This autistic experience, a kind of esthetic illumination, gives the pattern of all creative formations. Even my own small "illumination" which triggered the search leading to this book, happened in this way. I had spent more than two years reading, corresponding, thinking, struggling with the relation of thought and reality in general, and with the mechanics of metanoia in particular, for a form of this had dramatically altered my own life.
One day, following an exciting connection of ideas that had unfolded over several weeks and seemed tantalizingly close to "jelling," I grew stale and unable to go further. I went out to relax with my children and dutifully climbed an apple tree at their insistence that it gave a lovely view. And there, in my own little suspended moment out of mind, I "saw." The connecting link between the fragmented parts of my search fused. There was a great wash of understanding, powerful, total. I had my answer. Nothing was specific or articulate. It just was , in a perfectly clear kind of ultimate certainty. The answer seemed, utterly remote from my thinking, however, far larger than the sum total of my insignificant bits of material gathered over the years, and far exceeding the scope of my own ideas or capacity of thought. I knew the "translating" of that experience, making it articulate, structuring the answer into a logical, communicable shape, would involve me for a long time.
Let me add now that in my experience what was understood to be the "answer" was the very function by which I had achieved my "seeing." My answer was a turning in on the process of questioning. That is, the answer to my passionate pursuit was insight into how the answers to passionate questions are formed in the mind. I saw that this was but an extension of the very ontological function by which "things were." I saw that this was the way the "empty category" of science was shaped and filled. For me no "universal out-there truth" was given. Rather, I saw that the, only "truth" for us is the process of questioning what truth might be, and receiving answers in keeping with the nature of our questions.
I will return to this question-answer procedure in some detail. For now I want to explore the state of mind involved in the moment of answer itself. The state is brought on by a chance suspension of ordinary thinking, following a rigorous exercise of normal logic. Both the Sonata and apple tree experiences show how the autistic mode breaks into mind with "universals," but universals in keeping with the mundane nature of the suggestions triggering the experience, suggestions drawing on ordinary life and its materials.
An unconscious synthesis is involved in the formation of this answering experience. Unconscious , though, carries too many limiting connotations. For instance, imagination (creating images not present to the senses) is surely one of the active ingredients of creative thinking, and the prime ingredient of the "empty category." But imagination is our conscious play with potential, just not hampered with modifications or adjustments to other things or other thinkers. A sonata-type experience, or apple tree illumination, the finally-arriving scientific Eureka! or for that matter: Higamous, Hogamous, Women are Monogamous, etc., happens to a person. The synthesis is other to him, even as it is wholly within him, and he is within it.
Yet it should not be overlooked that the great postulate-illumination- answer happens only to a mind that has been deeply immersed in the proper materials for its genesis, and has passionately asked the question for a prolonged period. The Eureka! arrives out of the blue, but from a well-prepared and primed one. The spirit bloweth where it listeth, but inevitably the direction it finally takes is determined by hard work and true commitment.
Autistic thinking, then, refers to an autonomous, self-contained kind of thinking that makes no adjustment to the world of other things or other thinkers, but it must have its materials from this other source. A-thinking includes conscious imagination and apparently unconscious processes and so offers a label for a wide range of similar phenomena.
The 'hypnagogic state,' a jargon term you do not have to know to experience, is a common form of autistic thinking that "happens" to a person. Have you ever spent a day in some rare, new venture, such as picking wild strawberries, and that night, just as you start to drift off to sleep, found yourself suddenly "looking" at the most real strawberries of your life? In fact, they are more than real; they are the most fragrant, beautiful, green-leafed, red-fruited berries conceivable to mind, occurring in a vital and sensual immediacy more real than any actual occurrence of your life.
Consider the similarity between this "strawberry hypnagogery," my friend's Mozart Sonata, and my apple tree experience, and you will see the basic outline by which life moves randomly from possibility to possibility. This kind of thinking acts on some exceptional, dramatic, emotional, ultimately serious, or even just repetitive, involvement from actual experience. It synthesizes this into something larger and more perfect than the original. Then the autistic synthesis breaks into the mind, at some odd off-guard moment, when the logical processes have been suspended. The autistic mode then presents this streamlined, utterly superior version, as something unique, larger than life, and unavailable to previously accepted logical manipulations.
Hans Selye wrote that every really important scientific idea he knew of had occurred in the twilight moments between sleep and waking, that state called hypnagogic, a point to which I will return.
The hypnagogic's strawberry vision is free of half-ripe, bird-pecked, imperfect berries; free of gnats, dirt, sore knees, or aching back. The sonata-illumination was beyond all mechanical frailties; beyond the limitations of instrument, muscle and bone, the small errors, the (adventurous) possibility of serious failure of productions that makes precarious and tenuous a living music, or living things. My apple tree experience showed a living unity of all things, in a tranquil simplicity free of all the logical problems its translation would involve, and that the "translated world" surely entails. The autistic version is free of the excluded possibilities that stand as possible static in the standard broadcast. This is the key issue. Autistic thinking is unambignous -- a point to which I will return time and again. To the mind in this state all things are possible, all postulates are true. To the mind seized by this mode, fire need not burn, affliction cripple, or disease kill.
There is, then, this freely-synthesizing aspect of mind, self-contained, untrammeled by harsh realities, abstracting and idealizing certain isolated phenomena from the world of realized events, and breaking into the conscious mind with this idealization. Such breakthroughs may be numinous, awesome, universal, with a feeling of sureness that gives the person involved the confidence to push his translation of the experience in spite of all outward evidence to the contrary. Polanyi believes an esthetic appreciation of the beauty of a discovery gives its bearer his sense of rightness and conviction. This is surely an element, for the autistic non-ambiguity is highly colored with esthetic sanction and absoluteness.
Bearing this in mind, consider again William Blake's claim that: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time." And add to this Jesus' postulate that: "What you loose on earth is loosed in Heaven."
The hypnagogic form of the autistic state, though happening as a rare and fleeting otherness to most of us, can be developed by care and discipIine. The price is suspension of the ordinary world view. If the ordinary categories which hold our world together can be bypassed, anything capable of being thought of can be "true." Sometimes the hypnagogic state happens to a person as a kind of "empty category." There are rare half-sleep moments when we suddenly realize that we are in this pseudo-dream state. At those times the first flicker of thought can be instantly "made real" in the dream state and directed by conscious desire and volition. The erotic dream is occasionally a form of this.
The "little lizard" divination rite of the Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan (of whom more later), created a form of this "empty category." And the divination would answer the first question asked. It would succeed, however, only if the question were presented without confusion or ambiguity. Paul Tillich wrote that the "hidden content" of prayer was always the decisive factor,
which is another expression of the same function, and a point to which I will return. The real assumption of our underlying beliefs is the determinant in our lives. Surface verbal plays of mind are often only forms of wishful thinking posited against the deep strata of a belief to the contrary. But the deep strata are the determinant in the reality event because of the nonambiguous nature of this level of thought. Jesus' "prayer in the secret place" refers to this level of certainty that underlies all the contingencies of any reality.
Ambiguous confusion, lack of an "ultimate desire" or basic motivation, fragments and dissolves the autistic-hypnagogic possibilities, should they occur to a person's mind. Seven centuries ago, Roger Bacon recognized that mathematics would be the gateway to the sciences. This is because of the nonambiguous nature of mathematics. An idea that can be expressed mathematically is one that can be represented unambiguously, and anything which can be represented and believed in non-ambiguously tends to be expressed in reality. Mathematics serves as a projection device giving objective certainly, just as the god Kataragama does for the Hindu, for instance.
The Tibetan Yoga spends years developing a state of mind that bears, from written reports, direct relation to the hypnagogic. The Yoga cultivated, practiced, and finally "entered into" the potential of his autistic mode of thinking. The state he brought about was a subset of his ordinary reality, organized along specific and controlled lines, as found in hypnotism. By a subset I mean that he drew on his background experience in selective ways, setting up a world within a world, the equivalent of a concretized dream state under direct conscious control. (Later, the similarities between this Hindu activity and the Path of Knowledge outlined by the sorcerer, don Juan, will become apparent.)
One Yogic activity was the production of a 'tulpa,' a phantasm, or imaginary person. The production was a slow development which could itself only be undertaken in a mature stage of training. Eventually the 'tulpa' creation would begin to form and take on aspects of reality for the subject-creator. Fleeting glimpses, peripheral and insubstantial, would become more stable, until a full and permanent image could be brought to focus. A 'tulpa' became responsive to speech and the whole sensory range of the subject. 'Tulpas' developed definite personality traits and full capacities for ordinary human response. Occasionally a 'tulpa' would take on strong enough reality aspects to be glimpsed by other people, people who had no knowledge of the production-project itself. 'Tulpas' were known to display the same passionate adherences to their developed personalities as would a real person (bringing to mind the strange tenacity of the personality, Eve Black, in Thigpen's case of the Three Faces of Eve).
The Tibetan monk used this technique to create a form of the local goddess, voluptuous creature, as a consort with whom connubial bliss could be indulged at whim. This might seem only a cultic freak of subjectivity, but several aspects of it are indicative of both metanoia, that creates physicists from students, and the Eureka! postulate that brings about reality-changing concepts and "discoveries."
First, the process of mind takes its idea and its material from the real world. The goddess is a well-established and familiar part of the culture. Further, experience with a real woman must be undergone by the novice, followed by a complete mastery of all sexual desire. That is, the novice not only experiences a real woman, he then must gain complete mental control over his actual glandular reactions (and it is a medical fact that the Yoga can control all "old-brain" autonomous activities, such as heart beat, body heat, glandular output, and so on), as well as psychological reactions, until he can turn desire on or off at will, without ambiguous double-thinking.
These are the "given materials," then, that are acted upon by the catalyzing synthesis within the autistic mode of thinking. The materials are synthesized and "given back" to ordinary thinking in a unified image, larger and greater than life. True to all autistic creations, the goddess achieved proves superior to frail woman, though some plain Tibetan girl was part of the raw material for the "divine synthesis." To achieve a state of non-ambiguity is the final goal of Yogic training. Then when a specific desire is singled out, as for instance 'tulpa' creation, the attention of mind, the passionate pursuit, brings about a slow metanoia of the necessary concepts, tranforming them to direct the percepts in the needed ways. Finally the Yoga's senses respond according to the dictates of his "editorial hierarchy" of mind, and the goddess materializes and becomes real for him.
The superiority of autistic creations suggest an additive unavailable from the ordinary ambiguous processes of mind. Autistic thinking can apparently synthesize out of the sum total of the context of the ultimate desire triggering the process. But it also adds that maddening quality of perfection, larger and more real than any of the elements in the triggering background. The autistic experience is felt as a wholeness that lies beyond all mundane reality, a numinous quality that makes us feel we have received lightning from the hand of God.
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 Crack in the Cosmic Egg Page 4
