The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (23 page)

The concrete models by which he is able to picture the current view
of himself are destructive to him, fated, and strip him of hope. As a
bit of thinking protoplasm, caught on this cold cinder for his brief
second, without rhyme or reason, what else to do but jostle for a bit
of snatched hedonism, soon palling, before the time runs out? It is
not just fortuitous that those promulgating the images of despair then
capitalize
on
that despair.
We blithely accept the ideology of a Naked Ape viewpoint, while equally
dismissing what should be at
least
the other side of the coin, Jung's
archetypal imagery: those "primordial images (that) are the most ancient
and the most universal 'thought-forms' of humanity." The reason for the
dismissal is not hard to find. Blind urges, instincts, glandular responses
that jerk us about as puppets on strings, are legitimate to the current
tough-minded nihilisms. "You can't change human nature" is the favorite
Pentagon rationale for murder. Thought-forms inherited from the past
suggest that man is more than simply another animal. And power over,
domination and control, feed best on deprecations of the human, hardly
on granting him esteem and value. If thought is a force of its own,
capable of being sustained as a cultural or racial continuity, though
not too susceptible to analysis, small wonder the current nihilisms
evade it as a viable and independent force in life.
Langer warns that the cultural losses to science should not be taken
lightly. She does not see science likely to "beget a culture" unless and
until a truly universal artistic imagination "catches fire from its torch
and serves without deliberate intent to give shape to a new feeling," by
which she means a new realm of tangible, commonly-shared experience. A
scientific mentality capable of filling this new need would have to go
beyond anything called by its name today. It would have to encompass
mind, growth, language, history, and produce social concepts that have
meaning for a humanity "which inhabits the whole earth and reaches for
the other stars."
Such a new cultural concept would have to include all mental phenomena,
all experiences of mind, and from a phenomenological standpoint, not
from the conventional dogmas of laboratory duplication and control. The
mind is more than that. It is an open system of synthesis, not a simple
biological mechanism as small minds, unable to grapple with large issues,
try to make it.
Langer defines mental experience as
feeling
-- the genetic basis of
all mental experience, sensation, emotion, imagination, recollection,
reasoning, and so on. She does not like the term
unconscious
, but
speaks of "many cerebral acts that are not mental," though they may
modify " mental acts. She qualifies
mental acts
as those centering in
the brain and that are
felt
, that have some psychic phase. A great
deal of cerebration, she notes, goes on "below the limen of feeling,
or experience."
Mistrusting
unconscious
also, I have used the term 'autistic,' which is,
of course, but jargon substitution, for this activity "below the limen of
feeling." I have suggested that the function runs into a continuum beyond
analysis, that it shades smoothly at some point into that organization
of energy we call
matter
.
Langer feels that a psychology oriented by her concept would run smoothly
into physiology without losing its identity. I would like to urge an even
more comprehensive and vigorous psychology, pursuing Langer's direction
even further, an examination of mind that runs as smoothly into
physics
itself. Only then will we realize fully the activity of thought, and
the rightful potential of man.
Life then becomes an integrated process of interdependent functions. Much
of our problem is in a failure to recognize the unique roles of the
different functions. To view ourselves only from the standpoint of the
tangible mental acts, what I have termed reality-adjusted reason, if I
read Langer correctly, is to seriously miss the capacity and meaning of
mind, and thus, as Jung claimed, to miss the meaning and capacity of man.
Langer sounds akin to Teilhard when she writes of a "vast change in
society, nothing less than a biological shift of functions to new
structures." This shift has disrupted cultural patterns for which we
have no replacement. What is lacking is a sufficiently large mythos to
encompass our new capabilities.
Modern man needs a definite and adequately big "world-image," Langer
writes, stating what we all surely recognize, that our "world-image
has collapsed." Powerful concepts are needed to cope with the welter of
new conditions that beset us, she continues, and going "back to Kant,
back to Plato," and so on, will not give us the abstract, powerful,
and novel ideas needed for our time.
An adequately large image of man can never be less than one encompassing
all aspects of man's mind, including that problematic and intangible
level "below the limen of feeling." No concept will be powerful enough
to cope with the welter of new conditions unless it takes into account
the true nature of man's mind as a shaping force in reality, a force
that has brought about the very reality needing the new concepts.
Teilhard de Chardin claimed that the central idea of the Christian
Gospel was that the universe is a
creative process carried on by man's
imagination, an operative power
. In Teilhard's view, the universe is
"capable of becoming more supple, more fully animate."
Mircea Eliade saw the thrust of life culminating in Jesus as nothing
less than
man's freedom to intervene in the ontological constitution
of the universe
.
Now these are surely bold claims, bold enough to qualify for Langer's new
needs. We are blocked from hearing the worth in them, however, by the
milieu from which they arise. We have experienced such a nonsensical,
paradoxical, and harmful parade of posturings from Christendom in the
past that such notions as Teilhard's and Eliade's seem untenable. The
very imagery in which such ideas arise blocks us from hearing them.
Christendom's long prate concerning the absolute division between God and
Man, the unholy dangers of man's assuming godly proportion, has become
fixed in our ears. The strident voice of the priest, warning us of the
dragon before the Tree of Life, is archetypal. Though we now dismiss the
metaphors involved, the notion is ingrained and has had its effect in
producing an ideology of the 'eiron.' The old notion is now projected
onto pseudoscientific imagery. The new priest poses as the Naked Ape.
As our world-image has collapsed, our image of God has collapsed. Carl
Jung felt that the "weight of history is unbearable without the idea of
God." But he also noted that once metaphysical ideas have lost their
capacity to recall and evoke the original experience, they have not
only become useless "but prove to be actual impediments on the road
to wider development." Jesus' fury over the Pharisees was that they
"stood at the gate and would not let others through." The symbol of God
may have become esthetically and intellectually offensive. The enormous
gap between representations of God by the preachers and theologians and
the actualities of life presents a paradox that modern man will simply
not tolerate.
Jung considered the God-image a complex of ideas, of an archetypal nature
necessarily regarded as representing a certain sum of energy which
appears as a projection -- that is, is seen as something "out there"
and absolutely-other when it is really an inward condition that is
unconscious, or, as Langer would say, "below the limen of feeling." And
so, before dismissing the projection called God, it would be fruitful
to examine closely the inward situation that triggers the projection.
In this book I have used the metaphors 'forest' and 'clearing' for our
reality and its potential, or for reality-adjusted thinking and that
continuum of possible synthesis triggered by passionate desire. I have
claimed that the correspondences and boundaries between the functions
are and always will be obscure. Obscure because conscious looking is a
search for verification of the notions that impel the search, and always
has a circular, mirroring element in it.
Imagination nevertheless opens to syntheses larger than the sum total of
reason. Something from the dark forest seems to be added to or encompassed
by the creative vision from our clearing. The new structures "found" in the
forest always reflect the expanding light from the clearing, but are always
more than logical synthesis can produce. There is a form of
radical
discontinuity
in every truly creative idea or discovery. And so
projection
,
while no doubt the case, is not the whole case. It involves
more than
the
logical mode of thinking that does the projecting.
The clearing in the forest, our reality-adjusted thinking, hinges
on a common bond of objective agreement. The threshold between this
kind of thinking and the forest itself I have called the 'autistic'
mode. Reality-thinking, autistic thinking, and that logically necessary
empty category, the unconscious continuum, are all of a piece. You cannot
have one without the other. Each implies the other; none are the other;
none can be except by or in the other. The process of reality is an
interaction between the three. They are not discontinuous. They merge
slowly and imperceptibly into each other.
To speak of nature or reality as though such a category exists
independently of the categorizing function that
speaks
of it is every
bit as one-sided and presumptuous as to suppose that no nature exists
except as a categorizing function of mind, or to presume that a function
of mind could operate outside the matrix of a nature. We can only explore
how our categorizing influences the categories that we find ourselves
in. The meshing of these components I have called the mirror-to-mirror
function, realizing that the simplistic one-to-one correspondence implied
has to be sharply and constantly qualified. An element of randomness
writes a question mark over all our efforts.
By now I think I have laid some groundwork for a defense of that
saying by Jesus that "what we loose on earth is loosed in heaven,"
and I believe we have the materials for updating and reinterpreting the
ontological insights afforded us by that genius's metaphor "heaven." If
the religious metaphors prove archaic and stand in the way, they should
be thrown out. But save the
function
toward which they point. Perhaps
we cannot re-bottle that new wine of his; the old skins into which it
was immediately put, in spite of his pleas, have probably soured it
beyond redemption. But within his postulates might reside the formula
by which we can make some new wine for our new, if empty, bottles.
This function of mirroring is found in the trance state in a simple,
direct, but limited way. It is found in the transference procedure in
general. It underlies the question-answer process, the formation of
postulates, the discoveries of science, the workings of the creative
imagination, and all those "radical discontinuities" of life.
By now we should be able to see that the thinking we call God and
the thinking we call man are all of a piece. The differences are
functional. The process cannot work well so long as the differences are
misunderstood, projected rather than stood under and accepted.
The autistic mode is equally everything, the way by which "all things
are in all places at the same time," as suggested by Whitehead. Physics
sees the relation through its own prism -- and there is no other way to
see -- recognizing that the farthest thing in the universe influences
the closest. The metaphors for interpretation are endless, but each
metaphor shapes the reality then experienced as the function.
This open capacity of synthesis has no value judgment since to judge
as value is to choose, limit, and close in on a specific, that is,
to become that chosen. In order to choose and limit
consciously
,
and still openly synthesize, another process of thinking has evolved
--
man
. The evolutionary development of this new function may well
have been trial and error, random chance, or purposive, as Teilhard
believed. To presume one or the other is equally arbitrary though reality
influencing. Nevertheless, life
has
created the means for a conscious
directing of potential and we are the means, aware of it or not, liking
it or not.
This new procedure attempted by life, that of creating a system of logical
selection from an open capacity, is, ornate and complex, beset with problems
and subject to enormous variations and breakdowns. No small part of the
problem is the vehicle itself, this "hominid creature," carrying within
him eons of triggered responses. The simple mirroring model I have drawn
is qualified by our inheritance -- from the simplest energy forms on up.
The infinite contingency of nature makes the problem of structuring an
open system ornately complex.
Carington believed that any idea expresses itself unless inhibited by
other ideas. In an infinitely contingent universe, operating by profusion,
ideas expressed must of necessity be at least partially compatible
and mutually non-inhibiting. Everything tends to strike a balance,
with all forms tending to perpetuate themselves. As Bohm pointed out,
such balances are only temporary, the very forces bringing about a
balance working equally to change. The slow breakdown of such forms,
and creation of others, makes no difference to an autistic, non-judging,
criteria-free system that is "equally all things."
The development of self-consciousness, necessary for value and conscious
directing of potential, poses a multitude of problems. To be self-conscious
is to be aware of the dissolution. Further, each person then has the
capability of organizing a unique reality picture, as exemplified, for
instance, in don Juan. (The problem of stress this creates at early
adolescence is fascinating, but must await a further work.) Chaos is
the underlying threat of the open system become self-conscious. Thus the
self-modification demanded by a common agreement, necessary for a common
world view and a society, is also a natural source of conflict. Organizing
a common reality seems to be bought at the price of individuality. Ideally
the flexible personality could enter into such common agreements without
loss of self. Underlying the ultra-conservative's paranoia is his
inability to enter into subsets of reality play other than his own. Once
he has modified to a world view he is frozen into it. Alien views become
threats to his very universe.