Adam,
Unless you are joking (and surely you must be), I most certainly did not say to "stop making sense" of the first half of URTH.
I said that if trying to force scientific logic on it was giving you a headache, then try using poetic logic. That is--stop reading it as if you were a Star Trek <tm> Vulcan looking over a schematic and read it like it was written by Robert Graves in the fullbore grip of the Muse (ala THE WHITE GODDESS). Or read it against Joseph Cambell's four volume THE MASKS OF GOD.
Or skip the whole thing as an unecessary energy drain. Life is for the living--leave the book behind! Break the chains, leave the Cave, pity the poor ghouls meeping to be spoon-fed by self-elected "experts."
=mantis=