Poetic vs.

literal truth
There are only two kinds of people: people who think there are only two kinds of people and
people who don't. Since this is a yes or no question, there are only two answers. The one you
make decides which kind of person you are, which makes the first statement true. Of course,
there are people who answer no who are wearing pants, and people who aren't, so there are three
types of people (or more). The statement is both true and false, depending on your angle of
approach. There is obviously more to truth than we learnt in religious school - there is such a
thing as a statement which can be both true and false.
We have two brains: a left brain oriented to the factual and verifiable, and a right brain
oriented to the fanciful and metaphorical. A great deal of our lives is taken up by a debate
between these two minds, which add up to a You. Your left brain demands logic and evidence,
while your right brain demands poetry and beauty.
Now, don't go sending me a flood of email telling me that your left brain says that this is a
drastic over-simplification. My left brain knows this already.
Likewise, don't go worrying that by attaching a left brain definition to the right brain means
that I fail to recognize the indefinable as valid. My right brain is all about the indefinable.
I need both brains working. I must accept the existence of more than one kind of truth. I must
accept the literal truth upon which Mr. Left insists. I must accept the poetic truth that motivates
Mr. Right.
Lets examine an example. We'll skip the foreplay and go straight to the main act.
Does God exist?
Allow Mr. Left to open the debate.
Clearly, there is no God. Science and reason tell us that the existence of an eternal creature,
omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient, is impossible. For such a being to exist, it would have
to be the conscious power of the universe itself, would have to be self-creating, self-perpetuating
and subject to self-made laws which are calculable, which would contradict the suggestion of
omnipotence. Such a being would hardly have reason to concern itself with the daily doings of
we small creatures in a universe of unimaginably large numbers of worlds. Humans create God
in response to a need to give definition to that of which we have no understanding. By creating
an all-being, we comfort ourselves in our ignorance, but to posit an all-being with traits identical
to those of the universe itself, we are simply describing the universe, and no god is necessary.
Besides, every time humans decide that God exists, they form an exclusive club which claims
him as their own property, and then use him to justify war, repression and eugenics. God is not
only a bad logic, God is a bad idea.
Mr. Right says, in his turn: Something cannot come from nothing. God is, in the absence of
better information, as good an explanation as anything else. Millions of people around the world,
taking comfort in suggestions of the supernatural, cannot simply be written off as stupid or
ignorant. God exists because we say he exists, and all the power-trappings that give God a bad
name are irrelevant. Something put us here, and if we decide that the universe is God, and assign
it a consciousness, Mr. Left has no rebuttal but scorn. God is a truth of the human species, our
brains are hardwired for him/her/it, and heaping derision on those whose relative intelligence
makes understanding of Big Bangs unlikely is merely a philosophical conceit of the self-
appointed elite. I (says Mr. Right) see the magic hand in everything around me, whether
perfectly organized or not, and nobody has ever proven otherwise to me.
Mr. Left and Mr. Right add up to Me. Some people who are overly-left can contact nothing of
the spiritual world, because there is no evidence for it. Some people who are overly-right can
make no sense of logic and science, replacing it with speculation to which they attach the label of
truth, and are often gullible enough to accept specious explanations from people obsessed with
power, money or violence.
There is only one way to reconcile the two halves of my brain, the half that believes in God
and the half which doesn't. I must accept the fact of two kinds of truth, one which satisfies each
half of me, without contradicting the other.
I call these truths literal truth and poetic truth. My left brain knows there is no God: this is a
literal truth. My right-brain knows that there is: this is a poetic truth. The question is, of course,
does one trump the other? Is a literal truth more important or real than a poetic truth?
We really do live in a mixed world. Your left brain is probably dominant, if you are like most
people, and you prefer reasonable explanations for the phenomena of the world. But you
probably use expressions like "God knows" or "oh my God" on a frequent basis. You are using
God in a poetic sense. You, aware of it or not, have accepted God as a poetic truth.
If you are right brain dominant, you may (that's MAY, please note) accept the existence of
god as a literal truth, but be stumped when it comes to providing evidence. Take heart, ye of the
holistic persuasion. You are as right as any scientist. You have learned to concentrate on poetic
rather than literal truth, and your viewpoint is equally valid. You do not need to provide evidence
for poetic truths: they are built into the fabric of reality. God is a poetic truth, and a really good,
useful one.
Asking "does God exist?" is a waste of time. The literal truth is clear: God exists as the
universe exists; the two are synonymous and therefore the question is irrelevant. The poetic truth
is clear: we have need of God, so to question his/her/its existence is irrelevant.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of us earth-dwellers insist on one truth or another, roughly
along the lines of left-right brain strength. Those whose left brains are not powerful enough to
win the debate accept the judgement of the right brain, and often follow blindly where the
fanatics and charlatans lead. I find this sad.
I also know many people to whom poetic truth is meaningless. To me, this is like living in a
world without sensing its full flavour. I find this sad as well.
There are many issues decided this way, along the lines of literal vs. poetic. I've known many
people who believe in astrology, for instance, or reincarnation. Both of these things are so
literally untrue that there is no need to discuss them from the point of view of the left brain. The
positions of stars often millions of light-years away do not even indirectly dictate the likelihood
of what will occur in our day-to-day lives. People who attempt to sell you these right brain
beliefs as left brain literal truths are con-artists taking rude advantage of our yearnings and
gullibility, and should be punched on the ear and thrown in the lake.
Yet there is a poetic truth to these things. We are beyond a doubt part of our universe, and are
directly connected by creation with the stuff of stars, no matter how distant. This is a feeling, a
poetic truth, and is undebatable. I feel a direct kinship with rocks and trees, my fellow children of
the big bang. And while I do not believe that my soul is separable from my body and mind, I
enjoy the idea of reincarnation. It is a useful thing, believing that somehow I will be paid back in
full for the good or bad I do in this life. It is a poetic truth, of great value to all of us, and should
be recognized as such. Our atoms are scattered as our consciousness leaves us, but we remain
part of this world, and if we decide to build a little magic into our philosophies based on this fact,
then so be it. If everyone believed in the right brain poetry of always belonging to the universe,
there would certainly be fewer wanna-be Hitlers and Stalins in the world.
To have both halves of your brain working is to experience in full what it means to be human.
To allow your two halves to co-exist in comfort is to experience the enlightenment pursued by so
many for so long. Perhaps that is a very presumptuous statement: deeper philosophers than me
have never come to enlightenment, and to announce my own enlightenment in such a way is
arrogant in the extreme.
So I'm arrogant. So what? I'm completely at home in the universe, and there's nothing anyone
can do about it. I believe in Fun, and I have fun believing in it.
About Fun - I hear you asking from afar - is it a literal or poetic truth? Here's where it will all
become clear; it is both, and it is neither. So there.
We have no way of knowing why the universe made itself the way it did. There is no literal
explanation of the unknowable. There are only poetic truths involved.
The universe made itself this way because it wanted to. Why did it want to?
To have fun with itself, obviously. This is the central poetic truth of enlightenment.
But but but, screams Mr. Left. Fun is a positive expression, and we have no reason to believe
that the universe is inherently a positive place.
Wrong! There is far more matter than anti-matter in the universe, a scientific fact. It is
perfectly possible that the universe is positive and fun-loving. It is both a poetic truth and a literal
truth that the universe exists in the material positive. Why couldn't it likewise exist in a spiritual
positive? Take that, Mr. Left!
Of course, we don't know that the universe made itself. It makes both literal and poetic sense
to decide that there was a precursor of some sort, an extra-dimensional black hole for instance,
whose collapse led to the explosion we call the beginning of time. That's for another day.
Now, why is it neither a literal nor a poetic truth? Because it is, as previously mentioned,
absolutely unknowable. We can never know what happened before the beginning of time. There
is no literal truth to be found in attempting to answer the ultimate question of where existence
came from, and beyond our universe even poetic truths mean nothing. Our grasping minds have
trouble accepting this, but that's all there is to it. Some things we will never know, Mr. Left, and
some things we must accept as beyond all explanation, Mr. Right.
Now you are enlightened. Go have a shower and get used to it. The universe is not full of the
impossible, but it is full of the unexplainable. Poetic and literal truth may or may not always
coincide, but there is no need for them to. Accept the poetic truths of existence, such as God,
Karma, reincarnation or the psychological power of crystals without falling prey to those who
would sell you explanations. Accept that there is not always a literal explanation for things. Mr.
Left must stop telling Mr. Right that only what is logical is true.
Accept also that there are logical explanations for most phenomena, that a great deal of
religious and spiritual knowledge is not meant for literal interpretation, and that you shouldn't be
giving money to people who claim they have the answers to riddles that have none. You cannot
affect the universe with the power of magic or thought, there is no such thing as telepathy and
you can't travel faster than light. You end when you end. Mr. Right must stop discounting the
truth of what Mr. Left says, in favour of poetic explanations.
You cannot be truly happy while you suffer from this duality. As long as the two sides of your
brain live on opposite sides of the fence, you cannot be whole. To achieve a state of Fun, you
must accept that Fun is a poetic truth, and not necessarily a literal one. You might also find it
useful accept that Fun is real, valid and the object of all existence.
Please don't lose any sleep over it. Your brains will still be there in the morning.