The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  The rationale of consciousness is what gives a particular value; that makes meaningful by limitation; that gives the form of a necessarily limited fact to the unlimited formlessness of fantasy. Thus a revolutionary idea that has no possibilities within the context that triggers it, and is thus stillborn or a failure, is still as valid within the synthesis function of mind as is anything else. On the other hand, ideas that are highly irrational, such as the atomic notion with its vast interplay of particle physics, can, if adhered to by true believers long enough, build up an ecology giving them the necessary possibilities for expression and realization.

  Jung talks about unconscious processes being in a continual state of synthesis, which brings to mind Poincaré's hooked-atom collision process. David Bohm, seeing the world from the eyes of a convert to the physicist's brotherhood, contends that all processes of nature are in a constant state of change. If we ourselves could shake off a Cartesian dualism, we might see the full shape of the procedure. Descartes believed that God was the mediator between a mechanistic world and the non-involved thinking mind. Since God was presumably honest, he would not deceive the mind with perceptions that were illusions -- provided, of course, that the mind under question were equally honest and open to the mediator. Jesus, on the other hand, said God judged not at all, and that we reaped as we sowed -- a notion that does not fit the Greek orientation, but does fit quite well the question-answer function under consideration.

  Carl Jung observed that a psychology reflected the background of the psychologist propounding it. Jung did not see how a Chinese psychologist and a Swiss one would reach the same conclusions. Cohen mused on the curious way the Jungian analyst's patient confirmed the fondest Jungian theories when under LSD, while the drugged Freudian patient gave back the proper Freudian symbol -- verifying the therapist's own most basic assumptions. The patient "senses the frame of reference to be employed," suggests Cohen, and his associations and dreams are molded to it.

  Kline of New York University, for several years head of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, observed the same interaction between a hypnotist and his subject. Kline found that the unconscious mind of the subject made every effort to comply with the demands of the hypnotist. The hypnotist serves as the logical value-selector in the resulting relation. Material ordinarily inaccessible to consciousness, forgotten or subliminal impressions, synthetic combinations of childhood fantasies, dreams, secondary percepts and so on, all become available as valid events and "real" contents under hypnosis. The association between hypnotist and subject takes on a marked affinity over a period of time. Material can be exchanged unconsciously between the two. The unexpressed desires of the hypnotist may affect the subject, who begins to fabricate from the unconscious of both parties, finally giving valid responses to the hypnotist's hidden desires. (In amateurs such desires are most often esoteric and cultic.)

  The experience of Fellin and Throne, the two miners mentioned before, shows the extent to which unconscious exchanges can occur. Cases of folie à deux, or shared hallucination, bear a relation to hypnosis, where fantasies from the unconscious may be built into logical and airtight structures creating non-ordinary states. This is particularly evident in cults (though of course a cult is a discipline not in the current acceptancies). For instance, insistence on the part of the hypnotist that the subject "rediscover a past life" can plant a seed of suggestion in the unconscious around which related materials, that is, materials that can be used for such a synthesis, gather into a coherent pattern and finally present themselves as a valid memory of an actual occurrence.

  In variations of this, a person's own desires, particularly cultic, can produce the same kind of unconscious synthesis which then breaks in automatically as verification. (Someone might make a study of the personality backgrounds of subjects seeing flying-saucers.) The conscious mind of the subject, since his desire has to some extent suspended his ordinary system of judgment in favor of the experience, suspends the ability to distinguish the "remembered" synthetic event from a "real" one.

  William Butler Yeats's biographer, Ellman, wrote that had Yeats died in 1917 at the age of 52, instead of marrying as he did, he would be remembered as a remarkable minor poet who "achieved a diction more powerful than that of his contemporaries," but who did not have much to say with it, except in a handful of poems. The difference between his being a minor poet or a major one rested, strangely enough, on the talent for automatic writing which Yeats, an enthusiast of the occult, found in his new bride. With great excitement Yeats drove her to hours of automatic writing daily, to her general weariness. Out of the results Yeats found emerging the crystalized metaphors with which he had struggled, with only partial success, all his life. Mrs. Yeats uncovered his thought in a synthesized and clarified imagery beyond his own abilities, and it was this esoteric venture that produced those last fruitful decades on which Yeats's greatness lies.

  Under the spellbinding situations hypnotic interplay often creates, the questions asked will tend to be in keeping with desire for esoteric or cultic knowledge. Conscious value judgment is precisely what is set aside by the subject in order to enter the hypnotic state -- a point to which I will return later. Value judgment is often willingly suspended by the hypnotist himself, if half-unconsciously, in his desire for conviction. Thus there is set up a possibility for folie à deux, and a ready granting of authenticity to the revelatory content.

  Laski dwelt at some length on P. W. Martin's Experiment in Depth. The major premise and purpose of Martin's book is to bring to those who treat life responsibly and with devotion, an experience of the deep center of mind that has in the past been available only to the "highly percipient man or woman, the mystic, the saint, or seer."

  Some idea of the goals of the experiment is made known immediately. The focus has narrowed. The reader who continues with Martin's book will have acknowledged tacitly that the prospect of such a goal is intriguing enough to warrant further investigation. Perseverance along the actual path outlined in the book would further the expectations and the desirability of the end product.

  Laski notes that the entire venture is cast in Jungian terms, and that it will be Jungian terms in which the final overbelief is expressed. Martin's process for arriving at the deep center entails working with a small group (two or three gathered together). It is far better to have one member of the group be someone who has already gone "some way along the search." This means, of necessity, someone of the Jungian bent. According to Martin the group would need to read and discuss appropriate literature, such as William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, Jung's Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, the Journals of George Fox, or such related materials. (Bertrand Russell, for instance, would hardly be in keeping with the desired end.)

  Needless to say, no one will involve themselves in such reading and discussion without implanting the necessary material needed for synthesis of the desired goal. The time and energy would only be expended for a desirable reward. Some suspension of ordinary criteria will have unconsciously been made. Some expectation for renewal or reshaping will have been nursed from the outset.

  As a part of the preliminary training, members will find it helpful to work out their psychological compass bearing according to Jung's "four functions." Threading their way through this elaborate, complex, and intellectual system would of itself necessitate considerable understanding and adoption of Jungian ideas.

  Other ventures for opening to the unconscious are "active imagination," a kind of conscious entry into autistic realms, automatic drawing, painting, writing, the inward conversation, and so on. Watch for the appearance of the 'Friend,' the symbol of the helpful figure of the unconscious. (The Spritualists have "Indian Guides" as mediators between the two worlds, and their use of pidgin English was probably the esthetic offense that kept my own hardness of heart quite intact.) If the helpful figure appears, the seeker must establish contact with it and not let go. Finally, if the deep center itself appears in a
ny of its forms, by then readily known , hold on to it.

  Thus will the shadow of the unconscious appear, and then the anima-animus, and finally, the active archetypis. This is the great possibility and the perilous encounter. Perilous, because the unconscious content can engulf, seize, and dissolve the ego-centered person. Jung speaks of the psyche being flooded or inflated by the contents of the collective unconscious.

  However, the man centered in depth (knowing what he is doing), the man who has properly prepared himself and has the right attitude toward the venture, can hold. (Rather as the fire-walker, whose attitude of mind holds , is not burned. ) Since experience from the "other side" of consciousness goes by like the wind, a journal should be kept of one's subjective impressions. Thus the psyche will be vastly enriched.

  Laski asks: "Who can doubt but that the technique will work?" After all that effort, no small investment, something recognizable as the desired experience will be achieved. Laski feels that preliminary training has ensured that those who persist with the experiment know explicitly both the question and the answer. The steps taken are those necessary both to clarify the question and bring about the answer. They further ensure that the answer will be lasting and felt to deepen progressively in significance. Laski observes that these very steps have been tried and true procedures from time immemorial. All the older disciplines have used the same procedure. (Education is but a confused, fragmented form of it.) Future catechumens, she feels, will have their own sectarian "confession" and journals to get the initial group discussion going along the right lines.

  Were you to undergo an "Experiment in Depth" along some other line than Jungian, without those indications of what to expect, it is hard to see how the Jungian pattern would develop. (Should the "Friend" appear to a non-Jungian, he might not seem so friendly.) The stylized archetypes might not occur, but something would. The energy of all the effort could only be generated for a reason and the reason would have given the nucleus determining the end result. There is no possibility of opening to some unconscious level except through a technique of opening, and the technique determines the nature of what is found. Such an experience would shape around the individual's background and the trigger of the seach device itself.

  The illumination resulting would have been synthesized by a catalyst giving something larger than the sum total of the background, however, and would move the subject beyond himself. That the end result is arbitrary does not affect its realness. Approximately the same procedure gave atoms and atom splitting which are real enough.

  Consider again Russell's observation that mystic revelations prove to be pretty much shaped by our culture and training, not by great cosmic powers "out there." Mr. Russell's purpose, of course, was to disparage religion. I think some basis has now been given for saying he was right for the wrong reasons.

  Mozart was born to an Austrian family and "ecology" of rich artistic bent. No Mozarts have been found in Bedouin tribes. Bach was a fifth-generation musician, not an Eskimo. And my truisms are no more fatuous than Russell's. Sartre's truth and Kazantzakis' truth are mutually exclusive, but equally valid within their respective frameworks. Adopt either viewpoint, invest your life in the sets and expectancies involved, and your life will bend to make good the investment. Then you may live with your gains. We seek and we find. What we find is up up to us. We knock and the door opens to us. There are an unlimited number of doors. We choose some, even as we are born with others ajar and absorbing us into their interiors, whether we like it or not, or know it or not.

  So I would say to Russell: "Were God to speak to me from the burning bush, He had better use English, not some heathenish Semitic tongue." I should be even more perturbed than Clarence Day to find God speaking French or something, like a foreigner.

  In my next chapter I hope to show how this question-answer function shapes not only those subjective things so much beneath Russell's contempt, but also that very scientific structure that seized him, and which he, in turn, has made into the same kind of idol he disparages in other casts.

  In Life with Father, by Clarence Day (Alfred Knopf, N.Y., 1935, p. 132). Day writes of finding a Bible which " . . . was in French and it sometimes shocked me deeply to read it . . . Imagine the Lord talking French."

  5 mirror to mirror

  Singer closed his History of Science (1941) with the observation that in the future the frontiers of scientific abstractions may be rendered more fluid. The philosophical method might have a share in determining the nature of change. The idea that mind is separated from mind, and mind from matter, might need modification, he felt. He suggested that the tendencies of science since the later nineteenth century may well have been working in just this direction.

  The late English physicist, Eddington, who was instrumental in helping translate and bring into being Einstein's relative universe, was deeply impressed by the way a short, tidy little equation, the product of a Eureka! image arriving full blown in the mind, could open our experience to a whole new aspect of concrete reality. He felt that man's mind must be a "mirror of the universe."

  Singer wrote that the processes of mind seemed to reflect the processes of nature. He felt that our minds were as much the product of evolution as were our bodies, an idea both Jung and Teilhard developed. We have developed through the ages as "mirrors of the world in which we dwell," wrote Singer, and spoke of us as "attuned to nature."

  Newton saw science as a voyage of discovery, coming across islands of truth in that great ocean. Jerome Bruner questions this discovery aspect of Newton's genius. Science and common-sense inquiry do not discover the ways in which events are grouped in the world, claims Bruner, they invent ways of grouping. Newton was a creative inventor, if unknowingly.

  Warren Weaver calls science a very human enterprise, exhibiting the same "lively and useful diversity" which is to be found in philosophy, art, or music. Bronowski claimed original scientific thought to be the same act of mind found in original artistic thinking. Sir Cyril Hinshelwood also spoke of science as a creative art, "joining hands with all human endeavors, learning by its mistakes."

  "By their fruits you shall know them" is the criterion that underlies scientific success. As with a piece of music the final question has been: how well does it perform, and how well does it listen? Performers will not consistently play, neither will an audience long support, a poor work. Time screens out the charlatans.

  Teilhard, reflecting a Bergsonian evolutionary theology, claimed that intellectual discovery and synthesis are no longer merely speculation, but creation. From our time on in history, some "physical consummation of things" is bound up with the "explicit perception" we make of them. What a thing is is to an unknowable extent determined by or influenced by what we think it is. This may be as much a growing conscious awareness of the basic ontology as it is an evolutionary development.

  Singer sees our minds reflecting nature, and we must go a step further and see this as a dynamic, an interrelation that will always deny clear categorization or a one-for-one correspondence. We must push Eddington's and Singer's reflecting mind one step further and recognize that man's mind is a mirror of a universe that mirrors man's mind, though the mirroring is subtle, random and unfathomable.

  Michael Polanyi has championed the subjective aspects of the scientific faith, an irritant to many in his field. Jerome Bruner is an articulate spokesman for this "contemporary nominalism" that senses science to be a process of inventive synthesis rather than discovery.

  A "contemporary nominalism" is possible, however, only because of a security and certainty in the scientific position. Hostility to such ideas of the creative power of thought may be the last lingering aspect of the very position of mind necessary to bring about the current confidence itself. As Jung pointed out, only the most secure of psyches can open to and face up to their own capacity for and tendency toward automatic projection. Current resistance to recognizing science projected as a synthetic creativity may be the last stand of science proje
cted as sacred "out there," a stand necessary to establish the entire structure.

  Descartes' notion of a fixed "out there," and a separate "in here," with God the honest mediator between the two, may have been naive realism, but it is possible that science could only have developed through such a faith projection -- a faith which produces, as all faiths do, according to the nature of its postulates.

  Apropos of this, in the early 1950's kidney transplants were a fascinating possibility. A Chicago doctor finally made an apparently successful transplant of one kidney, in a patient with a good one left. The doctor and his staff kept extremely accurate and detailed reports, covering every conceivable bit of data on the entire affair. After a few months the doctor cautiously published his reports on the apparent success, that others might benefit and follow suit with further lifesaving attempts. Immediately the performance was known to be workable, similar operations were tried all over the world, and the margin of success soared beyond all previous expectations.

  To his alarm, however, the doctor later found that he had erred in his interpretations. The transplant had failed, probably from the beginning; the other kidney had carried a double load plus the added strains of rejection and so on. The data so cautiously published had been erroneous. In what was admirable honesty, the doctor published a retraction and apology, but by then, of course, his error was incidental. Who cared? Success was at every hand, and has been growing ever since. All that may have been needed was sureness, belief, a concrete hope.