The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (8 page)

The blueprint comes from the non-personal source, but it must be filled
in with a content individual and unique. Paul Tillich claims that divine
answers are given the form of existential questions -- rather the reverse
of the above.
The Russian parapsychogist, Vasiliev, writes of subjecting hypnotized
persons to fake mustard plasters. Peasants who had never heard of a
mustard plaster had no reaction whatsoever to the fake application.
Patients who had experienced a
real
one suffered the usual red-rashy,
heat-irritated skin and sweated profusely. The inexperienced peasants
were then given, in their normal state, a real mustard plaster
treatment. After that, they produced all the appropriate symptoms in
the hypnotic experiments.
Carl Jung found cases in madmen of experiences beyond the personal
background. He told of a schizophrenic patient in his thirties,
hospitalized since his early twenties with delusions of grandeur, visions,
demonic seizures, and so on. One day the patient, blinking up at the
sun, stopped Dr. Jung and showed him how by scrooching up his eyes,
he could see the sun's phallus, swinging below the rim of the sun. When
one moved one's head from side to side, the phallus could also seen to
swing from side to side, and that was the "origin of the winds." This
was such a strange hallucination that Jung carefully noted it, along
with the patient's history.
In the course of his studies of mythology, Jung was sent a new book
of translations by Dieterich, including the
Paris Magical Papyrus
,
thought to be a liturgy of the Mithraic cult. Here Jung found, stated
in the same terms, but in cultic poetry, the identical sun-phallus-wind
vision described by his patient. Cryptomnesia, or hidden memory, was
ruled out. Jung later came across other references to the vision from
Greek and medieval sources.
Jung used such cases to establish his three-tiered cosmology: consciousness,
personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. Adopting his system,
things can be seen in just this way, though others might use the material
as grist for other mills. Anticipating my fourth chapter, on questions
and answers, I would mention that the patient's history suggested just
the kind of vision he experienced. It was the kind of esoteric, cultic
"information" and secret insight for which he had longed in his mundane,
uneventful and uneducated adolescence, the very drift which had eventually
brought on his reality suspension and produced his retreat from the world.
Fulfillment of desire was surely one of the elements in the experience.
The patient called up from the continuum of past experience the sort
of thing he desired. The sun was the trigger for the ancient imagery,
and the imagery was as valid to the patient as anything else, since all
criteria of ordinary reality adjustment had long since been suspended.
None of this validates Jung against McKellar. Rather, it shows McKellar's
"recent or remote" perceptions to be active on a wider scale than at
first evident. The roots of our garden clearing in the forest are not
shallow, and the common core of the unhinged mind may run deeper than
Cohen suspects. This does not give to this background of ours a character
of its own, however. If this continuum of experience is Huxley's "mind
at large," such a mind has no criteria or value, and as such, "mind" as
we know it is hardly the right term. A phallus swinging from the rim of
the sun and causing winds is just as "true" within this continuum as the
most sophisticated recent scientitie jargon for the origin of solar winds.
In his book on mysticism, Princeton's elderly philosopher, Walter Stace,
included an experience by the writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler was in
solitary confinement for several months during the Spanish Civil War. He
was supposedly awaiting execution, and to while away the time he revived
his esthetic interest in analytical geometry, scratching theorems on
the wall. Euclid's proof that the number of primes is infinite led to
a classical example of the spontaneous mystical experience.
Koestler became enchanted with the idea that a meaningful and comprehensive
statement about the infinite could be arrived at by precise and finite means,
without "treacly ambiguities." One day the significance of this swept
over him "like a wave," leaving him in a "wordless essence, a fragrance
of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue." This led to a "river
of peace, under bridges of silence," that came from nowhere and flowed
nowhere. Finally there was no river and no I. Koestler's I had ceased
to exist -- he had become one with that infinite.
Koestler apologized for such an embarrassing confession, stating that he
had read the
Meaning of Meaning
and nibbled at logical positivism, and
considered himself as tough-minded as anyone. He nevertheless recognized
from his experience an "interlocking of all events," an interdependence in
all things. He spoke of a "universal pool," and a unity of all things. He
had many recurrences of the experience in prison, though they faded and
disappeared after his return to normal life.
Consider now that Koestler's world at that time consisted of four grey
stone walls. The only window was a tiny opening high in the wall, from
which only a patch of sky could be seen. Week after week passed with no
voices, no communications, no modifications to another. It was a kind
of "sensory deprivation." All remaining was his growing fascination
with geometry.
Consider, too, that he had been subject to an unannounced firing squad
for months. Daily he had heard neighboring cell-mates being led into
the courtyard onto which his tiny window opened. Daily he had heard the
volley of shots. As with Feinberg's frustration at Einstein's speed
limit, did the idea of
infinite
have real meaning to Koestler as a
crack in his
finite
egg? As the full meaning of "finite" bore in on
him inescapably, did his own synthesis of "infinite" begin? Was his
finally-occurring experience not a
Eureka!
illumination in keeping
with the nature of the trigger? Did his deep strata of desire not use
as vehicle the only outlet available to his tough-minded world view,
namely, geometry, free of those treacly ambiguities he had found in
systems of belief? Was his experience, then, not only in keeping both
with the nature of the trigger and the materials available for synthesis,
yet satisfying the underlying ultimate desire? This is the case with all
other mental experiences, regardless of the nature of the experience,
as I will try to show with the scientific "breakthrough."
Was Koestler's experience not similar to my friend's Mozart-sonata,
or my apple tree illumination? In Chapter Four, I will outline other
experiences in science, religion, philosophy, and so on, some of them
radical ideas that have played a formative role in our modern world,
and will show that they all follow this same general pattern. So we
cannot disparage this type of experience as subjective illusion. Rather,
it is the way by which the crack in the egg literally materializes.
The spiritually-minded may be upset that this greatest of human
experiences, the religious illumination, is described as the synthetic
production of a stressed mind, and not an opening to Huxley's mind at
large, James's Over-Soul, the Stoic-Christian moral governor of the
universe, or what have you. If the surface nihilism can be penetrated,
however, a possibility more profound than either spiritualism or realism
can be found. The same function of mind that gives Koestler "intimations
of immortality" produces the scientific postulate that changes a
reality structure, or allows the Ceylonese Hindu to walk through beds of
fire. That the experience is a synthetic construct made by an ultimately
committed mind does not lessen its realness, or the implications of the
maneuver. Every aspect of our reality has this undercurrent of synthesis.
For now, I hope to have given some idea of what I mean by "autistic
thinking," and the peculiar way in which it is unambiguous. I hope I
have given some of its ramifications and suggested some of the ways
it mirrors or responds to passionate commitments, tacit beliefs,
unambiguous notions. I hope I have suggested how such notions tend to
"realize" themselves. Understanding this mirroring capacity of thought,
we can avoid the spiritualist trap of granting an authentic or stable
character of its own to this nebulous, indefinable, and haphazard play
of mind, while yet recognizing the fathomless potential available there,
a potential that goes beyond all naive-realist, biogenetic acceptances.
Jung, Carington, Teilhard, and others suggest a continuum of experience
underlying our surface realities. To imply that this continuum is
"thought" as we know it can cancel the open end it
holds
, and we must
dismiss universal pools of metaphysical knowledge, a fixed scheme of a
priori facts awaiting discovery "out there," or cosmic helping-hands
available to clear-thinking minds or pure-minded souls. Attributing
characteristics of personality to the function is a projection device
which turns the open end into a mirror of ourselves, trapping us in our
own logical devices.
The "universal pool" is as 'much "in here" as anywhere. Being autistic
by nature, anything desired can be gotten from it,
if
one is willing
to pay the price and has an ultimate commitment around which the process
can orient. Hard discipline of mind and passionate adherence to a belief
in spite of all obstacles and all evidence to the contrary, can overcome
all obstacles and bring about the necessary evidence. The mirrors of
reality play are brought into alignment by a nonambiguous commitment
from a conscious mind. The "other mirror" is automatically unambiguous.
The close relation between our commitments of life and what we perceive
was explored by Livingston in the
Bulletin of Atomic Science
, February,
1963. Livingston discussed the idea, inherited from the Greeks, of a
common logic of thinking. Recent studies have questioned this Greek
notion. Culture and language affect one's world view, the very process
by which we think, and the "logic assumed for the operation of the whole
universal process."
We inherited from Descartes the notion that there is a close
correspondence between what we perceive and the "real nature of our
environment." Descartes believed that a world of objects existed in a
stable form and that reasonable men could "divest themselves of their
passions" and by methods of reasoning arrive at an objective comprehension
of physical things, social events, and forces.
Descartes granted us a relatively one-to-one correspondence between
our subjective experience and the world "out there." He also gave us the
notion that each of us has access to a relatively uncontaminated screen of
perceptual experience upon which our judgements and actions can be based.
Livingston points out that our logical processes of thinking are relative
to the language learned. He questions the correspondence between what
we perceive and the "real nature of our environment." I would extend
his question tol ask: Is there such a
thing
as a "real nature of
our environment"? Cohen assumes that if there is, man can never know
it. All we can know, as Bruner says, is our own representation of the
world; a representation, Jung might add, carried as a blueprint within
our culture, filled with an endless variety of diverse content -- from
Solley-Murphy's sea of stimuli, shaped by Sapir-Whorf's concept-percept
in this semantic universe of Levi-Strauss's, and so on.
There is nothing orderly or logical to the function I am trying
to outline. I find no evidence that great cosmic powers keep the
process on an upward trend, keeping an eye on us to assure our eventual
success. There is no hierarchy of criteria or value for what is or is not
"realized," made real, by the function. It is a contest of inhibitions and
strengths, choices and allegiances. We are the source of value and choice,
the source of ideas around which the procedure of our reality orients.
On the one hand it is argued that there is no world "out there" available
to dispassionate observation. Objectivity in relation to reality is
a naive delusion on our part. On the other hand, a universal common
knowledge is denied. There appears to be no world-mind from which we
may get cues, no secret wavelengths for our perceptors.
There is, nevertheless, an open-ended aspect for us, a creative one, and
glimpsed through autistic thinking. There is a bridge between clearing
and forest, between logical man and his non-logical potential. William
Blake claimed that "anything capable of being imagined is an image of
truth." We openly shape reality when we diligently apply every ounce
of our logical process to a given desire. We are subject to the same
effect on less conscious levels. Our confused, conflicting, and inchoate
assumptions also enter as shaping forces in reality, and happen to us
as a random, confused fate.
It takes an ultimate commitment to damp out and exclude other
possibilities so that one possibility might formulate and be
realized. Autistic thought can synthesize and break into consciousness
with anything desired, if the conscious desire is strong enough to
win the struggle for dominance. Non-ambiguity is the shaping force of
reality. This capacity of mind is remote, elusive, whimsical, but it
can catalyze and synthesize ideas, notions, desires, and quests drawn
from or suggested by a realized world of events. From this catalytic
synthesis we have presented back an enhanced mirror of our concepts that
can enlarge our reality itself. This is the way in which "eternity is
in love with time."
Next I will explore the shaping of a world view, our set of concepts
built from infancy and childhood, its structure determining the kind of
world then available to the mind so shaped.
3
blueprints and viewpoints
A social world view, one shared with other people, is structured from our
infant minds by the impingements on us from, and the verifying responses
to us by, other people. A mind finds its definition of itself not by
confrontation with