The Power of Mythic Truth
So much human truth originates in the realms beyond physical facts.
The Supreme Divine Personality said: O scion of Bharat, these are the saintly virtues of those endowed with a divine nature—fearlessness, purity of mind, steadfastness in spiritual knowledge, charity, control of the senses, sacrifice, study of the sacred books, austerity, and straightforwardness; non-violence, truthfulness, absence of anger, renunciation, peacefulness, restraint from fault-finding, compassion toward all living beings, absence of covetousness, gentleness, modesty, and lack of fickleness; vigor, forgiveness, fortitude, cleanliness, bearing enmity toward none, and absence of vanity.
—Bhagavad Gita—16.1
Lord Krishna teaches Arjuna that a saintly nature blooms in individuals who nurture goodness, adhere to scriptural guidance, and purify the mind with spiritual practices. Ultimately, this path fosters qualities that guide one toward communion with God.
Perhaps neither of us is Hindu, but we can find value in Krishna’s words. The question is: Can we find truth?
Wouldn’t you prefer to live among those with these divine qualities? Or would you rather live among those that breed unwholesome traits such as “hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, anger, harshness, and ignorance?” (BG 16.4)
The skeptic might agree that nonviolence, truthfulness, and the absence of anger are good social practices but still wonder what significance Krishna’s appearance adds.
It turns out Krishna is everything.
The Matrix
In “Fact, Fiction, and Falsehood,” I set out a simple matrix:
This set of distinctions requires that we become more comfortable situating ourselves within paradox. Let's examine the interplay of two dimensions:
The x-axis represents the continuum between fact and fiction.
The y-axis represents the continuum between truth and falsehood.
We can clarify these terms further:
Facts (non-fictions): accounts of observable, physical events or circumstances.
Fictions: accounts of conceptual, imagined, or hypothetical events or possibilities.
Truth: reality revealed and elucidated.
Falsehood: unreality intentionally promoted.
By explicitly separating these axes, we recognize the possibility of truths existing within fictions and falsehoods within stated facts, compelling us to navigate beyond simpler binaries.
I employ such matrices as a categorization and synthesis tool. A framework emerges through examining these concepts along the two axes, which create four distinct quadrants that help us navigate life.
Let’s explore the Truth/Fiction quadrant—the Mythic Order—for it is in this quadrant that we find spiritual nourishment.
Moving into the mythic order, though, we encounter a territory where fictional narratives transmit deeper truths. Consider how Ancient Greek mythology still illuminates human nature or how Orwell's 1984 warns us about totalitarianism. These stories, while not historically accurate or publically observable like a spectrometer readout, resonate across cultures and centuries because they capture essential truths about our experience.
Here’s a related example I found in a conversation with a friend:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
It’s not just that we learn a timeless lesson about time and our cycle of endings. We also learn it from Gandalf, the senex, representing wisdom and liminality. We trust the admonition more because it comes from him.
This quadrant spills forth with figurative language and timeless wisdom, which says as much about us as a literal, prosaic biography—maybe more. Carefully crafted narratives allow us to explore complex philosophical and moral questions. Otherwise, life is full of useful fiction, especially amid uncertainty.
Indeed. Life is full of true fiction.
On the Side of Truth
Spirituality is a dirty word among those who operate entirely from the Truth/Fact quadrant. Yet we endeavor also to be on the side of truth. We resist any stratagems originating from the Fiction/Falsehood (Realm of Deception) and Fact/Falsehood (Art of Distortion) quadrants, as these are poisonous to discourse and social coherence.
But what about Truth/Fiction—the domain of mythic truth?
Let’s begin in the Western mind of David Hume. The Scottish philosopher tells us that one cannot derive a statement of value from a statement of fact. Similarly, we cannot arrive at moral truth, for example, by applying advanced instruments or methods of observation. In other words, we can no more find goodness in a telescope than in a beaker.
Philosophers have produced volumes arguing for objective morality. Still, such metaphysics seems dedicated to making a moral fact into something like a physical fact—such as a star, chair, or neutrino. Alas, all such efforts are likely to fail.
Even if we all found some act of murder odious, odium still lies in subjective expressions of disvalue. Our collective judgment is just intersubjective odium. We can observe the consequences of some immoral act, but we apply no science to determine its immorality. We must draw truth from the Mythic Order.
We can build moral arguments atop first principles and arrive at a duty, but we will find no such principles in the Truth/Facts domain. Instead, we make determinations about relative rightness in Truth/Fiction. Our ethics originate not in science but philosophy. And philosophy is the essence of mythic truth.
It might seem odd to claim that philosophy is the essence of mythic truth. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that philosophy is the love of wisdom. But isn’t wisdom just attunement to mythic truth? Aren’t archetypes just symbols of our species that live outside space and time?
Combining logos and pathos helps us limn the eternal truths of the Mythic Order. Such truths are neither Platonic forms nor scientific facts; instead, they are the distillation of human stories that capture and retain the lessons of wisemen to be bottled and stored in sacred places for ritual consumption.
Consider the words of Krishna, symbol of the All:
It is the desire evoked by a sense of attachment, that leads to the birth of anger. This anger is in turn the impelling force—full of unappeasable craving and great evil: know this, two-sided passion, to be the foulest enemy here on earth. The constant enemy of wise men is the unslakable flame of desire, by which wisdom is concealed.
—Bhagavad Gita 3.37-39
Okay, says the skeptic, so we might see something in the admonition that errant desire can kindle anger that leads to destructive behavior. But there is no such thing as Krishna. He is an imaginary character that haunts ancient Indian poems and ashrams.
Perhaps you are right, skeptic. But you’re arguing from the wrong quadrant.
In the mythopoetic form, wisdom bubbles up from imagination and the iterative cycles of humans teeming in various circumstances. These can generate surprisingly similar themes among peoples separated by distance. Ahimsa—the virtue of non-violence—pervades the Vedic traditions. Variations on the Golden Rule appear in the Torah and in Jesus’s words.
But did Krishna really appear to Arjuna? Did Moses really part the Red Sea? Did Jesus really walk the earth as a man and ascend to heaven on the third day after being crucified?
I don’t know, but questions of fact are inapt.
Empires of the Mind
The literal truth is sometimes far less important than the mythic truth. Symbols, avatars, and deities can help us orient ourselves and our societies. The mode and manner of that orientation can be a source of collective efficacy. It is in mythic truth that we build empires of the mind. Mythic structures help us remember who we are and transmit that memory through time.
Tested in various human experiences, mythic truths concentrate our common conceptions of the good. None is perfect, but many are valuable. They whisper to us from conceptual planes that are wholly other. And they can be far more potent than contemporary philosophy’s naked abstractions or syllogisms, and far more active than adherence to monolithic religious dogma.
It's no wonder Westerners conceived of natural rights, and many still take them for granted. But their reality is immaterial, in both the sense that it is non-physical and that their material reality is irrelevant to the question of their truth.
Rights are mythic truths, even if, strictly speaking, they are merely agreed-upon ideals that guide our behavior and organize our politics.
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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,…
Natural rights philosophy is a memeplex that originates in the Western mind. The rights memeplex also has its contours and limits, which we might refer to as membranes. In dialectics, forces of differentiation and opposition sometimes collide. Many times, the conflicting memeplexes bounce, creating conflagration, even combustion. But sometimes they bond, which creates a synthesis or catalysis with new properties and old, as well as a new membrane.
Witness then Europe’s liberal enlightenment tradition of rights. Contrast that memeplex with that of millions of migrants from the Middle East. Will there be combustion or synthesis as the memeplexes vie for domination? I cannot say. But I can say that a battle of memeplexes is underway.
They Transform Us
Philosophy and religion exist on a continuum, but that continuum lies within the Mythic Order. Where philosophy relies more on logos and open inquiry, religion relies more on pathos and revelation. Where philosophy aims at understanding, religion aims at spiritual fulfillment. Yet the continuum remains.
Philosophy seeks truths that are not empirically verifiable, just as myths do. It traffics in metaphysical ideas, moral judgments, and conceptual frameworks that aren’t directly observable. But so does religion. The value of philosophy and religion lies in how they can reconfigure us and reorient us in the world.
“One of the distinctive innovations of Western thought has been to turn the Otherworld into an intellectual abstraction,” writes Patrick Harpur in The Philosopher’s Secret Fire. He describes these three main Western conceptions as the Soul of the World, the Imagination, and the Collective Unconscious.
Harpur continues:
Historically, all three models have been largely ignored or outcast by Western orthodoxy, whether Christian theology or modern rationalism. But wherever they have as it were broken the surface and emerged from their ‘esoteric’ or even ‘occult’ underworld, they have been accompanied by extraordinary efflourescences of creative life.
There is a sense in which taking mythic truths on board, even in their symbols, representations, and daimons, commits us to bizarre metaphysics. Yet, to behave as if mythic entities were factual can be efficacious. Such efficacy in the factual world lies in how our adopted myths affect our behavior, as the truths of the Mythic Order transform us from within.
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> Our collective judgment is just intersubjective odium.
I like the term "intersubjective" . . . there are shared subjective positions that aren't quite objective but also seem like more than purely, singularly subjective.