The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  If an arbitrary and premature death is announced as your statistical imperative, why not give up allegiance to that system and devote yourself to something less statistical? With death the alternative, surely you could generate the same intensity the Hindu does with Kataragama, and find a new structure of concept-percept. Granted, the statistical world is a broad and pawerful way. You would need a strong image for the new goal to break completely with the bad-news system and risk your life in a new one. It is the equivalent of asking a passionate question. If you hold and serve the question, until all ambiguity is erased and you really believe in your question, it will be answered; the break-point will arrive when you will suddenly be "ready." Then you must put your hand to the plow and not look back; walk out onto the water unmindful of the waves.

  Jung speaks of life's potential as governed by law and yet not governed by law, rational and irrational. Bruner refers to 'fate' as that which is beyond one's control, a residuum left after one has run through the census of our possibilities.

  "Running through the census" is an act of reason. Fire-walking shows that possibility opens to extremities beyond our census. I cannot reason out fire-walking. There are things to which our intellect gives assent, and vague things to which only our soul can give assent. I know that two plus two must make four or our house of cards comes tumbling down. I also know that three loaves and two fishes can equal five thousand hungry mouths fed.

  Tillich speaks of God as the ground of our being. Our ultimate concerns are what this ground is for us. They shape God as He is for us. A faith in God as an ultimate beyond the perimeters of our reason and experience can give an ontological "warp." We may assume and by the assumption be open to new ground, Our images of belief are clothed in the flesh and blood of reality by action. The broad stream of semi-conscious belief cannot see any possibility but imitation of those actions already given form. This limits possibility to a priori modes of social acceptance, harmful or not. This is the broad road of automata leading to its own destruction. Blake wrote that the man who did not believe in miracles surely made it certain that he would never take part in one.

  The Hindu's belief restructures the way in which he shapes his data. Something unusual happens to his "editorial hierarchy" and something unusual happens in the world in which he moves. It is the function of structuring that counts. No claim is made for mind over matter. The successful fire-walker or hook-swinger simply alters and reshapes an event by an ultimate allegiance or commitment. He is then in the world, but not quite of its ordinary makeup.

  If for any reason, under any circumstances, hypnagogic, anagogic, hypnotic, spiritual, metaphysical, or what have you, fire does not burn a man, the cause-effect framework, considered a final arbiter all to itself and the means by which our current priesthood holds us in bondage, cannot be held as unalterable by the mind of even a single person. The hard-line realist, the biogenetic and determinist psychologist and their like are simply inadequate to cover life in its fullest, actual terms. We are sold short by our tough-minded dogmatists. The state of mind referred to as 'faith,' bandied about though it is, is profound beyond all "objective truth and logical thinking."

  7 behold and become

  The word hypnotism alienates some people, creating a semantic barrier to hearing, even when the point to be made lies considerably beyond the ordinary impressions of what the word implies. Ernest Hilgard, of Stanford University, spent ten years in research on one question: why can only about twenty percent of the population undergo a deep trance experience? In his exploration, Dr. Hilgard threw light on the whole problem of mind, differences of world view and personality, as well as on the characteristics of the trance state. Hilgard's text makes for rather specialized reading, however, and the occultic, popular approach too often is accepted as the norm for hypnotism. Legitimate studies offer a far more sensational, radical, and novel picture, in their cautious and subdued tones, than those writers whose intent is generally toward sensationalism and whose uncritical extravagances prejudice many in the scientific field from "hearing" the significance of legitimate trance studies.

  The trance state is another manifestation of the autistic mode of mind. Bloodless wounds can be inflicted on a hypnotized person, or undergone by a conscious person in a voluntary, self-induced trance. Enormous strength and ridiculous weakness can be induced. Earlier notions of the powers of suggestion, as a kind of super-adrenalin enhancing native capabilities, no longer will cover all cases of trance phenomena, though it surely enters as an element.

  Carl Jung told of a young lady patient, disabled by anemia, whose body weight had dropped to seventy pounds. Hypnotized, she was told of her enormous strength. Her head was then placed on one chair, her heels on another, her body easily spanning the gap in a straight line -- a feat the best of athletes have difficulty doing. Jung must have been fond of this trick, for he recounted a similar case in which he and several other doctors then sat on the patient -- and Jung was himself a very large man -- without any detectable strain, discomfort, or after-effects on the patient.

  In 1966 interesting experiments were performed on student volunteers who fasted for three days until blood samples showed their blood sugar to be extremely low. Hypnotized, they were given imaginary bowls of sugar to eat. Then samples were again taken, which showed a several hundred percent increase in blood sugar. Others fasted for three days; samples showed the basic food nutrients of the blood to be very low. Hypnotized, the students were given imaginary meals which they "ate" with gusto. Blood samples taken afterward showed a several hundred percent increase in the basic food nutrients.

  This cannot imply pulling a rabbit out of the hat when there is no rabbit in the hat, neither does it suggest a quick, magical way out of the food problem. Perhaps the body reverses the blood-ingestion process, drawing on tissue for the nutrients. Even this would be no small thing. The body manages, somehow and at all costs, to respond to the conceptual framework induced by the hypnotist. Somehow the materials are found to make real, to realize, the mind's notion. A conceptual demand brings about a change in the ordinary mechanisms of life. The same process can be seen in the fire-walker, who reverses or nullifies or bypasses the most extreme cause-effect to be found in life.

  The term 'a-causal' used to appeal to me, tinged with a bit of magic perhaps, but something causes non-ordinary events even though the causality falls outside the criteria of the times. Perhaps the focus of attention has been misdirected heretofore. Perhaps the "cause" of non-ordinary effects and the "cause" of ordinary effects are simply different points of emphasis of a single causal function. Are we not dealing with the Price-Carington notion that any idea will realize itself in any way it can -- unless inlaibited by conflicting notions? In the trance state, the world of conflicting notions is temporarily set aside.

  Carington would claim that there are phenomena that achieve only some aspects of a reality event, but not a sufficient number. Mirages, apparitions, many occultic experiences, hallucinations, and so on could be explored from this standpoint. Suppose a group of people were to experience a non-ordinary event that would not fit their conceptual frame of possibility -- that agreement on which their normal world hangs together. They would call the event an hallucination, or folie à deux, and so keep their categories for the norm intact, lest their ideation collapse and they fall into chaos.

  The situation is complicated by the fact that not every personality type will experience a non-ordinary event. Hilgard searched for the properties of mind that made one student capable of entering deep trance, another not. The backgrounds proved varied and general, but one feature came to light and proved to be the decisive element.

  As children, all those capable of deep trance as adults had shared in fantasy play and imaginative ventures of some sort with their parents. Their parents had read to them a great deal, entering with them into the "inner space travel" that reading brings about. Or their parents told them tales, ghostly stories, saw giant-castles in the clouds with the
m, played "let's-pretend" with them, listened to the children's fantasies with respect. And, not incidentally at all, always brought them back to reality of the norm with "Enough of that now, back we come," back to the world of real people.

  This background gives the temperament capable of deep religious experiences, empathy, compassion; ability to see from a different world view, willingness to agree quickly with the adversary, and other marks of a flexible tolerance that does not feel threatened by strangeness. Surely the problem of the "hawk" and "dove" sets of mind can be understood within this line of study, and some grasp gained of the fundamental gap between the two that logic alone cannot bridge.

  Smythies, you recall, considered hallucination to be a normal part of every child's psychological life. These hallucinatory capacities are gradually repressed because of negative social values. It is said that Blake's father paddled him for seeing angels in the windows, so it must have been Blake's mother who helped keep his threshold of mind open. Carl Jung's father was a stiff and pedantic cleric, but according to Jung his mother was almost mystically inclined. Both Blake and Jung retained a marked degree of hallucinatory capacity and were capable of creative and imaginative thought.

  Trance experience is a disengagement from ordinary reality orientation. It is a suspension of the ordinary criteria, or common consensus. Trance falls into the autistic mode of thinking. The kind of grown person who is able to suspend his reality orientation is the one who retains a pleasant recollection of former disengagements. His childhood fantasies were forms of play in which parental tolerance, approval, or participation played a specific part. The child could always come back to a warm security. The threshold between autistic and reality thinking became a well worn path, a door well hinged and oiled, through which access was easy and safe.

  The parents were the ones who had structured the infant autistic responses into a communicable world of others in the first place. Fantasy play then repeated the essentials of the long development, each time for a new and novel kind of mental adventure. The child who feels secure and comfortable in "flexible role taking," as Hilgard called it, and in creating fantasy and adventure without intense self-criticism, can learn to become absorbed easily in new interests or esoteric points of view. A variety of such new experience will keep alive in adolescence and adulthood the ability to relinquish reality and enter non-ordinary states.

  Having found that he can let go of reality adjustment in favor of other experiences, confident in his ability to return to the world, he has a favorable background for acceptance of novelty. On this background new experience can be grafted, constantly reinforcing the native autistic ability. Without this uncritical spirit of adventure, however, this faculty of mind is repressed until it atrophies, rather as speech in a child missing the formative elements in language development.

  Jane Belo, in her study Trance in Bali, makes it clear that when trance seizure is socially acceptable, desirable, and a mark of esteem, as it is among the Balinese, it is found on a wider scale than in the west. Trance entrance was the high point of Balinese social life. It provided each participant with a unique expression and outlet, and was for onlookers an adventure otherwise lacking in the easy, static, island life.

  The characteristics of the trance state. according to Hilgard, are directly related to childhood. There is the same blurring of fantasy and reality, the enjoyment of pretense and sensation, the excitement of omnipotence, and the implicit following of adult words.

  These traits are easily seen in the Balinese child trance-dancers, who function as an integral part of the society. Chosen for their trance ability at age seven or so, the children demonstrated immediately on first seizure an uncanny ability to perform automatically and with finesse the highly ornate and difficult Balinese dances. This impressed Jane Belo, but I would point out that the children had watched such dancing all their short lives. A seven-year-old has pretty well absorbed his culture. And trance seizure gives complete confidence, a total recall, and perfect synthesis of material.

  In this activity, childhood autisms, with their excitements of pseudo-dangers, could merge with the adult world itself and win approval and acclaim. Small wonder the young eyes missed nothing, and that the unconscious synthesis was made so readily once the mind had developed to the point where such was possible. The little boys, meanwhile, played at Kris-dancing, mimicking with sticks the self-stabbing (ngoerek) postures of the adult males, laying all the groundwork needed for their own seizures when the time came that such would be in keeping with the social modes. This self-stabbing of the adult Kris-dancers, by the way, was designed to really stab and draw blood, unlike the Ceylonese whose purpose was a-causal by nature, designed to bypass the world of cause-effect. On the other hand, the little girl trance-dancers danced blithely over hot coals without fear or harm.

  Back to the Western world, Hilgard points out that the hypnotist fills the same role in the trance state that the parent once filled for the child. The final phase of the hypnotic process parallels precisely that phase in the development of the infant's ego in which its boundaries initially expanded, that is, when his world view was inculcated by parental response and demand. This procedure, if you recall my second and third chapters, unconsciously patterns the image of the parents, an image shaping the autistic mind into a reality-adjusted, communicable member of the society. The adult who can freely abandon his common world view and retreat to the unformed autistic is the one who feels security with the hypnotist, as he once was secure with his parents in a similar function, crossing the same threshold passage between autisms and the world of others. What takes place is a reproduction of the natural developmental processes of early experience.

  The ability to relinquish reality and enter trance states must wait until a fairly firm reality picture is itself built up. Trance abilities are lost, unless retained by the associations mentioned, somewhere in early adolescence. Somewhere between twelve and fourteen logical development, which means a final adjustment to the world-of-others, becomes the complete criterion of concept -- the ruling hierarchy of mind. This hardening of world view generally represses the autistic modes, with their free synthesis, into fully unconscious, lost potentials.

  The small percentage under discussion retain the autistic mode as a freely-possible subset. Trance entrance bypasses the ordinary criteria for data selection, and draws on the ordinary world as needed by the novel suggestions induced.

  The most important aspect of autistic thinking, and one I may have emphasized ad nauseam, is that it has no value judgment. It has no criteria for what shall or shall not be synthesized. This same qualification and limitation holds in all trance states, a point of major importance, and one overlooked by cults. The person in trance, though he has an enormously rich background to draw on for synthesis, remains a blank slate -- at least when his entrance is through a hypnotist. The person can draw on background not from his own value system, since that has been suspended to create the trance state, but draws on his background perceptually in response to the concepts of the hypnotist. The "over-all ego" retains its ordinary relationship with both hypnotist and world. It is the partially regressed subsystem that is surrendered to the hypnotist's control. And it is this subsystem that is receptive to novel thought formations, novel restructuring of the perceptual world.

  Immediately it should be asked, concerning the Balinese trance states: Who, then, is directing their conceptual systems? Who is determining the selection of concepts for response in self-induced trance? For the Balinese it is the cultural image, the socially-shared set of expectancies, built up over untold generations, that acts as the trigger for autistic synthesis. The trances are self-induced, but within the confines of the proper social setting. The cultural image functions as the directing selector; it functions as the hierarchy of mind -- a factor that enters heavily into Jesus' Kingdom and don Juan's path, as will be explored later.

  This cultural imagery was clearly evident in the Ceylonese experience, and was
one of the many reasons the poor Protestant missionary nearly burned to death. As with the language trigger, the process seems to be the sowing of a small wind to reap a whirlwind. The cultural image, given the proper triggering for synthesis, seems to carry an enormous force of its own.

  Hilgard likens the surrender of world view for restructuring by a hypnotist to the transference of patient to analyst attempted in psychiatry. A successful transfer is both subject to and limited only by the conceptual framework and capacity for belief of the hypnotist himself.

  The function of world view development is a natural, imitative process, building on acquisition of given data. It is profoundly complex within this simple pattern, however, and there may be an untold number of innate capacities inborn and awaiting the proper triggers that would give unique and novel experiences. The partial restructuring of world view, by repeating the initial steps through trance induction, indicates some of the range of possibility, a range going beyond any particular world view or set of concepts.

  An interesting account of a self-induced anesthesia appeared in a medical journal (1963), when the well-known doctor, Ainslie Meares, underwent a tooth extraction. The dental surgeon performing the operation described the details. First, an incision had to be made in the gums, laying bare the bone over the third molar. This bone was then removed with a chisel, exposing the roots of the tooth near the apices, after which the tooth was removed by forceps. No anesthetic was used. The dental surgeon asked Dr. Meares to write out his own subjective reactions.