More Than Allegory

by Bernardo Kastrup

  A deprived myth is not the same as an absence of myth. A deprived myth is one that favors narrow and lame interpretations of consensus reality, interpretations that do not resonate with one’s deepest intuitions. A deprived myth makes life in the world seem futile and claustrophobic. But it is a myth nonetheless, because it entails an interpretation. 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.

  The dominance of deprived myths is insidious and has severe consequences as far as one’s psychic health and relationship with truth is concerned. Yet, these consequences are usually overlooked in the first half of life, because deprived myths have a strong distractive power in that period.4 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. Let us elaborate on these ideas a bit more.

  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.

  The impetus of human life

  Renowned 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, becoming as necessary to a person’s life on Earth as performance to [Judy] Garland, battle to [George] Patton, painting to [Pablo] Picasso.’6 It is this transcendence that imbues life with the eternal significance of destiny fulfillment, as opposed to the evanescence of a mere chain of chance events. ‘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.

  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.

  Notice that true transcendence should not be confused with mere fame and influence: while it’s true that Garland’s performances enchanted millions, Patton’s victories changed the course of history and Picasso’s influence on the arts cannot be overestimated, are their fame and influence truly timeless and boundless? Our planet is like a spec of dust floating in the vastness of space. Are Garland, Patton and Picasso of any significance anywhere beyond this tiny spec? The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Will Earthlings even remember them a mere million years from now? How could mere fame and influence possibly embody the eternal significance of destiny fulfillment? 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.’9 I am going to elaborate more on this subtle notion of transcendence later.

  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. Deep inside, we feel small and powerless before the immensity and impersonal character of a seemingly absurd world. We know that ‘everything changes and nothing remains still,’10 so none of what we find important can last. Investing our identity in a fragile body confined in both space and time, we—uniquely among animals—also know that our own death is inevitable. Every thought, feeling, choice and action of our lives will—or so we fear—eventually be reduced to irrelevance. Aren’t they all then, at bottom, already irrelevant? Aren’t our lives meaningless, our suffering pointless and our dreams frivolous? These questions are the source of our existential despair. ‘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. Our despair propels our soul—our deepest drives and intuitions—toward some form of transcendence. 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.

  But can we, in subtle and indirect ways as the case may be, somehow achieve a form of immortality or boundlessness? Is the drive to transcend grounded on valid intuitions or is it mere wish fulfillment? 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. And although this myth is disputed on very solid logical and empirical grounds,12 the main counterforce to it seems to be the experiential one: 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.14 One can make a very strong case for the validity of these transcendent experiences. The question of validity, however, isn’t the problem.

  The problem is this: 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. Once it ends, one quickly falls victim again to the irresistible pull of ordinary life and its claustrophobic ethos. 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. One is left with ‘the agony of absence of the eternally further-beyond,’15 in the words of Henry Corbin. At best, life becomes divided into the baseline dullness of ordinary existence and fleeting, occasional excursions into transcendence. Either way, transcendence does not penetrate ordinary life. A clear boundary persists between the two, like a dam that prevents the riches amassed on the other side from flowing down into the river of our everyday existence. The two worlds don’t seem to overlap. Ordinary life remains, to a large extent, devoid of meaning.

  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.

  Religious myths and transcendence

  Are we then condemned to a life wherein our deepest yearnings can never be realized? Not really, for a special type of myth—a religious myth—can bring transcendence into everyday life, thereby saving the human animal from existential despair. Indeed, we can even define a religious myth as a myth that imbues life with purposefulness, timelessness and boundlessness. In other words, a religious myth is a story capable of lifting the experience of being from the confines of time, space, randomness and blind automatism.

  A religious myth infuses ordinary aspects of life with enchantment and significance: accidents and coincidences become invested with hidden purposes; our actions in the world acquire the importance of a cosmic mission; our suffering becomes the carrier of critical insights; even objects and people around us acquire a numinous aura. In the Talmudic myth of conception, Lailah—an angel of the night—touches the fetus on the upper lip immediately prior to birth, causing him to forget everything about the transcendent order of reality whence he originates. This angelic action is supposedly what creates the philtrum, that little groove between
the nose and the upper lip that we all have. Every time a Rabbinic Jew looks at someone’s face on the streets, he potentially sees the footprints of transcendence, the touch of Lailah. Through the religious myth, the ‘otherworld’ enters this world. The dam is broken and the river flows.

  In a life informed by a religious myth, nothing is ‘just so.’ Everything has a reason for being and a purpose to fulfill. Everything belongs in a bigger and timeless context; the ‘over-all pattern’ mentioned by Sacks. 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.

  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.

  The lamentable state of religious myths today

  Religious myths are much disregarded and belittled today. Not that myth itself has disappeared: 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. The hyping of religious fundamentalism by the mainstream media simply masks the faster-advancing loss of authentic religious vibrancy: a noisy minority makes the headlines while a majority falls into apathy and cynicism. 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. Perhaps as a desperate, instinctive effort to compensate for this unnatural state of affairs, scientific myth-making is on the rise, as the latest multiverse cosmologies illustrate.16 But that’s a lame form of mythologizing: science’s blind devotion to the gods of chance and automatism condemns its myths to hollowness. ‘Random events, nothing truly necessary. Science’s cosmologies say nothing about the soul, and so they say nothing to the soul, about its reason for existence,’17 said Hillman. The transcendence that only religious myths can bestow upon our lives is dissipating fast in a globalized, pragmatic, cynical and market-driven society.

  This process unfolds along two apparently opposite avenues that, ultimately, lead to the same destination. 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.18 Alan Watts saw this as a reflection of the nineteenth century ethos under which the values of contemporary science congealed. He wrote:

  The world-conquering West of the nineteenth century needed a philosophy of life in which realpolitik—victory for the tough people who face the bleak facts—was the guiding principle. Thus the bleaker the facts you face, the tougher you seem to be. So we vied with each other to make the Fully Automatic Model of the universe as bleak as possible.19

  In other words, science, as the exclusive domain of men in the nineteenth century, incorporated in its very fabric the adolescent male’s need to look tough. When listening to the spokespeople of science and neo-atheism today, one in fact wonders whether much has changed since then. Be it as it may, the result is that contemporary science cannot acknowledge even the possibility of meaning and purpose—let alone transcendence—for real men and tough chicks face bleak facts. This isn’t skepticism but cynicism: an arbitrary commitment to the impossibility of something. It reflects an attitude as beset by blind belief as any religious dogma. Consequently, authentic religious myths are now allowed no role in the mainstream, academically-endorsed worldview of our culture. The natural and legitimate psychic impulse towards transcendence has become artificially associated with ignorance, stupidity and weakness. Such marginalization of religion has robbed us of context and perspective. We now find our gods not on the altar, but in the bottle of alcohol, the football match on television, the new pair of shoes and the arms of the casual lover.

  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. Like the fear that blinds a cornered animal, our insecurities cloud our view of subtlety and nuance. 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. We see a square for the cube, a triangle for the diamond. We make the religious myth small, a flattened shadow of what it is truly meant to represent, so we can hold on to it more easily. As a result, we’ve succumbed to lives of uptightness, intolerance and even hatred.

  Both cynicism and fundamentalism blind us to the full breadth and depth of religious myths. Consequently, we’ve lost our ability to experience the comprehensive way in which transcendence can envelop our entire existence. We now desperately lack context, perspective and purpose. Our lives have become uprooted, our journey lonely and scary, and our suffering pointless and nearly unbearable.

  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.

  Chapter 2

  The rich colors of mythical life

  It hasn’t always been like this. In fact, during the vast majority of history and pre-history things have been very different. But to reencounter the lush colors that religious myths could once bring into human life, we have to turn to those dwindling cultures that still manage to keep them partly alive, precariously as the case may be. We have to turn, for instance, to the Arandan, an aboriginal Australian people with an extraordinarily evocative account of the origins of their world.

  The Arandan religious myth

  The Arandan believe that Karora, the creator, dreamed the world up in his sleep.21 As he lay in darkness on the ground, a kind of tree grew from his head all the way to the heavens, its roots planted on Karora’s head. The thoughts, wishes and desires in his head then became real as Karora dreamed them: animals and men sprung from his navel and armpits.

  Eventually, when the sun rose, Karora awoke. As he stood up, he left a hole on the ground in the place where he had lain asleep. This hole then became the Ilbalintja Soak, a sacred place for the Arandan, which connects their daily life with the transcendence of their deity. Now awake, Karora lost his magical powers and, to his own surprise, met the animals and men that he had dreamed into existence the previous night. He even cooked and ate some of the animals for, without his magical powers, he felt hungry. Over a series of subsequent nights, Karora again fell asleep and dreamed more creatures into existence, coming in contact with them upon awakening the next morning.

  All of this supposedly took place around the Ilbalintja Soak, a location integral to Arandan life. 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.22

  One way to look upon the Arandan myth is to take it literally and then proceed to dismiss it as absurd. Another way is to try and look beyond the words, taking the images of the myth as evocative symbols that point to deeper and ineffable intuitions. An extensive analysis of the Arandan myth is beyond the scope or purposes of this book, but it is useful to highlight a few salient aspects.

 
Clearly, the myth evokes the notion that the world is a mental creation of a deity who dreams it into existence while lacking lucidity. In the stupor of the dream, this deity has the magical power of bringing things forth into existence; the freedom unique to the imagination to concoct images without being bound by logic, resource constraints, ordinary causality or consistency. In other words, during his dream the deity doesn’t know what is supposed to be impossible and, therefore, nothing is impossible. However, he can also enter the dream, as it were, by waking up in it. When this happens, the deity gains the ability to self-reflect but loses his magical powers, for he is now a participant in his own dream, subject to its constraints and internal logic like the rest of his creation. In other words, by waking up he becomes aware of, and subject to, what is supposedly impossible. Yet, it is this act of waking up inside the dream that gives his creation concreteness and solidity, for only now creation is experienced in the state of lucid self-reflection that fixes it in place, as opposed to the ever-flowing slumber of sleep.

  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.

  I will leave it to you to consult your own intuition and determine what—if any—ring of truth and significance this myth might have. Be it as it may, the Arandan are not alone in their sophisticated intuitions…