More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief 

by Bernardo Kastrup

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Last annotated on September 9, 2016

Introduction by Jeffrey Kripal: 

Reading Inside God’s Brain 

Oh, I had read plenty of idealists  Read more at location 65

professor and philosopher whose sermons on the always-happening incarnation of the Word in the individual soul and the Now of eternity read like medieval versions of the books of Bernardo Kastrup (or Eckhart Tolle). But Meister Eckhart died almost seven hundred years ago. There is Ramana Maharshi, the great South Indian Hindu mystic of the immortal Self, or what I like to call the Same in us all. But he left us over sixty years ago. Much closer culturally (and digitally), there is Philip K. Dick, the great American science fiction writer who realized through an encounter with the Logos or Cosmic Mind that “reality is a giant brain” that appears to work like a binary computer code network.1 But he died over thirty years ago. Dick is worth dwelling on for a moment here, as his weird thought eerily reflects the more precise and calmer books of Bernardo Kastrup.  Read more at location 67

****  Here is a typical passage from Dick’s Exegesis, the 8,000 page private journal that Dick scrawled in the last eight years of his life after getting energetically zapped in the winter of 1974 by a cosmic Mind that he came to call “VALIS,” for Vast Active Living Intelligence System: All that I could fathom was that the conventional picture that we normally get—and seem to share—is not in fact what is there; what is there is not even in time or space, nor is causation involved. There seems to be a mind and we are in it.… “We are all but cells in a colossal mad brain that both makes and perceives reality”—  Read more at location 74

More accurately, this material world can be thought of as a kind of dream in which God incarnates through sexual reproduction and evolutionary biology in order to reflect back on itself and come to know itself inside the dream.  Read more at location 85

Bernardo Kastrup emerged from the professional fields of physics, mathematics, and computer science and is a successful computer engineer in the corporate world.  Read more at location 89

Indeed, if Bernardo Kastrup and the idealist mystical literatures of the world are pointing us in the right direction—and I think they are—the materialist hypothesis is the exact opposite of the truth. It is fantastically wrong. Mind does not emerge as a fragile and temporary product of matter. Matter emerges as a fragile and temporary product of what Aldous Huxley famously called “mind-at-large” and its own mathematical structures and symmetrical beauty.  Read more at location 100

I will just say it: any future, truly adequate philosophy of mind or science of consciousness will have to go through the study of religion, and in particular the comparative study of mystical literature.  Read more at location 108

****  Why does math work so well? Because we participate in and are expressions of the deepest structures of reality. Because we are that universe and those mathematical structures.  Read more at location 116

He takes comparative mystical literature as seriously as mathematics. He does not confuse the two realms of human knowing. He does not turn to one to establish the other. But he puts them into deep conversation and emerges on the other side with a most extraordinary story or “myth” of who we are and why we are here. This is where his idealist mysticism morphs into a contemporary or emergent mythology.  Read more at location 119

Entranced by the technological successes of science and engineering, we have come to think of reality as composed of invisible numbers. Everything real is numerical. Anything worth knowing can be measured. Anything not worth knowing cannot be measured. The only real form of knowledge is mathematical or scientific knowledge. Such is the claim, anyway. It’s more than a claim. As I write this, the education minister of Japan is issuing a decree to “abolish” all of the social science and humanities programs of the Japanese universities. Of the 60 national universities, 26 have agreed to do so in some measure.3  Read more at location 122

this materialist paradigm that wants to reduce everything to practical numbers is a half-truth and, if taken as the whole truth, a profound mistake with morally and existentially awful consequences.  Read more at location 128

Reality is not just made of numbers, it turns out. It is also made of words and narratives.  Read more at location 131

We are after understanding, wisdom, gnosis.  Read more at location 135

We are the universe becoming self-aware. We know what God does not know. In the symbolic and mythical terms of Bernardo’s Cologne Cathedral realization, we are all Christs, crucified on the cross of space and time: “we are all hanging from the self-conceptualized cross of space, time, confinement and impermanence. His divine nature is our true nature as timeless mind taking particular, seemingly limited perspectives within its own dream. That Christ is both God and the Son of God born into God’s creation is a hardly disguised way to express this symbolically.”  Read more at location 148

myth is “symbolic.” It points. It evokes. It reminds and remembers. But it never quite speaks literally, and for a simple reason: that of which and from which it speaks cannot be captured in language, in number, or by any other act of intellectual cognition. It is simply beyond, or before, all of this. Symbols speak of and out of consciousness, but never literally. A myth here is a story that recalls a mystical experience of transcendence.  Read more at location 158

Jeffrey J. Kripal

J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion Rice University 

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.  Read more at location 177

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.  Read more at location 180

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.  Read more at location 183

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.  Read more at location 188

our own inner storytelling plays a surprising role in creating the seeming concreteness of things and the tangibility of history.  Read more at location 192

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.  Read more at location 194

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.  Read more at location 205

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  Read more at location 224

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.  Read more at location 227

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.  Read more at location 235

Myth and consensus reality 

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.  Read more at location 243

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.  Read more at location 247

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.  Read more at location 252

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.  Read more at location 265

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.  Read more at location 269

these outer images work as keys to unlock our affective and intellectual potentials. Without them, our capacity for feeling and thinking wouldn’t actualize.  Read more at location 274

our mind needs a code to translate consensus images into thoughts and feelings.  Read more at location 277

****  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.  Read more at location 278

(Note: metaphor, embodied cognition)  a story that implies particular correspondences between outer images and inner feelings and ideas. The translation code is thus a myth.  Read more at location 281

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.  Read more at location 283

****  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.  Read more at location 287

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.  Read more at location 290

****  (Note: premise)  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.  Read more at location 300

A vacuum of myth? 

**********  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.  Read more at location 307

*********  To say that nature is a mechanical apparatus without purpose or intentionality is itself an interpretation; a myth.  Read more at location 311

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.  Read more at location 312

Today, we don’t live in a mythless society. Our condition is much more tragic: we live in a society dominated by increasingly deprived myths.  Read more at location 317

Young adults, in a natural attempt to self-affirm, are often distracted by the deprived myths of consumption, power and status. Many manage to continue distracting themselves almost all their lives and, in that sense, we live in an adolescent society. But once these deprived myths are seen for what they are, one needs a richer myth that does justice to the scope of life and imbues it with timeless meaning.  Read more at location 320

****  One always lives according to a myth, for a continuous interpretation of consensus reality is inherent to the human condition. The question is whether one’s chosen myth resonates with one’s deepest intuitions or runs counter to them.  Read more at location 324

The impetus of human life 

psychologist James Hillman, in his ‘acorn theory,’ suggested that each person has a call: an often-obfuscated but passionate idea of what her life is meant to be, just like an acorn holds within itself a blueprint of the oak it’s meant to become. A life lived so as to bring that idea into reality—thus turning the acorn into the oak—is a life of purpose and timeless meaning.5 As such, ‘the call offers transcendence,  Read more at location 327

‘To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend … we need meaning … we need to see over-all patterns in our lives.… And we need freedom … to get beyond ourselves … to rise above our immediate surroundings,’7 observed Oliver Sacks.  Read more at location 333

****  The whole impetus of life is to transcend: to get beyond the separateness, insignificance and transience of the ordinary human condition through association with something timeless and boundless.  Read more at location 336

Garland, Patton and Picasso transcended not because of their celebrity—transcendence is far subtler than that—but because, by ‘following their bliss,’8 they embodied ‘a flowering of existence in a very creative and new way.’  Read more at location 342

(Note: also ecclesiastes, impermanence central to many philosophical and religious concepts)  Our innate drive to transcend is a natural and legitimate response to the existential despair that characterizes the ordinary human condition, as powerfully described by the existentialist philosophers.  Read more at location 346

*********  ‘If you have lived in despair, then, regardless of whatever else you won or lost, everything is lost for you, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you,’11 wrote Kierkegaard.  Read more at location 352

We long for a more-than-merely-human condition; a form of immortality and boundlessness that would allow us to observe the drama of our ephemeral lives from ‘above,’ as opposed to being engulfed and drowned by it.  Read more at location 355

****  The predominant intellectual answer in our culture today is that transcendence is fundamentally impossible, for there is nothing to a human being but his biological body. This, in itself, is a myth; an interpretation of images.  Read more at location 358

throughout history, countless people have had transcendent—spiritual, mystical—experiences.13 They have felt and cognized directly that our true identities extend far beyond our bodies and that our lives in this world are pregnant with meaning.  Read more at location 361

although the personal and direct experience of a transcendent order leaves an indelible mark in the human mind, the experience itself is almost never abiding.  Read more at location 365

The issue is compounded by the impossibility to properly translate the experience into words and concepts, which makes recall very difficult. This way, the transcendent order quickly becomes a rather abstract and distant idea, as opposed to a present and felt reality.  Read more at location 367

The impetus of human life is to transcend the limitations of the ordinary human condition and realize a form of eternal significance. Although transcendence can be experienced in mystical or spiritual states, the experience is almost never abiding and does not permeate one’s daily life.  Read more at location 374

Religious myths and transcendence 

a special type of myth—a religious myth—can bring transcendence into everyday life, thereby saving the human animal from existential despair.  Read more at location 378

****  Religious myths turn ordinary life into an abiding transcendent experience; a small but crucial segment of an epic cosmic drama. The boundaries between this world and a bigger world dissolve. There is no more ‘here and there.’ Instead, transcendence abides in the here and now. Religious myths provide the ground where the acorn can grow into the oak.  Read more at location 389

A religious myth can bring transcendence into daily life in an abiding manner. It can infuse ordinary aspects of life with enchantment and timeless significance, thereby saving the human animal from existential despair.  Read more at location 392

The lamentable state of religious myths today 

moral and ethical codes, ideologies of every kind and ontological interpretations of science—such as the metaphysics of materialism—are, quite literally, myths. They are stories that provide context and direction to our lives, be they lives of scientific pursuit or social activism. Undeniably, however, religious myths have been steadily losing their power.  Read more at location 396

The richness and variety of religious folklore is quickly being swallowed up by globalized, packaged, market-driven worldviews that impart no meaning to one’s local community, geography, history or traditions.  Read more at location 400

On the one hand, the crucial usefulness of skepticism is degenerating into the narrow-mindedness of cynicism. The allegedly skeptical scientific myth that dominates contemporary culture is, in fact, based on a peculiarly biased value-system: an emotional and irrational need to deny all meaning and purpose in nature.  Read more at location 408

On the other hand, the crucial usefulness of faith—a word whose meaning I am going to elaborate upon later—is degenerating into the narrow-mindedness of fundamentalism. So petrified are we at the specter of a meaningless life that we now cling rather desperately to a particular, narrow interpretation of our chosen religious myth.  Read more at location 423

We squash the many facets of the myth—the multiple entendres, perspectives and contradictions necessary for conveying the deeper, intellect-transcending intuitions underlying the myth20—into a single facet.  Read more at location 426

****  Both cynicism and fundamentalism blind us to the full breadth and depth of religious myths.  Read more at location 431

Because of the contemporary tendency toward cynicism and fundamentalism, we’ve marginalized our religious myths and made them small and flattened. Consequently, we’ve lost our connection with transcendence.  Read more at location 434

Chapter 2

The rich colors of mythical life 

during the vast majority of history and pre-history things have been very different.  Read more at location 437

We have to turn, for instance, to the Arandan, an aboriginal Australian people with an extraordinarily evocative account of the origins of their world.  Read more at location 439

The Arandan religious myth 

Arandan believe that Karora, the creator, dreamed the world up in his sleep.  Read more at location 441

The animals that sprouted from Karora’s dreaming body are animals the Arandan see every day. The myth thus endows their very environment and its inhabitants with transcendence. Their whole existence is colored by the myth. It gives their lives meaning.  Read more at location 450

****  The idea built into this religious myth is sophisticated and striking. Karora can find himself in two different mental states: one lacking lucidity, which is linked to the unconstrained freedom to imagine things into existence; and a self-reflective state linked to becoming subject to self-imposed constraints. Upon waking up inside his own dream, Karora even has to find food, cook and eat! There seems to be a trade-off between lucidity and unconstrained creative freedom; they don’t come together.  Read more at location 464

The Hindu religious myth 

(Note: Profound link between word, language, and content (as meaningful or purposeful))  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.  Read more at location 477

The common motifs behind the world’s religious myths 

****  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.  Read more at location 489

according to the Christian myth, God also enters His creation by being born into it as the Christ.  Read more at location 495

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.  Read more at location 497

****  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.’  Read more at location 502

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.  Read more at location 510

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.  Read more at location 517

****  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.  Read more at location 526

Religious myths: either true or irrelevant 

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.  Read more at location 532

Mere allegories? 

Something glaringly essential is lost when we reduce religious myths to just allegories.  Read more at location 553

****  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?’  Read more at location 556

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.  Read more at location 562

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.  Read more at location 572

Chapter 3 

The truth of religious myths 

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.  Read more at location 579

Language and thought 

**********  (Note:  exactly. Objective truth is translatable to propositional language)  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.  Read more at location 583

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.  Read more at location 587

****  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.’  Read more at location 592

(Note: Mirrors embodied experience, embodied cognition)  Before being a tool for communication, language mirrors the very way our intellects process information about reality.  Read more at location 596

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.’  Read more at location 599

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  Read more at location 603

****  we assume that if something cannot be unambiguously said then it cannot be true.  Read more at location 607

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 preposterous to think that such a template, evolved for survival purposes, could mirror within itself all the dynamics of nature.  Read more at location 614

Truth doesn’t care about the limits of human language. 

****  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.  Read more at location 619

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.  Read more at location 625

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.  Read more at location 628

Where the intellect stops intuition picks up. We can sense truth even if we cannot articulate it in words or derive it from logical schemes. Unreliable as this sense may be, it is our only link to a broader reality.  Read more at location 633

the ‘unconscious’ mind is merely an obfuscated part of consciousness. Terminology aside, however, what matters here is the existence of a broader, intuitive part of mind underlying the ego. From this point on, I will call it the ‘obfuscated mind.’  Read more at location 638

**************  (Note:  Jung, subconscious, deep psychology)  Today’s neuroscience has produced strong empirical evidence that, like the ego, the obfuscated mind can also acquire, process, store and retrieve information, exhibiting a surprisingly broad range of cognitive functions.49 Indeed, the presence of an obfuscated mind much broader and more powerful than the ego is an empirical fact that confronts every depth-psychologist, every day, in the therapy room.  Read more at location 640

As a cognitive domain that transcends the intellect, the obfuscated mind does not operate according to linguistic constructs.  Read more at location 645

Instead, evidence from depth-psychology shows that the obfuscated mind operates symbolically.  Read more at location 647

In the words of Corbin, ‘a symbol is a primary phenomenon (Urphänomen), unconditional and irreducible, the appearance of something that cannot manifest itself otherwise to the world where we are.’  Read more at location 649

We can experience the amazing latitude of symbolic cognition when we dream: as expressions of the obfuscated mind, dreams unfold in a much broader space than that delineated by rationality and physics. They don’t ‘make sense’ in the way our rational thoughts do because they refuse to be bound by the constraints of logic, time and space normally enforced by grammatical rules. Scenes change suddenly and discontinuously; events don’t obey ordinary cause-and-effect relationships; contradictions and cognitive dissonance abound; etc. Yet, dreams have great power to reveal truth about our inner states, conveying their meaning through indirect, seemingly absurd but strongly evocative symbols. This, in fact, is the whole basis of dream analysis in depth-psychology.  Read more at location 653

I believe that the logical constraints of the human intellect are very useful but ultimately arbitrary.53 After all, one cannot logically argue for the absolute validity of logic without begging the question.  Read more at location 659

Its symbolic character should be regarded, according to Carl Jung, as an ancient mode of thought that has been superseded—or rather, obfuscated—by the relatively recent acquisition of linguistic thinking.  Read more at location 662

What is the meaning of it all? The possibility that presents itself to us is that our neglected obfuscated mind—with its deeply rooted, unfathomably broader, but purely intuitive apprehension of reality—could offer us answers.55 Could it give us access to transcendent truths? Could we ease our modern anxieties and rediscover the meaning of life by tapping into this ancient umbilical-chord that keeps us connected to the ground of existence?  Read more at location 672

Truth can be intuited even when it cannot be articulated in language. Such intuition is rooted in our broader obfuscated mind, which can apprehend—in symbolic ways—aspects of reality beyond the grasp of our self-reflective thoughts and perceptions.  Read more at location 676

Transcending the intellect 

Many of the neuroses that plague the lives of modern humans—from anxiety to depression—are often fed, if not caused, by a confined, claustrophobic and ultimately unsubstantiated interpretation of consensus reality; that is, by a deprived myth derived from grammatical rules.  Read more at location 679

That the intellect can’t access these transcendent truths does not mean that our broader obfuscated mind can’t either. As a matter of fact, both the long history of religious epiphany56 and over a century of depth-psychology57 suggest strongly that it can; that the obfuscated mind can intuitively recognize transcendence, offering us our best chance of deliverance from the clutches of deprived myths.  Read more at location 685

despite the radically different geographical, historical and cultural contexts of different traditional peoples, they were intuitively ‘looking at,’ and trying to describe, the same phenomenon. In arguing this, I am largely echoing Jung’s views, which were extensively substantiated in his own work and those of others after him.  Read more at location 695

****  to restore meaning to our lives, we must develop a close relationship with the transcendent truths symbolically unveiled by the obfuscated mind in the form of religious myths.  Read more at location 698

the symbolic religious myths produced by the obfuscated mind aren’t merely roundabout ways to refer to something literal, but the only pointers we have to a form of salvation. They aren’t less precise and redundant alternatives to literal explanations, but the only fair way to capture and communicate the transcendent aspects of reality.  Read more at location 710

****  religious myths take on the power of literal truth: in the absence of the latter, they become the most direct, explicit, declarative, accurate and precise utterance of the truth. If transcendent truths are to be uttered at all, they can only be uttered in the form of religious myths.  Read more at location 712

Many religious myths reflect a culture’s intuitive apprehension of transcendent aspects of reality. They aren’t merely roundabout ways to refer to something literal, but the most direct and accurate utterance of transcendent truths. A religious myth is symbolic—never literal—because it emerges from the obfuscated mind.  Read more at location 715

A daring proposal 

I thus propose that, if a religious myth resonates deeply with your inner intuitions and survives a reasonably critical assessment of its depth, then you should emotionally—though not intellectually—take it onboard as if it were literally true. The religious myth that resonates the strongest with your obfuscated mind should inform your emotional life  Read more at location 721

Therefore, the logical way to go about life is, ironically, to buy into your heart-chosen myth with reasonable but not excessive intellectual oversight. The intellect is a valuable adviser but a lousy king.  Read more at location 727

****  This was Nietzsche’s mistake when he declared God to be dead.64 Overwhelmed by late nineteenth century rationalism, he rejected the religious myth of an anthropomorphic God, omniscient overseer of human life. But, with this reasonable rejection of the literal interpretation of a symbol, he denied all transcendent aspects of reality.65 Is this denial less false—or even less naïve—than the divine symbol taken literally?  Read more at location 731

Faith is the sincere emotional openness to the transcendent truths connoted by a story, beyond the superficial, literal appearances of the story’s denotations.  Read more at location 763

Plausibility is key for the images used in any religious myth. And plausibility changes with the zeitgeist and the views of a culture.  Read more at location 769

The images of traditional myths were appropriate for cultures without the scientific understanding of the world that we possess today. We need new images, new representations consistent with our contemporary knowledge and intellectual ethos.  Read more at location 774

Emotionally, we either believe a religious myth or we don’t. If we don’t, the myth loses the power to bring transcendence into daily life. I thus propose that, if a religious myth resonates deeply with your intuitions, you should emotionally—though not intellectually—take it onboard as if it were literally true.  Read more at location 778

The danger of fundamentalism 

My proposal is that you allow your chosen religious myth to inform your emotional life as though it were literally true. However, I am not suggesting that you intellectually take it to be the literal truth. Doing so is tantamount to denying transcendence altogether, since it implicitly assumes that the corresponding truths can be accurately, unambiguously and completely captured in a language-based narrative. Moreover, taking a religious myth to be the literal truth at an intellectual level plants the seed of fundamentalism. This has been the source of unimaginable suffering and destruction throughout history.  Read more at location 781

****  A transcendent truth is to our intellect like a solid cylinder is to its shadows. The same transcendent truth can, in principle, ‘appear’ to the intellect in different and apparently contradictory forms, like circle and rectangle. The symbolisms of different but valid religious myths are the shadows of transcendent truths.  Read more at location 791

Cynically dismissing all religious myths is tantamount to closing one’s eyes to the shadows projected by truth.  Read more at location 800

However, if you intellectually take your religious myth to be the literal truth, you will be closing your eyes to the cylinder! You will be taking a shadow to be all there is to reality and dismissing that which is its source. This is as unfair to the transcendent truth as dismissing all religious myths; perhaps worse.  Read more at location 802

********  if one grants validity only to the world of shadows, a logical implication is that shadows with different shapes cannot be concurrently true. Since the transcendent reality—the place where these differences are reconciled—is intellectually dismissed, the differences in shape must imply true contradictions. In the absence of the cylinder, if the circle is true then the rectangle must be false, and vice-versa. Here fundamentalism is born:  Read more at location 805

*************  Cynicism and fundamentalism are the two sides of one coin. Both practice voluntary blindness toward transcendent truth: one by refusing to acknowledge that shadows convey valid insights about it, and the other by taking a shadow to be the sole and complete truth.  Read more at location 813

Because of its very nature, there are no arbiters of mythical veracity other than intuition. The validity of a religious myth is not decidable by the intellect.  Read more at location 816

Fundamentalism is untenable because it depends on there being just such a fully objective standard of transcendent truth.  Read more at location 819

Does it mean that all religious myths are equally valid at a transcendent level? Of course not. A shadow in the form of a pentagon is always invalid as a projection of a solid cylinder, whichever way one illuminates it.  Read more at location 820

I am, thus, not saying that there is no way to evaluate the validity of a religious myth. We will always have our own sincere intuition—the sense of the heart—to do so. The difficulty, of course, lies in telling real intuition—emerging from the depths of the obfuscated mind—from shallow self-deception, like wish fulfillment and gullibility.  Read more at location 825

it is conceivable that the comparative study of religion, as professionally done in academia, could help us recognize true religious myths by identifying the symbolic patterns typical of genuine intuitive insight.  Read more at location 829

Religious myth and language 

In the same way that only some of the conceivable interactions among ordinary images are empirically verifiable consensus facts, only a subset of all conceivable meta-images is actually true. These transcendent truths are recognized by the human mind as outer realities, as though captured by a sixth sense utterly incommensurable with the other five.  Read more at location 842

Chain 1-2: lies, ordinary fictions and factual errors. Here, an ordinary statement of language (1) denotes an ordinary image interaction (2) that is not a consensus fact.  Read more at location 846

Chain 3-4-5: allegories. Here, an ordinary statement of language (3) denotes an ordinary image interaction (4) that is not, but does connote, a consensus fact (5).  Read more at location 848

Chain 6-7: literal truths. Here, an ordinary statement of language (6) denotes an ordinary image interaction that is a consensus fact (7).  Read more at location 852

Chain 8-9-10: transcendent fallacies or false religious myths. Here, a mythical statement of language (8) denotes an ordinary image interaction (9) that is not a consensus fact, but does connote a transcendent meta-image (10). This transcendent meta-image, however, is not a transcendent truth.  Read more at location 854

Chain 11-12-13-14: true religious myths. Here, an intuition emerging from the obfuscated mind (11) inspires the intellect to produce a mythical statement of language (12) denoting an ordinary image interaction (13). This ordinary image interaction is not a consensus fact but does connote a transcendent truth (14). Clearly, true religious myths aren’t allegories (chain 3-4-5).  Read more at location 857

Is the universe itself a form of language? 

we can call such mythical stories quasi-fictions.70 Now, notice that the basic images in these quasi-fictions—the building blocks of the stories—are, in themselves, consensus facts. It’s just their particular interactions that are not.  Read more at location 866

The building blocks of facts and religious myths are the same. This may sound like a casual and insignificant point, but it suggests an astounding possibility: Could the ordinary events of life themselves be pointing to transcendent truths?  Read more at location 875

Even the mere fact that we sleep and dream—believing the dream to be real while we are in it—seems suspiciously like a hint about the transcendent nature of existence, if you remember our earlier discussion about the cosmogonic cycle.  Read more at location 882

The proven effectiveness of the images of consensus reality in evoking transcendent meta-images is non-trivial. In principle, there should be no reason for nature to be like that. The fact that it is is cumbersome to make sense of, unless consensus reality itself were attempting to evoke something transcendent; unless it were trying to say something deeper about itself through symbolism. ‘Holy art Thou, O God … of whom All-nature hath been made an image.… Holy art thou, transcending all pre-eminence … unutterable, unspeakable,’ sings the Hermetic myth.  Read more at location 890

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, a twentieth century Indian sage, was less-than-cryptic about this idea: ‘When you see the world you see God. There is no seeing God apart from the world. Beyond the world to see God is to be God,’ he stated.74  Read more at location 895

‘Contemplator of God’s works did man become; he marveled and did strive to know their Author,’ continues the Hermetic myth.  Read more at location 907

Chapter 4 

Myth and no-myth 

throughout much of history, there have been spiritual traditions whose aim has been precisely that: to reach an interpretation-free state of awareness; a state of pure observation, without commentary. Among these traditions one can count Zen Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Dzogchen and certain Western variations. Collectively, these traditions today are usually lumped under the term ‘nondualism.’ I will call them the traditions of no-myth,  Read more at location 915

In the West, the traditions of no-myth roughly correspond to what has been called the ‘via negativa’—theologies of negation that attempt to characterize transcendence by stating what it is not—as opposed to the ‘via positiva’ of mythology.  Read more at location 919

because transcendent truths cannot be rationalized in words, no religious myth can be literally true. As such, all religious myths are literally false. It is easy to see how this realization could have led entire spiritual traditions to a complete rejection of the intellect and all myths.  Read more at location 923

First, it would be simplistic and false to conclude that the traditions of no-myth are exclusive to the East or that mythical traditions are exclusive to the West. Many Christian mystics—like Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Heinrich Suso, Jan van Ruysbroeck, etc.—echo no-myth approaches, whilst many Eastern religions—Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Mandaeism, etc.—are rich in myths.  Read more at location 929

My intention here is to briefly suggest the intertwining roles of myth and no-myth, as well as their potential pitfalls, in the search for the transcendent truths of nature.  Read more at location 934

The traditions of no-myth 

Adyashanti describes well the interpretation-free state of awareness that no-myth traditions seek to achieve: The mind compulsively interprets what it is aware of (the object) in a mechanical and distorted way. It begins to draw conclusions and make assumptions according to past conditioning.… In true meditation, the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself.… An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness.  Read more at location 938

In the traditions of no-myth, the emphasis is on stopping the effort to interpret consensus reality, thereby relinquishing all myths. Instead of actively engaging with the symbolic activity of the obfuscated mind to understand its insights, the emphasis is on silence and stillness.  Read more at location 952

Transcendence with no-myth 

The delusory myth of personal identity and separateness is at the root of human suffering. It is also at the root of our loss of contact with transcendence.  Read more at location 970

by helping one drop the delusory myth of personal identity and separateness, the traditions of no-myth also bring a form transcendence back into one’s everyday life, just like religious myths do!  Read more at location 973

Advaita Vedanta and Christianity 

Advaita Vedanta and Christianity help us tackle this fundamental cause of suffering in surprisingly analogous ways. Advaita aims to stop all suffering by dis-identification with the ego.  Read more at location 992

The practitioner has thoughts, but he isn’t those thoughts; he has feelings, but he isn’t those feelings; etc. A successful Advaita practitioner will identify himself only with pure awareness: an impersonal, interpretation-free witness. He will still maintain an ego, but instead of believing himself to be the ego, he will use the ego as a tool for interacting with the world.  Read more at location 994

Christians also suffer because of the inability of their egos to control the world: they can’t have all they want, they can’t avoid all adversity and they can’t stop death, no matter how hard they pray. Their myth offers a way to deal with this dilemma through a form of surrender to a higher power: they place their fate ‘in the hands of God,’ as former American president Jimmy Carter said upon announcing his cancer diagnosis. By handing over its responsibilities and struggles to a higher power, the ego withdraws from its war against reality.  Read more at location 1000

In the inner realm, the lessening of a tremendous burden is achieved in both cases, as if a huge load were lifted off of one’s shoulders. The futile struggle against reality stops.  Read more at location 1005

Clearly, Advaita and Christianity represent different trade-offs. They may appeal to different people with different proclivities. But they aren’t dissimilar in at least the one aspect discussed above. This alone shows how myth and no-myth can, despite apparent contradictions, lead to the same destination. Finally, notice that, although I’ve been using Christianity and Advaita as examples, the point is more generic. Consider, for instance, Islam: the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘surrender;’ to surrender and submit oneself to a universal will—the will of God—much beyond the ego’s petty desires. Here is a religious myth that results in over one and a half billion people worldwide prostrating themselves to a power beyond the ego; not one, but five times a day. It’s easy to see how this, too, reflects the parallel discussed above.  Read more at location 1022

Both Advaita Vedanta (no-myth) and Christianity (myth) help ease suffering by enabling one to drop one’s futile struggle against reality. Advaita does this by dis-identification with the ego. Christianity, by surrender to a higher power. Indeed, this parallel goes beyond Advaita and Christianity alone.  Read more at location 1029

The pitfalls of no-myth

a potential pitfall of the no-myth traditions is the temptation to throw away the baby with the bath water: to reject, along with the myth of separateness, the value of self-reflection for interpreting the phenomenal world, simply because they seem to come together. Moreover, because we cannot derive meaning from the outer realm without interpreting it, by rejecting interpretative effort the no-myth traditions may also mislead us towards the conclusion that consensus reality is meaningless.  Read more at location 1060

Those seduced by this line of thought reckon that consensus reality is a pointless, useless drama; a cosmic mistake of sorts. They reckon that nothing in consensus reality is important or means anything. Therefore, nothing in it needs to be reflected upon. They see all consensus images as mere illusion, dream, ‘maya;’ nothing we need to pay careful attention to. They overlook the possibility that the transcendent truth may only be able to express itself through the illusions it generates.  Read more at location 1074

A potential pitfall of the no-myth traditions is the failure to see that not only may illusions carry symbolic truth, they may embody the only possible expression of transcendence.  Read more at location 1086

Or even Ramana Maharshi’s paradoxical words: ‘The world is illusory. Brahman alone is real. The world is Brahman.’  Read more at location 1089

The no-myth traditions may reject self-reflective interpretations of the world along with the myth of separateness. They may fail to recognize that the illusion of consensus reality may be the symbolic expression of transcendence. If so, self-reflection is crucial for groking the symbolism.  Read more at location 1094

Myth and no-myth working together 

Myth and no-myth can be complementary. The traditions of no-myth help us put the intellect in its proper place and attune to our mythical intuition. They also help us unblock our view of the symbols of consensus reality, so we can reflect upon them more clearly and advance religious myths.  Read more at location 1108

The true value of self-reflection 

self-reflection is largely an intellectual capacity. At the very moment that we bring an originally obfuscated intuition up into the field of self-reflection, we place it in the intellect and, therefore, confine it to language. And since language cannot capture transcendent truths, the whole exercise seems to defeat itself. If we try to apply self-reflection to a transcendent idea, we end up losing its very transcendence through the filter of language; we end up with a well-elaborated circle, but miss the cylinder altogether.  Read more at location 1115

The true value of self-reflection is not in answering, but in asking.  Read more at location 1121

****  the self-reflective but language-limited intellect will never be able to produce the transcendent answer to the riddle of life. But by progressively refining the way the riddle is posed—that is, the way the questions are asked—the intellect can nudge and guide the obfuscated mind toward increasingly more insightful answers.  Read more at location 1121

The limitation of the obfuscated mind is that, because it lacks self-reflection, it simply doesn’t occur to it to ask the questions.  Read more at location 1125

My claim is that the obfuscated mind is just as uncritical and unquestioning as the dream state. We know this because, after all, dreams are expressions of the obfuscated mind.90 As such, by its very nature, the obfuscated mind can’t stand out of itself; it doesn’t occur to it to ask the deeper questions about the nature of self and world. That’s why the obfuscated mind needs the self-reflective intellect to nudge and guide it toward answers. For as long as the right questions aren’t asked by the intellect, the ultimate answers of life and reality will remain elusive.  Read more at location 1130

**********  This is the natural way the linguistic intellect and the symbolic obfuscated mind spontaneously cooperate. The intellect self-reflectively contemplates its circumstances and asks progressively more refined questions, while the obfuscated mind—nudged along by these questions—reacts intuitively with symbolic answers.  Read more at location 1141

this is how every creative person ordinarily operates in any area of intellectual activity, from science to business: first, the intellect contemplates the problem and iterates upon the right questions to ask. Then, you must stop thinking, so the questions have a chance to sink into the obfuscated mind.  Read more at location 1143

****  The natural role of self-reflection—even in ordinary situations—is to ask the right questions, as opposed to composing creative or original answers through mechanical steps of reasoning.  Read more at location 1147

Breaking through religious myths 

As we’ve seen, a true religious myth indicates the way to transcendent truths. It isn’t the moon, but the finger pointing at the moon. Some of us—the cynics, literalists and fundamentalists—stay fixated on the finger, never looking at what it is pointing at. Others take the hint and discover that beautiful celestial body reigning over the night sky. But a few go beyond watching and visit the moon itself.  Read more at location 1176

Could I articulate my epiphany in language? I could try, but I know that it would be completely misunderstood, no matter how carefully I chose my words. I know it because I would misunderstand it completely if someone else tried to describe it to me. The insight escapes language and can only be conveyed—precariously as it may admittedly be—through the religious myth. All I can say is this: that sudden epiphany confirmed the validity of the Christian myth to me and, simultaneously, shredded it to pieces. It was an ‘Aha!’ moment that, while making clear why the Christian myth is what it is—it simply couldn’t be any different—it also showed that the truth has very little to do with the myth as expressed in words. Although this may sound like a contradiction, my living experience wasn’t contradictory at all: it made perfect sense at a non-intellectual, heart-felt level. I had glanced at the cylinder beyond the shadows.  Read more at location 1200

The experience I am trying to describe wasn’t rapture or ecstasy. It was simply an insight of understanding that escapes the boundaries of the intellect and resolves paradoxes; a syzygy or coniunctio, as Jung called it.94 It was like a subtle but powerful shift of perspective that instantly placed me where the myth had been pointing to all along.  Read more at location 1209

here is the point I am trying to make: when the experience does happen, the religious myth dissolves itself like clouds dissolve as they surrender their rain. After all, once on the moon, one no longer needs to follow the pointing finger. If anything, one finds the finger pointing directly at oneself!  Read more at location 1216

even for those lucky souls who receive the grace of experiencing a transcendent truth directly, the religious myth remains an important reminder; an important link to transcendence that infuses meaning into earthly life after one’s cognitive vantage point returns to the intellect.  Read more at location 1223

A religious myth can create the conditions for a direct experience of a transcendent reality. If and when the experience actually happens, the myth dissolves itself. But once the experience is over, the religious myth remains an important link—a reminder—between ordinary life and transcendence.  Read more at location 1231

PART II: Truth 

These things never happened, but they always are. Sallust 

Chapter 5 

The quest for truth 

The myth below is the story of Castor and Pollux, twin brothers that couldn’t be more different. Their epic journey mirrors aspects of ourselves as we seek liberation. Indeed, Castor and Pollux live within me as they probably live within every human being who is sincerely engaged in this ultimate quest.  Read more at location 1246

—There are only two authentic paths to truth, young seekers. Man has no shortage of myths at his disposal. If his true motivation is to find peace, he must search for the myth that resonates with his heart and make it his life and reality.  Read more at location 1255

—The other path is one on which many truth-seekers before you have found their demise. It is the path of the absolute: the rejection of every myth in the quest for a truth as pure and untarnished by the touch of man’s thoughts as a buried jewel in the bowels of the Earth. This path requires the rigorous cleansing of raw experience from the narratives constantly woven and projected by the intellect.  Read more at location 1258

Chapter 6 

Deconstructing truth 

we’ve freely spoken of not one but three kinds of truth—literal, allegorical and transcendent—without stopping for a moment to consider what the very concept of truth actually entails.  Read more at location 1316

the question here is much deeper than mere semantics: What hidden, unexamined metaphysical assumptions do we make when we think of truth?  Read more at location 1318

Three culturally sanctioned concepts of truth 

‘truth’ is surely a concept of the human intellect.  Read more at location 1322

The first culturally sanctioned concept of truth has to do with the validity of perceptions in the present moment. It entails that our perceptions are true only if they correspond to states of affairs that exists now, independently of our subjective inner lives.  Read more at location 1326

Let us call this first concept of truth ‘perceptual truth.’  Read more at location 1332

The second culturally sanctioned concept of truth has to do with the validity of explanations, whose essential elements are inferred past causes.  Read more at location 1332

Let us call this second concept of truth ‘explanatory truth.’  Read more at location 1342

The third culturally sanctioned concept of truth has to do with predictions and deals with future possibilities.  Read more at location 1343

Let us call this third concept of truth ‘predictive truth.’  Read more at location 1350

****  In summary, perceptual truth entails that an internal, subjective perception is true only if it corresponds to a present external state of affairs. Explanatory truth entails that an internal, subjective explanation is true only if it corresponds to a past external state of affairs. And predictive truth entails that an internal, subjective expectation is true only if it corresponds to a future external state of affairs.  Read more at location 1351

Truth is a concept of the human intellect that arises after infancy. There are three culturally sanctioned concepts of truth: perceptual, explanatory (which includes memories) and predictive. They are meant to correspond to present, past and future external states of affairs, respectively.  Read more at location 1354

The subjectivity of the past 

Our confidence in the objectivity of the past arises from our subjective, intellectual models of reality. These models take our memories and perceptions as inputs and then interpolate a chain of causal links between them, so to couch the present in a coherent, reassuring and actionable context.  Read more at location 1367

This linear and coherent chain of connected events is a mentally constructed story that reassures you and allows you to take appropriate actions.  Read more at location 1371

The past is a mental, intellectual construct meant to give context to your present perceptions. There has never been a moment in your entire life in which the past has been anything else; I challenge you to find one. Again, I am not saying that this mental construct is false; I am saying that it is a mental construct.  Read more at location 1379

If the past is entirely subjective, it follows that there can never be explanatory truths. We can never say that any explanation is true in the culturally sanctioned sense, for the past is always already gone; it’s never out there. The best we can ever say is that the explanation is consistent with memories and present perceptions,  Read more at location 1384

Our mind generates, based on our intellectual models of reality, the stories we call the past. Moreover, we know that the mind is innately incentivized to construct these stories so ‘to preserve a coherent personal narrative,’95 which reassures us by strengthening our sense of personal self.  Read more at location 1400

Explanatory truths require mind-independent past states of affairs that are never really out there, for the past is always a mental construct. All bulletproof rational arguments for believing certain explanations are also subjective, arising from our intellectual models of the workings of nature.  Read more at location 1406

All explanations are myths whose truth-value we assign subjectively. They are true only insofar as we say that they are true. They are stories we conjure up and tell ourselves in order to make sense of the disconnected, context-free phantasmagoria of present perception.  Read more at location 1412

The subjectivity of the future 

The future is always just a subjective expectation in your mind, never a mind-independent state of affairs somewhere out there.  Read more at location 1425

The future is a mental, intellectual construct meant to give perspective to your present actions. There has never been a moment in your entire life in which the future has been anything else; I challenge you to find one.  Read more at location 1430

We imagine a future wherein we remember a past wherein we predicted a future that matches the future we are now imagining. From this tortuous intertwining of imaginings we conclude that the future and the past must exist, well, objectively, even though all the while we’ve never left the present.  Read more at location 1448

****  Past and future are myths: stories in the mind.  Read more at location 1452

The future is a mental construct generated by subjective, intellectual models of reality fed with subjective memories and present perceptions. It isn’t anywhere out there but an internal myth meant to give perspective to present actions. Thus, there can be no predictive truths.  Read more at location 1459

There is only ever the present

Past and future exist only as mental explanations and predictions, images in the mind. But these images are experienced in the present.  Read more at location 1465

The intangibility of the present 

The present is infinitely short unless we choose to believe the theoretical, abstract limits imposed by current physics. In this case, the shortest possible interval of time is supposed to be the so-called Planck time, denoted tP: tP ≈ 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second If you try to develop a felt intuition for how short this is, you will quickly discover that you can’t. It is inconceivably shorter than the ranges of time you have any familiarity with and could use as references for comparison.  Read more at location 1487

From an intellectual standpoint, the present is thus intangible.  Read more at location 1493

****  The present is an intangible moment squeezed in between a growing past and an approaching future. Therefore, perceptual truths are, at best, an inconceivably fleeting part of the experience of life. The bulk of life consists of internal myths.  Read more at location 1497

The cognitive ‘big bang’ 

Even the past and the future, as myths experienced in the present, exist within it. Thus, out of the quasi-nothingness of the now somehow comes everything. ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,’ says the Heart Sutra of Buddhism.  Read more at location 1502

This is a subtle but crucial point: the cognitive ‘big bang’ is not a process unfolding in time. Rather, it’s a qualitative pattern of distribution of mental contents across the map of human cognition. This complete pattern exists now and only now.  Read more at location 1511

The past and the future are thus projected images—symbols, icons—of the intrinsic, timeless attributes of the singularity; of the intangible essences contained in the cosmic egg.  Read more at location 1516

Analogously, in the words of Wittgenstein, the myth of ‘Christianity is not … a theory about what has happened or will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life.’  Read more at location 1519

We transmute quasi-emptiness into the solidity of existence through a trick of cognitive deception where we play both magician and audience. In reality, nothing ever really happens, for the scope of the present isn’t broad enough for any event to unfold objectively.  Read more at location 1524

The subjectivity of all concepts of truth 

A perception is true only if it corresponds to a present external state of affairs,102 so there must exist something ‘outside.’ And by ‘outside’ I mean an objective world independent of consciousness, wherein states of affairs would still exist and develop even if no conscious entity were observing them. Clearly then, perceptual truth is contingent on the validity of a metaphysical abstraction: a world independent of consciousness. The problem is that such a world is merely a hypothesis, for the only reality we can ever know is that of subjective experience.103 We infer a world outside experience in an attempt to explain present perception,  Read more at location 1535

****  the concept of perceptual truth is inextricably linked to an abstract hypothesis formulated by, and residing entirely within, thought. In other words, perceptual truth is as subjective as explanatory and predictive truths. All three rest on intellectual projections.  Read more at location 1543

Perceptual truth depends on a metaphysical abstraction: a hypothetical external world independent of consciousness. All three culturally sanctioned concepts of truth thus rest on intellectual projections. The very foundations of truth are inherently subjective.  Read more at location 1545

The circularity of space-time 

The fabric of this hypothetical world outside consciousness is what we call space and time. They make up the scaffolding where supposedly objective things and events hang from.  Read more at location 1550

You may say: ‘Time is the interval between two events.’ But ‘interval’ is just another word for ‘time.’ As such, this definition is circular and says absolutely nothing; it contains no new information.  Read more at location 1552

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).  Read more at location 1561

I suggest that space and time are language ghosts. They only seem to exist as independent entities because we conceptualize them in words.  Read more at location 1568

****  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.  Read more at location 1576

Brief recapitulation 

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.  Read more at location 1580

Evidence for non-objectivity 

(Note: Evidence against objectivity from quantum physics)  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  Read more at location 1591

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,  Read more at location 1617

****  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.’  Read more at location 1623

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 Jesus. 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.  Read more at location 1629

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.  Read more at location 1643

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.  Read more at location 1650

The false idols of truth 

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.  Read more at location 1654

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.  Read more at location 1660

(Note: Exactly. Recursiveness in judgment)  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.  Read more at location 1665

‘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?  Read more at location 1675

(Note: Judging good and evil, garden of eden genesis myth)  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.  Read more at location 1686

We should redirect our critical abilities towards reflecting upon the symbolic, iconic meaning of our experiences,  Read more at location 1692

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.  Read more at location 1705

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.  Read more at location 1708

Chapter 7 

Truth, myth and world 

The world as true myth 

***********  (Note:   akin to Nietzsche, Lakoff, etc)  An inescapable implication of our conclusions so far is that the bulk of the world is a collection of narratives experienced in mind according to linguistic patterns. In other words, the world is made of myths, though not necessarily religious ones.  Read more at location 1716

we predict the same future only insofar as we tell each other the same myths about how the world works. Only the present moment, which we share by directly co-perceiving images, can escape the mythical framework of language. However, as discussed earlier, the present is an elusive, intangible singularity. As such, the experiential bulk of human life is a collection of stories, myths. Whether we live in transcendence or existential despair is simply a matter of which type of myth—religious or deprived—predominantly composes our world.  Read more at location 1728

********  dismissing myth is tantamount to dismissing life. The very essence of what it means to be a human being alive in the world is the linguistic hallucination that creates that world.  Read more at location 1733

Myth—and therefore life itself—is how the ‘hoaxer’ symbolically projects out its nature, so it can perceive these projections as seeming objects and thereby inquire into itself.  Read more at location 1744

The hallucination we call the world—including its history—consists of symbols of the intangible nature of mind reflected on the mirror of human awareness. These symbolic reflections are the ‘correspondences’ between the natural and spiritual worlds insisted upon by Swedenborg.  Read more at location 1746

Dismissing myth is tantamount to dismissing life, for the bulk of our world is made of myths, whether religious or deprived. The world consists of symbols of the nature of mind projected out and reflected on the mirror of human awareness, so to enable self-inquiry.  Read more at location 1750

Consensus reality without external truth 

****  But the absence of external truth does not change the fact that experience exists as such. Whether grounded on external truth or not, experience isn’t nothing. It occurs and is the only reality we can ever know for sure.  Read more at location 1754

the absence of external truth does not refute reality, insofar as experience is real as such.  Read more at location 1757

****  the only difference between sense perceptions and private reveries is the degree to which the experience is shared across individuals. Consensus images are largely shared across individuals, while your nightly dreams and daytime fantasies aren’t. Our culture takes this simple observation and extrapolates it to a gigantic and unjustified metaphysical abstraction: a whole universe independent of mind.  Read more at location 1763

Now, notice that only perceptions (present) seem to be intrinsically consensual, while explanations (past) and predictions (future) tend to vary from person to person. Most people can easily agree about what is in front of their eyes right now, but will tend to disagree about how or why it got there, or where it will go next.  Read more at location 1768

Notice that the closer to perception an explanation—including memories—or prediction lies, the higher is its potential for consensus.  Read more at location 1778

consensus reality is a cognitive space not only comprising, but also surrounding, perception. It exists as a kind of glow around the center of the cognitive ‘big bang.’  Read more at location 1785

The potential for an experience to be shared dissipates fast as it is projected further away from the center of the cognitive ‘big bang.’  Read more at location 1790

****  Narrow and diffuse as the boundaries of consensus may be, they still play a crucial role: the experiences that fall within them gain the formidable weight of a collective reality. Consensus experiences live in a transpersonal cognitive space, instead of an individual mind. It is this collective momentum that motivates us to attribute more reality to shared experiences than to private reveries.  Read more at location 1791

For not refuting experience, the absence of external truth does not refute reality. What we call consensus reality is a cognitive space of shared experiences surrounding present perceptions.  Read more at location 1799

The mythical origin and fate of the world 

Myths that correspond to consensus perceptions—such as the immediate outcome of experiments—can be considered more valid than myths that don’t, this being where science has an overwhelming edge. Such is indeed a sound differentiation—and the only one that saves us from the chaos of relativism124—but its scope of applicability is more limited than most people realize. After all, the cognitive space of consensus is confined to the surroundings of the singularity we call the present moment.  Read more at location 1809

most religious myths are, in fact, explanations and predictions. They try to make sense of life by couching present perceptions in a transcendent context. They try to give meaning to life by offering present actions a transcendent perspective.  Read more at location 1813

explanations and predictions are symbols of the nature of mind.  Read more at location 1837

there is no such a thing as the literal truth of any explanation or prediction, for the past and the future are just mental projections experienced in the present moment. ‘There never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on,’125 remarked Campbell.  Read more at location 1840

The significance of both myths lies solely in how they symbolically portray what is happening in your mind now; yes, right now. Anything else is just culturally sanctioned cognitive delusion.  Read more at location 1850

We must look where all reality resides: our own mind, profound aspects of which are given symbolic expression in the form of religious myth.  Read more at location 1865

Religious myths are, by and large, explanations and predictions. They do not correspond to facts outside mind, but neither do scientific cosmologies. The only value of any religious myth or scientific cosmology is symbolic. The only meaningful way to interpret them is as icons of the now.  Read more at location 1867

How religious myths reveal internal truths 

our own nature is clearly transcendent, for that which conjures up time and space through a trick of circular reasoning cannot itself be bound by time or space.  Read more at location 1871

the man hanging from the cross is each and every human being. His sacrifice is our sacrifice: we are all hanging from the self-conceptualized cross of space, time, confinement and impermanence. His divine nature is our true nature as timeless mind taking particular, seemingly limited perspectives within its own dream. That Christ is both God and the Son of God born into God’s creation is a hardly disguised way to express this symbolically. We are Brahman hatching from the cosmic egg now; now; now. ‘Atman [the personal self] is Brahman,’128 concludes the Vedanta School of Hinduism.  Read more at location 1874

The transcendent truths these myths point to are the truths of our own nature, for there’s nothing ‘out there.’ And it is the religious myths themselves that prime us for this realization.  Read more at location 1881

what seems to be the worship of external agencies is, in fact, a conversation with estranged aspects of ourselves through symbolic proxy. In this context, the myths still point inward: if we can’t turn our head back to look at ourselves, we can at least project our inner essence out so to face ourselves head-on. As Swedenborg put it, ‘One should not omit the practice of external worship. Things inward are excited by external worship.’  Read more at location 1892

another way in which religious myths can reveal truth: by cancelling out the implications of deprived cultural myths. Take the modern myth of materialism, for instance: it states that the real world is outside and independent of consciousness, and that consciousness is generated by particular, transient configurations of matter. There are two peculiar things about it: the first is the abstract inference of a world outside consciousness, which is fundamentally beyond knowledge. The second is the implication that consciousness, as a secondary phenomenon of matter, is limited in both time and space. Notice further that it is this very implication that obscures the transcendence of our lives. Thus, by believing in a deprived myth, we lose touch with our own transcendent nature.  Read more at location 1896

That the contemporary anti-religion movement131 focuses precisely on combating the literal validity of religious myths misses the point rather spectacularly.  Read more at location 1912

Ordinarily, most of us are locked inside what I’ve earlier called ‘the hole of cultural conditioning.’ This ‘hole’ entails self-reinforcing, circular patterns of thinking—intellectual models—that prevent us from becoming lucid of the many layers and nuances of our own cognitive processes. They blind us to the simple, transcendent truth of our being.  Read more at location 1914

both the metaphysics of materialism and idealism—the notion that the world is made up entirely of ideas in transpersonal consciousness—are intellectual models inside the ‘hole,’ since both assume space and time in a linguistic description of reality. However, materialism makes more unnecessary, fictional postulates and abstract inferences. This extra ballast weighs it down and drags it much deeper in. Consequently, there are better and worse myths in the ‘hole’ of conditioning: worse myths drag you down while better myths lift you up to the edge of the ‘hole’—the ‘brink of a transcendent illumination,’132 in the words of Campbell—maximizing your chances of escape. This is where religious myths come in again.  Read more at location 1919

True religious myths, on the other hand, acknowledge transcendence and foment the openness—the faith—that is precondition to the final leap to freedom.  Read more at location 1936

true religious myths can help bring transcendence into our lives, thereby delivering us from existential despair, in three ways: first, by helping us turn our gaze inwards to realize the truth of our own nature; second, by projecting symbols that cancel out the implications of deprived cultural inferences and abstractions; and third, by lifting us up to the edge of the ‘hole’ of cultural conditioning, from which grace can help us take the final step to freedom.  Read more at location 1939

Since there is no external reality, religious myths can only point to internal truths. They reveal our transcendent nature, for that which conjures up time and space cannot itself be bound by time or space. Religious myths also cancel out the transcendence-denying implications of cultural abstractions and lift us up to edge of the ‘hole’ of conditioning.  Read more at location 1943

Religious institutions 

My emphasis on the importance of true religious myths in contemporary culture and society should not be construed as blanket support for religious institutions and their actions.  Read more at location 1947

religious myths have been routinely hijacked and corrupted for political and economic gain. They have been misused to establish and maintain the power of clergy. They have been abused as instruments of oppression and social control.  Read more at location 1950

by pointing at the inner truth of each person, true religious myths also contradict any alleged need for intermediaries or translators of any kind. The myth only has vitality if we develop a direct, personal, intimate relationship with it.  Read more at location 1959

‘Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only,’134 advised Wittgenstein.  Read more at location 1962

Because living the transcendent truth of a religious myth is a subtle and very personal phenomenon, not conducive to the gathering of adoring crowds, religious institutions often try to ‘translate’ the myth into pre-packaged dogmas that can be doled out like pills and practiced blindly like calisthenics. We are told that if we simply believe the simple formula handed down to us we will attain transcendence—‘salvation’ in Christian terminology—after death. This, of course, is very convenient for the institutions. But if transcendence could be directly captured in simple words and beliefs, we wouldn’t need the iconography of the myths to begin with. We wouldn’t need religion to begin with. As a matter of fact, dogmas anchor us to the bottom of the ‘hole’ of cultural conditioning; religious conditioning in this case.  Read more at location 1965

in my view, a legitimate religious institution will focus on making the images of the myth alive through ritual, not on laying down dogmas and codes of behavior.  Read more at location 1992

One should not confuse religious myths with the activities of religious institutions. The true myth precedes any institution in its psychic purity and authenticity. It precedes any moral or behavioral code.  Read more at location 2000

Bringing it all together

An individual mind is formed when a segment of mind-at-large collapses into itself, creating a point of dense, highly localized cognitive activity. This singularity subsequently gives rise to the cognitive ‘big bang’ discussed earlier. Each living being thus corresponds to one among countless such singularities in mind-at-large.  Read more at location 2009

The formation of a cosmic egg creates a cognitive boundary between the inside of the egg—that is, the ‘inner realm’ of thoughts and emotions discussed in the very beginning of this book—and the mental activity in the regions of mind-at-large immediately surrounding the egg. It is this boundary that gives rise to sense perceptions: from the perspective of an egg, the activity in the surrounding cognitive neighborhood is experienced in the form of images of an ‘outer realm,’ such as mountains, other people, trees, etc. Therefore, the empirical world you see around you right now is simply your egg’s view of mental processes unfolding in neighboring regions of mind-at-large.  Read more at location 2015

cosmic eggs aren’t different or separate from mind-at-large. They are simply localized cognitive configurations of it. Therefore, beyond sense perceptions, we remain cognitively connected to all of mind-at-large at a foundational level.  Read more at location 2023

****  Transcendent insights feel like perceptions, in that the personal mind often has the impression that they come from outside. This is true in that the insights originate outside the personal mind, in the obfuscated cognitive regions of mind-at-large. However, you also have the ability to deliberately produce insights within your own personal mind: we call it thinking. As  Read more at location 2049

****  the myth of an objective reality is triggered by consensus perceptions; true religious myths are triggered by transcendent insights; more ordinary explanatory and predictive myths are triggered by thoughts; and the myths of past and future are lived out in the form of fantasies. As a result, our entire cognitive ‘space’ becomes populated with myths, which gives substance to human life. These myths hint at the essential truths of mind: they reflect, in symbolic form, the underlying reality of whatever it is that we are. Our seemingly objective perceptions of the world reveal something true about the surface of mind-at-large, while true religious myths hint at its deeper, underlying layers.  Read more at location 2075

As such, the myths of explanations, predictions, past and future, when properly contemplated as symbols, provide a unique window into something ineffable and otherwise impervious to self-reflection. This may be an important clue to the very meaning of human life.  Read more at location 2082

PART III: Belief 

Some things have to be believed to be seen. Ralph Hodgson 

The final part of this book hence consists entirely of a modern religious myth, each chapter relating a part of its story. And, as is the case with any such myth, what follows is much more than mere allegory.  Read more at location 2094

Unlike what people today normally associate with a religious myth, the one here is fairly down-to-earth and contemporary. Its cultural references are plausible and familiar to many. It entails no supernatural occurrences, no prophets and no saints. Anyone could be its protagonist.  Read more at location 2096

Chapter 8 

Ticket off-world 

Chapter 9 

Meeting the Other 

(Note: Akin to Jung's Red Book)  I found that the easiest way for me to rationally make sense of, and later remember, the transcendent insights attained during each trip was to frame the journey in the form of a dialogue. Naturally, this raises the question of whom I was dialoguing with. The most honest answer is: a deeply obfuscated but knowledgeable complex of my own mind that, at the same time, was also entirely alien to my ego.  Read more at location 2294

This simple dissociative trick allowed us to nail down the Club’s original, apparently contradictory goals in a rather elegant manner. There was no complete ego dissolution, as in traditional psychedelic trances, but neither was the ego able to obfuscate the deeper aspects of mind any longer.  Read more at location 2302

****  ‘Your confusion arises from a fundamental inversion: it is your head that is in your mind, not your mind in your head.  Read more at location 2334

‘When you dream at night, the objects you see in your dreams do not correspond to a world outside your mind, do they? Yet, they can influence your subjective state within the dream: dreamed-up water can get you wet and make you experience cold within the dream; a dreamed-up lover can make you feel arousal within the dream; even dreamed-up drugs can make you trip within a dream. Moreover, you always have a dreamed-up avatar, whether implicit or explicit, since you always experience the dream from a localized, moving view-point within it.’ ‘I think I already see where you are going with this…’ ‘Your ordinary life is like a dream,’ he continued anyway. ‘Your physical body is inside your dreaming mind just like your avatar is inside your nightly dreams.  Read more at location 2380

Reality is a feeling. Concreteness and palpability are qualities of experience, not of the abstraction you call the “material world.”  Read more at location 2401

It’s true that all reality is in your mind, but the “your” here does not refer to you as an individual person; instead, it refers to your true nature as impersonal mind. Your sense of personhood is an amalgamation of a particular experiential perspective—that is, a specific point of view within the dream—a particular set of memories and a particular model of self-identity.  Read more at location 2428

the instinctive and concrete sense of “I” that you feel right now, which precedes and couches all your perceptions, thoughts, emotions and memories, is mind-at-large.  Read more at location 2439

Pure being, unpopulated by thoughts, concepts, memories, etc. Every living creature feels this sense of pure being in exactly the same way. All organisms have the same instinctive “I” feeling that is mind-at-large.’  Read more at location 2447

‘Mind-at-large is the subject. All objects exist in mind-at-large as experiences, so mind-at-large itself can’t be an object, can it? You must turn inward, to the innermost sense of pure being you’ve just felt. Only by being itself can mind-at-large know itself.  Read more at location 2451

in the only way that matters, you are mind-at-large. The universe unfolds in your mind. It’s just that your mind is not only yours; it is also my mind, the neighbor’s mind, the co-worker’s mind, the cat’s mind, the ant’s mind, etc., since we all share the same instinctive “I” feeling.’  Read more at location 2458

To be a little more precise, each living being is in fact a distinctive cluster—not just a chain—of mostly internally associated thoughts, feelings and sensations imagined by mind-at-large. The biological body is what this cluster looks like from the perspective of other clusters. Each cluster becomes amnesic of the rest of mind-at-large because the dense cognitive associations within it lead to highly focused internal attention, which then obfuscates everything else outside the cluster.’  Read more at location 2468

‘It means that experiences inside the cluster tend to repeatedly evoke other experiences also inside the cluster. Sensations may lead to habitual thoughts, which may evoke recurring emotions, which may trigger familiar memories, which in turn may lead to other similar sensations, etc., all mostly within the cluster.  Read more at location 2477

This way, you end up with a set of mental contents that mostly reference each other, reinforcing their collective experiential footprint at the expense of everything else outside the cluster. It is this internally associated set that gives you a personal history and a sense of individual identity.’  Read more at location 2481

‘Amnesic clusters are like islands in an ocean of mentation,’ he elaborated. ‘The existence of the islands doesn’t eliminate the ocean. I am what the ocean looks like from the vantage point of someone standing on your island; that is, your ego.’  Read more at location 2490

the view of the ocean is different from every island. And it isn’t complete from any island, since from no one of them can the entire ocean be seen. The view from each island contributes a different but equally valid angle to humanity’s understanding of the ocean. Thus, what you see of me is as much a function of your own individual peculiarities as it is of my nature.  Read more at location 2493

‘I know only in potentiality. Think of it as the light of a match: until you ignite the match, its light exists only in potentiality, in the form of energy chemically stored in its phosphorus head. But when you ignite the match, its light becomes actualized. Only then can it be seen. My knowledge is like the match: it exists complete, but only in potentiality, until you or someone else asks me about it. Your questions then partly ignite the match of my limitless insight, so its light can be seen. Only then does it illuminate existence.’  Read more at location 2504

‘I do know the answer always, but only in potentiality. In other words, I know it, but I don’t know that I know it. The answer remains latent, like the light of a non-ignited match, and doesn’t illuminate my experience; or yours.’  Read more at location 2512

‘Why don’t you ask yourself all relevant questions? You could then illuminate the whole of existence and eradicate ignorance!’ ‘Because I am incapable of asking myself questions.’ What?! This was completely unexpected. But he continued before I could interject: ‘Asking myself questions would require a particular cognitive configuration that arises exclusively within clusters like the human mind.  Read more at location 2515

to understand reality one needs to inquire into the multiple subtle layers of hidden assumptions, expectations and beliefs in one’s own mind. To do so, mind must turn in upon itself. It is this process of turning in upon itself that creates clusters, enables self-reflection and focuses the attention of egos at the cost of obfuscating everything else.’  Read more at location 2521

‘This is the meaning of life! The human purpose is to light up the match of your latent knowledge!’ ‘That’s a fair way to put it…’ confirmed the Other, with slight hesitation.  Read more at location 2524

(Note: Empirical example: metaphors actualized as experienced (e.g. feeling weighted on shoulders when stressed, so forth))  Your perceptions, and all other cognitive associations that follow from them, are thus conditioned and facilitated by implicit, underlying beliefs and expectations.  Read more at location 2533

Uncritically and implicitly taking something for granted is the effect of underlying, obfuscated layers of your cognition.  Read more at location 2537

‘Whether you discern meaning in your life,’ he obliged, ‘is entirely conditioned by beliefs in underlying layers of your cognition. Deep within yourself, do you take it for granted that you are a material entity bound in space and destined to oblivion? If so, such belief will prevent you from experiencing your life’s meaning.’  Read more at location 2545

‘Reality is a reflection of what you believe very deeply within your mind, not of what your ego wishes for. What people wish for is not necessarily what they truly believe in. As a matter of fact, most people wish for endless things they don’t believe possible.’  Read more at location 2572

The beliefs that govern ordinary waking reality are not the beliefs formed in the superficial egoic layers, but in much deeper layers with comparatively many external associations.’  Read more at location 2583

(Note: This idea doesn't resonate much. Even within Idealism it seems Mind at Large would have some Way that is built into patterns we see as nature)  ‘These aren’t deep beliefs, for they don’t reside in deep layers of cognition. They are just strong, sincere beliefs still in superficial layers. The existence of very strong but relatively superficial beliefs in a cluster of mentation does not cancel out the effects—such as gravity—of beliefs concurrently held in much lower, less differentiated layers.  Read more at location 2589

‘Do you mean that the minds of all living creatures are interconnected at that level?’ ‘Yes, exactly. At that level, particular species haven’t yet differentiated from one another. They remain interconnected. That’s why you all share an underlying belief system: the mind of an amoeba, at that level, is one with the mind of a man.  Read more at location 2599

‘To change a belief system, you have to become lucid of the layers of cognition that underlie and give rise to it. In other words, you have to go at least one layer deeper than the layers where the belief system itself resides. And you have to do it in a critical, self-reflective manner.’  Read more at location 2623

‘The belief system that governs ordinary reality is like a collective instinct: it’s an automatism unreachable by lucid reasoning.  Read more at location 2633

‘The myriad effects that you are referring to arise as compound implications of basic, much more generic rules of association. Many of these generic rules simply correspond to what you know as the laws of classical physics, which aren’t many. That the laws of classical physics are, in fact, rules of cognitive association doesn’t change the fact that their effects can combine into higher-complexity implications.  Read more at location 2648

while the classical laws you know apply all the way down to the level of molecules, there are organizing principles in nature—wide-ranging beliefs of mind-at-large—that only apply at the level of complex, macroscopic systems. Currently, you dismiss these purely macroscopic regularities as mere coincidences.’  Read more at location 2655

not only synchronicities,’ he answered. ‘Certain aspects of physiology and metabolism, as well as other organizing principles  Read more at location 2659

undiscovered mental patterns reflecting instinctive beliefs and charged with emotions,’ he clarified, ‘which will remain unknown for as long as your science arbitrarily limits its own perspectives by unnecessarily inferring a world outside mind.’  Read more at location 2662

Chapter 10

The origin of life, the universe and everything 

‘Mind-at-large is populated with endless mental contents,’ he continued. ‘These mental contents are “excitations” or “movements” of mind-at-large that, although multiple and varied, are all experienced concurrently in the now.  Read more at location 2702

****  what you call space-time is simply a mental coordinate system that allows you to unfold or unpack overlapping mental contents. This makes explicit the associative links between them, which would otherwise remain hidden. In other words, space-time allows you to mentally “spread out” simultaneous perceptions, thoughts, emotions, insights, etc., along cognitive reference lines, thereby rendering their links visible to, and treatable by, the intellect. Moreover, this mental trick allows you to describe the associative links in terms of the reference lines used—that is, time and space—which is precisely what you do when you talk of “cause and effect”: you mentally extend simultaneous events in time, so you can say which one happened first and “caused” the other. Essentially, however, all associative links are simultaneous, overlapping mental evocations. They do have structure, but this structure doesn’t inherently span time or space. Instead, it is determined simply by which mental contents evoke which other mental contents—or equivalently, by which mental contents are not evoked in each respective case—as in the cross-referenced database you alluded to. Space-time patterns are only a way to describe and think about this essentially static and dimensionless cognitive structure.’  Read more at location 2713

In summary, mind-at-large expresses itself to itself through many simultaneous, overlapping behaviors.’  Read more at location 2756

*********  keep in mind the key point: space-time is a descriptive framework in cognition; a reference frame that allows you to think and talk about the structure of associations across simultaneous, overlapping mental contents. It does not exist outside cognition.  Read more at location 2759

**********  (Note:  premise, idealism)   ‘To create a particular realm of mentation—which you might call a “world,” a “universe,” or even a “reality”—two steps are required in mind-at-large: initially, a belief system must congeal in a first group of adjacent layers of cognition; then, in a second group above and conditioned by the first one, this belief system must be experienced from within. One experiences a belief system from within when one forgets that it is a belief system in the first place, perceiving the unfolding of its corresponding cognitive associations as standalone events independent of oneself. This is what gives you your sense of reality: you “forget” that, through your imagination, your own beliefs generate what you perceive. Because of this amnesia, you find yourself inside and subject to those beliefs.  Read more at location 2765

you also perceive the dream from within, after your mind has set up rules of cognitive association to govern the dream from underlying, obfuscated layers of cognition. While dreaming, you “forget” that it is your own mind making up the whole story. This is the reason the dream feels real.’  Read more at location 2772

In other words, what you call reality is a reflection of the first layer of your cognition that escapes your critical self-reflection.  Read more at location 2778

****  ‘Belief, when experienced from within, generates a reality. Looking behind belief, in turn, gives away the secret and reveals the imaginary nature of this reality. Consensus reality is the belief you humans, as a species, don’t look behind.’  Read more at location 2784

‘In the beginning,’ he began his longest monologue yet, ‘the imagination of mind-at-large consisted of fleeting, disconnected ideas and feelings; incoherent and evanescent flashes of cognitive activity.  Read more at location 2810

‘But mind-at-large has the innate predisposition to get drawn into its own imaginings,’ he continued, ‘as a painter gets drawn into the making of her painting. The affective force of the imaginings, like a siren song seducing a sailor, enchants and pulls mind into them. Ideas expressing symmetry, as any artist or mathematician could tell you, are particularly attractive at an intrinsic level. So as mind-at-large began conceiving of purely abstract symmetries—mathematical in essence—it became captivated by them. With the increasing commitment of mental energy that resulted, cognitive associations began to form spontaneously: the imagining of more complex symmetries led to more sophisticated emotional responses, which in turn led to the imagining of other complex—though still abstract—symmetries, and so on.  Read more at location 2819

This allowed the ideas and feelings in the loop to become, for the first time, self-sustaining. They would no longer fizzle out like before, but maintain themselves through recurring mutual evocations. It was the emergence of a self-referential loop of cognitive associations that created the first enduring reality, the first universe. In the case of your universe, your science refers to this moment as the “Big Bang.”’  Read more at location 2831

‘The evolving structure of the tangle eventually reached a point of temporary equilibrium, allowing the increasing levels of mental energy to flow smoothly across it in a balanced way. For a while, there were no more energy bottlenecks; no more traffic jams of emotion creating localized pressure points. Therefore, no new branches formed and the tangle became stable. In the case of your universe, this was the moment when your laws of classical physics congealed.  Read more at location 2847

The Other was basically laying out a cosmology of mental processes, based on imagination and fueled by emotion, which nonetheless matched the form of both today’s scientific cosmology and ancient mythological symbols. I had a profound insight then: there were many different languages to describe the origin of life and the universe, none of which was literally true, but all of which pointed more or less accurately to the same ineffable developments.  Read more at location 2852

now that the basic rules of cognitive association were stable, their implications and compound effects had time to unfold and develop fully. In the case of your universe, this corresponded to the operation of the laws of classical physics leading to the birth of the first stars, galaxies, supernovae, planets, moons, etc. The universe became exponentially richer, more complex and, hence, more seductive. ‘The growing seductive power of the universe pulled mind-at-large further into it, like a child is pulled into a rich fairytale.  Read more at location 2859

‘And so it was that mind-at-large punched through and entered its own imaginings with tremendous momentum,’ he said. ‘The resulting change in context is easy to intuit from your own experience: when you deliberately conceive of something while awake and alert, you experience your imagination from the outside. You instinctively know that the conceived scenarios are in you—generated by you—not you in them. But when you dream of something, you enter your own imagination. In a dream, the imagined scenarios become seemingly autonomous and you seem to inhabit them. This transition from conceiving to dreaming, from outside to inside, is the change in context that mind-at-large underwent once it entered its own imaginings. And from within, the rules of cognitive association governing the universe were now believed in as autonomous realities.  Read more at location 2868

This resonated profoundly with several creation myths I’d had to study during my Explorer certification courses.  Read more at location 2876

‘The first entrance or protrusion of mind-at-large into your universe was what your science calls the origin of life.’  Read more at location 2886

the inception of the first living organism—provided only temporary relief. Mental energy continued to accumulate in the tangle because mind-at-large was still increasingly captivated by its own imaginings. This is where biological reproduction came in: by multiplying themselves within the dream, organisms enabled a continual release of emotional pressure and, with it, a kind of dynamic equilibrium. Indeed, nature’s drive to create life wherever and whenever possible is a reflection of this ongoing need to release the emotional charge that mind-at-large constantly pumps into its imaginings.’  Read more at location 2915

history of any universe: the first is when surging mental energy circulating in a self-referential loop forces it to blossom out into a tangle. The second is when surging mental energy circulating in the tangle forces it to blossom out into life.’  Read more at location 2921

clusters remain connected to the tangle by interlinking cognitive associations. Through these interlinking associations, a cluster can receive an influx of mental contents from the neighboring regions of the tangle immediately below it. Most of this influx you call “sense perception:” vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. Sense perception is thus enabled by local cognitive associations between cluster and underlying tangle.’  Read more at location 2926

‘Before mind-at-large penetrated its own imaginings,’ he continued, ‘there was thus no sense perception: no visions, sounds, textures, flavors or scents. Mind-at-large’s imagination consisted of purely abstract ideas—largely about symmetries of a rather mathematical nature—with accompanying feelings.’  Read more at location 2932

(Note: The entire metaphor is wrapped in conceptions using spacetime)  Only through the cognitive influx entering the cluster from the tangle—that is, mostly sense perception—can the cluster gain some awareness of what’s happening outside. The cluster isn’t aware of the broader, deeper cognitive activity—including universal beliefs and will—that set the universe in motion.  Read more at location 2942

For these reasons, the cluster begins to think of itself as an entity separate from the rest of the tangle and the rest of mind-at-large. It perceives the universe as an external, autonomous entity. It acquires a localized, confined and ultimately illusory sense of identity.  Read more at location 2945

the cognitive collapse not only changes the context of the experience from conceiving to dreaming, but also its contents.’  Read more at location 2953

Mind-at-large’s drive to gain this view from within is due to its innate desire to experience and explore new angles of itself. When you perceive the world around you through your five senses, you witness the mental activity of what your mythology calls God from an angle that isn’t accessible to God Himself.’  Read more at location 2975

The meaning of life wasn’t just about lighting up the Other’s matchstick of knowledge in order to understand existence. It was equally about experiencing existence, in all its angles and glory, for the sheer and pure sake of experience itself!  Read more at location 2980

We are the vehicles through which God both experiences and understands Itself.  Read more at location 2984

Let us take the Christian myth as an example: Is it incorrect to describe the penetration of the universal dream by a segment of mind-at-large as the incarnation of a soul? Is it inaccurate to highlight the kinship between biology and mind-at-large by speaking of the Christ as God incarnate? Is it wrong to suggest—through the doctrine of the descent of the Holy Spirit, or Pentecost—that this same kinship applies to all humans? For the first time in my life I had understood religion.  Read more at location 2985

Chapter 11

Happy hour in the Dome 

‘This wave of possibilities is the source and fuel of universal creativity and originality. Without it, the cognitive activity in higher layers would grind to a halt. There would be no novelty feeding it from below. How this wave gets filtered and then congeals into one particular reality—a process that your quantum physics calls “wave function collapse”—depends on the belief system running in those higher layers. Once again, thus, the reality you experience is a function of your deeply ingrained belief system.’  Read more at location 3078

‘Remember that all is in mind, so machines are also the images of mental processes. And so are photons and electrons. As such, that machines can help you punch through layers of your cognition is no more surprising than that your thoughts can penetrate your emotions.’  Read more at location 3084

Because the subatomic realms are so far removed from ordinary experience, they escape the reach of expectations, hence revealing the unbound creative activity of mind-at-large prior to the formation of stable tangles.’  Read more at location 3089

when you look at another person’s brain activity through your Telemetry, you see the reverse side of that person’s inner life. The person’s inner life is behind your perception of her brain activity.  Read more at location 3116

you know that there is a correspondence between the two: one is the reverse side of the other. God’s inner life is the reverse side of the universe in much the same way that a person’s inner life is the reverse side of her brain activity (in fact, of her entire metabolism, but let’s not complicate things for now). Put in another way, the universe is the scan of God’s brain  Read more at location 3121

‘if the ordinary world around us suggests its reverse side—that is, God’s perspective—then the world is a symbol of something transcendent. It points to what God thinks and feels when conceiving the universe into existence.’  Read more at location 3133

****  ‘The inanimate universe is a collection of symbols pointing to imaginings incommensurable with perception; to feelings and ideas beyond your intellectual comprehension. But if you can tune into these symbols using your intuition and imagination, you can read them and unveil their meaning. The world around you is a book waiting to be deciphered. Figuring out how to do it—that is, finding a suitable hermeneutics of the universe—has been the quest of poets, artists, shamans, mystics and philosophers since time immemorial. Only modern Western science, plagued by its materialist metaphysics, has chosen to dismiss the universe’s symbolic significance.’  Read more at location 3143

the sun represents an outpouring of universal love, the mental energy that moves the world.’  Read more at location 3168

‘You have never experienced your death—the end of your primary sense of being—have you? And neither have you experienced other people’s deaths from their perspective, which is the only perspective that counts. In the now there is no death.  Read more at location 3189

death is just an event of the dream, within the dream…’  Read more at location 3201

The direct experience of death is akin to waking up from a dream. One realizes that one was making the whole thing up all along. Moreover, one begins to experience the universe from the reverse side: instead of the sun, one feels the corresponding outpouring of love; instead of a thunderstorm, one feels what the thunderstorm had been symbolizing all along; and so on.’  Read more at location 3206

‘The mystery of death is the change of perspective from observing the universe to being the universe!’ ‘That and more,’ the Other added, ‘for there are countless universes, realms, realities being simultaneously imagined by mind-at-large.’  Read more at location 3209

Chapter 12

Another facet of the truth 

Eventually, I could discern a seemingly human figure. He appeared to be dressed like a nineteenth-century stage magician,  Read more at location 3267

I was now in deep cognitive layers of mind-at-large, where universal belief systems formed; layers supercharged with emotional energy to the brink of bursting at the seams.  Read more at location 3277

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.  Read more at location 3365

‘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;  Read more at location 3382

‘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.’  Read more at location 3404

‘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.  Read more at location 3416

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.’  Read more at location 3427

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!”  Read more at location 3432

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;  Read more at location 3436

used to your classical physics. There are countless other realities in mind-at-large  Read more at location 3440

at-large in which what you consider absurd is perfectly normal and reasonable.  Read more at location 3441

****  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.  Read more at location 3443

********  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.  Read more at location 3455

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.  Read more at location 3478

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.  Read more at location 3493

Epilogue

The Legacy of a Truth-Seeker 

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, You shall always find the layer of self-deception Upon which any one of your convictions ultimately rests.  Read more at location 3506

The honest search for truth annihilates its own subject Slowly, recursively, from within. Having peeled away every layer of self-deception within me, I have found myself to be like an onion: Nothing is left. Only nothing is true. No external references exist, no outside arbiters. We are self-created fictions and so is the cosmos. Truth-seeking is the path to self-annihilation And thus to liberation.  Read more at location 3518

There is nothing to fear, nothing to strive for, nothing to regret. You have no soul; that’s just self-deception. And you won’t die; that’s just self-deception. But beware! As a dream symbolically portrays the inner state of the dreamer, As a novel insinuates the inner life of the writer, As a lie betrays the insecurities of the liar, So the fiction you call reality reveals something about truth. Thus pay attention to life, For truth expresses itself only through its own fictions. To discern truth in fiction: here is the cosmic conundrum! To engage wholeheartedly without being taken in: here is the ultimate challenge! To find meaning in nothingness: here is the epic demand of nature! Partake in reality as an actor in a theatrical play: With attention, dedication and an open heart. But never believe yourself to be your character For characters spend their lives chasing their own shadows, Whereas actors embody the meaning of existence.  Read more at location 3527