Bernardo Kastrup > Quotes

“Indeed, it is nearly impossible for any person inserted in a modern cultural context to escape the haze of the zeitgeist and develop a truly unbiased, critical, and personal worldview.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“materialism is a fantasy. It’s based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“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

“if we could escape the hysterical cacophony of culture so to develop a more authentic and unbiased worldview,”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“The ability to turn conscious apprehension itself into an object of conscious apprehension is what fundamentally characterizes our ordinary state of consciousness”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“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 be 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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“Materialism represents an astonishing failure of the human intellect to see what’s right under its nose. It hides nature’s marvelous simplicity behind a veil of contrivance. Its continuing survival in face of the mounting odds of reason, evidence and direct experience requires constant and deliberate maintenance. Indeed, materialism serves powerful economic and political interests.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Truth-seeking is the path to self-annihilation and thus to liberation.”
― 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

“Particular experiences – that is, particular contents of mind – are just mind in movement.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“The pattern here is not only clear, but striking. The most complex, coherent, intense, non-local, and transpersonal experiences people report are associated precisely with reductions, or even elimination, of brain activity”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“[D]eep within, in a way that isn't self-reflective, there is that intuition that you aren't really this character you seem to be playing in this story.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“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

“In other words, causality is to synchronicity as Newtonian mechanics is to quantum physics.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe

“Just as the notes produced by guitar strings exist only abstractly, in pure potentiality, unless and until the string is actually plucked, the natural, archetypal modes of excitation of the psyche are only discernible in actual experience, not in and of themselves.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe

“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

“Our consensus world-instantiation is a metaphor of mind for mind; a self-referential ‘strange loop.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Meaning in Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us about the Nature of Reality

“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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“Philosophy is the discipline of human thought that allows us to interpret our experience of ourselves and of the world at large, thereby giving meaning to our existence. While science constructs models of reality that predict the behavior of matter and energy, philosophy asks how those models relate to our condition as conscious entities. Without philosophy, science is merely an enabler of technology; it tells us nothing about the underlying nature of nature.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“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.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“The mainstream metaphysics of materialism [legitimizes] the outrageous notion that unhappy people are simply malfunctioning biological robots.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

“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

“It seems that wherever we look - quantum physics, major world events, the foundations of logic, analytic philosophy, and now the history of science - we see the subtle footprints of a dreamed-up reality; a reality where logic is itself constructed through a self-imposed reduction in the degrees of freedom of the absurd; a world constructed through coherent mental procedures; a world where empirical observation is a mirror of the subjects’ implicit worldview.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Meaning in Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us about the Nature of Reality

“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