The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (7 page)

Solley and Murphy spoke of us as immersed in a "sea of stimuli," all
"striving for dominance" within us. We are not so easily impinged upon
by things, however, and the system of reality growing from our given
stimuli is far more dynamic. The "striving" tensions are those of ideas,
or ways for grouping this sea of stimuli. Surely a basic stimulus is given
us, but each culture, discipline, or ideology, strives for dominance as
the prism through which this stimulus will be ordered into a coherent,
shared world. This fragmented striving is the charismatic curse of reason
that drives us from innocence to experience, from circle to circle. The
more thoroughly we search out our past, the more embracing and sweeping
we find this "cosmic-egg structuring" to have always been, even in the
most archaic of cultures.
Aldous Huxley considered our consciousness but a segment of a larger
one. Normal consciousness is that which has been funneled through
the "reducing valve" of brain, nervous system and sense organs. This
protects us, Huxley believed, from being "overwhelmed on the surface
of the planet." Through drugs, or the various mental cult systems,
this valve-reduced reality can be bypassed and "mind at large" partially
admitted by the personal psyche. The schizophrenic has lost the way back,
and can no longer take refuge in the homemade universe of common sense,
the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially
acceptable conventions. (Ronald Laing might say the schizophrenic may
be hiding, not lost, or even on a private adventure from which he simply
does not care to come back.)
"Mind at large" gives to a continuum of events an anthropomorphic shape
that the situation may not warrant. Our "reducing valve" may be designed
not so much to protect us from being overwhelmed (by those seven million
shades of color, for instance?) as designed to simplify and realize,
literally select, focus and make real a specific event out of a continuum
of possible events. The only reality available in this universe may
well be a homemade one.
Sherwood wrote of an apparent universality of perception in the
psychedelic experience. He attributed this "universal central perception"
to a single reality. Cohen takes a more nihilistic view, arguing that
once the mind is unhinged from normal categories, regardless of the means
used, it can only go in a limited number of directions. He called such
departures "unsanity" to distinguish them from insanity. He considered
"unsanity" the common pathway of the stressed mind. Variations of
the unhinged experience contain a common core of necessity, according
to Cohen.
In another context, however, Cohen points out that the underlying
motivation impelling the drug taker or systems-follower to
break
with
the norm is the nucleus for what is
then
experienced. A combination
of these two observations by Cohen gives insight into the reality
function. The "common core of mind" may be the autistic mode of thinking,
itself a kind of mirror for some ultimate notion or desire coming from
consciousness.
Carington considered consciousness an intensified point on a spectrum of
unconsciousness. He rejected the metaphors of a "layered consciousness,"
as found in depth psychology. He favored a "field of consciousness,"
the mind belonging to this field rather than the field belonging to
the mind. Even material objects are only "logical constructions" from
different appearances or possibilities for sense data. The limitations
of the human mind are thus only matters of fact, not matters of some
universal law.
Carington's working model is related to Whitehead's theory of
organism
,
where the event is the core of reality. No simple location, or set of
simple assumptions, can in themselves grasp the "unity of the event." For
Whitehead, nature is a structure of evolving processes, and the reality
is the process.
Bruner, in his
Study of Thinking
, discusses experiments in sensory
deprivation. These experiments were designed to find out what happens
when a person is shut off from all intake of perceptual data. A subject
is isolated in a sound- and light-proofed room. He lies on foam rubber,
wears velvet gloves, and everything is done to block out any possibility
for sensory intake. Microphones, electrographic apparatus picking up
brain waves which are amplified and recorded, and related devices keep
tab on the subject's reactions.
After a period of this womb-like condition, the subject begins to
hallucinate. Voices, images, movements, sensations, entire episodes begin
to take place. Deprived of ordinary sensory data from which to select
according to the needs of his world view, his mind structures a reality,
drawing on past data. This structuring
happens
to the personality,
too. He is not necessarily aware that he is hallucinating. He feels
himself very much a part of the resulting event. The event takes place
around him as an ordinary occasion. His sensory system is in full play,
sending appropriate sights, smells, tastes, touches, and so on, as
needed by the mind for its reality.
There is a rough similarity here with the Tibetan 'tulpa' and other
psychic creations such as Carlos Castenada's experiences with don Juan (as
I will relate later.) Bruner's subjects, however, have no prestructured
set of expectancies around which to orient their synthetic creations, and
without such, and without the social world as definition and criteria, the
experiences tend to become chaotic and nightmarish.
In 1963, two miners, Fellin and Throne, were isolated for nineteen days
in a Pennsylvania mine collapse. After a while they began to be able
to "see" and were able to maneuver and improve their conditions. They
shared hallucinations, seeing the same imaginary things at the same
time. At one time both men saw a great doorway rimmed in blue light,
and a flight of marble steps beyond. At another time they saw two
men walking along with miner's lanterns and called to them, at which
the apparitions faded. The miners were, of course, in a tiny pocket
nearly a mile underground, without lights of any sort. One wonders what
would have happened had they gone up the blue-lit doorway and steps,
as they debated trying. The experiences of
folie à deux
, or shared
hallucinations, had a numinous quality deeply impressing the two rough
miners, and the blue light described sounds quite similar to the light
of the sacred mushroom experiences of the Mexicans.
Stephen McKellar argues that all mental experiences, no matter how
bizarre and novel, are related to and originate in learned or subliminal
information gained from experience.
Secondary
percepts, those gained
vicariously from reading, listening to others, movies, and so on, must
be taken into account. We can have perfectly real memories of other
people's imaginings, just as we dream on former dream content or have
specific childhood memories that originated in dreams or fantasies.
McKellar claims that no subject matter for thought is possible except from
an external source. Our most unrestrained imaginings, works of art and
science, all derive from "recent and/or remote perceptions." McKellar
seems on strong grounds. Even so esoteric a production as the Yogic
'tulpa' proves to have its inception in commonly-shared perceptions, and,
as will be noted with Carlos Castenada's extremely strange experiences,
the initial point of departure was some tangible perception from the
mundane world.
Freud's analysis of dreams is one of McKellar's points of reference,
however, and there is tacit acceptance of Freud's interpretation of the
unconscious as limited to the repressed, peripheral, forgotten episodes
of an individual's experience. Yet there are experiences that suggest a
mental structure more flexible than the Freudian. There are experiences
that point to a collective level of consciousness, and unconscious
exchanges. Suspending one's reality adjustment can open one to experiences
neither available to, nor amenable to, examination by logical thinking.
For instance, one rainy afternoon when I was young, friends and I were
pleasantly listening to Mahler and chatting of inanities when, crossing
the room, I suddenly passed out. It was a bone-dry gathering, inside at
least, and I had never done such an asinine thing before. Instantly I
was "looking" at the hand of my girl, then some 250 miles away, writing
me a letter. (She was "shooting me down" as we used to say, a point of
no small emotional impact for me.) Immediately I regained consciousness,
having been out only momentarily, just long enough to upset my roommate
and friends. I told my friend of the letter, later that day. A couple
of days later he brought in the mail, amused at the coincidence as he
handed me the letter from the girl, postmarked the fateful afternoon. I
made my roommate open the actual letter, however, and check as I recited
the contents, burned into my brain as they were. This paled my friend
and unhinged his day.
Unconscious exchanges and shared hallucinations between two or three
gathered together in a common cause or belief express themselves in
many ways. The experiences of Castenada and don Juan will prove to
incorporate this phenomenon. Spiritualists, for instance, in their desire
for information from "the other side" suspend all criteria of ordinary,
social thinking. As a group they enter into a subset of experience, a kind
of shared autistic hypnagogic state. Gathering together strengthens their
faith in the validity of their system. Their
desire
for conviction
suspends the criteria used in ordinary reality, criteria standing in
the way of the esoterica desired.
The believers accept avidly everything produced, since doubt would
split the fabric of their state. Eternal knaves feed on eternal fools,
of course, and charlatanism runs rife, but so do genuine mind-picking,
telepathy, clairvoyance, a kind of yogic-tulpa creation, and a variety
of phenomena not available to the ordinary processes.
Having spent some time at a spritualist "camp," I attempted comment
to a true-believing friend. He stated, however, that a
wise
person
would spend twenty years or so in the brotherhood, in careful, devoted
study, before attempting to draw any conclusion at all. Twenty, years,
indeed far less, of devoted study would only be sustained, of course,
by one who had
already decided
that the framework offered sufficient
reward to justify the life investment. That very decision would have set
into motion the kind of restructuring of mind the new procedure would
require. Further, the mind would make the adjustment, the restructuring
of concept, sooner or later, in order to justify the investment of
self. The mind would eventually reorganize to get the kind of percepts
the new world view would need. It would be a self-verifying maneuver.
We easily dismiss as illusory and occult such esoteric plays of mind. Two
things should be borne in mind, however. First, the productions of these
"two or three gathered together" asking for certain things, and agreeing
on the means of getting them, are quite genuine. The system produces
as it aims to produce. Secondly, and more difficult to recognize, is
that the same mirroring function underlies a science, a respectable
discipline, a religion, or what have you. This assertion will equally
offend the spiritualist, the scientist, and the theologian, since each
apparently must represent his system as an absolute "out there" distinct
from and objectively existing apart from himself, in order to have the
nonambiguous faith to sustain the very fabric of his system.
Extrasensory experience may be a misnomer, but such occurrences are
compatible with Carington's field of consciousness theory, as well as
Whitehead's theory. "In a sense," Whitehead once said, "all things
are in all places at the same time." Extrasensory influence of a
sleeping person's dreams has been investigated at Brooklyn's Maimonides
Hospital. Dr. Montague Ullman and psychologist Stanley Krippner used the
classic dream investigation technique devised by Nathaniel Kleitman at
the University of Chicago. By using special equipment, much the same as
in the sensory deprivation experiments, records can be made during sleep
of eye movements, breathing, sub-vocal activity, brain wave patterns,
and so on. From these it can be determined when a person is dreaming.
A sleeping subject is in one room, all the apparatus attached; a reseacher
observing the equipment is in the next room; Dr. Ullman, in a third room,
studies a "target picture" and tries to influence the dreams of the
sleeping person. The equipment shows when the subject starts dreaming,
after which he is awakened and asked to relate the dream. Sealed
envelopes, containing pictures, one of which is the "target" picture,
are then given the subject, who correctly chooses the one he "saw"
in his dreams.
In one example, Ullman. concentrated on a Gauguin painting, "Still Life
with Three Puppies," which had blue goblets in it. The subject dreamed
of "a couple of dogs making a noise, and dark blue bottles." In another
trial, Ullman concentrated on a painting called
Zapatistas
, showing
followers of the Mexican revolutionary Zapata. The followers march
along a road with a range of mountains in the background. The dreamer,
when awakened, explained that his dream was about New Mexico. A file of
Indians were going to Santa Fe for fiesta time, with great mountains in
the background.
Now the subject had once lived in New Mexico and had seen Indians going
to Santa Fe for fiesta. Simple fortuituousness could be presumed, but
note that it is only
similar
data, found already in the subject's
background, that is triggered up. Nothing
new
is given the subject,
precisely as McKellar would claim. There is, instead, this calling-up and
regrouping of previous perceptual contents in keeping with the stimulus
of the nonsensory source. This justifies both Jung and McKellar, making
them complementary rather than opposing.