More Than Allegory

On Religious Myth, Truth and Belief

By Bernardo Kastrup

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2015 Bernardo Kastrup
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78535-287-4

Contents

Other books by Bernardo Kastrup,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction by Jeffrey Kripal: Reading Inside God's Brain,
Overview,
PART I: Myth,
Chapter 1: The role and importance of myth,
Chapter 2: The rich colors of mythical life,
Chapter 3: The truth of religious myths,
Chapter 4: Myth and no-myth,
PART II: Truth,
Chapter 5: The quest for truth,
Chapter 6: Deconstructing truth,
Chapter 7: Truth, myth and world,
PART III: Belief,
Chapter 8: Ticket off-world,
Chapter 9: Meeting the Other,
Chapter 10: The origin of life, the universe and everything,
Chapter 11: Happy hour in the Dome,
Chapter 12: Another facet of the truth,
Epilogue: The Legacy of a Truth-Seeker,
Notes,
Bibliography,

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 seriously 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. 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,' 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...