More Than Allegory Quotes

“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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“Only nothing is true.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“Truth-seeking is the path to self-annihilation and thus to liberation.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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!”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“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?”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“Our myth-making capacity may be our key role in the dance of existence.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“These myths weren’t thought through deliberately, but sensed. Their intricacies weren’t composed through steps of reasoning, but arose spontaneously from attempts to describe the underlying structure of reality, which their originators could intuitively apprehend. This explains how cultures with limited intellectual development could produce such astoundingly refined cosmologies. It also explains how these various cosmologies ended up being so mutually consistent: after all, we all share the same reality that the myths attempt to describe. In a nutshell, despite the radically different geographical, historical and cultural contexts of different traditional peoples, they were intuitively ‘looking at,’ and trying to describe, the same phenomenon. In arguing this, I am largely echoing Jung’s views, which were extensively substantiated in his own work and those of others after him.58 The conclusion here is inescapable: to restore meaning to our lives, we must develop a close relationship with the transcendent truths symbolically unveiled by the obfuscated mind in the form of religious myths.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“the crucial usefulness of skepticism is degenerating into the narrow-mindedness of cynicism.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“Love nurtures but also smothers, depending on the dose and perspective.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“It is your head that is in your mind, not your mind in your head.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“The only meaningful way to conceive of truth implies that truth is internal, not external.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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?”
― Bernardo Kastrup, 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief