The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (4 page)

Our archaic background was concerned with keeping stable our small clearing
in the forest. Our clearing is a world view, a cosmic egg structured by
the mind's drive for a logical ordering of its universe. The clearing is
an organization imposed by us on a random possibility. It is a circle
of reason won from meaninglessness. Each person is a potential line
capable of breaking through the circle of reason. Yet the circle is
an accomplishment of no small order. An enormous force bends all lines
into circles. Each new mind threatens the structure but ages of pressure
weigh on the infant to win from him agreement with, modification to,
and help in sustaining his cultural circle.
Teilhard de Chardin saw human destiny spreading the light from our small
clearing out into the dark beyond. In archaic times we feared lest the
dark engulf our fragile construction of reason, and all actions were
oriented toward keeping the cultural circle intact. Teilhard and the
"new nominalists" of physics speak with a new and bold confidence that
dares move beyond stability.
We have been passionately involved in strengthening our ideation,
cataloging and indexing our clearing in the forest. Some unanimity of
opinion has begun to form. But the nature of the 'dark forest' is the real
problem. For our attitude toward the forest influences sharply the way we
look upon our clearing, and affects the kind of new clearing we can make.
The Platonists and Stoics have always assumed the forest to be ready
planted. Corresponding ideas of what was "out there" were planted also in
our minds, leading us by heuristic devices until we finally stumbled our
way to various discoveries and conclusions. The gods and fates looked on,
rather as we would watch rats in a maze.
Consider, however, that the kind of trees we succeed in felling at
the clearing's edge need not have always been. Indeed, there may be no
trees at all in the depths of that dark. Rather, the forest may shape,
the trees may grow, according to the kind of light our reason throws.
Scientists speak of the dark forest of nature as essentially simple.
Nature is a category, however, a label, a concept shot through and
through with man's thought. And man's thought is designed to simplify
from an endless possibility. Scientists are never really talking about
the unknown nature of the forest beyond their circle of reason and
logic. They talk about their garden within it, the forest converted,
the trees labeled, the plants and shrubs cataloged, selected, arranged
in orderly patterns. When the scientists look at the forest, they look
for additions to their garden, and they look with a gardeners eye.
The nature "discovered" is determined, to an indeterminable degree, by
the mind that sets out to discover. We can never know the full extent we
play in this reality formation. It will never be computable or reducible
to formula. An ultimately serious commitment of mind, however, can be
the determinate in any issue, overriding randomness and chance.
In the following chapters I hope, by showing what I have found about
this reality play, to suggest a way by which we may take a more active
part in shaping our events. I will explore the formation of world view,
which determines our adult world-to-view, and this will require some
exploration of different phenomena of mind, particularly from that
shadow-side of thinking called autistic. Then I will explore the way a
passionate pursuit or commitment of mind shapes its own fulfillment --
the way a question can bring about its answer, a belief its illumination,
a desire its gratification, by reshaping, as needed, those concepts
shaped from birth, and so reshaping perceptual patterns.
I have traced this mirroring of mind and reality in scientific pursuits,
the postulate, the 'Eureka!' the new notion that changes the actual
tangibles for a civilization. Then I have tried to show how this same
relation between idea and fact found in science equally underlies such
a cultic affair as fire not burning a person under certain circumstances.
Mind over matter is a misnomer, and even to speak of a
mirroring
between
the two probably implies a false dualism. I will try to trace the function
by which events are shaped, and avoid those comfortable categories, those
idolatries, those easy psychological clichés that act as stopping-places
before the goal is reached. And the goal is nothing less than the very
ontological underpinnings of things, the reality-shaping way by which
events come about.
In this opening chapter I have given a rough survey of the kinds of
questions, and the kinds of answers, I will deal with in the rest of the
book. Our clearing in the forest is all there appears for us to go on. I
have no 'deus ex machina' to introduce skilfully at the last. There is
no magic for us -- and no outside interference. The game is ours. Our
responsibility is ultimately serious, yet there is often only one way
really to serve our cultural circle, and that is by breaking through
its tight logic, and plunging into that empty category, the dark forest
beyond. I attempted to do this when disaster struck at my own little
world. I failed in the last analysis -- though of course in retrospect
I see my failure as needless.
The high priests of the disciplines controlling our cultural circle
try to tell us that logic and reason are the sum total of things, or,
if more is possible, that it is only so through
their
controls, which
are their own logical rules. Logic and reason are surely the stuff of
which the clearing is made, and the high point of life's thrust. Yet
these techniques of mind tend to become destructive and to trap us in
deadlocks of despair.
Logic and reason are like the tip of an iceberg. The naive realists, the
biogenetic psychologists, the rats-in-the-maze watchers, claim the tip is
all there is. Yet life becomes demonic when sentenced to so small an area.
There are times when we need to open the threshold of mind to that unknown
subterranean depth -- and we always need to believe in its existence.
And so, though our cosmic egg is the only reality we have, and is not to
be treated lightly, what I hope to show is that there is available to us a
crack in this egg. For there are times when the shell no longer protects
but suffocates and destroys." The crack must be approached with care,
however, lest the egg itself be destroyed. There is a story in the Codez
Bezae, a fifth-century manuscript of the Gospel According to St. Luke,
that illustrates this circle-line problem. Jesus and his disciples were
cutting across a field one Sabbath morning when they came across a man
gathering in his grain. The Sabbath was a strictly no-work day, of course,
and Jesus had been censured by the Establishment for just this kind of
infringement. He knew that only by agreed upon criteria for acceptable
acts can a civilization exist, and so he looked at the man and said:
"Man, if you
know
what you are doing, you are blest. If you do
not
know what you are doing, you are accurst and a transgressor of the law."
The mirroring of mind and reality finds its best expression in a comment
by Jesus almost universally ignored. Those who claim to have heard him
insist that
supplication
is the way out. They cry that we should look
to heaven for our answers. But Jesus, that harsh realist, recognized
the play of mirrors, and pointed out that: "What you loose on earth is
loosed in heaven."
2
valves and solvents
Our clearing in the forest is the form by which content is shaped,
a content which in turn helps determine the form of the clearing. Our
clearing is ancient and archetypal, of infinitely contingent formative
lines, but there are experiences in which a crack forms in this egg, when
nonordinary things are possible, or nonordinary solutions, occur to mind.
This crack formation is the key to reality formation, and involves an
exploration of our modes of thinking. We need a broader look at "mind"
than the biogenetically indoctrinated psychologists have given. We are
aware of our reality-adjusted thinking, our ordinary, socially-oriented,
logical, rational thinking. We are less aware of another mode of thinking
with which we are continually but more peripherally involved.
The god Odin, discovering the secret spring of wisdom and poetry,
asked the guardian of the spring for a drink. He was told: "The price
is your right eye." Jerome Bruner writes of "thinking for the left
hand." Michael Polanyi wrote of a primary process thinking that is
typical of the thinking of children and animals. Psychologists refer
to 'autistic' thinking, and it is this last term that I have found most
descriptive of and useful in talking about the shadow-side of thinking.
Autistic thinking (or A-thinking) is an unstructured, non-logical
(but not necessarily illogical), whimsical thinking that is the key to
creativity. It involves "unconscious processes" but is not necessarily
unconscious. Autistic thinking is indulged in, or in some cases
happens
to one, in ordinary conscious states. The autistic is a kind of dream-world
mode of thinking. This left-handed thinking is nevertheless a functional
part of reality formation. It is the connecting link between our
"clearing" and "forest." It is the pearl of great price. It is the way
by which potential unfolds.
Later I will suggest how this primary process of mind is structured and
modified into an adult world view. This structuring process that we call
'maturing' is a modifying procedure that represses and largely eliminates,
by the very act of maturation, the open-ended potential which thinking
encompasses.
Michael Polanyi wrote that creative thinking was thinking as a child with
the tools of logical structuring given by maturity. This is the key. Most
logical structuring is bought at the price of this child-thinking. There
remains a certain feyness, a childlike quality, in all great creative
people. In them, somehow, a thread remains intact between their modes of
thought. It is a return to this primary-process thinking which brings
about metanoia, conversion, the
Eureka!
illumination of creative
thinking, the seizure by the gods which restructures an event to allow
fire-walking, the transfer of hypnotism which allows non-ordinary
structurings of events, and so on.
It was this re-entrance into primary-process thinking by the adult,
matured, reality-adjusted mind that brought about Jesus' Kingdom. The
structuring process by which the world is born and shaped anew in a mind
is the way by which the mind and its world may be reborn and reshaped.
Whether this re-entry and reshaping process gives a Kingdom of Heaven,
the illumination of E=MC˛, or the double-helix postulate as an "empty
category" to be eventually filled with content, is incidental to the
process. All leavenings raise the flour. There is no logical, rationed,
prestructured criterion "out there" with a divine plan. There is no truth
"out there" which our weak minds or souls eventually run across. There
is this casual, haphazard, moral process that leaps the logical gaps
and brings about newness. And the procedure's only demand is that given
talents be invested, risked, doubled, the possibilities explored.
World view development in a child modifies his primary process thinking,
that archetypal mode that melts out into a continuum. This structuring
modifies, but also gives the child's world-to-view the form in which,
and only in which growth, expansion, and possibility can unfold. World
view development limits and thwarts, but there is no other way to have
a world-to-view.
Metanoia changes, to varying extents, this fundamental structure built
since infancy. The change of concept is brought about by a
retracing
of the original formative process of world view development, and a
reshaping of the concepts originally formed.
When the postulate arrives out of the blue, and a person suddenly
"sees" a long desired answer to a problem, when "illumination" or
understanding is suddenly achieved, this re-formation process has taken
place in relation to some specific possibility. All creative mental
phenomena involve this autistic thinking and follow a similar pattern of
development in the mind. All such phenomena are reality-influencing, or
capable of influencing reality. In each case there is a change of concept
that changes some aspect of the logical world view and introduces a new
"seeing," which itself may eventually bring about new things to be seen
within the broad, statistical mode of reality-adjusted, social thinking.
One cannot induce creative autistic thinking ad lib., however. It is
bought at a price. The creative aspect of A-thinking is not controllable,
and cannot be duplicated by a computer, for the autistic mode
adds
something
not in the given context. There is a catalystic quality in
A-thinking that gives
more than
the sum of the parts suggesting and
bringing about the new possibility.
This A-thinking catalyst is not one's personal thinking. Rather,
it happens to a person. It happens to a person, though, only after
the person has achieved a certain saturation point of his controlled,
directed reasoning. The creative will-o'-the-wisp occurs only alter
rigorous logical thinking. It is the Spirit that is found only when one
has exceeded and gone beyond the lawyers and Pharisees.
Autistic thinking can only be defined in a roundabout way. For instance,
a pianist friend told me of the following experience, the most impressive
of his life. His favorite work, one he had lived with for years, was
Mozart's last sonata, K576, the one written after the composer's late
discovery of Bach. My friend was giving a concert one evening, and was
scheduled to play this sonata. Just before commencing, he leaned back for
a moment to sense the mood of that contrapuntal texture, and was struck
anew by its exquisiteness and his love of it. At that moment, in a single
frozen instant out of time, he "experienced" the sonata. It happened to
him, rather as Susanne Langer's volume-filled time. Every note, phrase,
nuance, shadow and line formed in an ethereal circle of perfection for
him. He described it as a volume, a sort of universal whole, perfect,
far more than human, and happening to him as something unique and totally
outside of himself. Though it had occupied only a second, the occurrence
was immeasurable by any kind of time, and was numinous and profound.