“A tremendous mystery unfolds in front of our senses every waking hour of our lives; a mystery more profound, more tantalizing, more penetrating and urgent than any novel or thriller. This unfolding mystery is nature’s challenge to us. Are we paying enough attention to it?”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Truth can be intuited even when it cannot be articulated in language. Such intuition is rooted in our broader obfuscated mind, which can apprehend - in symbolic ways - aspects of reality beyond the grasp of our self-reflective thoughts and perceptions.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Clearly, we once knew with intuitive clarity that which we can no longer remember. In today’s culture we take the package for the content, the vehicle for the precious cargo. We attribute reality to physical phenomena while taking their meanings to inconsequential fantasies. By extricating ‘reality’ from mind, materialism has sent the significance of nature into exile. With the pathetic grin of hubris stamped on our foolish faces, we carefully unwrap the package and then proceed to throw away its contents while proudly storing the empty box on the altar of our ontology. What a huge stash of empty boxes have we accumulated! Idols of stupidity they are; public reminders of a state of affairs that would be hilarious if it weren't tragic.”
Source: Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything
“By extricating 'reality' from mind, materialism has sent the significance of nature into exile. With the pathetic grin of hubris stamped on our foolish faces, we carefully unwrap the package and then proceed to throw away its contents whileb proudly storing the empty box on the altar of our ontology. What a huge stash of empty boxes have we accumulated! Idols of stupidity they are; public reminders of a state of affairs that would be hilarious if it weren't tragic.
The meaning of it all is unfolding right under our noses, all the time, but we can't see it. We don't pay any attention. We were taught from childhood to avert our gaze, lest we be considered fools. So now we seem to live in some kind of collective trance, lost in a daze the likes of which have probably never before been witnessed in history. We feel the gaping emptiness and meaninglessness of our condition in the depths of our psyches. But, like a desperate man thrashing about in quicksand, our reactions only make things worse: we chase more fictitious goals and accumulate more fictitious stuff, precisely the things that distract us further from watching what is really happening. And, when we finally realize the senselessness of such reactions, we turn to 'gurus' doling out pill-form answers instead of paying attention to life, the only authentic teacher, who is constantly speaking to us. There is no literal shortcut to whatever it is that the metaphor of life is trying to convey. There is no literal truth. The meaning of it all cannot be communicated directly. There are no secret answers spelled out in words in some rare old book. The metaphor is the only way to the answers, if only we have patience and pay attention. Look around: what is life trying to say?”
Source: Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything
“The meaning of it all is unfolding right under our noses, all the time, but we can't see it. We don't pay any attention. We were taught from childhood to avert our gaze, lest we be considered fools. So now we seem to live in some kind of collective trance, lost in a daze the likes of which have probably never before been witnessed in history. We feel the gaping emptiness and meaninglessness of our condition in the depths of our psyches. But, like a desperate man thrashing about in quicksand, our reactions only make things worse: we chase more fictitious goals and accumulate more fictitious stuff, precisely the things that distract us further from watching what is really happening. And, when we finally realize the senselessness of such reactions, we turn to 'gurus' doling out pill-form answers instead of paying attention to life, the only authentic teacher, who is constantly speaking to us. There is no literal shortcut to whatever it is that the metaphor of life is trying to convey. There is no literal truth. The meaning of it all cannot be communicated directly. There are no secret answers spelled out in words in some rare old book. The metaphor is the only way to the answers, if only we have patience and pay attention. Look around: what is life trying to say?”
Source: Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything
“Partake in reality as an actor in a theatrical play: with attention, dedication and an open heart. But never believe yourself to be your character, for characters spend their lives chasing their own shadows, whereas actors embody the meaning of existence.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Our myth-making capacity may be our key role in the dance of existence.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Therefore, even for those lucky souls who receive the grace of experiencing a transcendent truth directly, the religious myth remains an important reminder; an important link to transcendence that infuses meaning into earthly life after one’s cognitive vantage point returns to the intellect. The pointing finger now says: ‘Look! You’ve been there! Never forget what you knew to be true then!”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The past is a mental, intellectual construct meant to give context to your present perceptions. There has never been a moment in your entire life in which the past has been anything else; I challenge you to find one.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Only nothing is true.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Truth-seeking is the path to self-annihilation and thus to liberation.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Space and time are like ghosts that vanish into thin air every time we try to grab them. Their ‘form’ is ‘emptiness’ referring to itself in a kind of cognitive short-circuit... [They] are names we give to certain configurations of subjective experience, not independent entities out there.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Our culturally sanctioned notions of truth are meaningless concepts, idols of delusion. We’ve been chasing ghosts, mirages conceived and maintained entirely in the human intellect through circular reasoning and projections. This delusion pervades the way we relate to each other and the world. It underlies everything, from ethics to legislation, from trade to religious dogma, from our neuroses to street revolutions. In all these domains we scramble to find external references to ground the truth of the matter. A meaningless quest this is. We’ve become completely entranced by our own projections and lost ourselves in a hall of mirrors.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The prize at the end of the path is handsome: the freedom to make the deliberate, guiltless choice of which untruth to live. Exercising this choice wisely is the art of life.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Cynicism and fundamentalism are the two sides of one coin. Both practice voluntary blindness toward transcendent truth: one by refusing to acknowledge that shadows convey valid insights about it, and the other by taking a shadow to be the sole and complete truth.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“All explanations are myths whose truth-value we assign subjectively. They are true only insofar as we say that they are true. They are stories we conjure up and tell ourselves in order to make sense of the disconnected, context-free phantasmagoria of present perception.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Past and future are myths: stories in the mind.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The present is an intangible moment squeezed in between a growing past and an approaching future. Therefore, perceptual truths are, at best, an inconceivably fleeting part of the experience of life. The bulk of life consists of internal myths.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Out of the quasi-nothingness of the now somehow comes everything.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“[The present moment] is a singularity that births all existence into form. It seeds our mind with fleeting consensus images that we then blow up into the voluminous bulk of projected past and future. These projections are like a cognitive ‘big bang’ unfolding in our mind. They stretch out the intangibility of the singularity into the substantiality of events in time. But unlike the theoretical Big Bang of current physics, the cognitive ‘big bang’ isn’t an isolated occurrence in a far distant past. It happens now; now; now. It only ever happens now.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Existence only appears substantial because of our intellectual inferences, assumptions, confabulations and expectations. What is actually in front of our eyes now is incredibly elusive. The volume of our experiences - the bulk of life itself - is generated by our own internal myth-making. We conjure up substance and continuity out of sheer intangibility. We transmute quasi-emptiness into the solidity of existence through a trick of cognitive deception where we play both magician and audience. In reality, nothing ever really happens, for the scope of the present isn’t broad enough for any event to unfold objectively. That we think of life as a series of substantial happenings hanging from a historical timeline is a fantastic cognitive hallucination.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The very foundations of truth are inherently subjective.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Through the fantastic trick of self-reference, our thoughts make the intangible phantasmagoria of present experience feel like a substantial external world unfolding across space and time.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Instead of contemplating our experiences in an open and self-reflective manner, trying to sense their symbolic meaning in a way analogous to how a therapist analyzes dreams, we continuously search for external references in a futile quest to determine their ‘validity.’ In doing so, we close ourselves up to reality and proceed to tirelessly chase our own tails. You see, there is nothing more to the world than experience itself. What meaning can there be in trying to determine the ‘validity’ of an experience?”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“When we had unsettling dreams as children, our parents would try to reassure us with that fatidic statement: ‘Forget about it, it was just a dream!’ That was a seminal moment in the process of our entrancement. It was then and there that we began to learn that an experience is either bigger than ourselves - the ‘real world out there’ - or so insignificant that it should be dismissed without a thought. It was then and there that we began to slice away huge chunks of our mental lives and throw them in the garbage bin, while elevating other chunks - the ones that weren’t just dreams - to the status of oppressive external tyrants... It inculcates the notion that each and every experience is to be categorized as either nothing or other; that each and every experience must either be killed or exiled. By doing this, we surrender intimacy with our own lives and become estranged from ourselves… Whether we reject or project the reality of an experience, we isolate ourselves from it. We avoid responsibility for it. Perhaps most importantly, we circumvent the need to identify with it. But in doing all this we become, at best, small and insignificant ourselves: What is left for us to be? Ironically, thus, our neurotic attempt at self-preservation is precisely what causes the existential despair from which we succumb.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The only meaningful way to conceive of truth implies that truth is internal, not external.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Whether we live in transcendence or existential despair is simply a matter of which type of myth - religious or deprived - predominantly composes our world.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Dismissing myth is tantamount to dismissing life, for the bulk of our world is made of myths, whether religious or deprived. The world consists of symbols of the nature of mind projected out and reflected on the mirror of human awareness, so to enable self-inquiry.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“We must look where all reality resides: our own mind, profound aspects of which are given symbolic expression in the form of religious myth.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“True religious myths … acknowledge transcendence and foment the openness - the faith - that is precondition to the final leap to freedom. They bring us to the edge of what can be achieved within the framework of language, space and time, priming us for grace.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“It is your head that is in your mind, not your mind in your head.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Your perceptions of the sun, rainbows, thunderstorms, etc., are as inaccessible to God as the patterns of firing neurons in your brain - with all their beauty and complexity - are inaccessible to you in any direct way.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The planets, moons, thunderstorms, volcanoes, rocks, even specs of dust. They are all symbols of transcendence… The world around you is a book waiting to be deciphered.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Love nurtures but also smothers, depending on the dose and perspective.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“It has become indispensable for us to rationally understand how and why a religious myth can carry truth. Without this understanding, the myth is dismissed by the intellect - bouncer of the heart - thereby losing its colors and becoming irrelevant to us.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The depressed person sees no meaning in life largely because the small box of her linguistic thinking limits her view of what life is. The anxious person fears self-destruction largely because her linguistic understanding of her own identity is confining.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Taking a religious myth to be the literal truth at an intellectual level plants the seed of fundamentalism.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“A religious myth can bring transcendence into everyday 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.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Our mind needs a code to translate consensus images into thoughts and feelings… the translation code takes the form of a mental narrative we tell ourselves; a story that implies particular correspondences between outer images and inner feelings and ideas. The translation code is thus a myth… myth is a story that implies a certain way of interpreting consensus reality so to derive meaning and affective charge from its images and interactions.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“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.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“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.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Science’s blind devotion to the gods of chance and automatism condemns its myths to hollowness.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“Contemporary science cannot acknowledge even the possibility of meaning and purpose - let alone transcendence - for real mean and tough chicks face bleak facts. This isn’t skepticism but cynicism… It reflects an attitude as beset by blind belief as any religious dogma.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“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.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The logical constraints of the human intellect are very useful but ultimately arbitrary. After all, one cannot logically argue for the absolute validity of logic without begging the question. The obfuscated mind, for not being restricted to such arbitrary constraints, can embody a much greater range of cognition than the intellect. Its symbolic character should be regarded, according to Carl Jung, as an ancient mode of thought that has been superseded - or rather, obfuscated - by the relatively recent acquisition of linguistic thinking.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“The symbolic religious myths produced by the obfuscated mind aren’t merely roundabout ways to refer to something literal, but the only pointers we have to a form of salvation.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“There is no better description of transcendent truths than the religious myth that resonates with your heart. Therefore, the logical way to go about life is, ironically, to buy into your heart-chosen myth with reasonable but not excessive intellectual oversight. The intellect is a valuable adviser but a lousy king.”
Source: More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
“By extricating 'reality' from mind, materialism has sent the significance of nature into exile. With the pathetic grin of hubris stamped on our foolish faces, we carefully unwrap the package and then proceed to throw away its contents whileb proudly storing the empty box on the altar of our ontology. What a huge stash of empty boxes have we accumulated! Idols of stupidity they are; public reminders of a state of affairs that would be hilarious if it weren't tragic.”
Source: Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything