That said, if one prefers to go straight to the heart of the matter and enjoy a gripping story without analytical preludes, it is entirely possible to jump directly to Part III and then return to Parts I and II afterwards.
In whichever order you choose to read it, you will notice that the three themes of this book—myth, truth and belief—flow into and interpenetrate each other at multiple levels and meta-levels throughout the text. Part I, for instance, examines mythology with a mindset characteristic of a quest for factual truth. Part II explores the nature of truth by appealing to our own felt intuitions, as we do when we pursue our beliefs. Finally, Part III elaborates upon the role of beliefs in the format of a myth. The goal is to illustrate, both explicitly and implicitly, through concepts and style, the intimate relationship that exists between myth, truth and belief.
The three parts of this book are meant to echo and reinforce each other content-wise as well. Its central ideas return in all three, being explored from a different angle each time. This allows me to convey—often indirectly and implicitly—many more nuances than otherwise possible. For instance, the nature and role of myth is explored in Part I, but the contents of certain myths come back in Parts II and III, where they echo what is discussed there about truth and belief.
The ebb and flow of the book’s trinity of themes ultimately circles around one of them: truth, the central motif of this work. All three parts revolve around it: Part I by exploring how myths can deliver truth, Part II by unveiling the nature of truth through dispelling unexamined beliefs, and Part III by appealing to belief in a myth in order to hint at truth.
You will notice that what I mean by the words ‘myth,’ ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ is richer and more nuanced than the flattened denotations of everyday language. This may, and probably will, surprise you at first. Nonetheless, the attempt to push the boundaries of words and reveal a much bigger, deeper reality behind them is an essential aspect of this work. My intent is to help you see beyond the dull, superficial cultural dialogue reigning in society today.
I hope you find many new vistas and avenues of inquiry in this book. I’ve poured much of myself into it; more than I think most authors would consider prudent. Whatever else it may or may not be, this work is most certainly a sincere, openhearted account of my own way to relate to life, the universe, truth and transcendence.
PART I: Myth
The religious myth is one of man’s greatest and most significant achievements, giving him the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe.
Carl Jung
Chapter 1
The role and importance of myth
A myth is a story in terms of which one can relate to oneself and the world. The myth of the Holy Trinity, for instance, provides context to the lives of millions of Christians: God, as the Father, explains and justifies the creation of the world. As the Holy Spirit, He maintains the world’s significance on an on-going basis by infusing it with an invisible divine essence. The myth also provides perspective: God, this time as the Son, offers a concrete example of how to live life in accordance with His grand plan and achieve salvation. The divinity’s entrance into its own creation in forms both ethereal (the Holy Spirit) and concrete (the Son) provides a bridge between ordinary life and a transcendent order (the Father). This brings meaning into the world of many Christians, preventing ordinary life from being experienced as aimless and futile.
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. Never before in history has a civilization been so desperately devoid of context and perspective. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where should we go? What’s the point of it all? We feel lost because we are unable to take se
riously the maps that could give us directions. We can no longer take myths seriously because, after all, they are only myths.
Historically speaking, the contemporary attitude toward myth is an aberration. The skewed assumptions that sustain this aberration and the reasons why they are mistaken will be addressed in the next chapters. For now, though, let us briefly review the role and importance of myth.
Myth and consensus reality
We can roughly divide the chain of subjective experiences we call life into two realms: an outer realm of perceptions and an inner realm of emotions and thoughts. Indeed, while identifying with our emotions and thoughts, we usually don’t identify with experiences mediated by our five senses. In other words, we tend to think that our perceptions—despite still being subjective experiences—are outside us, while our emotions and thoughts are part of us. For reasons that will become apparent later, I will refer to the contents of perception—that is, everything we see, hear, smell, taste and feel through the skin—as images and interactions. For instance, a lion and a wildebeest are images, while a lion eating a wildebeest is an interaction between images. A rock and a hill are images, while a rock rolling down a hill is an interaction between images. And so on.
The sole facts of the outer realm are images and their respective interactions in space and time.1 Everything else arises in the inner realm through an act of interpretation. After all, in and by themselves the images and interactions express no meaning or emotion. They are simply the movement of pixels in the canvas of a world outside the ego—outside the control of our volition—which evokes thoughts and feelings within us.
Let us belabor this a bit. What I am saying is that the potentials for emotion and meaning remain unexpressed in the outer realm, which our culture has come to call consensus reality. It is a domain of pure form. It’s not sad or happy, pointless or purposeful, boring or exciting. In and by itself, consensus reality doesn’t express any conclusion, emotional or intellectual. All we can consider to be its facts are the images and interactions themselves, not our interpretations of them. The horror or the natural beauty one sees in a wildebeest being devoured alive by a lion are evoked, by interpretation, entirely within one’s inner realm. Then they are projected outward onto the world. ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.… We interpret what we see … We live entirely … by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience,’2 observed Joan Didion.
The outer realm is shared across individuals. After all, we all seem to live in the same world. We all know what lions, wildebeests, rocks and hills are. We go to theaters, museums and parks to share perceptual experiences with others. But the meaning and emotion evoked by these perceptual experiences aren’t necessarily shared: they arise in our private inner realm alone. Two people observing the exact same outer events may conclude different things from, and react emotionally in different ways to, the images. As such, meaning and emotion aren’t part of the consensus. To convey meaning or emotion to another individual, we even have to first translate them into consensus images—such as gestures, facial expressions, spoken or written words, etc.—in the hope that these images will then evoke the same meaning and emotion in the inner realm of another. Meaning and emotion cannot be directly shared the way the images of consensus reality are.
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. As discussed in my earlier books Why Materialism Is Baloney and Brief Peeks Beyond, they are two facets of the same coin. Whether meaning is anchored in the outer or inner realm is thus irrelevant: the world is meaningful in both cases for these realms are, at bottom, expressions of one and the same reality.
All this said, my argument holds whether one adopts Sartre’s view or my own: the images and interactions of consensus reality evoke meaning and emotion in our inner realm. As such, these outer images work as keys to unlock our affective and intellectual potentials. Without them, our capacity for feeling and thinking wouldn’t actualize. Just try to imagine how you could possibly feel romantic love or ponder about the nature of existence without consensus images, such as other sentient beings and the universe they occupy. You will quickly realize that you can’t.
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 well lived if one has adopted the myth that status, power and wealth accumulation are the purpose of life. If none of these things were assumed to be important, what could a promotion mean? Myth is also the very thing that allows the events of life to impact us emotionally. The death of a loved one is only a permanent loss under the myth of materialism. Our disgust toward acts of wickedness is entirely dependent on our respective myths of morality. And so on. Notice that I am not passing judgment on these myths. I am simply stating that they are a necessary condition for the images of the world to convey any meaning to us, intellectual or emotional. Without these myths, consensus images and their respective interactions would be just dancing pixels.
Without a code for interpreting the consensus images all around us, life in the world would evoke no thought, no emotion, no conclusion. It would consist of pure and neutral observation, without commentary.
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.
A vacuum of myth?
It is nearly impossible to live life without a myth. A continuous and relentless effort at interpreting consensus reality is part-and-parcel of the human condition. And this on-going interpretation, as we’ve seen above
, entails the code we call myth. It is already a huge challenge for most people to become lucid of the myth underlying the somewhat instinctive way in which they relate to the world. So to deliberately do away with all interpretations, and all codes, is at best a very tough call indeed.
Myth is disguised in subtle forms. Take, for instance, the notion that consensus reality exists outside mind: it’s an inference, an interpretation of perceptions, since the perceptions themselves are always in mind. Or take today’s materialist neo-Darwinian cosmology: its story suggests that the whole universe is a kind of machine and that its entire dynamics, including life, are driven by a combination of blind chance and some mechanical laws. One might think that such a cosmology dispenses with myth altogether, but nothing is farther from the truth. 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.
More Than Allegory Page 2