It's All Made UP

One of our dearest friends said last night, when we were talking about Buddhist ‘ideas, that they were all made up. This got me thinking and on reflection I believe she’s right. Every idea about spirituality, psychology and just about everything else, is just made up - what else could it be since they all emanate from within the human mind? All acts of human creativity that seek to understand the unfathomable mysteries of being alive. However, I wonder if there is also a hidden word here that changes the meaning of the statement? Is there a ‘just’ present which then says, ‘It’s all just made up’, which would then diminish whatever was being said - kind of like saying. ‘It’s all head stuff and doesn’t mean anything really’.

I got stuck on this one years ago. The Archetypal Psychologist James Hillman made a similar claim when he was writing about his concept of soul. He said that soul - an amalgam in his understanding of emotions, intuition, imagination and liminal states of mind - was the source of everything including all our ideas about spirituality. From soul emerges every world religion and each persons individual understanding of things spiritual. And I could not argue with this - it was obviously true. First there were people who had experiences that they were conscious of and to make these events intelligible to themselves and others they made up explanations that once repeated enough becames enshrined within fairy tales, myths and finally religious beliefs. This ‘soul-centric’ perception of things was uncomfortable for me as a person who had always felt that there existed in its own right something ‘spiritual’ that was entirely outside of and beyond human subjectivity. Now, I could see that this idea of an objective spiritual reality itself had originated with others and had taken up residence within my own mind. That it really was just made up.

And then I found the way out of this conundrum. I needed to go back a step and remember that the first part of this process is consciousness (or awareness) of what we feel. Prior to all the images, words, stories and explanations is the raw material of our immediate known sensory experience - right now in the ever emerging present. And this experience, a great conglomeration of sensations, emotions, thoughts and consciousness, does have an objective reality that exists prior to the words and ideas that are made up to encapsulate it. While our understanding of it is made up, awareness and its contents, demonstrably exists independent of and prior to any descriptions. And there is one more crucially important twist. Not all its contents are entirely personal. There are some contents of experience that are felt to be transpersonal, experiences that seems to be outside of, or beyond, who we feel we are. And most crucially, the awareness that experiences this can be aware of itself. It is self-knowing. Here of course I need to be careful because almost anything I say will immediately cross the divide between raw experience and a made up explanation for it. However, while the word ‘transpersonal’ is certainly made up, the experience of an awareness that is aware of itself and its contents, is not.

Fortunately we have a new kind of language that helps us with all this - neuroscience and its astonishing ability to detect which areas of our brains are alive with different types of experience in real time by using its selection of scans. Now we can differentiate between the different areas of the brain as it receives and processes sensory inputs, feels emotions, has thoughts and is generally alive in all its amazing ways. One thing that comes from this is that experience and the minds capacity to know need not always be mediated through our emotions and thoughts. That there exists within us the ability to rest in a special type of spacious awareness within which emotions and thoughts may or may not emerge. A unique type of impersonal clarity that is experienced as stretching away in all directions at once. An awareness that literally contains every experience we have. Now, of course, this experience has been known to us for a very long time, perhaps thousands and thousands of years, and this has created a great many explanations for it which are most certainly all made up by those that have experienced it and those who are interested in it. But, whatever the explanation, in itself it exists. There is something really ‘there’, (or is it ‘here’), and it is a real experience.

So what about Hillman and his notion of soul being the matrix out of which all notions and experiences of spirituality arise? Two things: the first is, if this is true then it must also apply to itself. The notion of soul arises from soul - it too is made up. An explanation that Hillman has created to answer his concerns about Analytical Psychology, celebrate the complexity of the psyche and act as a corrective to what he feels is the omnipotence of spiritual claims. However, the second digs a little deeper. If we accept the empirical evidence that awareness is the source, and that within this matrix everything that may be known arises, then still avoiding adding additional concepts and language, we do have something that appears - is felt - to be the basis of all. Which leads us perilously close to the Great Perfection claim that it is this - self-knowing awareness - that is the ultimate nature of reality. Not something just made up.

NW. With thanks to JCJ. 18 November 2025