The clearing in the forest, our reality-adjusted thinking, hinges on a common bond of objective agreement. The threshold between this kind of thinking and the forest itself I have called the 'autistic' mode. Reality-thinking, autistic thinking, and that logically necessary empty category, the unconscious continuum, are all of a piece. You cannot have one without the other. Each implies the other; none are the other; none can be except by or in the other. The process of reality is an interaction between the three. They are not discontinuous. They merge slowly and imperceptibly into each other.
To speak of nature or reality as though such a category exists independently of the categorizing function that speaks of it is every bit as one-sided and presumptuous as to suppose that no nature exists except as a categorizing function of mind, or to presume that a function of mind could operate outside the matrix of a nature. We can only explore how our categorizing influences the categories that we find ourselves in. The meshing of these components I have called the mirror-to-mirror function, realizing that the simplistic one-to-one correspondence implied has to be sharply and constantly qualified. An element of randomness writes a question mark over all our efforts.
By now I think I have laid some groundwork for a defense of that saying by Jesus that "what we loose on earth is loosed in heaven," and I believe we have the materials for updating and reinterpreting the ontological insights afforded us by that genius's metaphor "heaven." If the religious metaphors prove archaic and stand in the way, they should be thrown out. But save the function toward which they point. Perhaps we cannot re-bottle that new wine of his; the old skins into which it was immediately put, in spite of his pleas, have probably soured it beyond redemption. But within his postulates might reside the formula by which we can make some new wine for our new, if empty, bottles.
This function of mirroring is found in the trance state in a simple, direct, but limited way. It is found in the transference procedure in general. It underlies the question-answer process, the formation of postulates, the discoveries of science, the workings of the creative imagination, and all those "radical discontinuities" of life.
By now we should be able to see that the thinking we call God and the thinking we call man are all of a piece. The differences are functional. The process cannot work well so long as the differences are misunderstood, projected rather than stood under and accepted.
The autistic mode is equally everything, the way by which "all things are in all places at the same time," as suggested by Whitehead. Physics sees the relation through its own prism -- and there is no other way to see -- recognizing that the farthest thing in the universe influences the closest. The metaphors for interpretation are endless, but each metaphor shapes the reality then experienced as the function.
This open capacity of synthesis has no value judgment since to judge as value is to choose, limit, and close in on a specific, that is, to become that chosen. In order to choose and limit consciously , and still openly synthesize, another process of thinking has evolved -- man. The evolutionary development of this new function may well have been trial and error, random chance, or purposive, as Teilhard believed. To presume one or the other is equally arbitrary though reality influencing. Nevertheless, life has created the means for a conscious directing of potential and we are the means, aware of it or not, liking it or not.
This new procedure attempted by life, that of creating a system of logical selection from an open capacity, is, ornate and complex, beset with problems and subject to enormous variations and breakdowns. No small part of the problem is the vehicle itself, this "hominid creature," carrying within him eons of triggered responses. The simple mirroring model I have drawn is qualified by our inheritance -- from the simplest energy forms on up. The infinite contingency of nature makes the problem of structuring an open system ornately complex.
Carington believed that any idea expresses itself unless inhibited by other ideas. In an infinitely contingent universe, operating by profusion, ideas expressed must of necessity be at least partially compatible and mutually non-inhibiting. Everything tends to strike a balance, with all forms tending to perpetuate themselves. As Bohm pointed out, such balances are only temporary, the very forces bringing about a balance working equally to change. The slow breakdown of such forms, and creation of others, makes no difference to an autistic, non-judging, criteria-free system that is "equally all things."
The development of self-consciousness, necessary for value and conscious directing of potential, poses a multitude of problems. To be self-conscious is to be aware of the dissolution. Further, each person then has the capability of organizing a unique reality picture, as exemplified, for instance, in don Juan. (The problem of stress this creates at early adolescence is fascinating, but must await a further work.) Chaos is the underlying threat of the open system become self-conscious. Thus the self-modification demanded by a common agreement, necessary for a common world view and a society, is also a natural source of conflict. Organizing a common reality seems to be bought at the price of individuality. Ideally the flexible personality could enter into such common agreements without loss of self. Underlying the ultra-conservative's paranoia is his inability to enter into subsets of reality play other than his own. Once he has modified to a world view he is frozen into it. Alien views become threats to his very universe.
Even this brief attempt to touch on the problem of form and content starts branching exponentially, like a tree at every tip, and must be ignored now to get back to the subject at hand. And that point is the need of a modern mythos sufficient to give a cultural symbol for organization -- one that will not be bought at too great a price of potential.
Such a mythos must be psychological, based on the ramifications of personality and thought, not on media, technology, or any of our products. We are infinitely more than our things. It is our capacity of production, not our products, that is the key.
Parapsychology failed also to materialize as an opening through which our position might have clarified. Like the figures of don Juan and Jesus, though, it gives indications of the overall picture. Jule Eisenbud gives amusing accounts, as did William James three-quarters of a century ago, of the resistance of colleagues to any suggestion of a parapsychological element in man. Eisenbud pinpoints part of the reason. Psychical data suggests that man has within him untapped powers and any data offering evidence of man's being more than a naked ape is met with powerful negation. Within a generation after James's death, the tough-minded were attributing to fraud all the extraordinary events he tried to get his fellow-professors to witness. One thinks of Galileo and his telescope. Recognition of James's and Eisenbud's phenomena would lead to every bit as upsetting a crack in the egg as Galileo's, an occurrence that will not be tolerated by current priesthoods.
Eisenbud agrees with Jung and the depth psychologists that the culprit is the split of consciousness from unconsciousness, the "Fall" in mythological terms. The split is widening, too, Eisenbud claims. Man has tended to project farther and farther from himself his responsibility for the evil that goes on around him. Modern times may have really begun, writes Eisenbud, when man could project his own will for the death of others onto some "out there" power and say: "I didn't do it, he did."
Eisenbud points out that the conspiracy of denial and rejection followed by science, concerning that "below the limen of feeling," is bred into its very marrow. All potential not funneled through their peculiar view of fate is dismissed as not even happening, as occult, delusion, folie à deux, mass hallucination. Avis Dry turned out a very scholarly study of the "schizophrenia'~ of Carl Jung.
We tend to think of the Golden Age of Greece, that short half-century of magnificence five hundred years before Jesus' birth, as the Greek part of our Greco-Hebraic heritage. It was the post-Platonic Greece of the Stoics that molded our western history, however, that same "failure-of-nerve" thinking to which Singer attributed the death of early science. Some scholars attributed to Greece the breaking with the archetyp
al cyclic world view, introducing the objective mode of thinking leading to science. But, as Polanyi and others point out, the Greeks destroyed only the unity of man and his world, while leaving intact that world as a cyclic unit. In the resulting Greek representation of reality, man is a passive and helpless bit of protoplasm caught in the grindstones of fated cosmic forces. This was the very view that crushed Jesus' new ideas, and used his imagery as expression of this very fate.
At root is the age-old battle, whether to recognize the mind as a whole unit encompassing its reality or to split the mind from its wholeness. Religion and science too often prove blood brothers beneath their different vestments, and man proves the victim of their civil war.
Clear lines of demarcation between cyclic and historical thinking are not easily drawn. More to the point is that both attitudes are ever-present in varied ways. What depth psychologists fail to understand or point out is that the split of mind between conscious and unconscious thinking is a necessity for the mind to achieve objectivity. In order to become aware of the function of reality, the mind has somehow to stand outside itself, which it apparently can do only by projection. To attribute to some absolutely-other thing or symbol a process of our own thinking entails a split of mind which splits the reality. But objective thinking necessarily involves projection. It is a form of empty-categorizing that fills itself, a form of myth-making and realization, the way by which life bounds forward.
The projection device is not so easily replaced. I am not sure that new content can structure without forms of it. Surely projection of absolutes "out there" played a decisive role in the development of science. The problem is that the projection turns on the projector and becomes a fixed concept controlling the direction of new-projections. The physicist projects his imaginary particle or wave, which, because it appears utterly remote from anything human, is thought to be the ultimate reality.
Blake anticipated Eisenbud's appreciation of this kind of madness, two hundred years ago. Blake saw that the inversion of Stoic thinking led to the deadness of the stone as the only real, while the enormous capacity of life, the imagination of man, is considered the most unreal.
Piaget's stages of logical development enter the picture. To be more than an infant in the ecological womb, man has to dissociate himself from the process which he is. To develop your mind to the point where the faith of a grain of mustard seed can move mountains, you have to dissociate yourself from the very function by which mountains can so move. By the time you develop to that point of conceptual ability, your very process of logical development will have split your mind so thoroughly that the idea of moving mountains cannot be entertained unambiguously. This is why 'metanoia' -- that adult transformation of world view is the only apparent way around the dilemma.
Perhaps life will discover a way by which the paradox can be overcome. That is, a way in which the development of logic will not destroy the autistic openness. Hilgard's studies indicate partial accomplishment of this. The intriguing figure of Mozart comes to mind. His reality adjustment was rather poor, granted, but he apparently displayed almost from the beginning a complete openness to creative synthesis, operating beautifully within the strict confines of a disciplined structure.
Paul Tillich understood that logical thinking could only develop by splitting personal, ego-centered thinking from the whole mind. He failed to carry through on Jesus as a symbol for the bridge between the modes of mind, however, and in the last analysis surrendered at least in part to the very Stoic view he, saw as Jesus' rival. Tillich presumed that ambiguous thinking was the fare of man, leaving us only with the hope that God would bridge the gap. This still leaves us subject to fate, and is in itself a projection.
The hero has always been the one who could somehow re-enter his autistic state with his objective mind, and bring some boon back to man. As Joseph Campbell states, that message, in its many guises, has always been that the God-state so entered was the true nature and real being of man. This implies though that man is responsible for his reality, and the Greco-Hebraic backlash to Jesus' proposal is not hard to understand. Projection gives a world of absolutes "out there," and places responsibility elsewhere -- even as it sets up a psychological need for heroes that show a crack in the egg so created.
There was a small but passionate impact from Carlos' don Juan, similar to the perpetual, if covert, attraction found in Jesus. Perhaps many interpretations will be made of don Juan; cults may spring up in the shadow of the book; seekers may ascend the Mexican hills in search of the old sorcerer. For there is an underlying desperation in us, unstated and inchoate, that is nothing less than a split mind's intolerable realization of its split world. We long for a way out -- a way down and out from this current structure that is, as Ronald Laing put it, rather an obscene madness.
Our current psychosis is no more or less than that of all ages. The same power structures maneuver man as he has always been maneuvered. The eternal knaves feed on the eternal fools now as always, fattening them up far better, in our rich and rare corner of the world, since needing fatter fools.
There is a difference today, though, and it is neither just in the barrage of brainwash designed to convince us that we really do have the kingdom right here -- within the grasp of one more round of installments -- nor that we are told daily that this is the best of all worlds. It is that we are told that this world is the only one, that this is all there is. It is that we are told not only that man can live by bread alone, but that he damned well better since bread is all there is.
All gods are jealous -- and the one in the saddle now, selling all that bread, has a winning thing for sure, a power and success unknown in history. The man in the streets has no choice but to believe "those who know about these things," and the scientific-technological mind convinces man that those channels controlled by their various, if competing, priesthoods are the only channels available. God, if he is acknowledged by this clique, is the god of a Warren Weaver -- made to fit the needs of the scientific-technician world view, shutting the door on the hope of man as thoroughly as the most rabid atheism. Meanwhile the split of psyche grows apace, reaching for a point of nlhilistic self-doubt that can finally destroy itself as the only reasonable solution.
Recently a little book called The Cross and the Switchblade sold over sixteen million copies. It has been called the "most phenomenal hidden best seller in history" (my italics). Perhaps it sold so well because in it a man told a believable story of a psychic activity of an extrasensory kind, apparently operating outside the control of that university-scientific-political-industrial-military complex that denigrates and denies such modes of mind. The book's coauthor, David Wilkerson, claimed that this psychic activity moved into, changed, and specifically directed his life along new and larger lines. He became the totally unpredictable, guided by a formative kind of synthesis that moved only in the context of his complete openness to the instant moment. The little book smacked of the crack in the egg.
By and large, those who hate the world and long for a way out have no place to go. The only published underground is apparently run by the opposition, leading back into the sterility from which escape is sought. The church, by and large, rests on good, solid successful citizens. In return for support, the church gives sanction for the good life. The National Association of Manufacturers carried on a lively courtship for years under the byline: Church and Industry -- Together on the Current Scene. And this cozy togetherness was not at all misplaced. Not inconsiderable in the censure of James Pike was his casualness concerning the financial holdings of his diocese, holdings jeopardized by Pike's stand on race. The Trinity could look after itself but a bishop's first duty was to the solvency of his diocese.
In any generation few people really believe there can be something like a crack in the cosmic egg, a way down and out. Even fewer look for it. Rarely indeed has anyone ever gotten through it. But the crack is there and must be used. It must play a part in any viable mythos for our current predicament. I
n my next chapter I will defend and try to explain briefly the crack as represented in don Juan's twilight between the worlds, and Jesus' Narrow Gate.
I am not so naive that I think Jesus' Way could be revived, though I know that archetypal energy is still potent. I am aware that his "new being" was aborted almost from its beginning, killed off by that Stoic "failure of nerve." Neither do I claim any social value in don Juan's "Way of Knowledge" (though surely there is energy there, too, as Carlos found out). My contention is that in these figures we find historical cracks that should be explored to give understanding of the crack itself. It is not only a time for bold hypothesis, but for bold analysis.
No decent scientist would ignore such an intriguing riddle as a quasar. He would leap into the puzzle with glee. There is something cowardly in that the preacher and the cultist so thoroughly intimidate psychology that it shuns great examples of the crack. Psychology could open to the most exciting venture of our history, the role it should have rightfully assumed, by a new openness of mind. And it is adventure that we need, that we must have. Not just the vicarious adventure shared with rare heroes exploring the planets, admirable as they are. Every man needs the personal adventure of finding the true depths of himself. Every man needs a way out from being only a cipher in a computer, a subservient cog in the machine. If our cultural confusion is to find its mythos sufficiently large to orient us into a unity, hero-archetypes, and the crack they represent, must play a part.
The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Page 18
