The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (12 page)

There is a strong possibility that there is no a priori status for any
one idea as against another idea. Teilhard observed that nature operates
by profusion. According to Nietzche, we hear only the question to which
we are capable of finding an answer. A question to which we can respond
with a full investment of life and energy will influence our "editorial
hierarchy" of mind. Then the kind of data we
accept
as
evidential
will
be different. We will screen out and let in, interpret and synthesize,
on a different basis.
The success of the atomic postulate influences the way we look on the
birth and history of that hypothesis. Our current reality is not just
represented as atomic, it is atomic. The atomic hypothesis, therefore,
must have been a correct ~'hunch" about a pre-existing state of mechanical
affairs. Any other attitude is surely madness.
Consider, however, that the final fruits of the atomic notion were born
from an ecology greatly different from the original grounds wherein the
early and tentative questions first appeared. And pursuit of the notion
was one of the formative processes in changing the ecology itself.
The translations and testings of all the myriad pieces of the puzzle
expanded the original basis for possible thoughts about atoms. The
expansion of the ecology was the result of both a peripheral and
direct play of passionate believers, all those people working out the
contingencies and correspondences with reality that would prove necessary
for the answer's fruition. We tend to forget that a century and a half
separated Dalton's early overtures from the final fruits at Alamogordo,
and that Dalton himself was a late-comer to the atomic fantasy. Each of
the many people involved could hardly have been aware that they were
laying the groundwork for Oak Ridge or Hiroshima. The overall drift of
possibility toward such a thing as atomic energy may be seen as a kind
of self-sustaining idea seeking its own expression over many centuries.
Passionate belief is the chief ingredient in any question-answer
function. William James referred to "overbelief" as the subjective gloss
given by people to an experience or an idea that they felt revealed a
universal truth. Laski considers
overbelief
the most desired answer
to an urgently-asked question. Once we have been seized by a question,
that is, once we have accepted a question as ultimately meaningful to us,
we set about gathering the kinds of material the question needs to build
its answer.
Poincaré was fascinated by the way ideas coalesce in the mind to produce
original thinking. He thought of all the related ideas as "hooked atoms,"
which, in the unconscious work of mind, collide and give rise to new
combinations. The process is hardly one of chance, he noted, since the
separate ideas involved have been selected according to the definite
purpose in mind, and are the ones from which the desired solution may
reasonably be expected.
Wallas distinguished four stages in the process of postulate building:
preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The preparation
period is the seizure by the notion; Laski would call this the asking of
the question. This dedicates the mind, rules out conflicting drives,
and organizes the energy to the task. Laski's search for materials for
answer is the gathering of Poincaré's "hooked atom," feeding them into
the hopper with selective care. This part of the process may take many
years, as with Hamilton's quaternions, or may be comparatively rapid,
as with Einstein's idea.
The incubation period is the "unconscious work," wherein the collisions
of hooked atoms occur. Laski speaks of the fusion of materials, which is
an unconscious process. This is the stage I have called autistic, since
it grinds along its way without conscious control. The illumination is
the
Eureka!
experience itself, the final fusion of all materials, the
breakthrough when the barriers of ordinary logical screening are relaxed.
Verification involves the translation of the experience, as found in
Hamilton's ten to fifteen years needed to work out all the ramifications.
This is the point separating wheat from chaff. Laski speaks of the
crucial "testing of the answer" to see if it can be fitted into the
common domain. This is no simple jigsaw puzzle placement, however,
but is rather a subtle play of many contingencies.
Bruner points out that our ordinary experience is a categorizing, a
placing in a syntax of concepts. We can explore connections heretofore
unsuspected by metaphoric combinations that leap beyond regular systematic
placements. In his
Essays for the Left Hand
, Bruner explores the
creative process and ends with a pattern similar to that of Laski
and Wallas. First in Bruner's outline, there must be a
detachment
from the commonplace. (You could not be a follower of Jesus until you
hated the ordinary world, rejected it, gave it up as your "systematic
placement.") One detaches from the world in order to commit oneself to
the
replacing
of the conventional with a new construct.
After this commitment of self to the task, the work itself becomes
a balance between the
passion
, which gives a "superior degree of
attention," (the capacity for selective blindness), and a
decorum
that
counters the enthusiasms with a "love of form," an
etiquette
toward
the object of passionate effort, and a respect for the materials involved.
The creative movement, according to Bruner, is rounded out by the
"freedom to be dominated by the object." Blake noted that only by a
long and intensive training and discipline, getting beyond the mechanics
of technique, could the mind truly utilize its imagination. Yet this
utilization meant a final breaking with all the forms and boundaries of
the very discipline necessary for the ability to develop. The Divine
Imagination moves the mind as it pleases, the wind bloweth where it
listeth, but only when the way has been prepared by a discipline of
mind. In every recorded case of
Eureka!
illumination, the final
breakthrough of the postulate occurs at a moment when the logical
processes have been momentarily suspended, a moment of relaxation from
serious work.
If one is dominated by the object of desire, the work of creation takes
over, Bruner says, and "assumes the role of dominance." Then the artist or
scientist serves the new work. I would add saint to Bruner's listing. In
turn, the life, then committed to that line of action, is justified
only if the work succeeds. Thus the initial commitment breeds an ever
more stringent allegiance and striving for successful completion. The
new work is served since the new work serves the life and justifies it.
Mircea Eliade spent several years in the Orient, studying the Yoga
discipline. He was quite struck by it, and his exhaustive book on the
subject was sympathetic. He found it an arduous discipline, requiring
years of development. The real technique hinges on a mental "blankness"
that bypasses the world of "false and illusory notions." Stilling the flux
of mental activity is in itself no small achievement. Having done this,
the Yoga is convinced that a truth
happens
to him. What happens is so
totally at variance with the "world" that no prestructuring on his part
seems possible as a determinant.
On examination, however, the Yoga system proves to be a clear example
of the question-answer function as outlined by Laski, Bruner, and
Wallas. Eliade writes that
this
world is rejected,
this
life
depreciated, because it is
known
that something else exists. And
that something else is beyond temporality, beyond suffering. The Indian
rejects the profane world because he believes without question in the
reality of a sacred mode of being, and so we find from the very outset
what Bruner calls the
detachment
from the commonplace.
The
commitment
to the new construct is adhered to passionately. All
around him the Yogin sees his superiors able to do things that cannot
be done so long as one remains in the ordinary world. Nothing less than
concrete production is ever the motivation or the expectation. By their
fruits they are known. Each particular discipline had its particular
short-term rewards in addition to the long-range goal of Nirvana. The
initiate absorbed an expectancy of the goals as he was incorporated into
the system, just as a physics student does. Should the novitiate fail
to produce tangible results, his life had failed. His long associative
learning provided strong stimulus to overbelief formation in keeping
with his traditions. His passion was carefully balanced with his decorum
and respect for the tradition. His mind was finally transformed, just
as Kazantzakis', Hamilton's, or Einstein's, in respect to each of their
disciplines and goals. Where the faith is simple the test of the faith
is simple. The Yogln had to produce: walk on fire, produce extraordinary
body heat, reverse any of the bodily functions, and in general overcome
the ordinary fated necessities of life. Nothing less than actuality was
expected, or accepted as proof of "arrival."
The Yogin's environment was one of expectation of esoteric phenomena, and
acceptance of such esoterica is commonplace within that environment. This
is no small part of the entire fabric and possibility therein. It took
several centuries to build up the kind of scientific environment we have
today, the ecology in which the particular esoterica we produce can be
thought of, accepted by mind, and brought about. Countless centuries
have gone into the production of the sets of expectancies shaping the
Yoga's sensory world. And, of course, the realists from
our
system
smugly dismiss as nonsense reports of the non-ordinary reality produced
by Yoga.
Answers arrive through novel media. It is a matter of esthetics what
label is given, but the mind's predisposition toward one metaphor and
against another has a damping effect on the kinds of possibilities open
to it. The English occultist, Douglas Hunt, for instance, relates a
story from Benker's
Gepenster und Spuk
in which a Munich engineer
came home one day to find, to his alarm, none other than himself,
"seated at the drawing board," busily sketching. This "mirror-image,"
or
Doppelgänger
, which has caused some terror through the ages, had
worked out the solution to a problem which had worried the engineer for
days. The twin-image had supposedly penned out the entire problem, and
there it lay before the startled engineer's eyes. The example is given by
Hunt as proof of astral projection, exteriorization, or out-of-the-body
experience, as it is variously called.
No scientist could tolerate such occultist terminology or definitions.
Hypnagogic imagery, however, is quite respectable. No less than the
great Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, otherwise just Kekule,
professor of organic chemistry at Bonn from 1865 fill his death in 1896,
conceived the theory of the benzene ring, one of the most important
theories in all modern chemistry, and one of the most original ideas
of modern times, in a
hypnagogic state
. He actually "saw" the ring
in visual image clearly and distinctly right before him, as occurs in
all hypnagogic imagery. Surely it took no little doing to translate the
strange imagery into terms compatible with his brotherhood, but the nature
of the whole experience is typical of most discoveries. In the same way,
Descartes appears to have encountered the basic notions of his analytical
geometry -- in this quasi-dream state.
Laski wondered about all those scientific breakthroughs that fail to "pass
the appropriate tests" of translation. Obviously they, too, arrive with
initial certitude and conviction. We seldom hear of the ones that fail,
she noted, though evidence strongly suggests they are in a majority. The
question arises why wrong
Eureka!s
arrive at all.
Bruner supposes it to be an heuristic device of the mind, leading us on
until we finally arrive at proper conclusions. This attributes to the mind
a subconscious foreknowledge of the proper answer, which automatically
places the proper answer in an a priori state of permanence. Why,
with the foreknowledge already there (wherever
there
could be), would
the mind keep stopping at so many false or premature places -- playing
tricks on itself, as it were, and hardly just for fun since lives invest
in answers and are ruined when the answers prove unacceptable. This
further attributes to unconscious processes a value-judging capacity
quite counter to evidence.
Rather, autistic thinking acts on all possibility, without judgment,
since value is a capacity of logical reasoning only. The choices for
possibility are suggested by the conscious mind's own value selections,
and the material with which the autistic synthesis must work are
those drawn from the experienced world. Nature operates by profusion
as Teilhard said. All answers created are "true" to this nature,
but not all will fit the tight limitations of the logical framework
of the recipients triggering the very procedure. We might say that an
infinite potential casually produces a thousand answers, one of which
fits the carefully-defined jigsaw puzzle of the rational mind. A new
puzzle could be organized around any of the pieces randomly produced,
provided the rational mind were willing or able -- which it is not --
to change its total orientation so casually. All postulates are thus
"true" in some context.
The sum total of the experienced world does not necessarily afford the
new knowledge attained by the
Eureka!
hypothesis. The illumination
"given" is generally of a character and nature larger than life, greater
than the sum total of all data leading up to it. For instance, you can
add the total thought from John Dalton, through Avogardo, Mendelejeff,
Arrhenius, Planck, Bohr and all the others of that rich century and a
half preceding and contemporaneous with Einstein, and never come up with
a final sum that is Einstein.