Dr Bernardo Kastrup - Myth, Allegory and Symbol

Scientist and philosopher Dr Bernardo Kastrup discusses the power of mythic and symbolic understanding for our age. In this session recorded in 2021, we talk with Bernardo about his book ‘More than Allegory’ and the relationship of intellect, emotion and belief in religious and mythic narratives and their importance today.
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For more information about the Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, please visit: www.mythcosmologysacred.com
To find out more about Dr Bernardo Kastrup, please visit: www.bernardokastrup.com/
Credits and Attributions
Music: Slow Motion by Bensound - www.bensound.com/
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[@michaeldillon3113]

It may not happen in his lifetime but I think that ultimately Bernardo will come to be seen as one of the great scientist- philosophers . E=🕉️✌️

[@oliviergoethals4137]

True. He is so sharp and so genuine.

[@michaeldillon3113]

@Danny Dreadnought I agree . In fact I call him the Galileo of Consciousness. However , he seems to have plenty of detractors. Also I came across him relatively recently ( perhaps within 2 years ) and I was amazed that he had been ' teaching ' for nearly ten years . Materialism is still king in the UK with Dawkins still the high priest of Materialism.

[@michelecole362]

I think so too

[@michaeldillon3113]

@@michelecole362 The idea that matter is an appearance within Consciousness rather than consciousness being an emergent property of matter is even more profound than Heliocentrism. Also it gives a scientific basis for my favourite philosophy - advaita Vedanta - not that it needs it. Best wishes ✌️

[@SoyOtroTu]

Absolutely agree. Actially, I am pretty sure he is the Greatest.

[@candaniel]

This is probably the best Bernardo Kastrup I have ever had the pleasure to listen to. So much truth and wisdom in this video.

[@canisronis2753]

A beautiful mind...thank you Bernardo

[@juergenbloh45]

So clear, thanks for sharing this🙏🙏🙏

[@leandrosilvagoncalves1939]

More than Allegory was one of the most amazing books I've read in my life. I hope one day some creative film director decides to make a movie from the part 3 of the book. It would probably be as interesting as Inception or The Matrix

[@MythCosmology]

Thank you, Leandro. Of all the books we have read of Bernardo Kastrup's, More Than Allegory is our favourite. Your vision of a movie from part 3 of the book sounds wonderful :)

[@give_me_hope]

Part 3 of the book was the main content of the book .

[@patriciaching100]

I just downloaded "More than Allegory" from Audible ... Thank You for your recommendation ...

[@mcnallyaar]

The questions on this interview are absolutely marvelous!

[@jmoffitt100]

I agree. Bernardo has so much to offer and the acuity of the interviewer is so key to sort of lighting him up in various areas and inspiring new threads. I agree, this interviewer is very good. Bernardo is great as a solo speaker as well , but I find him to be particularly insightful when he is engaging on a topic conversationally.

[@breayannawhiteoak9405]

A great explanatory talk that helped illuminate many concepts and ideas. Thanks for the clarity, Bernardo.

[@TheYellowshuttle]

Very nice & engaging conversation! ❤️ It's a joy to listen to BK.

[@mcnallyaar]

"Myths are the best way we have to communicate an ineffable truth known by direct acquaintance."

[@davidchou1675]

Unfortunately I don't know what that means.

[@garymelnyk7910]

It might help if you try reading poetry. Try Emily Dickinson. Here’s a whole poem………. The competitions of the sky/Corrodeless ply

[@Jagombe1]

Slowly but surely, Bernardo is soon going to be pedestalized as a guru!

[@davidchou1675]

He admitted in a New Thinking Allowed episode that that's the reason why he doesn't want to travel to go on Joe Rogan or Lex Fridman despite repeated invitations: He's "just a peasant boy from the land of dreams" who wants to retire to the Swiss countryside and is procrastinating Jonah-like to escape the "Wise Old Man" destiny he sees before himself!

[@davidchou1675]

19:22 It's important to keep Niels Bohr's words in mind: the laws of physics are not about reality but our reaction to reality.

[@herbalfleece8821]

Great stuff, thankyou guys

[@yuvarajgopal2717]

He looks very humble nice of him

[@bozoerectus3207]

Kastrup says here, words to the effect of, "Where does the car end and the road begin?" meaning that the divisions we perceive are arbitrary and illusory, but convenient and helpful to us in navigating daily existence. I agree. But I think that should also be extended to the most fundamental divisions we imagine, such as the divisions between living matter and non-living matter, between consciousness and non-consciousness. Those divisions seem very real and important to us, but they're just as arbitrary and illusory as any others.

[@youtubecanal]

Great guest. Thank you for sharing such profound insights about the nature of reality. It’s a very counter intuitive move for such one importante paradigm shift.

[@VenusLover17]

❤❤❤❤

[@oliviergoethals4137]

48:00 I think it was Alan Watts who wrote about this in his last book.

[@Lizarus.un-sane]

50:32 Im encouraged since this is a somewhat recent interview that my comment has the chance of being considered for a response… I’d be grateful to have even a topical dialogue about or around this .. I am not formally educated in this or any area actually and I choose to see that for its advantage in that I don’t have preconceived notions to adhere to or rest a subconscious bias in.. At my current level of ignorance I have come to believe that a major part of these mysteries of why things happen the way they do to us is that we are much more personally involved in the apparent way things are as the onus , the power and influence we have has been disregarded and invalidated .. it seems it’s all the power of subconscious influencing projection, limitations, and manifestations, and beliefs .. we exactly create and or co-create our experience and then use symbols or prayer as a middleman type tool to communicate and actually have an strong influence on the subconscious through the pretense of ritual and symbolic greater powers or superstition that can be effectively used to hack our own subconscious (and or super consciousness/ unconscious influence power) Because it’s easier to believe in anything other than ourselves .. There is no line between precognition and self fulfilling prophecy Like it’s all a game of beliefs and placebos that we are playing w ourselves Feedback? Or I can possibly clarify if vague

[@19battlehill]

Kastrup's idea of empty space as universal consciousness is interesting in the fact that it is not even space because space is relative to what it is next to. Reminds me of God being limitless and thus undefinable because once you say what God is you put a limit on him. Thus you can only define God not by what he is - but only by what he isn't.

[@burtonaka___]

Allegory, myth, symbol... What's beyond that?

[@rachellane2836]

This could have gone so much deeper. Hopefully next time.

[@davidchou1675]

For some reason all these KZbinrs have a "Chinese restaurant mentality" -- a million things on the menu but nothing done right...better they tackle only one or two questions comprehensively than rush through a smorgasbord of snacks.

[@thomassimmons1950]

I recently found my way back to Christianity through ironically, Vedanta and reading widely fiction, poetry, drama, philosophy... literature generally. I finally embraced my own contradictions in the spirit of Whitman and Christ. "I contain contradictions...and am not contained between my hat and boots." (Whitman) "Before Abraham was, I Am." ( )

[@garymelnyk7910]

Whitman is great. But Emily Dickinson is at least his equal. The great literary critic Harold Bloom said: “Her intellectual strength and complexity are surpassed only by Shakespeare”.

[@19battlehill]

You should read Owen Barfield's "Saving the Appearance" --- one of his references. And Rudolf Steiner who was a clairvoyant mystic says what Owen Barfield say before him and Steiner says way way more and he is completely forgotten.

[@thomassimmons1950]

@@garymelnyk7910 No argument, here. Between the two rests American poetry...

[@anhumblemessengerofthelawo3858]

_anything any brilliant one says about the nature of our illusion/reality is a footnote to A Course In Miracles_

[@Mandibil]

54:10 "Infinite archetypes..." ... would that not turn you into an anthropic soup ?

[@kathleenbrady9916]

No sound???

[@siewkonsum7291]

The *_Metaphor_*_ "the finger is pointing to the moon, but the finger itself is NOT the Moon"_ ; Is often said in the Eastern Traditions, in the Teachings of the Truths of life. It means _"The words or sentences ( are fingers) in the Teachings, Scriptures or Sutras are pointing to the Moon (TRUTH) but the fingers themselves are NOT the Moon (TRUTH)";_ Because the *_TRUTH_* is inexpressible or undescribable by words or letters, or inconceivable by thoughts or imagination; And the *_TRUTH_* is unknowable, unfindable or unattainable by bookish learning, knowledge, education, conceptual abstraction, religions, religious beliefs or practices. The *_TRUTH_* can only be realized naturally by a sudden direct experience of it ie *_Self Awakening._* Sage *_Lao Tzu_* says, _"The that TAO can be said (or named, described) is NOT the real TAO."_ 😊🙏🙇‍♂️🌷

[@davidchou1675]

34:07 There's something very important going on here, that something that just came into being shouybe so powerful, and I wish the interviewer had picked up on it and ran with it! Why -- and how -- is something so new so powerful??? Is it related to youth itself, possibly?? I don't mean biological youth, exactly, except insofar as biological/chronological "youth-hood" is a "symbol" of what's really going on in that Field of Mentation/Universal Mind of Bernardo's, but just the whole phenomenon of "the young" lording it over "the old"...why is it that this young faculty of symbolic thinking so powerful against those mysterious older facilities???

[@davidchou1675]

44:28 Ahhh! The other host has returned to this matter -- bravo! (Brava?) Unfortunately Bernardo basically demurs due to the sheer difficulty (general impossibility) of the task. Pity!

[@davidchou1675]

1:20:11 Ah!! So is this (at least part of) "The Western Mind" that Bernardo's so often mentioned in passing???

[@KassJuanebe]

Scent? Osho? 1:26:10 (repeated from an earlier answer): If recipes and preaching solved anything....all of our problems would have been solved...1700 years ago when Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire." Yes. Exactly.

[@OnlineMD]

Nice, but Joseph Campbell is the gold standard as regards mythology...just my opinion. Myth, metaphor, allegory, all related words.

[@19battlehill]

Medicine does the same exact thing --- bacteria shows up and medicine says the bacteria is the bad guy when in reality the bacteria is there to clean up what is rotted. It is like blaming the fireman who shows up at a fire to put it out -- for creating the fire because every time there is a fire he is there. IT DRIVES ME MAD that people look at the world like this

[@davidchou1675]

20:18 WHOA -- THIS IS BIG...in almost eighty hours of Bernardo videos on KZbin so far this is the first time I've come across a *taxonomy of consciousness* like this!!! So it's not just a distinction between the consciousness of each individual dissociation of what Bernardo here calls "Universal Consciousness" and that Universal Consciousness but that that Universal Consciousness could be thought to be "composed" of Mind-at-Large plus the sum total of all individual dissociative consciousnesses! Hmmm...I wonder what's the use of such a conceptual model??

[@davidchou1675]

24:35 Indeed! Too bad Bernardo didn't say -- and wasn't pressed to elaborate -- what the other "kinds of minds," so to speak, are...what the various words in "The East" (India?) are for different minds or states of mind...quite a pity! Why does no one ever pursue Bernardo to the very end????? It's like we're watching television and the interviewer has got to run along and move on in order to cover everything before the commercial break!!

[@davidchou1675]

28:43 Indeed, even when Bernardo himself acknowledges that he hasn't even answered the question the interviewer just moves on without further Ado! Why does this happen??? Why are interviewers not even interested in their own questions?????

[@davidchou1675]

I'm increasingly troubled by what seems to be Bernardo's increasing impatience with the common viewpoint that is materialism/physicalism. It's not just personally annoying to have him ranting yet again about the stupidity/lunacy of that common view, but it does not bode well for the wider acceptance of Analytic Idealism if its founder and chief proponent is so dismissive of common sense. Despite Bernardo's claims, it is actually not common sense to believe that our perceptions are really just symbols, as it were, for something else. You actually have to be fairly well versed in philosophical thinking in order to appreciate the beauty of Bernardo's argument. For someone who's never heard of Socrates and Plato, never mind Jung and his archetypes, Analytic Idealism can sound like sheer lunacy. Maybe after all these years he's getting tired of repeating himself and getting seriously tired of encountering the same intellectual obstinacy. But be that as it may, in terms of outreach and propagation/dissemination among those not "already in the choir," Bernardo might wanna do meditation or something (if any meditation he's doing is "not working" in this sense) so that he "emotes" much more empathy than disgusted incredulity!

[@davidchou1675]

Interestingly enough, he's extremely tolerant of the patent lunacy of Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity, which is based on the idea that your deadbeat dad -- whom you've never seen or heard from -- somehow believes *you* owe *him* but he'll "forgive" your "debt" by having his other son, a half-brother you'd also never seen or even have heard of, until now -- "pay" it all off for you in a really horrifically painful way because he "loves" you.... Can I get a "WTF?" I wonder if Bernardo has an actual strategy with all this or if he's simply behaving as the result of the flotsam and jetsam of Univeral Will/Mind-at-Large/Cosmic Consciousness working through him...! Is the idea to make common cause with the most common of nut-jobs (Abrahamists) and subtly subvert their literal-mindedness (their fundamentalism) in the process, ultimately?? Whether intentional, I wonder if it develop thus! Because it's sheer lunacy otherwise to be so unpittingly dismissive of the common-sense mistake of materialism/physicalism and yet so solicitous of the Middle Eastern Iron Age mystery blood cult that is Abrahamism!

[@davidchou1675]

Maybe to begin to help win the physicalists, over Bernardo should state that everything is emergent, including our individual consciousnesses...and leave until the very last minute the matter of from out of what exactly everything is supposed to be emerging (i.e., leave Universal Will/Mind-at-Large/Cosmic Consciousness for last).... I personally would rather see that than his cozying up with "the woo folks" (Deepak Chopra most notoriously but now also more and more explicitly the Abrahamists and even "Western Civilizationists" [the West-Is-Best people]).

[@fineasfrog]

"Time is a river is true but not literally true. The human mind operates through analogy. We are pattern matching. We recognize a pattern in a different place -the same pattern (in a different place)." A river is visible to the outer senses. Time is not visible to the outer senses. So to begin to approach the unknown "time" by suggesting that it is something like a "river". A river is known to some extent by the outer senses....I have seen a river and it is known to some extent by the outer senses. Yet while this knowing reveals a partial knowing it also at the same time obfuscates a deeper understanding. Bernardo knows all this but it would have been useful to point out that pattern would be dead and limiting if it did not originally comes out of the "creative insight of mind". In other words consciousness is the source of pattern and it can to go beyond pattern. While analogy can spontaneously inspire insight and further knowing in and of itself it is limited. It is important to note the action of insight and ask what allows it to occur more frequently in our consciousness. What is this potential of knowing that resides in our consciousness. The Zen that grew up around Dogen might say: "Total insight into the mind or enlightenment happens by 'accident' (a mind that knows itself only through the pattern of separation can not know itself totally, that is to say, it can not enlighten itself). However Dogen and many others have discovered or rediscovered a way to make us "accident" prone. This 'way' is known to all inner traditions but it is 'the secret that keeps itself' for we have to discover it, since it can't be completely conveyed by words. Uniqueness can not be directly and completely conveyed by words alone. We wish to allow the potential of the unknown potential within consciousness to arise within us. This involves completely suspending 'the known' and resting in silence. Even the Christian tradition suggest "Be still and know I am God". Rumi says: Silence, let the silence inform you of the unspeakable. So what is the question here for each one of us? Can we listen and wait and allow our own question to arise? If we can remain with the question as a felt sense in whole body awareness, what happens? Can we remain with the total groundlessness with just retreating to the safe territory of conceptualization? Such conceptualization keeps us within the field of the know and does not allow the field of the unknown to directly act on us as a total insight that reveals we have been seeing through the template of subject-object knowing. That is to say the kind of knowing that is based on the subject being completely separate from object.

[@fineasfrog]

By resting in the question we can allow it to let the mind go silent. The question, as it were, goes from being formed in words to becoming non-verbal and beyond the words and the distinctions and differientations of the realm of already formed and known words.......words represent some kind of pattern, for example, "this is separate from that" which is very useful but limited. We take the word and pattern and go beyond word and pattern to the creative and unitive source of words. This is akin to the Bible's advice: Make your eye one (wholly one -not identified with differentiation) and your body will be filled with light).

[@dramirezg70]

If people could stop referring to the "judeo-christian" god, things would be much clearer. The God of Israel has nothing to do with the god of the Christians.

[@aminomar7890]

1:12:00 revealed himself!

[@katleenbackus4976]

𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓶𝓸𝓼𝓶 💔

[@aminomar7890]

27:40 the thief doesn’t mean read through rather stealing and polluting human thoughts through recalling and reinterpret old thoughts (to hide theft crimes)

[@dueldab2117]

Audio is horrible.

[@davidchou1675]

Not from Bernardo; it's the two ladies, likely because they do not have professional mics set up with the "hairpiece" muffling winds and other ambient noise.

[@aminomar7890]

32:00 and do theft too ! So civilised!

[@aminomar7890]

Take a look at last video on closer to truth KZbin channel, read the comments to understand what many thieves have stolen and polluted, that was written since 2019 and repeated since that in addition to many other human thoughts in many fields. I have used other two KZbin accounts: haroon averrous and Amin A

[@aminomar7890]

Watch and try to read the thief was saying about three years ago then compare it with what the thief is saying now to understand what the thief has stolen and polluted using thievery as patching techniques and in some positions used blunt theft (self concept, types of consciousness and how he hides his theft crimes through pollution)

[@aminomar7890]

27:00 hiding his theft crimes through Recall the illusions of the past, many thieves did that.

[@aminomar7890]

25:00 the thief

[@aminomar7890]

He already has stolen something and recalls ancient thinkers thoughts and reinterpret them to fit his booty (pollution) read what he thief was saying about 3 years ago and compare that with what the thief is marketing for now. That is the only way to understand.

[@dane.5772]

Hello Amin, It would me more helpful if you would actually say what you think rather than laying out hoops for others to jump through. Most people won't try to piece together what you are trying to say because no one feels like they have the time. As for theft, everything is built on the past, and when Bernardo speaks about the evolution of language or references others he is recognizing the past's influence, as I see it. In my experience, his more modern precise use of language and the way he lays his thoughts out make the same historical thoughts harder to just dismiss by materialists who may not have ever really considered where their beliefs come from and how much of reality they can actually explain. "Everything I know, I learned from somebody else, I don't see why I couldn't grow up to be just about anyone." - Todd Snider.

[@davidchou1675]

Moreover, Bernardo makes the history books for his deployment of Dissociative Identity Disorder as an explanatory mechanism. This is a huge insight that "concretized" what heretofore was simply poetic All-is-One language.

[@aminomar7890]

Not possible to reply, they delete my replies. it’s a collective theft, they wanted to steal and pollute human thoughts then remove human traces. why?! to maintain their faked imaginary irrational realm! Planet of the irrational thief apes is the planet of endless wonders!