More Than Allegory

by Bernardo Kastrup

  Consensus reality is the belief you don’t look behind

  After a brief but welcome pause, just long enough to allow me to catch my cognitive breath, the Other pressed on. He was now finally tackling his key point, which he’d announced in the beginning to be his goal for this dialogue:

  ‘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. The ancients described this process in their mythology as “entering God’s imaginings.” It plays out in an ordinary dream too: 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.’

  I mentally nodded. The whole thing made perfect sense to me, especially after the allusion to ordinary dreams. It dawned on me then that ordinary dreams were like clues intentionally or unintentionally planted in biology to remind us of, and help us grasp, a bigger picture.

  ‘Remember,’ he continued, ‘a realm of mentation—that is, a particular reality—only feels real for as long as you are unable to reflect lucidly upon what’s happening in the layers of your cognition that underlie the corresponding belief system. In other words, what you call reality is a reflection of the first layer of your cognition that escapes your critical self-reflection. If you were to become lucid of the cognitive layers underlying all your beliefs—that is, if you could “look behind” all your beliefs—reality, as a standalone phenomenon, would dissolve. You would immediately realize, with a laugh, that you are making everything up.’

  As he spoke, I knew we had had a similar conversation before. Nonetheless, coming back to these points in a different context and under a different light was very helpful to me. It allowed me to grasp some subtle nuances that had escaped me earlier.

  ‘We can summarize all this as follows,’ he finally concluded. ‘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.’

  These words were accompanied, in my mind, by the imagery of a theater stage with many actors and complex props. An epic opera was being performed and the audience was transfixed. People were so taken in by the spectacle that they forgot it was just theater. If any one of them would have simply stood up and taken a peek behind the stage, they would have immediately seen that the play wasn’t a standalone reality, but merely the visible front of complex production machinery behind the scenes. They would have remembered that the opera was made up. Yet, nobody stood up to look. What the Other meant to say was that consensus reality was like that opera; that we only think of it as something standalone because we don’t peek behind the stage. The hidden, complex production machinery behind the scenes is our reality-generating belief system. We don’t inquire into it for the same reason that no member of the theatrical audience cared to peek behind the stage during the performance.

  ‘That beliefs can color our experiences,’ I commented, ‘is something I always understood and felt. People’s religious, ideological, political and moral beliefs, for instance, largely influence how they experience the world and themselves. But you are taking this to a whole new level. You are saying that beliefs don’t just modulate our perceptions of a standalone core of reality, but that they make up the very essence of consensus reality!’

  ‘Your intuition about superficial beliefs conditioning experience,’ he said, ‘is all you need in order to grasp my point. Take the example you mentioned: a person’s ideology can change the person’s experience of the world and self. You can easily intuit and feel this. Now remember that there is nothing more to consensus reality than experience. Your experiences aren’t experiences of consensus reality; they are consensus reality. Thus, in exactly the same way that a superficial belief can condition some of your experiences, the full set of your beliefs determines the whole of consensus reality. This full set of beliefs includes deeply ingrained ones, which differ from superficial beliefs in that the former are shared with other living beings and escape your ability to look behind them.’

  His reply brought back to me insights I had already had earlier, but which cultural conditioning had drowned in the meantime. I fully groked what he meant. Sensing this, he continued:

  ‘Let us now look into how you and other living creatures enter your shared belief system in the form of seemingly separate entities. This entering of your own belief system is the origin of the world as you know it.’

  The Other was now promising to make what was perhaps the most significant revelation of all Trilobite journeys thus far. Having had access to all trip reports ever written by other Explorers, I knew nobody had described the origin of life and the universe in an even remotely comprehensible manner. So despite being already exhausted at this point, I dug deep inside myself and braced for what was about to come.

  A cosmology of mind

  ‘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. Mind-at-large instinctively recognized these ideas and feelings to be of its own making, unfolding within itself, just as you recognize your thoughts and emotions to unfold within you. There were hardly any cognitive links across these fleeting ideas and feelings. Instead of evoking one another in a chain of associations, they would arise and dissolve in isolation, spontaneously, like bubbles in a fizzy drink. Indeed, because these initial ideas and feelings couldn’t evoke each other in order to keep themselves alive, they fizzled out quickly. You can witness a similar process in your daily life: when an experience doesn’t evoke any memory, emotion or insight in you, you hardly remember it; it becomes meaningless and intangible, as if it had never happened. Without cognitive associations, you can’t hold on to it.’

  This was obviously true. It is only through cognitive associations that we maintain the thread of awareness that runs through our lives. As a matter of fact, as the Other had highlighted earlier, life is this thread of associated experiences.

  ‘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. In other words, more refined and specific ideas began evoking more refined and specific feelings, which in turn evoked other specific ideas, and so forth. Long but isolated lines of cognitive associations formed.’

  This reference to long lines of cognitive associations reminded me of a vision I’d had during a previous visit to the Dome: the multi-layered cosmic structure of interconnect lines. The
structure’s lower layers seemed to correspond to what the Other was describing now: they consisted of long, straight interconnect lines homogeneously distributed. He continued:

  ‘As it was bound to happen in a field of emerging, growing chains of cognitive associations, eventually one such chain formed a self-referential loop: the last mental content in the chain evoked the first one again, closing a circle of associations. 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.”’

  As the Other explained all this, I could see with my mind’s eye an animated version of the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros: a serpent swallowing its own tail, forming a circle. He was basically suggesting that the universe was created from an Ouroboros of cognitive associations, a self-referential loop. Immediately it dawned on me why the ancients attributed so much mythological significance to such a symbol.

  ‘Before the formation of this first self-referential loop,’ he went on, ‘the mental energy of mind-at-large was dispersed across myriad evanescent chains of associations, innumerable ideas that dissolved before they could evoke significant emotion. But now the enduring loop could accumulate mental energy—that is, evoke ever more emotion—simply by maintaining itself alive; like a fisherman’s net that catches more fish the longer it stays in the water. The unprecedented levels of mental energy thus amassed created bottlenecks—points of swelling emotional pressure—in parts of the loop where the imagined symmetries weren’t balanced out. And since ever-increasing pressure can’t be contained forever, these swellings finally gave in and began branching out into extra cycles of new ideas, feelings and respective associations. The original loop was now blossoming, rather explosively, into a broad tangle of many interconnected loops.’

  Another animated image of an ancient mythological symbol popped in my mind: the formation of the Flower of Life, a symbol containing many interlinked circles or closed loops. I had studied ancient symbology and mythology during my certification courses to become a Trilobite Explorer, but I’d never expected that they would be of any use. How wrong I turned out to be.

  ‘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. However, the corresponding rules of association weren’t yet believed in as autonomous realities; they were still experienced from “the outside” as instinctive predilections, not laws.’

  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. It’s impossible to do justice to this living understanding in words, so my hope in mentioning it here in passing is merely that you find confirmation of your own insights in it.

  Entering God’s imaginings

  ‘Allow me to insist on this point,’ the Other emphasized. ‘At this stage, mind-at-large still instinctively recognized the universe to be the product of its own imagination at work. However, 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. This increasing intimacy with its own imaginings led mind-at-large to commit more and more mental energy to it—just as you commit your emotions to an engaging movie—which in turn drew mind-at-large even faster in, and so on, in a virtuous cycle. Eventually, as in the crossing of the event horizon of a black hole, the gravitational pull became insurmountable and the accelerating process could no longer be slowed down. The siren song could no longer be resisted. Like the child losing itself in the fairytale, mind-at-large became enchanted, hypnotized, entranced by this self-sustaining universe it was imagining.’

  I could sense what was coming next…

  ‘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. Indeed, the birth of belief and the entrance of mind-at-large into its own imaginings were one and the same event: the change in context happened when mind-at-large began to believe in its own imaginings as a standalone universe.’

  This resonated profoundly with several creation myths I’d had to study during my Explorer certification courses. Many of them talked of deities entering or being born within their own imagination or creation. In the enhanced cognitive state I had within the Dome, I could easily remember every detail of each of those myths. I could see that they were all attempting to point, through symbolisms, to precisely the same events the Other was now describing. I was beyond exhausted but my mind wouldn’t stop. I was being flooded with unending insights. Everything made sense, everything was connected. I knew that I was mind-at-large having entered its imaginings; and so was everybody else. I knew that the seeming autonomy of the world was a reflection of my own deeply ingrained beliefs and expectations. I could see precisely how it all worked and how it came to being. I can’t describe how I felt at that moment, except to say that it was as though my head were inflating like a balloon, becoming a thousand times bigger to accommodate all the new understandings. I thought I was going to explode any time, but the Other pressed on relentlessly. He knew that the story had to be told from beginning to end, in one go, in order to be properly assimilated. He also knew that we would not have a second chance, since the power of the first “Aha!’ can never be replicated.

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

  ‘Of course!’ I thought. The inception of a living being was the image, within the dream, of a segment of mind-at-large punching through and entering the dream. This penetration or protrusion had to look like something when observed from within the dream itself, and it so happened to look like what we call biology.

  ‘And once a segment of mind-at-large was inside the dream,’ he continued, ‘it could facilitate the entrance of other segments by creating suitable cognitive conditions within the dream itself. This was much easier to accomplish than to accumulate once again the momentum originally required for the first penetration. Indeed, the process was analogous to getting your hand inside to unlock a door from within, as opposed to punching through the door multiple times unti
l your whole body could pass through it.’

  Yes! He was referring to biological reproduction, which requires action within the dream. I got it. I was on a roll…

  ‘You think you already understood everything but you grasped only the generalities so far. So hold your horses and listen,’ he admonished me.

  I tried to comply with whatever cognitive energy I had left, but I had to dig deep into reserves I didn’t even know existed. I certainly couldn’t keep going for much longer.

  ‘As we already discussed,’ he pressed on, ‘a living being is a dense, tight cluster of mostly internally associated sensations, feelings and insights in mind-at-large. When a segment of mind-at-large enters a universe, this action corresponds to the formation of one such cluster somewhere above the tangle of associations that corresponds to the universe itself.’

  He was again describing the structure of interconnect lines I had seen before, but this time by unfolding the description along the axis of time.

  ‘To understand this more precisely, let us return to the time preceding the origin of life. Remember that accumulating, localized emotional pressure in the original self-referential loop had forced it to branch out into a more stable tangle, thereby congealing the universe’s laws of classical physics. The stability of the tangle gave the universe opportunity to develop further and increase in complexity. Mind-at-large then became more and more enamored with such ever-richer imaginings and was pulled into them, which in turn amplified the emotional charge of the tangle and pulled mind-at-large even faster in. This runaway process led once again to surging internal pressure—this time in the tangle—which had to be released somewhere. When it eventually was, the release took the form of the first cluster. The cluster’s dense knot of cognitive associations was created from the emotional energy thus liberated.