The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG

  "THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG

  is the Phoenix rising from the ashes."

  -- Alan Watts

  "The book itself is impossible to pin down and analyze; it allows only

  for being experienced and absorbed through the skin of eyes and intuition

  . . . If you are game for some creative, inventive thinking, this book

  can provide the spark for many upsetting controversies.

  -- The Critic

  "A uniquely challenging brain-cracker, one that offers a constant

  interplay among the ideas of Blake, Bruner, Jesus, Laing, Polyani,

  Teilhard, Tillich, and Castaneda."

  -- Publishers Weekly

  "The most disturbing and stimulating book I have read in many years."

  -- Parapsychology Review

  Selected by Psychology Today Book Club

  THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG

  Challenging Constructs of Mind & Reality

  Joseph Chilton Pearce

  © 1971

  ISBN 0-671-44388-7

  First Pocket Books Printing January, 1973

  To the memory of my wife

  Patricia Ann

  mother of five

  There was a child went forth every day,

  And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,

  And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

  Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

  -- WALT WHITMAN

  contents

  introduction xi

  1. circles and lines 1

  2. valves and solvents 19

  3. blueprints and viewpoints 49

  4. questions and answers 63

  5. mirror to mirror 84

  6. fire-burn 104

  7. behold and become 116

  8. mythos and logos 141

  9. don Juan and Jesus 162

  10. vision and reflection 190

  references and notes 199

  bibliography 213

  introduction

  Almost a decade has passed since I first experienced the crack in my own cosmic egg, and made tentative attempts to translate it into communicable form. A certain urgency underlay my efforts, for I felt frustrated by a lack of both technique and background, and outpaced by a growing social outrage and general collapse of cultural logic.

  In spite of the radical, fundamental, and shattering effect of the crack personally, it simply would not translate into the common domain. My concern was social, and I hoped for some charismatic formula for altering the broad stream leading to destruction. But the crack remained, and still remains, a fragile, lonely way of nonstatistical balance in a rough statistical world.

  I searched for that explosive translation that would magically halt the grinding forces of war, ease our ideological hatreds, and abate our wholesale battenings on our brothers' blood. I longed to find some clever cosmic sign, signalling abroad the way for mass exodus from a Naked Ape despair, and leading to that ecstasy of being fully human. I have ended, at best, with the hope that I might be heard by two or three suffering our common concern, recognizing the dilemma of logical demise, and willing to gather together to explore the crack as a mutual way down and out.

  When logic bankrupts it empties the coffers of possibility. And now, as Orwell's 1984 shapes its fantasy about us, our need for alternatives is acute -- but alternatives are absent from the scene.

  Here in this crack alternatives abound -- but only for that lone reader, driven, perhaps, to hate a world of instant death, shifting enemy symbols, perpetually stimulated fears and hatreds, economic servitude, psychological enslavement, and general absence of joy; a world where alternatives polarize into equally abhorrent either-ors; a world of logic that at its best has conceived the antiballistic missile -- that combatting of direct death with an equally-sure death once removed; a world where leaders tend to become that very thing they behold and declare most intolerable; where Pentagons and CIA's, assuming the role of problem-solvers; tend to bring about the very events which make necessary, verify the assumptions of, and justify the existence and techniques of, Pentagons and CIA's; where the only known underground railway is run by an opposition leading back into the common circles of despair.

  My generation boasts its accomplishments, and wonders that our young might spurn the splendors offered. Yet there are those who read the price tag, and find the cost of psyche, life, and hope to be too high. And so I write for that reader who cannot stand where he is and has no place to go. I write of an alternative that is a kind of excluded middle in this logical impasse.

  There is a third alternative in this world of exclusive either-ors, but the way out is a way beyond , not a rehashing of ruined ingredients. The delusion of problem-solving is the first false hope that must be abandoned, for problem-solving tends to be circular. The techniques used to solve a problem determine the nature of the solutions with which we must then live. Problem-solving is like patching holes in a rotten boat; for each patch applied, two more leaks spring up. There are times when a way out is needed that is not available to logical patching techniques. There are times when we need a way beyond rotten hulks, a way not for restructuring a new boat or even a serviceable life jacket, but rather some submariner's way through a sea of confusion to new terrain.

  I can only approach the crack obliquely, using ordinary language that includes those unknown but highly charged "trigger-words" we all carry, words that block hearing, words having overtones drowning out the fundamental intended. Further, my alternative suffers the old dilemma of "don't go near the water until you can swim." For I must question archaic assumptions that not only underlie science and religion equally, but which go to the very roots of our culture and are accepted unconsciously. To question such concepts is to question the very ground on which we sitand. So I can only plunge the reader in immediately,. asking him for a bit of faith and water-treading through these first pages, until, hopefully, more tangible grounds for understanding form.

  Mind over matter is a misleading notion, and not the issue here. I have, however, traced the relation of mind and reality, as complementary poles of a continuum, and have found, for instance, that a spontaneous healing in a terminal patient occurs in the same way that a discovery forms in science, an illumination in religion, or that change of concept which turns the student into the mature physicist.

  When the Hindu walks through a pit of white-hot charcoal, or the scientist experiences his Eureka! that opens new levels of reality, each uses the same reality-shaping function of mind. This book traces the pattern of development underlying this function, paying particular attention to the formation of answers to passionate questions, or the filling of empty categories proposed by creative imagination. The empty category proposed by a scientist, for instance, brings about its own fulfillment in the same way, and for the same reasons, that a popular disease is entertained, promoted by publicity, feared by all, and watched for in the contemporary form of physician-priest and patient-supplicant, until it fulfills itself on a statistically predictable and self-verifying basis.

  While my book explores this mirroring of thinking and experience, I avoid philosophical arguments, such as the "reality" of the world. What I have explored, in this personal search, is the way we experience a world, and, more importantly, the way this relation influences that world so experienced.

  Our reality is influenced by our notions about reality, regardless of the nature of those notions. No notion can arise in isolation from, or stand outside, the current fabric of all our notions. My book has been shaped within the context of cultural beliefs in which I f
ind myself, so I must consider some of the many current influences, even though these conflict and my aim is to go beyond them.

  Peter McKellar writes that: "Dislike of the models that have become the symbols of an opposing school of thought may partially or completely seal off the work of one thinker from another, until some third thinker notices that they are both saying something worthy of impartial attention."

  My attention is hardly impartial, but I think I can sketch a third-man theme by drawing the similarities between apparently unrelated fields. I hope to show that many recent developments, though insulated one from the other, are lines pointing toward the same functional "crack in the cosmic egg."

  Our cosmic egg is the sum total of our notions of what the world is, notions which define what reality can be for us. The crack, then, is a mode of thinking through which imagination can escape the mundane shell and create a new cosmic egg. The crack is that "twilight between the worlds" found by the young anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda, in his study of the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan, and his "Way of Knowledge." The crack is found as well in that "narrow gate" of Jesus' Way of Truth. The crack is an open end, going beyond the broad, statistical way of the world.

  Readers will think of many pros and cons which I should have acknowledged, but to keep my work within bounds I have selectively chosen my supporting material, and selectively ignored arguments not fitting my purpose. The implications of the crack have expanded exponentially, and I have had to limit those past notions and current studies which point up the growing awareness of an unbroken continuum between mind and reality. I have used these sources in the hope of both clarifying and verifying my translation, but I must state clearly that I cannot claim their sanction for my efforts, though I do not think I have used others against their own purposes or too reductively.

  The last portion of my book is theological in intent, though hardly calculated to win applause from the pulpit. Readers looking for divine absolutes, closed systems of security, or neat formulas and directives, may find these last chapters inconclusive. The crack contains an enormous, indeed romanfic, optimism, however, by which I hope to counter our current passion for nihilistic self-doubt.

  An awareness of the creative force of mind is springing up increasingly, after a gestation of nearly two millennia. If the dark forces of the Pentagon or the technician mentality do not destroy us in their death throes of naive realism, the childhood of Man could well draw to a close within our own time. Then it may be that we shall "seize the tiller of the world," as Teilhard de Chardin dreamed. This seizure can only take place as a "crack in the egg," whatever shape the egg might have by then. The reality-shaping function operates automatically in spite of us, but this breath of life that structures all things is also the deepest level of our very minds, and available to any of us, even now. The technique for making this function consciously available will be clarified, hopefully, in the following pages -- for that reader with perseverance and an open mind.

  J.C.P.

  Williamstown, Massachusetts

  June 1970

  THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG

  1 circles and lines

  There is a relationship between what we think is out there in the world and what we experience as being out there. There is a way in which the energy of thought and the energy of matter modify each other and interrelate. A kind of rough mirroring takes place between our mind and our reality.

  We cannot stand outside this mirroring process and examine it, though, for we are the process, to an unknowable extent. Any technique we might use to look objectively at our reality becomes a part of the event in question. We are an indeterminatety large part of the function that shapes the reality from which we do our looking. Our looking enters as one of the determinants in the reality event that we see.

  This mirroring between mind and reality can be analyzed, and more actively directed, if we can suspend some of our ordinary assumptions. For instance, the procedure of mirroring must be considered the only fixed element, while the products of the procedure must be considered relative. William Blake claimed that perception was the universal, the perceived object was the particular. What is discovered by man is never the "universal" or cosmic "truth." Rather, the process by which the mind brings about a "discovery" is itself the "universal."

  Jerome Bruner, of Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies, doubts that there is a world available for "direct touch." We are not in a subjective trap of our own making, either. Rather, we represent the world to ourselves and respond to our representations. There is, I would add, a subtle and random way in which "the world" responds to our representations too. Naive realism and naive idealism must be equally dismissed if we are to grasp the mirroring function of mind and reality toward which Bruner points.

  The reader is referred to the author's Guide to the References and Bibliography System described on page 197.

  We used to believe that our perceptions, our seeing, hearing, feeling and so on, were reactions to active impingements on them by the "world out there," We thought our perceptions then sent these outside messages to the brain where we put together a reasonable facsimile of what was out there. We know now that our concepts, our notions or basic assumptions, actively direct our percepts. We see, feel, and hear according to what Bruner calls a "selective program of the mind." Our mind directs our sensory apparatus every bit as much as our sensory apparatus informs the mind.

  It used to be thought that the physical was a fixed entity "out there," unaffected by anything our transient, incidental thoughts might make of it. Holding to this idea today are the "tough-minded," whose boastful posturing of a "realistic, no-nonsense objectivity" cloaks a narrow and pedantic selective-blindness, a "realism" that sees only what has been established as safe to see. Yet there is a way in which physical and mental events merge and influence each other. A change of world view can change the world viewed. And I am not referring to such parlor games as influencing the roll of dice. The stakes are higher, the relationships more subtle and far-reaching.

  For instance, as a young man I once found myself in a certain somnambulistic, trance-like state of mind which I will later in this book define as autistic. In the peculiarities of this frame of reference I suddenly knew myself to be impervious to pain or injury. With upwards of a dozen witnesses I held the glowing tips of cigarettes against my palms, cheeks, eyelids, grinding them out on those sensitive areas. Finally, I held the tips of several cigarettes tightly between my lips and blew sparks over my amazed companions. To the real consternation of my dormitory fellows, ,there were no after-effects, no blisters, no later signs of my folly. This stimulated the physics majors to test the temperature of a cigarette tip, which they found to be around 1380° F. My contact with such heat had been quite genuine, steady, and prolonged.

  Later, when I did a bit of research on Hindu firewalking, I understood quite well the state of mind involved, though I never again achieved it myself. It was apparent to me, however, that I had suspended my ordinary. thinking, and was using a mode of mind strongly suggestive of early childhood. At the same time I was aware of myself though experiencing some dissociation within, rather as though I were sitting and watching myself.

  Several things intrigued me about this venture. First, of course, why were the ordinary reactions of live flesh to extreme heat not operative under that strange state of mind? What was the state of mind? Could the reality of this state be different from the reality of ordinary thinking, and if so, was there a relative and arbitrary quality to any reality state? What were the possibilities of this kind of thinking, particularly if it could be controlled by a fully operational, conscious person? (I had surely not been fully operational, and the cigarette trick was the only expression of imperviousness my imagination could seize on.)

  Last but not least, certain of my tough-minded colleagues of later years were so unnecessarily hostile to my accounts of this and similar personal experiences. Why did they refuse to believe the experience had taken pl
ace? Why did they insist that I had hallucinated, simply misinterpreted my data, or was, perhaps, just lying? This threw another aspect into my search, in addition to trying to determine the role our concept-percept interaction plays in our reality: why is our ordinary, logical thinking so hostile to these rifts in the common fabric?

  Reality is not a fixed entity. It is a contingent interlocking of moving events. And events do not just happen to us. We are an integral part of every event. We enter into the shape of events, even as we long for an absolute in which to rest. It may be just this longing for an absolute in which our concepts might not have to be responsible for our percepts, and so indirectly our reality, that explains the hostility of our ordinary intellect to these shadowy modes of mind.

  Later I will try to summarize how an infant's mind is shaped into a "reality-adjusted" personality, and show how this representation helps determine the reality in which the adult then moves. By analyzing how our representations of the world come about we may be able to grasp the arbitrary, and thus flexible, nature of our reality. The way we represent the world arises, though, from our whole social fabric, as Bruner put it. There is no escaping this rich web of language, myth, history, ways of doing ,things, unconsciously-accepted attitudes, notions, and so on, for these make up our only reality. If this social fabric tends to become our shroud, the only way out is by the same weaving process, for there is only the one. So we need to find out all we can about the loom involved, and weave with imagination and vision rather than allow the process to happen as a random fate.