The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read online

  The infant's dream-like association of ideas is slowly won over to an agreement of what should constitute reality. By the time our reasoning has developed enough to reflect on the process by which our reasoning has formed, we are part and parcel of the whole process, caught up in and sustaining it. By the time the young rebel reaches the age of rebellion he is inevitably that against which he would rebel, his linear thrust ending as a pale reflection of the circle from which he would break.

  Edward Hall writes that it is impossible for us to divest ourselves of culture, for it has penetrated to the roots of our nervous system and determines how we perceive the world. We cannot act or interact except through the medium of culture. Thus Whitehead could write of "fundamental assumptions" unconsciously presupposed by all the variant systems within an epoch. People do not know that they are tacitly assuming, for no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them; they are always merely responding to "obvious facts."

  Whately Carington spoke of the limitations of the individual mind as matters of fact, not of law. We are limited by our agreements on possibility. Agreement is a common exclusion of alternate possibilities. Agreement is the cement of social structure. Two or three gathered together, agreeing on what they are after, may create a subset in which their goals can be achieved, even though folly in the eyes of the world. The world in this case means a set of expectancies agreed upon, a set excluding other possibilities.

  Cornell's Gibson referred to a "visual field" as a constantly-shifting light pattern, bringing to mind Bruner's seven million shades of color. Gibson refers to the "visual world" as distinct from this "field." In the formation of a visual world, sensory data from other sources are used to correct the visual field. These "other sources" are the conceptual framework, the world view formation, built in the formative years. Seeing is a synthetic process incorporating our conceptual assumptions and esthetic conditionings.

  Edward Hall points out that we are less actively aware of seeing than we are of talking. It is difficult to grasp that talking and understanding are synthetic processes, overlapping and incorporating an intricate network of varied responses. Much more difficult is the idea that seeing is subject to the same qualification. The variables that enter into seeing prove enormous, nevertheless, and people from different cultures not only use a different language, but inhabit a different sensory world, as Hall puts it.

  So, when Cohen wrote that the world we see is far from an exact image of the physical world, I wondered how one could ever tell. He added that this was the case since perception is highly variable and often erroneous, and that we can only perceive what we can conceive. Cohen observed that we tend to see only what can be incorporated into our established frame of reference, and tend to reject anything not fitting. Cohen then presumed, however, that our notions of what is "out there" are based on an "indistinct uncertainty," and I thought of Blake's comment: "If the sun and moon should doubt, they'd immediately go out." Failure of nerve is the major sin. Cohen went on to conclude that for all we know, the "thing called reality may exist, but we shall never see it," and at this point I protested.

  Is there an "exact image" of a physical world? Consider even photography. The same subject can be hideous or lovely according to the skill of the photographer. Photography is an art because it can catch aspects of reality that escape us, precisely as painting can do. I can traverse the same tired street year in and year out, familiar with every twig and stone -- but a photographer can suddenly present me with a photograph of it that makes me catch my breath much as from a poem or a piece of music. I refuse to believe the "police lineup" photograph on my driver's license is my real image; as with all aspects of the police mentality it somehow has sought out the worst possible aspects of me.

  Is the strange abstraction of the physicist an "exact image" of a world? The physicist is the last to claim this. But his at times absurd abstractions become contingencies in the processes of a physical world. Does the word 'real' mean at all what the naive realists and the tough-minded have claimed? What could the "atomically-verifiable statement" conceivably mean? Our error is in considering our concept-percept function to be separate and distinct from reality, rather than a dominant force in the shaping of it.

  The condition called reality exists as an ever-current sum total of our representations and responses. Whatever we see is what reality is for us, and there will never be, from here to eternity, any other kind of reality for us. And this reality will always be in a process of mutation and change. Huxley's "homemade world" is a necessity in any context. There is no magic, there is only The Creation. There is no supernatural, but there are an infinite number of possible natures. A point of centered thinking organizes and survives by relationship with similar points of thinking. It is a matter of agreement, a structuring of similar patterns of shared response.

  We know now, according to Jerome Bruner, that our nervous system is not the "one-way street" it was long considered to be. All minds have a program of their own. The mind sends out monitoring orders to the sense organs and the "relay stations." The orders specify priorities for different kinds of environmental message. Selectivity is the rule. We used to think of the nervous system as a simple telephone switchboard, bringing in messages from outside. We know now, Bruner claims, that the system is every bit as much an "editorial hierarchy" -- a policy-making device determining what is perceived.

  Edward Hall, with his "proxemic research," speaks of 'vision' as a "transaction between man and his environment in which both participate." Hall explores how we unconsciously structure our visual world. Perhaps we can consciously seize the process. William Blake antedated all this by two centuries. He said he used his eyes to see with , in active vision -- a process in which creative imagination played a principal role. He did not look from his eyes as through a window, in passive sight, as Descartes or Locke would claim.

  How can firm statements be made about a world to itself? The very statement enters as a contingency in that world. What is real is a variable. Though a regressing contingency stretches back to a hypothetical First Day, the visual world is what we practice day by day, and our capacity for practice is infinitely varied. Our "editorial policies" are more flexible than we dare imagine. Our range of selectivity is boundless. All things are possible to him who believes -- that is, to him who believes in the possibility.

  We feel that surely, to a man of good will and honesty, an honest look should inform of an honest reality -- and we mean, of course, our reality. This common assumption has been questioned in our day -- and this is a crack in the cosmic egg of the realisms of the past few centuries. Our survival may well depend on this crack splitting the blind world of politician and pentagonian. The crack should lead us to find an open-ended possibility, provided we can open to other world views, those of Oriental and archaic cultures for instance, as valid, rather than as objects for destruction that our own might reign supreme.

  The open end of human potential is built into the blueprint of mind, and is contained in that mode I have called 'autistic.' This is blocked, however, by blindness of viewpoint , and yet the autistic can be structured and realized only by assuming viewpoints. The openness nevertheless happens to us in peripheral and unsuspected ways. One of the most intriguing of these ways is the procedure of ultimately asked and passionately adhered to questions. The ways in which questions form in the mind and are answered is the next part, and the central part, of my exploration.

  4 questions and answers

  The English scientist, Edward de Bono, writes of "lateral and vertical thinking." Since Aristotle, he points out, vertical thinking, which I have called reality-adjusted thinking, or logic, has been given the place of supremacy. In actuality, de Bono writes, all truly new ideas, by which new eras of reality have come into play, have been products of lateral thinking. Following on one great lateral opening of mind, the vertical thinkers can busy themselves for generations. De Bono likens the activity of vertical thinking to digging post ho
les deeper and deeper, along the lines established by lateral breakthroughs of thinking.

  In this chapter I will elaborate on how the postulate, the Eureka! discovery, the illumination, of lateral thinking, come about. A few examples were given in Chapter Two, when I claimed that these "autistic eruptions" into logical thinking suggested a clue to the way reality shapes, the way the potential of the "dark forest" is given shape by ideas arising from our cultural clearings.

  The relation of questions and answers is an example of the mirroring function between the modes of mind. Answers are shaped by the questions demanding them, just as the question is finally shaped by the nature of the answer desired. In this way our experience shapes and moves as desire reaching for the unknown.

  A question is a seed of suggestion which we plant into that continuum of synthesis I have called autistic thinking. The question's germination takes place in ways unavailable to conscious thought, but only in a ground prepared and nourished by conscious thought. The synthesis flowers as the Eureka! illumination, that dramatic breakthrough wherein we are convinced of having received a universal truth.

  There are no limits to the kinds of Eureka! we may experience. Verification of any prejudice, fulfillment of any desire can be obtained. Polanyi pointed out that the procedure of mind involved here follows St. Paul's formula of faith, works, and grace. Faith is a neutral function, however, and any kind of belief can stimulate passionate work. Grace, unfortunately, is given according to the nature of the faith, the content of the work, the triggers around which the synthesis can organize.

  The scientist, the idiot-fringe philosopher, the cult prophet, the devout Christian, the withdrawn Hindu, may each find their respective pearls in this same sea of thought. The function of question-answer is the same in all cases. The triggering desires, the metaphors of allegiance, the dictates of training, the techniques of attainment, may all differ radically, and give correspondingly different products, but underneath is the single function of representation-response, undergoing analysis throughout this book.

  Back in 1935, Bertrand Russell, in his book Religion and Science, pointed out that Catholics, but not Protestants, could have visions in which the Virgin Mary appeared. Christians and Mohammedans, but not Buddhists, may have great truths revealed to them by the Archangel Gabriel. The list could go on, of course, and Russell was obviously right -- but he was right for the wrong reasons. His conclusion was a product of nineteenth century naive realism, and a defense of vertical thinking as the only true indicator of "real things." In this chapter I hope to show the sterility and narrowness of Russell's viewpoint, and to suggest that his attack on religion was a case of pot calling kettle black.

  Sir William Rowan Hamilton was professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Dublin. His 'Quaternion Theory' has played a vital role in modern mechanics. The theory "happened to him" as a Eureka! discovery, an illumination, while walking to Dublin one morning with Lady Hamilton. As they started across Grougham Bridge, which his boys afterward called Quaternion Bridge, right there, in such an unlikely spot, the "galvanic circuit of thought closed," as Hamilton put it in metaphor fitting to the interests current to his time, and the "sparks which fell" from the closing of this circuitry were the fundamental equations making up his famous theory -- a theory which generations of vertical thinkers have happily explored.

  At the very moment of illumination there washed over Hamilton the understanding that an additional ten to fifteen years of his life would be required to translate fully the enormity of the insight given in that second. Marghanita Laski, investigating the nature of the mental maneuver involved, notes that the experience itself filled an 'intellectual want' of long standing. In a letter written shortly before the discovery, Hamilton spoke of his long-cherished notion having "haunted" him for some fifteen years. A recent renewal of his old passion had given him a "certain strength and earnestness for years dormant." This renewed diligence and application to the mathematics involved furthered the long collection of material for the synthesis of the desired answer.

  The historian, Arnold Toynbee, had a mental illumination of history , fittingly enough, and in the incongruously prosaic setting of Buckingham Palace Road. There he suddenly found himself in "communion" not with just some particular episode of history, but with "all that had been, and was, and was to come," an apt description of a mystical-autistic seizure. In that experience Toynbee was directly aware of the "Passage of History" gently flowing through him in a mighty current, his own life "welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide." His communion both verified his life investment, and furthered it as stimulus.

  Albert Einstein spoke in reverent tones of his illumination giving rise to his famous theory. He never doubted that he had been privileged to glimpse into the very mathematical mind and physical heart of all things. James R. Newman spoke of Einstein's 30-page paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," as embodying a "vision." He observed that poets and prophets are not the only ones to have visions, but that scientists do so as well. They glimpse a peak perhaps never again seen, but the landscape is "forever changed." Their life is then spent describing what was seen, elaborating on the vision that others might follow.

  Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek novelist and poet. He was an adherent to the Bergsonian concept of the élan vital, a spirit transcending matter and transforming it into spirit; an "onrushing force throughout all creation which strives for purer and more rarified freedom."

  In a final assault on the meaning of existence, Kazantzakis retreated to Mount Athos, that near-legendary Greek mountain where no woman has ever set foot, but ascetics and monastics abound. For two years Kazantzakis devoted himself to contemplation. He spent months teaching his body to endure cold, hunger, thirst, sleeplessness and every privation. Then he turned to his spirit, where, in painful concentration he sought to conquer within himself the "minor passions, the easy virtues, the cheap spiritual joys, the convenient hopes."

  Kazantzakis finally experienced a tremendous vision, in keeping with his desire for verification of his ultimate concern. In his numinous experience, his life-work, the belief he had hammered out all his years, was both clarified and verified. His illumination happened one night and he "started up in great joy," seeing the "red ribbon" left behind in the ascent, within us and in all the universe, by his "certain Combatant." Kazantzakis clearly saw those "bloody footprints ascending from inorganic matter into life and from llfe into spirit." It was this, the transmutation of matter into spirit that was the great secret. Here was the meaning of his own life, to transmute, even in his own small capacity, matter into Spirit, the highest endeavor, and by which he might reach a harmony with the universe.

  Jean-Paul Sartre had a diabolical mystical experience, an "extraverted," or conscious one, in which he "saw" the whole world to be a single, unified, grey, jelly-like protoplasm of pain, horror, and meaninglessness. This is completely opposite to the mystical experience of Jacob Boehme, also a conscious one. Walter Kaufman, with his Faith of a Heretic, claimed a negative experience that verified, that is gave a numinous, "universal" kind of rightness to, his agnostic position.

  St. Augustine was driven by his desire for religious conviction, but felt blocked by a myriad of minor allegiances inhibiting the single devotion demanded by Christian belief. Little by little he damped down and inhibited the various drives of ego and flesh that prevented his opening to transformation. Augustine knew what his goals were, however. He longed for a certain experience of total seizure because he had heard others speak of such an experience, and he had seen the evident results. His longing finally reoriented his own "hierarchy of mind," making his own "new-seeing" possible. (That what he finally "saw" was a synthesis of his own desires -- not some absolute or universal "out there" knowledge -- is clearly evident from the Stoic nature of the Christianity resulting from Augustine, a point to which I will briefly return in the last part of this book. )

  Laski contrasts Augustine's complex persona
lity and search with John Wesley's simpler one. Wesley was, though a sincere, practicing Christian, not one of the twice-born. He had simply never doubted God or felt removed from a divine presence. All around him his fellow workers were experiencing dramatic conversions, however, and Wesley wanted the same stamp of authenticity for his own formulations. He investigated in detail the moment he sought; he knew what it must feel like. He was moved by "appropriate influences at significant moments," according to Laski's study. He knew the question he was asking, and the answer desired. He finally achieved his conversion and it was just as dramatic as that hoped for, just as real as could be desired, precisely toward which he had long aimed.

  The asking of a question with passionate concern for its answer, a concern which demands life investment, suggests a door which will sooner or later be found. Whether it is successfully opened to the public is another matter, but if a current world view can accommodate a new synthesis, the new idea may prove to be the case. A new idea fails if it involves too great a sacrifice of invested belief. If the new idea triggers a passionate enough pursuit to make suspension or abandonment of previous beliefs, or current criteria worth the risk, however, the new idea can change the reality structure.