The Deep Truth of Religious Myth with Bernardo Kastrup

Thinking Allowed, conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery, with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello, I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we'll be exploring the deep truth of religious myths. With me is Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, a computer scientist and philosopher. He is the author of Rationalist Spirituality, an examination of the meaning of life and existence informed by logic and science. Also, meaning in absurdity, what bizarre phenomena can tell us about the nature of reality and dreamed-up reality, diving into the mind to discover the astonishing hidden tale of nature. Also, why materialism is baloney, how true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe and everything. And, brief peeks beyond critical essays in metaphysics, neuroscience, free will, skepticism and culture. Also, more than allegory on religious myth, truth and belief, and to be published in 2019, The Idea of the World, a multidisciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality. Dr. Kastrup lives in the Netherlands and this interview is being conducted on Skype. So now, I'll switch over to the Skype video. Welcome Bernardo, it's a pleasure to be with you once again. We'll be talking about the deep truth of religious myth, which is interesting because, you know, some of my favorite public figures like Bill Maher, who's a popular comedian, make a big point about how religious myths are false and people believe in talking snakes and what kind of nonsense is that. You really endeavor to address that problem. Yeah, I think, you know, we bring a very modern attitude to the interpretation of religious myths. I mean, interpreting something very literally is a more or less modern phenomenon in human history. Similarly, analogy, metaphor, symbolic interpretations have been the mainstay for a long, long time before we brought this attitude of trying to interpret everything literally. Of course, if you interpret religious myths literally, then they are not true. They are certainly not literally true. Thank goodness, because otherwise they would be so flat, so uninteresting, so almost meaningless, I would say. But, if instead of looking at the finger, you look at where the finger is pointing to, what it's trying to indicate, what it's trying to evoke within you, then I think it's a whole different story. But, in the title of your book, more than allegory suggests that you don't want to just limit the metaphorical interpretation. That in itself is rather flat. Right, because what is the difference then, right, between a metaphor or an allegory and a myth? I think an allegory is a colorful, interesting way to say something that can be said literally, that you can't precisely describe or explain in a direct, literal way. But, you can use an allegory to make it more interesting, or to make it easier, or less complex, or more evocative, whatever. But, there is a literal alternative. The difference here is that when you're talking about a symbolic message, the difference is that there is no literal alternative. That it is an inner experience that you're trying to evoke in somebody else's mind, in a way that cannot be indicated conceptually, cannot be indicated through direct descriptions. It has to be evoked. It has to be pointed at. It has to be made to arise by itself within somebody else's mind. Because, you see, there is nothing in our understanding of nature that requires that the linguistic structures evolved by a primate species on planet Earth should be sufficient to directly and precisely describe the deepest truths of nature. I mean, that's preposterous, right? We know that, I mean, my cats cannot describe the deepest truths of nature through their meowing language. Why should we? It's a very anthropocentric thing to imagine that we could literally capture the deepest truths according to our own linguistic constructions. And these same linguistic constructions underlie human rational thoughts. I mean, Noam Chomsky has been putting forward that idea for about 50 years now, I think. That, you know, the structure of our thinking is the same as the structure of our language. That there is a universal grammar, so to say, underlying how we put concepts together to weave stories and explanations and descriptions. I don't think there is any reason to think that the universal grammar encoded in our primate species, Homo sapiens sapiens, should be powerful, comprehensive enough to evoke within our own minds, or in the minds of the people we're trying to communicate with, the deepest truths of nature. I think that can be achieved only in a symbolic way, in a way that appeals to the deeper mind, the mind that underlies the intellect, that underlies reasoning, conceptual reasoning. It is a much more ancient mind, phylogenetically speaking. It's been there for a long time. It's much more rooted in the, you know, the primordial soil of nature, so to say. It's much more connected to the primordial truths. It's not yet lost in a cloud of conceptualizations and alternative conceptual realities and reality tunnels, you know, which unfortunately, or fortunately, I don't know, is the culture we live in today. Well, I think many modern people would respond to your argument here by saying, look at science. Science has had amazing success at describing nature down to many, many decimal points of precision. That's absolutely true. Science is extremely successful in describing the behavior of nature. The entire scientific method is based on observation, confirmation by observation. When you observe nature, what you observe is nature's behavior. If something happens here, and that leads to something happening there, and there is some correlation between the two, that's what you then model through scientific models, and which you then use to predict the future behavior of nature, anchored on past observations. But this whole thing about behavior doesn't tell you much about what nature essentially is, about what essentially is going on. There is a metaphor I like to use. Imagine you have a five-year-old kid, your son, five years old, and he's playing computer games. He's really good at it, and he's winning, you know, local championships and maybe even the world championship in playing a certain computer game. He's very good at understanding the behavior of the game's characters and, you know, how they should go about their business in order to collect points and, you know, extend their lives and so on. That doesn't give your kid, your five-year-old kid, any insight into computer hardware and software architecture, the whole mechanism that's bringing the game to life. He only has an insight into the behavior of the characters under the circumstances and the framework of the game. I think science is a method for understanding the behavior of nature under the circumstances of our perceptual and conceptual abilities, our ability to perceive nature and conceptualize it and turn that into predictive models. But it doesn't necessarily give us any insight into the underlying structure. What is bringing this about? What is the essential nature of being of ourselves and the world? And that's precisely what I think religious myths, the valid ones, the traditional ones that have some inertia going in the human psyche, it's precisely what they are pointing at. Well, I know you have a background in computer science, but really you're functioning as a philosopher primarily. It strikes me. Yeah, I will soon have a very formal background in philosophy, but I'm not going to anticipate that. Okay, but what we're talking about is philosophy and it is the purpose of philosophy to describe the ultimate nature of reality. That's what we call ontology and you've written extensively on ontology and epistemology using the English language and coming up with very refined arguments as a matter of fact. So, are you saying that ultimately philosophy itself must fail? To what extent is a religious myth a form of philosophy? I mean, if you go to India, if you go to the East, they don't make that distinction. The philosophy of the Vedas, of the Upanishads in the Vedas, is a religious myth. It's philosophy made through the symbolism of religious myths. In the West we've made this partitioning and this partitioning has become much more dramatic in the early 20th century with the emergence of analytic philosophy. Philosophy that is supposed to be conceptually clear, specific and direct. Philosophy that doesn't have much tolerance for metaphor, maybe as an add-on, as something extra to make a literal explanation a little bit more appealing, but not as the means of conveying a message. So we've split this in the West. Now, if I grant this split, I would say we can go a fairly long way with analytic philosophy. I'm not a pure critic of analytic philosophy. I think it has value. We found ourselves, and we still find ourselves today, in a conceptual morass. And I think the clarity of thinking, the rigor in the use of terminology, and in making explicit each step in one's line of reasoning, I think that's important. It helps us weed out stories and pretentious stuff there on the fringes of the culture that try to come across as purely reasoned, while in fact it has a bunch of implicit mistakes built into it and it has no value. It's just garbage. So I think analytic philosophy has value in making this distinction. But there is only so far it can go, because it's not symbolic. It's very direct. So it's fundamentally limited by the human intellectual ability, by the universal grammar of Chomsky. I think we should use it to go until that limit, until that edge. And it's useful also because our culture is based on communication, and communication is based on language itself. So our culture can't go much beyond that before appealing to the mythical stories of religion as well. So it's important we develop that analytic philosophy, but I think we should also keep in mind that it has its limits, and those limits are such that they don't really satisfy the human psyche, the human soul, so to say. We want to know more. We really want to have some intuition, some feeling for the deepest layers of what's going on. And I don't think analytic philosophy can go there at all, and goes to a certain point. And beyond that, you have no alternative but symbolism. Well, as an alternative to analytic philosophy, we have what's sometimes called the continental philosophy of Europe. That's a different tradition that relies heavily on metaphor. If I read Nietzsche, it's quite poetic, for example. He fenced it himself as a sort of a philosopher-poet, Nietzsche. There are other examples that are a little less dramatic. You know, we've talked about him last time, Schopenhauer. He's in my mind because I'm steeped in Schopenhauer philosophy these days. He also did metaphysics. I mean, Nietzsche did a lot of ethics, talked a lot about morals, you know, about behavior, and very limited on the metaphysical side. Not zero, but it was not really his cup of tea. He even criticized metaphysics quite a bit. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, based his entire edifice, his entire system, on a certain metaphysics. So he talked a lot about metaphysics, which today is almost purely analytic. Metaphysics today is almost a purely analytic discipline. If you look at the latest anthologies, Cosmos Psychism, Penn Psychism, it's all analytic philosophy. And yet Schopenhauer addressed the exact same problems in a non-analytic way, in a continental way. What does that mean? It means that, for instance, his usage of certain terms, of certain words, is context-dependent. He will use the word knowledge in one context with one meaning, and without telling you in another context, he will use the same word meaning something else. And it's on you to realize, based on the context, that he means something else. Now, analytic philosophers cannot take this. They cannot swallow this. They take the first usage and they fix it. And it's okay, this is what this guy means by the word knowledge. And then later on, later on, they find another usage of that word. And that interpretation then doesn't hold, otherwise the philosopher falls into contradiction. And they say, well, Schopenhauer's metaphysics is untenable, it's full of contradictions. It's not. It's just that the usage of terms is context-dependent, because that comes very natural to most human beings, except mathematicians, computer scientists, and analytic philosophers. Well, I think it's also very human that we change our minds quite a bit, or that we have different personas that have different attitudes, beliefs, inner mental structures, depending on the context that we're in. You see it all the time in politics, of course. Absolutely, and sometimes these changes of mind aren't even really changes of mind. They are just, you know, there are many angles from which to look at the same object, the same truth, so to say, right? And sometimes when you approach the truth from different paths, different angles, what you describe on the way there can be different, and yet you're converging to the same point, just from a different angle. In the book, I use the metaphor of the cylinder, that if you take a solid cylinder and you illuminate it from one side, the shadow will look like a rectangle. If you illuminate it from another side, the shadow will look like a circle. And now, a rectangle and a circle, they are mutually contradictory, right? Well, yes, in the world of 2D shadows, but in the world of 3D cylinders, they're perfectly reconcilable. So the fact that one day you say rectangle, and in the next day you say circle, doesn't necessarily mean that you changed your mind, or that you're falling into contradiction. You're just approaching the problem, the cylinder, from a different angle. Well, when you look at reality, you use the term transcendence. That's very important in your thinking. Perhaps you could elaborate on why transcendence seems so significant to you. It's my way of highlighting that there is more to nature, there is more to what is true, most likely, than what can be captured directly, literally, through our conceptual reasoning. Whatever truths of nature cannot be directly described and made sense of in a literal way, in a direct way, is, from the point of view of the human intellect, necessarily, and almost by definition, transcendent, in the sense that it escapes the reach of the intellect to capture, model, and make sense of in a closed, causal manner. It's not etched in stone, in nature, that the intellect should have a limit that is coextensive with the limits of reality itself. The intellect is a little, tiny subset of what's real, right? Well, the logical positivists, who had a lot of influence in the early part of the 20th century, argued that if we can't analyze something conclusively, through the senses, and through logic and reason, we shouldn't talk about it at all, that it's simply nonsensical to even pursue it further. You seem to be suggesting, no, we have other means. Exactly. That is the point. If all there was to a human being were the intellect, if that were the case, then the logic positivists would have a point. There's no use in going beyond the limits of the intellect, because there is all there is to us, so there's no use in talking about anything that transcends that. But I don't think we are limited to the intellect at all. We are not limited to conceptual reasoning. We are not limited to the linguistic manipulation of concepts in our heads. There is a much more primordial mind, the foundation of the human psyche, that psychologists would call the unconscious, personal and the collective unconscious, for Jungians. I don't like the word unconscious. I think it's a misnomer. I think it refers to a part of mind that escapes our ability to introspect into, to metacognitively access, but it's not necessarily unconscious in the sense that it lacks the qualities of experience. I think it doesn't. It's experiential in nature, but we can't introspect into it. That, quote, unconscious part of mind has been shown, even by modern psychology, to encompass all the degrees of freedom that consciousness itself has. It has a form of reasoning, although it's symbolic reasoning. It's image-based mythical reasoning. It holds memories. It has cognitive associations. The whole gamut of conscious mental activity is mirrored there. But I would argue it has less constraints. It's not constrained by continuity. It's not constrained by Aristotelian logic, which is more or less arbitrary. Every logic is arbitrary in the sense that every logic is founded on certain axioms that we just postulate or consider self-evident, but nothing in nature tells us that it should be so. Even logicians today, they fight. They have different versions of logic. It's not only Aristotelian logic out there. There is an intuitionistic logic in which they drop one of the axioms, the law of excluded middle. Anyway, that, quote, unconscious part of mind is not limited by these axioms. It's a much more raw, foundational, primordial way of, I don't want to use the word reasoning, thinking, a way of relating to reality, inner and outer. And I think it has much deeper reach than the intellect itself. And if it is there, then of course there is a point for human beings to talk about things that transcend the intellect, because we are not only intellect. There is more to us. So why shouldn't we talk about it? It's just a different way of talking. It's not a literal way of talking. It's talking by pointing. It's talking by symbol. A symbol is something that points at something beyond itself. It's trying to turn your gaze to what it's pointing to. While a literal description attracts your gaze to itself. It's not pointing at anything beyond itself. It is what it's trying to point at. That's the difference. Well, it does strike me that for hundreds of thousands of years, human beings never had written language, or even mathematical symbols. I suppose we had some sort of spoken forms of communication. But many scholars suggest that in that time, which is, you know, 90% of human history, at least, maybe more, people basically thought in pictures and in metaphors. Our ability to think symbolically is certainly very old. It has evolved before language. Language sort of hitchhiked on our ability to think symbolically. Ian Tattersall wrote an excellent book about this in 2012, Masters of the Universe, I think was the name. It's a great book, highly recommended. So yes, our ability to think symbolically precedes, is more primordial than our ability to think linguistically and conceptually. And you see that, and now I'm speaking almost as a death psychologist now, which I'm not, but you see that when we dream, we dream symbolically. Our dreams are not literal or reasoned expressions of our inner mental activity. It's a symbolic expression. What we have underlying the intellect, which goes to sleep, is symbolic thinking, mythical thinking. Is it wrong? Well, from a literal perspective, it's certainly wrong. But is it really wrong in the sense that it's not pointing at anything of any validity in nature? I doubt that. I doubt that very much. Well, there are many people who would call themselves rationalists today, or even skeptics, who would say that, you know, our great concern is what they would call the rising tide of superstition. And they could point to all sorts of horrors that occur when people take these various myths literally, and it usually ends up in tribal conflicts. I am horrified at all that as well. I share that concern. I sympathize very much with the critique. When people take a religious myth literally, they are doing greater abuse to the human psyche than when they discard the religious myth altogether. Both are mutilations of the human psyche. Because you see, a religious myth, the whole power, the evocative power it has, is beyond its literal appearance. When you interpret it literally, you're basically killing it. You're flattening it. Then you're throwing away whatever value it has. And that leads to conflict, for sure. Because you see, if I'm looking at a shadow on the wall, and it's a rectangle, and you're looking at another shadow on the wall, and it's a circle, and we take both literally, then the circle is not compatible with the rectangle. And I will fight you, because for me, the truth is a rectangle. For you, the truth is a circle, and we'll go to war over it. But if we, oh, what is the shadow pointing at? What is the circle pointing at? Oh, there is a cylinder, you know. And the cylinder is a reconciliation of the shadow and the rectangle. Ah, now we are going somewhere. Now we are hinting at something that can be of great value. So I share the concern of the rationalists in that sense. At the same time, what is a rationalist but somebody who denies many of his or her own psychic functions by saying, well, all that matters is the intellect. The rationalist, from that perspective, is also committing voluntary self-mutilation. He is ignoring intuition. He is ignoring mythical, symbolic thinking. He is ignoring gut feeling. He is ignoring artistic, an aesthetic ability, an aesthetic mode of interacting with the world. He is ignoring so many things. That's just self-mutilation. I see no reason to mutilate myself that way. I wouldn't cut off my arm. Why would I cut off my symbolic psyche? Well, in your pursuit of the nature of religious myth, you have a section in your book on the nature of truth itself. And interestingly, you end up concluding that everything we believe to be true about the world is a story we tell ourselves. In effect, not very different at all from a religious myth. That's the most delicate part of the book. Yes, yes. You were accurate. Of course, there is like a hundred ways this could be completely misinterpreted. So I would refer people to have a look at part two of the book to understand what I mean by what you just said. Because it may not mean what it looks like if we just say it so short. We live in a story, ultimately. Because you see, if you remove the story, all there is is the present. And the present is infinitesimally small. It's vanishingly small. When you try to pin it up, it's gone. It's already gone into the past. And where is the past? It's nowhere you can point to. It no longer exists as far as your experience is concerned. All you have is a memory. But the memory itself is experienced now, in the present. Your memory is not in the past. And the future didn't come yet. Right? So it also doesn't exist. All you have is the present, which is vanishingly small because you can't pin it down. So small it is. So everything that exists, exists in a vanishingly small space or segment of space-time. So that's nothing. Experientially, that's really nothing. So we don't leave that. Because it's so intangible, so to say. What do we leave then? Where do we leave our lives? We leave our lives in a story, in a narrative. And that narrative extends experience all the way into the past and all the way into the future. That's the bulk of human life. The bulk of human life is that narrative. And there are some narratives that are good. The scientific narrative has value. And if you compare to some, you know, we have been historically in phases which can be fairly characterized as a morass of superstition in which horrendous crimes have been committed in the name of a very bad story that we told ourselves. There is no denying that to anybody who picks up a history book. But there are other stories that are better. The scientific story is fairly good, but has tremendous limits. And I think we are now hitting the wall with the scientific story. Because we are realizing, okay, it doesn't convey meaning. It doesn't convey any deeper purpose and significance to human life. There is an aesthetic beauty to it, for sure. The scientific story has tremendous aesthetic power. I don't know whether your listeners will relate to this, but to me, I mean, I used to work at CERN as a young adult in the beginning of my career. And to me it was like a religious experience in a certain way, because of the aesthetic power of that. I mean, we were fully around at the time with SUSY, supersymmetry. And the beauty of that was just, I mean, nature had to be like that. Turned out we haven't found any supersymmetric particle yet. So that dream may be a dud, which is unfortunate. But beyond this aesthetic value, it doesn't convey deeper meaning, purpose. It doesn't fill the hole that we feel here in the chest, right? Once we dealt with the basic needs of survival, you know, have enough money in the bank to live with some security, good health insurance, a house and food on the table, there is a hole that's left. And I don't think the purely scientific story about the behavior of nature can cover that. We need another story. And I would say we need a modern religious myth that is not completely implausible. A plausible but modern religious myth. And by that I mean a story that transcends the intellect. A symbolic story that points beyond the intellect. Would that be still a story? Yes, of course, it would still be a story. Because we live in a story. That's what life is. Otherwise it's a singularity. It's vanishingly small. It's intangible. Well, we're coming now to a point in our conversation which really fascinates me. Because you create, in your book, in the third section of this book, you create a myth. And I have the feeling that, at least in part, this myth is based on actual experiences that you've had. And in part, it struck me that your myth is based on a protocol for a new kind of science altogether. We might call them psychonauts. Explorers into the depths of the human mind. And maybe without giving the whole book away, we could explore that a little bit. There were two questions there. To what extent is that a real event? Well, it's based on, well, it's a highly stylized biography. Let's put it that way. Made to serve the purpose of the book. But I didn't take that out of a hat completely. I don't think I could take something like that completely out of a hat, if you know what I mean. I don't have enough creative juices to do that like that. Is that a new kind of science? That I would resist a little bit, Jeff, to call that. And I may even have used that characterization a few years ago. I'm not sure. But today, I would resist that. And let me tell you why. I am critical of science trying to be everything. Science trying to be philosophy, trying to be metaphysics, trying to be ethics, trying to be everything. I think it's nonsense. Science has a very clear definition. It's about observing the patterns and regularities of the behavior of nature, modeling those, and being able to predict the behavior of nature, mainly for the benefit of technology. And therein lies the power of science. We can build technology with it, like the five-year-old kid can win championships playing that game without understanding the underlying computer architecture or software that enables the game. I think science is equivalent in that sense. It enables us to build technology, even if we don't really understand the nature of reality. We don't need to. We know how it behaves. We can use that to our advantage. But I think the power of science lies precisely in this limitation of the scientific method. If we accept that it's limited that way, we keep it clean. We keep it powerful and pure. If we try to make something of it beyond what I just said, that's where I think we can get confused. Things can become unclear. We may lose ourselves in something that isn't really science, at least not according to a clean 21st century definition. That doesn't mean that there aren't other avenues, other modes of acquiring knowledge about reality. I think there are many others. And maybe part three of the book talks about one of these other modes of acquiring knowledge about reality. But I would hesitate calling it a new kind of science. I want to preserve science, if you know what I mean. Because I think it's very powerful, according to this more restrictive definition. Well, the reason I called it a new kind of science is that what you have described in several chapters in the third section of your book, it struck me as a scenario that almost perfectly embodies what one of my friends and mentors and former professors, Dr. Charles Tart, published in Science in 1972. An article that got a lot of attention back then called State Specific Science, in which he proposed that scientists themselves enter into various altered states of consciousness to see if there would be consensus reality that might be observable uniquely through the altered state and not available to us in our normal state of consciousness. I certainly see the value in that. I have some concerns as well, to share with you. Are there consensus experiences in altered states of consciousness? Absolutely. There is just no doubt about that. I mean, if I drop some words here talking to you, maybe most of your audience will not know what I'm talking about. But there will be some who immediately say, oh, I know exactly what he's talking about. For instance, people who use psychedelics. If I say the dome, everybody knows what that is. Everybody who has had a decently effective dose of psilocybin or DMT knows what the dome is. They have been there. It's a shared experience. There is something in an altered state of consciousness that this word will identify. It doesn't describe it. If I just say the dome and you never had the experience and you try to imagine a concrete dome or something, it's not that at all. It has nothing to do with that. It's something completely else. But if you've had the experience, you understand what the word is indicating. I have to interrupt because I've taken psychedelics maybe a hundred times and I've read your chapter. I know you referred to the dome in it, but I wouldn't apply that word automatically to my experiences. So that's my concern. You see, there are many people who immediately recognize it. Or if I say the Borg cube, many people immediately recognize it. I know at least one person who immediately recognized the Toffee machine. So these are experiences that are at least to some extent shared. Because if you go to a psychedelic festival and you drop these words, people go, of course I've been there. I know exactly what you're talking about. Many times. Maybe we should make an appointment and meet over there. But then other people who have had psychedelic experiences do not recognize it. So these are partly consensus experiences. And it's not only psychedelics. Meditators share experiences. I mean, the Buddhist void is something that to a large extent shared. But I have never visited the Buddha. Actually, I have. I have been to the void once. But it was only once. I don't consider that enough to establish me as a participant in a consensus. So there is some degree of consensus. But at the same time, you bring so much of yourself to the experience. And it's so circumstance dependent that I don't think the degree of consensus that can be talked about is enough for us to say, well, a science can be built around it. There isn't enough stability. There isn't enough internal consistency. There isn't enough. And I will use this word with a lot of reservation, but I will use the word anyway. There isn't enough objectivity, psychic objectivity, for us to identify stable, reliable patterns and regularities of behavior, of experiential behavior in those altered states, for us to develop anything remotely akin to what might be characterized as science. I think those experiences, the greatest value they have is to evoke a form of gnosis, a form of recognition. Because you see, scientific consensus is a replacement for direct acquaintance with what is true. If you don't have direct acquaintance with something that is true, you need the consensus of a culture, of a society, to convey a proxy of that certainty to you, something that you can rely on, even though you have never been directly acquainted with, but nonetheless, you believe it, because others are telling you, we've done 100 experiments, and they're all consistent. We know this is true. That's the end of it. Fine. But when you're directly acquainted with something that is true, you know it with every fiber of your body. You don't need others to come to you and say, well, we've published this paper, we've run these experiments. Good for you. I know, I know what I know. And it's surprisingly sufficient for the person who experienced it. I know if I say that, other people will say, well, you can't trust your own experience, because it has been known to be unreliable. We are all prone to wish fulfillment and visions and hallucinations. It's all true. But if you've been there, you know what I'm talking about. There is a level. When you pass through that gate, all these arguments about the unreliability of personal experience, they sort of dissolve, they evaporate, because the power of being acquainted with something is just so absolutely massive, that if you decide that you're not going to rely on that, you might as well roll up in a corner and die because you can't rely on absolutely anything anymore. Ultimately, all you have is your inner certainty. Even if you transfer that to a consensus of others, that's your inner certainty that you're doing commerce with. That's the only currency you have. So I don't think transcendent states, I don't think the greatest value is to develop consensus-based science. I think the greatest value is that they give you direct acquaintance with an aspect of nature, that after the experience you just cannot deny, at least for a while. After a while, you forget the experience and your rational mind kicks in again and you go like, well, do I really trust what I experienced or not? And then you're back in Maya. That's normal. Maya, that's an interesting word. It refers to illusion. Yes. Okay, let me be more accurate. You're back in the story, the cultural narrative that basically defines the reality we live in. A direct acquaintance with the truth happens underneath the story. It's what the story is covering. It's the veneer on top of the story. On top of the truth, that's the cultural narrative. It may be more or less opaque or transparent, but underneath that there is direct acquaintance with the truth. But after you are back to normal states of consciousness for a long time and you're back into this culture, watching television, talking to your boss or going to your doctor, how long does that survive? Not very long. You're back to Maya in the sense that you're back to the story. Kind of, almost like a hypnotic trance. Yeah, an extremely powerful one. Yeah, an extremely seductive, compelling, irresistible. I think it's completely irresistible. Maybe some humans have transcended it. I don't know any. Well, in your story, you describe an encounter with a magician who is able to magically transform you from one reality to another, to another, to another, and each time they seem real. It's almost like you think you're going to break out of the illusion only to fall into a different illusion. Yes, how far you want to go down that rabbit hole without the context. I relate that to the skeptic movement. Let me first make a disclaimer. I think skepticism is very important. Skepticism is an attitude of caution, of doubt, in which you question your own beliefs. You're like, well, do I really believe this? And if I do, why do I believe that? What reasons do I have to believe this? I think this is very important. There's also false skepticism out there, which is basically, well, I don't think story B is true because story A is true. Then you're just basically a fundamentalist for story A, and then you try to get across as a skeptical of story B. But even for true skepticism, there is a potential trap. When you question your own beliefs to the point that you sort of become objective about your own beliefs, that you put them in front of you, you separate yourself from them, and you analyze them coldly, oh, those are my beliefs. What reason do I have to believe in those stories? So you sort of extract yourself from your beliefs. This movement of extracting yourself from your beliefs basically brings you to another set of implicit beliefs, from which you objectively observe the other beliefs that you just extracted yourself from. This falling back onto another implicit story, which basically is based on a whole belief system as well, that movement is the best way to get you to buy completely into a different story, because it completely evades your critical abilities. You're not pointing your critical eyes to the story you fall back onto. You're looking at a certain belief system, and you fall into another set of beliefs that you're not criticizing, you're not evaluating critically. So that was what I tried to illustrate with that metaphor, and I think that happens at many levels, cultural level, personal level, even some transcendent levels. Well, I don't want to give away your whole book, because I certainly encourage our viewers to read it for themselves, but you do more or less end up by concluding that religious myths can be valuable, even for rationalistic, scientifically minded people. You suggest that they might start with a myth with which they feel at least some degree of comfort. Yes, I think most people, at least, if not everybody, most people, before their reasoning, their critical reasoning kicks in and forces them to break away from a certain story, most people have a symbolic story that they actually resonate with, that gives them a sense of warmth, an intuition that there is something to that, there is something of value to that, although they can't quite pin it down. Of course they can't pin it down, otherwise it would be literally true. It's the nature of the beast that it can't be pinned down, that it operates at another level in the psyche. But they force themselves to part ways with it, because their critical reasoning kicks in, it cannot find space in a literal framework to accommodate that story, so they force themselves to part ways with it. What I would suggest is, don't do it. Even if you don't understand it literally, but you feel the resonance at some degree, stay with it. You don't need to say, oh it's literally true. Of course it's not literally true, but why force yourself to dissociate from something that is clearly resonating at some level? Maybe it grows in you, and maybe at some point you develop a certain insight that you'll not be able to put it in words, but which will be sufficient for you to establish a relationship not only with the myth, but through the myth, with the world at large. And that can certainly change lives. In other words, a sense of a transcendent connection with the world at large being the ultimate mystery. Yes, I mean, look, if you go out at night, suppose you're on holidays, and you are outside the city, and you are in a rural area, and you go out at night, and you look up at the night sky, there are many different things that you can see, even though the night sky is exactly the same. Some people would just say, well, just masses of plasma, you know, collapsed mass that is undergoing fusion or emitting photons. Other people, we see very different things. Other people, we see, you know, expressions of universal love pouring out in the form of light in a great void in the night sky. Other people will see the constellations, you know, Orion, Pegasus, and all the mythical stories of the Greeks that are sort of implied in those. There are many different things you can see, symbolically speaking. And what determines what you see, your relationship to the world, the meaning you see or project onto the world, is the myth that you're always running in your mind. You're always running a myth. Even if you're running the myth of, I don't have a myth, that's also a myth. That there's always a basic operating system, you know, a bio, a basic input-output system in your mind on the basis of which you give value to the world, semantic value to the world. Otherwise the world would be just a set of incoherent pixels and there would be no life as such. So you're always running a myth. The myth determines to a very large extent the quality of your life. So I think it's very important that we are cognizant about this, so we can explore the depth of our own psyche to the maximum extent, so we can run the best myth we are capable of, that nature endowed us with, instead of self-mutilating and saying, you know, all there is of value to my mind is my intellect and my reasoning and everything else I'll discard. Well, too bad if you do that. Bernardo Kastrup, this has been a fascinating and I would say important conversation. Delighted to share this time with you and to be able to share it with our viewers. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun again. And I look forward to more conversations with you.