The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  This centering of mind fills a person with power and conviction. It creates mathematicians, saints, or Nazis with equal and impartial ease.

  A mind divided by choices, confused by alternatives, is a mind robbed of power. The body reflects this. The ambiguous person is a machine out of phase, working against itseft and tearing itself up. That person is an engine with sand in its crankcase, broken piston rods, water in its fuel lines. In spite of great effort and noise, nothing much happens.

  Metanoia tunes the engine, gets it running on all cylinders, functioning with power and efficiency. Conversion is like a laser; it centers the diffusing and fragmented energy into a tight, potent focus. But where the beam goes, the direction it takes, while germane to its structure, is incidental to the function. This questions those religious justifications each system inwardly grants itself in the struggle for superiority among conflicting and competing drives.

  Yet the nature of the imagery by which any conversion occurs, if incidental to the process, is closely related to the product. Direction and end will always be in keeping with the centered notion by which the organization takes place. The end is in the beginning. Heaven or hell is contained in the choice for center, not in the function of centering. Single-minded devotion to any point tends to give power -- for that point's use. All gods are jealous, but all are equally productive if they can take over completely and run the machine.

  Metanoia restructures, to varying degrees and even for varying lengths of time, those basic representations of reality inherited from the past. On those representations we base our notions or concepts of what is real. In turn, our notions of what is real direct our perceptual apparatus, that network of senses that tells us what we feel, hear, see, and so on. This is not a simple subjective maneuver, but a reality-shaping procedure.

  We are taught to believe that only the "out there" is real. We are taught to consider our perception of reality to be transient, accidental, and insignificant, arising from and oriented only to economic biological necessities. This becomes an enormous inner contradiction, as Jung would call it, splitting our reality in half. The inner conflict is reflected outwardly, and the world happens to us as fate.

  We look on archetypal world views, those held by "primitive" tribes, and consider them archaic "survival" mechanisms. We have been taught that the real "out there" has been seen only dimly before, but with a progressively more realistic, aware, civilized eye, culminating in our viewpoint. (Alien world views can thus be exploited or even removed as threats to our true one, lending a religious sanctification to our culture destructions.)

  Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, challenges our smug chauvinisms. He claims that archaic thought patterns were highly disciplined, intellectual structures, designed to give the world coherence, shape, and meaning. This is, in fact, just what all world views do. Primitive man "sacralized" his intellectual structure no more than we do ours. Neither system is any more true than the other. Ours is more esthetically desirable to us, but is bought at the same price all selective systems are, the price of those possibilities sacrificed to keep a limited structure intact. The difference between Einstein's relative universe and the Dream-Time cosmology of the Australian aborigine is not a matter of truth or falsehood, realism or illusion, progression or regression, intelligence or stupidity, as the naive realists have claimed. It is a matter of esthetic choice. Each system produces results unobtainable to the other; each is closed and exclusive.

  Robert Frost saw civilization as a small clearing in a great forest. We have hewn our space at no small cost, and the dark "out there" seems ever ready to close in again -- a collapse into chaos should our ideation fail. In my book I shall consider Frost's clearing to be the disciplines of mind, reality-adjusted thinking, reason, logic, civilization, society, culture. I shall consider the dark forest to be the primal stuff, the unconscious, the unknown potential -- perhaps just an "empty category." In my next chapter I will define the psychological term 'autistic-thinking' and refer to it as the borderline between clearing and forest. Then I will try to outline the interaction between these aspects of the reality function.

  Our archaic background was concerned with keeping stable our small clearing in the forest. Our clearing is a world view, a cosmic egg structured by the mind's drive for a logical ordering of its universe. The clearing is an organization imposed by us on a random possibility. It is a circle of reason won from meaninglessness. Each person is a potential line capable of breaking through the circle of reason. Yet the circle is an accomplishment of no small order. An enormous force bends all lines into circles. Each new mind threatens the structure but ages of pressure weigh on the infant to win from him agreement with, modification to, and help in sustaining his cultural circle.

  Teilhard de Chardin saw human destiny spreading the light from our small clearing out into the dark beyond. In archaic times we feared lest the dark engulf our fragile construction of reason, and all actions were oriented toward keeping the cultural circle intact. Teilhard and the "new nominalists" of physics speak with a new and bold confidence that dares move beyond stability.

  We have been passionately involved in strengthening our ideation, cataloging and indexing our clearing in the forest. Some unanimity of opinion has begun to form. But the nature of the 'dark forest' is the real problem. For our attitude toward the forest influences sharply the way we look upon our clearing, and affects the kind of new clearing we can make.

  The Platonists and Stoics have always assumed the forest to be ready planted. Corresponding ideas of what was "out there" were planted also in our minds, leading us by heuristic devices until we finally stumbled our way to various discoveries and conclusions. The gods and fates looked on, rather as we would watch rats in a maze.

  Consider, however, that the kind of trees we succeed in felling at the clearing's edge need not have always been. Indeed, there may be no trees at all in the depths of that dark. Rather, the forest may shape, the trees may grow, according to the kind of light our reason throws.

  Scientists speak of the dark forest of nature as essentially simple. Nature is a category, however, a label, a concept shot through and through with man's thought. And man's thought is designed to simplify from an endless possibility. Scientists are never really talking about the unknown nature of the forest beyond their circle of reason and logic. They talk about their garden within it, the forest converted, the trees labeled, the plants and shrubs cataloged, selected, arranged in orderly patterns. When the scientists look at the forest, they look for additions to their garden, and they look with a gardeners eye.

  The nature "discovered" is determined, to an indeterminable degree, by the mind that sets out to discover. We can never know the full extent we play in this reality formation. It will never be computable or reducible to formula. An ultimately serious commitment of mind, however, can be the determinate in any issue, overriding randomness and chance.

  In the following chapters I hope, by showing what I have found about this reality play, to suggest a way by which we may take a more active part in shaping our events. I will explore the formation of world view, which determines our adult world-to-view, and this will require some exploration of different phenomena of mind, particularly from that shadow-side of thinking called autistic. Then I will explore the way a passionate pursuit or commitment of mind shapes its own fulfillment -- the way a question can bring about its answer, a belief its illumination, a desire its gratification, by reshaping, as needed, those concepts shaped from birth, and so reshaping perceptual patterns.

  I have traced this mirroring of mind and reality in scientific pursuits, the postulate, the 'Eureka!' the new notion that changes the actual tangibles for a civilization. Then I have tried to show how this same relation between idea and fact found in science equally underlies such a cultic affair as fire not burning a person under certain circumstances.

  Mind over matter is a misnomer, and even to speak of a mirroring between the two probably implies a false d
ualism. I will try to trace the function by which events are shaped, and avoid those comfortable categories, those idolatries, those easy psychological clichés that act as stopping-places before the goal is reached. And the goal is nothing less than the very ontological underpinnings of things, the reality-shaping way by which events come about.

  In this opening chapter I have given a rough survey of the kinds of questions, and the kinds of answers, I will deal with in the rest of the book. Our clearing in the forest is all there appears for us to go on. I have no 'deus ex machina' to introduce skilfully at the last. There is no magic for us -- and no outside interference. The game is ours. Our responsibility is ultimately serious, yet there is often only one way really to serve our cultural circle, and that is by breaking through its tight logic, and plunging into that empty category, the dark forest beyond. I attempted to do this when disaster struck at my own little world. I failed in the last analysis -- though of course in retrospect I see my failure as needless.

  The high priests of the disciplines controlling our cultural circle try to tell us that logic and reason are the sum total of things, or, if more is possible, that it is only so through their controls, which are their own logical rules. Logic and reason are surely the stuff of which the clearing is made, and the high point of life's thrust. Yet these techniques of mind tend to become destructive and to trap us in deadlocks of despair.

  Logic and reason are like the tip of an iceberg. The naive realists, the biogenetic psychologists, the rats-in-the-maze watchers, claim the tip is all there is. Yet life becomes demonic when sentenced to so small an area. There are times when we need to open the threshold of mind to that unknown subterranean depth -- and we always need to believe in its existence.

  And so, though our cosmic egg is the only reality we have, and is not to be treated lightly, what I hope to show is that there is available to us a crack in this egg. For there are times when the shell no longer protects but suffocates and destroys." The crack must be approached with care, however, lest the egg itself be destroyed. There is a story in the Codez Bezae, a fifth-century manuscript of the Gospel According to St. Luke, that illustrates this circle-line problem. Jesus and his disciples were cutting across a field one Sabbath morning when they came across a man gathering in his grain. The Sabbath was a strictly no-work day, of course, and Jesus had been censured by the Establishment for just this kind of infringement. He knew that only by agreed upon criteria for acceptable acts can a civilization exist, and so he looked at the man and said: "Man, if you know what you are doing, you are blest. If you do not know what you are doing, you are accurst and a transgressor of the law."

  The mirroring of mind and reality finds its best expression in a comment by Jesus almost universally ignored. Those who claim to have heard him insist that supplication is the way out. They cry that we should look to heaven for our answers. But Jesus, that harsh realist, recognized the play of mirrors, and pointed out that: "What you loose on earth is loosed in heaven."

  2 valves and solvents

  Our clearing in the forest is the form by which content is shaped, a content which in turn helps determine the form of the clearing. Our clearing is ancient and archetypal, of infinitely contingent formative lines, but there are experiences in which a crack forms in this egg, when nonordinary things are possible, or nonordinary solutions, occur to mind.

  This crack formation is the key to reality formation, and involves an exploration of our modes of thinking. We need a broader look at "mind" than the biogenetically indoctrinated psychologists have given. We are aware of our reality-adjusted thinking, our ordinary, socially-oriented, logical, rational thinking. We are less aware of another mode of thinking with which we are continually but more peripherally involved.

  The god Odin, discovering the secret spring of wisdom and poetry, asked the guardian of the spring for a drink. He was told: "The price is your right eye." Jerome Bruner writes of "thinking for the left hand." Michael Polanyi wrote of a primary process thinking that is typical of the thinking of children and animals. Psychologists refer to 'autistic' thinking, and it is this last term that I have found most descriptive of and useful in talking about the shadow-side of thinking.

  Autistic thinking (or A-thinking) is an unstructured, non-logical (but not necessarily illogical), whimsical thinking that is the key to creativity. It involves "unconscious processes" but is not necessarily unconscious. Autistic thinking is indulged in, or in some cases happens to one, in ordinary conscious states. The autistic is a kind of dream-world mode of thinking. This left-handed thinking is nevertheless a functional part of reality formation. It is the connecting link between our "clearing" and "forest." It is the pearl of great price. It is the way by which potential unfolds.

  Later I will suggest how this primary process of mind is structured and modified into an adult world view. This structuring process that we call 'maturing' is a modifying procedure that represses and largely eliminates, by the very act of maturation, the open-ended potential which thinking encompasses.

  Michael Polanyi wrote that creative thinking was thinking as a child with the tools of logical structuring given by maturity. This is the key. Most logical structuring is bought at the price of this child-thinking. There remains a certain feyness, a childlike quality, in all great creative people. In them, somehow, a thread remains intact between their modes of thought. It is a return to this primary-process thinking which brings about metanoia, conversion, the Eureka! illumination of creative thinking, the seizure by the gods which restructures an event to allow fire-walking, the transfer of hypnotism which allows non-ordinary structurings of events, and so on.

  It was this re-entrance into primary-process thinking by the adult, matured, reality-adjusted mind that brought about Jesus' Kingdom. The structuring process by which the world is born and shaped anew in a mind is the way by which the mind and its world may be reborn and reshaped.

  Whether this re-entry and reshaping process gives a Kingdom of Heaven, the illumination of E=MC˛, or the double-helix postulate as an "empty category" to be eventually filled with content, is incidental to the process. All leavenings raise the flour. There is no logical, rationed, prestructured criterion "out there" with a divine plan. There is no truth "out there" which our weak minds or souls eventually run across. There is this casual, haphazard, moral process that leaps the logical gaps and brings about newness. And the procedure's only demand is that given talents be invested, risked, doubled, the possibilities explored.

  World view development in a child modifies his primary process thinking, that archetypal mode that melts out into a continuum. This structuring modifies, but also gives the child's world-to-view the form in which, and only in which growth, expansion, and possibility can unfold. World view development limits and thwarts, but there is no other way to have a world-to-view.

  Metanoia changes, to varying extents, this fundamental structure built since infancy. The change of concept is brought about by a retracing of the original formative process of world view development, and a reshaping of the concepts originally formed.

  When the postulate arrives out of the blue, and a person suddenly "sees" a long desired answer to a problem, when "illumination" or understanding is suddenly achieved, this re-formation process has taken place in relation to some specific possibility. All creative mental phenomena involve this autistic thinking and follow a similar pattern of development in the mind. All such phenomena are reality-influencing, or capable of influencing reality. In each case there is a change of concept that changes some aspect of the logical world view and introduces a new "seeing," which itself may eventually bring about new things to be seen within the broad, statistical mode of reality-adjusted, social thinking.

  One cannot induce creative autistic thinking ad lib., however. It is bought at a price. The creative aspect of A-thinking is not controllable, and cannot be duplicated by a computer, for the autistic mode adds something not in the given context. There is a catalystic quality in A-thinking
that gives more than the sum of the parts suggesting and bringing about the new possibility.

  This A-thinking catalyst is not one's personal thinking. Rather, it happens to a person. It happens to a person, though, only after the person has achieved a certain saturation point of his controlled, directed reasoning. The creative will-o'-the-wisp occurs only alter rigorous logical thinking. It is the Spirit that is found only when one has exceeded and gone beyond the lawyers and Pharisees.

  Autistic thinking can only be defined in a roundabout way. For instance, a pianist friend told me of the following experience, the most impressive of his life. His favorite work, one he had lived with for years, was Mozart's last sonata, K576, the one written after the composer's late discovery of Bach. My friend was giving a concert one evening, and was scheduled to play this sonata. Just before commencing, he leaned back for a moment to sense the mood of that contrapuntal texture, and was struck anew by its exquisiteness and his love of it. At that moment, in a single frozen instant out of time, he "experienced" the sonata. It happened to him, rather as Susanne Langer's volume-filled time. Every note, phrase, nuance, shadow and line formed in an ethereal circle of perfection for him. He described it as a volume, a sort of universal whole, perfect, far more than human, and happening to him as something unique and totally outside of himself. Though it had occupied only a second, the occurrence was immeasurable by any kind of time, and was numinous and profound.