The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  The believers accept avidly everything produced, since doubt would split the fabric of their state. Eternal knaves feed on eternal fools, of course, and charlatanism runs rife, but so do genuine mind-picking, telepathy, clairvoyance, a kind of yogic-tulpa creation, and a variety of phenomena not available to the ordinary processes.

  Having spent some time at a spritualist "camp," I attempted comment to a true-believing friend. He stated, however, that a wise person would spend twenty years or so in the brotherhood, in careful, devoted study, before attempting to draw any conclusion at all. Twenty, years, indeed far less, of devoted study would only be sustained, of course, by one who had already decided that the framework offered sufficient reward to justify the life investment. That very decision would have set into motion the kind of restructuring of mind the new procedure would require. Further, the mind would make the adjustment, the restructuring of concept, sooner or later, in order to justify the investment of self. The mind would eventually reorganize to get the kind of percepts the new world view would need. It would be a self-verifying maneuver.

  We easily dismiss as illusory and occult such esoteric plays of mind. Two things should be borne in mind, however. First, the productions of these "two or three gathered together" asking for certain things, and agreeing on the means of getting them, are quite genuine. The system produces as it aims to produce. Secondly, and more difficult to recognize, is that the same mirroring function underlies a science, a respectable discipline, a religion, or what have you. This assertion will equally offend the spiritualist, the scientist, and the theologian, since each apparently must represent his system as an absolute "out there" distinct from and objectively existing apart from himself, in order to have the nonambiguous faith to sustain the very fabric of his system.

  Extrasensory experience may be a misnomer, but such occurrences are compatible with Carington's field of consciousness theory, as well as Whitehead's theory. "In a sense," Whitehead once said, "all things are in all places at the same time." Extrasensory influence of a sleeping person's dreams has been investigated at Brooklyn's Maimonides Hospital. Dr. Montague Ullman and psychologist Stanley Krippner used the classic dream investigation technique devised by Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago. By using special equipment, much the same as in the sensory deprivation experiments, records can be made during sleep of eye movements, breathing, sub-vocal activity, brain wave patterns, and so on. From these it can be determined when a person is dreaming.

  A sleeping subject is in one room, all the apparatus attached; a reseacher observing the equipment is in the next room; Dr. Ullman, in a third room, studies a "target picture" and tries to influence the dreams of the sleeping person. The equipment shows when the subject starts dreaming, after which he is awakened and asked to relate the dream. Sealed envelopes, containing pictures, one of which is the "target" picture, are then given the subject, who correctly chooses the one he "saw" in his dreams.

  In one example, Ullman. concentrated on a Gauguin painting, "Still Life with Three Puppies," which had blue goblets in it. The subject dreamed of "a couple of dogs making a noise, and dark blue bottles." In another trial, Ullman concentrated on a painting called Zapatistas, showing followers of the Mexican revolutionary Zapata. The followers march along a road with a range of mountains in the background. The dreamer, when awakened, explained that his dream was about New Mexico. A file of Indians were going to Santa Fe for fiesta time, with great mountains in the background.

  Now the subject had once lived in New Mexico and had seen Indians going to Santa Fe for fiesta. Simple fortuituousness could be presumed, but note that it is only similar data, found already in the subject's background, that is triggered up. Nothing new is given the subject, precisely as McKellar would claim. There is, instead, this calling-up and regrouping of previous perceptual contents in keeping with the stimulus of the nonsensory source. This justifies both Jung and McKellar, making them complementary rather than opposing.

  The blueprint comes from the non-personal source, but it must be filled in with a content individual and unique. Paul Tillich claims that divine answers are given the form of existential questions -- rather the reverse of the above.

  The Russian parapsychogist, Vasiliev, writes of subjecting hypnotized persons to fake mustard plasters. Peasants who had never heard of a mustard plaster had no reaction whatsoever to the fake application. Patients who had experienced a real one suffered the usual red-rashy, heat-irritated skin and sweated profusely. The inexperienced peasants were then given, in their normal state, a real mustard plaster treatment. After that, they produced all the appropriate symptoms in the hypnotic experiments.

  Carl Jung found cases in madmen of experiences beyond the personal background. He told of a schizophrenic patient in his thirties, hospitalized since his early twenties with delusions of grandeur, visions, demonic seizures, and so on. One day the patient, blinking up at the sun, stopped Dr. Jung and showed him how by scrooching up his eyes, he could see the sun's phallus, swinging below the rim of the sun. When one moved one's head from side to side, the phallus could also seen to swing from side to side, and that was the "origin of the winds." This was such a strange hallucination that Jung carefully noted it, along with the patient's history.

  In the course of his studies of mythology, Jung was sent a new book of translations by Dieterich, including the Paris Magical Papyrus, thought to be a liturgy of the Mithraic cult. Here Jung found, stated in the same terms, but in cultic poetry, the identical sun-phallus-wind vision described by his patient. Cryptomnesia, or hidden memory, was ruled out. Jung later came across other references to the vision from Greek and medieval sources.

  Jung used such cases to establish his three-tiered cosmology: consciousness, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. Adopting his system, things can be seen in just this way, though others might use the material as grist for other mills. Anticipating my fourth chapter, on questions and answers, I would mention that the patient's history suggested just the kind of vision he experienced. It was the kind of esoteric, cultic "information" and secret insight for which he had longed in his mundane, uneventful and uneducated adolescence, the very drift which had eventually brought on his reality suspension and produced his retreat from the world.

  Fulfillment of desire was surely one of the elements in the experience. The patient called up from the continuum of past experience the sort of thing he desired. The sun was the trigger for the ancient imagery, and the imagery was as valid to the patient as anything else, since all criteria of ordinary reality adjustment had long since been suspended.

  None of this validates Jung against McKellar. Rather, it shows McKellar's "recent or remote" perceptions to be active on a wider scale than at first evident. The roots of our garden clearing in the forest are not shallow, and the common core of the unhinged mind may run deeper than Cohen suspects. This does not give to this background of ours a character of its own, however. If this continuum of experience is Huxley's "mind at large," such a mind has no criteria or value, and as such, "mind" as we know it is hardly the right term. A phallus swinging from the rim of the sun and causing winds is just as "true" within this continuum as the most sophisticated recent scientitie jargon for the origin of solar winds.

  In his book on mysticism, Princeton's elderly philosopher, Walter Stace, included an experience by the writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler was in solitary confinement for several months during the Spanish Civil War. He was supposedly awaiting execution, and to while away the time he revived his esthetic interest in analytical geometry, scratching theorems on the wall. Euclid's proof that the number of primes is infinite led to a classical example of the spontaneous mystical experience.

  Koestler became enchanted with the idea that a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the infinite could be arrived at by precise and finite means, without "treacly ambiguities." One day the significance of this swept over him "like a wave," leaving him in a "wordless essence, a fragrance of eter
nity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue." This led to a "river of peace, under bridges of silence," that came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Finally there was no river and no I. Koestler's I had ceased to exist -- he had become one with that infinite.

  Koestler apologized for such an embarrassing confession, stating that he had read the Meaning of Meaning and nibbled at logical positivism, and considered himself as tough-minded as anyone. He nevertheless recognized from his experience an "interlocking of all events," an interdependence in all things. He spoke of a "universal pool," and a unity of all things. He had many recurrences of the experience in prison, though they faded and disappeared after his return to normal life.

  Consider now that Koestler's world at that time consisted of four grey stone walls. The only window was a tiny opening high in the wall, from which only a patch of sky could be seen. Week after week passed with no voices, no communications, no modifications to another. It was a kind of "sensory deprivation." All remaining was his growing fascination with geometry.

  Consider, too, that he had been subject to an unannounced firing squad for months. Daily he had heard neighboring cell-mates being led into the courtyard onto which his tiny window opened. Daily he had heard the volley of shots. As with Feinberg's frustration at Einstein's speed limit, did the idea of infinite have real meaning to Koestler as a crack in his finite egg? As the full meaning of "finite" bore in on him inescapably, did his own synthesis of "infinite" begin? Was his finally-occurring experience not a Eureka! illumination in keeping with the nature of the trigger? Did his deep strata of desire not use as vehicle the only outlet available to his tough-minded world view, namely, geometry, free of those treacly ambiguities he had found in systems of belief? Was his experience, then, not only in keeping both with the nature of the trigger and the materials available for synthesis, yet satisfying the underlying ultimate desire? This is the case with all other mental experiences, regardless of the nature of the experience, as I will try to show with the scientific "breakthrough."

  Was Koestler's experience not similar to my friend's Mozart-sonata, or my apple tree illumination? In Chapter Four, I will outline other experiences in science, religion, philosophy, and so on, some of them radical ideas that have played a formative role in our modern world, and will show that they all follow this same general pattern. So we cannot disparage this type of experience as subjective illusion. Rather, it is the way by which the crack in the egg literally materializes.

  The spiritually-minded may be upset that this greatest of human experiences, the religious illumination, is described as the synthetic production of a stressed mind, and not an opening to Huxley's mind at large, James's Over-Soul, the Stoic-Christian moral governor of the universe, or what have you. If the surface nihilism can be penetrated, however, a possibility more profound than either spiritualism or realism can be found. The same function of mind that gives Koestler "intimations of immortality" produces the scientific postulate that changes a reality structure, or allows the Ceylonese Hindu to walk through beds of fire. That the experience is a synthetic construct made by an ultimately committed mind does not lessen its realness, or the implications of the maneuver. Every aspect of our reality has this undercurrent of synthesis.

  For now, I hope to have given some idea of what I mean by "autistic thinking," and the peculiar way in which it is unambiguous. I hope I have given some of its ramifications and suggested some of the ways it mirrors or responds to passionate commitments, tacit beliefs, unambiguous notions. I hope I have suggested how such notions tend to "realize" themselves. Understanding this mirroring capacity of thought, we can avoid the spiritualist trap of granting an authentic or stable character of its own to this nebulous, indefinable, and haphazard play of mind, while yet recognizing the fathomless potential available there, a potential that goes beyond all naive-realist, biogenetic acceptances.

  Jung, Carington, Teilhard, and others suggest a continuum of experience underlying our surface realities. To imply that this continuum is "thought" as we know it can cancel the open end it holds , and we must dismiss universal pools of metaphysical knowledge, a fixed scheme of a priori facts awaiting discovery "out there," or cosmic helping-hands available to clear-thinking minds or pure-minded souls. Attributing characteristics of personality to the function is a projection device which turns the open end into a mirror of ourselves, trapping us in our own logical devices.

  The "universal pool" is as 'much "in here" as anywhere. Being autistic by nature, anything desired can be gotten from it, if one is willing to pay the price and has an ultimate commitment around which the process can orient. Hard discipline of mind and passionate adherence to a belief in spite of all obstacles and all evidence to the contrary, can overcome all obstacles and bring about the necessary evidence. The mirrors of reality play are brought into alignment by a nonambiguous commitment from a conscious mind. The "other mirror" is automatically unambiguous.

  The close relation between our commitments of life and what we perceive was explored by Livingston in the Bulletin of Atomic Science, February, 1963. Livingston discussed the idea, inherited from the Greeks, of a common logic of thinking. Recent studies have questioned this Greek notion. Culture and language affect one's world view, the very process by which we think, and the "logic assumed for the operation of the whole universal process."

  We inherited from Descartes the notion that there is a close correspondence between what we perceive and the "real nature of our environment." Descartes believed that a world of objects existed in a stable form and that reasonable men could "divest themselves of their passions" and by methods of reasoning arrive at an objective comprehension of physical things, social events, and forces.

  Descartes granted us a relatively one-to-one correspondence between our subjective experience and the world "out there." He also gave us the notion that each of us has access to a relatively uncontaminated screen of perceptual experience upon which our judgements and actions can be based.

  Livingston points out that our logical processes of thinking are relative to the language learned. He questions the correspondence between what we perceive and the "real nature of our environment." I would extend his question tol ask: Is there such a thing as a "real nature of our environment"? Cohen assumes that if there is, man can never know it. All we can know, as Bruner says, is our own representation of the world; a representation, Jung might add, carried as a blueprint within our culture, filled with an endless variety of diverse content -- from Solley-Murphy's sea of stimuli, shaped by Sapir-Whorf's concept-percept in this semantic universe of Levi-Strauss's, and so on.

  There is nothing orderly or logical to the function I am trying to outline. I find no evidence that great cosmic powers keep the process on an upward trend, keeping an eye on us to assure our eventual success. There is no hierarchy of criteria or value for what is or is not "realized," made real, by the function. It is a contest of inhibitions and strengths, choices and allegiances. We are the source of value and choice, the source of ideas around which the procedure of our reality orients.

  On the one hand it is argued that there is no world "out there" available to dispassionate observation. Objectivity in relation to reality is a naive delusion on our part. On the other hand, a universal common knowledge is denied. There appears to be no world-mind from which we may get cues, no secret wavelengths for our perceptors.

  There is, nevertheless, an open-ended aspect for us, a creative one, and glimpsed through autistic thinking. There is a bridge between clearing and forest, between logical man and his non-logical potential. William Blake claimed that "anything capable of being imagined is an image of truth." We openly shape reality when we diligently apply every ounce of our logical process to a given desire. We are subject to the same effect on less conscious levels. Our confused, conflicting, and inchoate assumptions also enter as shaping forces in reality, and happen to us as a random, confused fate.

  It takes an ultimate commitment to damp out and exclude other possibiliti
es so that one possibility might formulate and be realized. Autistic thought can synthesize and break into consciousness with anything desired, if the conscious desire is strong enough to win the struggle for dominance. Non-ambiguity is the shaping force of reality. This capacity of mind is remote, elusive, whimsical, but it can catalyze and synthesize ideas, notions, desires, and quests drawn from or suggested by a realized world of events. From this catalytic synthesis we have presented back an enhanced mirror of our concepts that can enlarge our reality itself. This is the way in which "eternity is in love with time."

  Next I will explore the shaping of a world view, our set of concepts built from infancy and childhood, its structure determining the kind of world then available to the mind so shaped.

  3 blueprints and viewpoints

  A social world view, one shared with other people, is structured from our infant minds by the impingements on us from, and the verifying responses to us by, other people. A mind finds its definition of itself not by confrontation with things so much as other minds. We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of a world but to the reality of other thinkers. When we have finally persuaded and/or badgered our children into "looking objectively" at their situation, taking into consideration those things other to themselves, we relax since they are being realistic. What we mean is that they have finally begun to mirror qur commitments, verify our life investments, and strengthen and preserve the cosmic egg of our culture.