The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  The free-synthesis capacity of A-thinking, able to draw on the continuum of reality experience and potential as it does, is what gives all really new ideas their "initial element of foolishness," as Whitehead wrote of all genuinely new notions. Consider, for instance, David Bohm and all those billions of tons of energy from a cubic centimeter of nothing at all, or Jesus moving those mountains with the faith of a grain of mustard seed.

  Piaget felt that autistic thinking corresponded with "primitive psychological causality, implying magic." Belief that any desire whatsoever can influence objects, the belief in the "obedience of external things," sets up a confusion "between self and world," Piaget claimed, which destroys both "logical truth and objective existence."

  Piaget here expresses that intriguing fear the rational mind feels toward autistic processes. This is the cosmic egg's fear of being cracked. Piaget is here the voice of our eternal culture-priest, intoning the dangers of moving outside the common consensus of what constitutes our current egg-dimensions. Don Juan the sorcerer would be contemptuous of Piaget's timidity and narrowness, even as Piaget could rightfully dismiss don Juan.

  Surely we must be selective. Surely we do not casually choose what makes up our current criteria for our "irreducible and stubborn facts" so longed for by the realists. These facts are our given world view and to question them is to threaten our ideation with collapse into chaos. Yet, "Logical truth" and "objective "existence" are variables, formed by cultural agreement. These "Facts" change, much as fashions change -- though to each generation they represent reality as it must then be.

  We represent change as our own emerging from the dark and foolish superstitions of the past and the coming into the light of a final, true, and really modern understanding. Each age proclaims itself the 'Ars Nova' and scorns the 'Ars Antiqua.' Each man believes, as did Erasmus, that the world is just coming awake from a long sleep. Generation by generation we proclaim ourselves the enlightenment. Each age delights in singing a new requiem to its fathers. As we change our inherited representation of the world, the world we deal with changes accordingly.

  In our struggle for an agreeable representation of reality, various systems rise as meteors, pronouncing, in their brief fling, absolutes concerning what we are. The mind is only this, only that. Each system is quietly bypassed as the mind and its reality prove always to be more than this, and more than that. A survey of this parade of self-asserting notions would be a history of the human race. A fairly recent episode lends itself well to the problem of autistic thinking, however, as well as to the nature of our shifting attitudes.

  In the early 1960's there was a meeting of psychiatrists in San Francisco. One important dignitary mounted the rostrum and intoned that the problem of mental disease had been solved. Mental disease was just a chemical imbalance in that electrochemical machine called the brain. Now, chemistry had come to the rescue. Within about three years this certainty was quietly buried, quietly lest anyone be embarrassed. The issue will never prove so simple. The cause of this particular flurry was the growing experimentation with psychedelics, the mind-manifesting drugs, or hallucinogens, as they are variously called. Queen of the chemicals was LSD, and great were the wonders thereof. Apparently psychedelics enabled the mind to bypass the patterns of our ordinary, illusory world view and experience phenomena that had little relation to the everyday world. The experiences may have powerful subjective meaning, occasionally plunging the subject into "universals" and absolutes.

  Psycherelics induce a kind of autistic experience and so are valuable to the present discussion. As stated before, there is no "value judgement" in the autistic mode of thinking. In the autistic mode anything conceivable is "true." The nature of the autistically perceived experience can thus become an exciting area for speculation since ordinary categories no longer apply.

  Hoffer and Osmond, of the Saskatchewan group, in their early (1959) defense of a "chemical psychiatry," recognized that our beliefs influenced the way we perceived the world, and that the "mould for world-making," once formed, resisted change stubbornly. Psychedelics, they mused, allowed the mind to divest itself of the "protective yet dulling layers" of acquired assumptions and rationalizations with which all men are "encumbered." For a little while, it seemed, psychedelics allowed the mind to "see the universe again with an innocent, unshielded eye."

  These early enthusiasms did not bear up well under experience. For one thing, a person's given conceptual frame of reference proved formative, even in the remote regions of psychedelic phenomena. When the patterns of the common world are fractured, our underlying attitudes still influence the nature of the experienced data. Cohen, of USC, pointed out that the "divergent expectations and intent" of the investigators made the difference between heaven and hell from the same ha!lacinogen. Cohen quoted Thomas Aquinas in one saying that can be considered a universal: "Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient."

  Hoffer and Osmond's notion of an "innocent, unshielded view of the universe" proved no more fruitful. So long as a thinking egocenter exists, its fundamental assumptions are a determinant in the experienced universe itself. Stripping off the acquired interests of our world view does not lead to a 'true universe.' Our "acquisitions," as Hoffer and Osmond call them, are the very concepts directing the percepts that constitute the world in which we move, and there is no other world for us. We cannot free ourselves of our clearing in the forest and plunge out into the dark and find truth. If our acquired interests are a cloak that can be shed, we would immediately have to weave another, equally arbitrary garb. There is, in this sense, no going naked in the world.

  Bruner of Harvard tells of studies in perception that have identified over seven million different shades of color between which we can differentiate. We categorize this spectrum into about a dozen groups, or families. This makes a practical, limited representation which we can respond to easily, talk about handily, and think about coherenfiy.

  The spectrum of light "as itself" might be analagous to the continuum of autistic thinking, lying free and untrammeled outside all categories. A handful of primary colors represent the defining disciplines of social thinking, our logic and objective reason. We impose our categories on what we see in order to see. We see through the prism of our categories.

  The world view we inherit has been built up by putting things into objective pigeonholes like this, categories that can be shared. The psychedelic may fracture these structures. Under LSD, for instance, the categories of color, by which we help organize our field of visual possibility, may be dissolved. Then colors may merge, flow together, and not stay put. Faces may suddenly "drip" and run across the floor. Shapes may become fluid and mixing.

  However, to shatter our working models of the universe does not lead to 'truth,' any kind of new data, or, above all, a "true picture" of the universe. The universe, like nature, is a conceptual framework that changes from culture to culture and age to age. Our concepts are to some extent arbitrary constructs but to disrupt or dissolve them with drugs does not free us into some universal knowledge "out there" in the great beyond. There is, instead, the loss of meaningful structures of agreement needed for communion with others. This can lead to the loss of personality definition itself, that which don Juan meant by "loss of soul," or Jesus meant by the "outer darkness."

  This "freedom from false concepts" notion is but a recurrence' of the old Garden of Eden myth, the "noble savage," return-to-nature nonsense of the romantics. Any world view is a creative tension between possibility and choice. This is the tension that holds community and "real" world together. This is the cohesive force of our own center of awareness, the thin line between loss of self to autistic dissolution on the one hand, or slavery to the broad statistics of the world on the other. Perceptions relieved of this natural tension, through drugs or the various occult religious techniques, may well be profound or frightfully chaotic.

  Price, in his preface to Carington's book (Matter, Mind and Meaning), d
iscusses the physiological phenomenon of "ideomotor action." It has been found that an idea or response tends to fulfill itself or execute itself automatically through the muscular apparatus of the body, and will do so unless other ideas are present to inhibit it. Price suggests that this is indicative of a wider operation in life, namely that all ideas have a tendency to realize themselves in the material world in any way they can, unless inhibited by other ideas. This Price-Carington notion will be borne out, I believe, in the exploration taking place here in my book.

  Solley and Murphy spoke of us as immersed in a "sea of stimuli," all "striving for dominance" within us. We are not so easily impinged upon by things, however, and the system of reality growing from our given stimuli is far more dynamic. The "striving" tensions are those of ideas, or ways for grouping this sea of stimuli. Surely a basic stimulus is given us, but each culture, discipline, or ideology, strives for dominance as the prism through which this stimulus will be ordered into a coherent, shared world. This fragmented striving is the charismatic curse of reason that drives us from innocence to experience, from circle to circle. The more thoroughly we search out our past, the more embracing and sweeping we find this "cosmic-egg structuring" to have always been, even in the most archaic of cultures.

  Aldous Huxley considered our consciousness but a segment of a larger one. Normal consciousness is that which has been funneled through the "reducing valve" of brain, nervous system and sense organs. This protects us, Huxley believed, from being "overwhelmed on the surface of the planet." Through drugs, or the various mental cult systems, this valve-reduced reality can be bypassed and "mind at large" partially admitted by the personal psyche. The schizophrenic has lost the way back, and can no longer take refuge in the homemade universe of common sense, the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions. (Ronald Laing might say the schizophrenic may be hiding, not lost, or even on a private adventure from which he simply does not care to come back.)

  "Mind at large" gives to a continuum of events an anthropomorphic shape that the situation may not warrant. Our "reducing valve" may be designed not so much to protect us from being overwhelmed (by those seven million shades of color, for instance?) as designed to simplify and realize, literally select, focus and make real a specific event out of a continuum of possible events. The only reality available in this universe may well be a homemade one.

  Sherwood wrote of an apparent universality of perception in the psychedelic experience. He attributed this "universal central perception" to a single reality. Cohen takes a more nihilistic view, arguing that once the mind is unhinged from normal categories, regardless of the means used, it can only go in a limited number of directions. He called such departures "unsanity" to distinguish them from insanity. He considered "unsanity" the common pathway of the stressed mind. Variations of the unhinged experience contain a common core of necessity, according to Cohen.

  In another context, however, Cohen points out that the underlying motivation impelling the drug taker or systems-follower to break with the norm is the nucleus for what is then experienced. A combination of these two observations by Cohen gives insight into the reality function. The "common core of mind" may be the autistic mode of thinking, itself a kind of mirror for some ultimate notion or desire coming from consciousness.

  Carington considered consciousness an intensified point on a spectrum of unconsciousness. He rejected the metaphors of a "layered consciousness," as found in depth psychology. He favored a "field of consciousness," the mind belonging to this field rather than the field belonging to the mind. Even material objects are only "logical constructions" from different appearances or possibilities for sense data. The limitations of the human mind are thus only matters of fact, not matters of some universal law.

  Carington's working model is related to Whitehead's theory of organism , where the event is the core of reality. No simple location, or set of simple assumptions, can in themselves grasp the "unity of the event." For Whitehead, nature is a structure of evolving processes, and the reality is the process.

  Bruner, in his Study of Thinking, discusses experiments in sensory deprivation. These experiments were designed to find out what happens when a person is shut off from all intake of perceptual data. A subject is isolated in a sound- and light-proofed room. He lies on foam rubber, wears velvet gloves, and everything is done to block out any possibility for sensory intake. Microphones, electrographic apparatus picking up brain waves which are amplified and recorded, and related devices keep tab on the subject's reactions.

  After a period of this womb-like condition, the subject begins to hallucinate. Voices, images, movements, sensations, entire episodes begin to take place. Deprived of ordinary sensory data from which to select according to the needs of his world view, his mind structures a reality, drawing on past data. This structuring happens to the personality, too. He is not necessarily aware that he is hallucinating. He feels himself very much a part of the resulting event. The event takes place around him as an ordinary occasion. His sensory system is in full play, sending appropriate sights, smells, tastes, touches, and so on, as needed by the mind for its reality.

  There is a rough similarity here with the Tibetan 'tulpa' and other psychic creations such as Carlos Castenada's experiences with don Juan (as I will relate later.) Bruner's subjects, however, have no prestructured set of expectancies around which to orient their synthetic creations, and without such, and without the social world as definition and criteria, the experiences tend to become chaotic and nightmarish.

  In 1963, two miners, Fellin and Throne, were isolated for nineteen days in a Pennsylvania mine collapse. After a while they began to be able to "see" and were able to maneuver and improve their conditions. They shared hallucinations, seeing the same imaginary things at the same time. At one time both men saw a great doorway rimmed in blue light, and a flight of marble steps beyond. At another time they saw two men walking along with miner's lanterns and called to them, at which the apparitions faded. The miners were, of course, in a tiny pocket nearly a mile underground, without lights of any sort. One wonders what would have happened had they gone up the blue-lit doorway and steps, as they debated trying. The experiences of folie à deux, or shared hallucinations, had a numinous quality deeply impressing the two rough miners, and the blue light described sounds quite similar to the light of the sacred mushroom experiences of the Mexicans.

  Stephen McKellar argues that all mental experiences, no matter how bizarre and novel, are related to and originate in learned or subliminal information gained from experience. Secondary percepts, those gained vicariously from reading, listening to others, movies, and so on, must be taken into account. We can have perfectly real memories of other people's imaginings, just as we dream on former dream content or have specific childhood memories that originated in dreams or fantasies.

  McKellar claims that no subject matter for thought is possible except from an external source. Our most unrestrained imaginings, works of art and science, all derive from "recent and/or remote perceptions." McKellar seems on strong grounds. Even so esoteric a production as the Yogic 'tulpa' proves to have its inception in commonly-shared perceptions, and, as will be noted with Carlos Castenada's extremely strange experiences, the initial point of departure was some tangible perception from the mundane world.

  Freud's analysis of dreams is one of McKellar's points of reference, however, and there is tacit acceptance of Freud's interpretation of the unconscious as limited to the repressed, peripheral, forgotten episodes of an individual's experience. Yet there are experiences that suggest a mental structure more flexible than the Freudian. There are experiences that point to a collective level of consciousness, and unconscious exchanges. Suspending one's reality adjustment can open one to experiences neither available to, nor amenable to, examination by logical thinking.

  For instance, one rainy afternoon when I was young, friends and I were pleasantly listening to Mahler and chatting of inani
ties when, crossing the room, I suddenly passed out. It was a bone-dry gathering, inside at least, and I had never done such an asinine thing before. Instantly I was "looking" at the hand of my girl, then some 250 miles away, writing me a letter. (She was "shooting me down" as we used to say, a point of no small emotional impact for me.) Immediately I regained consciousness, having been out only momentarily, just long enough to upset my roommate and friends. I told my friend of the letter, later that day. A couple of days later he brought in the mail, amused at the coincidence as he handed me the letter from the girl, postmarked the fateful afternoon. I made my roommate open the actual letter, however, and check as I recited the contents, burned into my brain as they were. This paled my friend and unhinged his day.

  Unconscious exchanges and shared hallucinations between two or three gathered together in a common cause or belief express themselves in many ways. The experiences of Castenada and don Juan will prove to incorporate this phenomenon. Spiritualists, for instance, in their desire for information from "the other side" suspend all criteria of ordinary, social thinking. As a group they enter into a subset of experience, a kind of shared autistic hypnagogic state. Gathering together strengthens their faith in the validity of their system. Their desire for conviction suspends the criteria used in ordinary reality, criteria standing in the way of the esoterica desired.