The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (2 page)

Guide to the References and
Bibliography System
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We used to believe that our perceptions, our seeing, hearing, feeling and
so on, were reactions to active impingements on them by the "world out
there," We thought our perceptions then sent these outside messages to
the brain where we put together a reasonable facsimile of what was out
there. We know now that our concepts, our notions or basic assumptions,
actively direct our percepts. We see, feel, and hear according to what
Bruner calls a "selective program of the mind." Our mind
directs
our
sensory apparatus every bit as much as our sensory apparatus
informs
the mind.
It used to be thought that the physical was a fixed entity "out there,"
unaffected by anything our transient, incidental thoughts might make of
it. Holding to this idea today are the "tough-minded," whose boastful
posturing of a "realistic, no-nonsense objectivity" cloaks a narrow and
pedantic selective-blindness, a "realism" that sees only what has been
established as safe to see. Yet there
is
a way in which physical and
mental events merge and influence each other. A change of world view can
change the world viewed. And I am not referring to such parlor games as
influencing the roll of dice. The stakes are higher, the relationships
more subtle and far-reaching.
For instance, as a young man I once found myself in a certain
somnambulistic, trance-like state of mind which I will later in this book
define as autistic. In the peculiarities of this frame of reference I
suddenly knew myself to be impervious to pain or injury. With upwards of
a dozen witnesses I held the glowing tips of cigarettes against my palms,
cheeks, eyelids, grinding them out on those sensitive areas. Finally,
I held the tips of several cigarettes tightly between my lips and
blew sparks over my amazed companions. To the real consternation of
my dormitory fellows, ,there were no after-effects, no blisters, no
later signs of my folly. This stimulated the physics majors to test the
temperature of a cigarette tip, which they found to be around 1380° F. My
contact with such heat had been quite genuine, steady, and prolonged.
Later, when I did a bit of research on Hindu firewalking, I understood
quite well the state of mind involved, though I never again achieved
it myself. It was apparent to me, however, that I had suspended my
ordinary. thinking, and was using a mode of mind strongly suggestive
of early childhood. At the same time I was
aware
of myself though
experiencing some dissociation within, rather as though I were sitting
and watching myself.
Several things intrigued me about this venture. First, of course, why
were the ordinary reactions of live flesh to extreme heat not operative
under that strange state of mind? What was the state of mind? Could the
reality of this state be different from the reality of ordinary thinking,
and if so, was there a relative and arbitrary quality to
any
reality
state? What were the possibilities of this kind of thinking, particularly
if it could be controlled by a fully operational, conscious person? (I
had surely
not
been fully operational, and the cigarette trick was
the only expression of imperviousness my imagination could seize on.)
Last but not least, certain of my tough-minded colleagues of later
years were so unnecessarily hostile to my accounts of this and similar
personal experiences. Why did they refuse to believe the experience
had taken place? Why did they insist that I had hallucinated, simply
misinterpreted my data, or was, perhaps, just lying? This threw another
aspect into my search, in addition to trying to determine the role our
concept-percept interaction plays in our reality: why is our ordinary,
logical thinking so hostile to these rifts in the common fabric?
Reality is not a fixed entity. It is a contingent interlocking of moving
events. And events do not just happen to us. We are an integral part of
every event. We enter into the shape of events, even as we long for an
absolute in which to rest. It may be just this longing for an absolute
in which our concepts might not have to be responsible for our percepts,
and so indirectly our reality, that explains the hostility of our ordinary
intellect to these shadowy modes of mind.
Later I will try to summarize how an infant's mind is shaped into a
"reality-adjusted" personality, and show how this representation helps
determine the reality in which the adult then moves. By analyzing how
our representations of the world come about we may be able to grasp the
arbitrary, and thus flexible, nature of our reality. The way we represent
the world arises, though, from our whole social fabric, as Bruner put
it. There is no escaping this rich web of language, myth, history,
ways of doing ,things, unconsciously-accepted attitudes, notions, and
so on, for these make up our only reality. If this social fabric tends
to become our shroud, the only way out is by the same weaving process,
for there is only the one. So we need to find out all we can about the
loom involved, and weave with imagination and vision rather than allow
the process to happen as a random fate.
Our inherited representation, our world view, is a language-made
affair. It varies from culture to culture. Edward Sapir, the linguist,
called this idea of ours that we adjust to reality without the use of
language an illusion. He claimed that the "real world" is to a large
extent built up on the language habits of the group.
None of us exercises our logical, social thinking as a blank slate,
or as a photographic plate, seeing what is "actually there." We focus
on the world through an esthetic prism from which we can never be free
except by exchanging prisms. Them is no pure looking with a naked,
innocent eye. When I found myself in that peculiar twilight world in
which fire no longer burned me, I had not found "the true reality" or "the
truth." I had simply skipped over some syllogisms of our ordinary logical
world and restructured an event not dependent on ordinary criteria. Even
our most critical, analytical, scientific, or "detached" looking is a
verification search, sifting through possibilities for a synthesis that
will strengthen the the hypotheses that generate the search.
Our world view is a cultural pattern that shapes our mind from birth. It
happens to us as fate. We speak of a child becoming "reality-adjusted"
as he responds and becomes a cooperating strand in the social web. We are
shaped by this web; it determines the way we think, the way we see what
we see. It is our pattern of representation and our response sustains
the pattern.
Yet any world view is arbitrary to an indeterminable extent. This
arbitrariness is difficult to recognize since our world to view is
determined by our world
view
. To consider our world view arbitrary
and flexible automatically places our world of reality in the same
questionable position. And yet we are always changing this world view.
We represent such changes as discoveries of absolutes in order to protect
ourselves
from
our arbitrary status, and to avoid the implication
that human thinking is a creative process. We deny that disciplines of
mind synthetically create; we insist we are but discovering "nature's
truths." We possess an open-ended potential at considerable variance
with contemporary nihilisms, but we must recognize and accept the dynamic
interplay of representation-response if we are not to be acted on rather
than fully acting.
For instance, years after my little fireburn experience, my world faced
dissolution when two massive "radical surgeries" and other macabre
manipulations on my wife failed to check a malignancy wildly stimulated
by the growth hormones of pregnancy. Finally, having had everything cut
off or out, she offered little for further experimentation. The priests
of the scalpel passed judgment and gave her but a few short weeks to
live. Surely the evidence was in their favor.
Nevertheless, I remembered that strange world in which fire could not
burn, and entered into a crash program to find that crack in the egg that
we might restructure events more in our favor. During five- and six-day
fasts, I subjected her to a total "brainwash" day and night, never letting
her mind alone. Through all her waking hours I read her literature related
to healing, and while she slept I endlessly repeated suggestions of hope
and strength. I had no thought of how the restructuring would take place,
but in a few hours, some three weeks later, she was suddenly healed and
quite well.
We traipsed back to the temple, I with misgivings over such a risk of
the new structure, to have the priests declare us clean. And that we
were duly declared and recorded, with the reaction pattern among the
many doctors of that research center running the gamut. From emotional
talk about miracles, the brass-tack realists soon rebounded with dire
warnings that some fluke had occurred and that we should present ourselves
regularly for constant watches for the "inevitable reoccurrence;" just
the sort of doubt-category I would have avoided at all costs.
True, a year or so later our carefully-balanced private world fell
apart. This began when it became obvious that our last child, born in
the midst of all that carnage, was in serious trouble. When the trouble
proved to be severe cerebral palsy, our bubble burst, the dragon roared
back, and within weeks my world was in ruins.
Nevertheless, by a change of concept concerning possibilities, we beat the
broad way of the statistical world, if only for a while. The social fabric
is sustained by agreement on which phenomena are currently acceptable.
Susanne Langer referred to nature as a language-made affair, subject
to "collapse into chaos" should ideation fail. Threat of this chaos
proves sufficient stimulus to insure a ready granting of validity to
the current ideas. And strangely, even when this ideation decrees that
a particular event must end in death, most people would rather accept
the sentence than risk the chaos.
To be "realistic" is the high mark of intellect, and assures the
strengthening of those acceptances that make up the reality and so
determine what thoughts are "realistic." Our representation-response
interplay is self-verifying, and circular. We are always in the process
of laying our cosmic egg.
The way by which our reality picture is changed provides a clue to the
whole process. A change of concept changes one's reality to some degree,
since concepts direct percepts as much as percepts impinge on concepts.
There are peculiarities and exceptions, such as my no-fireburn venture,
by which our inherited fabric is bypassed temporarily in small private
ways. These are linear thrusts that break through the circles of
acceptancy making up our reality.
Metanoia is the Greek word for conversion: a "fundamental transformation
of mind." It is the process by which concepts are reorganized.
Metanoia
is a specialized, intensified adult form of the same world-view
development found shaping the mind of the infant. Formerly associated
with religion,
metanoia
proves to be the way by which all genuine
education takes place. Michael Polanyi points out that a "conversion"
shapes the mind of the student into the physicist.
Metanoia
is a
seizure by the discipline given total attention, and a restructuring of
the attending mind. This reshaping of the mind is the principal key to
the reality function.
The same procedure found in world view development of the child, the
metanoia of the advanced student, or the conversion to a religion,
can be traced as well in the question-answer process, or the proposing
and eventual filling of an "empty category" in science. The asking of
an ultimately serious question, which means to be seized in turn by an
ultimately serious quest, reshapes our concepts
in favor of
the kinds
of perceptions needed to "see" the desired answer. To be given ears to
hear and eyes to see is to have one's concepts changed in favor of the
discipline. A question determines and brings about its answer just as
the desired end shapes the nature of the kind of question asked. This
is the way by which science synthetically creates that which it then
"discovers" out there in nature.
Exploring this reality function shows how and why we reap as we sow,
individually and collectively -- but no simple one-to-one correspondence
is implied. The success or failure of any idea is subject to an enormous
web of contingencies. Any idea seriously entertained, however, tends
to bring about the realization of itself, and will, regardless of the
nature of the idea, to the extent it can be free of ambiguities. The
"empty category" of science as an example will be explored later and the
same function is triggered by any set of expectancies, as, for instance,
a disease.
For instance, in my wife's case, a grandmother who had died of cancer
was the family legend, and all the females scrupulously avoided all the
maneuvers rumored to have possibly caused the horror. Then, in neat,
diabolical two-year intervals, my wife's favorite aunt died of cancer;
her mother developed cancer but survived the radical-surgery mutilations;
her father then followed and died in spite of extensive medical
machinations. Naturally, two years after burying her father, my wife's
own debacle occurred, in spite of her constant submissions to the high
priests for inspections, tests, and, no doubt, full confessionals. The
fact that all these carcinomas were of different sorts, and on opposite
sides of the family, was incidental. Few people understood my fury when
the medical center that had attended my wife requested that I bring my
just-then-budding teenage daughter for regular six-monthly check-ups for
ever thereafter, since they had found -- and thoroughly advertised -- that
mammary malignancies in a mother tended to be duplicated in the daughter
many hundred percent above average. And surely such tragic duplications do
occur, in a clear example of the circularity of expectancy verification,
the mirroring by reality of a passionate or basic fear.