The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (20 page)

Following my own absorption with Jung's works, the extent of my
psychological awareness, the contents of my dreams, my hypnagogic
capacities, underwent a profound enrichment and expansion. But not until
my exposure to and fascination with Jung.
Somewhere around adolescence the Australian aborigine boy undergoes a rite
of initiation that is probably the most extreme known to anthropology. The
resulting hierarchy of mind is also the most markedly different of any
known (except perhaps that world view of modern physicists.)
The young boy is taken from his mother, isolated in a wilderness
spot from which he may not move on pain of death. He is starved for a
prolonged number of days, kept awake at night by the terrifying sounds
of the bullroarer (a device kept hidden until needed in the rites, and
never seen by women). Finally, after this long solitude, starvation,
and sleeplessness, he is suddenly surrounded by the elders in hideous
body-paints and masks, and subjected to an ordeal of fear and pain against
which ordinary circumcision is idle pleasantry. Through it all he must
remain stock still, silent, and impassive. By this enormous shock, his
psyche is very literally shattered and disintegrated. At that moment
of disintegration, the inculcation of the totem world view begins. It
is an elaborate and complex system, intellectual, logically cohesive,
completely interrelated.
Many of the raw materials have been sensed and unconsciously assimilated,
of course, throughout childhood. The sets and expectancies are all there.
Nevertheless the rites initiate a logical, intellectual synthesis only
available once the logical phase of normal maturation had set in.
After this, if the young man has survived, his acceptance and
unquestioning automatic response, according to his totem world, is
complete. He takes his place with the two great mythical Brothers
who eternally create the world. His every move is dictated by the
strict traditions of what the Brothers did on that first great day of
creation. These are the very movements by which creation is sustained. The
stance he takes for his Dream-Time is rigorous and exact. Dream-Time is
that mode of trance communication with the Brothers by which he attains
that clairvoyant and telepathic rapport with his ecology -- clan, animal,
nature, world. The stance he takes for urination, the manner in which
he runs, hurls his spear and boomerang (that most sophisticated of
labor-saving implements), his mode of eating, copulation, addressing
others, dancing, fire-building, painting his body, every facet of life
is controlled by the taboos of his totem world.
In return, everything has meaning, a definite place in a specific
hierarchy of events. His clairvoyancy and telepathy are natural results
of his total rapport. He knows when his own totem food animal is in his
vicinity, though a hill intervenes. At the closest point of interception,
he breaks his stance, and, in the least number of moves, intercepts
his game.
His discipline is complete. He is seldom bothered by choice, since his
totemism decides most issues. Spontaneity is at a minimum, and, as a
result, so is ambiguity. The mesh of threatening, excluded possibilities
of western man plays no part in his world at all. He stands on one leg,
immobile for hours, in that Dream-Time state that is apparently a cross
between a nature rapport and a mystical trance. Flies crawl unmolested
across his open eyes; no movement such as blinking is wasted.
Lévi-Strauss champions the aborigine totem-cosmology as an intellectual
refinement as well knit and coherent as any culture's in history. Jung
aped the graces of the naive realism of his day to state that primitive
thinking and feeling were "exclusively concretistic," always related to
"sensation." Primitive thought has no "detached independence," he wrote,
but "clings to material phenomena." The primitive could not, for instance,
experience the idea of the divinity as a subjective content, but the
"sacred tree is the habitat," if not the deity himself. Behind such
"primitive" projections, however, lay a rich intellectual scheme --
as found today in our own activities. Will history recognize only
our
projection symbols, and not our intellectual schemes behind them, and
so view us as we now view the "primitive"?
One aborigine explained that he knew others would come along and paint
over his own cave-painting. But, he mused, "they" would see his art there,
and know that, though dead, he too had once lived and painted, and they
would be sad for him, and remember him. Now this is individualization --
this is the keenest expression of being human. We deny soul or psyche of
"real feelings" to those we are in process of removing or dominating. Just
as the Germans with the Jews, we find it hard to accept that the dry
statistics of dead Vietcong, for instance, could also be those who lived,
felt dawn, saw sunset glow.
Lévi-Strauss was the most articulate, though not the first, to insist
that the aborigine long ago
rejected
the more common world views, by
choice, and isolated himself to develop, undisturbed, his highly-refined
and abstract intellectual cosmology. Adaptive techniques, so loved by the
nineteenth century evolutionists, play almost no part in totemism.
Necessity could have been met on far less rigorous terms.
George Peter Murdock, writing in 1934, summed up the destructive and
limited view we have long held of man, when he wrote (apparently from
second-hand information): "The idea of using skins as clothing seems never
to have dawned upon the Aranda," (a central tribe of Australia). What
seems never to have dawned on Murdock was to research his information
before echoing the mistaken views, of E. B. Tylor.
Murdock went on to say: "The Aranda cannot conceive of death from
natural causes." Neither, might I add, can we. Our own medicine men, to
whom word-magic and cabbalistic signs have only assumed more arrogance,
give elaborate, preferably alien, awesome-to-laymen, Latin or synthetic
cult-names to excuse or write off their failures.
The aborigine Dream-Time is a highly-specialized form of trance, unique
as the other growths of that strange land. The aborigine has been on
that continent, isolated from the rest of mankind, for at least 16,000
years, and probably much longer. His cultural expectations are not
dismissible. Refinements of the system were long in building, and his
Dream-Time totemism probably represents the longest unbroken intellectual
scheme in man's history.
My interest here is Dream-Time itself. The aborigine may be in a state
of permanent trance, or rather, trance may be the normal state of the
mature aborigine. It was his socially-shared state of mind -- not just
"approved" as with the Balinese -- and certainly not necessary for
survival. Through this state, and only through it, he knew communion and
relation with his gods, his world, his society, his family, and himself.
In his state of permanent trance -- at least his threshold was so low as
to be nonexistent -- it was the Two Brothers who served as his conscious
selector system, his value system directing his perceptual screening
of a world. In this respect the Two Brothers could be said to serve as
the hypnotist does a subject. The totem structure was developed over
thousands of years. The subset was created by careful trial and error,
achieving a perfect balance between mind and nature. Before dismissing
the potentials of this long period, consider what science has done in
only a few, short, half-dozen centuries. (And the two systems differ
only quantitatively according to the kinds of choice made.)
The aboriginal subset screened out everything not needed for the
intellectual refinement, precisely as the scientific world so rigorously
denies and screens out the aboriginal world view. The aborigine could
use the world of others, however, but only as needed within his own.
He drew on others from strict choice, not fate. Adaption to necessity
played a negligible part in his abstractions. He was the only predator
on the continent except for the dingo dog which he half domesticated,
after his own fashion. He had no real competition, and life supported
him without trouble. None of the survival-adaptation ideology of the
nineteenth century can account for the elaborate ritual of aboriginal
life. His primary necessity was an intellectual craving for a system
encompassing all things of his life and relating them to a single center.
Berndt was impressed and puzzled by those "miles of cave-paintings,"
those enormous quantities of carvings, and above all, by the series of
great festivals and religious rites, lasting for weeks, that filled the
aboriginal calendar. Life was one long pageant, a colorful ritual, a
cosmic play. For a people considered animal-like, grazing all the time to
sustain themselves, how did they possibly have the time for such frills?
Berndt speaks of the way the aborigine overcame his limited tools
to produce his art as "nothing less than genius." I would point out
that he always produced the kinds of tools necessary to or desired by
his interests. And his interests were solely in his symbols, totems,
rites, and that joyous union with the Two Brothers.
Archeology. has discovered that, at one stage of his development,
the aborigine developed a splendid pottery industry, so fine it was
sought by cultures from that entire area on the Pacific. The aborigine
assiduously avoided use of the pottery
himself
, however, using it
only for trade purposes, and probably for hallucinogens to enhance his
religious ceremonies and Dream-Time experiences.
The naive viewpoint of western man, as exemplified in Murdock for
instance, points to the nudity and houselessness of the aborigine as
evidence of a remarkably low level of mind. Even wolves make dens, after
all. But this famous assumption did not hold. The aborigine eschewed
houses, clothing, articles and things -- other than a few sacred articles,
bull-roarer, spear, boomerang, a few beads and feathers as ornaments,
and even his own skillfully-designed and esthetic pottery -- because
these things
interfered
with Dream-Time. Allegiance had to be solely
to the Two Brothers, and not to acquisitions. And -- know them by their
fruits -- the rewards of Dream-Time were greater for the aborigine than
all other visible rewards from the world of the "unreal men."
The aborigine considered "sufficient unto the day were the evils thereof,"
and very literally took no thought of the morrow. He sought always only
his own particular kingdom of heaven, and all other things were "added
unto it." Jesus insisted it would be harder for a camel to get through the
eye of a needle than for the rich man to get into heaven. Riches were not
the point, as they were not with the aborigine; allegiance of mind was
the thing. Ambiguity does not find the narrow gate. Morality or ethics
is not the issue, but rather a simple, mechanical, ontological fact.
Surely the aborigines system gave no basis for spontaneous creativity, and
here the analogy with Jesus breaks down. The stringency of their system
allowed neither flexibility nor adaptiveness to other systems. Aborigines
were courteous as all primitives, but were seriously disoriented when
intruded upon by the spontaneous and disorganized aggressions of western
man. The centuries of selective isolation broke down under the white man's
invasion. Outsiders were called "unreal" for logical reasons. Outsiders
responded to none of the modes for a coherent and meaningful reality.
Scholars found the aborigine's powers of mind exceptional, if narrowed to
specific limits. On a bright, clear day a tribe would suddenly move off in
a slow, loping, loose-limbed run, twenty miles straight over a high ridge,
to intercept a rainfall, rare and sacred, and also undetectable by any
ordinary means from their point of departure. To test their proverbial
tracking skill, a single man traveled on foot for many miles over
widely-different terrain, sandy desert, marsh, rocky country, following
no trail, leaving no detectable trail. The route was nevertheless followed
unhesitatingly a year later by a cooperative aborigine. Their ability for
"ground reading" is famous, but here the contemporaneousness with the Two
Brothers was called on. The aborigine had to have an article of clothing
from the man leaving the original trail. This he held while going into
Dream-Time. The Two Brothers, of course, were contemporaneous with the
original event itself. Having made his connections with the Two Brothers,
the tracker connected with the event which was then contemporaneous with
himself as well. He followed the trail rapidly, unerringly, and without
pause, never giving any indication of looking for signs, should any have
conceivably remained.
It might be wondered why the aborigine boy had to undergo a terrible
initiation in order to enter Dream-Time and its totem world. According
to my third chapter, he should have mirrored his adult world. The reason
is that the adult world of Dream-Time was an abstract, intellectual
construct. It was not just raw material from an informational "out
there." Its logical complexity could only be grasped by a mind that
had developed to the logical level, which, as Piaget points out, is
in early adolescence. Then the world view developed to that point was
disintegrated as a rational structure, while its acquired information
was retained. The totem and dream state then acted as screens channeling
percepts and determining the autistic synthesis. The system produced
according to its premises, as any cohesive, logical structure should.
The aborigine, the Balinese, the Ceylonese, the doctor having a tooth
extraction, all show the wide scope and variety of the trance state,
and suggest its potential, and its limitation. Trance states repeat the
basic process by which world views originally form in the mind, by first
bypassing that world view and opening the autistic or unconscious to
restructuring. The triggers for the new syntheses are given either by a
conscious directive or by assumed cultural expectancies. These serve as
concepts for the directing of percepts in new ways. Trance is a dramatic,
if temporary and limited, kind of 'metanoia.'