Philip K. Dick and the Symbolic World

Photo by Bernardo Kastrup, hereby released into the public domain.

In the wonderful Introduction he wrote for my upcoming book, More Than Allegory, Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal compared my ideas to those of famed American Sci-Fi writer—and unacknowledged metaphysician—Philip K. Dick. Jeff wrote:

Dick is worth dwelling on for a moment here, as his weird thought eerily reflects the more precise and calmer books of Bernardo Kastrup. ... You will see, in due time, just how close Dick’s Valis is to the idealist vision worked out in the following pages. (More Than Allegory, pp. 2-3)

Valis, of course, is Dick's acclaimed sci-fi novel, wherein he lays out an elaborate, gnostic-like metaphysics. Amazingly enough, I hadn't read Valis until prompted by Jeff's Introduction to my book. I write this article immediately after having finished reading it.

I confess that my feelings about Dick's book are mixed, with a part of me somewhat disappointed about its lack of metaphysical closure, whilst another part feels tempted to look upon Dick as some kind of Hermes-like figure, the trickster who plays the role of intermediary between people and the gods.

Valis has an appendix—the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura—wherein Dick summarizes his metaphysics. In Dick's own words:

One Mind there is. ... We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. ... The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind. We hypostatize information into objects. ... The changing information which we experience as world is an unfolding narrative. ... Thoughts of the [Mind] are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements—change—in a physical universe. ... But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it. ... The linking and relinking of objects by the [Mind] is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself). ... This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. (Valis, London, UK: Gollancz, 2001, pp. 257-263)

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When I read these passages, it became clear to me just how correct Jeff was in comparing my work to Dick's metaphysical ideas. They touch on two key themes explored in More Than Allegory, as I discuss below.

The insight that our understanding of the world as a reality independent of mentation is a mistaken intellectual inference

From a recapitulating passage of More Than Allegory:

We’ve discovered so far that unexamined intellectual projections, based on hidden circular reasoning, lie at the root of our belief that an objective, standalone reality grounds truth. Everywhere we’ve looked we’ve found only circularity and projections: in the past, present, future and space itself. They are all stories—myths, though not religious ones—we tell ourselves. Once we’ve redirected our attention to our own cognitive processes and unmasked their self-validating nature, the objectivity of the world vanished into thin air. We’ve realized that, through the fantastic trick of self-reference, our thoughts make the intangible phantasmagoria of present experience feel like a substantial external world unfolding across space and time. (More Than Allegory, pp. 107-108)

The insight that the phenomenal world—that is, everything we see, hear, taste, smell and feel around us—is a symbolic representation of the ideas and feelings of the 'One Mind' underlying all existence

In other words, the world means something. Like a form of language, the phenomena of nature point to something beyond themselves. But unlike an ordinary language, they connote something transcendent, rather than denote something ordinary. From More Than Allegory:

Consensus reality may be a form of symbolic language attempting to point at something else. This ‘something else’ may be trying to reach out to us by appealing to our interpretative capacities. It may be posing the question: ‘Here is consensus reality, the best representation of myself that I can produce. Can you figure out what it really means?’ The question isn’t necessarily rhetorical or redundant, for the ‘something else’ may not know the answer. In fact, we may be the means through which it hopes to solve the riddle. We may be nature’s best shot at coming up with the answer. (More Than Allegory, pp. 59)

The very essence of what it means to be a human being alive in the world is the linguistic hallucination that creates that world. There is valid information in the hallucination for the same reason that there is valid information in a nightly dream. Although the dream is entirely conjured up in mind, it does reveal—if interpreted properly—something true and significant about the dreamer: his or her drives, desires, fears, traumas, etc. It couldn’t be any different, since the dream is an expression of the dreamer. Analogously, lies—which are by definition untrue—betray something true about the aspirations and insecurities of the liar. For instance, a teenager who lies about his sexual exploits gives away not only his sexual insecurities, but also his inner need to be accepted by others. So the lie does ultimately reveal significant truth about the teenager, if only we know how to read it. Even an entirely fictional novel is bound to suggest something true about its author, since the novel is an expression of the author. So you see, that something is fictional, hallucinated, conjured up or ‘hoaxed’—to use Roger Ebert’s chosen word—does not mean that it can’t ultimately reveal important truth. The hoax is bound to betray the nature of the hoaxer, if only we inquire into it through the right angle.

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. Without the projections self-inquiry would be impossible, for the same reason that you can’t see your own eyes without a mirror. 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. The projected symbols betray something about mind in the same way that a lie betrays something about the liar or that a dream betrays something about the dreamer. (More Than Allegory, pp. 117-118)

These ideas are more directly explored in Part III of the book, where I recount the mythical story of a modern explorer of consciousness who took part in a secret scientific project. In the dialogue quoted below, what is referred to as 'mind-at-large' corresponds to Dick's 'One Mind':

‘You know, there is something else I’ve been contemplating,’ I continued. ‘You said that we, living creatures, have an inside-out perspective of the universe, while the non-collapsed segment of mind-at-large has the inverse, outside-in perspective. This made me think of the Amduat, a religious myth from Ancient Egypt in which the world of the dead is portrayed as the reverse image of the world of the living. Indeed, it seems to me that an implication of what you explained is that the universe we perceive is, as it were, the reverse side of mind-at-large’s imaginings. Or, to say the same thing in a different way, what God experiences is the reverse side of the world we see around us.'

‘Right,’ he confirmed. ‘The deeper layers of mind-at-large do not experience the world the way you do. The experience of sense perception—vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch—is unique to the inside-out perspective. As such, God cannot see or hear the sun, the planets, mountains, rainbows, thunderstorms, etc. He does experience something corresponding to the visible sun, the planets, etc., but in a way qualitatively very different from yours. Indeed, God’s perspective entails experiential categories incommensurable with sense perception. As you put it, He experiences the reverse side of the universe; that which is behind perception.’ (More Than Allegory, pp. 211-212)

Part III of More Than Allegory is a story that blurs the distinction between fact and fiction. It represents my first attempt to elaborate on metaphysical ideas in the form of a narrative, as opposed to a rigorous philosophical argument. This story format gave me much more freedom and flexibility to discuss what I really think is going on—what I really think the underlying nature of reality is. And as it turns out, having now read Valis, I believe to see a kinship between my story and the 'fictional' work of Philip K. Dick that goes beyond metaphysical content. Like me with More Than Allegory, Dick wasn't merely telling a fantasy with Valis, but using a story format to convey his sincere metaphysical conjectures.

Thanks to Jeff Kripal, I've found new, interesting and fertile avenues of thought in Philip K. Dick, which I plan to explore more thoroughly over the coming months and years.

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The Idealist Symbolism of the Christmas Archetype

Photo by Bernardo Kastrup, hereby released into the public domain.

As we experience the afterglow of Christmas—the date that symbolically commemorates the birth of the Christ in the Christian world—I wanted to share some reflections about its archetypal symbolism. Just as Pentecost symbolically marks the Divinity's entrance into Its own Creation in ethereal form (the Holy Spirit), Christmas symbolically reminds us of God's entrance into the world in human form. Surprising as this may sound to the average Christian, this archetypal idea of the Creator entering Its own Creation is by no means exclusive to Christianity.

In the creation myth of the Aranda people, in Australia, the Creator deity Karora dreams the world up as He sleeps. He then wakes up in His own dream, effectively entering it. Once within the dream, Karora even eats some of the animals He'd imagined into existence. On the other side of the world, the Witoto people of the Amazon jungle believe their Creator deity Nainema also imagined the world into existence while in a state of slumber. He then stamped on His own imaginings and eventually penetrated them, subsequently spitting the jungle into existence. In a foundational Hindu myth, the supreme deity Brahman creates the basic scaffolding of the world as a thought in his mind. Brahman then births Itself into Its own imagination, by imagining a cosmic egg and then hatching from it. And so on. More details about all these myths can be found in my upcoming book More Than Allegory. The key point, however, is that cultures across time, geographies and languages have expressed this primordial notion that God imagines the world into existence, and then enters Its own imagination. Isn't this a fair way to also describe what happened when the Christ was born? Symbolically speaking, wasn't the Christian God also entering His own Creation in the form of Jesus, the man? The human mind, in its trans-intellectual and trans-linguistic depths, has always known something about this; something more true than mere allegory, which it has expressed in profoundly symbolic, mythical forms.

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Remember: according to the Christian myth, Jesus wasn't only the son of God. He was God incarnate. It is this identity between God and human that gives us symbolic clues about the metaphysics suggested by the religious myths mentioned above, including the Christian myth. There is a passage from More Than Allegory that discusses this. I will quote it below but, first, I need to quote another passage that explains what I call the cognitive 'big bang':

The present moment is the cosmic egg described in so many religious myths, which we briefly discussed in Part I. It is a singularity that births all existence into form. It seeds our mind with fleeting consensus images that we then blow up into the voluminous bulk of projected past and future. These projections are like a cognitive ‘big bang’ unfolding in our mind. They stretch out the intangibility of the singularity into the substantiality of events in time. But unlike the theoretical Big Bang of current physics, the cognitive ‘big bang’ isn’t an isolated occurrence in a far distant past. It happens now; now; now. It only ever happens now. (pp. 102-103)

And now the passage about the Idealist metaphysics hinted at in many of the world's religious myths:

Significantly, idealism is precisely what many of the world’s religious myths have been hinting at for thousands of years, as discussed in Part I. In the Arandan, Uitoto and Hindu myths we explored, as well as in the Hermetic myth that underlies Western esotericism, the world is seen as the mental activity of a cosmic mind. As a matter of fact, the sophisticated Vedanta school of Hinduism states explicitly and unambiguously that all phenomena unfold in consciousness alone. The same notion is found in Buddhism, particularly the Yogācāra School. 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.’ ‘Word’ here is a translation of the original Greek Λόγος (Logos), which also means reasoning or thought. So through thought ‘all things were made.’

Kripal states that ‘Logos here does not refer to some form of rationalism or linear logic, but to a kind of cosmic Mind, universal intelligence, or super-language out of which all that is emerges and takes shape. Logos is not human reason here. It is “with God.” It is God.’ Yet, John has the Logos incarnate as a man, Jesus. 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.

And it goes on and on: Nainema breaks into his own illusion to spit—a movement of the mouth, like the utterance of words— the substance of the forest into existence, while Karora wakes up within his own dream to experience, by eating, the substance of the animals sprouted from his own navel. Do you see how different peoples have been trying to suggest the same subtle cosmology through the symbolism most evocative to their respective cultures? The world we ordinarily experience is a mental creation. Its concrete form arises out of emptiness through cognitive self-reference, a process whose inherent circularity makes you believe that you were born in the world. But it is you, through your human thinking, who is creating the whole of it now; now; now. (pp. 110-111)

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Back to Sam Harris' Critique of Eben Alexander's NDE

Who is this clown? Image source: Wikipedia.

A teacher of philosophy called Michael Sudduth has written a blog post criticizing what I say, in my book Brief Peeks Beyond, about Sam Harris' attack on Eben Alexander. Let me admit upfront that I had never heard of Michael Sudduth, have no idea who he is beyond what I found in a quick google search, and know nothing of his work. I will explain at the end of this essay why I nonetheless decided to comment on his criticism.

He starts his critique of my views rather colorfully, implicitly promising a knock-out punch at some later stage:

It’s astonishingly evident to me that Kastrup’s thinking on this matter is not merely confused; it’s profoundly confused. ... Kastrup’s reasoning in both his blog and book is an astonishing display of misrepresentation and philosophical obfuscation.

Apparently I astonish him a lot. Undeterred, he uses 1142 words (!) to introduce his essay and disparage my position with pure rhetoric before he even begins the attempt to substantiate his allegations. It's a lot of gratuitous disparaging that doesn't seem motivated by eagerness to debate: when he posted his essay on Facebook, he tagged 34 people (!) with visibility in the media, but failed to tag me, the very target of his criticism. I found this rather curious.

After disparaging me repeatedly, one would expect that, by the time he actually began to justify his prolific allegations, a mortal blow would soon follow. I confess: I was somewhat curious. But the implicit promise of a knock-out punch never materialized. His post disappoints. He uses almost ten thousand words (!) in total to basically fail to even argue against—let alone defeat—the substance of any of my points; the true and unsurpassed feat of philosophical obfuscation in this whole story. But don't let the ten thousand words frighten you: I can summarize the essence of what he says about me in only 3 quick points:

1. The DMT similarity argument. Harris originally stated that Alexander's NDE looked like a DMT trip. Harris overtly suggests that Alexander's experience could have been caused merely by chemicals in Alexander's brain, as opposed to having a transcendent nature. I then argued that a chemical or physical trigger does not necessarily invalidate the transcendent nature of the experience, since all NDEs are, ultimately, triggered by some physical event. What does Sudduth have to say about this? He writes: "Kastrup is correct, of course, that in at least one sense the similarity between Alexander’s NDE and DMT experiences doesn’t defeat the authenticity of the former as a valid transcendent experience." But this was my point. So Sudduth actually agrees with my point. What's his problem then? Well, he asserts that "Harris nowhere claims [that] Alexander’s NDE was produced by brain chemistry," so my point is a straw-man. What? With a blush of embarrassment, I leave it to you to judge it after you consider the following passage by Harris: "Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex “shut down,” freeing his soul to travel to another dimension." Can someone explain to me how is it that Harris is not suggesting here that DMT could explain Alexander's NDE on a purely chemical basis? I mean, how much clearer could this possibly be? Sudduth's grievance is that Harris does not outright state that the NDE was caused by chemicals; that Harris merely mentions the possibility that it was. Duh. So what? It would obviously have been ridiculous if Harris had asserted that he knew what caused Alexander's NDE. Raising the possibility of a chemical cause was as far as Harris could have gone to try to debunk Alexander. And I rebutted this by arguing that a chemical trigger—even if true—wouldn't invalidate the potentially transcendent nature of Alexander's experience anyway (this, even Sudduth agrees with). In other words, I granted to Harris the possibility of a chemical trigger and argued against the relevance of that possibility as far as Alexander's claims were concerned. I never assumed or implied that Harris did anything more than to raise a hypothesis, the force of my argument being directed precisely at the relevance of that hypothesis. I'd bet that all readers of my essay, except perhaps for Michael Sudduth, fully understood this. It's embarrassing to have to spell it out now. Either Sudduth is splitting hairs for the sake of inventing something to criticize and create polemic, or he is so myopically focused on the strict formal semantics of Harris' words that he fails to see the obvious thrust and intent of the text. Harris, my dear Michael, is not writing for analytic philosophy majors here; he's trying to debunk Alexander's story in the public's eye and he is perfectly aware of how the public will understand his words. That you fail to see this is so sweetly naive it makes me smile. Perhaps you've become too engrossed with linguistic games in your academic ivory tower and now lost touch with the real world. Or are your motivations of a different nature? (More on this later.) 
2. The cortical inactivity argument. Harris originally claimed that Alexander didn't sufficiently demonstrate that his brain lacked enough activity to account for his NDE. In turn, I argued that appeals to residual brain activity in sub-cortical areas weren't enough to explain Alexander's NDE: the type of experience Alexander underwent normally correlates with neocortical activity, as opposed to residual activity in deeper parts of the brain. And it was precisely Alexander's neocortex that was devastated by the meningitis. What does Sudduth have to say about this? He writes: "we can concede that Kastrup is at least correct to say that whether there could have been residual brain activity misses the point." Well, once again that was precisely my point. How curious. So what's Sudduth's problem this time? He claims that Harris' grievance was that Alexander did not show that his neocortex was inactive; that Harris was not appealing to activity in sub-cortical regions. Yet Harris' own words, as quoted by Sudduth himself, indicate the opposite: "almost no one thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of cortical activity." Clearly, Harris is appealing to sub-cortical activity to suggest a materialist explanation for Alexander's NDE. Be it as it may, once again Sudduth admits that I was essentially correct. What is he trying to achieve with this?
3. The "Failures of Proper Argumentation" critique. Sudduth writes paragraph after paragraph claiming that I failed to establish that Alexander's neocortex was incapable to generate his NDE. The only problem is that I never tried to construct an argument to establish that in the first place. After all, I have not seen the hard clinical data and, just like Sudduth, am not qualified to judge it. So who is "profoundly confused" here? I simply took seriously the assessment of the data by Alexander—a Harvard professor of neurology and practicing neurosurgeon—and explored its implications. Indeed, I believe Alexander is better qualified to judge this than Harris, who has no clinical experience and isn't a practicing neuroscientist. Harris seems much more interested in studying religion and politics than neuroscience. My argument, as I clearly state in the book, was against the notion that residual sub-cortical activity could have been sufficient to explain the NDE. Sudduth doesn't dispute this at all.

In fact, Sudduth doesn't dispute—let alone defeat—the real substance of any of my arguments. So why this mismatch between what is alleged in the beginning of his post and what one actually finds when one reads it through? It's a lot of fit & fury amounting to nearly nothing at the end. A lot of noisy but empty posturing.

You see, the essence of Sudduth's post is the assertion that Sam Harris never meant to imply what I claim that he implied. As such, my arguments, correct as they may be, are straw-men; or so says Sudduth. "Harris is not proposing any alternative materialistic explanation of Alexander’s experience." (Oh, really?) And neither does Harris "assume, for instance, that a physical trigger cannot lead to a perfectly valid NDE." (Oh, he doesn't?) It's my own delusions that turned Harris into a debunker of transcendence; or so Sudduth's story goes. Leaving aside the obvious naiveté of this position, the problem, of course, is that it ends up completely deflating the main thrust of Harris' very critique of Alexander. Sudduth's "defense" of Harris, if correct, would render Harris' arguments ineffective in rebutting the transcendent nature of Alexander's NDE. In trying to help Harris have it both ways, Sudduth ends up leaving no way for Harris. His 'semantic deconstruction' unintentionally helps further Eben Alexander's claims. With a groupie like this, Harris needs no critics.

Sudduth is so focused on hair-splitting the philosophical minutiae that he seems to completely lose sight of the big picture. To say that debunking the transcendent nature of Alexander's NDE was not Harris' intent seems extraordinarily ingenuous to me, if not outright stupid. But is mere naiveté the explanation here? Or are there other possible motivations for Sudduth's charade? What motivated all the unsubstantiated disparaging in his post? I can only speculate.

In my view, it is entirely legitimate that a new author attempts to raise his visibility by attacking more visible peers, as long as the attack is honestly argued and fairly substantiated. Sudduth's noisy, derogatory allegations in the purely rhetorical opening of his post are neither: they find no justification or substantiation in the body of his text. They seem to me to be aimed squarely at generating polemic and attracting attention. They catch the interest of the casual reader who parses the highly polemicized initial paragraphs but has no appetite for ~10K tortuous words.

The reason I decided to offer this reply was the messages a few of my regular readers sent me immediately after Sudduth posted a link to his essay on Facebook. They'd noticed that he didn't tag me and wanted both to warn me and ask for a prompt rebuttal. I do not consider Sudduth's hair-splitting essay, in and of itself, deserving of any reaction. Therefore, I will limit my comments on this matter to this post. I do not know Michael Sudduth and have no interest in changing this. He's proven to my own satisfaction that interacting with him isn't productive. With this reply, I know I am already giving him some of the attention he seems to crave, but I have no intention to reward attention-seeking behavior any further. Sam Harris does not need an unsolicited interpreter of his meaning or intent, no matter how frantically willing this interpreter may be. Sam can articulate his meaning and intent himself, without a Sancho Panza. Therefore, I remain perfectly willing to continue this debate with Sam, if he chooses to do so.

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Overview of More Than Allegory

"The Light of Transcendence" photographic series, by Bernardo Kastrup.
This image is hereby released into the public domain.

"Over the years I have felt that the limitations of mainstream religion increasingly outweigh its potential benefits, but More Than Allegory sees into its heart, enabling us to consider religion with fresh perspective and redeeming it for our generation."

~ Rupert Spira

To mark the online availability of my new book More Than Allegory for pre-order (see links below), I am posting today the Overview chapter of the book. You can now pre-order it here:

Amazon USA
Amazon UK

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. With each turn, the book seeks to convey a more nuanced and complete understanding of the many facets of transcendence.

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. It tries to reach those whose souls are at war with their intellects. One of its goals is to restore the meaning of human life by helping the intellect give itself permission to accommodate the intuitions of the soul, without sacrificing reason or plausibility. Indeed, 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. This transcendent truth, for not being amenable to words or equations, cannot be communicated through any other means—scientific or philosophical—but religious mythology. To make sense of all this, Part I attempts to articulate the nature of mythical truth in a manner that honors both religion and our skeptical rationality.  

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. What does it mean to say that something is true or false? What hidden assumptions do we make about the underlying nature of reality when we talk of truth? Tackling these questions is the journey of Part II. In its search for answers it leverages our direct experience of world and self to inquire into the nature of time and space, the framework where truth is supposedly to be found. It then concludes that our own inner storytelling plays a surprising role in creating the seeming concreteness of things and the tangibility of history. Finally, it points to clear echoes of its conclusions in many of the world’s religious myths.

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. In laying out a complete cosmology for making sense of reality and restoring its transcendence, Part III highlights the critical role of belief in everything we take for granted. Indeed, it explains how deeply ingrained belief systems create the world we live in. Its narrative is based on the story of a modern explorer of consciousness who, during his participation in a secret scientific project, has a series of transcendent encounters. The metaphysics he brings back from these encounters integrates the themes of the book in one coherent framework. It also opens whole new horizons for the restoration of meaning and purpose to our daily lives.

Naturally, the optimal sequence to read this book is that in which it is presented: from Part I to Part III. Indeed, the ideas discussed in Parts I and II are meant to enrich the reading of Part III. That said, if one prefers to go straight to the heart of the matter and enjoy a gripping story without analytical preludes, it is entirely possible to jump directly to Part III and then return to Parts I and II afterwards.

In whichever order you choose to read it, you will notice that 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. Part I, for instance, examines mythology with a mindset characteristic of a quest for factual truth. Part II explores the nature of truth by appealing to our own felt intuitions, as we do when we pursue our beliefs. Finally, Part III elaborates upon the role of beliefs in the format of a myth. The goal is to illustrate, both explicitly and implicitly, through concepts and style, the intimate relationship that exists between myth, truth and belief.

The three parts of this book are meant to echo and reinforce each other content-wise as well. Its central ideas return in all three, being explored from a different angle each time. This allows me to convey—often indirectly and implicitly—many more nuances than otherwise possible. For instance, the nature and role of myth is explored in Part I, but the contents of certain myths come back in Parts II and III, where they echo what is discussed there about truth and belief.

The ebb and flow of the book’s trinity of themes ultimately circles around one of them: truth, the central motif of this work. All three parts revolve around it: Part I by exploring how myths can deliver truth, Part II by unveiling the nature of truth through dispelling unexamined beliefs, and Part III by appealing to belief in a myth in order to hint at truth.

You will notice that what I mean by the words ‘myth,’ ‘truth’ and ‘belief’ is richer and more nuanced than the flattened denotations of everyday language. This may, and probably will, surprise you at first. Nonetheless, the attempt to push the boundaries of words and reveal a much bigger, deeper reality behind them is an essential aspect of this work. My intent is to help you see beyond the dull, superficial cultural dialogue reigning in society today.

I hope you find many new vistas and avenues of inquiry in this book. I’ve poured much of myself into it; more than I think most authors would consider prudent. Whatever else it may or may not be, this work is most certainly a sincere, openhearted account of my own way to relate to life, the universe, truth and transcendence.

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Upcoming book: More Than Allegory

"Over the years I have felt that the limitations of mainstream religion increasingly outweigh its potential benefits, but More Than Allegory sees into its heart, enabling us to consider religion with fresh perspective and redeeming it for our generation."

~ Rupert Spira

Coming out in the spring of 2016, but soon available for pre-order, is my new book More Than Allegory. Here is the book's blurb:

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. With each turn, the book seeks to convey a more nuanced and complete understanding of the many facets of transcendence.

Part I puts forward the controversial notion that many religious myths are actually true; and not just allegorically so.
Part II argues that our own inner storytelling plays a surprising role in creating the seeming concreteness of things and the tangibility of history.
Part III suggests, in the form of a myth, how deeply ingrained belief systems create the world we live in.

The three themes, myth, truth and belief, flow into and interpenetrate each other throughout the book.

For a more detailed description of the book, check out the video below from 21:10 to 25:10 min.

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Letter to a cancer patient

Photo by Bernardo Kastrup, hereby released into the Public Domain.

I wrote the letter below to someone dear to me, who's been battling a serious form of cancer. I struggled with it for weeks, till finally the words came to me in a manner that felt genuine. After sending the letter, I figured that if it could help even just one more person, it would be worth to translate it into English and make it publicly available here. This is precisely what I am now doing, having removed all the more personal material. It is my sincere hope that this text finds its way to whoever may benefit from it, if anyone.

Dear friend,

Since this the most important message I've ever sent you, for weeks I've been waiting for the right mental and emotional conditions to write it. But the ideal conditions never seem to come. So today I've decided to simply write.

I imagine that everyone around you right now is trying to convey optimism regarding your prognosis. They are encouraging you to believe in a cure. "Positive thinking," we call it. "Faith," perhaps. Their views are possibly correct and certainly constructive. I want, however, to try to offer you a different perspective.

Our generalized compulsion to try and "think positively" when faced with mortal danger reflects our profound fear to confront the nature of life, not only of death. He who refuses to think about death cannot reflect upon life, for the same reason that he who has never confronted darkness cannot know light. Through our "positive thinking," we spend our lives running away from life. What is this that we think we will lose at the moment of death? To talk ourselves into the belief that we will be saved by the bell at the end, even if it's true, is our way—and that of most people around us—to avoid facing these uncomfortable but essential questions.

You suffer from a terminal condition called "life." There's no cure: we struggle, suffer, become ill, and ultimately die; 100% mortality rate; everyone; no exceptions. It's all just a matter of time. So why postpone the confrontation? Why even wait for a serious illness?

I've just said that death is a matter of time. But notice how relative time is, both metaphorically and literally speaking (think of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, for instance). Two years can pack a lot more life than twenty. And by this I don't mean just how much you travel, how many love affairs you have, or how many parties you go to. I mean something a lot subtler and more significant.

Since my father died, almost thirty years ago, I have been confronting these questions more intensely, I suppose, than the average human being. It's impossible for me, in a mere letter, to convey to you my own inner reality in this regard, which has evolved continuously over this long period of time. It would remain impossible even with a thousand letters. I simply want to invite you to contemplate a perspective that may have escaped your consideration thus far.

Contemporary culture has two popular narratives about the nature of life and, therefore, that of death. The first narrative is dualist and found mainly in our religions: it's the idea that we have a soul that inhabits our body during life, and then departs to another world upon physical death. The other narrative is materialist and frequently—albeit incorrectly—associated with science: that we're nothing more than our physical bodies and cease to exist upon death. Notice that both narratives make an assumption that is hardly ever examined critically: that the world exists outside and independently of ourselves.

When you dream at night, you also assume that you have—or are—a body inside a universe external to you. Only when you wake up do you realize that, all along, the universe of your dream was inside you; that it was never separate from you. While in the dream, you simply take a localized perspective within your own imagination.

There are ancient traditions in the world—such as Advaita Vedanta in India, Mind-Only Buddhism in China and Japan, Hermeticism in the West, etc.—which maintain that the nature of life is the same as that of a dream, and that physical death is like awakening. The difference is that the dream of life is collective and carries a momentum that renders it continuous and stable. From this ancient perspective, the world is inside your soul, not your soul inside the world. For this reason, nobody can ever find a soul in the world: Could you find your physical body inside a nightly dream?

That which you think you are—your body, thoughts, opinions, beliefs, personality, memories, etc.—are merely images that arose within your own dream. That which you truly are—the center of consciousness you've felt to be you since your earliest childhood, and which has been producing the dream of your life since then—was never born to begin with. Death is not a future event; it's not something that happens to you. You are not going anywhere, because all "where's" exist within your imagination. Death is as present to you right now, at this very moment, as it will ever be. It is the symbol of the return of your sense of identity to the consciousness that dreams the dream of reading this letter now.

It's impossible to put this properly into words. However, if and when you truly realize what I am trying to say, you will burst into laughter for having ever forgotten that this, obviously, is the true nature of life. You knew it instinctively when you were a young child, but "education" has made you forget it.

I do not know whether your cancer will be cured or not. I do not know which direction this aspect of the dream will take. What I do know is this: at the end of the day, it doesn't matter much, for nothing is lost either way. You are alive now and this is all that is truly real. I know it may sound cruel to say this, especially for the loved ones around you who would suffer as terribly with your loss as I suffered with the loss of my father. However, to deny the true nature of life cannot be the best way to deal with life's sufferings.

We spend our lives desperately defending a hallucinated identity that has never truly been real. We cling to our opinions, personal image, values, etc., as if we were those opinions, personal images, values, etc. What reality do these things have in face of death? We're defending a ghost. And in the process of defending it, we put up barriers and close ourselves up to what is truly important around us. Because we don't want to appear vulnerable, we deny love. Because we don't want to appear weak, we dominate and offend. Because we don't want to appear insignificant, we oppress and cause suffering. What is all this for?

The living presence of death dissolves these pernicious illusions. What have you got to lose by allowing yourself to be vulnerable, weak, sentimental, or whatever? Who is this entity that would allegedly be threatened if it were to open itself up, without armor or preconditions, to other people and the world? That which we think we need to defend dies and, as such, never truly existed in the first place; it's just a set of ephemeral thoughts and opinions that vanish the moment we wake up.

The gift cancer gives you, whether it's cured or not, is to force you to live in the presence of death. You can no longer ignore or dismiss it, despite all the "positive thinking" around you. You are now naked before life. All the illusions of control, security, power, status and identity are dissolving and opening space for a truer, more genuine and intense life; a life where you no longer need to waste time defending ghosts, denying love and closing yourself up to an integral experience of reality. Two years or twenty: what matters is how much we open ourselves up to life, like a parachuter in free fall... without a parachute.

With love,

Bernardo.

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Violence in the name of religion

Photo by Bernardo Kastrup, hereby released into the public domain.

This post is just a thought: we cannot stop violence committed in the name of religion by attempting to eradicate religion. A relationship with transcendence is a primary, authentic and valid impulse intrinsic to being human. The solution is the very opposite of the annihilation of religion demanded by the opportunistic, populist shallow-thinkers of Neo-atheism: we will stop pseudo-religious violence only by truly coming to terms with religion in a full, genuine manner; by allowing this primordial psychic impulse to express itself in a healthy, harmonious, undistorted manner.

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