Brief Peeks Beyond

by Bernardo Kastrup

  The way to wake up from this all-too-real nightmare is a form of education that we, worryingly, seem to have lost familiarity with. Only a philosophical education can provide a truly human alternative for our future. Some may argue that, without a strong focus on optimizing the practical aspects of life, we would be so busy with securing food and shelter that we wouldn’t have time or opportunity to consider philosophical questions. Yet, a superficial look at the world’s pre-literate cultures proves this to be simply false: aboriginal societies have always made significant room for philosophy – which, in their case, we call mythology – despite their ever-present and rather formidable survival challenges.147 We look upon them as primitive and unenlightened whilst, in fact, it’s we who have become sick. Unfortunately, our sickness seems to play right into the hands of entrenched power structures and, in this way, self-perpetuate.

  5.3. Has academic philosophy lost its relevance?

  Philosophy is the discipline of human thought that allows us to interpret our experience of ourselves and of the world at large, thereby giving meaning to our existence. While science constructs models of reality that predict the behavior of matter and energy, philosophy asks how those models relate to our condition as conscious entities. Without philosophy, science is merely an enabler of technology; it tells us nothing about the underlying nature of nature. Science provides practical tools that mostly work, but it is philosophy – even when unthinkingly and precariously done by scientists – that relates those tools to the framework of our being. This way, the importance of philosophy for giving meaning to our lives cannot be overestimated. Yet, for several decades now, I believe philosophy has lost its way and become nearly irrelevant to most educated people.

  If you ask an average educated person to make a short list of key philosophers in chronological order, he or she will likely start with Socrates or Plato, mention a few Renaissance or Enlightenment names such as Spinoza or Descartes and probably end with Nietzsche or Heidegger. Nietzsche’s contribution to human thought and his cultural influence are undeniable. He guided the transition of our culture away from uncritical theism, tackling the immense implications it had as far as our need for finding meaning in life. Political movements, such as the Nazi regime in Germany, have misappropriated and distorted his ideas for political gain. Though I personally disagree with many of Nietzsche’s key tenets and believe his thought to largely reflect his own troubled nature, it is undeniable that the man had tremendous influence in society. Right or wrong, wise or pathological, he was a true, relevant philosopher, brave enough to face the depths of the human condition in all its glory and horror. But Nietzsche died at the turn of the 20th century. How many philosophers of the past few decades do you know to have had similar impact on our culture? Heidegger published his masterpiece Sein und Zeit in 1927. What happened to philosophy since then?

  What happened is that philosophy became increasingly more academic and departmentalized. In itself, there was nothing wrong with it. But a side effect was that, in trying to emulate science and mathematics to gain more respect within academia, academic philosophy ended up formalizing itself into irrelevance. It begun to resemble a highly abstract form of mathematical logic or linguistics, far removed from our immediate experience of reality. It forfeited its links to what is of significance to the average educated person. The great questions of existence, like the nature of reality and the meaning of human life, so cogently tackled by the likes of Nietzsche, Goethe – who I consider a philosopher before a poet – Plato and even Jung – who I consider a philosopher before a psychologist – were left out. They couldn’t be framed in sufficiently formal terms.

  Today, the role academic philosophers should play in helping us all make sense of our lives, of our minds, of our culture and science, of our historical nexus and of our condition as living entities in general, has been left to others: priests and preachers, inspirational speakers, self-help literature, questionable gurus, reductionist psychiatrists and even scientists. This is a tragedy. It has caused our civilization to lose its bearings. Where are the Platos, Nietzsches, Goethes and Jungs of our times? Who is guiding us to construct sensible worldviews and relate to reality in a mature manner? Not academic philosophers but the evening news anchor; because academic philosophers are, by and large, locked away in obscure conferences discussing abstract issues of little relevance to the educated person on the street.

  With a few honorable exceptions,148 academic philosophy has largely shunned its own humanity, losing its link to our culture in the process. It has succumbed to the foolish notion that the original approach of classical philosophy, which harmoniously integrated the subjective and objective aspects of the total human being, was inferior – instead of complementary – to those of science and mathematics. It began to believe that to ‘prove’ an idea is more important than for the idea to resonate with the innermost selves of people and, thereby, make a true difference.

  Like a teenager unsure of his or her identity and self-worth when standing next to bigger bullies, academic philosophy has become blind to its own value, seeking instead to turn into something it didn’t need to be. In doing so, it forfeited its own role and relevance in our culture. You see, the only carrier of reality anyone can ever know for sure is experience. And experience, while projecting objectivity onto the world at large, is fundamentally affective. By denying the affective nature of reality, academic philosophy has alienated itself from a large and significant part of what it means to be a human being alive in the world. In seeking to become more objective and real, it ended up distancing itself from reality.

  As our civilization begins to face the inherent contradictions of the way it relates to reality and life, we need philosophy more than ever. The absence of true, wholesome philosophy is both a symptom and a cause of the current world crisis. Academic philosophers must wake up, find their own identity and cultural role again and make a palpable contribution to society at large. We cannot go through this crisis without qualified guidance. A new path must be found; one that brings academic philosophy closer to the people and the culture. The matter is urgent.

  5.4. Myths in contemporary culture

  Myths have been part and parcel of human life since primordial times. They have given expression to our obfuscated psyche – which depth-psychology calls the ‘unconscious’ – and their telling around the fire has been critical for the psychic health of our ancestors. Indeed, our ancestors did not make a sharp and hard distinction between myths and facts. To this day, members of aboriginal cultures do not understand why we, civilized peoples, make such a distinction, since both myths and facts are realities of the mind.149

  At some point, Western society defined a rigorous boundary between these two worlds: it emptied the world of myth from its significance, reserving all ontological value for the world of consensus facts. This has been going on for several hundred years, with the effect of progressively impoverishing our mental lives, as Jung sought to highlight.150 Now, in the early 21st century, a new dynamics seems to be at play: the obfuscated but powerful collective segment of the human psyche is trying to restore the connection between myth and fact; this time, however, with a new and dangerous twist.

  Continuous repression of, and alienation from, our own obfuscated psyche – the realm of myths – has left an open and festering wound. We’ve become unable to derive psychic energy from anything but the stories that we believe to be objective facts. The cultural indoctrination that deems myths to be inconsequential has left us, as adults, unable to discern meaning and significance in our own imagination the way a child can. The craving that results from such alienation from ourselves has been accumulating in our society for centuries now. We try to numb it by increasing the ‘loudness’ of what we know to be ‘mere’ fantasies: ever brasher music, ever more action-packed movies, 3D, virtual reality, high-tech role-playing games, etc. But, deep inside, we continue to live in psychic poverty, for we ‘know’ that those are ‘just fantasies.’

>   In unacknowledged desperation, we turn to newscasts, reality television and other sources of ‘real’ stories, which we grant ourselves permission to believe in. But there, ultimately, we only find disappointment: ‘real’ reality is too constrained and static to even approach the evocative power of myth. Poor we continue to be, despite our desperate attempts to find meaning and significance somewhere ‘out there.’

  Realizing that the source of this poverty is the hard divide between myth and fact, the obfuscated psyche seems to have now found a dangerous and frantic way out: while it cannot close the divide, it can attempt to convey myth under the guise of fact, so we again give ourselves permission to derive significance from it. In other words, there seems to be an astonishing readiness, on the part of many of us over the past few decades, to believe as literal fact that which is clearly mythical. Only through such belief do we allow the stories to again reach us, bringing their richness into our psychic lives without the inevitable dismissal reserved for anything deemed unreal. Our willingness to believe in the literal reality of fantastic stories has reached incredible levels in some corners of society. As the collective psyche must always maintain its global equilibrium, this very tendency towards unreasonable beliefs feeds into the development of an equally hysterical and biased pseudo-skeptical movement, which is now better organized and funded than ever before in history. Action and counter-action: balance is maintained at a global level. Whoever tries to remain individually balanced now finds him or herself isolated and friendless in the crossfire between these extreme poles.

  A quick look at a list of popular books and videos over the past couple of decades reveals a recurring attempt to pass myth for literal fact: well-meaning extraterrestrials trying, as you read this, to free humanity from the tyranny of secret societies and other caricatural conspiracies; invisible inter-planetary wars taking place every day as we blindly go to work in the morning; energy waves from the galactic center re-architecting our DNA to grant us access to higher dimensions; channeled messages from Pleiadeans who are about to re-enter human history to rescue the chosen ones among us; special souls incarnating in human form with a specific mission to prepare the rest of humanity for some kind of ontological shift; ancient alien visits that explain everything not yet understood – and even much of what is understood – and for which every archeological finding is evidence; etc. Mind you, these stories are conveyed as literal fact, not metaphors. Their authors are telling you that this is what is actually happening. Some go as far as presenting them as scientific fact, pointing to an unlikely array of dubious, obscure, pseudoscientific work on the one hand, and sometimes-outrageous misrepresentations of legitimate scientific work on the other hand.

  As discussed above, such ideas likely arise from overactive imaginations seized by the obfuscated collective psyche, hungry as it is for meaning, richness and significance. As such, and in all fairness, their authors are simply meeting a demand. They are tools of a transpersonal process, not culprits of a crime. There would be no motivation for any of this if there weren’t a collective need for rich and meaningful myths conveyed under the label of ‘fact.’ If they were to be conveyed in any other form, their power would dissolve. We want to be deceived; we need to be deceived. That’s the only way the obfuscated psyche has found to restore significance to what has otherwise become a vacuous and purposeless existence, devoid of much of its original evocative power. After all, as Michael Prescott so forcefully put it, the materialist worldview of our culture entails that:

  None of the key developments in your life was somehow meant for you. No one is looking out for you. No events in your past happened for a reason, and they aren’t building up to any future purpose. The story of your life has no continuity and no destination – heck, it’s not even a story – and there is nothing to strive for. You were not put here for a reason, you don’t matter, and you’re deluded if you think you have a ‘mission’ in life. Face facts! You have no calling! The universe couldn’t care less about you! Just give up!!!’151

  Such a situation is psychically unsustainable. Indeed, it’s a wonder that we’ve accepted it so long.

  It may look to you as though I was just psychologizing the contemporary phenomenon of fantastic realism and dismissing the corresponding stories as mere delusions. But to conclude so assumes that I don’t see anything significant in the psychic dynamics behind all this. I do.

  As discussed in essay 2.1, I hold the position that consensus reality is a projection of mind. The continuity and seeming autonomy of reality arise from collective structures in the obfuscated parts of our psyche. Reality, as such, is merely the visible tip of the collective mind’s iceberg. What I am thus suggesting is that the collective mind is restless: it can no longer accept our cynical view of reality. It craves new significance, new richness, new meaning. And if consensus reality is the tip of the psychic iceberg, these obfuscated mythical needs, if continually unfulfilled, are bound to end up manifesting themselves, in some form, in reality. In other words, if we insist in denying ourselves permission to derive fulfillment from anything deemed unreal, our obfuscated mythical aspirations may eventually infiltrate consensus facts. After all, a bland reality loses the evocative power that is its raison d’être, defeating its own purpose. What the exact nature of this process will be, however, is anybody’s guess.

  5.5. Enchantment: the lost treasure

  When young, we were all familiar with the enchanted places of fairytales. Even as adults, we still hear others describe special places in the world as enchanted, which we take to be some kind of metaphor. But what is enchantment? What do people mean when they say that a place or a thing is enchanted? As I child, I intuitively knew the answers to these questions. Only later in life, however, could I begin to articulate those ideas to myself in words.

  Once, while playing blitz chess with an old, very traditional chess set, I suddenly had the sense that the pieces had come alive. It coincided with my intuitively sensing – not calculating – a forced checkmate combination several moves ahead, which assured me of victory. As I began to play the moves out on the board, the pieces became a living, breathing army, resolutely marching towards their opponents with a harmony, iridescence and purposefulness that nearly made them glow. They were moving themselves, my hand merely a tool under their control. It was a brief, elusive experience, but the token fell: that, my friend, was enchantment.

  One night, in the spring of 2012, the Moon, Venus and Jupiter were all very close to one another in the lower Northwestern sky. While I contemplated this cosmic alignment against the faint silhouette of my house, they seemed to come alive. It occurred to me at once that they had been right up there, without fail, throughout my life. It was as if they were watching over me from my earliest childhood up until that very moment, through every important event of my existence: my first day at school, my first kiss, the death of my father, university graduation, first job, wedding, etc. The celestial bodies were a kind of forgotten cosmic family of mine. On that night, they became enchanted.

  Yet, enchantment is more than that. It also entails a brief ability to imagine the world through the eyes of another. When seen through the eyes of an insect, a mere bush becomes enchanted: it transforms itself into an uncanny, mysterious forest. When seen through the eyes of a rabbit, mere shrubs in a shallow depression take on the glow of a cozy, warm village: something akin to a hobbit shire in Middle-Earth, with huts, trees, fields and all. When one is in a peculiar, indefinable state of mind – when one has the ‘eyes of enchantment,’ so to say – passages through rock formations become gateways to fairyland: a feeling as elusive and hard to catch at work as it is heartwarming.

  One may say, rather cynically, that it is all in the eyes of the beholder; that there is no such a thing as objective enchantment, but only one’s own thoughts and emotions projected onto consensus reality. Such a view is as correct as it misses the point. After all, all experiences entail interplay between subject and object. No object – no real
ity – is ever experienced in or by itself, but always as an amalgamation between observer and observed. It is thus true that enchantment exists only in one’s mind, in exactly the same way that all experienced reality exists in mind; and, as discussed in essay 2.1, in mind alone. As such, enchantment is as real as anything can be.

  Enchantment is the lost treasure of our culture. In our shamedriven strive to avoid foolishness (see essay 4.5), we got rid of the baby along with the bathwater. In glorifying the object, we totally lost sight of the subject as the matrix of all reality. Because the whimsical and moody subject is not amenable to the objective methods of science, we basically removed it from our picture of reality. And since the object is merely pixels if not imbued with the meaning bestowed on it by the subject, the world we live in became hollow and bland. What a loss! What is the world for if not to evoke and reflect back to us, as mirror, the obfuscated aspects of ourselves? In denying the world the significance of our psychic life, we deny ourselves our own significance.

  5.6. A cultural narrative of projections

  In analytical psychology, projection is the act of attributing to other people qualities of ourselves that we do not acknowledge. For instance, a spouse who has repressed thoughts about having an affair may project these thoughts onto his or her partner, suspecting him or her of infidelity. On a more positive note, we may project our own inner wisdom onto figures of authority such as doctors, therapists or teachers. In doing so, we see in another an aspect of ourselves. Indeed, many of us live in personal realities populated with projections: we don’t really see people for who they are, but for the aspects of ourselves that we project onto them. This way, the world inadvertently enacts our own psychic dynamics. We have even developed cultural institutions, such as religious organizations, to catalyze projection: priests, preachers and gurus reflect our own inner wisdom back to us; altar boys and children’s choirs reflect our innocence; the church or temple the protective maternal matrix within us all, etc.