The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (6 page)

There are other ramifications of autistic thinking. In our town lived
a child called autistic by the psychologists. For some reason ordinary
reality adjustments were never made by the child. At age seven she could
perform prodigious intellectual feats, whenever the world was randomly
tuned in. Certain blocks seemed operative; tight channelings allowed
in only a few selected perceptions. Perhaps the rewards of reality
adjustment, with its self-modification, demands for choice, exclusion
of other potential, damping of archaic thought-processes, risk of self
to a world of other selves, and so on, were never as strong for her as
the lure of the autonomous, inner synthesis. Perhaps the bits and pieces
of reality perceived were put together in a free synthesis similar to a
Yogic wonderland, though a frightful construct is apparently more often
the case with these unfortunates.
My own small son gave insight into autistic-reality tensions. For
his birthday he was given a vicious little soldier-doll; complete
with scarred face, movable limbs, and murderous paraphernalia of war,
it captivated my boy. For close to two years he was absorbed with the
"G.I. Joe" and played with nothing else.
One summer day, he became even more fey than usual, withdrawn, faraway
and quiet. He ate little, looking at us with the strange pitying look
of one possessed of universal secrets. He would not leave the house but
sat quietly with his soldier-doll, no longer playing or speaking. The
spell lasted four days, when he was suddenly himself again.
Later he voluntarily, if haltingly, explained to me why he had been "so
rude" those four days. It had occurred to him, in a burst of insight,
that his G.I. Joe could become alive for him, as he had passionately
wished and daydreamed about so long, and that they could play together
for ever and ever. But, and here he groped his way carefully, G.I. Joe
would have been alive only for him, not for anyone else, and then he,
my son, could no longer have been a part of us, his family, or take part
in things we did.
The issues were clear-cut, equally real, and equally rewarding. His
decision had been no light thing, weighed those silent days. Why
we
happened to win I will never know. Perhaps we rather lost. Life should
be a venture of liberty, with a safe harbor for return. Perhaps my son
would only have entered on an adventurous path, as don Juan the sorcerer
might say, and probably that path might have been traversed more freely
than we can imagine. Ronald Laing, the Scotch psychiatrist, would have
understood and sympathized with my boy. Laing knows the social structure
to be every bit as much an exercise in madness as these opposites. He
considers escape from our world a fairly rational maneuver, if rather
an exchange of chains.
Back to the autistic procedures. A-thinking is not reality adjusted,
and so not hinged about by modifications to what can and cannot be
true. Children distinguish from an early age that certain experiences
are considered unreal by their superiors, since eliciting either no
adult responsive-verification or a negative adult response. This is mere
arbitrariness to a child, however, not an absolute. A child's world is
"quasi-hallucinatory," as Smythies calls it, though nonetheless real for
that. Only little by little does a child adopt criteria for true-false
in keeping with the relationship of parents and society. He does this as
the rewards from and demands by that relationship grow. Piaget considers
early adolescence the breakpoint for a new psychological stage and the
full development of logic. It is not just fortuitous that this coincides
with a growing peer group demand for other-directedness, culminating in
that absolutely-other demand, sexuality.
Autistic thinking is self-contained. It operates beyond the restrictions
and modifications of a world. That is why this kind of thinking can make
an unlimited synthesis of experience. Anything is "true" in A-thinking;
any of its constructions are "universals," or cosmic truths. It is just
this capacity, still operating in the adult mind, even though only
peripherally and unconsciously, that creates the postulate arriving
full-blown in the brain.
The
Eureka!
illumination is unavailable to the constructions of logical
thought, but dependent on the machinations of logical thought with its
selective screening. Logical thought operates by limitation, selecting
from potential some specific isolated desire. The autistic is a continuum,
an "everything," and so nothing. A conscious desire held to passionately,
or ultimately, until it excludes other ideas that would inhibit it, thus
takes on the characteristics of autistic non-ambiguity, and furnishes a
point of focus for this autistic capacity. The autistic can synthesize
this desire into a unified postulate or answer relating far beyond the
limited materials of the triggering passion. The given postulate can,
in turn, change world views, and worlds-to-view.
The free-synthesis capacity of A-thinking, able to draw on the continuum
of reality experience and potential as it does, is what gives all really
new ideas their "initial element of foolishness," as Whitehead wrote of
all genuinely new notions. Consider, for instance, David Bohm and all
those billions of tons of energy from a cubic centimeter of nothing
at all, or Jesus moving those mountains with the faith of a grain of
mustard seed.
Piaget felt that autistic thinking corresponded with "primitive
psychological causality, implying magic." Belief that any desire
whatsoever can influence objects, the belief in the "obedience of external
things," sets up a confusion "between self and world," Piaget claimed,
which destroys both "logical truth and objective existence."
Piaget here expresses that intriguing fear the rational mind feels toward
autistic processes. This is the cosmic egg's fear of being cracked. Piaget
is here the voice of our eternal culture-priest, intoning the dangers
of moving outside the common consensus of what constitutes our current
egg-dimensions. Don Juan the sorcerer would be contemptuous of Piaget's
timidity and narrowness, even as Piaget could rightfully dismiss don Juan.
Surely we must be selective. Surely we do not casually choose what
makes up our current criteria for our "irreducible and stubborn facts"
so longed for by the realists. These facts are our given world view and
to question them is to threaten our ideation with collapse into chaos.
Yet, "Logical truth" and "objective "existence" are variables, formed
by cultural agreement. These "Facts" change, much as fashions change --
though to each generation they represent reality as it must then be.
We represent change as our own emerging from the dark and foolish
superstitions of the past and the coming into the light of a final, true,
and really
modern
understanding. Each age proclaims itself the 'Ars
Nova' and scorns the 'Ars Antiqua.' Each man believes, as did Erasmus,
that the world is just coming awake from a long sleep. Generation by
generation we proclaim ourselves the enlightenment. Each age delights
in singing a new requiem to its fathers. As we change our inherited
representation of the world, the world we deal with changes accordingly.
In our struggle for an agreeable representation of reality, various
systems rise as meteors, pronouncing, in their brief fling, absolutes
concerning what we are. The mind is only this, only that. Each system
is quietly bypassed as the mind and its reality prove always to be more
than this, and more than that. A survey of this parade of self-asserting
notions would be a history of the human race. A fairly recent episode
lends itself well to the problem of autistic thinking, however, as well
as to the nature of our shifting attitudes.
In the early 1960's there was a meeting of psychiatrists in San
Francisco. One important dignitary mounted the rostrum and intoned that
the problem of mental disease had been
solved
. Mental disease was just a
chemical imbalance in that electrochemical machine called the brain. Now,
chemistry had come to the rescue. Within about three years this certainty
was quietly buried, quietly lest anyone be embarrassed. The issue will
never prove so simple. The cause of this particular flurry was the
growing experimentation with psychedelics, the mind-manifesting drugs,
or hallucinogens, as they are variously called. Queen of the chemicals
was LSD, and great were the wonders thereof. Apparently psychedelics
enabled the mind to bypass the patterns of our ordinary, illusory world
view and experience phenomena that had little relation to the everyday
world. The experiences may have powerful subjective meaning, occasionally
plunging the subject into "universals" and absolutes.
Psycherelics induce a kind of autistic experience and so are valuable to
the present discussion. As stated before, there is no "value judgement" in
the autistic mode of thinking. In the autistic mode anything conceivable
is "true." The nature of the autistically perceived experience can thus
become an exciting area for speculation since ordinary categories no
longer apply.
Hoffer and Osmond, of the Saskatchewan group, in their early (1959)
defense of a "chemical psychiatry," recognized that our beliefs influenced
the way we perceived the world, and that the "mould for world-making,"
once formed, resisted change stubbornly. Psychedelics, they mused, allowed
the mind to divest itself of the "protective yet dulling layers" of acquired
assumptions and rationalizations with which all men are "encumbered." For
a little while, it seemed, psychedelics allowed the mind to "see the
universe again with an innocent, unshielded eye."
These early enthusiasms did not bear up well under experience. For one
thing, a person's given conceptual frame of reference proved formative,
even in the remote regions of psychedelic phenomena. When the patterns
of the common world are fractured, our underlying attitudes still
influence the nature of the experienced data. Cohen, of USC, pointed
out that the "divergent expectations and intent" of the investigators
made the difference between heaven and hell from the same ha!lacinogen.
Cohen quoted Thomas Aquinas in one saying that can be considered a
universal: "Whatever is received is received according to the nature of
the recipient."
Hoffer and Osmond's notion of an "innocent, unshielded view of the
universe" proved no more fruitful. So long as a thinking egocenter exists,
its fundamental assumptions are a determinant in the experienced universe
itself. Stripping off the acquired interests of our world view does
not lead to a 'true universe.' Our "acquisitions," as Hoffer and Osmond
call them, are the very concepts directing the percepts that
constitute
the world in which we move, and there is no other world for us. We cannot
free ourselves of our clearing in the forest and plunge out into the dark
and find truth. If our acquired interests are a cloak that can be shed,
we would immediately have to weave another, equally arbitrary garb. There
is, in this sense, no going naked in the world.
Bruner of Harvard tells of studies in perception that have identified
over seven million different shades of color between which we can
differentiate. We categorize this spectrum into about a dozen groups,
or families. This makes a practical, limited representation which we
can respond to easily, talk about handily, and think about coherenfiy.
The spectrum of light "as itself" might be analagous to the continuum of
autistic thinking, lying free and untrammeled outside all categories. A
handful of primary colors represent the defining disciplines of social
thinking, our logic and objective reason. We impose our categories on
what we see in order to see. We see through the prism of our categories.
The world view we inherit has been built up by putting things into
objective pigeonholes like this, categories that can be
shared
. The
psychedelic may fracture these structures. Under LSD, for instance,
the categories of color, by which we help organize our field of visual
possibility, may be dissolved. Then colors may merge, flow together, and
not stay put. Faces may suddenly "drip" and run across the floor. Shapes
may become fluid and mixing.
However, to shatter our working models of the universe does not lead to
'truth,' any kind of new data, or, above all, a "true picture" of the
universe. The universe, like nature, is a conceptual framework that
changes from culture to culture and age to age. Our concepts are to
some extent arbitrary constructs but to disrupt or dissolve them with
drugs does not free us into some universal knowledge "out there" in the
great beyond. There is, instead, the loss of meaningful structures of
agreement needed for communion with others. This can lead to the loss
of personality definition itself, that which don Juan meant by "loss of
soul," or Jesus meant by the "outer darkness."
This "freedom from false concepts" notion is but a recurrence' of the
old Garden of Eden myth, the "noble savage," return-to-nature nonsense of
the romantics. Any world view is a creative tension between possibility
and choice. This is the tension that holds community and "real" world
together. This is the cohesive force of our own center of awareness, the
thin line between loss of self to autistic dissolution on the one hand,
or slavery to the broad statistics of the world on the other. Perceptions
relieved of this natural tension, through drugs or the various occult
religious techniques, may well be profound or frightfully chaotic.
Price, in his preface to Carington's book (
Matter, Mind and Meaning
),
discusses the physiological phenomenon of "ideomotor action." It has been
found that an idea or response tends to fulfill itself or execute itself
automatically through the muscular apparatus of the body, and will do so
unless other ideas are present to inhibit it. Price suggests that this
is indicative of a wider operation in life, namely that all ideas have
a tendency to realize themselves in the material world in any way they
can, unless inhibited by other ideas. This Price-Carington notion will
be borne out, I believe, in the exploration taking place here in my book.