More Than Allegory

Previous books by Bernardo Kastrup have provided a scathing critique of scientific materialism and a strong advocacy of a worldview based on the primacy of consciousness. This book addresses the relative status of religious myth, truth and belief in relation to each other in a rigorous way. The overall thrust is that the universe is becoming self-aware through us, but we are misled by our current consensus reality that there is a real world outside consciousness. Myths are in fact a means of embodying transcendent truth and not just to be taken allegorically. Their significance can be apprehended intuitively. The author's experience of the cross in Cologne Cathedral revealed to him the transcendent truth of this Christian symbol so that he experienced it for himself. In a spiritual sense, the quest for truth is also a quest for inner peace. In the process, not only the ego but also the notion of truth itself need to be deconstructed while we come to the realisation that past and future are both constructs and, given the primacy of consciousness, truth is inherently subjective, even though it can be shared in terms of perceptions, explanations and predictions. All this, according to Kastrup's perspective, takes place within Mind at large. The third part on belief takes the form of a story/dialogue exploring the themes in more depth as lenses that define our perceptual possibilities. This leads to an interesting discussion of death as a transition from observing the universe to being the universe, from dreaming to conceiving, reflecting another aspect of Mind at large. All this is within the Divine imagination. We become aware of non-separation and thus achieve liberation. A subtle exploration of reality as we know it.