The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  Dr. Meares, the patient, had published widely on therapy, and had served as president of the International Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Thus the integrity of the two doctors seems beyond question. Meares was capable of self-induced trance. Though normally sensitive to pain, he was well aware of the anesthetic possibilities of trance. He explained to the surgeon that he would signal "ready" when in the proper state of mind, and that he would also signal should it be necessary to halt the proceedings.

  The idea of halting the operation never occurred to Meares. When he heard the chiseling of the bone he knew an instant's irrational anger that the surgeon might have injected anesthetic without his knowledge since he felt no pain. The doubt quickly vanished, however, since he realized that he felt every detail of the work being done, just without the pain of it. There was, further, almost no sign of blood during the operation, or any trace afterward. Dr. Meares suffered no after-effects, felt perfectly normal and took his family out to dinner that night.

  Here then is the technique of the hook-swinger, the fire-walker, the cultist, adapted to specific beneficial needs by an intelligent medical man. He carried into a trance state his own ego awareness. He had predetermined the idea around which his subset would orient. He had filtered out those elements of his ordinary world that he did not want, and had set up his expectuncles for those he needed to retain.

  The trance part of his experience was a voluntary releasing of his ordinary logic, while logically controlling the autistic results. That portion of logic which cannot escape ambiguity, which cannot avoid the excluded possibilities, was bypassed. The secret involved is thus an inner agreement with one's self.

  There is, then, this capacity of the adult to bypass the world selectively, while drawing on that world for a particular synthesis. This is only a peculiar and specialized form of the way all pursuits and disciplines work, as briefly outlined so far in my book.

  Hilgard presumes that our trance experiments have so far been role-playing only, and wonders what trance possibilities there are for "inner experience" itself. If the autistic mode were an experience level in its own right, this might be another possibility. Evidence is so far against the notion. The necessity for some sort of guiding stimulus or triggering, some seed for synthesis, cannot be avoided. The kind of trigger, whether furnished by the conscious manipulations of a hypnotist or the cultural patterns of expectancy unconsciously assumed and synthesized, will determine the nature of the "inner experience." That is the way it works, and no system or method, including religion and science, has yet gotten around it, because there is no place to get to -- the function is the only thing there is. The light of the clearing still determines what is seen in be dark forest; eternity is still in love with the productions of time; and what we loose on earth is still loosed in heaven. ------------ Please note the commentary in Reference section concerning Dr. Charles Tart's work in this field.

  Carl Jung's structural analysis of the processes of mind involved various psychological "figures," as you recall from P. W. Martin's Experiment in Depth. These represented levels or depths of psychic experience: the friend, the shadow, the anima and animus, the old man, the final deep center. One had to have a fairly good grasp of these images beforehand, in order to comprehend them when they occurred. If they occurred to an unprepared mind, the person would not recognize the experience for what it was. It would be literally un-cognized and so lost. One must be primed beforehand for the introductions.

  Now this is perfectly logical, and try as you may, you can find no way around it. Simultaneously, however, the mind has then been given the necessary materials and triggers the syntheses of the very figures under consideration. The seed will grow to fruition, as Martin pointed out, if the desire is sufficient. Do you not see the unavoidable symmetry of the problem? This in no way denigrates the profound personality healing this "integration experience" can bring about. It can surely open one to levels of experience beyond previous conception. The materials emerging seem vastly larger than the synthetic possibilities of one's own unconscious workings. The material always seems to have had an a priori existence. But the mirroring function is clearly evident.

  Following my own absorption with Jung's works, the extent of my psychological awareness, the contents of my dreams, my hypnagogic capacities, underwent a profound enrichment and expansion. But not until my exposure to and fascination with Jung.

  Somewhere around adolescence the Australian aborigine boy undergoes a rite of initiation that is probably the most extreme known to anthropology. The resulting hierarchy of mind is also the most markedly different of any known (except perhaps that world view of modern physicists.)

  The young boy is taken from his mother, isolated in a wilderness spot from which he may not move on pain of death. He is starved for a prolonged number of days, kept awake at night by the terrifying sounds of the bullroarer (a device kept hidden until needed in the rites, and never seen by women). Finally, after this long solitude, starvation, and sleeplessness, he is suddenly surrounded by the elders in hideous body-paints and masks, and subjected to an ordeal of fear and pain against which ordinary circumcision is idle pleasantry. Through it all he must remain stock still, silent, and impassive. By this enormous shock, his psyche is very literally shattered and disintegrated. At that moment of disintegration, the inculcation of the totem world view begins. It is an elaborate and complex system, intellectual, logically cohesive, completely interrelated.

  Many of the raw materials have been sensed and unconsciously assimilated, of course, throughout childhood. The sets and expectancies are all there. Nevertheless the rites initiate a logical, intellectual synthesis only available once the logical phase of normal maturation had set in.

  After this, if the young man has survived, his acceptance and unquestioning automatic response, according to his totem world, is complete. He takes his place with the two great mythical Brothers who eternally create the world. His every move is dictated by the strict traditions of what the Brothers did on that first great day of creation. These are the very movements by which creation is sustained. The stance he takes for his Dream-Time is rigorous and exact. Dream-Time is that mode of trance communication with the Brothers by which he attains that clairvoyant and telepathic rapport with his ecology -- clan, animal, nature, world. The stance he takes for urination, the manner in which he runs, hurls his spear and boomerang (that most sophisticated of labor-saving implements), his mode of eating, copulation, addressing others, dancing, fire-building, painting his body, every facet of life is controlled by the taboos of his totem world.

  In return, everything has meaning, a definite place in a specific hierarchy of events. His clairvoyancy and telepathy are natural results of his total rapport. He knows when his own totem food animal is in his vicinity, though a hill intervenes. At the closest point of interception, he breaks his stance, and, in the least number of moves, intercepts his game.

  His discipline is complete. He is seldom bothered by choice, since his totemism decides most issues. Spontaneity is at a minimum, and, as a result, so is ambiguity. The mesh of threatening, excluded possibilities of western man plays no part in his world at all. He stands on one leg, immobile for hours, in that Dream-Time state that is apparently a cross between a nature rapport and a mystical trance. Flies crawl unmolested across his open eyes; no movement such as blinking is wasted.

  Lévi-Strauss champions the aborigine totem-cosmology as an intellectual refinement as well knit and coherent as any culture's in history. Jung aped the graces of the naive realism of his day to state that primitive thinking and feeling were "exclusively concretistic," always related to "sensation." Primitive thought has no "detached independence," he wrote, but "clings to material phenomena." The primitive could not, for instance, experience the idea of the divinity as a subjective content, but the "sacred tree is the habitat," if not the deity himself. Behind such "primitive" projections, however, lay a rich intellectual scheme -- as found today in our ow
n activities. Will history recognize only our projection symbols, and not our intellectual schemes behind them, and so view us as we now view the "primitive"?

  One aborigine explained that he knew others would come along and paint over his own cave-painting. But, he mused, "they" would see his art there, and know that, though dead, he too had once lived and painted, and they would be sad for him, and remember him. Now this is individualization -- this is the keenest expression of being human. We deny soul or psyche of "real feelings" to those we are in process of removing or dominating. Just as the Germans with the Jews, we find it hard to accept that the dry statistics of dead Vietcong, for instance, could also be those who lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.

  Lévi-Strauss was the most articulate, though not the first, to insist that the aborigine long ago rejected the more common world views, by choice, and isolated himself to develop, undisturbed, his highly-refined and abstract intellectual cosmology. Adaptive techniques, so loved by the nineteenth century evolutionists, play almost no part in totemism. Necessity could have been met on far less rigorous terms.

  George Peter Murdock, writing in 1934, summed up the destructive and limited view we have long held of man, when he wrote (apparently from second-hand information): "The idea of using skins as clothing seems never to have dawned upon the Aranda," (a central tribe of Australia). What seems never to have dawned on Murdock was to research his information before echoing the mistaken views, of E. B. Tylor.

  Murdock went on to say: "The Aranda cannot conceive of death from natural causes." Neither, might I add, can we. Our own medicine men, to whom word-magic and cabbalistic signs have only assumed more arrogance, give elaborate, preferably alien, awesome-to-laymen, Latin or synthetic cult-names to excuse or write off their failures.

  The aborigine Dream-Time is a highly-specialized form of trance, unique as the other growths of that strange land. The aborigine has been on that continent, isolated from the rest of mankind, for at least 16,000 years, and probably much longer. His cultural expectations are not dismissible. Refinements of the system were long in building, and his Dream-Time totemism probably represents the longest unbroken intellectual scheme in man's history.

  My interest here is Dream-Time itself. The aborigine may be in a state of permanent trance, or rather, trance may be the normal state of the mature aborigine. It was his socially-shared state of mind -- not just "approved" as with the Balinese -- and certainly not necessary for survival. Through this state, and only through it, he knew communion and relation with his gods, his world, his society, his family, and himself.

  In his state of permanent trance -- at least his threshold was so low as to be nonexistent -- it was the Two Brothers who served as his conscious selector system, his value system directing his perceptual screening of a world. In this respect the Two Brothers could be said to serve as the hypnotist does a subject. The totem structure was developed over thousands of years. The subset was created by careful trial and error, achieving a perfect balance between mind and nature. Before dismissing the potentials of this long period, consider what science has done in only a few, short, half-dozen centuries. (And the two systems differ only quantitatively according to the kinds of choice made.)

  The aboriginal subset screened out everything not needed for the intellectual refinement, precisely as the scientific world so rigorously denies and screens out the aboriginal world view. The aborigine could use the world of others, however, but only as needed within his own. He drew on others from strict choice, not fate. Adaption to necessity played a negligible part in his abstractions. He was the only predator on the continent except for the dingo dog which he half domesticated, after his own fashion. He had no real competition, and life supported him without trouble. None of the survival-adaptation ideology of the nineteenth century can account for the elaborate ritual of aboriginal life. His primary necessity was an intellectual craving for a system encompassing all things of his life and relating them to a single center.

  Berndt was impressed and puzzled by those "miles of cave-paintings," those enormous quantities of carvings, and above all, by the series of great festivals and religious rites, lasting for weeks, that filled the aboriginal calendar. Life was one long pageant, a colorful ritual, a cosmic play. For a people considered animal-like, grazing all the time to sustain themselves, how did they possibly have the time for such frills?

  Berndt speaks of the way the aborigine overcame his limited tools to produce his art as "nothing less than genius." I would point out that he always produced the kinds of tools necessary to or desired by his interests. And his interests were solely in his symbols, totems, rites, and that joyous union with the Two Brothers.

  Archeology. has discovered that, at one stage of his development, the aborigine developed a splendid pottery industry, so fine it was sought by cultures from that entire area on the Pacific. The aborigine assiduously avoided use of the pottery himself , however, using it only for trade purposes, and probably for hallucinogens to enhance his religious ceremonies and Dream-Time experiences.

  The naive viewpoint of western man, as exemplified in Murdock for instance, points to the nudity and houselessness of the aborigine as evidence of a remarkably low level of mind. Even wolves make dens, after all. But this famous assumption did not hold. The aborigine eschewed houses, clothing, articles and things -- other than a few sacred articles, bull-roarer, spear, boomerang, a few beads and feathers as ornaments, and even his own skillfully-designed and esthetic pottery -- because these things interfered with Dream-Time. Allegiance had to be solely to the Two Brothers, and not to acquisitions. And -- know them by their fruits -- the rewards of Dream-Time were greater for the aborigine than all other visible rewards from the world of the "unreal men."

  The aborigine considered "sufficient unto the day were the evils thereof," and very literally took no thought of the morrow. He sought always only his own particular kingdom of heaven, and all other things were "added unto it." Jesus insisted it would be harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for the rich man to get into heaven. Riches were not the point, as they were not with the aborigine; allegiance of mind was the thing. Ambiguity does not find the narrow gate. Morality or ethics is not the issue, but rather a simple, mechanical, ontological fact.

  Surely the aborigines system gave no basis for spontaneous creativity, and here the analogy with Jesus breaks down. The stringency of their system allowed neither flexibility nor adaptiveness to other systems. Aborigines were courteous as all primitives, but were seriously disoriented when intruded upon by the spontaneous and disorganized aggressions of western man. The centuries of selective isolation broke down under the white man's invasion. Outsiders were called "unreal" for logical reasons. Outsiders responded to none of the modes for a coherent and meaningful reality.

  Scholars found the aborigine's powers of mind exceptional, if narrowed to specific limits. On a bright, clear day a tribe would suddenly move off in a slow, loping, loose-limbed run, twenty miles straight over a high ridge, to intercept a rainfall, rare and sacred, and also undetectable by any ordinary means from their point of departure. To test their proverbial tracking skill, a single man traveled on foot for many miles over widely-different terrain, sandy desert, marsh, rocky country, following no trail, leaving no detectable trail. The route was nevertheless followed unhesitatingly a year later by a cooperative aborigine. Their ability for "ground reading" is famous, but here the contemporaneousness with the Two Brothers was called on. The aborigine had to have an article of clothing from the man leaving the original trail. This he held while going into Dream-Time. The Two Brothers, of course, were contemporaneous with the original event itself. Having made his connections with the Two Brothers, the tracker connected with the event which was then contemporaneous with himself as well. He followed the trail rapidly, unerringly, and without pause, never giving any indication of looking for signs, should any have conceivably remained.

  It might be wondered why the aborigine boy
had to undergo a terrible initiation in order to enter Dream-Time and its totem world. According to my third chapter, he should have mirrored his adult world. The reason is that the adult world of Dream-Time was an abstract, intellectual construct. It was not just raw material from an informational "out there." Its logical complexity could only be grasped by a mind that had developed to the logical level, which, as Piaget points out, is in early adolescence. Then the world view developed to that point was disintegrated as a rational structure, while its acquired information was retained. The totem and dream state then acted as screens channeling percepts and determining the autistic synthesis. The system produced according to its premises, as any cohesive, logical structure should.

  The aborigine, the Balinese, the Ceylonese, the doctor having a tooth extraction, all show the wide scope and variety of the trance state, and suggest its potential, and its limitation. Trance states repeat the basic process by which world views originally form in the mind, by first bypassing that world view and opening the autistic or unconscious to restructuring. The triggers for the new syntheses are given either by a conscious directive or by assumed cultural expectancies. These serve as concepts for the directing of percepts in new ways. Trance is a dramatic, if temporary and limited, kind of 'metanoia.'