The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (19 page)

Smythies, you recall, considered hallucination to be a normal part
of every child's psychological life. These hallucinatory capacities
are gradually repressed because of negative social values. It is said
that Blake's father paddled him for seeing angels in the windows, so
it must have been Blake's mother who helped keep his threshold of mind
open. Carl Jung's father was a stiff and pedantic cleric, but according
to Jung his mother was almost mystically inclined. Both Blake and Jung
retained a marked degree of hallucinatory capacity and were capable of
creative and imaginative thought.
Trance experience is a disengagement from ordinary reality orientation. It
is a suspension of the ordinary criteria, or common consensus. Trance falls
into the autistic mode of thinking. The kind of grown person who is able
to suspend his reality orientation is the one who retains a pleasant
recollection of former disengagements. His childhood fantasies were forms
of play in which parental tolerance, approval, or participation played a
specific part. The child could always come back to a warm security. The
threshold between autistic and reality thinking became a well worn path,
a door well hinged and oiled, through which access was easy and safe.
The parents were the ones who had structured the infant autistic responses
into a communicable world of others in the first place. Fantasy play then
repeated the essentials of the long development, each time for a new and
novel kind of mental adventure. The child who feels secure and comfortable
in "flexible role taking," as Hilgard called it, and in creating fantasy
and adventure without intense self-criticism, can learn to become absorbed
easily in new interests or esoteric points of view. A variety of such
new experience will keep alive in adolescence and adulthood the ability
to relinquish reality and enter non-ordinary states.
Having found that he can let go of reality adjustment in favor of other
experiences, confident in his ability to return to the world, he has a
favorable background for acceptance of novelty. On this background new
experience can be grafted, constantly reinforcing the native autistic
ability. Without this uncritical spirit of adventure, however, this
faculty of mind is repressed until it atrophies, rather as speech in a
child missing the formative elements in language development.
Jane Belo, in her study
Trance in Bali
, makes it clear that when trance
seizure is socially acceptable, desirable, and a mark of esteem, as it is
among the Balinese, it is found on a wider scale than in the west. Trance
entrance was the high point of Balinese social life. It provided each
participant with a unique expression and outlet, and was for onlookers
an adventure otherwise lacking in the easy, static, island life.
The characteristics of the trance state. according to Hilgard, are
directly related to childhood. There is the same blurring of fantasy
and reality, the enjoyment of pretense and sensation, the excitement of
omnipotence, and the implicit following of
adult
words.
These traits are easily seen in the Balinese child trance-dancers,
who function as an integral part of the society. Chosen for their trance
ability at age seven or so, the children demonstrated immediately on first
seizure an uncanny ability to perform automatically and with finesse
the highly ornate and difficult Balinese dances. This impressed Jane
Belo, but I would point out that the children had watched such dancing
all their short lives. A seven-year-old has pretty well absorbed his
culture. And trance seizure gives complete confidence, a total recall,
and perfect synthesis of material.
In this activity, childhood autisms, with their excitements of
pseudo-dangers, could merge with the adult world itself and win approval
and acclaim. Small wonder the young eyes missed nothing, and that the
unconscious synthesis was made so readily once the mind had developed
to the point where such was possible. The little
boys, meanwhile, played at Kris-dancing, mimicking with
sticks the self-stabbing (ngoerek) postures of the adult males, laying
all the groundwork needed for their own seizures when the time came that
such would be in keeping with the social modes. This self-stabbing of
the adult Kris-dancers, by the way, was designed to really stab and draw
blood, unlike the Ceylonese whose purpose was a-causal by nature, designed
to bypass the world of cause-effect. On the other hand, the little girl
trance-dancers danced blithely over hot coals without fear or harm.
Back to the Western world, Hilgard points out that the hypnotist fills
the same role in the trance state that the parent once filled for the
child. The final phase of the hypnotic process parallels precisely that
phase in the development of the infant's ego in which its boundaries
initially expanded, that is, when his world view was inculcated by
parental response and demand. This procedure, if you recall my second
and third chapters, unconsciously patterns the image of the parents, an
image shaping the autistic mind into a reality-adjusted, communicable
member of the society. The adult who can freely
abandon
his common
world view and retreat to the unformed
autistic
is the one who feels
security with the hypnotist, as he once was secure with his parents in a
similar function, crossing the same threshold passage between autisms and
the world of others. What takes place is a reproduction of the natural
developmental processes of early experience.
The ability to relinquish reality and enter trance states must wait
until a fairly firm reality picture is itself built up. Trance abilities
are lost, unless retained by the associations mentioned, somewhere
in early adolescence. Somewhere between twelve and fourteen logical
development, which means a final adjustment to the world-of-others,
becomes the complete criterion of concept -- the ruling hierarchy of
mind. This hardening of world view generally represses the autistic modes,
with their free synthesis, into fully unconscious, lost potentials.
The small percentage under discussion retain the autistic mode as a
freely-possible subset. Trance entrance bypasses the ordinary criteria
for data selection, and draws on the ordinary world as needed by the
novel suggestions induced.
The most important aspect of autistic thinking, and one I may have
emphasized ad nauseam, is that it has no value judgment. It has
no criteria for what shall or shall not be synthesized. This same
qualification and limitation holds in all trance states, a point of major
importance, and one overlooked by cults. The person in trance, though
he has an enormously rich background to draw on for synthesis, remains
a blank slate -- at least when his entrance is through a hypnotist. The
person can draw on background not from his
own
value system, since
that has been suspended to
create
the trance state, but draws on his
background perceptually in response to the concepts of the hypnotist. The
"over-all ego" retains its ordinary relationship with both hypnotist
and world. It is the partially regressed subsystem that is surrendered
to the hypnotist's control. And it is this subsystem that is receptive
to novel thought formations, novel restructuring of the perceptual world.
Immediately it should be asked, concerning the Balinese trance states:
Who
, then, is directing
their
conceptual systems? Who is determining
the selection of concepts for response in self-induced trance? For
the Balinese it is the cultural image, the socially-shared set of
expectancies, built up over untold generations, that acts as the trigger
for autistic synthesis. The trances are self-induced, but within the
confines of the proper social setting. The cultural image functions
as the directing selector; it functions as the hierarchy of mind --
a factor that enters heavily into Jesus' Kingdom and don Juan's path,
as will be explored later.
This cultural imagery was clearly evident in the Ceylonese experience,
and was one of the many reasons the poor Protestant missionary nearly
burned to death. As with the language trigger, the process seems to
be the sowing of a small wind to reap a whirlwind. The cultural image,
given the proper triggering for synthesis, seems to carry an enormous
force of its own.
Hilgard likens the surrender of world view for restructuring by a hypnotist
to the transference of patient to analyst attempted in psychiatry. A
successful transfer is both subject to and limited only
by
the
conceptual framework and capacity for belief of the hypnotist himself.
The function of world view development is a natural, imitative process,
building on acquisition of given data. It is profoundly complex within
this simple pattern, however, and there may be an untold number of
innate capacities inborn and awaiting the proper triggers that would
give unique and novel experiences. The partial restructuring of world
view, by repeating the initial steps through trance induction, indicates
some of the range of possibility, a range going beyond any
particular
world view or set of concepts.
An interesting account of a self-induced anesthesia appeared in a medical
journal (1963), when the well-known doctor, Ainslie Meares, underwent a
tooth extraction. The dental surgeon performing the operation described
the details. First, an incision had to be made in the gums, laying bare
the bone over the third molar. This bone was then removed with a chisel,
exposing the roots of the tooth near the apices, after which the tooth
was removed by forceps. No anesthetic was used. The dental surgeon asked
Dr. Meares to write out his own subjective reactions.
Dr. Meares, the patient, had published widely on therapy, and had served
as president of the International Society for Clinical and Experimental
Hypnosis. Thus the integrity of the two doctors seems beyond question.
Meares was capable of self-induced trance. Though normally sensitive to
pain, he was well aware of the anesthetic possibilities of trance. He
explained to the surgeon that he would signal "ready" when in the proper
state of mind, and that he would also signal should it be necessary to
halt the proceedings.
The idea of halting the operation never occurred to Meares. When he
heard the chiseling of the bone he knew an instant's irrational anger
that the surgeon might have injected anesthetic without his knowledge
since he felt no pain. The doubt quickly vanished, however, since he
realized that he felt every detail of the work being done, just without
the pain of it. There was, further, almost no sign of blood during the
operation, or any trace afterward. Dr. Meares suffered no after-effects,
felt perfectly normal and took his family out to dinner that night.
Here then is the technique of the hook-swinger, the fire-walker,
the cultist, adapted to specific beneficial needs by an intelligent
medical man. He carried into a trance state his own ego awareness. He
had predetermined the idea around which his subset would orient. He had
filtered out those elements of his ordinary world that he did not want,
and had set up his expectuncles for those he needed to retain.
The trance part of his experience was a voluntary releasing of his
ordinary logic, while logically controlling the autistic results. That
portion of logic which cannot escape ambiguity, which cannot avoid the
excluded possibilities, was bypassed. The secret involved is thus an
inner agreement with one's self.
There is, then, this capacity of the adult to bypass the world
selectively, while drawing on that world for a particular synthesis. This
is only a peculiar and specialized form of the way all pursuits and
disciplines work, as briefly outlined so far in my book.
Hilgard presumes that our trance experiments have so far been
role-playing only, and wonders what trance possibilities there are for
"inner experience" itself. If the autistic mode were an experience
level in its own right, this might be another possibility. Evidence
is so far against the notion. The necessity for some sort of guiding
stimulus or triggering, some seed for synthesis, cannot be avoided. The
kind of trigger, whether furnished by the conscious manipulations of a
hypnotist or the cultural patterns of expectancy unconsciously assumed
and synthesized, will determine the nature of the "inner experience."
That is the way it works, and no system or method, including religion
and science, has yet gotten around it, because there is no place to get
to -- the function is the only thing there is. The light of the clearing
still determines what is seen in be dark forest; eternity is still in
love with the productions of time; and what we loose on earth is still
loosed in heaven.
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Please note the commentary in Reference section concerning
Dr. Charles Tart's work in this field.
Carl Jung's structural analysis of the processes of mind involved
various psychological "figures," as you recall from P. W. Martin's
Experiment in Depth
. These represented levels or depths of psychic
experience: the friend, the shadow, the anima and animus, the old man,
the final deep center. One had to have a fairly good grasp of these
images beforehand, in order to comprehend them when they occurred. If
they occurred to an unprepared mind, the person would not recognize the
experience for what it was. It would be literally un-cognized and so lost.
One must be primed beforehand for the introductions.
Now this is perfectly logical, and try as you may, you can find no way
around it. Simultaneously, however, the mind has then been given the
necessary materials and triggers the syntheses of the very figures under
consideration. The seed will grow to fruition, as Martin pointed out,
if the desire is sufficient. Do you not see the unavoidable symmetry of
the problem? This in no way denigrates the profound personality healing
this "integration experience" can bring about. It can surely open one
to levels of experience beyond previous conception. The materials
emerging seem vastly larger than the synthetic possibilities of one's
own unconscious workings. The material always seems to have had an a
priori existence. But the mirroring function is clearly evident.