The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  Our inherited representation, our world view, is a language-made affair. It varies from culture to culture. Edward Sapir, the linguist, called this idea of ours that we adjust to reality without the use of language an illusion. He claimed that the "real world" is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group.

  None of us exercises our logical, social thinking as a blank slate, or as a photographic plate, seeing what is "actually there." We focus on the world through an esthetic prism from which we can never be free except by exchanging prisms. Them is no pure looking with a naked, innocent eye. When I found myself in that peculiar twilight world in which fire no longer burned me, I had not found "the true reality" or "the truth." I had simply skipped over some syllogisms of our ordinary logical world and restructured an event not dependent on ordinary criteria. Even our most critical, analytical, scientific, or "detached" looking is a verification search, sifting through possibilities for a synthesis that will strengthen the the hypotheses that generate the search.

  Our world view is a cultural pattern that shapes our mind from birth. It happens to us as fate. We speak of a child becoming "reality-adjusted" as he responds and becomes a cooperating strand in the social web. We are shaped by this web; it determines the way we think, the way we see what we see. It is our pattern of representation and our response sustains the pattern.

  Yet any world view is arbitrary to an indeterminable extent. This arbitrariness is difficult to recognize since our world to view is determined by our world view. To consider our world view arbitrary and flexible automatically places our world of reality in the same questionable position. And yet we are always changing this world view. We represent such changes as discoveries of absolutes in order to protect ourselves from our arbitrary status, and to avoid the implication that human thinking is a creative process. We deny that disciplines of mind synthetically create; we insist we are but discovering "nature's truths." We possess an open-ended potential at considerable variance with contemporary nihilisms, but we must recognize and accept the dynamic interplay of representation-response if we are not to be acted on rather than fully acting.

  For instance, years after my little fireburn experience, my world faced dissolution when two massive "radical surgeries" and other macabre manipulations on my wife failed to check a malignancy wildly stimulated by the growth hormones of pregnancy. Finally, having had everything cut off or out, she offered little for further experimentation. The priests of the scalpel passed judgment and gave her but a few short weeks to live. Surely the evidence was in their favor.

  Nevertheless, I remembered that strange world in which fire could not burn, and entered into a crash program to find that crack in the egg that we might restructure events more in our favor. During five- and six-day fasts, I subjected her to a total "brainwash" day and night, never letting her mind alone. Through all her waking hours I read her literature related to healing, and while she slept I endlessly repeated suggestions of hope and strength. I had no thought of how the restructuring would take place, but in a few hours, some three weeks later, she was suddenly healed and quite well.

  We traipsed back to the temple, I with misgivings over such a risk of the new structure, to have the priests declare us clean. And that we were duly declared and recorded, with the reaction pattern among the many doctors of that research center running the gamut. From emotional talk about miracles, the brass-tack realists soon rebounded with dire warnings that some fluke had occurred and that we should present ourselves regularly for constant watches for the "inevitable reoccurrence;" just the sort of doubt-category I would have avoided at all costs.

  True, a year or so later our carefully-balanced private world fell apart. This began when it became obvious that our last child, born in the midst of all that carnage, was in serious trouble. When the trouble proved to be severe cerebral palsy, our bubble burst, the dragon roared back, and within weeks my world was in ruins.

  Nevertheless, by a change of concept concerning possibilities, we beat the broad way of the statistical world, if only for a while. The social fabric is sustained by agreement on which phenomena are currently acceptable. Susanne Langer referred to nature as a language-made affair, subject to "collapse into chaos" should ideation fail. Threat of this chaos proves sufficient stimulus to insure a ready granting of validity to the current ideas. And strangely, even when this ideation decrees that a particular event must end in death, most people would rather accept the sentence than risk the chaos.

  To be "realistic" is the high mark of intellect, and assures the strengthening of those acceptances that make up the reality and so determine what thoughts are "realistic." Our representation-response interplay is self-verifying, and circular. We are always in the process of laying our cosmic egg.

  The way by which our reality picture is changed provides a clue to the whole process. A change of concept changes one's reality to some degree, since concepts direct percepts as much as percepts impinge on concepts. There are peculiarities and exceptions, such as my no-fireburn venture, by which our inherited fabric is bypassed temporarily in small private ways. These are linear thrusts that break through the circles of acceptancy making up our reality.

  Metanoia is the Greek word for conversion: a "fundamental transformation of mind." It is the process by which concepts are reorganized. Metanoia is a specialized, intensified adult form of the same world-view development found shaping the mind of the infant. Formerly associated with religion, metanoia proves to be the way by which all genuine education takes place. Michael Polanyi points out that a "conversion" shapes the mind of the student into the physicist. Metanoia is a seizure by the discipline given total attention, and a restructuring of the attending mind. This reshaping of the mind is the principal key to the reality function.

  The same procedure found in world view development of the child, the metanoia of the advanced student, or the conversion to a religion, can be traced as well in the question-answer process, or the proposing and eventual filling of an "empty category" in science. The asking of an ultimately serious question, which means to be seized in turn by an ultimately serious quest, reshapes our concepts in favor of the kinds of perceptions needed to "see" the desired answer. To be given ears to hear and eyes to see is to have one's concepts changed in favor of the discipline. A question determines and brings about its answer just as the desired end shapes the nature of the kind of question asked. This is the way by which science synthetically creates that which it then "discovers" out there in nature.

  Exploring this reality function shows how and why we reap as we sow, individually and collectively -- but no simple one-to-one correspondence is implied. The success or failure of any idea is subject to an enormous web of contingencies. Any idea seriously entertained, however, tends to bring about the realization of itself, and will, regardless of the nature of the idea, to the extent it can be free of ambiguities. The "empty category" of science as an example will be explored later and the same function is triggered by any set of expectancies, as, for instance, a disease.

  For instance, in my wife's case, a grandmother who had died of cancer was the family legend, and all the females scrupulously avoided all the maneuvers rumored to have possibly caused the horror. Then, in neat, diabolical two-year intervals, my wife's favorite aunt died of cancer; her mother developed cancer but survived the radical-surgery mutilations; her father then followed and died in spite of extensive medical machinations. Naturally, two years after burying her father, my wife's own debacle occurred, in spite of her constant submissions to the high priests for inspections, tests, and, no doubt, full confessionals. The fact that all these carcinomas were of different sorts, and on opposite sides of the family, was incidental. Few people understood my fury when the medical center that had attended my wife requested that I bring my just-then-budding teenage daughter for regular six-monthly check-ups for ever thereafter, since they had found -- and thoroughly advertised -- that mammary malignancies in a mother tended to be duplicated
in the daughter many hundred percent above average. And surely such tragic duplications do occur, in a clear example of the circularity of expectancy verification, the mirroring by reality of a passionate or basic fear.

  The "empty category" is no passive pipe dream -- it is an active, shaping force in the making of events. There are not as many hard line, brass tack qualifications to the mirroring procedure to be outlined in this book as one might think. For instance, the Ceylonese Hindu undergoes a transformation of mind that temporarily bypasses the ordinary cause-effect relationships -- even those we must have for the kind of world we know. Seized by his god and changed, the Hindu can walk with impunity through pits of white-hot charcoal that will melt aluminum on contact. Recently, in our own country, hypnotically-induced trance states have replaced chemical anaesthesias, allowing bloodless, painless, quickly-healing operations to be performed.

  These are "mutations" in the metaphoric fabric of our "semantic universe," as Levi-Strauss has called our word-built world. The cults seized these novelties previously, and, in their longing for magic, alluded to shadowy cosmic mysteries. Rather, trance states prove to be forms of metanoia , temporary restructurings of reality orientation. Some fundamemal restructuring of mind underlies all disciplines and pursuits. Mathematician and physicist follow the same mirroring of idea and fact, just on a wider scope, from a different set of metaphors, with a different set of expectancies, and from a different esthetic.

  My neighbor was "seized and changed" somewhere in his final year of doctoral studies in topology. The structure of his mind, and his resulting world, were never again the same as that of non-mathematicians. He lived in a world of mathematical spaces. He loved to figure the spaces of knots , the kind you tie, though I could not relate his marvelous figurings to my shoelace world. He tried to show me, in beautifully-diagrammed hieroglyphics, how he could remove an egg from an intact shell through mathematical four-space. In my naive concreteness, frustrated that I had no ears to hear or eyes to see, I wanted him to apply his four-space miracle to a common hen's egg. But my friend's world was cerebral, his eggs those rare cosmic ones found in the inner land of thought, and his frustration at my blindness was as great as my own.

  There is an eloquent madness in topology, but from that strange brotherhood's abstractions lunar modules have been built. From their four-spaced absurdities have come real ships for spaces other than our own. The mythos leads the logos. The language of fantasy goes before the language of fact.

  The physicist, David Bohm, computed the "zero-point energy" due to quantum-mechanical fluctuations in a single cubic centimeter of space, and arrived at the energy of 10^38 ergs. A cubic centimeter of space is next to nothing at all, and yet Bohm translates his ergs into the energy equivalent of about ten billion tons of uranium. That is a lot of fireworks to come from nothing at all.

  It was proposed once that if we had the "faith of a grain of mustard seed" we could say to the mountain: "Be removed to the sea" -- and it would be. Is this not an oddly similar proposal to physicist Bohm's?

  Bohm wrote that under present conditions this energy he hypothesized is inaccessible, but as conditions change we will get our hands on some of it. The techniques of getting will reside in the remote recesses of those minds seized by Bohm's kind of faith. When finally brought about, that enormous energy will be hailed as a "discovery of nature's secrets." It will have been, instead, the filling by life of an empty category. It is not just that nature abhors a vacuum. This will be an example of the way "Eternity is in love with the productions of time," as William Blake put it.

  Physicist Gerald Feinberg frets at a universe where Einstein's light speed is the maximum allowed for our reality, so Feinberg has substituted "imaginary numbers" for Einstein's "real ones" that created the limitation involved. Feinberg sees no way of repealing Einstein's law, and so tries to use the whole abstraction against itself for a new era of freedom -- at least freedom for imaginative thinking. Physicist Feinberg has been seized too, and no longer lives in a world of common breakfast eggs, but in that cosmic one where aberrations of thinking bring new realities into play. So great is Feinberg's faith that he has already given a fitting Greek name, tachyon, or speed, to his as yet undiscovered faster-than-light bits of energy. And already there is confidence in Feinberg's minus-mathematics. Universities have started building the kinds of machines that might respond to the new representation and "find" those speedy little minus-number things that might hurry other things along.

  Once found, the rest of us will then presume that God built tachyons into the universe way back there. We have automatically assumed that about atoms, molecules, and the rest of our new marvels. Who would doubt that these were a priori facts awaiting discovery by a slowly awakening man?

  Nevertheless, this assumption has outlived its usefulness. It is probably the most basic "fact" we accept, too self-evident even to dwell on as in any way questionable. Yet this assumption keeps us subject to fate, blind to our potential, and ignorant of God.

  The history of the scientific discipline shows that after a certain discreet courtship, the proper passion to implant the mathematical gamete into the cosmic egg currently in season, a new idea, "indwelled" by the brotherhood as Polanyi might say, will finally gestate and eventually be bern into the world of the common domain.

  First comes The Word, the cabalistic sign, the representation of possibility in a way that can be believed by the brotherhood of believers. After that comes the discovery. The relation of fact and idea is not quite magic, and it is not quite of the same reality as hens' eggs either. Rather, thinking is a shaping force in reality.

  William Blake claimed that "anything capable of being believed is an image of truth." Our capacity for belief is highly conditioned however, and "truth" always proves to be a synthesis of current possibilities. Physicist Feinberg, frustrated by the limits of the Einsteinian universe, has, nevertheless, no other materials to work with -- certainly not if he is to be a physicist. The very idea of great speeds came about only with that metaphoric framework resulting in Einstein. Any possibilities beyond Einstein's restrictions exist only because of the necessary definitions of the system itself.

  Our imaginations cannot set out to find the cracks in the cosmic egg until someone lays the egg. New representations for reality, new ideas, new fabrications of fantasy searching for supporting logic, must precede the final "discovery" by which verification of the notion is achieved.

  It has been claimed that our minds screen out far more than we accept, else we would live in a world of chaos. Our screening process may be essential, but it is also arbitrary and changeable. We pick and choose, ignore or magnify, illuminate or dampen, expand upon or obscure, affirm or deny, as our inheritance, adopted discipline, or passionate pursuit dictate. At root is an esthetic response, and we invest our esthetic responses with sacred overtones.

  Value, as Whitehead said, is limitation. Limitation involves faith, faith that an exclusive interest is worth life investment, worth the sacrifice of every other possibility. I like to think of our "open-ended potential," but potential is always limited to the sum total of the images that can be conjured up by the mind, and this ties us down immediately to syntheses of things already realized -- although, as we will find later with the sorcerer don Juan, such syntheses can grow exponentially, like a tree at every tip.

  Among the potentials of resyntheses of our current reality, one possibility must be selected, heard as a question one might answer, seen as a goal one might achieve. Every choice involves such a commitment. Once we have made an investment and corresponding sacrifice of other possibilities, our life is at stake. Feinberg has made such a choice and risked his professional life on the possibility that his tachyons might come about. The excluded possibilities will act as counterpoints of discord until his notion sufficiently reorients the concepts of his brotherhood. Then the overall. selectivity will rule out the contradictory notions altogether, and for a generation or two or more, the new "discovery"
might shape reality -- until replaced in turn.

  Most people respond automatically to their given circle of representation, and strengthen it by their unconscious allegiance. Since their cultural circle is made of many conflicting drives for their allegiance, their lives are fragmented and ambiguous.

  To be converted is to be seized by an idea that orients us around a single focal point of possibility. The point of focus groups into orderly sequence the myriad necessities for choice we face continually. Given a central thesis for orientation, all the energies and interests of personal or group life can reinforce and amplify each other, rather than now-here, now-there attempts at tending to fragmenting demands.

  The power of Freudian thought was in its metaphoric simplicity. A few dramatic images stabilized and organized all the data of a world in flux. Its simplicity made it readily available to anyone for whom the imagery was esthetically satisfying. Hans Sachs read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and found in it "the one thing worth living for." He was caught up in an imagery by which he too could interpret the universe and give it meaning. He was seized by the material he had seized, and saw his life as meaningful in serving the new construct.