More Than Allegory

by Bernardo Kastrup

  The same thing applies to space. Take a moment and try to define space without direct or indirect, narrow or broad circularity. Definitions like ‘Space is the distance between two objects’ simply hide the circularity through the use of synonyms: ‘distance’ is just another word for space. We all take space and time for granted until we try to tell ourselves what they are. We then discover that, despite the fact that we seem to inhabit them, they can’t be defined without reference to themselves. They arise magically from self-reference, like Brahman hatching from the cosmic egg that Brahman Itself created (pause and give some thought to the symbolism here). Space and time are like ghosts that vanish into thin air every time we try to grab them. Their ‘form’ is ‘emptiness’ referring to itself in a kind of cognitive short-circuit.

  Indeed, if you can’t tell yourself what something is, then it’s most-likely an illusion resulting from a cognitive short-circuit; it isn’t really out there. More specifically, I suggest that space and time are language ghosts. They only seem to exist as independent entities because we conceptualize them in words. Here is an analogy to help you see what I mean: if you close your left hand into a fist, you can point at it with your right hand and say ‘Here is a fist!’ Linguistically, the fist is treated like a standalone entity, which you can move around and point at. But when you suddenly open your left hand, where does the fist go? Does it just magically dematerialize? You see, we just named a particular configuration of a hand and confused it linguistically with an independent object. I suggest that we make a similar mistake when it comes to space and time. These are names we give to certain configurations of subjective experience, not independent entities out there. They refer to qualities of experience, not the scaffolding of a world outside consciousness. And if the scaffolding isn’t there, the objective world that supposedly hangs from it right now can’t be there either.

  Space and time supposedly form the scaffolding of a hypothetical world independent of consciousness. But we cannot define space or time without circularity. They are language ghosts. The hypothetical world outside mind isn’t there.

  Brief recapitulation

  We’ve discovered so far that unexamined intellectual projections, based on hidden circular reasoning, lie at the root of our belief that an objective, standalone reality grounds truth. Everywhere we’ve looked we’ve found only circularity and projections: in the past, present, future and space itself. They are all stories—myths, though not religious ones—we tell ourselves. Once we’ve redirected our attention to our own cognitive processes and unmasked their self-validating nature, the objectivity of the world vanished into thin air. We’ve realized that, through the fantastic trick of self-reference, our thoughts make the intangible phantasmagoria of present experience feel like a substantial external world unfolding across space and time.

  Evidence for non-objectivity

  My strategy so far has been to appeal to your direct experience of both the world and your own cognitive processes to instigate skepticism about an objective universe. I’ve tried to coax you into the personal, heartfelt insight that a great many things we take for granted are cognitive illusions. But if you are well acclimated to our contemporary cultural ethos, your next question will be: ‘What about objective evidence for or against a world independent of consciousness? Can it be proven or disproven?’

  In a sense, the essence of my argument so far has been precisely to raise doubt about anything allegedly independent of consciousness, including so-called objective evidence. Be it as it may, I will acquiesce to the cultural conditioning here because, as it turns out, objective evidence shoots itself in the foot. The latest experiments in the field of quantum mechanics have rendered all but untenable the notion that there is anything objective at all.

  For instance, Kim and others have shown that observation not only determines the world perceived at present, but also retroactively changes it, so that its history becomes consistent with what is measured now.107 This suggests that the world is merely a self-consistent myth constructed in the mind. Moreover, it further substantiates our earlier discussion that explanatory truths are entirely subjective. Gröblacher and others have also shown that the world is either entirely in consciousness or we must abandon our most basic intuitions about what objectivity means.108 Their work is probably the most compelling to date in refuting the notion that reality is ‘out there,’ as opposed to ‘in here.’ Lapkiewicz and others have shown that, unlike what one would expect if the universe were independent of mind, the properties of a quantum system do not exist prior to being observed.109 This suggests that things only exist insofar as they are experienced. Ma and others have again shown that no naively objective view of the world can be true.110 Finally, as I was writing this book, two new results emerged: first, a group of scientists in Australia confirmed, through yet another, more sophisticated experiment, that the universe really does not exist except insofar as it is observed.111 Then, physicists in the Netherlands performed the most rigorous experiment yet, closing a number of possible loopholes. The respected scientific journal Nature even called it the ‘toughest test yet.’112 Unsurprisingly by now, their results further confirmed the outcomes of earlier experiments.113

  Even before most of the studies I’ve just cited had been carried out, renowned Johns Hopkins physicist and astronomer Prof. Richard Conn Henry had already seen enough. Back in 2005, he published an essay in Nature claiming that ‘The universe is entirely mental.… There have been serious [theoretical] attempts to preserve a material world—but they produce no new physics, and serve only to preserve an illusion.’114 The illusion he was referring to was that of a world outside consciousness.

  The bulk of my earlier writings focuses on explaining, rationally and in an empirically honest manner, how we can reconcile our sense perceptions with the notion that the world isn’t ‘out there’ but ‘in here.’115 In fact, in Chapter 2 of my previous book Brief Peeks Beyond I went as far as listing the sixteen best arguments against this notion and refuting them one by one. But my goal with the present work is not to repeat my case or embark on an argumentative and abstract intellectual trip. I want to remain focused on helping you inquire critically into the many subtle layers of your own cognition, for nothing more is needed to expose our culturally sanctioned delusions. The only point that needs to be stressed here is this: the seeming independence of the world from consciousness, if pursued diligently to its ultimate implications, contradicts itself from within and then implodes. The universe seems to be inherently a phenomenon of and in mind; an internal story; a myth. In Western philosophy, this is known as the metaphysics of idealism, according to which the universe consists solely of ideas in consciousness.

  Significantly, idealism is precisely what many of the world’s religious myths have been hinting at for thousands of years, as discussed in Part I. In the Arandan, Uitoto and Hindu myths we explored, as well as in the Hermetic myth that underlies Western esotericism, the world is seen as the mental activity of a cosmic mind. As a matter of fact, the sophisticated Vedanta school of Hinduism states explicitly and unambiguously that all phenomena unfold in consciousness alone.116 The same notion is found in Buddhism, particularly the Yogācāra School.117 Even the Christian New Testament hints at this in a magnificently symbolic way when John the Evangelist writes: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.… Through [the Word] all things were made.’118 ‘Word’ here is a translation of the original Greek Λόγος (Logos), which also means reasoning or thought. So through thought ‘all things were made.’

  Kripal states that ‘Logos here does not refer to some form of rationalism or linear logic, but to a kind of cosmic Mind, universal intelligence, or super-language out of which all that is emerges and takes shape. Logos is not human reason here. It is “with God.” It is God.’119 Yet, John has the Logos incarnate as a man, Jesus.120 So this ‘cosmic Mind’ is also the human mind. The Logos is also human reasoning because God was also the man Je
sus. Indeed, as we’ve seen in Part I, the words of language are the form and manifestation of human thought.

  Ponder about this for a moment: just as John’s incarnated Logos makes all things, the cognitive ‘big bang’ resulting from human reasoning (logos) creates the substantiality of the universe across space and time through a trick of self-reference. As God is born within His own creation as the Christ, Brahman is born in primordial waters from the cosmic egg—the singularity—that Brahman Itself created, subsequently uttering ‘the Word’ to bring forth the world’s substance. The self-referential, circular character of the process and its parallels with the cognitive ‘big bang’ are even more striking here.

  And it goes on and on: Nainema breaks into his own illusion to spit—a movement of the mouth, like the utterance of words—the substance of the forest into existence, while Karora wakes up within his own dream to experience, by eating, the substance of the animals sprouted from his own navel. Do you see how different peoples have been trying to suggest the same subtle cosmology through the symbolism most evocative to their respective cultures? The world we ordinarily experience is a mental creation. Its concrete form arises out of emptiness through cognitive self-reference, a process whose inherent circularity makes you believe that you were born in the world. But it is you, through your human thinking, who is creating the whole of it now; now; now.

  To be more generic, let me again cite the work of scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell. It reveals that, when looked at closely, many of the world’s religious myths suggest that the universe isn’t ‘out there;’ that it is, instead, a kind of dream in a transpersonal cosmic mind,121 just as maintained by idealism. Where does this leave us as far as our concepts of truth and the way they inform our lives?

  The latest experiments in the field of quantum mechanics have rendered all but untenable the notion that there is anything objective at all. Significantly, this is entirely consistent with many of the world’s religious myths, which suggest that the world is a self-referential mental creation.

  The false idols of truth

  Clearly, our culturally sanctioned notions of truth are meaningless concepts, idols of delusion. We’ve been chasing ghosts, mirages conceived and maintained entirely in the human intellect through circular reasoning and projections. This delusion pervades the way we relate to each other and the world. It underlies everything, from ethics to legislation, from trade to the economic system, from politics to war, from science to religious dogma, from our neuroses to street revolutions. In all these domains we scramble to find external references to ground the truth of the matter. A meaningless quest this is. We’ve become completely entranced by our own projections and lost ourselves in a hall of mirrors. Alarmingly, we can no longer even conceive of reality without these projections. Just consider your own thoughts as you read my words. You may be thinking: ‘Bernardo claims that it is true that there is no truth, which is self-contradictory!’ You see? Because I’ve denied all external truths, you may have concluded that I’ve denied reality itself.

  The ghost didn’t exist when we were infants. We didn’t ask ourselves whether something was true or not, illusion or not. We didn’t even know what these questions meant. We simply experienced what was there to be experienced. There were no external arbiters determining the ‘validity’ of our experiences—what could that even mean anyway?—for the experiences simply were. Can you still remember that simple, unpretentious state of mind? If you can, I encourage you to invoke it again, for it contains the key to our inquiry here.

  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.’ In doing so, we close ourselves up to reality and proceed to tirelessly chase our own tails. You see, there is nothing more to the world than experience itself. What meaning can there be in trying to determine the ‘validity’ of an experience?

  When we had unsettling dreams as children, our parents would try to reassure us with that notorious, fatidic statement: ‘Forget about it, it was just a dream!’ That was a seminal moment in the process of our entrancement. It was then and there that we began to learn that an experience is either bigger than ourselves—the ‘real world out there’—or so insignificant that it should be dismissed without a thought. It was then and there that we began to slice away huge chunks of our mental lives and throw them in the garbage bin, while elevating other chunks—the ones that weren’t just dreams—to the status of oppressive external tyrants. A huge fault line cracked open through the center of our mind, like a bleeding wound from which most of us never recover.

  ‘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?

  Notice that the compulsion to either deny or externalize the reality of an experience is a neurotic form of self-protection. It is motivated by a deeply ingrained fear to realize and acknowledge who or what we really are. Whether we reject or project the reality of an experience, we isolate ourselves from it. We avoid responsibility for it. Perhaps most importantly, we circumvent the need to identify with it. But in doing all this we become, at best, small and insignificant ourselves: What is left for us to be? 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.

  No, I am not suggesting that we abandon our critical thinking. I am simply proposing that we redirect it towards fruitful goals. Using our critical intellect to create excuses for discarding or alienating experiences is a counterproductive denial of reality and ourselves. After all, experience is the only reality we can ever know and it is integral to who or what we are. We should redirect our critical abilities towards reflecting upon the symbolic, iconic meaning of our experiences, not artificially categorizing them according to the rules of some game. We should be busy looking for the right questions to ask, not passing arbitrary judgment.

  How much of our life do we miss out on because of the delusory idols of external truth? How much of our inner realm do we neglect because of its alleged frivolousness? Those hypnagogic and hypnopompic images, feelings and insights that come to us on the edge of sleep: they are forgotten within seconds because, well, they are just nonsense anyway; they can’t correspond to anything ‘out there,’ where all truths supposedly lie. The unusual, surprising associations that arise in our awareness in moments of quiet contemplation: we don’t waste time with them because, well, what significance could they have anyway? The alien landscapes of thoughts and impressions we traverse just after orgasm: no more than the inconsequential gimmicks of an indulged organism. The mind-boggling alternative realities of psychedelic trances: just chemicals. The richness and emotional charge of our daydreams and fantasies: just nothing. And so down the drain go the most transcendent
moments of our lives and aspects of ourselves; precisely those that could offer us a passage—elusive and brief as it may be—to visit something beyond the ordinary human condition and sooth our existential despair. We have been educated to dismiss the natural paths to transcendence.

  Our delusions about the nature of truth are the single most important reason for the loss of vibrancy of religious myths worldwide. Because most of the events portrayed by these myths cannot correspond to anything we consider possible in a world outside mind, they are condemned to irrelevance. Yes, there is no external, mind-independent reality to religious myths; not to a single one of them. But there is no external, mind-independent reality to anything else either. The only meaningful way to conceive of truth implies that truth is internal, not external. Realizing this is probably one of the most urgent and critical challenges humanity faces at the present historical nexus.

  Without an external reality, our culturally sanctioned notions of truth are meaningless concepts. They fallaciously suggest that an experience is either nothing or other; that it must be either killed or exiled. So we surrender intimacy with our own lives and become estranged from ourselves.