We have now navigated through the objective and subjective universes that give platform to our model of reality. This brings us to the overlay that influences how these universes interact with each other. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari calls this overlay the inter-subjective reality. This is defined as the things large groups of human beings together believe to be true, though they are not supported by evidence from the objective universe. In this journey, we will refer to this universe as the consensual reality, or our cultural universe- the reality many humans together believe in. This is thus the overlay of religion, human rights, economics, politics and everything else we humans have considered valid or real, now or at any period in history. Understanding our cultural universe will help us formulate answers to questions like- is there a meaning to life? Is there such a thing as morality? Is humanity headed anywhere purposeful?
While it is easy to see how religion is part of consensual reality, not many people give thought to how even human rights are not ordained through natural laws. We choose to believe that all humans have basic and inviolable rights. We choose to believe that there cannot be discrimination based on gender, caste, creed, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. Or we choose to believe in various bigoted refutations. In either case, our beliefs are firmly rooted in the inter-subjective. In Sapiens, Harari offers an example of how the inter-subjective reality would actually appear, if made compatible with objective reality. He does this by ‘correcting’ a line from the American Declaration of Independence from this-
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
To this-
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.”
This interpretation of the inter-subjective universe implies that it is an indispensable aspect of civilisation. Human cooperation is contingent upon large groups of people working towards a common cause. Such a cause could be of any nature- eradication of infidels, emancipation of minorities, or even maximisation of profit. And this reveals something atheists rarely like to think about. Faced with the vacant space that is atheism, even we must turn to certain beliefs and hold them unalienable. For atheists, this takes the form of humanism, or secularism. Most atheists proudly hold human rights to be unalienable, and atheist groups often overlap with feminist, LGBQT and other minority groups. But the matter of unalienable human rights is in fact a matter of faith. As Harari illustrates, in reality we are all creatures with mutable characteristics, and each of us has evolved differently. No natural law says we are equal, we simply consider it a decent thing to believe so.
This forces the atheist into a slight corner, for there is no escaping the fact that we hold a wide gamut of beliefs, not all of which are scientific. Some speculate on a form of life after death even as they deny a supernatural hand in affairs. Others entertain paranormal ideas, and a few dabble in all sorts of stuff classified as pseudoscience. Still others, like me, who have experienced the psychedelic side, find it hard to resist the idea of non-material parallel realities even as our atheist minds are conditioned for materialism. This diversity is why the general label of atheist says very little about a person. But a secularist, or a humanist, that gets more definitive. It confesses that the atheist does agree that some beliefs are good to be held, even if they are not true. The atheist agrees that it is a good thing that large groups of humans believe some things in particular, and that believing these particular things will mean the betterment of humanity.
That brings the atheist dangerously close to the entity she defines herself against- the theist. For who is a theist if not someone who believes in some things in particular, and that these things will mean the betterment of humanity? But there are critical differences between the atheists’ faith and the theists’ faiths. For one, the former is not based on dogma. Humanism can and does change with evolving beliefs and new learnings. An ever-maturing humanistic strain has seen us progress from the issue of ethnic/race rights, going through women rights, child rights and homosexual rights to arrive at the burgeoning voice for animal rights. In contrast, religions have dogmatically opposed this development at every step, and resignedly jumped onto the bandwagon when resistance is no longer pragmatic. The second difference arises from history and scripture. Humanistic movements have no canon texts, no prescribed rituals and no prophets or avatars. Indeed, they often arise in resistance to such elements in established religions.
These differences understood, we can view religion for what it should be- a set of beliefs that, when tethered to pragmatism and humanism, enables humanity to move forward on issues of ethics, philosophy and speculation in any era. The beliefs need not be congruent with objective reality, but as long as the tether remains, religion can be a multi-faceted cousin to humanism. One that enshrines essential stories on human history, tradition, mistakes and learnings. This is in fact what it’s good for- the chronicling of our cultural universe. Religion turns signs into symbols, and stories into myths. It contains metaphor, poetry and organisation that ensures that some of humanity’s learnings survive the millennia and corruption through language.
This definition of religion should not become a form of apologism. It must not deny the large-scale violence and brutality religion has perpetrated throughout history and does to this day. It must not validate the absurd superstitions and practices religion maintains in the name of tradition. And it cannot justify how religion has oppressed minorities of all forms. When we discuss how religion could be a beneficial thing for humanity, we must acknowledge that this is possible only if the bigoted nature of religion is reformed into an evolving ideology that stays relevant to its context. Within this framework, the American mythologist Joseph Campbell offered a guide on how to place religion in a more relevant context.
Campbell viewed religion as bits of information from history, which encoded themes from human life. They dealt with the stuff all homo sapiens have faced throughout their lives- inner problems, inner mysteries, and inner thresholds. To him, myths were stories of our search for truth, meaning and significance. One must not see this naively, of course. Myths are not just stories of our search for truth. They are stories of our past actions, moralities, dogmas, wars and oppression. They are the tales of our search for truth only as much as they are the tales of everything else. Once again, when we view myth and religion as Campbell does, we must view it in the larger context where acknowledging the good does not ignore the bad.
To Campbell then, myths are stories of gods. And gods are personifications of the motivating powers and value systems at play in human life. They are metaphorical of the potentiality in both, human life and the universe. He goes on to say that heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This sentiment is echoed in the psychedelic experience. On more than one occasion, in a moment of sheer epiphany, I have realised a fundamental secret- all the monsters, all the demons, all the horrors and tortures of hell, all the angels, the guardians and the benevolent white wizards, they are within us. And that makes them as real as anything can be. Of course, personal experience does not make this true, but a mere four grams of psilocybin mushrooms separate you from the same sense of trueness.
It is the tragedy of religion that it separates the human from the real, personal experience of mystery and subjects her to mechanical subscription to ritual, scripture and tradition. What religion calls god is understood in the psychedelic experience as the fundamental mystery of being, and anyone who has undergone a genuine experience of religious ecstasy can affirm that the fundamental mystery is at once singular and also the many manifestations in myth and symbol. These manifestations are the oldest artefacts humanity possesses. They were created in the early origins of mind, when mind itself was raw. They have survived countless millennia of cultural evolution, and they relate the history of humankind. But to do this they must evolve themselves, and if they stay rigid or rooted in bronze-age dogma, then they cease to be relevant.
To illustrate how a modern religion would have to be compatible to the contemporary context, Campbell insists that the only myths worth thinking about in the immediate future are ones that talk about the entire planet. Not a country, not a city, not a group of people, but the entire gamut of beings that inhabit Earth. It becomes immediately evident that this definition of religion precludes any belief that defines a limited group of people as the ‘chosen people’ or the ‘twice-born.’ Campbell’s view of religion is inspired by the Jungian concept of archetypes. The German psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung reasoned that the human psyche, which was the inward experience of the human body, was essentially the same in all human beings, for we share the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts and the same fears. Out of this common pool of human experience emerged archetypes, or forms that symbolised one common element or the other.
One way to understand archetypes is through the hero myth, a myth common to all human groups across history and geography. The hero myth begins with an introduction to the protagonist, who in most cases is of high or legendary birth. Think Hercules, the son of Zeus, or think Rama, the avatar of Vishnu. Once the hero’s lineage is established, the myth moves to initial tests of strength and resolve, and more often than not there are wise guides that help the hero along the way. Think Vasishtha and Vishwamitra, or think Gandalf and Dumbledore. An introduction to the chief antagonist follows, and some early intervals pit the hero against the antagonist to demonstrate both the hero’s early vulnerability and the antagonist’s power. The myth raises this to the crescendo of a final battle. Here the hero’s might is put to its greatest test, and he (it’s a ‘he’ in most ancient myths) emerges winner to live happily ever after.
The psychedelic experience of ayahuasca is often compared to the hero myth. In a typical ayahuasca session, the person undergoes a personal hero story. She faces her inner demons, guilts, envies and gripes that scar her psyche. The ayahuasca helps her in this journey, and along with the traditional shaman it acts as the mentor- the white wizards. This does not happen without struggle and surrender. An ayahuasca trip is often accompanied with bouts of diarrhoea and vomiting, which mirror the purging of psyche. The musical genre of psychedelic trance, which emerged specifically to facilitate the psychedelic experience, closely follows the hero myth in its structure.
The typical psytrance track begins with a gentle intro that lands with a powerful bassline. The bassline remains a constant throughout the track, with minor variations in pitch and note to facilitate a build-up or descent. After a few initial sequences and breaks that are analogous to the tests of strength and resolve in a hero myth, the track rises to a final crescendo- the climactic battle of a hero myth- before gradually descending and concluding in the happily ever after.
Humanity’s early epics are submerged in the hero myth, and there are two ways to look at it. One could take the hero myth as literal truth, and this results in things like the destruction of a mosque located at a site important to the hero myth a la Ayodhya, or the systematic oppression of a group of people by those who consider themselves the chosen ones of a land a la Israel. Or one could take the myth as metaphor for the hero archetype within all of us. The hero myth is the story of every human. The purpose of any human life is to find and reach its full potential, and all journeys are full of antagonists, challenges and mentors. The archetype of a hero is one of a human facing her inner demons and emerging stronger. This is encoded in countless myths, felt directly during a psychedelic experience, and reinforced as an archetype by the standard psytrance track.
When we hear people speaking of religion as a metaphor, these metaphors apply to Jungian archetypes. And the stories in any religion are but the stories of the human psyche. The problem that humanity faces today is how to separate the literal interpretations of religion from its deeper archetypes. Is it possible to reduce the stories of Jesus, Buddha and Mohammad to the archetype of a direct and personal experience of the mystery, without leading to bloodshed and violence on a large scale? Can we remove casteism and patriarchy from Hinduism while preserving the laudable inquiries into consciousness its scriptures explain? Atheists of the order of Richard Dawkins think it’s unlikely we can reform religion to such an extent, and this explains the militant nature of their atheism. Those of Joseph Campbell’s school of thought believe that religious stories can act as guides for the individual in her quest for personal salvation.
My own feelings on the matter lie somewhere in the middle. I see in history a gradual increase in human awareness of the metaphorical nature of religion. I take encouragement from the results of education, exposure and freedom from parental imposition of religion. Under such conditions, humans appear capable of engaging with religion for personal development while not taking its myths as literal truths. But it is equally important that this does not happen in an environment of religious apologism. In other words, the internalisation of religious metaphors by individuals in their own life is good only as long as it does not prevent a free and fair public discourse on the many social evils religion perpetrates.
Religion is not the only layer in consensual reality that we must unravel. Tied to it, but not necessarily so, are models of free will, morality, law and justice. These models show us how humans order those sets of reality that are open to definition. How we do this has, in turn, grouped us into tribes of all kinds. Emergence of the consensual reality has allowed humans to find bonds that go beyond blood ties, and so we now have tribes of religion and politics as much as we do of capitalism and ethics. Our tendency to lump into in-groups and out-groups, and the ways in which this affects our us-vs.-them instincts, plays a huge role in consensual reality. We will examine these important debates before viewing consensual reality through three lenses. In the Past lens, we examine its origins and history. This will explain why the Present reality is the way it is, and we look at that separately. Then we will view the Future lens to see where consensual reality is headed, and where it could instead. But first let us visit some important debates, and the focus here is not so much on taking a stand but on understanding the issues better. As Socrates said, wisdom begins with a definition of terms.