Religion and Symbol Systems: How We Shape Reality (Symbolism Part 2)

The Jewish Tree of Life is a fully-integrated, multi-media mystic symbol system, comparable to the Chakra system in Yoga

Religions are deeply interwoven symbol-systems. Like their component symbolic complexes, religions are neither true nor false: they are reality-creating systems. They create a cultural world as our adaptive niche, and then project this culturally-mediated world externally as something real and objective ‘out there – despite that our culture-worlds are in fact an active creation of our awareness. To forget this process results in a state called ‘alienation.’

The state of alienation creates the illusion that we are separate from the world. It is responsible for an immense amount of the suffering – if you interpret the principle radically, perhaps all of it.

Unfortunately, culture requires alienation if its structures are to be taken seriously as independent ‘realities.’ Since we are all enmeshed in cultural matrices we experience as ‘realities,’ to see beyond them might seem a doomed enterprise.

There is a bright spot, however, for the nature of the illusion is that it changes when you see it – so it can be quickly reversed simply by seeing how it works. Here’s a run-down. First, humans have experiences that transcend normal awareness, perhaps in dream states. Then, they we formulate these experiences into systems, building them up in an ‘anabolic’ manner. This is how we get every symbolic system, from religions and sciences to that personal symbol-system that is the ‘self.’

Systems of this type ‘work’ so long as they allow people to predict and control experience. Over time, however, these systems lose their relevance to present conditions. Ideology, like biology, is subject to the law of entropy. Challenge, opposition, variation, innovation, rebellion – all of these forces tear down old ideologies ‘katabolically,’ while order-generating forces ‘anabolically’ reformulate the disintegrated system’s components. These two phases of creation are like the systole and diastole of the heartbeat – the rhythmic force that propels religion through time. This is how symbol-systems actively re-create tradition.

The active creation of tradition has two phases: as symbolic thought, and as actual practice. By exploring the symbolic thought of reality-creating traditions, you discover HOW the process of reality-creation works historically. By consistently practicing the symbolic thought of a reality-creating tradition, you discover THAT the process works individually.

Here, observation and application are revealed as complementary principles. First, as an observer, you discover the principles by which symbol guides experience. Then as a practitioner and member of the community, you apply these principles to your own life. As your life changes, you ‘prove’ the principles you practice. Then, something more. As you communicate your knowledge and experience, it (and you) become part of the tradition.

This is very exciting – you begin to discover something that everyone from sociologists like Peter Berger to Australian Dreamtime cultures know well: that we human beings keep culture’s virtual world going by continually creating and recreating it.