The Uitoto religious myth
On the other side of the planet, in the Amazon jungle, the Uitoto tribe has a mind-bending myth of their own.23 According to it, a creator deity, Nainema, also created the world by imagining it while in a state of slumber. Initially, his imaginings were a tenuous and evanescent illusion, which could easily be lost and forgotten. However, Nainema held on to the illusion by the thread of a dream, not allowing it to escape him. He tied the thread with magical glue and then proceeded to stamp on the illusion until he could, as it were, break into it, so to sit down on the earth he was imagining. Now inside his own dream, he spat on the earth, thereby sprouting the jungle from his saliva. At last his original, tenuous illusion had become the actual, concrete world of the Uitoto.
The Hindu religious myth
There are many other examples of similar myths. The Hindu tradition in India, for instance, is particularly rich.
According to a foundational Hindu myth, the primary formative principle behind everything is called Brahman. Brahman thought primordial ‘waters’ into existence, forming the basic scaffolding of the world to come. Brahman’s seed in the primordial waters then became a cosmic egg—a universal motif across the world’s religious myths24—from which Brahman Itself was born. Having achieved self-generation by being born inside the basic scaffolding of Its own creation, Brahman gave it content: through further acts of thought, It created Heaven, Earth and all the concrete elements of the world.25 In some versions of the myth, the utterance of a sound, or ‘the Word,’ is what fills the world in with content.26
What richness of color and transcendence the Arandan, Uitoto and Hindu myths must bestow on the lives of the people who live by them.
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.
The common motifs behind the world’s religious myths
Alert readers will have noticed conspicuous and even striking similarities across the myths discussed. In all cases, the world is seen as the mental creation of a deity; that is, a kind of thought in the mind of God. The universe begins as insubstantial imaginings—‘illusions’ in the Uitoto case; ‘dreams’ in the Arandan case; thought-up primordial ‘waters’ in the Hindu case—which then gain concreteness and solidity once the deity itself enters the dream—by waking up in it, in the case of the Arandan; by stamping on it, in the case of the Uitoto; or by birthing itself into it, in the Hindu case. The deity always undergoes a significant change in its state of consciousness—from dream or illusion to a lucid, self-reflective, deliberate state—once it enters its creation.
These motifs recur across time and cultures, the West being no exception. For instance, according to the Christian myth, God also enters His creation by being born into it as the Christ. The broader notion of a cosmic mind holding the world within itself as a thought is also present in Western mythology. Consider the following words of the Corpus Hermeticum, basis of the Hermetic myth that underlies Western esotericism:
That Light, He said, am I, thy God, Mind, prior to Moist Nature … Mind is Father-God. Not separate are they the one from other; … He [God] thinketh all things manifest … [and] manifests through all things and in all.27
Changes in the state of consciousness of such cosmic mind—dreamless sleep, dream and wakefulness—are integral to the cycle of creation according to many of the world’s myths, as revealed in Joseph Campbell’s monumental work on comparative mythology. Indeed, Campbell recognized a consistent message in many myths regarding the nature of reality and the process of creation. He called it the cosmogonic cycle, describing it ‘as the passage of universal consciousness from the deep sleep zone of the unmanifest, through dream, to the full day of waking.’28 In the waking state, creation is experienced as ‘the hard, gross facts of an outer universe.’ In the dream state, it is experienced as the ‘fluid, subtle forms of a private inner world.’29 In the dreamless sleep state, there is no experience as such and, therefore, only the potential for creation exists. The different phases of the cosmogonic cycle thus entail different states of cognition of the universal consciousness.
This is not to say that all—or even most—religious myths reflect the cosmogonic cycle, the notion that the universe is a kind of dream in a universal consciousness. Modern scholarly work has shown that religious mythology is varied and largely inconsistent.30 Indeed, such inconsistency should come as no surprise: the briefest review of history and contemporary society already shows that the human mind is perfectly capable of generating baseless ideas, often dangerous ones. Mythology, as a human activity, couldn’t be an exception to that. Not all religious myths—at least in their developed forms—fully resonate with the deepest intuitions of humankind, even when their original psychic seeds are genuine. Various mundane motivations play a role in the further development of myths, including human greed and drive to power.31 But this isn’t the point…
The point is that some—dare I say many—religious myths, originating in cultures separated by abysses of space, time and language, somehow reflect surprisingly similar themes and ideas. And although comparing myths can inadvertently imbue them with generic meanings they didn’t have in their local historical contexts,32 the similarities here aren’t generic or simple. They are highly specific and sophisticated. The world as the mental activity of a deity that becomes lucid within its own imagination certainly isn’t a view you would expect to arise by mere coincidence all over the world. Neither is it a vague generality created artificially by comparison. Somehow, peoples separated by half the circumference of the globe and thousands of years have, through their religious myths, arrived at specific, refined, surprisingly similar cosmologies. This, in itself, already raises interesting questions regarding the origin of the commonalities (more in the next chapter). The most urgent and important of all questions, however, is whether this largely shared cosmology is true. Are these religious myths in some way true? This is what we must now address.
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.
Religious myths: either true or irrelevant
When we were children, before we conceptualized the notion of ‘truth,’ we were able to derive great excitement and meaning from fantasy and imagination. How many a rainy afternoon have we not spent daydreaming amazing stories? Can you still remember how that felt? Our imagined stories were no less significant and evocative than any real event, simply because we hadn’t yet learned to differentiate between these two categories. Both real events and fantasies were, for our younger selves, simply experiences. But things changed later in life. Once we began to conceptualize a boundary separating truth from untruth, we became unable to derive any excitement or significance from what we saw as mere fantasy. If you are a culturally-acclimated human being, this will still be the case for you today.
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?
The Arandan and Uitoto face the exact same challenge: their religious myths would also die out if they weren’t believed. However, unlike traditional cultures, the intellect has become the dominant psychic function in our society. That’s the difference between them and us. We don’t just take our intuitions at face value anymore—as the Arandan and Uitoto do—but subject them to the tyrannical scrutiny of reason. Therefore, it has become indispensible for us to rationally understand how and why a religious myth can
carry truth. Without this understanding, the myth is dismissed by the intellect—bouncer of the heart—thereby losing its colors and becoming irrelevant to us.
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.
Mere allegories?
Because traditional religious myths admittedly can’t carry literal truth, our instinctive explanation for their sophistication and mutual consistency is to think of them as allegories for some kind of advanced cosmology. After all, it’s pretty safe to say that Karora didn’t literally rise from the soil and that Nainema didn’t literally spit the jungle into existence. But to say that these myths are just allegories wouldn’t do justice to the power they hold in their respective societies. To the Uitoto, the trees of the forest really grew from the saliva of Nainema. To the Arandan, the Ilbalintja Soak was really formed when Karora arose from the ground. If their myths were seen as mere allegories, they wouldn’t have the power to flood the entire world of the Arandan and Uitoto with transcendence, as they do. The Ilbalintja Soak wouldn’t be sacred. The trees of the Amazon jungle wouldn’t have the significance of divine secretion. Something glaringly essential is lost when we reduce religious myths to just allegories.
Corbin pointed out that ‘allegory is a more or less artificial representation of generalities and abstractions which can be perfectly well grasped and expressed in other ways.’33 As such, allegories are quickly categorized by our intellects as marginally useful little stories that aren’t really true after all. They just indirectly point to a truth that—we assume—can ultimately be described in some direct, explicit, accurate and precise way; that is, in a literal way. Immediately, we start investing the whole of our intellectual and emotional energy in searching for this direct representation of the truth, dismissing the allegory as a superfluous intermediary step. We say to ourselves: ‘Nice allegory, but what is it that is really going on?’ As such, allegories cannot carry the power that we now reserve for literal truth. Religious myths seen as mere allegories cannot provide us with the context, perspective and meaning we crave in modern life. They cannot restore the transcendence and mystery of the world. They become merely ‘a mode of thought that eventually needs to be abandoned for the clean lines and straight thinking of pure reason,’34 in the words of Jeffrey Kripal.
Yet, despite lacking literal truth, religious myths have been the engine of human psychic life for almost the entire length of our history and pre-history combined. Whence do they derive their undeniable force? Here is a conundrum that isn’t easy to solve. Patrick Harpur has probably made the best recent attempt at tackling this in his excellent books.35 But his overarching conclusion—as much as it may be correct—is ultimately unsatisfying: he argues that there is a subtle, roundabout way of seeing reality according to which the distinction between literal and allegorical truth disappears, and that religious myths should be interpreted in that ambiguous way. Harpur brilliantly uses poetry, psychology, philosophy and a whole arsenal of scholarship to try and coax the reader toward his elusive but intriguing viewpoint. I, however, believe that the conundrum can be unpacked and made sense of in a fully explicit and declarative manner. Instead of elusive and ambiguous ways of seeing, I believe we can positively state, logically and coherently, in what precise manner religious myths can hold actual truth.
The key to solving this riddle lies in realizing that truth is not restricted to only two categories—literal and allegorical—as implicitly assumed above, but that there is a third and essential category: transcendent truth. We will explore this in the next chapter.
The truth carried by religious myths is much more than merely allegorical, yet not literal.
Chapter 3
The truth of religious myths
For thousands of years, traditional cultures the world over have taken religious myths seriously, not only as an integral part of their lives but as the very basis and guiding principle of their existence. As David Leeming put it, religious ‘myths have had significant power to move people. Societies have defined themselves by, committed themselves to, and even been willing to kill and be killed in support of their myths.’36 Clearly, our ancestors believed in the truth of their religious myths unreservedly. Were they merely naïve and unenlightened or did they benefit from a subtle perspective that we have lost? What is the nature of mythical truth and why have we become so blind to it in our culture?
Language and thought
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.
By ‘language’ I don’t mean merely English or Chinese, but a system of signs for the representation and manipulation of information about the world. Language represents the images of consensus reality—lions, wildebeests, rocks, hills, etc.—with signs like written words, sounds and other labels.37 It then combines these signs through a set of rules, called a grammar, so to represent the interactions found in consensus reality.38 This way, language allows us to create an internal model of reality within our intellects. Examples of language in this general sense include not only English and Chinese, but also mathematical notations, computer codes, sign language, etc. As the basis of our internal models of reality, language underlies the way we reason and delineates the boundaries of what we consider possible. The Greeks were on to this, for their word for ‘word’—λόγος (‘logos’)—also means ‘reasoning.’
Indeed, Noam Chomsky argued that our ability to use language is not just learned, but enabled and conditioned by preexisting, hardwired structures in the human brain. Language isn’t arbitrary: it is what it is because we are what we are. Before being a tool for communication, language mirrors the very way our intellects process information about reality.39 This is not so surprising if you consider that the vast majority of our use of language is internal: we talk to ourselves much more than we talk to others. We reason in language. As Ian Tattersall put it, ‘it is virtually impossible to imagine our thought processes in [the absence of language], for without the mediation of language those thought processes would be entirely intuitive.’40 Our ancestors could only begin to communicate in our unique human way after biological hardware that enabled a linguistic style of thought had evolved in their brains, an idea confirmed by paleoanthropological data.41 Our reasoning and our language overlap and co-define each other. ‘Language is generated by the intellect, and generates the intellect,’42 said Abelard, expressing a fundamental circularity whose profound implications we will explore in Parts II and III of this book.
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?
Yet, there is no reason to believe that language is sufficient to capture all relevant truths. 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.’43 After all, how plausible is it that the information processing apparatus of a mere primate would have evolved to articulate all reality? Indeed, the operations of the human intellect are based on what Chomsky has called a ‘universal grammar,’ a structured template for manipulating information. Chomsky went as far as to assert that ‘the study of universal grammar … is a study of the nature of human intellectual capacities.’44 It is pr
eposterous to think that such a template, evolved for survival purposes, could mirror within itself all the dynamics of nature. ‘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.
Truth doesn’t care about the limits of human language. It is what it is. Therefore, there almost certainly is much about reality that we cannot make sense of in words or other notations; many truths that cannot be unambiguously said and hence reasoned. 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.’46
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
The boundaries of language and of the intellect, as we’ve seen in the previous section, are co-extensive: the intellect cannot go where language cannot take it. And most of us know how limited language is—despite the magnificent attempts of poets—in expressing the subtleties of human feelings, let alone the broader truths of reality. ‘The categories of human thought … so confine the mind that it is normally impossible not only to see, but even to conceive, beyond the … phenomenal spectacle,’47 continued Campbell.
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