The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (3 page)

The "empty category" is no passive pipe dream -- it is an active,
shaping force in the making of events. There are not as many hard line,
brass tack qualifications to the mirroring procedure to be outlined
in this book as one might think. For instance, the Ceylonese Hindu
undergoes a transformation of mind that temporarily bypasses the ordinary
cause-effect relationships -- even those we must have for the kind of
world we know. Seized by his god and changed, the Hindu can walk with
impunity through pits of white-hot charcoal that will melt aluminum
on contact. Recently, in our own country, hypnotically-induced trance
states have replaced chemical anaesthesias, allowing bloodless, painless,
quickly-healing operations to be performed.
These are "mutations" in the metaphoric fabric of our "semantic
universe," as Levi-Strauss has called our word-built world. The cults
seized these novelties previously, and, in their longing for magic,
alluded to shadowy cosmic mysteries. Rather, trance states prove to be
forms of
metanoia
, temporary restructurings of reality orientation.
Some fundamemal restructuring of mind underlies all disciplines and
pursuits. Mathematician and physicist follow the same mirroring of idea
and fact, just on a wider scope, from a different set of metaphors,
with a different set of expectancies, and from a different esthetic.
My neighbor was "seized and changed" somewhere in his final year of
doctoral studies in topology. The structure of his mind, and his resulting
world, were never again the same as that of non-mathematicians. He
lived in a world of mathematical spaces. He loved to figure the
spaces of
knots
, the kind you tie, though I could not relate his
marvelous figurings to
my
shoelace world. He tried to show me, in
beautifully-diagrammed hieroglyphics, how he could remove an egg from an
intact shell through mathematical four-space. In my naive concreteness,
frustrated that I had no ears to hear or eyes to see, I wanted him to
apply his four-space miracle to a common hen's egg. But my friend's world
was cerebral, his eggs those rare cosmic ones found in the inner land
of thought, and his frustration at my blindness was as great as my own.
There is an eloquent madness in topology, but from that strange
brotherhood's abstractions lunar modules have been built. From their
four-spaced absurdities have come real ships for spaces other than our
own. The mythos leads the logos. The language of fantasy goes before
the language of fact.
The physicist, David Bohm, computed the "zero-point energy" due to
quantum-mechanical fluctuations in a single cubic centimeter of space,
and arrived at the energy of 10^38 ergs. A cubic centimeter of space
is next to nothing at all, and yet Bohm translates his ergs into the
energy equivalent of about
ten billion tons of uranium
. That is a lot
of fireworks to come from nothing at all.
It was proposed once that if we had the "faith of a grain of mustard
seed" we could say to the mountain: "Be removed to the sea" -- and it
would be. Is this not an oddly similar proposal to physicist Bohm's?
Bohm wrote that under present conditions this energy he hypothesized is
inaccessible, but as conditions change we will get our hands on some
of it. The techniques of getting will reside in the remote recesses
of those minds seized by Bohm's kind of faith. When finally brought
about, that enormous energy will be hailed as a "discovery of nature's
secrets." It will have been, instead, the filling by life of an empty
category. It is not just that nature abhors a vacuum. This will be an
example of the way "Eternity is in love with the productions of time,"
as William Blake put it.
Physicist Gerald Feinberg frets at a universe where Einstein's light
speed is the maximum allowed for our reality, so Feinberg has substituted
"imaginary numbers" for Einstein's "real ones" that created the limitation
involved. Feinberg sees no way of repealing Einstein's law, and so tries
to use the whole abstraction against itself for a new era of freedom --
at least freedom for imaginative thinking. Physicist Feinberg has been
seized too, and no longer lives in a world of common breakfast eggs, but
in that cosmic one where aberrations of thinking bring new realities
into play. So great is Feinberg's faith that he has already given
a fitting Greek name, tachyon, or speed, to his as yet undiscovered
faster-than-light bits of energy. And already there is confidence in
Feinberg's minus-mathematics. Universities have started building the kinds
of machines that might respond to the new representation and "find" those
speedy little minus-number things that might hurry other things along.
Once found, the rest of us will then presume that God built tachyons into
the universe way back there. We have automatically assumed that about
atoms, molecules, and the rest of our new marvels. Who would doubt that
these were a priori facts awaiting discovery by a slowly awakening man?
Nevertheless, this assumption has outlived its usefulness. It is probably
the most basic "fact" we accept, too self-evident even to dwell on as
in any way questionable. Yet this assumption keeps us subject to fate,
blind to our potential, and ignorant of God.
The history of the scientific discipline shows that after a certain
discreet courtship, the proper passion to implant the mathematical gamete
into the cosmic egg currently in season, a new idea, "indwelled" by the
brotherhood as Polanyi might say, will finally gestate and eventually
be bern into the world of the common domain.
First comes The Word, the cabalistic sign, the representation of
possibility in a way that can be believed by the brotherhood of
believers. After that comes the discovery. The relation of fact and idea
is not quite magic, and it is not quite of the same reality as hens'
eggs either. Rather, thinking is a shaping force in reality.
William Blake claimed that "anything capable of being believed is
an image of truth." Our capacity for belief is highly conditioned
however, and "truth" always proves to be a synthesis of current
possibilities. Physicist Feinberg, frustrated by the limits of the
Einsteinian universe, has, nevertheless, no other materials to work
with -- certainly not if he is to be a physicist. The very idea of
great speeds came about only with that metaphoric framework resulting
in Einstein. Any possibilities
beyond
Einstein's restrictions exist
only because of the necessary definitions of the system itself.
Our imaginations cannot set out to find the cracks in the cosmic egg
until someone lays the egg. New representations for reality, new ideas,
new fabrications of fantasy searching for supporting logic, must precede
the final "discovery" by which verification of the notion is achieved.
It has been claimed that our minds screen out far more than we accept,
else we would live in a world of chaos. Our screening process may be
essential, but it is also arbitrary and changeable. We pick and choose,
ignore or magnify, illuminate or dampen, expand upon or obscure, affirm
or deny, as our inheritance, adopted discipline, or passionate pursuit
dictate. At root is an esthetic response, and we invest our esthetic
responses with sacred overtones.
Value, as Whitehead said, is limitation. Limitation involves faith,
faith that an exclusive interest is worth life investment, worth the
sacrifice of every other possibility. I like to think of our "open-ended
potential," but potential is always limited to the sum total of the images
that can be conjured up by the mind, and this ties us down immediately
to syntheses of things already realized -- although, as we will find
later with the sorcerer don Juan, such syntheses can grow exponentially,
like a tree at every tip.
Among the potentials of resyntheses of our current reality, one
possibility must be selected, heard as a question one might answer,
seen as a goal one might achieve. Every choice involves such a
commitment. Once we have made an investment and corresponding sacrifice
of other possibilities, our life is at stake. Feinberg has made such
a choice and risked his professional life on the possibility that
his tachyons might come about. The excluded possibilities will act as
counterpoints of discord until his notion sufficiently reorients the
concepts of his brotherhood. Then the overall. selectivity will rule out
the contradictory notions altogether, and for a generation or two or more,
the new "discovery" might shape reality -- until replaced in turn.
Most people respond automatically to their given circle of representation,
and strengthen it by their unconscious allegiance. Since their cultural
circle is made of many conflicting drives
for
their allegiance, their
lives are fragmented and ambiguous.
To be converted is to be seized by an idea that orients us around a
single focal point of possibility. The point of focus groups into orderly
sequence the myriad necessities for choice we face continually. Given a
central thesis for orientation, all the energies and interests of personal
or group life can reinforce and amplify each other, rather than now-here,
now-there attempts at tending to fragmenting demands.
The power of Freudian thought was in its metaphoric simplicity. A few
dramatic images stabilized and organized all the data of a world in
flux. Its simplicity made it readily available to anyone for whom
the imagery was esthetically satisfying. Hans Sachs read Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams
and found in it "the one thing worth living
for." He was caught up in an imagery by which he too could interpret
the universe and give it meaning. He was seized by the material he had
seized, and saw his life as meaningful in serving the new construct.
This centering of mind fills a person with power and conviction. It
creates mathematicians, saints, or Nazis with equal and impartial ease.
A mind divided by choices, confused by alternatives, is a mind robbed
of power. The body reflects this. The ambiguous person is a machine out
of phase, working against itseft and tearing itself up. That person is
an engine with sand in its crankcase, broken piston rods, water in its
fuel lines. In spite of great effort and noise, nothing much happens.
Metanoia tunes the engine, gets it running on all cylinders, functioning
with power and efficiency. Conversion is like a laser; it centers the
diffusing and fragmented energy into a tight, potent focus. But where
the beam goes, the direction it takes, while germane to its structure, is
incidental to the function. This questions those religious justifications
each system inwardly grants itself in the struggle for superiority among
conflicting and competing drives.
Yet the nature of the imagery by which any conversion occurs, if
incidental to the process, is closely related to the product. Direction
and end will always be in keeping with the centered notion by which
the organization takes place. The end is in the beginning. Heaven or
hell is contained in the choice for center, not in the function of
centering. Single-minded devotion to any point tends to give power --
for that point's use. All gods are jealous, but all are equally productive
if they can take over completely and run the machine.
Metanoia restructures, to varying degrees and even for varying lengths of
time, those basic representations of reality inherited from the past. On
those representations we base our notions or concepts of what is real. In
turn, our notions of what is real direct our perceptual apparatus, that
network of senses that tells us what we feel, hear, see, and so on. This
is not a simple subjective maneuver, but a reality-shaping procedure.
We are taught to believe that only the "out there" is real. We are taught
to consider our perception of reality to be transient, accidental, and
insignificant, arising from and oriented only to economic biological
necessities. This becomes an enormous inner contradiction, as Jung would
call it, splitting our reality in half. The inner conflict is reflected
outwardly, and the world happens to us as fate.
We look on archetypal world views, those held by "primitive" tribes, and
consider them archaic "survival" mechanisms. We have been taught that the
real "out there" has been seen only dimly before, but with a progressively
more realistic, aware, civilized eye, culminating in our viewpoint. (Alien
world views can thus be exploited or even removed as threats to our true
one, lending a religious sanctification to our culture destructions.)
Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, challenges our smug
chauvinisms. He claims that archaic thought patterns were highly
disciplined, intellectual structures, designed to give the world
coherence, shape, and meaning. This is, in fact, just what all world
views do. Primitive man "sacralized" his intellectual structure no more
than we do ours. Neither system is any more true than the other. Ours
is more esthetically desirable to us, but is bought at the same price
all selective systems are, the price of those possibilities sacrificed
to keep a limited structure intact. The difference between Einstein's
relative universe and the Dream-Time cosmology of the Australian aborigine
is not a matter of truth or falsehood, realism or illusion, progression
or regression, intelligence or stupidity, as the naive realists have
claimed. It is a matter of esthetic choice. Each system produces results
unobtainable to the other; each is closed and exclusive.
Robert Frost saw civilization as a small clearing in a great forest. We
have hewn our space at no small cost, and the dark "out there" seems ever
ready to close in again -- a collapse into chaos should our ideation
fail. In my book I shall consider Frost's clearing to be the disciplines
of mind, reality-adjusted thinking, reason, logic, civilization, society,
culture. I shall consider the dark forest to be the primal stuff, the
unconscious, the unknown potential -- perhaps just an "empty category." In
my next chapter I will define the psychological term 'autistic-thinking'
and refer to it as the borderline between clearing and forest. Then I will
try to outline the interaction between these aspects of the reality function.