The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (22 page)

had
been a crow. Carlos asked, though, about his
body
:
it had not changed had it?; surely it was the same body as it ordinarily
was? Don Juan said of course it was not the same body at all. Carlos
countered that surely only his
mind
had been a crow; surely his
body
had not flown? Of course your body flew, was don Juan's retort, that's
what the devil's weed is for. So Carlos asked whether, if friends of
his had been there to see him, they would have seen him as a crow. That,
don Juan answered, depended on his friends. If they understood about the
'devil's weed' they would certainly have done so. Finally, Carlos asked
don Juan what would happen, say, if he tied himself to a large rock by
a heavy chain before flying? Don Juan looked at him incredulously and
replied that he would certainly have to fly holding the rock with its
heavy chain.
Reading this brought back memories of my equally frustrated evenings
with my mathematical neighbor and those topological eggs he could remove
from the shell without damage to the shell, through his mathematical
four-spaces, and my trying so desperately to link it up with a tangible
concreteness that I could grasp. The situation between don Juan and
Carlos was surely analogous to that of the nonbeliever who asked Jesus
for a sign, a miracle, that he might then believe in him. And of course
the dilemma was that the sign could only be given through belief --
the two in agreement -- suspending the ordinary for the non-ordinary.
Mathematical magic has built magical machines now quite in the
ascendancy. Don Juan's magic created magical places to go, but they
are almost extinct. I sensed some of don Juan's sadness that his great
adventure was fading from this earth as a meaningful mark of a "warrior"
-- the reward for bravery and skill. His enormous powers were of no use
anymore. Surely he could clip the tops of the tallest trees in his great
leaps -- but it only scared his own Indians, who no longer understood,
while the white man only saw something blurry and dismissible in the
treetops.
The path of knowledge was no longer important maybe, but to have a path
of knowledge, a path with a heart, made for a joyful journey, and was
the only conceivable way to live. Don Juan had spent his life traversing
his path, and intended going to its fullest and final length "looking,
looking, breathlessly."
Don Juan advised us to think carefully about our paths before we set out
on them. For by the time a man discovers that his path "has no heart,"
the path is ready to kill him. At that point, he cautions, very few
men can stop to deliberate, and
leave that path
. Surely the nuclear
Pentagon madness of our day bears out his analysis.
So now my book leads, as did my search, to its final goal -- another
kind of path, strangely similar to don Juan's, as unique, as difficult
in vastly different ways, with an even more daring goal. I believe it
is a path with a heart -- though I must recognize that it is only one
of an infinite number of possible paths, and that no heavenly hierarchy
sanctions it or gives it a final edge. This path hinges on analyzing
the process by which paths function, and, as don Juan would say, by
exercising the self-confidence to claim knowledge as power, seizing the
tiller by which realities are made.
8
mythos and logos
The discoveries we make at the edge of our "clearing in the forest" are
given shape by the nature of our looking. There is no way of looking
at the forest except by the light of our own reason, and this light
determines the particular kind of forest then seen.
The kind of looking we
can
do is itself determined by and limited to
previous interactions between forest and clearing. We stand on ground
that is the whole human venture. Having become subservient to our own
technology, however, we see ourselves split off from our continuity
leading to this technology. We misinterpret the nature of both clearing
and forest and think our current ground newly discovered terrain having
no relation to past clearings, rather than recognizing where we stand
to be a metaphoric mutation of that ground. We interpret our mutations
of this inherited web of concepts as discoveries of fixed absolutes
"out there." Looking at our past only through our mutation of it, we seem
isolated from it. On the other hand, we recognize the baggage we have had
to bring with us to be the same old trunk. So we interpret ourselves as
clever animals who, having found a hole in the zoo's fence, have wandered
into alien territory. Unable to deny our physical inheritance from the
past we have become overly fascinated with it, while denying and ignoring
our psychological heritage which has been the real formative agent.
Our new historical research is thorough. We may know more about certain
past eras than the participants of those periods themselves. Our relation
to the past is not so important from the standpoint of mechanical
developments contributing to science, however, as it is to the growth of
a psyche, the emergence of a thinking earth that built up this network
of concepts, now capable of almost infinite synthesis. To accept our
physical mode of being as ancient and formative, and yet fail to grant
the psychic mode the same status is to help split our world in half.
Archaic cultures had a skimpy history at best, but they possessed
rich myths, traditions, and symbols, giving continuity, purpose, and
meaning. Ancestors, for instance, played a vital role. Recitation of one's
lineage gave a secure place in time, a sense of personal participation in
a long drama. Genealogy, learned from memory and half-symbolic fantasy,
often reached back to the very gods. Ancestor worship expressed an
archetypal imagery indicating a cultural continuity with the whole scheme
of life. One's forebears had not just "joined the god," but were, in
effect, the gods themselves. Jesus' Fatherhood of God, Sonship of man,
Father Abraham, and "before Abraham was, I am," indicate this shaping
of a god by the whole history of man.
Interpreting history from a scientific rather than psychological viewpoint
alienates us from Blake's "larger body of man," our true self. We can
be integrated with ourselves, and understand our true position and
potential, only by personally experiencing the full mode of our mind,
which is a mind that shades into the past.
The average man cannot contemplate such things as deeper processes of
mind so long as "those that know" deny their existence. And the ideologies
presently strangling us do deny the peripheral areas of mind. The current
vogue ignores mind and concentrates on biology. There is a kind of
nihilistic fascination in pointing out that since we must ingest food,
defecate, and copulate, we are only another animal. This constitutes
massive denial of our true selves. It is a repetition of our old and
chronic "failure of nerve." For we are larger than the sum total of
the mechanisms of our form. There is no being but in a mode of being,
and each thrust of life incorporates previously-developed forms of
expression, but our form should not blind us to our content.
Language plays the dominant role in the shaping of our world view
and world-to-view. We know now that language is not a mode of
animal communication. Surely animals communicate. Recent studies of
the higher apes compel such a conclusion. But language is far more
than communication. Animals communicate without language and without
symbols. Susanne Langer points out that language deals not just with
some higher form of general animal function, but with a
new function
developed in the hominid brain. More than mentality is involved in
language. Language is a function of such complexity that not one,
"but many subhuman mental activities underlie it."
C. E. Bitterman, of Bryn Mawr, has offered a theory of
discontinuity
in the evolutionary growth of mind that substantiates Langer's quarrel
with biogenetic psychology, and may well indicate a wider tendency in
life. The old idea of evolution saw the growth of "cephalization," or
mind, as an additive process, simply building up more complex patterns
of a basic brain function. Bitterman shows, however, that new mental
functions, found in widely variant steps in ascending species, are
not just additive parts, basic replications of a mechanism. They are,
instead,
radical discontinuities
introducing entirely new functions
and possibilities.
Old functions might give hints of a direction for new possibility, but
no quantitative manipulation of the old can produce the new. There is
a qualitative addition. This addition is from that creative spark that
leaps the logical gaps with naive ease. The development of a new life
form follows, then, the same creative pattern found in the formation
of the
Eureka!
illumination, the 'metanoia,' the radical discovery
experience. It is another expression of the same thrust.
Speech is radically discontinuous with those life forms leading up to
it. Speech serves no adaptive purpose, no "pair-group" survival function,
as the naive realists claim. Yet speech
was
developed by life, and
its purpose can be understood from its real function, a function long
championed by Langer and slowly being grasped by others. This purpose
has been spelled out here in my book. It was part of the development
of a system of logical choice, of value judgment, and of projected
symbol-making, through which new possibilities for reality could be
consciously directed. This was a radical step of universal significance,
and life leaped the gap with a discontinuity between old and new.
The cause of the need is the cause of the fulfillment of the need, as
Langer quotes Flüger. The passionate question created its own answer,
or, as Tillich would say, the divine answer was shaped by the existential
question. That a formative, creative force should evolve from an ape-like
creature is no more puzzling than that the earliest automobiles were
literally horseless-carriages. That man sits in the same vehicle does
not mean that the internal-combustion engine is really just a horse.
This discontinuity in the growth of mind makes ridiculous our current
attempts to equate man with the lower animals. Langer doubts that we can
rely on any built-in behavior patterns. The range of our possible actions
has been so enormously widened by our conceptual powers -- imagination,
conception, and speculation -- that "no inherited repertoire could
fit the contingencies" of our world. Skinner may have enjoyed his
ping-pong-playing pigeons, but then to presume that the mind of
man
could be controlled by turning on the right lights, pushing the right
buttons, is the most unrealistic of naive-realistic fantasies.
The failure of psychology rests squarely on its inability to deal with
the
psyche
itself. Mental phenomena comprise the one area that has
frustrated psychology. So for several generations now psychologists have
busied themselves with something they
could
manipulate, the worm, the
rat, the dog, the poor hairy ape. But the correspondences they have so
laboriously made have proved thin material.
In recent years there has been a renewed attack on consciousness,
declaring it nothing more than electrochemical discharges in a complex
adaptive device. As a result, psychology has not only failed to grow as
the other sciences, but has surely failed in its logical role of filling
the vacuum left by religion.
Among other things, Langer blames the failure of psychology on its
inability to allow the "heavy strains of bold, speculative hypothesis
to be laid on it." Not only has psychology failed to provide us with
the material for a new mythos, by which a truly modern culture could
form, it has fed directly into the self-abrogation and denial on which
such atavistic and destructive nonsense as the "Naked Ape" ideology has
leeched out its obscene existence.
Langer writes that despite man's zoological status the gulf between the
highest animal and the most primitive of humans is fundamental. This
difference she attributes to the human brain and its use of symbols.
A culture, in Langer's terms, is the symbolic expression of developed
habitual ways of experience as a whole. This symbolic expression takes
on a mythical form. Jerome Bruner claims that personality imitates
myth in as deep a sense as myth is an externalization of personality.
Society patterns itself on "idealizing myths," and the individual man is
only able to "bring order to his internal clamor of identities in terms
of prevailing myth." Life, writes Bruner, produces myth and finally
imitates it. This, I would note, suggests a kind of mirroring.
As a result, Bruner says, our standard of what is humanly possible is
profoundly affected by our view of ourselves. We act ourselves into ways
of believing and believe ourselves into ways of acting.
Our current views of human possibility set up contradicting and
fragmenting paradoxes. We view ourselves ironically on the one hand,
and assume boastful posturings on the other. We unleash forces and feel
ourselves capable of unlocking secrets of the universe. At the same time
we feel largely dissociated from and fated to our very actions.
Northrop Frye, in his
Four Essays
, writes of the
alazon
, the
impostor who pretends to be more than he is, the 'miles glorious.' On the
other hand is the 'eiron,' the man who deprecates himself. Our modern
image plays the 'alazon' in that we pretend to be unique from previous
developments; superior, because of our science and gadgets, to all other
cultures in spite of a lack of a cohesive culture of our own. And we
play the 'eiron' in that we deprecate ourselves -- considering ourselves
but a clever ape, able by some freak to catch on to a mechanism a priori
and superior to us. Thus we suffer guilt and fear of reprisal over our
manipulations of nature, and a sense of alienation from our continuum,
our ecology, our fellows, and ourselves.
Langer points out, as did Jerome Bruner, that we live in a web of ideas,
a fabric of our own making. "The activity of imagining reality is the
center of experience," she claims. The average man, though, picks up his
symbols and ideas for imagining from "those that know." He may never
analytically understand the workings of the various disciplines that
shape his time, but he senses the general frame of their reference,
and becomes very much aware of the drift of their conclusions. He does
not contemplate serious matters often. Abstract and logically developed
ideas "seep into the untutored thought only as concrete, familiar models
are found to picture them."