The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (29 page)

In Berkeley, California, for instance, the Carnegie Institute has
pioneered a program for developing a kind of free intuitive creativity in
young children. The young child is presented with problem-filled adventure
readings, situations
without
formal, logical conclusions, where no
prestructured logical "answer" exists, even in the minds of the creators
of the system. The child has to create a "solution" freely in order to
continue the adventure, and the self-motivated technique avoids those
arbitrary absolutes which act as constricting, goal-oriented motivations
in ordinary education. With no a priori answer, and no outside criteria,
the child develops a trust and confidence in an inner, open logic too
often stifled by formal schooling. Developing this free-synthesis capacity
has led, in turn, to impressive leaps of the intelligence quotient itself
-- that questionable gauge of reality-thinking.
The whole experiment is a gesture toward bridging the modes of mind,
and the results could reach beyond science fiction. We may yet see the
day when the tragedy of school is overcome.
Prophetic, in a Teilhardian way, was Arthur C. Clarke's little
mythos-fantasy,
Childhood's End
. Here science and all intermediate
mechanisms of projection had finally given way to a direct "intervention
in the ontological constitution of the universe." There was an absorption
and loss of individuality implied in Clarke's little dream, reminiscent
of a problem never solved by Teilhard. But there was also an odd, if
strained, similarity between Clarke's extrapolation and that "coming
again in glory" of Jesus' misplaced and misunderstood Apocalypse.
For now the kind of nonambiguous thinking demanded by a don Juan or a
Jesus seems highly improbable. Too many priesthoods have too tight a
control and domination over our fragmented minds. That
Childhood's End
where in we might "level this lift to rise and go beyond" will have to
encompass, perfect, and make obsolete a vast number of brilliant but,
restricting disciplines. We will have to become more righteous than a
host of Pharisees, but we will get around these stumbling blocks by the
only creative method -- which is "agreeing quickly with your adversary,"
the way to use stumbling blocks as stepping stones.
As for myself, however, today is the day, and I dare not wait for some
slow cultural drift finally to pave the way that I might easily float
into some nebulous social salvation. I cannot depend on "them" "out there"
to order into coherency this small sphere of my only present now. And I
find, fortunately, that the process of reality remains unchanged. Ultimate
allegiance to a symbol of openness really does open things. The search
for the proper materials, the passionate intensity, the decorum and
respect, the willingness to be dominated by that desired, leads now as
always to the needed synthesis. The fusion still arcs across the gap --
the crack surely follows.
If some single, lonely reader is desperate enough, and "hates" an
obscenely mad world sufficiently to give it up and open his mind to a
restructuring for love
of
that world, things can be different for him,
even now. And if he could find two or three to gather with him and agree
on what was mutually needed, in this highly-specialized form of agreement
even more things could be different. That -- strangely -- is the way,
and the only way by which the broad social drift itself will ever be
changed for the better.
So I would urge you to remember, when the forces of despair and
destruction hedge you round about, that you need not succumb to their dark
statistics. The nonstatistical is even here -- closer than your very self,
and it is yours, and it works. The relation of mind and reality has been
but dimly grasped -- surely only hinted at in these pages of mine --
but even these brief glimpses are blinding. As Whitman said "I am ever
shutting sunrise out of me, lest sunrise should kill me." And surely
we must channel with care, and take our waking slow, for even in these
tentative gestures of ours, outlined here, even in this our infancy of
awareness -- people
do
walk fire. We
are
an open possibility.
10
vision and reflection
When Carlos started down the mountain with the bags of Mescalito, he
found them impossibly heavy and suffered cruelly carrying them. Don
Juan warned him not to let the bags touch ground lest the god be lost
to Carlos permanently. After a grueling time the bags suddenly became
"light and spongy," and Carlos ran down the mountain and caught up with
don Juan. The god is never obtained cheaply, but he wears easily and well.
In mythology every Tree of Life is guarded by a dragon, a monster hideous
and deadly to behold. The priest in us brands this monster the great evil
and warns us away for the safety of our souls. William Blake claimed that
this dragon grows only in the human brain -- as does the priest himself.
When the bravest of heroes ignore all warnings and throw their lives to
the winds to reach the goal, they find the dragon a phantom spun out of
their own fear and doubt. They push the flimsy image aside, and enter
their kingdom.
Perfection, Northrop Frye claims, is the full development of one's
imagination. The timid reflective thinker sees perfection as a quality
abstracted from a real thing, and thus the sole property of an abstracted
and unreal god. Perfection is the utilizing of all the modes of mind,
finding that the Trees of Life and Knowledge are twins from the same
taproot. Perfection is daring to embrace the universe itself as our
true dimension, daring to steal the fire of the gods, to walk on water
or fire unafraid, to heal, to claim plenty in time of dearth, to behold
boldly that desired and become what we have need to be.
There have always been two predominant and rival views of man and his
position or predicament. Tough- and tender-minded come to mind, as do
cyclic and linear, hawk and dove. Blake saw our ambivalence in terms of
biblical 'vision' and Greek 'reflection.' 'Reflection,' relying on material
things, ends in the dead inertia of the rock as the only real, the mind
as the unreal. 'Vision' is creative imagination using the eyes as windows
to see
with
actively and not
through
passively.
Vision sees life as an "eternal existence in one divine man." Reflection
sees life as a series of cycles in nature. Northrop Frye says we
vacillate our life away between the two notions, never fully conscious
of either. Reflection is Blake's
Diabolos
, the nihilistic impulse
of self-doubt reminding us of our helpless frailty and increasing our
dependence on the current priesthoods. If the fire-walker listened
to this side of his nature, he would never walk fire. As Blake said,
"If the sun and moon should doubt, they would immediately go out."
The victory of the cyclic theory becomes the view of a fallen,
deadlocked world, a mechanical horror. In Eastern terms this world
is a cosmic error to be overcome, from which to escape back into
an undifferentiated continuum. In Western terms the universe is a
monstrous
necessity
, grinding itself out in a great entropic road to
folly and nothingness. Frye points out that we are incapable of accepting
this view as objective fact. The moral and emotional implications of it
become mental cancers breeding cynical indifference, short-range vision,
selfish pursuit of expediency, and "all the other diseases of selfhood."
Reflection inverts the "eternal mental life of God and Man, the Wheel of
Life," into a dead cycle. Wonder, joy, imagination, ecstasy, even love,
are smugly diagnosed by these cyclic destroyers, who test the blood
count, analyze the temperature, the oxygen content, the background of the
subjects, and learnedly dismiss as aberrations the highest capacities
life has yet produced. All free actions are held in ridicule, only
reactions are left. The belly and groin are made supreme, the only point
of realness, and the strings by which the vulture-priests think to make
the Naked Ape dance to their grindings. But the ape is not controlled
thereby, he merely goes mad and dies or destroys.
Saturation with images of violence creates violence, and saturation with
ideologies of reflective thinking creates suicidal despair. We need an
image, a mythos, representing a way upward and outward where creative
longing can be released and not denied. But reflective thinking seizes
the insight given by vision and turns it into a dogma that makes for
reliably ineffective, lifeless supporters of the world,
in
that world
and hopelessly
of
it.
The cyclic religious view loves to speak of
God's plan
for mankind. We
are a theatrical group, they say, our roles preordained according to some
shadow script. As free actors we do not follow the prescribed actions, as
interpreted by the ruling hierarchy of those who know. Or there is
God's
great symphony
spread out for all to play, if we would just follow the
notes properly and watch the beat of that great-baton-up-yonder, a pulse
which synchronizes strangely with the heartbeat of the current powers
that feast on fools.
Science has only a small shift to turn this preordaining god into an
inflexible and other-to-us Nature, with all the universe laid out on a
grand economy of laws. To discover these laws is the Promethean goal,
the religious duty in new vestments. And cultures are crushed, the young
gods are condemned to years of a madness-producing attempt at 'metanoia'
called education, and whole civilizations are whipped into line to serve
the new god.
We are not involved with a preset script on a preset stage. We are a
magnificent and terrible improvisation in which we must be spontaneous
playwrights, actors, critics, and audiences. There is no orchestral
score up there with every note assigned and waiting. We are, at best, an
aleatoric performance. Cacophony and discord are inevitable, yet infinite
combinations await us. We err and are bound to err in this open system,
yet we are never bound to our errors, as an infinite ability to correct
these errors is built in.
We long for an ultimate and our longing is itself the ultimate. Our
need is the universal, that with which we satisfy is the particular and
never sacrosanct. There is no absolute "out there" of logic, reason,
love, goodness, or perfection. Nature is amoral, indifferent, operating
by profusion. Needing these things we can only become them by boldly
holding them as our rightful due. Life creates myth and then strives to
fill it by imitation.
Susanne Langer warned that our losses to science should not be taken
lightly. And what we have lost is our psyche, our very soul. Mass
psychosis, sickness of soul, is the price we are paying for letting a
product become our absolute, letting a tool become master. The young
rebel lashes out blindly at this living death to which he is condemned
and which he must support, for which he must fight. The tragedy is that
by the time he senses a deadly trap he has become, by the very process
of reality formation, that against which he instinctively rebels. The
only logical tools with which he can fight create the very situation he
hates. As don Juan said, "When you find the path you are on has no heart,
and try to leave that path, it is ready to kill you." Very few men,
he observed, can stop to deliberate at that point, and leave the path.
Any path we choose is arbitrary, but in our choice we shape the world
as it is for us. Cohen felt that whatever reality is, we will never know
it. I have claimed that reality is what we
do
know, that the world as
it is for us is one we represent to ourselves for our own response. So
it is with nature, God, "ultimate matter," and so on. We can never get
at these as such. Everything we say about them, our sciences, dogmas
and creeds, are only representations we seem fated to make and to which
we are fated to respond. God, as surely as
Nature
, is a concept shot
through and through with the mind of man.
And yet, who for a minute believes that nature is
only
a projection
of man's mind? Nature is something of which I am a part, and which I
must represent to myself. But it is also something which I am not. My
thinking and that nature thought about create an event, but they are
not identical. Man is not God or nature because he projects gods and
natures for his life. Projection is not the whole mechanism even though
it shapes the ground on which we stand. There is always more than this.
Teilhard projects his longing onto a great 'Omega-Point' "out there." But
even there we would find some super-shell, and we would itch to find its
crack. In a peculiarly prophetic vision a century and a half ago, Walt
Whitman asked, looking up at the vast universe of stars: "When we have
encompassed all those orbs, and know the joys and pleasures in them, will
we be satisfied then?" No, he realized, "we but level that lift to rise
and go beyond."
Without man there is no leveling to rise and go beyond. We give the
direction and meaning to the process of becoming. It is time to see
man in his true perspective, as Whitman did when he wrote: " . . . in
the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by
God's name."
Blake put it in this quatrain:
God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in Night,
But does a Human form Display
to those who Dwell in Realms o] Day.
And yet, how easily Blake assumed as given that light that gave
his Realms their Day, that light by which his Human Form could be
displayed. Whitman writes, "I am ever shutting sunrise out of me lest
sunrise kill me." This is the given premise on which the function rests,
that which we can shape into a level to lift, that toward which we can
rise to go beyond -- a light of which I cannot speak except to those
who would know already of what might then be said -- beyond our words,
where speech itself is superfluous, a knowing beyond the clouds of all
unknowing, an answer beyond all questioning.