The Crack in the Cosmic Egg

by Joseph Chilton Pearce

  Our new historical research is thorough. We may know more about certain past eras than the participants of those periods themselves. Our relation to the past is not so important from the standpoint of mechanical developments contributing to science, however, as it is to the growth of a psyche, the emergence of a thinking earth that built up this network of concepts, now capable of almost infinite synthesis. To accept our physical mode of being as ancient and formative, and yet fail to grant the psychic mode the same status is to help split our world in half.

  Archaic cultures had a skimpy history at best, but they possessed rich myths, traditions, and symbols, giving continuity, purpose, and meaning. Ancestors, for instance, played a vital role. Recitation of one's lineage gave a secure place in time, a sense of personal participation in a long drama. Genealogy, learned from memory and half-symbolic fantasy, often reached back to the very gods. Ancestor worship expressed an archetypal imagery indicating a cultural continuity with the whole scheme of life. One's forebears had not just "joined the god," but were, in effect, the gods themselves. Jesus' Fatherhood of God, Sonship of man, Father Abraham, and "before Abraham was, I am," indicate this shaping of a god by the whole history of man.

  Interpreting history from a scientific rather than psychological viewpoint alienates us from Blake's "larger body of man," our true self. We can be integrated with ourselves, and understand our true position and potential, only by personally experiencing the full mode of our mind, which is a mind that shades into the past.

  The average man cannot contemplate such things as deeper processes of mind so long as "those that know" deny their existence. And the ideologies presently strangling us do deny the peripheral areas of mind. The current vogue ignores mind and concentrates on biology. There is a kind of nihilistic fascination in pointing out that since we must ingest food, defecate, and copulate, we are only another animal. This constitutes massive denial of our true selves. It is a repetition of our old and chronic "failure of nerve." For we are larger than the sum total of the mechanisms of our form. There is no being but in a mode of being, and each thrust of life incorporates previously-developed forms of expression, but our form should not blind us to our content.

  Language plays the dominant role in the shaping of our world view and world-to-view. We know now that language is not a mode of animal communication. Surely animals communicate. Recent studies of the higher apes compel such a conclusion. But language is far more than communication. Animals communicate without language and without symbols. Susanne Langer points out that language deals not just with some higher form of general animal function, but with a new function developed in the hominid brain. More than mentality is involved in language. Language is a function of such complexity that not one, "but many subhuman mental activities underlie it."

  C. E. Bitterman, of Bryn Mawr, has offered a theory of discontinuity in the evolutionary growth of mind that substantiates Langer's quarrel with biogenetic psychology, and may well indicate a wider tendency in life. The old idea of evolution saw the growth of "cephalization," or mind, as an additive process, simply building up more complex patterns of a basic brain function. Bitterman shows, however, that new mental functions, found in widely variant steps in ascending species, are not just additive parts, basic replications of a mechanism. They are, instead, radical discontinuities introducing entirely new functions and possibilities.

  Old functions might give hints of a direction for new possibility, but no quantitative manipulation of the old can produce the new. There is a qualitative addition. This addition is from that creative spark that leaps the logical gaps with naive ease. The development of a new life form follows, then, the same creative pattern found in the formation of the Eureka! illumination, the 'metanoia,' the radical discovery experience. It is another expression of the same thrust.

  Speech is radically discontinuous with those life forms leading up to it. Speech serves no adaptive purpose, no "pair-group" survival function, as the naive realists claim. Yet speech was developed by life, and its purpose can be understood from its real function, a function long championed by Langer and slowly being grasped by others. This purpose has been spelled out here in my book. It was part of the development of a system of logical choice, of value judgment, and of projected symbol-making, through which new possibilities for reality could be consciously directed. This was a radical step of universal significance, and life leaped the gap with a discontinuity between old and new.

  The cause of the need is the cause of the fulfillment of the need, as Langer quotes Flüger. The passionate question created its own answer, or, as Tillich would say, the divine answer was shaped by the existential question. That a formative, creative force should evolve from an ape-like creature is no more puzzling than that the earliest automobiles were literally horseless-carriages. That man sits in the same vehicle does not mean that the internal-combustion engine is really just a horse.

  This discontinuity in the growth of mind makes ridiculous our current attempts to equate man with the lower animals. Langer doubts that we can rely on any built-in behavior patterns. The range of our possible actions has been so enormously widened by our conceptual powers -- imagination, conception, and speculation -- that "no inherited repertoire could fit the contingencies" of our world. Skinner may have enjoyed his ping-pong-playing pigeons, but then to presume that the mind of man could be controlled by turning on the right lights, pushing the right buttons, is the most unrealistic of naive-realistic fantasies.

  The failure of psychology rests squarely on its inability to deal with the psyche itself. Mental phenomena comprise the one area that has frustrated psychology. So for several generations now psychologists have busied themselves with something they could manipulate, the worm, the rat, the dog, the poor hairy ape. But the correspondences they have so laboriously made have proved thin material.

  In recent years there has been a renewed attack on consciousness, declaring it nothing more than electrochemical discharges in a complex adaptive device. As a result, psychology has not only failed to grow as the other sciences, but has surely failed in its logical role of filling the vacuum left by religion.

  Among other things, Langer blames the failure of psychology on its inability to allow the "heavy strains of bold, speculative hypothesis to be laid on it." Not only has psychology failed to provide us with the material for a new mythos, by which a truly modern culture could form, it has fed directly into the self-abrogation and denial on which such atavistic and destructive nonsense as the "Naked Ape" ideology has leeched out its obscene existence.

  Langer writes that despite man's zoological status the gulf between the highest animal and the most primitive of humans is fundamental. This difference she attributes to the human brain and its use of symbols.

  A culture, in Langer's terms, is the symbolic expression of developed habitual ways of experience as a whole. This symbolic expression takes on a mythical form. Jerome Bruner claims that personality imitates myth in as deep a sense as myth is an externalization of personality. Society patterns itself on "idealizing myths," and the individual man is only able to "bring order to his internal clamor of identities in terms of prevailing myth." Life, writes Bruner, produces myth and finally imitates it. This, I would note, suggests a kind of mirroring.

  As a result, Bruner says, our standard of what is humanly possible is profoundly affected by our view of ourselves. We act ourselves into ways of believing and believe ourselves into ways of acting.

  Our current views of human possibility set up contradicting and fragmenting paradoxes. We view ourselves ironically on the one hand, and assume boastful posturings on the other. We unleash forces and feel ourselves capable of unlocking secrets of the universe. At the same time we feel largely dissociated from and fated to our very actions.

  Northrop Frye, in his Four Essays, writes of the alazon, the impostor who pretends to be more than he is, the 'miles glorious.' On the other hand is the 'eiron,' the man who deprecates himself. Our modern imag
e plays the 'alazon' in that we pretend to be unique from previous developments; superior, because of our science and gadgets, to all other cultures in spite of a lack of a cohesive culture of our own. And we play the 'eiron' in that we deprecate ourselves -- considering ourselves but a clever ape, able by some freak to catch on to a mechanism a priori and superior to us. Thus we suffer guilt and fear of reprisal over our manipulations of nature, and a sense of alienation from our continuum, our ecology, our fellows, and ourselves.

  Langer points out, as did Jerome Bruner, that we live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making. "The activity of imagining reality is the center of experience," she claims. The average man, though, picks up his symbols and ideas for imagining from "those that know." He may never analytically understand the workings of the various disciplines that shape his time, but he senses the general frame of their reference, and becomes very much aware of the drift of their conclusions. He does not contemplate serious matters often. Abstract and logically developed ideas "seep into the untutored thought only as concrete, familiar models are found to picture them."

  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.