Archetypes: Heaven
To everything turn, turn, turn
There is a season turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under Heaven
The Byrds
…
Normally, when I finish reading a book, I write a small summary to post on social media. I don’t expect anyone to read it through the haze of flickering reels. I write these summaries to test my understanding, and having an audience to write to – even if that audience is a figment of my imagination – is helpful. However, when I began writing my summary of The Myth of Eternal Return, it ballooned beyond the confines of a social media post. Despite being a small book, The Myth of Eternal Return is like wisdom: a seed. Each small idea contains immense implications. I will do my best to synthesize his book with my understanding of mythology, psychology, religion, and my experience, what I’ve seen with my own eyes. As you may have noticed, I’m not allergic to casual language, so long as the topic allows it. I want this essay to reflect how things look from my point-of-view. I intend to communicate from this perspective, from this coordinate in the cosmos with all its flaws and blind-spots. In other words, I hope to participate in the human-centered pattern – a pattern we can never truly escape. This will rub some readers the wrong way, others will love it for the wrong reasons, and a small few will stand beside me.
To begin, we must understand “heaven.” I grew up in a non-denominational Christian church and family. Every Sunday, we attended a mega-church outside of Chicago – whose walls more closely resembled a shopping mall than a cathedral. After church, while I was in high school, we attended additional “house groups,” where teenagers engaged in Bible-study guided by volunteer adults. The summer after high school, I spent approximately two-weeks at a summer camp designed to teach apologetics. Put simply, I was trained to argue for a 4,000-year-old Earth, to argue against Darwinian evolution, and advocate for the literal interpretation of the Bible, generally. This occurred during the rise of “New Atheism,” a publishing phenomenon wherein leading atheist figures took turns dismantling religious beliefs, and the church was on guard – ready to die for its iron-gripped convictions.
I have since left the church and maintained a critical stance against Evangelical Christianity. The otherwise bloated, boring, and Boomer-backed comfortable Christianity of my youth had a certain and self-righteous bend. American Christianity’s emphasis on the Bible as the foundation of its religion, a move first taken during the Protestant Reformation, reached a “blind alley” during my upbringing. The culture of the church became frighteningly litigious, evidenced by “purity culture,” wherein sexuality became incessantly and sanctimoniously policed (for details from a Christian’s perspective, see Wagner, 2023), and the attempted cancellation of Harry Potter for the sin of wizardry (Phelps-Roper, 2023). In effect, this is a natural consequence of a text being foundational. If the Bible is the literal word of God, and God has the last word on all moral actions, then the Bible becomes a ‘legal document’ dictating moral law. And believers? God’s prosecutors.
It was against this attitude that New Atheism – as a movement – rebelled. And many continue to rebel against their upbringing. I have seen first-hand how the “woke” movement became an extension of Millennial Christians’ resentment, manifest their desire to tear down anything they considered contaminated by Christianity (read: all Western civilization). I have very little sympathy for this movement, besides a shallow camaraderie based in our mutual anguish. It is a movement that does absolutely nothing to fix the problems it ostensibly cares about. Its sole tactic is to invert any problem in society under the guise of “equity.” Racism? Don’t dismantle racial hierarchy, just take the old one and flip it on its head. Sexism? Same thing. Just make the women the mean ones. Gay rights? Make all the gays tops! (Or is it, “put the gays on top?”). Better yet, abolish the idea of biological sex altogether, rendering “sexual preference” a meaningless term. Say nothing about support for the ‘transition’ (read: chemical and surgical castration) of children – 70% of whom would’ve grown to be gay, in both senses of the word, had they been left alone (Ristori & Steensma, 2016).
I mention contemporary American Christianity and the entangled political/cultural mess it preceded, to highlight the necessity of redefining “heaven.” Or rather, clarifying its meaning – breaking it free from hundreds of years of scar tissue and enabling it to move as God intended. Most people have downloaded a definition of heaven from their cultural milieu – a milieu defined by Evangelicalism and New Atheism – both of whom believed heaven to be a locale outside of physical space and time. In a sense, heaven was a white room floating above the universe, presumably populated with angels and rollercoasters. Effectively, heaven was an object separate from another object: the universe. And when you died, if you followed God (i.e., adhered to his rule book) then you moved from the Earth-room to the heaven-room.
Things are not so simple. God, the universe, and heaven as separate ‘objects’ comes from a materialist worldview (i.e., “object ontology”), and that view didn’t emerge until the Enlightenment – long after the Bible was written. There is no reason to believe that the authors of those books, or any mythological text, were thinking like modern scientists. So, if their concept of heaven preceded our materialist conception of reality… what is heaven? Does our materialist conceptualization mean anything to the ancients?
Heaven is not a metaphysical place, like some cloud-laden platform peering over Earth. It is a domain of experience. It is contained in consciousness. Consciousness is the root of all conception, and the canopy of contemporary concepts – the incalculable number of words and ideas – can trace their lineage back to it. This may seem obvious, but before the Enlightenment, seeing was believing, and the objective and subjective worlds were con-fused. However, since Descartes summoned his demon (1641/1993), we have become increasingly skeptical of our experience. In the postmodern age, dominated by “alternative facts” and deepfakes, we no longer believe our concepts refer to anything at all. Instead, they are tools for power. Yet, even these tools, if that is all they are, are content in consciousness. Consciousness is primary; evidence for this fact, which will resurrect our understanding of heaven, comes from two places: language and psychology.
In Metaphors We Live By, the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson argued that “human thought processes are largely metaphorical… Metaphors as linguistic expressions are possible precisely because there are metaphors in a person’s conceptual system” (1980/2008, p. 6). In other words, the brain itself is metaphorical; it contains a metaphorical structure, and our words are instantiations of that structure. Language fits the brain like water fits a vase, taking on its shape.
If the brain is metaphorically structured, or structured in such a way as to give rise to what we generally call “metaphors,” then where did they come from? Why is it that metaphor appears to be fundamental, rather than downstream of literal forms of conception? In other words, why does “X is Y” exist before “X is like Y?” Lakoff and Johnson argue that experience itself is undifferentiated, a composition, an “experiential gestalt.” For example, imagine that you are sitting outside at a café. It’s a Tuesday morning and you have the day off. Most people are heading to work, but the café is slightly off the main road and adjacent to a cobblestone street, the kind with polished stones from years of perusing pedestrians, rolling water and rubber tires. As you sip your coffee from a white mug, steam rising in the morning air, glowing like a specter when lit by the golden sun, a car drives by. First, you hear its engine rising in pitch as it approaches. Then you see it, and, nearly out of consciousness, you hear the bumbling of its tires against the uneven stones. It passes. Wind pushes the steam of your mug, and the pitch of the car deepens. The sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells all occur at once, more of an ocean of experience than an assortment of separate, differentiated heap of objects.
Reality is happening all at once. And we have developed multiple senses and means of comprehending it. As such, those different means occur simultaneously and are associated. The associative nature of reality, an ocean of experience, leads to a brain and concepts like constellations. These are “complexes” or networks of associations. Concepts reflect the brain, and the brain reflects reality. Lakoff and Johnson provide many examples of how our concrete, embodied experiences, still peak their head out from under our mundane language:
CONSCIOUS IS UP; UNCONSCIOUS IS DOWN
Get up. Wake up. I’m up already. He rises early in the morning. He fell asleep. He dropped off to sleep. He’s under hypnosis. He sank into a coma.
Physical basis: Humans and most other mammals sleep lying down and stand up when they awaken (1980/2008, p. 15).
This is deceptively simple. We lie down when asleep and stand when awake. Two aspects of experience, consciousness and orientation, are associated with one another and represented in cognition.
Heaven maintains similar associations. We “give it up,” and, “offer up.” Religious rituals, or embodied metaphors, frequently instantiate in this pattern. For example, on the right side of ancient Hebrew temples, offerings were burnt so the smoke could rise to heaven. On the left side a menorah (light, ‘from above’) came ‘down’ from heaven (Pageau, 2019, p. 97-99). Keep in mind that light does come from above: the sun. It is also light when we are awake, and dark when we are asleep. Consciousness is frequently associated with light: Enlightenment; lucid (lucidus means “light”); someone who is smart is bright; when you have an insight a light-bulb appears over your head; etc. Thus, up/light/consciousness is part of an experiential gestalt. However, embodied metaphors extend beyond up and down. For example, the political Left and Right are directions we may take as a country. You may have a right-hand man. You may feel lost or disoriented. Each of these metaphors are dependent on embodiment, action, and our experience of them.
Many contemporary concepts are composites. They are like processed foods, each ingredient being composed of many other ingredients, making the whole recipe dependent on the invention of many subcomponents. Consciousness, the locus of being, is the ground from which these concepts sprung. However, these compositive concepts can seem so abstract, so decontextualized, that we no longer know the experience they come from. Moreso, we may not be able to experience the contemporary concept at all. One cannot experience the Helio-Centric Model of the Solar System directly. Instead, we understand the Sun, the Center, a Model, the Solar System, and perhaps the Geocentric Model as a helpful contrast. This tangled composition leads us to believe that words, concepts, and the arts have no connection to experience at all. Thus, they are ‘merely’ ideas, merely conceptions convenient for the reigning hegemony. All concepts are a means for capturing ideological territory in a zero-sum game between cultural combatants (no wonder postmodern commentary is banal, movies are exhausting, and art falls flat; Postmodernism leaves no room for beauty).
From a slightly different postmodern perspective, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1994/1981) believed that our concepts develop into increasingly abstract, decontextualized, “simulacra.” Like copies of copies of copies, they become increasingly warped and devoid of truth until they fail to resemble reality at all. Then, the massive proliferation of simulacra ‘crowd out’ reality, leading us to believe that unreal abstractions are, in fact, ground truth. This stage is “hyperreality.” For example, the more pornography men report watching, the more they request their partner perform sexual acts they saw in porn, the more they recall images from porn during sex, and the less they enjoy kissing, cuddling, and caressing their partner (Sun et al., 2016). Hyperreality overtakes reality – a Luciferian nightmare.
The key to avoiding this catastrophe is anchoring our concepts in consciousness and recognizing that all conceptions, even scientific ones, are concepts in consciousness which correspond to reality approximately. If we look at a word closely, we can trace the branch of meaning back to its roots. My favorite example of this comes from the word “laconic.” One is laconic when they use very few words; they are terse, even blunt. It comes from the Greek region of Laconia, once inhabited by ancient Spartans. Catch of glimpse of Spartan personality: Philip of Macedon threatened that if he entered Spartan territory, he would destroy them, never to rise again. The Spartans replied, “If” (Harper, n.d.). In other words, being laconic is being like a Spartan, or having a similar demeaner. Over time, when the word migrated to regions where they did not have direct experience of Laconic people, or a connection to the root experience, the meaning became more abstract. Unmoored from its roots, “laconic” took on its modern meaning. However, we can still uncover its original meaning, and when we do, we may better understand those who came before us and flourished under conditions we’re too scared to consider.
Ultimately, Lakoff and Johnson suggest that cognition is rooted in human nature. Which is, in a sense, unsurprising. We are undoubtably animals who evolved under the pressures of nature. To reach our modern cognitive heights, we needed a sturdy behavioral foundation to build upon. The following passage states this well:
We have found that metaphors allow us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another. This suggests that understanding takes place in terms of entire domains of experience and not in terms of isolated concepts. The fact that we have been led to hypothesize metaphors like LOVE IS A JOURNEY [e.g., look how far we’ve come], TIME IS MONEY [e.g., spend time], and ARGUMENT IS WAR [e.g., your claims are indefensible] suggests to us that the focus of definition is at the level of basic domains of experience like love, time, and argument. These experiences are then conceptualized and defined in terms of other basic domains of experience like journeys, money, and war… What constitutes a “basic domain of experience?” Each such domain is a structured whole within our experience that is conceptualized as what we have called an experiential gestalt. Such gestalts are experientially basic because they characterize structured wholes within recurrent human experiences. They represent coherent organizations of our experiences in terms of natural dimensions (parts, stages, causes, etc.). Domains of experience that are organized as gestalts in terms of natural dimension seem to us to be natural kinds of experience (1980/2008, p. 117-118).
Lakoff and Johnson go on to say that these “natural kinds of experience” are the product of seemingly inescapable features of our human nature. They are ontological facts, realities of being, and products of embodiment, interactions with our environment and people. In other words, they “are products of human nature” (1980/2008, p. 118).
I make this point to root our concepts in consciousness. In the postmodern (possibly Hermetic) view, there is only mind, only thought, only ideas, only words. They are disjointed objects, atomized facts – like leaves without a tree, they are desiccate, fallen, decomposed. However, when we reconnect our concepts to their origin, they fill with water fed from the source and come alive again.
To reinforce this incredibly important point, I’m going to make a similar argument from a psychological point of view. In the middle of the 20th century, Leon Festinger, Henry W. Reicken, and Stanley Schachter published When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World (1956/2011). This book began Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, initially conceived as the discomfort between two incompatible cognitions. With a small team of research assistants, the authors infiltrated a budding Chicago-based cult. The cult leader, Marian Keech, a pseudonym, claimed to channel extraterrestrials who warned her of a great flood destined to engulf the world on the morning of December 21st, 1954. A local news column read:
Prophecy From Planet. Clarion Call to City: Flee That Flood. It’ll Swamp Us on Dec. 21, Outer Space Tells Suburbanite
Lake City will be destroyed by a flood from Great Lake just before dawn, Dec. 21, according to suburban housewife. Mrs. Marian Keech, of 847 West School street, says the prophecy is not her own. It is the purport of many messages she has received by automatic writing, she says… The messages, according to Mrs. Keech, are sent to her by superior beings from a planet called ‘Clarion.’ These beings have been visiting the earth, she says, in what we call flying saucers. During their visits, she says, they have observed fault lines in the earth’s crust that foretoken the deluge (1956/2011, p. 29).
By specifying a date the flood would arrive, Mrs. Keech provided the authors the opportunity to study what happens when believers are confronted with disconfirming evidence. Festinger et al.’s hypothesis, evidenced by historical cases of the Anabaptists, the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, and the Millerites, was that disconfirming evidence would produce more proselytizing and fervor amongst the believers. In effect, the believers would double down, and free themselves from discomfort by way of consensus. They state,
The dissonance cannot be eliminated completely by denying or rationalizing the disconfirmation. But there is a way in which the remaining dissonance can be reduced. If more and more people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must, after all, be correct. Consider the extreme case: if everyone in the whole world believed something there would be no question at all as to the validity of this belief (1956/2011, p. 27).
The ultimate cope: convert the world.
On December 17th, Marian Keech received a call. The man on the line claimed to be an alien and said his flying saucer would land at four in the afternoon to pick up the believers. The cultists took this call seriously and waited. Four o’clock came and went. By 5:30, the believers had ceased their manic pacing. Initially disquieted, Keech disrupted the silence with another “message” from the aliens, which encouraged the cultists. The enthusiasm proved temporary, and the cultists began ginning up explanations; it was a “practice session,” “strangers disrupted the landing,” etc. One member, a relatively new one, quit the group by eleven. Visitors, some claiming to have visionary and confirmatory experiences, came to the house. These visitors were welcomed as “independent verification of their beliefs… The change in attitude of the [cultists] towards inquirers was noticeable: no longer were they indifferent or preoccupied with other matters. Rather they made pointed and deliberate attempts to persuade and convince” (1956/2011, p.113).
Multiple events of this kind occurred, each with a ‘message’ being relayed and disconfirmed. And each time the proselytizing increased. Soon, the group saw the benefits of speaking to the press, which before they vociferously avoided. They even began delivering organized lectures to the public. On the 18th, a group of 20-something year-old boys claiming to be aliens they came to the house. They had a series of discussions with the cultists, often challenging their faith. While the boys seemed content to toy with Mrs. Keech before leaving, “The net result of this attack on the belief system and the prophecy was to strengthen conviction” (1956/2011, p. 121). However, a couple periphery members left and never returned.
On the 20th, Mrs. Keech told the believers of another ‘message,’ an alien would arrive at midnight to escort them to the saucer and salvation. They group practiced a series or rituals while they awaited their escort, who never came. After midnight, the group engaged in a series of bizarre rationalizations, including that they were meant to bear witness to the non-believing Mr. Keech’s “death and resurrection” (which apparently happened when no one was watching). Eventually, the group began to break: “They were all, now, visibly shaken and many were close to tears” (1956/2011, p. 131). As the researcher hypothesized, Mrs. Keech conjured another explanation of the disconfirmation: The crisis had been averted because they had spread enough light to the world. In the mind of the believers, there was going to be a flood – they had prevented it.
Importantly, the explanation for the concrete disconfirmation of their beliefs was to create an abstract, unfalsifiable recourse. In the mind of the cultists, they saved the world from a cataclysm that was otherwise destined to occur. They had been right all along. Thing didn’t turn out as they predicted because they succeeded in their mission. That’s all. They could maintain their belief in the spacemen, the flood, their leader, and themselves – despite concrete evidence to the contrary – without the fear of being proven wrong.
Interestingly, Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) have argued that a similar process resulted in contemporary postmodernism:
Before the postmodern turn, Marxist, socialist, and other radical feminist theories saw power as an international, top-down strategy by powerful men in patriarchal and capitalist societies, but the advances of second-wave feminism made this conception somewhat redundant. While boorish men with patriarchal assumptions continued to exist, it became increasingly untenable to view Western society as genuinely patriarchal or to see most men as actively colluding against the success of women. Postmodern Theory offered an opportunity to retain the same beliefs and predictions – male domination exists and serves itself at the expense of women – while redefining them in terms diffuse enough to be a matter of faith, requiring no evidence: social constructions, discourses, and socialization. The Foucauldian idea of a diffuse grid of power dynamics that constantly operates through everyone through their unwitting use of language fit the bill perfectly (p. 145-146).
Thus, the Marxist class-battle for capital became an identity-battle for power (ill-defined), which allowed the most ardent believers to maintain the structure of their beliefs by securing them to an unfalsifiable patriarchy.
In recent years, the foundations of cognitive dissonance have been excavated (for reviews, see Harmon-Jones & Harmon-Jones, 2007; Harmon-Jones & Mills, 2019). Initially, Festinger conceptualized dissonance as emerging from two cognitions which were relevant to each other, but incompatible. The incompatibility produced discomfort, and that discomfort motivated people to reconcile these cognitions. And they do so by providing more evidence for one cognition or discounting the other. Like the cultists and Marxists (or cultist-Marxists), when disconfirming evidence emerges, you merely create consonant cognitions (i.e., rationalizations) to reinforce your beliefs and minimize the disconfirming evidence. If those cognitions are unfalsifiable, your beliefs are indefinitely secure – all the better! Some psychologists suggested that dissonance was related to violations of one’s self-perception (Bem, 1967, 1972) or the impressions others have of us (Tedeschi, Schlenker, & Bonoma, 1971). However, four-year-olds, who have a developing self-model, and capuchin monkeys, who may lack explicit self-models, still try to reduce cognitive dissonance (Egan, 2007). This suggests that dissonance precedes self-concepts. As such, the Action-Based Model of cognitive dissonance was proposed (Harmon-Jones et al., 2009; Harmon-Jones et al., 2015a). This model states that:
Mental representations are action oriented.
Cognition is embodied in that it draws on sensorimotor abilities, environments, brains and bodies.
Cognition and action are the result of dynamic processes of interactions between an agent and environment.
Following this, dissonance is rooted in action; “dissonance between cognitions evokes a negative affective state because it has the potential to interfere with effective and unconflicted action” (Harmon-Jones et al., 2009, p. 128). These propositions converge with Lakoff and Johnson’s conclusions: Human abstract, representational, semantic cognition and expressions, like rational argument, are founded in and formed by concrete action.
Therefore, it may be said that cognitive dissonance follows a fork in the road. The discounting of disconfirming evidence, and bias for confirming evidence, is a marker of approach. One study compared dissonance related effects between those sitting upright and those lying down (Harmon Jones et al., 2015b). Those lying down, and therefore not in a position to approach a target, rated difficult and easy tasks as equally enjoyable. However, those sitting up found the more difficult task to be more enjoyable, indicating a justification of their effort towards a goal. In a second experiment, the researchers presented participants with descriptions of different tasks. Then, they gave them a choice to perform one of two tasks. In the easy condition, participants chose between two options with dissimilar desirability ratings, making the choice easy. In the hard condition, they were presented with similarly desirable choices, making the choice difficult. After making a choice, they were asked to re-rate their evaluation while either sitting up or laying down. Those sitting up in the difficult condition rated their initial choice as more desirable than they had initially rated it, and their rejected choice as far less desirable than they initially rated it; this effect is called a “spreading of alternatives” (see Figure 1 from Harmon-Jones et al., 2015b, p. 232). The sitting/difficult condition showed a greater spread of alternatives than the sitting/easy, laying/difficult, or laying/easy conditions. Thus, rationalizations signify approach – a kind of walking through the territory of our minds. Dissonance discomfort is acknowledging alternative routes in our minds. As such, we can hypothesize that rationality is a sincere elaboration of one’s reason for acting, or a cynical post hoc justification after having ‘gone too far to turn back now.’
Figure 1 - An example of the "spreading of alternatives" that occurs during many cognitive dissonance experiments
At this point, we have traced two lines of evidence, one linguistic and one psychological, which converge on a single idea: Our concepts are routed in natural kinds of experiences. These experiences are constellations, networks of associations, or gestalts, and are the consequence of embodiment and interactions between ourselves and the natural and social worlds. In other words, consciousness as the locus of being is the root of all conception. Therefore, heaven is derived from consciousness.
If the ancients experienced heaven, what does “heaven” refer to? What were they experiencing? The Language of Creation by Matthieu Pageau (2018) is helpful here. Pageau’s book is a manual for understanding symbolism which, in effect, interprets the Bible on its own terms. Pageau takes Biblical cosmology to be a description of ‘our world’ (not the material makeup of the universe), with basic phenomenological categories being stated in the first line of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (KJV, Genesis 1:1). This provides a starting point: The world is earth and heaven. Or, all that exists belongs to one of these two categories. Already, the contemporary materialist is befuddled. For our contemporaries, reality is defined by matter. Therefore, heaven does not exist by default, and is immediately disregarded. Pageau states:
In the Bible, raw ‘earth’ refers to matter without meaning, and pure ‘heaven’ refers to spiritual meaning without corporeal existence. As strange as this duality may seem to modern sensibilities, this way of framing reality is self-evident from the spiritual perspective because it directly addresses the following questions: “What does it mean?” and, “What spiritual truth does it embody?” So, it is not surprising that the basic polarity of this cosmology is meaning and matter. Conversely, the materialistic perspective has developed its model of the universe in response to the following questions: “What is it made of?” and, “How does it work?” So, it is not surprising that materialism’s fundamental duality is matter and energy… According to the spiritual worldview, the whole universe can be described in terms of the intercourse between ‘heaven’ and ‘earth.’ This joining of spiritual and corporeal realities – called knowledge is the most fundamental notion in biblical cosmology. In fact, every single phenomenon can be interpreted according to this pattern (2018, p. 18).
As such, heaven is the domain of meanings, but it is important to define what “meaning” is. Some may be inclined to conceive of meaning as supernatural jargon, an idea dependent on a deconstructed Christian foundation, and therefore, exhaustingly baseless, unsupported, or unfounded. The reductionist materialist, who sees meaning as subjective or constructed in the Existentialist fashion, and the nihilist, who bends his gaze inward and sees the construction of meaning as meaningless, believe cosmic meanings to be illusory. However, a psychological understanding of meaning can help us understand that humanity doesn’t construct meaning but participates in it.
Psychologically, meaning is a subtle phenomenon. When we say our lives are meaningful, we often mean they are “coherent,” “significant,” and “purposeful” (George & Park, 2013; Martela & Steger, 2016; for a review, see King & Hicks, 2021). Life is coherent when it makes sense, when our world is comprehensible and predictable. The sun will rise. Our loved ones will be there for us. We know when our next meal will be. That is coherence. Significance is the sense of one’s intrinsic value, of having a life worth living. Our lives matter. We impact those around us. The world as we know it needs us. In a sense, coherence is understanding the world and significance is understanding our place in it. Purpose is goal-directed. It is how we relate to the future and our objectives embedded in it. We have an aim. We have direction. We have a place in history.
Each of these factors reinforce and closely relate to one other. Imagine that you are living in a small tribal community, like we did for most of our existence. You are surrounded by family, whom you live closely to. You have friends, and there are so few people in your community that you know them all (likely around 150; see Dunbar, 1992), and they are all dependent on you for survival. The work you do for the tribe matters. Nearly every day is the same. You hunt for food or gather berries. To a modern, this may seem uneventful. However, the space unoccupied by cellphones and miniscule tasks is filled by time with others. You constantly commingle, sometimes aimlessly laughing around a fire, sometimes laser focused on a common objective. Having a simple life affords you the time to explore other people, whose wonderful complexity rivals the night sky. This is a meaning-full life. Your routine, stable community and environment cultivates coherence. The work you do is appreciated, reflected in the cheers of your friends and the glimmer in your lover’s eye – self-evidently significant. Much of your work is done in service of others, and insofar as you responsibly strive towards that goal, you serve a high purpose.
An important commonality between these factors is relatedness. Meaning is about the way the world relates to itself, and how we relate to it. Coherence reflects an ordered cosmos. Significance is how we relate to that world, including other people. As such, it is not surprising, but it is important that belonging predicts meaning in life (Guthrie et al., 2024; Lambert et al., 2013). Purpose is how we relate to our objectives, be they concrete, like an animal we are hunting, or abstract, like Justice. It may be said that purpose is how we relate to the future, predicated on a stable enough world that you can predict the future. Our worldview, or Global Meaning (Park, 2010), is the total of these factors: the world, us in the world, us in the future of the world.
Therefore, heaven is what “informs” matter. It takes disordered matter and coheres it under a common purpose, imbuing it with significance. To provide a concrete and very human example, consider forging a tool. Therein, man behaves as heaven. He pulls ore from the earth and melts it together to form a wrench, a name given for its purpose. He could have forged it into any shape feasible, but he did not. The sacrifice of other potentials for an actual wrench indicates that he values that particular form, but more importantly, that he selected that shape for a purpose. A screwdriver is a poor wrench. Nature’s structure is at play (i.e., metal has the capacity to be forged and is strong enough to be torqued without breaking), but the purposes of man form matter. And matter participates in that purpose.
Earth participates in human purposes, humans participate in heavenly purposes. One such example is imitatio dei, or the imitation of gods. “Imitation,” in this context is a slightly modernized term. We think of the representation of godly figures’ behavior as an imitation, but the ancients saw this as hierophany, or the manifestation of the divine in the here-and-now. It is not an imitation, strictly speaking, but the emergence of a perennial meaning in the present. It is the same act, the same meaning alive again. Materiality or historicity is secondary at best. One example comes from early metallurgists who acted as the thunder gods. Eliade states,
The art of creating tools is essentially superhuman – either divine or demoniac (for the smith also forges murderous weapons). Remnants of ancient myths belonging to the Stone Age have probably been added to, or woven into, the mythology of metals. The stone tool and the hand-axe were charged with a mysterious power; they struck, inflicted injury, caused explosions, produced sparks, as did the thunderbolt. The ambivalent magic of stone weapons, both lethal and beneficent, like the thunderbolt itself, was transmitted and magnified in the new instruments forged of metal. The hammer, successor to the axe of the Stone Age, becomes the emblem of powerful gods, the gods of the storm. This enables us to understand why these storm gods and the gods of agricultural fecundity are sometimes conceived as smith-gods. The T’ou-jen of Kuang-si sacrifice goats to the god Däntsien Sân, who uses their heads as anvils. During storms, Däntsien forges his iron between the horns of the sacrificed beast; lightning and a hail of sparks fall upon the earth and lay low the demons. In his capacity as smith this god defends man and his crops… we find a similar situation among the Dogons. It is the heavenly smith who fills the role of civilizing hero; he brings down grain from heaven and reveals agriculture to mankind (1956/1962, p. 29 – 30).
Thus, the storm god is the smith of heaven who produces sparks of lighting as he ‘forges’ the earth. (I wonder if ancients ever found fulgurite.) The same meaning manifests when man behaves as his deity – when he forges earth under his purposes. Thus, man participates in a heavenly purpose; “When striking their anvils smiths imitate the primordial gesture of the strong god; they are in effect his accessories” (Eliade, 1956/1962, p. 31).
Eliade provides an example of hierophany that clearly shows the fractal structure of meaning (i.e., heaven organizes man, man organizes earth). In India, there is a ritual that occurs before one builds a house:
In India, before a single stone is laid, “The astrologer [an observer of the heavens] shows what spot in the foundation is exactly above the head of the snake that supports the world. The mason fashions a little wooden peg from the wood of a Khadira tree, and with a coconut drives the peg into the ground at this particular spot, in such a way as to peg the head of the snake securely down… If this snake should ever shake its head really violently, it would shake the world to pieces.” A foundation stone is placed above the peg. The cornerstone is thus situated exactly at the “center of the world.” But the act of foundation at the same time repeats the cosmogonic act, for to “secure” the snake’s head, to drive the peg into it, is to imitate the primordial gesture of Soma or if Indra when the latter “smote the Serpent in his lair,” when his thunderbolt [an action from heaven] “cut off its head” (1954/2005, p. 19).
Despite being an Indian ritual born a world away from Christendom, it shares the same motif as the Judeo-Christian creation myth. “The serpent symbolizes chaos, the formless and nonmanifested” (Eliade, 1954/2005, p.19). Thus, the serpent is the same formlessness at the beginning of Genesis, or, if you’d prefer, a symbol of chaos. Of course, the serpent plays this role throughout Christian mythology. Satan is the snake and an agent of disunity. He is diabolical, separating what was once unified. However, the snake, like the unknown or potential, has a positive guise as well. While the unknown can destroy, it can also heal. In Numbers 21 Moses constructs a Caduceus (or Rod of Asclepius) and those who gaze upon it are saved from poison. In the Indian ritual, the astrologer pins down (i.e., puts his finger on, nails down, or identifies) chaos and establishes the center of the world (see figure 2). The foundation stone, like the Greek omphalos (literally, “navel of the world”), marks the establishment of the world, just like God separated dry land (order) from water (chaos) in Genesis.
Figure 2 - Moses and the Brazen Serpent, by Sébastien Bourdon (1653-1654).
Genesis 1:2 says, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (KJV). At the dawn of the world, the spirit forms the dark, void, deep, formlessness which preceded the world. The Bible is not insinuating, much to the chagrin of Evangelicals and New Atheists, that the material universe came into existence the moment God said, “Let there be light” (KJV, Genesis 1:3). Instead, it suggests that the initial comprehending force, the meaning-maker, God, made matter meaningful (coherent, significant, and purposeful) for the first time. And that act is the beginning of the world as we know it. Ultimately, the process of cosmic creation in illo tempore is a description of a fractal pattern instantiated anytime you create, be it a house, car, relationship, society, or child. Always, creation is a hierophany and Genesis is a description of creation itself.
Therefore, the primordial mindset stands in juxtaposed with the modern view. For the ancients, reality is what is meaningful. In effect, heaven is ultimate reality, and matter is real only insofar as it is unified under heaven. Everything else is void. For us, reality is what is material. For postmoderns, both heaven and earth are illusory. Earth cannot be seen through the network of lies, and the only ‘meaning’ comes from an object’s instrumental value. Ultimately, there is only power.
It is no wonder our socially atomized world, systemically severed from nature, has produced ideas like hyperreality, Simulation Theory, and Wokeness. Even pop-culture artifacts like The Matrix and The Truman Show signify a belief in a florescent lit, cubicle ridden unreality. Both stories are reflections of an experience where our lives and actions appear unrelated to the cosmos; they have no impact on the world around us. When life lacks a higher purpose, it appears meaningless and unreal, and our conceptions follow consciousness. Metaphysics is downstream from experience.
However, the solution to the postmodern worldview is so close, that we often overlook it: consciousness. If meaning is about relatedness, how we relate to contents in consciousness – be they external objects or our very ideas – determines our meaning. The very thing that relates to the world is the being, and its center is consciousness. By ignoring the one undeniable fact of existence – I Am – the postmoderns entangle themselves in an infinite array of ‘facts’ which refer to… nothing. And therefore, these facts are transformed into weapons of power. They are in a psychological, metaphorical panopticon where every thought is under self-surveillance. They hopelessly analyze, critique, and deconstruct their thoughts without returning to the very thing against which those thoughts are judged: experience. Don’t worry, my perspective isn’t a solipsistic one. Empiricism is an extension of experience wherein we ‘live out’ our hypotheses in the real world. Science, when properly conducted, is the elaboration of our sense organs, additional reach for our exploratory appendage. The great danger is that these facts, which are disembodied, myopic representations of Being, if they refer to Being at all, will crowd out experience itself. And humanity will live in theory alone. By living in theory, even theories about their own motivations, the postmodern precludes rest, conviction, and the solidity of personality necessary for navigating reality in an upstanding manner. They live in a straitjacket of thought, constricted to what ‘should’ be true and not what is.
The first step in healing the schism between thought and experience is to stop explaining and start describing. There is no right answer. The goodness of any description comes from its ability to capture and convey the experience to others. Describe your experience and accept whatever else may come. As your descriptions become more elaborate, and your skill improves, questions, blind spots in your comprehension will emerge. To better understand your experience, you will need to move beyond the here-and-now into the past for those plausible causes of your experience. The further you reach from your center, the more tentative your statements will be. And science, where species of ideas fight for supremacy and the crashes of heavenly wars can be heard, will be situated appropriately – at the margin of our understanding, with consciousness at the center. From there, science informs being but does not tyrannize it, and man is free to live and understand.
In closing, despite being raised in a naively idyllic suburban evangelical world, which believed the world to be settled and all morality a matter of rule-following, I was saved by my contact with harsh realities. My closest friends are working class – and proud of it. They come from the city. They climb cellphone towers. My ‘second mother’ was a Walmart employee who grew up in the inner city of Chicago. Her son is an engineer. My time in the Marine Corps afforded me (thankfully, indirect) contact with the great reality principle: death. If we are wrong enough in our actions, we die, says Darwin. Thus, my adult life has been defined by death, often in ways I do not understand. This is heavy and relieving simultaneously. In our time, society lies. Nature is cruel – and honest. I was developed by those in contact with nature, in one form or another, who impressed upon me the necessity for honesty. Not Truth, but honesty. The Truth is an elusive thing, like holding onto rolling sand. But if you’re honest, if you describe the cosmos from your coordinate in it, you can catch a glimpse of the eternal. As William Blake said,
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
As such, I am grateful to God for this saving grace, the compulsion to honesty and truth seeking, which I necessarily fail but inevitably pursue. Without my connection to my friends, their worlds, and the Marine Corps, I sincerely doubt I would have ever understood heaven again. Dear reader, I hope I’ve been a friend to you.
Endnotes
1 - This is not entirely Protestantism’s fault. “Object Ontology,” as we know it, emerged during the Enlightenment in parallel with the Protestant Reformation; it was in the air, so to speak. We might say that Protestantism and the Enlightenment were both products of a new view of the world, one where the world was fundamentally a collection of objects or building blocks, and the breakdown of religious belief today, even the belief in Truth itself, is a consequence of Object Ontology’s shortcomings. For a significantly more informed perspective on Object Ontology and its failings, see McGilchrist (2021).
2 - This is evident in Carl Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy. Jung showed that the alchemist, in a state of incredible focus, projected his unconscious contents onto his laboratory objects (p.146-148). The staggering variety of procedures amongst alchemists, are accounted for by the variance amongst individual minds. However, common symbols framed the many alchemical terms, suggesting, insofar as these symbols were projections, a common psychological structure. The alchemist was performing a psychological procedure, splitting his subjective-concept from his objective-concept, his idea about his experience, from his idea about the-thing-in-itself; “there was no ‘either-or’ for that age, but there did exist an intermediate realm between mind and matter, i.e., a psychic realm of subtle bodies whose characteristic it is to manifest themselves in a mental as well as material form” (p. 278-279). In effect, the further back in history we go the more our concepts fuse into a common body. Alchemy split subject from object.
3 - As an aside, I should clarify what I mean by “postmodernism,” if only to differentiate between the helpful Jean Baudrillard and the obnoxious “woke” ideology of today. While Baudrillard is a postmodernist, in my view, he is an outlier. Today’s postmodernists, or “reified postmodernists” (Pluckrose & Lindsay, 2020) take the precession of simulacra to a whole new level: There never was a “reality,” truth does not exist. This leads to frightening conclusions; primarily that language constructs the world, and the only value is power.
However, this undercuts Baudrillard’s point and separates reified postmodernism from his line of thought. For Baudrillard, the precession of simulacra begins with representations of reality. For the reified postmodernist, there is no reality to reference, and therefore, no means of beginning the precession. Thus, I sympathize with Baudrillard while rolling my eyes at Wokeism without contradicting myself. (Unless Baudrillard undercut himself.)
4 - In occult texts like the Kybalion (1908/2018), mind is taken to be the foundation of all reality. However, “mind” is not clearly defined. Is it thought? Is it consciousness? One direction leads to a nightmare-scenario where man is a prisoner of his own thoughts, believing reality to be whatever he generates in a solipsistic padded cell. The other is a return to the foundation of all conception. The lack of clear definition, which one expects from ‘those who occlude,’ allows for a rehabilitation of Western civilization – or its annihilation. Perhaps, we should be clearer with our definitions.
5 - Interestingly but unsurprisingly, Mrs. Keech’s ‘prophecy’ has an archetypal shape. “Automatic writing” was a kind of creative exercise where one ‘turns off’ their rational mind and allows their hand to write whatever it wills. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this allows one’s ego to step aside so the unconscious can express itself freely. Thus, the expression takes the form of the unconscious. And if that unconscious has an archetypal form, so too does the ‘prophecy.’ Sure enough, the ‘prophecy’ contains mythological roles: A “clarion call” is a leader’s call to action, a message, and an association Mrs. Keech likely unconsciously made. Mrs. Keech received “messages” from “superior beings” or “flying saucers.” These mythical creatures are from ‘the stars’ or ‘above,’ and therefore heavenly. Thus, they are heavenly messengers provided a prophecy, like the foxes at Fushimi Inari or the Greek god Hermes.
6 - Like Mrs. Keech’s ‘prophecy,’ contemporary pop-feminism has a mythological structure: Culture/society is a father whose tyrannical power must be undone. A prototypical example is Kronos/Saturn who devoured his children to stop them from usurping him (see Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Sun). Of course, this myth has truth to it. Societies and individuals can intentionally hinder the development of their children to stifle the threat they pose to their power. The mistake is in believing that “devourer” is the only role society plays. All great mythological traditions have balance; Osiris and Set, for example. However, the reemergence of old gods, so to speak, suggests that as beliefs systems fail in the face of evidence, the rationalizations of believers more closely approximate the mythologies underpinning them. In other words, with the pesky facts out of the way, our imaginations can run free. And an imbalanced psyche expresses itself as a one-sided ideology.
7 - Elsewhere, the possibility for ‘mere facts’ to interfere with one’s actions has been called a “cascade” (Peterson, 1999, p. 251). This cascade occurs when disconfirming evidence undermines multiple levels of cognition, right down to the axioms which our entire lives depend on. This, in turn, can rattle the foundations of civilizations. As such, our reluctance to engage with disconfirming evidence is woefully comprehensible – rational, even.
8 - Importantly, our view of the world includes the unknown. This is to say that any healthy model of reality includes, paradoxically, what is not included. Like Jörmungandr, chaos circles the world, symbolizing danger and possibility. Genesis manages this, including in its worldview “formlessness,” “darkness,” “the deep,” and the snake in the garden of Eden.
9 - I am not making a statement about the validity of these ideas here. Merely, that their appeal comes from our experience of the world and their ability to explain it. Their truth value is decided by their fitness to the world, and insofar as they have described and cultivated a postmodern world, then they have an equal measure of validity.
10 - I strongly recommend you watch Chernobyl (2019). I haven’t seen a better depiction of living “in theory” than this.
I strongly recommend you watch Chernobyl (2019). I haven’t seen a better depiction of living “in theory” than this.I strongly recommend you watch Chernobyl (2019). I haven’t seen a better depiction of living “in theory” than this.
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