More Than Allegory

by Bernardo Kastrup

  It gets worse: at the same time that I could see myself in ‘the magician,’ I could also see me through ‘his’ eyes. After all, I was ‘him’ too. But from ‘his’ perspective I looked completely different; so different, in fact, that I couldn’t begin to describe what I looked like. Even the verb ‘to look’ is inappropriate here, since the experience was incommensurable with visual perception. I was more like a collection of feelings and ideas, if this makes any sense. Yet, I was absolutely sure that it was really me that ‘he’ was looking at.

  I know this is complicated, but it’s excruciatingly difficult to put it in words. I was simultaneously looking at two incommensurable ‘versions’ of myself through two different pairs of my own ‘eyes.’ I was both inside and outside myself, witnessing both perspectives at once. And each perspective was both subject and object of the other, simultaneously.

  For some reason, the experience moved me to tears. Tidal waves of emotion welled up. I felt awe, love and gratitude of an intensity orders of magnitude higher than anything I had ever experienced before. I fell to my knees in a spontaneous, irresistible manifestation of overwhelming gratefulness. I was witnessing what I could only describe as a miracle.

  Unfortunately, the cognitive dissonance of the experience was so intense that it eventually yanked me out of wherever I was. After a few moments of confusion, I found myself back in the Dome. The return to familiar territory was disappointing but also comforting, I must admit. I had gone through a lot and was relieved to be back to a place where I could relax and take my bearings. The Other had quite some explaining to do, I thought, and indeed he wasted no time:

  ‘You’ve now experienced the most important points of what you had already understood in our earlier sessions together. This was very important for you because your intellect is predisposed to flattening everything down to conceptual models. Now you can finally honor the usefulness of your models while keeping them in perspective. Your experiences were mostly symbolic—though not entirely so, as we will soon discuss—because, as a living being, you are still a cluster of mind-at-large, no matter how inhibited your brain activity is. As such, for as long as you are alive, the bulk of your access to the rest of mind-at-large will continue to take place through the intermediation of symbols.’

  I didn’t feel like interjecting or asking anything. But I also knew that the new Recipe setup would terminate the session unless the Telemetry regularly detected spikes of activity in my brain’s default mode network, which corresponded to questions or comments from my end of the dialogue. So I just said ‘Please go on,’ in order to keep the session alive.

  The stages of belief

  ‘You’ve also experienced the key stages of belief,’ the Other continued. ‘The initial stage, after one is taken in by a belief system, is of pure delusion: one doesn’t know that one is within one’s own imagination, naively believing everything to be external and real in a standalone way. You’ve experienced this upon entering the brick world.

  ‘The next stage is when one begins to suspect that one is being deceived, but one still believes that an external agency—the magician—is responsible for the deception. Typically, a kind of mental combat develops between the subject and the magician; a contest to see which one can outsmart the other. You’ve experienced this when you realized that the brick world was absurd. You then thought that, thanks to your skepticism and critical thinking skills, you had seen through the trick. This, however, was precisely what the magician wanted you to believe…’

  ‘Yes, I’m listening.’

  ‘The magician has exquisitely subtle ways to trick its subject. His most powerful device is the multilevel deception: he allows the subject to see through a first-level trick—a mere decoy—only to fall into the trap of a second-level belief system, setup in advance in an adjacent layer of cognition. Seeing through the decoy reassures the subject, who then lowers his guard and buys wholeheartedly into what is in fact the actual deception. You’ve experienced this when you proudly rejected the brick world only to get caught in the insect world. So unquestioning were you of that second-level belief system that you spent a lifetime there before I could find an opening in your cognitive armor to pull you out.’

  ‘Can there be more than two levels in this multilevel deception?’ I asked. The question reflected an obvious reason for apprehension, as I am sure you can already anticipate.

  ‘Yes, there can be any number of nested levels.’ This reply only increased my uneasiness.

  ‘When I came round in the insect world,’ I said, ‘I was as sure that that world was the real one as I am sure now that the Dome is the real reality; or that the Trilobite laboratory is the real-real reality. How can I ever be sure that these nested realms, including my ordinary world, aren’t simply other levels in a multilevel deception?’

  ‘You can be absolutely sure that they are,’ he answered mercilessly. ‘For as long as you experience the cognitive category called perception, you most certainly are in some level of deception; in an imaginary world of your own making, which you mistakenly believe to be autonomous and independent of yourself. The magician has his veil pulled over your head right now.’

  ‘So the Dome, too, is a deception,’ I concluded.

  ‘Yes, it is a deception insofar as you believe that it exists outside and independently of you. That, of course, doesn’t invalidate what you learn here. Right now, for instance, you are learning about the truth through deceptive, mythical, symbolic means. It is nonetheless still the truth, whatever means are used to convey it. As such, what you learn in the Dome isn’t a deception.’

  Reassured, I said: ‘Okay, go on. You were explaining the different stages of belief.’

  ‘Right. 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. Consequently, one sees that the entire drama of life can only unfold in one’s own imagination. You’ve experienced this when you realized that the magician was in fact you.’

  ‘I get it,’ I said, mostly to keep the session going.

  Deep-well loops

  ‘But then something else happened,’ he continued, ‘something extraordinary that I was hoping for but wasn’t sure we could accomplish together: you managed to see yourself through the magician’s eyes. The view from his eyes was the only non-symbolic part of your experience. 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. These vertical chains must connect a cluster with layers of mind-at-large underneath its corresponding tangle. Hence, they must bore through the entire tangle, like a deep well! Even in the rare occasions when these long chains of associations do form, they remain unstable and dissolve quickly. For this reason, your characterization of the experience as a kind of ‘miracle’ wasn’t inappropriate. And neither was your heartfelt gratitude for it. Your heart resonated strongly with the uniqueness and affective force of the experience.’

  ‘Is a deep-well loop the same kind of self-referential loop behind the inception of a universe, as in the Big Bang?’ I asked. I thought I knew the answer but wanted to make sure anyway.

  ‘No,’ he replied categorically, confirming my expectations. ‘Big Bang loops are mostly horizontal, while deep-well loops are mostly verti
cal. Big Bang loops are broad but flat like pancakes, confined to only one or a few adjacent cognitive layers. Deep-well loops, on the other hand, are narrow and long like nails, piercing across countless layers. Moreover, Big Bang loops entail only the outside-in perspective, while deep-well loops bring together the outside-in and the inside-out perspectives. Finally, Big Bang loops quickly evolve into stable tangles, while deep-well loops are extremely elusive, fading away as quickly as they form.’

  ‘Why did this particular experience evoke so much emotion in me? I’ve experienced mind-boggling things with you but nothing has brought me to tears before.’

  ‘Because only through deep-well loops can mind-at-large simultaneously recognize itself in all the different cognitive roles it plays in a reality. Your emotional outpouring was mind-at-large’s emotional outpouring upon realizing: “This is all me!” Such a brief recognition of oneness is like a supernova explosion of love.’

  The circularity of consensus reality

  After a brief pause to take this in, I wanted to explore the implications:

  ‘So, in a sense, consensus reality is circular. The reasoning behind our understanding of the laws of classical physics is circular, insofar as we—that is, mind-at-large—are making them all up ourselves.’

  ‘Yes. At bottom, the laws of classical physics are as whimsical as the regularities of any idiosyncratic dream; as quirky as the rules governing the brick world you visited, which had just as much internal consistency as your ordinary world. The only difference is that you are used to your classical physics. There are countless other realities in mind-at-large in which what you consider absurd is perfectly normal and reasonable. A dragon popping out of your mouth every time you yawn? Of course, that’s just the way things are!’

  ‘Amazing…’

  ‘Only to you. You see, your everyday world would also look fantastic and implausible to living beings from another reality. Like theirs, your world arises from a complex tangle of circular cognitive associations. If you could traverse the tangle all the way through, you would find out that there is no essential difference between assumptions and implications in it; between axioms and theorems; between primary causes and secondary effects. Instead, you’d find that it’s a closed, self-generating system. Depending on where you are in the tangle, what was an assumption before becomes an implication now, and the other way around. What was a primary cause becomes a secondary effect. It’s all a matter of perspective. The tangle is like a Möbius strip, with no start and no finish. Assumptions follow from implications just as easily as the other way around. The only reason this isn’t obvious to you is that you contemplate only a tiny segment of the Möbius strip at any given time. If you were to step back and look at all of it at once, you would see that your consensus reality literally begs all questions.’

  ‘We never traverse the entire strip because we think it’s pinned down by verifiable external references on certain points,’ I added.

  ‘Your science’s attempt to pin things down by finding such external references is futile, because there is nothing external to the Möbius strip in your reality. As a matter of fact, even the rules of your classical logic are reflections of circular cognitive associations; that is, of self-validating beliefs, not of external references. What external references could there be for patterns of pure abstract thought? 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.

  ‘The bottom line is this: every reality spins itself into concrete existence through a form of deeply ingrained circular reasoning; through self-validating belief. Each tangle corresponds to a particular variation of this circularity. Moreover, it is the continuity enabled by the circularity that sustains the corresponding reality. All so-called “laws” are whimsical at bottom.’

  The future of humanity

  It was a lot to take in, despite the fact that he wasn’t really saying anything I couldn’t have derived from my earlier insights.

  ‘Most people today,’ I pointed out, ‘are still engrossed in the first stage of belief you described. Very few even suspect that the seemingly autonomous world we experience every day is actually a product of the imagination. And among those who do, I’m sure even fewer feel in their hearts that they themselves—their true, impersonal Self—are imagining it all into existence. So the point you’ve just made about the inherent circularity of what we consider real, though I understand it, has no chance of gaining traction in our cultural narrative today. It’s way beyond our present framework of understanding. Given this, do we have a future as a culture and civilization?’

  ‘The greatest victims of your ignorance are yourselves,’ the Other concluded. ‘Your present intellectual models of reality exile you from transcendence and plunge you into existential despair. But despite this, humanity holds great promise. Not only can you experience the world from a perspective unavailable to God, you can also self-reflect and ask the probing questions that God cannot. The challenge for you is to achieve greater depth of experience and subtlety of inquiry without killing yourselves or ruining the planet in the process. The living Earth is the reverse side—the symbol—of an expression of curiosity and eros by God. Loss of life on a planetary scale would thus be experienced by God as a hindrance of this expression, with accompanying suffering. Clearly, God has skin in this game too. Your responsibility as a civilization is significant.’

  Contemplations

  My dialogue with the Other continued for a little while longer after these words. In total, my journey was timed at almost two hours, the longest session ever. Yet, what does this number mean when hundreds of years worth of experience were packed into it? Objective measurements of time have no significance in transcendent space. And since our lives—whether we acknowledge it or not—unfold nowhere but in transcendent space, the number of years with which we measure their duration also has no meaning. 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.

  I would go on to journey many more times during my tenure at Trilobite. The subsequent insights the Other would share with me were more specific in nature, addressing particular questions of more narrow philosophical and scientific interest. The broad basis of my present understanding of life and reality, however, was laid out in those memorable initial dialogues, which I’ve tried to recount here as well as I could.

  Trilobite has discretely sought to publicly disseminate the insights it produced. In fact, it has invested heavily in doing so. The Club never tried to keep the results of the project secret in any way. Many former Trilobite Explorers—with the blessing, encouragement and even concrete support of Club leadership—continue to spread their message as widely as they can, through a variety of different channels and media. Yet, cruelly, insights shared openly tend to be ignored or dismissed in our culture. For some reason, we seem to value only what is privileged and exclusive.

  The answers we crave are all out there, freely available to those who seek. And they have been out there, in one form or another, for literally thousands of years. Indeed, one of Trilobite’s most striking realizations was that the symbolic message of religions and philosophies the world over resonate deeply with what the Other taught its Explorers. Ironically, Trilobite produced nothing truly new, except perhaps a new lens for interpreting symbols; a lens more amenable to the contemporary intellectual ethos.


  The truth isn’t, and has never been, a secret. It isn’t locked away in libraries of secret societies. It has been told and retold in ten thousand different ways throughout history. It continues to be told openly today. The problem is that efforts to disseminate it are often drowned out by the hysterical cacophony of our media, both corporate and social. Or worse: they are discredited by an uncritical academic establishment that has come to confuse reason and empirical honesty with the metaphysical conjectures of materialism. As a result, only those who already understood the truth with their hearts—and therefore least need to hear it—can recognize it. This is the tragic predicament we’re faced with today. How to help everyone else discern truth from hysterical nonsense is a problem that, unfortunately, Trilobite has never managed to solve. At the end of the day, it appears that there are no simple recipes. We are each responsible for recognizing the answers as they are paraded in front of us every day.

  Epilogue

  The Legacy of a Truth-Seeker

  Having trodden the path for cycles uncountable,

  Having crossed the ocean of mind from end to end,

  Through all veils, its fountainhead have I finally seen.

  To you, honest truth-seeker treading the path behind me,

  I grant the gift of my legacy.

  I have learned thus:

  Only untruths can be experienced.

  Hence, only untruths can exist.

  Truth is fundamentally incompatible with existence

  For it is that which gives rise to existence,

  As a loudspeaker gives rise to sound.

  Experiences are self-referential tricks:

  They arise from nothing and are made of nothing.

  If you dig deep enough within yourself,