J.C.P.
  Williamstown, Massachusetts
  June 1970

THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG



1 circles and lines

There is a relationship between what we think is out there in the world and what we experience as being out there. There is a way in which the energy of thought and the energy of matter modify each other and interrelate. A kind of rough mirroring takes place between our mind and our reality.

We cannot stand outside this mirroring process and examine it, though, for we are the process, to an unknowable extent. Any technique we might use to look objectively at our reality becomes a part of the event in question. We are an indeterminatety large part of the function that shapes the reality from which we do our looking. Our looking enters as one of the determinants in the reality event that we see.

This mirroring between mind and reality can be analyzed, and more actively directed, if we can suspend some of our ordinary assumptions. For instance, the procedure of mirroring must be considered the only fixed element, while the products of the procedure must be considered relative. William Blake claimed that perception was the universal, the perceived object was the particular. What is discovered by man is never the "universal" or cosmic "truth." Rather, the process by which the mind brings about a "discovery" is itself the "universal."

Jerome Bruner, of Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies, doubts that there is a world available for "direct touch." We are not in a subjective trap of our own making, either. Rather, we represent the world to ourselves and respond to our representations. There is, I would add, a subtle and random way in which "the world" responds to our representations too. Naive realism and naive idealism must be equally dismissed if we are to grasp the mirroring function of mind and reality toward which Bruner points.

The reader is referred to the author's Guide to the References and Bibliography System described on page 197.



We used to believe that our perceptions, our seeing, hearing, feeling and so on, were reactions to active impingements on them by the "world out there," We thought our perceptions then sent these outside messages to the brain where we put together a reasonable facsimile of what was out there. We know now that our concepts, our notions or basic assumptions, actively direct our percepts. We see, feel, and hear according to what Bruner calls a "selective program of the mind." Our mind directs our sensory apparatus every bit as much as our sensory apparatus informs the mind.

It used to be thought that the physical was a fixed entity "out there," unaffected by anything our transient, incidental thoughts might make of it. Holding to this idea today are the "tough-minded," whose boastful posturing of a "realistic, no-nonsense objectivity" cloaks a narrow and pedantic selective-blindness, a "realism" that sees only what has been established as safe to see. Yet there is a way in which physical and mental events merge and influence each other. A change of world view can change the world viewed. And I am not referring to such parlor games as influencing the roll of dice. The stakes are higher, the relationships more subtle and far-reaching.

For instance, as a young man I once found myself in a certain somnambulistic, trance-like state of mind which I will later in this book define as autistic. In the peculiarities of this frame of reference I suddenly knew myself to be impervious to pain or injury. With upwards of a dozen witnesses I held the glowing tips of cigarettes against my palms, cheeks, eyelids, grinding them out on those sensitive areas. Finally, I held the tips of several cigarettes tightly between my lips and blew sparks over my amazed companions. To the real consternation of my dormitory fellows, ,there were no after-effects, no blisters, no later signs of my folly. This stimulated the physics majors to test the temperature of a cigarette tip, which they found to be around 1380° F. My contact with such heat had been quite genuine, steady, and prolonged.

Later, when I did a bit of research on Hindu firewalking, I understood quite well the state of mind involved, though I never again achieved it myself. It was apparent to me, however, that I had suspended my ordinary. thinking, and was using a mode of mind strongly suggestive of early childhood. At the same time I was aware of myself though experiencing some dissociation within, rather as though I were sitting and watching myself.

Several things intrigued me about this venture. First, of course, why were the ordinary reactions of live flesh to extreme heat not operative under that strange state of mind? What was the state of mind? Could the reality of this state be different from the reality of ordinary thinking, and if so, was there a relative and arbitrary quality to any reality state? What were the possibilities of this kind of thinking, particularly if it could be controlled by a fully operational, conscious person? (I had surely not been fully operational, and the cigarette trick was the only expression of imperviousness my imagination could seize on.)

Last but not least, certain of my tough-minded colleagues of later years were so unnecessarily hostile to my accounts of this and similar personal experiences. Why did they refuse to believe the experience had taken place? Why did they insist that I had hallucinated, simply misinterpreted my data, or was, perhaps, just lying? This threw another aspect into my search, in addition to trying to determine the role our concept-percept interaction plays in our reality: why is our ordinary, logical thinking so hostile to these rifts in the common fabric?

Reality is not a fixed entity. It is a contingent interlocking of moving events. And events do not just happen to us. We are an integral part of every event. We enter into the shape of events, even as we long for an absolute in which to rest. It may be just this longing for an absolute in which our concepts might not have to be responsible for our percepts, and so indirectly our reality, that explains the hostility of our ordinary intellect to these shadowy modes of mind.

Later I will try to summarize how an infant's mind is shaped into a "reality-adjusted" personality, and show how this representation helps determine the reality in which the adult then moves. By analyzing how our representations of the world come about we may be able to grasp the arbitrary, and thus flexible, nature of our reality. The way we represent the world arises, though, from our whole social fabric, as Bruner put it. There is no escaping this rich web of language, myth, history, ways of doing ,things, unconsciously-accepted attitudes, notions, and so on, for these make up our only reality. If this social fabric tends to become our shroud, the only way out is by the same weaving process, for there is only the one. So we need to find out all we can about the loom involved, and weave with imagination and vision rather than allow the process to happen as a random fate.

Our inherited representation, our world view, is a language-made affair. It varies from culture to culture. Edward Sapir, the linguist, called this idea of ours that we adjust to reality without the use of language an illusion. He claimed that the "real world" is to a large extent built up on the language habits of the group.

None of us exercises our logical, social thinking as a blank slate, or as a photographic plate, seeing what is "actually there." We focus on the world through an esthetic prism from which we can never be free except by exchanging prisms. Them is no pure looking with a naked, innocent eye. When I found myself in that peculiar twilight world in which fire no longer burned me, I had not found "the true reality" or "the truth." I had simply skipped over some syllogisms of our ordinary logical world and restructured an event not dependent on ordinary criteria. Even our most critical, analytical, scientific, or "detached" looking is a verification search, sifting through possibilities for a synthesis that will strengthen the the hypotheses that generate the search.

Our world view is a cultural pattern that shapes our mind from birth. It happens to us as fate. We speak of a child becoming "reality-adjusted" as he responds and becomes a cooperating strand in the social web. We are shaped by this web; it determines the way we think, the way we see what we see. It is our pattern of representation and our response sustains the pattern.

Yet any world view is arbitrary to an indeterminable extent. This arbitrariness is difficult to recognize since our world to view is determined by our world view. To consider our world view arbitrary and flexible automatically places our world of reality in the same questionable position. And yet we are always changing this world view. We represent such changes as discoveries of absolutes in order to protect ourselves from our arbitrary status, and to avoid the implication that human thinking is a creative process. We deny that disciplines of mind synthetically create; we insist we are but discovering "nature's truths." We possess an open-ended potential at considerable variance with contemporary nihilisms, but we must recognize and accept the dynamic interplay of representation-response if we are not to be acted on rather than fully acting.

For instance, years after my little fireburn experience, my world faced dissolution when two massive "radical surgeries" and other macabre manipulations on my wife failed to check a malignancy wildly stimulated by the growth hormones of pregnancy. Finally, having had everything cut off or out, she offered little for further experimentation. The priests of the scalpel passed judgment and gave her but a few short weeks to live. Surely the evidence was in their favor.

Nevertheless, I remembered that strange world in which fire could not burn, and entered into a crash program to find that crack in the egg that we might restructure events more in our favor. During five- and six-day fasts, I subjected her to a total "brainwash" day and night, never letting her mind alone. Through all her waking hours I read her literature related to healing, and while she slept I endlessly repeated suggestions of hope and strength. I had no thought of how the restructuring would take place, but in a few hours, some three weeks later, she was suddenly healed and quite well.

We traipsed back to the temple, I with misgivings over such a risk of the new structure, to have the priests declare us clean. And that we were duly declared and recorded, with the reaction pattern among the many doctors of that research center running the gamut. From emotional talk about miracles, the brass-tack realists soon rebounded with dire warnings that some fluke had occurred and that we should present ourselves regularly for constant watches for the "inevitable reoccurrence;" just the sort of doubt-category I would have avoided at all costs.

True, a year or so later our carefully-balanced private world fell apart. This began when it became obvious that our last child, born in the midst of all that carnage, was in serious trouble. When the trouble proved to be severe cerebral palsy, our bubble burst, the dragon roared back, and within weeks my world was in ruins.

Nevertheless, by a change of concept concerning possibilities, we beat the broad way of the statistical world, if only for a while. The social fabric is sustained by agreement on which phenomena are currently acceptable. Susanne Langer referred to nature as a language-made affair, subject to "collapse into chaos" should ideation fail. Threat of this chaos proves sufficient stimulus to insure a ready granting of validity to the current ideas. And strangely, even when this ideation decrees that a particular event must end in death, most people would rather accept the sentence than risk the chaos.

To be "realistic" is the high mark of intellect, and assures the strengthening of those acceptances that make up the reality and so determine what thoughts are "realistic." Our representation-response interplay is self-verifying, and circular. We are always in the process of laying our cosmic egg.

The way by which our reality picture is changed provides a clue to the whole process. A change of concept changes one's reality to some degree, since concepts direct percepts as much as percepts impinge on concepts. There are peculiarities and exceptions, such as my no-fireburn venture, by which our inherited fabric is bypassed temporarily in small private ways. These are linear thrusts that break through the circles of acceptancy making up our reality.

Metanoia is the Greek word for conversion: a "fundamental transformation of mind." It is the process by which concepts are reorganized. Metanoia is a specialized, intensified adult form of the same world-view development found shaping the mind of the infant. Formerly associated with religion, metanoia proves to be the way by which all genuine education takes place. Michael Polanyi points out that a "conversion" shapes the mind of the student into the physicist. Metanoia is a seizure by the discipline given total attention, and a restructuring of the attending mind. This reshaping of the mind is the principal key to the reality function.

The same procedure found in world view development of the child, the metanoia of the advanced student, or the conversion to a religion, can be traced as well in the question-answer process, or the proposing and eventual filling of an "empty category" in science. The asking of an ultimately serious question, which means to be seized in turn by an ultimately serious quest, reshapes our concepts in favor of the kinds of perceptions needed to "see" the desired answer. To be given ears to hear and eyes to see is to have one's concepts changed in favor of the discipline. A question determines and brings about its answer just as the desired end shapes the nature of the kind of question asked. This is the way by which science synthetically creates that which it then "discovers" out there in nature.

Exploring this reality function shows how and why we reap as we sow, individually and collectively -- but no simple one-to-one correspondence is implied. The success or failure of any idea is subject to an enormous web of contingencies. Any idea seriously entertained, however, tends to bring about the realization of itself, and will, regardless of the nature of the idea, to the extent it can be free of ambiguities. The "empty category" of science as an example will be explored later and the same function is triggered by any set of expectancies, as, for instance, a disease.

For instance, in my wife's case, a grandmother who had died of cancer was the family legend, and all the females scrupulously avoided all the maneuvers rumored to have possibly caused the horror. Then, in neat, diabolical two-year intervals, my wife's favorite aunt died of cancer; her mother developed cancer but survived the radical-surgery mutilations; her father then followed and died in spite of extensive medical machinations. Naturally, two years after burying her father, my wife's own debacle occurred, in spite of her constant submissions to the high priests for inspections, tests, and, no doubt, full confessionals. The fact that all these carcinomas were of different sorts, and on opposite sides of the family, was incidental. Few people understood my fury when the medical center that had attended my wife requested that I bring my just-then-budding teenage daughter for regular six-monthly check-ups for ever thereafter, since they had found -- and thoroughly advertised -- that mammary malignancies in a mother tended to be duplicated in the daughter many hundred percent above average. And surely such tragic duplications do occur, in a clear example of the circularity of expectancy verification, the mirroring by reality of a passionate or basic fear.

The "empty category" is no passive pipe dream -- it is an active, shaping force in the making of events. There are not as many hard line, brass tack qualifications to the mirroring procedure to be outlined in this book as one might think. For instance, the Ceylonese Hindu undergoes a transformation of mind that temporarily bypasses the ordinary cause-effect relationships -- even those we must have for the kind of world we know. Seized by his god and changed, the Hindu can walk with impunity through pits of white-hot charcoal that will melt aluminum on contact. Recently, in our own country, hypnotically-induced trance states have replaced chemical anaesthesias, allowing bloodless, painless, quickly-healing operations to be performed.

These are "mutations" in the metaphoric fabric of our "semantic universe," as Levi-Strauss has called our word-built world. The cults seized these novelties previously, and, in their longing for magic, alluded to shadowy cosmic mysteries. Rather, trance states prove to be forms of metanoia , temporary restructurings of reality orientation. Some fundamemal restructuring of mind underlies all disciplines and pursuits. Mathematician and physicist follow the same mirroring of idea and fact, just on a wider scope, from a different set of metaphors, with a different set of expectancies, and from a different esthetic.

My neighbor was "seized and changed" somewhere in his final year of doctoral studies in topology. The structure of his mind, and his resulting world, were never again the same as that of non-mathematicians. He lived in a world of mathematical spaces. He loved to figure the spaces of knots , the kind you tie, though I could not relate his marvelous figurings to my shoelace world. He tried to show me, in beautifully-diagrammed hieroglyphics, how he could remove an egg from an intact shell through mathematical four-space. In my naive concreteness, frustrated that I had no ears to hear or eyes to see, I wanted him to apply his four-space miracle to a common hen's egg. But my friend's world was cerebral, his eggs those rare cosmic ones found in the inner land of thought, and his frustration at my blindness was as great as my own.

There is an eloquent madness in topology, but from that strange brotherhood's abstractions lunar modules have been built. From their four-spaced absurdities have come real ships for spaces other than our own. The mythos leads the logos. The language of fantasy goes before the language of fact.

The physicist, David Bohm, computed the "zero-point energy" due to quantum-mechanical fluctuations in a single cubic centimeter of space, and arrived at the energy of 10^38 ergs. A cubic centimeter of space is next to nothing at all, and yet Bohm translates his ergs into the energy equivalent of about ten billion tons of uranium. That is a lot of fireworks to come from nothing at all.

It was proposed once that if we had the "faith of a grain of mustard seed" we could say to the mountain: "Be removed to the sea" -- and it would be. Is this not an oddly similar proposal to physicist Bohm's?

Bohm wrote that under present conditions this energy he hypothesized is inaccessible, but as conditions change we will get our hands on some of it. The techniques of getting will reside in the remote recesses of those minds seized by Bohm's kind of faith. When finally brought about, that enormous energy will be hailed as a "discovery of nature's secrets." It will have been, instead, the filling by life of an empty category. It is not just that nature abhors a vacuum. This will be an example of the way "Eternity is in love with the productions of time," as William Blake put it.

Physicist Gerald Feinberg frets at a universe where Einstein's light speed is the maximum allowed for our reality, so Feinberg has substituted "imaginary numbers" for Einstein's "real ones" that created the limitation involved. Feinberg sees no way of repealing Einstein's law, and so tries to use the whole abstraction against itself for a new era of freedom -- at least freedom for imaginative thinking. Physicist Feinberg has been seized too, and no longer lives in a world of common breakfast eggs, but in that cosmic one where aberrations of thinking bring new realities into play. So great is Feinberg's faith that he has already given a fitting Greek name, tachyon, or speed, to his as yet undiscovered faster-than-light bits of energy. And already there is confidence in Feinberg's minus-mathematics. Universities have started building the kinds of machines that might respond to the new representation and "find" those speedy little minus-number things that might hurry other things along.

Once found, the rest of us will then presume that God built tachyons into the universe way back there. We have automatically assumed that about atoms, molecules, and the rest of our new marvels. Who would doubt that these were a priori facts awaiting discovery by a slowly awakening man?

Nevertheless, this assumption has outlived its usefulness. It is probably the most basic "fact" we accept, too self-evident even to dwell on as in any way questionable. Yet this assumption keeps us subject to fate, blind to our potential, and ignorant of God.

The history of the scientific discipline shows that after a certain discreet courtship, the proper passion to implant the mathematical gamete into the cosmic egg currently in season, a new idea, "indwelled" by the brotherhood as Polanyi might say, will finally gestate and eventually be bern into the world of the common domain.

First comes The Word, the cabalistic sign, the representation of possibility in a way that can be believed by the brotherhood of believers. After that comes the discovery. The relation of fact and idea is not quite magic, and it is not quite of the same reality as hens' eggs either. Rather, thinking is a shaping force in reality.

William Blake claimed that "anything capable of being believed is an image of truth." Our capacity for belief is highly conditioned however, and "truth" always proves to be a synthesis of current possibilities. Physicist Feinberg, frustrated by the limits of the Einsteinian universe, has, nevertheless, no other materials to work with -- certainly not if he is to be a physicist. The very idea of great speeds came about only with that metaphoric framework resulting in Einstein. Any possibilities beyond Einstein's restrictions exist only because of the necessary definitions of the system itself.

Our imaginations cannot set out to find the cracks in the cosmic egg until someone lays the egg. New representations for reality, new ideas, new fabrications of fantasy searching for supporting logic, must precede the final "discovery" by which verification of the notion is achieved.

It has been claimed that our minds screen out far more than we accept, else we would live in a world of chaos. Our screening process may be essential, but it is also arbitrary and changeable. We pick and choose, ignore or magnify, illuminate or dampen, expand upon or obscure, affirm or deny, as our inheritance, adopted discipline, or passionate pursuit dictate. At root is an esthetic response, and we invest our esthetic responses with sacred overtones.

Value, as Whitehead said, is limitation. Limitation involves faith, faith that an exclusive interest is worth life investment, worth the sacrifice of every other possibility. I like to think of our "open-ended potential," but potential is always limited to the sum total of the images that can be conjured up by the mind, and this ties us down immediately to syntheses of things already realized -- although, as we will find later with the sorcerer don Juan, such syntheses can grow exponentially, like a tree at every tip.

Among the potentials of resyntheses of our current reality, one possibility must be selected, heard as a question one might answer, seen as a goal one might achieve. Every choice involves such a commitment. Once we have made an investment and corresponding sacrifice of other possibilities, our life is at stake. Feinberg has made such a choice and risked his professional life on the possibility that his tachyons might come about. The excluded possibilities will act as counterpoints of discord until his notion sufficiently reorients the concepts of his brotherhood. Then the overall. selectivity will rule out the contradictory notions altogether, and for a generation or two or more, the new "discovery" might shape reality -- until replaced in turn.

Most people respond automatically to their given circle of representation, and strengthen it by their unconscious allegiance. Since their cultural circle is made of many conflicting drives for their allegiance, their lives are fragmented and ambiguous.

To be converted is to be seized by an idea that orients us around a single focal point of possibility. The point of focus groups into orderly sequence the myriad necessities for choice we face continually. Given a central thesis for orientation, all the energies and interests of personal or group life can reinforce and amplify each other, rather than now-here, now-there attempts at tending to fragmenting demands.

The power of Freudian thought was in its metaphoric simplicity. A few dramatic images stabilized and organized all the data of a world in flux. Its simplicity made it readily available to anyone for whom the imagery was esthetically satisfying. Hans Sachs read Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and found in it "the one thing worth living for." He was caught up in an imagery by which he too could interpret the universe and give it meaning. He was seized by the material he had seized, and saw his life as meaningful in serving the new construct.

This centering of mind fills a person with power and conviction. It creates mathematicians, saints, or Nazis with equal and impartial ease.

A mind divided by choices, confused by alternatives, is a mind robbed of power. The body reflects this. The ambiguous person is a machine out of phase, working against itseft and tearing itself up. That person is an engine with sand in its crankcase, broken piston rods, water in its fuel lines. In spite of great effort and noise, nothing much happens.

Metanoia tunes the engine, gets it running on all cylinders, functioning with power and efficiency. Conversion is like a laser; it centers the diffusing and fragmented energy into a tight, potent focus. But where the beam goes, the direction it takes, while germane to its structure, is incidental to the function. This questions those religious justifications each system inwardly grants itself in the struggle for superiority among conflicting and competing drives.

Yet the nature of the imagery by which any conversion occurs, if incidental to the process, is closely related to the product. Direction and end will always be in keeping with the centered notion by which the organization takes place. The end is in the beginning. Heaven or hell is contained in the choice for center, not in the function of centering. Single-minded devotion to any point tends to give power -- for that point's use. All gods are jealous, but all are equally productive if they can take over completely and run the machine.

Metanoia restructures, to varying degrees and even for varying lengths of time, those basic representations of reality inherited from the past. On those representations we base our notions or concepts of what is real. In turn, our notions of what is real direct our perceptual apparatus, that network of senses that tells us what we feel, hear, see, and so on. This is not a simple subjective maneuver, but a reality-shaping procedure.

We are taught to believe that only the "out there" is real. We are taught to consider our perception of reality to be transient, accidental, and insignificant, arising from and oriented only to economic biological necessities. This becomes an enormous inner contradiction, as Jung would call it, splitting our reality in half. The inner conflict is reflected outwardly, and the world happens to us as fate.

We look on archetypal world views, those held by "primitive" tribes, and consider them archaic "survival" mechanisms. We have been taught that the real "out there" has been seen only dimly before, but with a progressively more realistic, aware, civilized eye, culminating in our viewpoint. (Alien world views can thus be exploited or even removed as threats to our true one, lending a religious sanctification to our culture destructions.)

Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, challenges our smug chauvinisms. He claims that archaic thought patterns were highly disciplined, intellectual structures, designed to give the world coherence, shape, and meaning. This is, in fact, just what all world views do. Primitive man "sacralized" his intellectual structure no more than we do ours. Neither system is any more true than the other. Ours is more esthetically desirable to us, but is bought at the same price all selective systems are, the price of those possibilities sacrificed to keep a limited structure intact. The difference between Einstein's relative universe and the Dream-Time cosmology of the Australian aborigine is not a matter of truth or falsehood, realism or illusion, progression or regression, intelligence or stupidity, as the naive realists have claimed. It is a matter of esthetic choice. Each system produces results unobtainable to the other; each is closed and exclusive.

Robert Frost saw civilization as a small clearing in a great forest. We have hewn our space at no small cost, and the dark "out there" seems ever ready to close in again -- a collapse into chaos should our ideation fail. In my book I shall consider Frost's clearing to be the disciplines of mind, reality-adjusted thinking, reason, logic, civilization, society, culture. I shall consider the dark forest to be the primal stuff, the unconscious, the unknown potential -- perhaps just an "empty category." In my next chapter I will define the psychological term 'autistic-thinking' and refer to it as the borderline between clearing and forest. Then I will try to outline the interaction between these aspects of the reality function.

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.

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 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.

Solley and Murphy spoke of us as immersed in a "sea of stimuli," all "striving for dominance" within us. We are not so easily impinged upon by things, however, and the system of reality growing from our given stimuli is far more dynamic. The "striving" tensions are those of ideas, or ways for grouping this sea of stimuli. Surely a basic stimulus is given us, but each culture, discipline, or ideology, strives for dominance as the prism through which this stimulus will be ordered into a coherent, shared world. This fragmented striving is the charismatic curse of reason that drives us from innocence to experience, from circle to circle. The more thoroughly we search out our past, the more embracing and sweeping we find this "cosmic-egg structuring" to have always been, even in the most archaic of cultures.

Aldous Huxley considered our consciousness but a segment of a larger one. Normal consciousness is that which has been funneled through the "reducing valve" of brain, nervous system and sense organs. This protects us, Huxley believed, from being "overwhelmed on the surface of the planet." Through drugs, or the various mental cult systems, this valve-reduced reality can be bypassed and "mind at large" partially admitted by the personal psyche. The schizophrenic has lost the way back, and can no longer take refuge in the homemade universe of common sense, the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially acceptable conventions. (Ronald Laing might say the schizophrenic may be hiding, not lost, or even on a private adventure from which he simply does not care to come back.)

"Mind at large" gives to a continuum of events an anthropomorphic shape that the situation may not warrant. Our "reducing valve" may be designed not so much to protect us from being overwhelmed (by those seven million shades of color, for instance?) as designed to simplify and realize, literally select, focus and make real a specific event out of a continuum of possible events. The only reality available in this universe may well be a homemade one.

Sherwood wrote of an apparent universality of perception in the psychedelic experience. He attributed this "universal central perception" to a single reality. Cohen takes a more nihilistic view, arguing that once the mind is unhinged from normal categories, regardless of the means used, it can only go in a limited number of directions. He called such departures "unsanity" to distinguish them from insanity. He considered "unsanity" the common pathway of the stressed mind. Variations of the unhinged experience contain a common core of necessity, according to Cohen.

In another context, however, Cohen points out that the underlying motivation impelling the drug taker or systems-follower to break with the norm is the nucleus for what is then experienced. A combination of these two observations by Cohen gives insight into the reality function. The "common core of mind" may be the autistic mode of thinking, itself a kind of mirror for some ultimate notion or desire coming from consciousness.

Carington considered consciousness an intensified point on a spectrum of unconsciousness. He rejected the metaphors of a "layered consciousness," as found in depth psychology. He favored a "field of consciousness," the mind belonging to this field rather than the field belonging to the mind. Even material objects are only "logical constructions" from different appearances or possibilities for sense data. The limitations of the human mind are thus only matters of fact, not matters of some universal law.

Carington's working model is related to Whitehead's theory of organism , where the event is the core of reality. No simple location, or set of simple assumptions, can in themselves grasp the "unity of the event." For Whitehead, nature is a structure of evolving processes, and the reality is the process.

Bruner, in his Study of Thinking, discusses experiments in sensory deprivation. These experiments were designed to find out what happens when a person is shut off from all intake of perceptual data. A subject is isolated in a sound- and light-proofed room. He lies on foam rubber, wears velvet gloves, and everything is done to block out any possibility for sensory intake. Microphones, electrographic apparatus picking up brain waves which are amplified and recorded, and related devices keep tab on the subject's reactions.

After a period of this womb-like condition, the subject begins to hallucinate. Voices, images, movements, sensations, entire episodes begin to take place. Deprived of ordinary sensory data from which to select according to the needs of his world view, his mind structures a reality, drawing on past data. This structuring happens to the personality, too. He is not necessarily aware that he is hallucinating. He feels himself very much a part of the resulting event. The event takes place around him as an ordinary occasion. His sensory system is in full play, sending appropriate sights, smells, tastes, touches, and so on, as needed by the mind for its reality.

There is a rough similarity here with the Tibetan 'tulpa' and other psychic creations such as Carlos Castenada's experiences with don Juan (as I will relate later.) Bruner's subjects, however, have no prestructured set of expectancies around which to orient their synthetic creations, and without such, and without the social world as definition and criteria, the experiences tend to become chaotic and nightmarish.

In 1963, two miners, Fellin and Throne, were isolated for nineteen days in a Pennsylvania mine collapse. After a while they began to be able to "see" and were able to maneuver and improve their conditions. They shared hallucinations, seeing the same imaginary things at the same time. At one time both men saw a great doorway rimmed in blue light, and a flight of marble steps beyond. At another time they saw two men walking along with miner's lanterns and called to them, at which the apparitions faded. The miners were, of course, in a tiny pocket nearly a mile underground, without lights of any sort. One wonders what would have happened had they gone up the blue-lit doorway and steps, as they debated trying. The experiences of folie à deux, or shared hallucinations, had a numinous quality deeply impressing the two rough miners, and the blue light described sounds quite similar to the light of the sacred mushroom experiences of the Mexicans.

Stephen McKellar argues that all mental experiences, no matter how bizarre and novel, are related to and originate in learned or subliminal information gained from experience. Secondary percepts, those gained vicariously from reading, listening to others, movies, and so on, must be taken into account. We can have perfectly real memories of other people's imaginings, just as we dream on former dream content or have specific childhood memories that originated in dreams or fantasies.

McKellar claims that no subject matter for thought is possible except from an external source. Our most unrestrained imaginings, works of art and science, all derive from "recent and/or remote perceptions." McKellar seems on strong grounds. Even so esoteric a production as the Yogic 'tulpa' proves to have its inception in commonly-shared perceptions, and, as will be noted with Carlos Castenada's extremely strange experiences, the initial point of departure was some tangible perception from the mundane world.

Freud's analysis of dreams is one of McKellar's points of reference, however, and there is tacit acceptance of Freud's interpretation of the unconscious as limited to the repressed, peripheral, forgotten episodes of an individual's experience. Yet there are experiences that suggest a mental structure more flexible than the Freudian. There are experiences that point to a collective level of consciousness, and unconscious exchanges. Suspending one's reality adjustment can open one to experiences neither available to, nor amenable to, examination by logical thinking.

For instance, one rainy afternoon when I was young, friends and I were pleasantly listening to Mahler and chatting of inanities when, crossing the room, I suddenly passed out. It was a bone-dry gathering, inside at least, and I had never done such an asinine thing before. Instantly I was "looking" at the hand of my girl, then some 250 miles away, writing me a letter. (She was "shooting me down" as we used to say, a point of no small emotional impact for me.) Immediately I regained consciousness, having been out only momentarily, just long enough to upset my roommate and friends. I told my friend of the letter, later that day. A couple of days later he brought in the mail, amused at the coincidence as he handed me the letter from the girl, postmarked the fateful afternoon. I made my roommate open the actual letter, however, and check as I recited the contents, burned into my brain as they were. This paled my friend and unhinged his day.

Unconscious exchanges and shared hallucinations between two or three gathered together in a common cause or belief express themselves in many ways. The experiences of Castenada and don Juan will prove to incorporate this phenomenon. Spiritualists, for instance, in their desire for information from "the other side" suspend all criteria of ordinary, social thinking. As a group they enter into a subset of experience, a kind of shared autistic hypnagogic state. Gathering together strengthens their faith in the validity of their system. Their desire for conviction suspends the criteria used in ordinary reality, criteria standing in the way of the esoterica desired.

The believers accept avidly everything produced, since doubt would split the fabric of their state. Eternal knaves feed on eternal fools, of course, and charlatanism runs rife, but so do genuine mind-picking, telepathy, clairvoyance, a kind of yogic-tulpa creation, and a variety of phenomena not available to the ordinary processes.

Having spent some time at a spritualist "camp," I attempted comment to a true-believing friend. He stated, however, that a wise person would spend twenty years or so in the brotherhood, in careful, devoted study, before attempting to draw any conclusion at all. Twenty, years, indeed far less, of devoted study would only be sustained, of course, by one who had already decided that the framework offered sufficient reward to justify the life investment. That very decision would have set into motion the kind of restructuring of mind the new procedure would require. Further, the mind would make the adjustment, the restructuring of concept, sooner or later, in order to justify the investment of self. The mind would eventually reorganize to get the kind of percepts the new world view would need. It would be a self-verifying maneuver.

We easily dismiss as illusory and occult such esoteric plays of mind. Two things should be borne in mind, however. First, the productions of these "two or three gathered together" asking for certain things, and agreeing on the means of getting them, are quite genuine. The system produces as it aims to produce. Secondly, and more difficult to recognize, is that the same mirroring function underlies a science, a respectable discipline, a religion, or what have you. This assertion will equally offend the spiritualist, the scientist, and the theologian, since each apparently must represent his system as an absolute "out there" distinct from and objectively existing apart from himself, in order to have the nonambiguous faith to sustain the very fabric of his system.

Extrasensory experience may be a misnomer, but such occurrences are compatible with Carington's field of consciousness theory, as well as Whitehead's theory. "In a sense," Whitehead once said, "all things are in all places at the same time." Extrasensory influence of a sleeping person's dreams has been investigated at Brooklyn's Maimonides Hospital. Dr. Montague Ullman and psychologist Stanley Krippner used the classic dream investigation technique devised by Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago. By using special equipment, much the same as in the sensory deprivation experiments, records can be made during sleep of eye movements, breathing, sub-vocal activity, brain wave patterns, and so on. From these it can be determined when a person is dreaming.

A sleeping subject is in one room, all the apparatus attached; a reseacher observing the equipment is in the next room; Dr. Ullman, in a third room, studies a "target picture" and tries to influence the dreams of the sleeping person. The equipment shows when the subject starts dreaming, after which he is awakened and asked to relate the dream. Sealed envelopes, containing pictures, one of which is the "target" picture, are then given the subject, who correctly chooses the one he "saw" in his dreams.

In one example, Ullman. concentrated on a Gauguin painting, "Still Life with Three Puppies," which had blue goblets in it. The subject dreamed of "a couple of dogs making a noise, and dark blue bottles." In another trial, Ullman concentrated on a painting called Zapatistas, showing followers of the Mexican revolutionary Zapata. The followers march along a road with a range of mountains in the background. The dreamer, when awakened, explained that his dream was about New Mexico. A file of Indians were going to Santa Fe for fiesta time, with great mountains in the background.

Now the subject had once lived in New Mexico and had seen Indians going to Santa Fe for fiesta. Simple fortuituousness could be presumed, but note that it is only similar data, found already in the subject's background, that is triggered up. Nothing new is given the subject, precisely as McKellar would claim. There is, instead, this calling-up and regrouping of previous perceptual contents in keeping with the stimulus of the nonsensory source. This justifies both Jung and McKellar, making them complementary rather than opposing.

The blueprint comes from the non-personal source, but it must be filled in with a content individual and unique. Paul Tillich claims that divine answers are given the form of existential questions -- rather the reverse of the above.

The Russian parapsychogist, Vasiliev, writes of subjecting hypnotized persons to fake mustard plasters. Peasants who had never heard of a mustard plaster had no reaction whatsoever to the fake application. Patients who had experienced a real one suffered the usual red-rashy, heat-irritated skin and sweated profusely. The inexperienced peasants were then given, in their normal state, a real mustard plaster treatment. After that, they produced all the appropriate symptoms in the hypnotic experiments.

Carl Jung found cases in madmen of experiences beyond the personal background. He told of a schizophrenic patient in his thirties, hospitalized since his early twenties with delusions of grandeur, visions, demonic seizures, and so on. One day the patient, blinking up at the sun, stopped Dr. Jung and showed him how by scrooching up his eyes, he could see the sun's phallus, swinging below the rim of the sun. When one moved one's head from side to side, the phallus could also seen to swing from side to side, and that was the "origin of the winds." This was such a strange hallucination that Jung carefully noted it, along with the patient's history.

In the course of his studies of mythology, Jung was sent a new book of translations by Dieterich, including the Paris Magical Papyrus, thought to be a liturgy of the Mithraic cult. Here Jung found, stated in the same terms, but in cultic poetry, the identical sun-phallus-wind vision described by his patient. Cryptomnesia, or hidden memory, was ruled out. Jung later came across other references to the vision from Greek and medieval sources.

Jung used such cases to establish his three-tiered cosmology: consciousness, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. Adopting his system, things can be seen in just this way, though others might use the material as grist for other mills. Anticipating my fourth chapter, on questions and answers, I would mention that the patient's history suggested just the kind of vision he experienced. It was the kind of esoteric, cultic "information" and secret insight for which he had longed in his mundane, uneventful and uneducated adolescence, the very drift which had eventually brought on his reality suspension and produced his retreat from the world.

Fulfillment of desire was surely one of the elements in the experience. The patient called up from the continuum of past experience the sort of thing he desired. The sun was the trigger for the ancient imagery, and the imagery was as valid to the patient as anything else, since all criteria of ordinary reality adjustment had long since been suspended.

None of this validates Jung against McKellar. Rather, it shows McKellar's "recent or remote" perceptions to be active on a wider scale than at first evident. The roots of our garden clearing in the forest are not shallow, and the common core of the unhinged mind may run deeper than Cohen suspects. This does not give to this background of ours a character of its own, however. If this continuum of experience is Huxley's "mind at large," such a mind has no criteria or value, and as such, "mind" as we know it is hardly the right term. A phallus swinging from the rim of the sun and causing winds is just as "true" within this continuum as the most sophisticated recent scientitie jargon for the origin of solar winds.

In his book on mysticism, Princeton's elderly philosopher, Walter Stace, included an experience by the writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler was in solitary confinement for several months during the Spanish Civil War. He was supposedly awaiting execution, and to while away the time he revived his esthetic interest in analytical geometry, scratching theorems on the wall. Euclid's proof that the number of primes is infinite led to a classical example of the spontaneous mystical experience.

Koestler became enchanted with the idea that a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the infinite could be arrived at by precise and finite means, without "treacly ambiguities." One day the significance of this swept over him "like a wave," leaving him in a "wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue." This led to a "river of peace, under bridges of silence," that came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Finally there was no river and no I. Koestler's I had ceased to exist -- he had become one with that infinite.

Koestler apologized for such an embarrassing confession, stating that he had read the Meaning of Meaning and nibbled at logical positivism, and considered himself as tough-minded as anyone. He nevertheless recognized from his experience an "interlocking of all events," an interdependence in all things. He spoke of a "universal pool," and a unity of all things. He had many recurrences of the experience in prison, though they faded and disappeared after his return to normal life.

Consider now that Koestler's world at that time consisted of four grey stone walls. The only window was a tiny opening high in the wall, from which only a patch of sky could be seen. Week after week passed with no voices, no communications, no modifications to another. It was a kind of "sensory deprivation." All remaining was his growing fascination with geometry.

Consider, too, that he had been subject to an unannounced firing squad for months. Daily he had heard neighboring cell-mates being led into the courtyard onto which his tiny window opened. Daily he had heard the volley of shots. As with Feinberg's frustration at Einstein's speed limit, did the idea of infinite have real meaning to Koestler as a crack in his finite egg? As the full meaning of "finite" bore in on him inescapably, did his own synthesis of "infinite" begin? Was his finally-occurring experience not a Eureka! illumination in keeping with the nature of the trigger? Did his deep strata of desire not use as vehicle the only outlet available to his tough-minded world view, namely, geometry, free of those treacly ambiguities he had found in systems of belief? Was his experience, then, not only in keeping both with the nature of the trigger and the materials available for synthesis, yet satisfying the underlying ultimate desire? This is the case with all other mental experiences, regardless of the nature of the experience, as I will try to show with the scientific "breakthrough."

Was Koestler's experience not similar to my friend's Mozart-sonata, or my apple tree illumination? In Chapter Four, I will outline other experiences in science, religion, philosophy, and so on, some of them radical ideas that have played a formative role in our modern world, and will show that they all follow this same general pattern. So we cannot disparage this type of experience as subjective illusion. Rather, it is the way by which the crack in the egg literally materializes.

The spiritually-minded may be upset that this greatest of human experiences, the religious illumination, is described as the synthetic production of a stressed mind, and not an opening to Huxley's mind at large, James's Over-Soul, the Stoic-Christian moral governor of the universe, or what have you. If the surface nihilism can be penetrated, however, a possibility more profound than either spiritualism or realism can be found. The same function of mind that gives Koestler "intimations of immortality" produces the scientific postulate that changes a reality structure, or allows the Ceylonese Hindu to walk through beds of fire. That the experience is a synthetic construct made by an ultimately committed mind does not lessen its realness, or the implications of the maneuver. Every aspect of our reality has this undercurrent of synthesis.

For now, I hope to have given some idea of what I mean by "autistic thinking," and the peculiar way in which it is unambiguous. I hope I have given some of its ramifications and suggested some of the ways it mirrors or responds to passionate commitments, tacit beliefs, unambiguous notions. I hope I have suggested how such notions tend to "realize" themselves. Understanding this mirroring capacity of thought, we can avoid the spiritualist trap of granting an authentic or stable character of its own to this nebulous, indefinable, and haphazard play of mind, while yet recognizing the fathomless potential available there, a potential that goes beyond all naive-realist, biogenetic acceptances.

Jung, Carington, Teilhard, and others suggest a continuum of experience underlying our surface realities. To imply that this continuum is "thought" as we know it can cancel the open end it holds , and we must dismiss universal pools of metaphysical knowledge, a fixed scheme of a priori facts awaiting discovery "out there," or cosmic helping-hands available to clear-thinking minds or pure-minded souls. Attributing characteristics of personality to the function is a projection device which turns the open end into a mirror of ourselves, trapping us in our own logical devices.

The "universal pool" is as 'much "in here" as anywhere. Being autistic by nature, anything desired can be gotten from it, if one is willing to pay the price and has an ultimate commitment around which the process can orient. Hard discipline of mind and passionate adherence to a belief in spite of all obstacles and all evidence to the contrary, can overcome all obstacles and bring about the necessary evidence. The mirrors of reality play are brought into alignment by a nonambiguous commitment from a conscious mind. The "other mirror" is automatically unambiguous.

The close relation between our commitments of life and what we perceive was explored by Livingston in the Bulletin of Atomic Science, February, 1963. Livingston discussed the idea, inherited from the Greeks, of a common logic of thinking. Recent studies have questioned this Greek notion. Culture and language affect one's world view, the very process by which we think, and the "logic assumed for the operation of the whole universal process."

We inherited from Descartes the notion that there is a close correspondence between what we perceive and the "real nature of our environment." Descartes believed that a world of objects existed in a stable form and that reasonable men could "divest themselves of their passions" and by methods of reasoning arrive at an objective comprehension of physical things, social events, and forces.

Descartes granted us a relatively one-to-one correspondence between our subjective experience and the world "out there." He also gave us the notion that each of us has access to a relatively uncontaminated screen of perceptual experience upon which our judgements and actions can be based.

Livingston points out that our logical processes of thinking are relative to the language learned. He questions the correspondence between what we perceive and the "real nature of our environment." I would extend his question tol ask: Is there such a thing as a "real nature of our environment"? Cohen assumes that if there is, man can never know it. All we can know, as Bruner says, is our own representation of the world; a representation, Jung might add, carried as a blueprint within our culture, filled with an endless variety of diverse content -- from Solley-Murphy's sea of stimuli, shaped by Sapir-Whorf's concept-percept in this semantic universe of Levi-Strauss's, and so on.

There is nothing orderly or logical to the function I am trying to outline. I find no evidence that great cosmic powers keep the process on an upward trend, keeping an eye on us to assure our eventual success. There is no hierarchy of criteria or value for what is or is not "realized," made real, by the function. It is a contest of inhibitions and strengths, choices and allegiances. We are the source of value and choice, the source of ideas around which the procedure of our reality orients.

On the one hand it is argued that there is no world "out there" available to dispassionate observation. Objectivity in relation to reality is a naive delusion on our part. On the other hand, a universal common knowledge is denied. There appears to be no world-mind from which we may get cues, no secret wavelengths for our perceptors.

There is, nevertheless, an open-ended aspect for us, a creative one, and glimpsed through autistic thinking. There is a bridge between clearing and forest, between logical man and his non-logical potential. William Blake claimed that "anything capable of being imagined is an image of truth." We openly shape reality when we diligently apply every ounce of our logical process to a given desire. We are subject to the same effect on less conscious levels. Our confused, conflicting, and inchoate assumptions also enter as shaping forces in reality, and happen to us as a random, confused fate.

It takes an ultimate commitment to damp out and exclude other possibilities so that one possibility might formulate and be realized. Autistic thought can synthesize and break into consciousness with anything desired, if the conscious desire is strong enough to win the struggle for dominance. Non-ambiguity is the shaping force of reality. This capacity of mind is remote, elusive, whimsical, but it can catalyze and synthesize ideas, notions, desires, and quests drawn from or suggested by a realized world of events. From this catalytic synthesis we have presented back an enhanced mirror of our concepts that can enlarge our reality itself. This is the way in which "eternity is in love with time."

Next I will explore the shaping of a world view, our set of concepts built from infancy and childhood, its structure determining the kind of world then available to the mind so shaped.





3 blueprints and viewpoints

A social world view, one shared with other people, is structured from our infant minds by the impingements on us from, and the verifying responses to us by, other people. A mind finds its definition of itself not by confrontation with things so much as other minds. We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of a world but to the reality of other thinkers. When we have finally persuaded and/or badgered our children into "looking objectively" at their situation, taking into consideration those things other to themselves, we relax since they are being realistic. What we mean is that they have finally begun to mirror qur commitments, verify our life investments, and strengthen and preserve the cosmic egg of our culture.

Occasionally we hear of people found chained in attics and such places from infancy. Their world view is either scanty or different for they are always feeble minded at best. In 1951 a child was found in an Irish chicken-house, having somehow survived there with the chickens, since infancy. The ten-year old's long hair was matted with filth; he ate at the chicken trough; roosted with the flock; his fingernails had grown, fittingly, to semicircular claws; he made chicken-like noises, not surprisingly; he had no speech and showed no promise of learning any in the time he survived his rescue.

Forty years ago there was interest in two feral children found in India. They had apparently been raised by wolves. They were taken from an actual wolf den along with some cubs, the older wolves scattering or being killed. One of the children, Kamala they called her, survived for nine years. Only with difficulty was she taught table manners and such niceties as walking on the hind legs. Nevertheless she exhibited a growing awareness of the reward system of her new group, and displayed a strong drive toward such orientation. As with the chicken-child, however, she had missed the formative period of human infant development, and there was no easy or complete going back to retrace the steps. Kamala had formed according to the pattern eliciting response around her during her mirrorhag period. For her first two years of captivity --- or rescue -- she howled faithfully at ten, twelve, and three at night, as all Indian wolves do. She would also, in spite of precautions, manage to get at the chickens, rip them apart alive and eat them raw. Only when the new social reward system grew strong enough to outweigh the earlier rewards did she abandon her early training. --- There has been an accepted disparaging of the reports by Kellog, Gesell, Singh, and others concerning these children, until one now hears this case blithely dismissed as a fraud. No one reading the original publications, studying the photographs, the diaries, and the overall picture will dismiss the case, however.

What kind of minds did these feral children have? Jung claimed that no one is born a tabula rasa, a blank slate. As the body carries features specifically human yet individually varied, so does the psychic organism. The psyche preserves an unconscious stratum of elements going back to the invertebrates and ultimately the protozoa. Jung speaks of a hypothetical peeling of the collective unconscious, layer by layer, down to the psychology of the ameoba. We can trace a rough parallel in the development of the foetus.

As the body must be fed to realize the potential built into the genes as a blueprint waiting development, so must the mind. Jung used the term 'archetype' to describe "recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions." We inherit such ideas as part of our potential mind pattern. Archetypes, however, are only a kind of readiness to produce over and again the same mythical ideas. If the readiness is not triggered by a response or a demand, that particular possibility remains dormant and even steadily diminishes.

Linguists are intrigued by the readiness with which the infant seizes a language, if given the referents. The "readiness" of language can miscarry, as Susanne Langer put it, because of lack of the trigger-response interplay. If this happens, the world view shaped by that language miscarries too and never forms. Then participation in that kind of world is permanently blocked. Leonard Hall writes that our culture and our reality are not separate phenomena. People of different cultures not only speak different languages, but inherit different sensory worlds.

Lévi-Strauss uses the term "semantic-universe" to describe our intellectual-scientific-technological fabric of reality. Jerome Bruner suggested that language is our most powerful means for performing "transformations" on the world. We transmute the world's shape by metaphoric mutations. We recombine our verbal structures in the interest of new possibilities.

Susanne Langer considered language to be conception and concept the frame of perception. Thus, for Langer, we live in a "primary world" of reality that is verbal. The word for a thing helps to arrest an infant's visual process and focus it on a specific thing. It is the combination of sensory possibilities, parental focus, and innate drives for ordering, that organizes the child's visual field. Then the word-thing growth becomes exponential, growing like a tree at every tip. Grouping, identifying, correlating, with a constant check with his exemplars, gives the young child an exciting participation and communion, a defining of self and world. Langer calls even nature a "language-made affair," made for understanding, and "prone to collapse into chaos if ideation fails." Fear of this collapse may be the most potent fear in civilized man.

It is our ideation that shapes our children. We provide an enriched environment, visual, aural, tactile stimuli to furnish the best supply of raw materials, but our own background determines what we decide makes up a "rich environment." And then, quite naturally, we expect our children to shape this material into a pattern verifying our commitments. We look for agreement.

A "semantic universe" can be built only on a background of language, but a considerable input of raw materials of every kind is necessary to build a language. The mind has to have a world to draw on in order to organize a world-to-view. In my opening broadside I have emphasized thinking as the director of percepts, and surely our developed concepts shape our world. But an initial impingement on perception by a world "out there," of things and people, enters as the other mirror in the two-way interaction of development of mind. Infant thinking is probably autistic, gradually structuring into reality-thinking, but even autistic thinking cannot arise from a vacuum. The mill of the mind is the chief element in reality, but before it can grind, at least for our table, it must have some of our kind of grist. Missing this, a mind might still grind marvelous stuff, but we could never know it.

In the last chapter I presented evidence against a universal pool of knowledge or a common logic of thinking. Evidence points toward the infant mind being prestructured along clearly marked drives toward communion with others, toward speech, response and so on, but the content for the drives is acquired. Bruner points out that intent precedes both acquisition of knowledge and ability to do. Acquisition of language and the ability to do in an infant are brought about by nurturing and fostering the inborn intent. Raw material must be given the mind; the blueprint must be filled in by responsive and guiding actions and reactions from other minds. The infant mind then makes syntheses of these acquisitions of possibilities.

The kind of syntheses that can occur, once material is available to mind, is varied, however. Smythies, as mentioned before, assumes that hallucinations are a part of the normal child's psychic experience. As the child grows older, he selectively represses the hallucinatory fabric according to the "current negative social value." Syntheses accepted as the "current social value," and given "positive reward" are considered real.

Bracken pointed out that the distinction between autistic and reality-adjusted thinking corresponds with the German theory that new and more complex neurological structures, as the mid-brain and cortex, grow as superimpositions upon older and more primitive brain structures, such as the "old brain," or brain-stem. These older thinking devices (there is no being but in a mode of being,) continue to function, however, even after the higher ones are developed. McKeller presumes that A-thinking takes place in these lower centers, and Smythies' hallucinatory psychic experiences of childhood would fall into the same classification. Jung's notion of a collective response would fit in with this kind of representation. The mid-brain, old brain and stem being structures shared by all animals, one can see how the psyche might be peeled layer by layer down to the psychology of lower creatures. Polanyi's "primary process" thinking of animals and children could be understood in this sense.

Perhaps, then, the education of a child is unlearning as well as learning, and perhaps many possibilities are lost through lack of triggering response, possibilities that may have been of worth. James Old, in his experiments on rats (giving electrode stimulus to various parts of the brain), presumed a kind of ecstacy-response was created by stimulus of a certain area of the mid-brain. In the human, stimulus of this area makes "all the bells of heaven ring," as one subject expressed it. Hallucinogens must occasionally stimulate this area, as well as dissolving the ordinary categories of reality.

This kind of ecstatic experience is negated by logical thinking. Old found that the rapture faded as the stimulus was moved away from the mid-brain and toward the rat's thin layer of cortex. And life has moved toward an abundance of cortex, this thinking material giving us our superior discontinuity over the animals. Our logical process has been bought at too stiff a price, though, and life moves toward the further possibility of getting around the price paid. That is, life moves toward correcting the imbalance of mind that the development of logic has brought on. If balanced, a logical process could then selectively direct an infinite potential.

At any rate, while we can say the chicken-child was not really human, we cannot say his experience was that of a vegetable. A low level of cortical activity might allow free development of mid-brain experience. We tend to deny cousciousness to other things (or other people), but, as Blake put it:

How do you know but every bird That wings the airy way Is an immense,world of delight, Closed to your senses five?

Bruner's Center for Cognitive Studies proposes a "programmed infant mind," a mind only awaiting the proper stimulus to flower. Bruner argues that if language were the result of a learning process alone, man's grasp would be forever limited by what he has already learned to reach. The infant is a bud, ready to bloom. The intention, the will to do, precedes the skill, the ability to do.

William Blake, in his outrage against the dead world of a John Locke, cried: "Man's mind is like a garden ready planted. This world is too poor to produce one seed." We find, nevertheless, that the specifics of the plantings are given shape by the kind of weeding, thinning, and fertilizing done by other minds. Arnold Gesell noted with wonder that the wolf-child, Kamala, eventually did respond to her human environment in a "slow and orderly recovery of obstructed mental growth." The recovery was only partial, certainly. It took some five years of care before she had reached an approximate age development of an eighteen-month-old; at her death at seventeen, after nine years of human environment, she had reached something approximating a three-year-old level. Scant progress as it seems, this was from a child who had spent her first eight years in a wolf-den, and whose learning and unlearning problems must have been considerable.

Gesell considered the capacity of an individual to acquire and create culture to be inborn, but he pointed out that the culture which surrounds an individual operates as a "large-scale molding matrix, a gigantic conditioning apparatus." He warned against oversimplifying the complex and interwoven riddle of "nature versus nurture." And surely if only a wolf-culture is offered as the mirroring pattern, this is nevertheless seized upon by the programmed patterns of response and responded to, giving a structured world in which to move.

An error causing grief in our time is the idea that culture and civilization are recent acquisitions, and that all previous cultures were but crude gestures laying the groundwork for our own enlightened emergence into truth. Erickson denies that primitive societies are "infantile stages of mankind," or arrested deviations from the "proud progressive norms which we represent." They are, he states, a "complete form of mature human living." Levy-Bruhl spoke of prehistoric man not as a protoscientist who arrived at false conclusions, but another type of man entirely, whose mental life differed from ours in kind. I would qualify this by observing that primitive man is not so much a different type as of a different esthetic bent. Lévi-Strauss finds archaic cultures a unified, coherent, intellectual scheme, based on different logical premises from our own. Jensen deplores the theory that early man arrived at totally erroneous conclusions regarding cause and effect.

Culture is not an autonomous venture; autistic thinking remains autistic until modified by another mind which is also modified by the relation. But the capacity and drive to create a culture is innate. It is an enormous formative potential that realizes itself against the most extreme odds.

Oversold on the splendors of "realistic," tough-minded thinking, we are led to believe that current methods represent discovery of universal truths and are thus sacred, rather than particular esthetic choices. Notions of what we are, and of what our capabilities are, change with a marvelous disregard for consistency. Yet these world views tend to bring about the very state of mind they hold to be the case. We become what we behold.

The danger of accepting a programmed infant mind is that we might decide the mind was really programmed for our particular show, and that all the dark ages preceded this final light. We must, rather, realize the program capacity to be the universal, the current programs the particular, and that particulars are variable, flexible, even expendable, and never sacrosanct.

The child's mind is autistic, a rich texture of free synthesis, hallucinatory and unlimited. His mind can skip over syllogisms with ease, in a non-logical, dream-sequence kind of "knight's-move" continuum. He nevertheless shows a strong desire to participate in a world of others. Eventually his willingness for self-modification, necessary to win rapport with his world, is stronger than his desire for autonomy. Were it not, civilization would not be possible. That we succeed in moulding him to respond to our criteria shows the innate drive for communion and the flexibility of a young mind. It doesn't prove an essential and sanctified rightness of our own constructs.

Maturity, or becoming reality adjusted, restricts and diminishes this "knight's-move" thinking, and tends to make pawns of us in the process. The kind of adult logic that results is dependent on the kinds of demands made on the young mind by parents and society. If we believe our social view sacred and made in heaven, we tend to shut off a deep potential in which many of the terrors and shortcomings of our logic and reason might be averted. Exclusion of possibility is necessary to narrow and hold the mind to a world of others. The price of excluded possibility buys a prism that opens on specialized worlds. We lose and gain. But the autistic mode of mind offers a way around severe loss.

Benjamin Lee Whorf recognized cultural agreement as implicit and unstated, but absolutely obligatory. Agreement determines the way we organize nature into concepts giving nature significance. Agreement underlies our codified patterns of language. We cannot talk at all, Whorf claimed, except by "subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees." Whatever this agreement decrees is what then makes up reality. Cultural agreements are automatic and unconscious, built-in and unquestioned, furnishing the "obvious facts" of experience. These are the other factors moving into and synthesizing our "visual world" from the visual field.

We force our children, consciously and unconsciously, to selectively ignore certain phenomena and look for and nourish other phenomena. The child's capacity for imagination may put up a struggle. All of us "attend the world" only from necessity or specific reward. The mind wanders into byways every second it can. Its moments of attention are fragmented. Concrete things do not impinge on this flux of mind very much. Defensively tending to the world can be handled mechanically, but other people cannot. Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of hell as "other people," and his hell was well placed. Without others I could reign supreme, except that I must have others to reign at all.

All parties in a reality event are modified by each other. All create the common denominator through which they relate. To take part in society we must accept the social definitions and agreements that make up the society's reality picture. Our definitions outline the socially acceptable framework for what shall be considered real. This network of definition changes from culture to culture and period to period. It is arbitrary to an indeterminable degree, but is always the form for the only reality available.

Langer was one of the first to question the old concept of speech as a survival technique of evolution. Thirty years ago she wrote of the beginnings of speech as purposeless lalling-instincts, "primitive aesthetic reactions, and dreamlike association of ideas," all of which sound autistic. Langer denies that speech was a "natural adjustment." (Recent studies of the cultures and esthetics of the higher apes by C. E. Carpenter and others lend an interesting overtone to Langer's proposal.) Our dreamlike autistic quality is structured into a world of categories and logical shapes through language. The stage of this development lasts throughout infancy and early childhood. The word and the concept become fused in that early period of development and grow up together.

If language is not built in during this formative period, it cannot be built at all. Bruner'refers to the child as father to the man in an irreversible way. Piaget's stages of learning make clear that it is not just a lack of phonetic material (Langer's 'lalling') that blocks language learning later on. More important than this is the fact that the emerging mind will have mirrored whatever model it had during that formative period. The pattern formed in this plastic stage becomes firm. It hardens into the functional system of representation-response we call a world view. Once done, there is no undoing of the system except by metanoia resyntheses, that capacity for mutation which will occupy the next portion of this book. Even this mutation is dependent on the materials available for mutation -- conversion is a creative process, but not magical.

This pattern formed by the mirroring of child mind and social pressure is not only the means then available for coping with a world and other people, it largely determines what shall be coped with. This world view is then the screen allowing only related data in, as well as the synthetic process determining the final cognitive shape of that admitted material. The pattern shapes the kind of world to respond to, and the world response that must then be made.

The infant's dream-like association of ideas is slowly won over to an agreement of what should constitute reality. By the time our reasoning has developed enough to reflect on the process by which our reasoning has formed, we are part and parcel of the whole process, caught up in and sustaining it. By the time the young rebel reaches the age of rebellion he is inevitably that against which he would rebel, his linear thrust ending as a pale reflection of the circle from which he would break.

Edward Hall writes that it is impossible for us to divest ourselves of culture, for it has penetrated to the roots of our nervous system and determines how we perceive the world. We cannot act or interact except through the medium of culture. Thus Whitehead could write of "fundamental assumptions" unconsciously presupposed by all the variant systems within an epoch. People do not know that they are tacitly assuming, for no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them; they are always merely responding to "obvious facts."

Whately Carington spoke of the limitations of the individual mind as matters of fact, not of law. We are limited by our agreements on possibility. Agreement is a common exclusion of alternate possibilities. Agreement is the cement of social structure. Two or three gathered together, agreeing on what they are after, may create a subset in which their goals can be achieved, even though folly in the eyes of the world. The world in this case means a set of expectancies agreed upon, a set excluding other possibilities.

Cornell's Gibson referred to a "visual field" as a constantly-shifting light pattern, bringing to mind Bruner's seven million shades of color. Gibson refers to the "visual world" as distinct from this "field." In the formation of a visual world, sensory data from other sources are used to correct the visual field. These "other sources" are the conceptual framework, the world view formation, built in the formative years. Seeing is a synthetic process incorporating our conceptual assumptions and esthetic conditionings.

Edward Hall points out that we are less actively aware of seeing than we are of talking. It is difficult to grasp that talking and understanding are synthetic processes, overlapping and incorporating an intricate network of varied responses. Much more difficult is the idea that seeing is subject to the same qualification. The variables that enter into seeing prove enormous, nevertheless, and people from different cultures not only use a different language, but inhabit a different sensory world, as Hall puts it.

So, when Cohen wrote that the world we see is far from an exact image of the physical world, I wondered how one could ever tell. He added that this was the case since perception is highly variable and often erroneous, and that we can only perceive what we can conceive. Cohen observed that we tend to see only what can be incorporated into our established frame of reference, and tend to reject anything not fitting. Cohen then presumed, however, that our notions of what is "out there" are based on an "indistinct uncertainty," and I thought of Blake's comment: "If the sun and moon should doubt, they'd immediately go out." Failure of nerve is the major sin. Cohen went on to conclude that for all we know, the "thing called reality may exist, but we shall never see it," and at this point I protested.

Is there an "exact image" of a physical world? Consider even photography. The same subject can be hideous or lovely according to the skill of the photographer. Photography is an art because it can catch aspects of reality that escape us, precisely as painting can do. I can traverse the same tired street year in and year out, familiar with every twig and stone -- but a photographer can suddenly present me with a photograph of it that makes me catch my breath much as from a poem or a piece of music. I refuse to believe the "police lineup" photograph on my driver's license is my real image; as with all aspects of the police mentality it somehow has sought out the worst possible aspects of me.

Is the strange abstraction of the physicist an "exact image" of a world? The physicist is the last to claim this. But his at times absurd abstractions become contingencies in the processes of a physical world. Does the word 'real' mean at all what the naive realists and the tough-minded have claimed? What could the "atomically-verifiable statement" conceivably mean? Our error is in considering our concept-percept function to be separate and distinct from reality, rather than a dominant force in the shaping of it.

The condition called reality exists as an ever-current sum total of our representations and responses. Whatever we see is what reality is for us, and there will never be, from here to eternity, any other kind of reality for us. And this reality will always be in a process of mutation and change. Huxley's "homemade world" is a necessity in any context. There is no magic, there is only The Creation. There is no supernatural, but there are an infinite number of possible natures. A point of centered thinking organizes and survives by relationship with similar points of thinking. It is a matter of agreement, a structuring of similar patterns of shared response.

We know now, according to Jerome Bruner, that our nervous system is not the "one-way street" it was long considered to be. All minds have a program of their own. The mind sends out monitoring orders to the sense organs and the "relay stations." The orders specify priorities for different kinds of environmental message. Selectivity is the rule. We used to think of the nervous system as a simple telephone switchboard, bringing in messages from outside. We know now, Bruner claims, that the system is every bit as much an "editorial hierarchy" -- a policy-making device determining what is perceived.

Edward Hall, with his "proxemic research," speaks of 'vision' as a "transaction between man and his environment in which both participate." Hall explores how we unconsciously structure our visual world. Perhaps we can consciously seize the process. William Blake antedated all this by two centuries. He said he used his eyes to see with , in active vision -- a process in which creative imagination played a principal role. He did not look from his eyes as through a window, in passive sight, as Descartes or Locke would claim.

How can firm statements be made about a world to itself? The very statement enters as a contingency in that world. What is real is a variable. Though a regressing contingency stretches back to a hypothetical First Day, the visual world is what we practice day by day, and our capacity for practice is infinitely varied. Our "editorial policies" are more flexible than we dare imagine. Our range of selectivity is boundless. All things are possible to him who believes -- that is, to him who believes in the possibility.

We feel that surely, to a man of good will and honesty, an honest look should inform of an honest reality -- and we mean, of course, our reality. This common assumption has been questioned in our day -- and this is a crack in the cosmic egg of the realisms of the past few centuries. Our survival may well depend on this crack splitting the blind world of politician and pentagonian. The crack should lead us to find an open-ended possibility, provided we can open to other world views, those of Oriental and archaic cultures for instance, as valid, rather than as objects for destruction that our own might reign supreme.

The open end of human potential is built into the blueprint of mind, and is contained in that mode I have called 'autistic.' This is blocked, however, by blindness of viewpoint , and yet the autistic can be structured and realized only by assuming viewpoints. The openness nevertheless happens to us in peripheral and unsuspected ways. One of the most intriguing of these ways is the procedure of ultimately asked and passionately adhered to questions. The ways in which questions form in the mind and are answered is the next part, and the central part, of my exploration.





4 questions and answers

The English scientist, Edward de Bono, writes of "lateral and vertical thinking." Since Aristotle, he points out, vertical thinking, which I have called reality-adjusted thinking, or logic, has been given the place of supremacy. In actuality, de Bono writes, all truly new ideas, by which new eras of reality have come into play, have been products of lateral thinking. Following on one great lateral opening of mind, the vertical thinkers can busy themselves for generations. De Bono likens the activity of vertical thinking to digging post holes deeper and deeper, along the lines established by lateral breakthroughs of thinking.

In this chapter I will elaborate on how the postulate, the Eureka! discovery, the illumination, of lateral thinking, come about. A few examples were given in Chapter Two, when I claimed that these "autistic eruptions" into logical thinking suggested a clue to the way reality shapes, the way the potential of the "dark forest" is given shape by ideas arising from our cultural clearings.

The relation of questions and answers is an example of the mirroring function between the modes of mind. Answers are shaped by the questions demanding them, just as the question is finally shaped by the nature of the answer desired. In this way our experience shapes and moves as desire reaching for the unknown.

A question is a seed of suggestion which we plant into that continuum of synthesis I have called autistic thinking. The question's germination takes place in ways unavailable to conscious thought, but only in a ground prepared and nourished by conscious thought. The synthesis flowers as the Eureka! illumination, that dramatic breakthrough wherein we are convinced of having received a universal truth.

There are no limits to the kinds of Eureka! we may experience. Verification of any prejudice, fulfillment of any desire can be obtained. Polanyi pointed out that the procedure of mind involved here follows St. Paul's formula of faith, works, and grace. Faith is a neutral function, however, and any kind of belief can stimulate passionate work. Grace, unfortunately, is given according to the nature of the faith, the content of the work, the triggers around which the synthesis can organize.

The scientist, the idiot-fringe philosopher, the cult prophet, the devout Christian, the withdrawn Hindu, may each find their respective pearls in this same sea of thought. The function of question-answer is the same in all cases. The triggering desires, the metaphors of allegiance, the dictates of training, the techniques of attainment, may all differ radically, and give correspondingly different products, but underneath is the single function of representation-response, undergoing analysis throughout this book.

Back in 1935, Bertrand Russell, in his book Religion and Science, pointed out that Catholics, but not Protestants, could have visions in which the Virgin Mary appeared. Christians and Mohammedans, but not Buddhists, may have great truths revealed to them by the Archangel Gabriel. The list could go on, of course, and Russell was obviously right -- but he was right for the wrong reasons. His conclusion was a product of nineteenth century naive realism, and a defense of vertical thinking as the only true indicator of "real things." In this chapter I hope to show the sterility and narrowness of Russell's viewpoint, and to suggest that his attack on religion was a case of pot calling kettle black.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton was professor of mathematics and astronomy at the University of Dublin. His 'Quaternion Theory' has played a vital role in modern mechanics. The theory "happened to him" as a Eureka! discovery, an illumination, while walking to Dublin one morning with Lady Hamilton. As they started across Grougham Bridge, which his boys afterward called Quaternion Bridge, right there, in such an unlikely spot, the "galvanic circuit of thought closed," as Hamilton put it in metaphor fitting to the interests current to his time, and the "sparks which fell" from the closing of this circuitry were the fundamental equations making up his famous theory -- a theory which generations of vertical thinkers have happily explored.

At the very moment of illumination there washed over Hamilton the understanding that an additional ten to fifteen years of his life would be required to translate fully the enormity of the insight given in that second. Marghanita Laski, investigating the nature of the mental maneuver involved, notes that the experience itself filled an 'intellectual want' of long standing. In a letter written shortly before the discovery, Hamilton spoke of his long-cherished notion having "haunted" him for some fifteen years. A recent renewal of his old passion had given him a "certain strength and earnestness for years dormant." This renewed diligence and application to the mathematics involved furthered the long collection of material for the synthesis of the desired answer.

The historian, Arnold Toynbee, had a mental illumination of history , fittingly enough, and in the incongruously prosaic setting of Buckingham Palace Road. There he suddenly found himself in "communion" not with just some particular episode of history, but with "all that had been, and was, and was to come," an apt description of a mystical-autistic seizure. In that experience Toynbee was directly aware of the "Passage of History" gently flowing through him in a mighty current, his own life "welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide." His communion both verified his life investment, and furthered it as stimulus.

Albert Einstein spoke in reverent tones of his illumination giving rise to his famous theory. He never doubted that he had been privileged to glimpse into the very mathematical mind and physical heart of all things. James R. Newman spoke of Einstein's 30-page paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," as embodying a "vision." He observed that poets and prophets are not the only ones to have visions, but that scientists do so as well. They glimpse a peak perhaps never again seen, but the landscape is "forever changed." Their life is then spent describing what was seen, elaborating on the vision that others might follow.

Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek novelist and poet. He was an adherent to the Bergsonian concept of the élan vital, a spirit transcending matter and transforming it into spirit; an "onrushing force throughout all creation which strives for purer and more rarified freedom."

In a final assault on the meaning of existence, Kazantzakis retreated to Mount Athos, that near-legendary Greek mountain where no woman has ever set foot, but ascetics and monastics abound. For two years Kazantzakis devoted himself to contemplation. He spent months teaching his body to endure cold, hunger, thirst, sleeplessness and every privation. Then he turned to his spirit, where, in painful concentration he sought to conquer within himself the "minor passions, the easy virtues, the cheap spiritual joys, the convenient hopes."

Kazantzakis finally experienced a tremendous vision, in keeping with his desire for verification of his ultimate concern. In his numinous experience, his life-work, the belief he had hammered out all his years, was both clarified and verified. His illumination happened one night and he "started up in great joy," seeing the "red ribbon" left behind in the ascent, within us and in all the universe, by his "certain Combatant." Kazantzakis clearly saw those "bloody footprints ascending from inorganic matter into life and from llfe into spirit." It was this, the transmutation of matter into spirit that was the great secret. Here was the meaning of his own life, to transmute, even in his own small capacity, matter into Spirit, the highest endeavor, and by which he might reach a harmony with the universe.

Jean-Paul Sartre had a diabolical mystical experience, an "extraverted," or conscious one, in which he "saw" the whole world to be a single, unified, grey, jelly-like protoplasm of pain, horror, and meaninglessness. This is completely opposite to the mystical experience of Jacob Boehme, also a conscious one. Walter Kaufman, with his Faith of a Heretic, claimed a negative experience that verified, that is gave a numinous, "universal" kind of rightness to, his agnostic position.

St. Augustine was driven by his desire for religious conviction, but felt blocked by a myriad of minor allegiances inhibiting the single devotion demanded by Christian belief. Little by little he damped down and inhibited the various drives of ego and flesh that prevented his opening to transformation. Augustine knew what his goals were, however. He longed for a certain experience of total seizure because he had heard others speak of such an experience, and he had seen the evident results. His longing finally reoriented his own "hierarchy of mind," making his own "new-seeing" possible. (That what he finally "saw" was a synthesis of his own desires -- not some absolute or universal "out there" knowledge -- is clearly evident from the Stoic nature of the Christianity resulting from Augustine, a point to which I will briefly return in the last part of this book. )

Laski contrasts Augustine's complex personality and search with John Wesley's simpler one. Wesley was, though a sincere, practicing Christian, not one of the twice-born. He had simply never doubted God or felt removed from a divine presence. All around him his fellow workers were experiencing dramatic conversions, however, and Wesley wanted the same stamp of authenticity for his own formulations. He investigated in detail the moment he sought; he knew what it must feel like. He was moved by "appropriate influences at significant moments," according to Laski's study. He knew the question he was asking, and the answer desired. He finally achieved his conversion and it was just as dramatic as that hoped for, just as real as could be desired, precisely toward which he had long aimed.

The asking of a question with passionate concern for its answer, a concern which demands life investment, suggests a door which will sooner or later be found. Whether it is successfully opened to the public is another matter, but if a current world view can accommodate a new synthesis, the new idea may prove to be the case. A new idea fails if it involves too great a sacrifice of invested belief. If the new idea triggers a passionate enough pursuit to make suspension or abandonment of previous beliefs, or current criteria worth the risk, however, the new idea can change the reality structure.

Price spoke of an idea's propensity for achieving reality unless inhibited by other ideas. A new idea can be killed by the pressure of inhibiting investments. On the other hand, and happening a bit more as fate, a new idea can breed the very ecology necessary to its own translation, testability, and realization. In the next chapter I will explore this function as seen in the posing of the "empty category" in science, and how this can bring about the content needed to fall the category.

A person with passionate concern for the successful translation of his Eureka! (itself produced by passionate pursuit of an idea) can transform the very common domain with which adjustment of his new idea is sought. Whether the energy equivalent of ten billion tons of uranium fission will ever be obtained from a single cubic centimeter of empty space, as proposed by Bohm, depends on how passionately such an idea might be sustained and followed by enough people long enough for sufficient realignment of a vast network of assumptions.

If the current reality cannot contain a new idea, if the current allegiances inhibit the idea and prevent its completing its circuitry and fulfilling itself, never mind. Those current allegiances can be replaced, if slowly, until the new idea achieves its goal and is "real-ized," made real. Einstein's equations helped bring about the current scientific fabric that in turn verified Einstein's equations. New ideas must agree with this fabric or be discarded. On the other hand, for a new world view to develop, Einstein's ideas must be subtly changed or selectively abandoned. Such metaphoric mutations or discards require, however, a certain good taste, an esthetic protocol acceptable to the brotherhood of believers.

Passionate conviction can change the very adjusted reality with which testable correspondence is needed. The true believer can bring about the very changes and adjustments within his reality that can fit his new idea into the then altered background.

The double-helix formation for the chromosome gene was proposed as an "empty category" sixteen or so years before it was finally "photographed" and verified. Even then the photography was not direct, but only possible after suitable preparation allowed the photographing of an otherwise unphotographable entity.

How does the mind arrive at such remote and difficult theories when there is no tangible sign or even rudimentary hint, and when no way exists for verifying even the first part of the newly-forming fabric?

The Platonic retreat is an accepted evasion: Plato's God built into the mind the hidden idea of how he, God, created the mechanism to begin with. In a kind of Jungian extension of this, perhaps the mind itself, built up from the simplest combinations of a thinking phylum, contains within its labyrinthine corridors a kind of memory of its own structure. Or, of course, we can always attribute these Eureka!s to good, solid, scientific detective work and dismiss the problem.

Pére Teilhard said that whatever was put together could be taken apart. But our method of taking apart plays an indeterminately formative role in what is then taken apart. The nature of question-answer, filling the "empty categories," indicates that a kind of thinking encompasses the most remote regions of energy organization, much as' Teilhard proposed. And the function of question-answer is an expression of the ontological, reality-shaping process itself.

Common sense tells us that certain ideas are true because they prove to be backed by actual events; they were obviously triggered by real things. The "light of day" is the final arbiter. The cold facts of real things dispel the illusions of mind, and leave only the hard kernels of clear thinking. Piaget observed that we are continually hatching an enormous number of false ideas, conceits, Utopias, mystical explanations, superstitions, and megalomanic fantasies. All of these disappear when brought into contact with other people.

They do not all disappear, however; some remain to change the very framework and criteria of what makes real and what makes fantasy. There is more than a fortuitous connection between science fiction and scientific fact, though a one-for-one correspondence would be magic. That which is superstition and fantasy to Piaget was obvious fact to a previous age, and many of Piaget's cherished notions will themselves someday prove amusing and quaint.

There is a strong possibility that there is no a priori status for any one idea as against another idea. Teilhard observed that nature operates by profusion. According to Nietzche, we hear only the question to which we are capable of finding an answer. A question to which we can respond with a full investment of life and energy will influence our "editorial hierarchy" of mind. Then the kind of data we accept as evidential will be different. We will screen out and let in, interpret and synthesize, on a different basis.

The success of the atomic postulate influences the way we look on the birth and history of that hypothesis. Our current reality is not just represented as atomic, it is atomic. The atomic hypothesis, therefore, must have been a correct ~'hunch" about a pre-existing state of mechanical affairs. Any other attitude is surely madness.

Consider, however, that the final fruits of the atomic notion were born from an ecology greatly different from the original grounds wherein the early and tentative questions first appeared. And pursuit of the notion was one of the formative processes in changing the ecology itself. The translations and testings of all the myriad pieces of the puzzle expanded the original basis for possible thoughts about atoms. The expansion of the ecology was the result of both a peripheral and direct play of passionate believers, all those people working out the contingencies and correspondences with reality that would prove necessary for the answer's fruition. We tend to forget that a century and a half separated Dalton's early overtures from the final fruits at Alamogordo, and that Dalton himself was a late-comer to the atomic fantasy. Each of the many people involved could hardly have been aware that they were laying the groundwork for Oak Ridge or Hiroshima. The overall drift of possibility toward such a thing as atomic energy may be seen as a kind of self-sustaining idea seeking its own expression over many centuries.

Passionate belief is the chief ingredient in any question-answer function. William James referred to "overbelief" as the subjective gloss given by people to an experience or an idea that they felt revealed a universal truth. Laski considers overbelief the most desired answer to an urgently-asked question. Once we have been seized by a question, that is, once we have accepted a question as ultimately meaningful to us, we set about gathering the kinds of material the question needs to build its answer.

Poincaré was fascinated by the way ideas coalesce in the mind to produce original thinking. He thought of all the related ideas as "hooked atoms," which, in the unconscious work of mind, collide and give rise to new combinations. The process is hardly one of chance, he noted, since the separate ideas involved have been selected according to the definite purpose in mind, and are the ones from which the desired solution may reasonably be expected.

Wallas distinguished four stages in the process of postulate building: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The preparation period is the seizure by the notion; Laski would call this the asking of the question. This dedicates the mind, rules out conflicting drives, and organizes the energy to the task. Laski's search for materials for answer is the gathering of Poincaré's "hooked atom," feeding them into the hopper with selective care. This part of the process may take many years, as with Hamilton's quaternions, or may be comparatively rapid, as with Einstein's idea.

The incubation period is the "unconscious work," wherein the collisions of hooked atoms occur. Laski speaks of the fusion of materials, which is an unconscious process. This is the stage I have called autistic, since it grinds along its way without conscious control. The illumination is the Eureka! experience itself, the final fusion of all materials, the breakthrough when the barriers of ordinary logical screening are relaxed.

Verification involves the translation of the experience, as found in Hamilton's ten to fifteen years needed to work out all the ramifications. This is the point separating wheat from chaff. Laski speaks of the crucial "testing of the answer" to see if it can be fitted into the common domain. This is no simple jigsaw puzzle placement, however, but is rather a subtle play of many contingencies.

Bruner points out that our ordinary experience is a categorizing, a placing in a syntax of concepts. We can explore connections heretofore unsuspected by metaphoric combinations that leap beyond regular systematic placements. In his Essays for the Left Hand, Bruner explores the creative process and ends with a pattern similar to that of Laski and Wallas. First in Bruner's outline, there must be a detachment from the commonplace. (You could not be a follower of Jesus until you hated the ordinary world, rejected it, gave it up as your "systematic placement.") One detaches from the world in order to commit oneself to the replacing of the conventional with a new construct.

After this commitment of self to the task, the work itself becomes a balance between the passion , which gives a "superior degree of attention," (the capacity for selective blindness), and a decorum that counters the enthusiasms with a "love of form," an etiquette toward the object of passionate effort, and a respect for the materials involved.

The creative movement, according to Bruner, is rounded out by the "freedom to be dominated by the object." Blake noted that only by a long and intensive training and discipline, getting beyond the mechanics of technique, could the mind truly utilize its imagination. Yet this utilization meant a final breaking with all the forms and boundaries of the very discipline necessary for the ability to develop. The Divine Imagination moves the mind as it pleases, the wind bloweth where it listeth, but only when the way has been prepared by a discipline of mind. In every recorded case of Eureka! illumination, the final breakthrough of the postulate occurs at a moment when the logical processes have been momentarily suspended, a moment of relaxation from serious work.

If one is dominated by the object of desire, the work of creation takes over, Bruner says, and "assumes the role of dominance." Then the artist or scientist serves the new work. I would add saint to Bruner's listing. In turn, the life, then committed to that line of action, is justified only if the work succeeds. Thus the initial commitment breeds an ever more stringent allegiance and striving for successful completion. The new work is served since the new work serves the life and justifies it.

Mircea Eliade spent several years in the Orient, studying the Yoga discipline. He was quite struck by it, and his exhaustive book on the subject was sympathetic. He found it an arduous discipline, requiring years of development. The real technique hinges on a mental "blankness" that bypasses the world of "false and illusory notions." Stilling the flux of mental activity is in itself no small achievement. Having done this, the Yoga is convinced that a truth happens to him. What happens is so totally at variance with the "world" that no prestructuring on his part seems possible as a determinant.

On examination, however, the Yoga system proves to be a clear example of the question-answer function as outlined by Laski, Bruner, and Wallas. Eliade writes that this world is rejected, this life depreciated, because it is known that something else exists. And that something else is beyond temporality, beyond suffering. The Indian rejects the profane world because he believes without question in the reality of a sacred mode of being, and so we find from the very outset what Bruner calls the detachment from the commonplace.

The commitment to the new construct is adhered to passionately. All around him the Yogin sees his superiors able to do things that cannot be done so long as one remains in the ordinary world. Nothing less than concrete production is ever the motivation or the expectation. By their fruits they are known. Each particular discipline had its particular short-term rewards in addition to the long-range goal of Nirvana. The initiate absorbed an expectancy of the goals as he was incorporated into the system, just as a physics student does. Should the novitiate fail to produce tangible results, his life had failed. His long associative learning provided strong stimulus to overbelief formation in keeping with his traditions. His passion was carefully balanced with his decorum and respect for the tradition. His mind was finally transformed, just as Kazantzakis', Hamilton's, or Einstein's, in respect to each of their disciplines and goals. Where the faith is simple the test of the faith is simple. The Yogln had to produce: walk on fire, produce extraordinary body heat, reverse any of the bodily functions, and in general overcome the ordinary fated necessities of life. Nothing less than actuality was expected, or accepted as proof of "arrival."

The Yogin's environment was one of expectation of esoteric phenomena, and acceptance of such esoterica is commonplace within that environment. This is no small part of the entire fabric and possibility therein. It took several centuries to build up the kind of scientific environment we have today, the ecology in which the particular esoterica we produce can be thought of, accepted by mind, and brought about. Countless centuries have gone into the production of the sets of expectancies shaping the Yoga's sensory world. And, of course, the realists from our system smugly dismiss as nonsense reports of the non-ordinary reality produced by Yoga.

Answers arrive through novel media. It is a matter of esthetics what label is given, but the mind's predisposition toward one metaphor and against another has a damping effect on the kinds of possibilities open to it. The English occultist, Douglas Hunt, for instance, relates a story from Benker's Gepenster und Spuk in which a Munich engineer came home one day to find, to his alarm, none other than himself, "seated at the drawing board," busily sketching. This "mirror-image," or Doppelgänger, which has caused some terror through the ages, had worked out the solution to a problem which had worried the engineer for days. The twin-image had supposedly penned out the entire problem, and there it lay before the startled engineer's eyes. The example is given by Hunt as proof of astral projection, exteriorization, or out-of-the-body experience, as it is variously called.

No scientist could tolerate such occultist terminology or definitions. Hypnagogic imagery, however, is quite respectable. No less than the great Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, otherwise just Kekule, professor of organic chemistry at Bonn from 1865 fill his death in 1896, conceived the theory of the benzene ring, one of the most important theories in all modern chemistry, and one of the most original ideas of modern times, in a hypnagogic state. He actually "saw" the ring in visual image clearly and distinctly right before him, as occurs in all hypnagogic imagery. Surely it took no little doing to translate the strange imagery into terms compatible with his brotherhood, but the nature of the whole experience is typical of most discoveries. In the same way, Descartes appears to have encountered the basic notions of his analytical geometry -- in this quasi-dream state.

Laski wondered about all those scientific breakthroughs that fail to "pass the appropriate tests" of translation. Obviously they, too, arrive with initial certitude and conviction. We seldom hear of the ones that fail, she noted, though evidence strongly suggests they are in a majority. The question arises why wrong Eureka!s arrive at all.

Bruner supposes it to be an heuristic device of the mind, leading us on until we finally arrive at proper conclusions. This attributes to the mind a subconscious foreknowledge of the proper answer, which automatically places the proper answer in an a priori state of permanence. Why, with the foreknowledge already there (wherever there could be), would the mind keep stopping at so many false or premature places -- playing tricks on itself, as it were, and hardly just for fun since lives invest in answers and are ruined when the answers prove unacceptable. This further attributes to unconscious processes a value-judging capacity quite counter to evidence.

Rather, autistic thinking acts on all possibility, without judgment, since value is a capacity of logical reasoning only. The choices for possibility are suggested by the conscious mind's own value selections, and the material with which the autistic synthesis must work are those drawn from the experienced world. Nature operates by profusion as Teilhard said. All answers created are "true" to this nature, but not all will fit the tight limitations of the logical framework of the recipients triggering the very procedure. We might say that an infinite potential casually produces a thousand answers, one of which fits the carefully-defined jigsaw puzzle of the rational mind. A new puzzle could be organized around any of the pieces randomly produced, provided the rational mind were willing or able -- which it is not -- to change its total orientation so casually. All postulates are thus "true" in some context.

The sum total of the experienced world does not necessarily afford the new knowledge attained by the Eureka! hypothesis. The illumination "given" is generally of a character and nature larger than life, greater than the sum total of all data leading up to it. For instance, you can add the total thought from John Dalton, through Avogardo, Mendelejeff, Arrhenius, Planck, Bohr and all the others of that rich century and a half preceding and contemporaneous with Einstein, and never come up with a final sum that is Einstein.

There is a catalystic quality in autistic thinking, and this catalyst hinges on its very "non-judging" aspects. The Eureka! is traceable to its parts for genesis, yet is larger than their sum, or else attainment of radically new viewpoints, producing dramatically new results, could become a commonplace formula. The unconscious autistic continuum is a sort of total wealth where all things, or any thing, are true, where the energy of thought and the energy of adhered-to forms of matter appear to merge. There are no polarities in this "ultimate reconciliation of opposites," as those people falling into the mystic states have reported. In autistic thinking nothing is either true or false, it simply is.

The rationale of consciousness is what gives a particular value; that makes meaningful by limitation; that gives the form of a necessarily limited fact to the unlimited formlessness of fantasy. Thus a revolutionary idea that has no possibilities within the context that triggers it, and is thus stillborn or a failure, is still as valid within the synthesis function of mind as is anything else. On the other hand, ideas that are highly irrational, such as the atomic notion with its vast interplay of particle physics, can, if adhered to by true believers long enough, build up an ecology giving them the necessary possibilities for expression and realization.

Jung talks about unconscious processes being in a continual state of synthesis, which brings to mind Poincaré's hooked-atom collision process. David Bohm, seeing the world from the eyes of a convert to the physicist's brotherhood, contends that all processes of nature are in a constant state of change. If we ourselves could shake off a Cartesian dualism, we might see the full shape of the procedure. Descartes believed that God was the mediator between a mechanistic world and the non-involved thinking mind. Since God was presumably honest, he would not deceive the mind with perceptions that were illusions -- provided, of course, that the mind under question were equally honest and open to the mediator. Jesus, on the other hand, said God judged not at all, and that we reaped as we sowed -- a notion that does not fit the Greek orientation, but does fit quite well the question-answer function under consideration.

Carl Jung observed that a psychology reflected the background of the psychologist propounding it. Jung did not see how a Chinese psychologist and a Swiss one would reach the same conclusions. Cohen mused on the curious way the Jungian analyst's patient confirmed the fondest Jungian theories when under LSD, while the drugged Freudian patient gave back the proper Freudian symbol -- verifying the therapist's own most basic assumptions. The patient "senses the frame of reference to be employed," suggests Cohen, and his associations and dreams are molded to it.

Kline of New York University, for several years head of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, observed the same interaction between a hypnotist and his subject. Kline found that the unconscious mind of the subject made every effort to comply with the demands of the hypnotist. The hypnotist serves as the logical value-selector in the resulting relation. Material ordinarily inaccessible to consciousness, forgotten or subliminal impressions, synthetic combinations of childhood fantasies, dreams, secondary percepts and so on, all become available as valid events and "real" contents under hypnosis. The association between hypnotist and subject takes on a marked affinity over a period of time. Material can be exchanged unconsciously between the two. The unexpressed desires of the hypnotist may affect the subject, who begins to fabricate from the unconscious of both parties, finally giving valid responses to the hypnotist's hidden desires. (In amateurs such desires are most often esoteric and cultic.)

The experience of Fellin and Throne, the two miners mentioned before, shows the extent to which unconscious exchanges can occur. Cases of folie à deux, or shared hallucination, bear a relation to hypnosis, where fantasies from the unconscious may be built into logical and airtight structures creating non-ordinary states. This is particularly evident in cults (though of course a cult is a discipline not in the current acceptancies). For instance, insistence on the part of the hypnotist that the subject "rediscover a past life" can plant a seed of suggestion in the unconscious around which related materials, that is, materials that can be used for such a synthesis, gather into a coherent pattern and finally present themselves as a valid memory of an actual occurrence.

In variations of this, a person's own desires, particularly cultic, can produce the same kind of unconscious synthesis which then breaks in automatically as verification. (Someone might make a study of the personality backgrounds of subjects seeing flying-saucers.) The conscious mind of the subject, since his desire has to some extent suspended his ordinary system of judgment in favor of the experience, suspends the ability to distinguish the "remembered" synthetic event from a "real" one.

William Butler Yeats's biographer, Ellman, wrote that had Yeats died in 1917 at the age of 52, instead of marrying as he did, he would be remembered as a remarkable minor poet who "achieved a diction more powerful than that of his contemporaries," but who did not have much to say with it, except in a handful of poems. The difference between his being a minor poet or a major one rested, strangely enough, on the talent for automatic writing which Yeats, an enthusiast of the occult, found in his new bride. With great excitement Yeats drove her to hours of automatic writing daily, to her general weariness. Out of the results Yeats found emerging the crystalized metaphors with which he had struggled, with only partial success, all his life. Mrs. Yeats uncovered his thought in a synthesized and clarified imagery beyond his own abilities, and it was this esoteric venture that produced those last fruitful decades on which Yeats's greatness lies.

Under the spellbinding situations hypnotic interplay often creates, the questions asked will tend to be in keeping with desire for esoteric or cultic knowledge. Conscious value judgment is precisely what is set aside by the subject in order to enter the hypnotic state -- a point to which I will return later. Value judgment is often willingly suspended by the hypnotist himself, if half-unconsciously, in his desire for conviction. Thus there is set up a possibility for folie à deux, and a ready granting of authenticity to the revelatory content.

Laski dwelt at some length on P. W. Martin's Experiment in Depth. The major premise and purpose of Martin's book is to bring to those who treat life responsibly and with devotion, an experience of the deep center of mind that has in the past been available only to the "highly percipient man or woman, the mystic, the saint, or seer."

Some idea of the goals of the experiment is made known immediately. The focus has narrowed. The reader who continues with Martin's book will have acknowledged tacitly that the prospect of such a goal is intriguing enough to warrant further investigation. Perseverance along the actual path outlined in the book would further the expectations and the desirability of the end product.

Laski notes that the entire venture is cast in Jungian terms, and that it will be Jungian terms in which the final overbelief is expressed. Martin's process for arriving at the deep center entails working with a small group (two or three gathered together). It is far better to have one member of the group be someone who has already gone "some way along the search." This means, of necessity, someone of the Jungian bent. According to Martin the group would need to read and discuss appropriate literature, such as William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, Jung's Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, the Journals of George Fox, or such related materials. (Bertrand Russell, for instance, would hardly be in keeping with the desired end.)

Needless to say, no one will involve themselves in such reading and discussion without implanting the necessary material needed for synthesis of the desired goal. The time and energy would only be expended for a desirable reward. Some suspension of ordinary criteria will have unconsciously been made. Some expectation for renewal or reshaping will have been nursed from the outset.

As a part of the preliminary training, members will find it helpful to work out their psychological compass bearing according to Jung's "four functions." Threading their way through this elaborate, complex, and intellectual system would of itself necessitate considerable understanding and adoption of Jungian ideas.

Other ventures for opening to the unconscious are "active imagination," a kind of conscious entry into autistic realms, automatic drawing, painting, writing, the inward conversation, and so on. Watch for the appearance of the 'Friend,' the symbol of the helpful figure of the unconscious. (The Spritualists have "Indian Guides" as mediators between the two worlds, and their use of pidgin English was probably the esthetic offense that kept my own hardness of heart quite intact.) If the helpful figure appears, the seeker must establish contact with it and not let go. Finally, if the deep center itself appears in any of its forms, by then readily known , hold on to it.

Thus will the shadow of the unconscious appear, and then the anima-animus, and finally, the active archetypis. This is the great possibility and the perilous encounter. Perilous, because the unconscious content can engulf, seize, and dissolve the ego-centered person. Jung speaks of the psyche being flooded or inflated by the contents of the collective unconscious.

However, the man centered in depth (knowing what he is doing), the man who has properly prepared himself and has the right attitude toward the venture, can hold. (Rather as the fire-walker, whose attitude of mind holds , is not burned. ) Since experience from the "other side" of consciousness goes by like the wind, a journal should be kept of one's subjective impressions. Thus the psyche will be vastly enriched.

Laski asks: "Who can doubt but that the technique will work?" After all that effort, no small investment, something recognizable as the desired experience will be achieved. Laski feels that preliminary training has ensured that those who persist with the experiment know explicitly both the question and the answer. The steps taken are those necessary both to clarify the question and bring about the answer. They further ensure that the answer will be lasting and felt to deepen progressively in significance. Laski observes that these very steps have been tried and true procedures from time immemorial. All the older disciplines have used the same procedure. (Education is but a confused, fragmented form of it.) Future catechumens, she feels, will have their own sectarian "confession" and journals to get the initial group discussion going along the right lines.

Were you to undergo an "Experiment in Depth" along some other line than Jungian, without those indications of what to expect, it is hard to see how the Jungian pattern would develop. (Should the "Friend" appear to a non-Jungian, he might not seem so friendly.) The stylized archetypes might not occur, but something would. The energy of all the effort could only be generated for a reason and the reason would have given the nucleus determining the end result. There is no possibility of opening to some unconscious level except through a technique of opening, and the technique determines the nature of what is found. Such an experience would shape around the individual's background and the trigger of the seach device itself.

The illumination resulting would have been synthesized by a catalyst giving something larger than the sum total of the background, however, and would move the subject beyond himself. That the end result is arbitrary does not affect its realness. Approximately the same procedure gave atoms and atom splitting which are real enough.

Consider again Russell's observation that mystic revelations prove to be pretty much shaped by our culture and training, not by great cosmic powers "out there." Mr. Russell's purpose, of course, was to disparage religion. I think some basis has now been given for saying he was right for the wrong reasons.

Mozart was born to an Austrian family and "ecology" of rich artistic bent. No Mozarts have been found in Bedouin tribes. Bach was a fifth-generation musician, not an Eskimo. And my truisms are no more fatuous than Russell's. Sartre's truth and Kazantzakis' truth are mutually exclusive, but equally valid within their respective frameworks. Adopt either viewpoint, invest your life in the sets and expectancies involved, and your life will bend to make good the investment. Then you may live with your gains. We seek and we find. What we find is up up to us. We knock and the door opens to us. There are an unlimited number of doors. We choose some, even as we are born with others ajar and absorbing us into their interiors, whether we like it or not, or know it or not.

So I would say to Russell: "Were God to speak to me from the burning bush, He had better use English, not some heathenish Semitic tongue." I should be even more perturbed than Clarence Day to find God speaking French or something, like a foreigner.

In my next chapter I hope to show how this question-answer function shapes not only those subjective things so much beneath Russell's contempt, but also that very scientific structure that seized him, and which he, in turn, has made into the same kind of idol he disparages in other casts.

In Life with Father, by Clarence Day (Alfred Knopf, N.Y., 1935, p. 132). Day writes of finding a Bible which " . . . was in French and it sometimes shocked me deeply to read it . . . Imagine the Lord talking French."





5 mirror to mirror

Singer closed his History of Science (1941) with the observation that in the future the frontiers of scientific abstractions may be rendered more fluid. The philosophical method might have a share in determining the nature of change. The idea that mind is separated from mind, and mind from matter, might need modification, he felt. He suggested that the tendencies of science since the later nineteenth century may well have been working in just this direction.

The late English physicist, Eddington, who was instrumental in helping translate and bring into being Einstein's relative universe, was deeply impressed by the way a short, tidy little equation, the product of a Eureka! image arriving full blown in the mind, could open our experience to a whole new aspect of concrete reality. He felt that man's mind must be a "mirror of the universe."

Singer wrote that the processes of mind seemed to reflect the processes of nature. He felt that our minds were as much the product of evolution as were our bodies, an idea both Jung and Teilhard developed. We have developed through the ages as "mirrors of the world in which we dwell," wrote Singer, and spoke of us as "attuned to nature."

Newton saw science as a voyage of discovery, coming across islands of truth in that great ocean. Jerome Bruner questions this discovery aspect of Newton's genius. Science and common-sense inquiry do not discover the ways in which events are grouped in the world, claims Bruner, they invent ways of grouping. Newton was a creative inventor, if unknowingly.

Warren Weaver calls science a very human enterprise, exhibiting the same "lively and useful diversity" which is to be found in philosophy, art, or music. Bronowski claimed original scientific thought to be the same act of mind found in original artistic thinking. Sir Cyril Hinshelwood also spoke of science as a creative art, "joining hands with all human endeavors, learning by its mistakes."

"By their fruits you shall know them" is the criterion that underlies scientific success. As with a piece of music the final question has been: how well does it perform, and how well does it listen? Performers will not consistently play, neither will an audience long support, a poor work. Time screens out the charlatans.

Teilhard, reflecting a Bergsonian evolutionary theology, claimed that intellectual discovery and synthesis are no longer merely speculation, but creation. From our time on in history, some "physical consummation of things" is bound up with the "explicit perception" we make of them. What a thing is is to an unknowable extent determined by or influenced by what we think it is. This may be as much a growing conscious awareness of the basic ontology as it is an evolutionary development.

Singer sees our minds reflecting nature, and we must go a step further and see this as a dynamic, an interrelation that will always deny clear categorization or a one-for-one correspondence. We must push Eddington's and Singer's reflecting mind one step further and recognize that man's mind is a mirror of a universe that mirrors man's mind, though the mirroring is subtle, random and unfathomable.

Michael Polanyi has championed the subjective aspects of the scientific faith, an irritant to many in his field. Jerome Bruner is an articulate spokesman for this "contemporary nominalism" that senses science to be a process of inventive synthesis rather than discovery.

A "contemporary nominalism" is possible, however, only because of a security and certainty in the scientific position. Hostility to such ideas of the creative power of thought may be the last lingering aspect of the very position of mind necessary to bring about the current confidence itself. As Jung pointed out, only the most secure of psyches can open to and face up to their own capacity for and tendency toward automatic projection. Current resistance to recognizing science projected as a synthetic creativity may be the last stand of science projected as sacred "out there," a stand necessary to establish the entire structure.

Descartes' notion of a fixed "out there," and a separate "in here," with God the honest mediator between the two, may have been naive realism, but it is possible that science could only have developed through such a faith projection -- a faith which produces, as all faiths do, according to the nature of its postulates.

Apropos of this, in the early 1950's kidney transplants were a fascinating possibility. A Chicago doctor finally made an apparently successful transplant of one kidney, in a patient with a good one left. The doctor and his staff kept extremely accurate and detailed reports, covering every conceivable bit of data on the entire affair. After a few months the doctor cautiously published his reports on the apparent success, that others might benefit and follow suit with further lifesaving attempts. Immediately the performance was known to be workable, similar operations were tried all over the world, and the margin of success soared beyond all previous expectations.

To his alarm, however, the doctor later found that he had erred in his interpretations. The transplant had failed, probably from the beginning; the other kidney had carried a double load plus the added strains of rejection and so on. The data so cautiously published had been erroneous. In what was admirable honesty, the doctor published a retraction and apology, but by then, of course, his error was incidental. Who cared? Success was at every hand, and has been growing ever since. All that may have been needed was sureness, belief, a concrete hope.

Science is full, in fact, of cases where perfectly workable, fruitful productions have been organized on grounds later found fallacious. Gone, Popper says, is the old scientific ideal of 'episteme,' the absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge. Every scientific statement, he claimed, must remain tentative forever.

Warren Weaver likens the foundations of science to piles driven into soft and swampy terrain. We simply stop driving the piles down, he said, when we are satisfied that they are firm enough to carry the kind of structure we want, at least for the time being. Euclid called "axiomatic" the step on which he stood to build his system. Weaver says this bottom step is not axiomatic but simply a postulate, assumed to be true in order to obtain what we hope to find by following it to its conclusions. He speaks of an "ultimate mysticism" at the bottom of this type of scientific explanation.

Such attitudes are new in the history of thought. They might well be luxuries of mind that only a very rich discipline can afford. We are on the way, at least, to opening to both mirrors of reality -- mind and its source of possibilities -- and perhaps this could not have been done earlier.

Whitehead traced the rise of science from its religious conviction that God being rational, His Creation must also be rational and, therefore, available to the process of reasoning. The early scientist saw subjectivity as the illusion. Since Augustine, the neoplatonic view had held full sway, and one got outside such quicksands by concentrating on the "natural world." An interest in natural objects of the most mundane sort for their own sake grew. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries displayed a mania for labeling and cataloging every commonplace item on the globe.

This encyclopedic name-passion was another chapter in the building of a semantic universe. These obvious and self-evident events made up those "irreducible and stubborn facts" so loved by the earlier scientists. Whitehead felt that several centuries of contemplation of this basic stuff was needed. What grew from all this was a method of agreement -- agreement on the kinds of phenomena that could be "objectively" considered, and the way by which such speculation could be verified. The method of agreement was strengthened by its own careful restriction to those events amenable to the same "common objectivity." This kept intact the particular fabric of belief in process of being woven. Thus the growing frame of reference centered on a desire for an order of nature that would reflect the medieval faith in the rational order of God. The transition was slow, orderly, and smooth. The name displacement, the change of metaphor that would allow mutations of a more direct sort, followed a certain protocol of decorum.

Faith in the rational order of God, and thus of His Nature, was perfectly genuine. This faith gave the prism through which those events examined were seen. Events not fitting the prism were simply ignored. Order was imposed upon basically random disorder through this prism of prejudice. The prism dictated the kinds of events which were given the energy of attention. Whitehead pointed out that the narrow efficiency of the scheme was the very cause of its "supreme methodological success." The scheme directed attention to the groupings and correlations that lent themselves to that kind of investigation, and that in turn verified the system.

The efficiency, while narrow and selective, gave success within its confines. The success gave ever-growing boldness for speculations. This enlarged the selectivity itself. Whitehead observed that the early scientists confined themselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which those facts occurred. This gave rise to the materialistic assumption of "simple locations in time and space," an assumption which fit to perfection the facts so abstracted. The given confines were expanded by this very activity, and the store of "facts" grew apace. Postulating empty categories, for instance, gave the passionate focus of attention to find the particular facts that would fill the categories. Trial and error determined the general nature of empty categories likely to be filled by the accepted kinds of facts.

Eventually these self-verifying successes built a system of hypotheses that became self-sustaining. Science became a reality-shaping structure, creating its own unique ecology, much as the Pentagonian mind tends to produce the very events which make necessary an ever-expanding Pentagon structure, and justify such things as Pentagons.

The original "stubborn and irreducible facts" of science faded into the background as they were no longer needed. An equally stubborn fact, that of science as an event-producing activity, rooted itself into the growing reality structure that science itself had fostered and brought about. Scientific growth became a process of metaphoric combinations and mutations of existing scientific metaphor, a continual expansion of an inherited web of ideas.

Though nothing in this web remains static, each generation's "facts" produce the reality which that generation finds itself in, facts with which it must deal. Feinberg feels confident that we have found the basic substructure of matter. Yet a short two generations or so ago an eminent scientist could write, rather with a sigh, that at least one sure fact could finally be counted on by science, and that was that 'ether' filled all space.

A certain egotism marks all men of science simply because nothing less than sureness can sustain any system, much less give the confidence to blithely contradict their elders and "discover" anew the real way things work. McKellar speaks disparagingly of the "certainty systems," religions and cults, and lauds the reality-adjusted methods of the humble scientists who only serve truth. The reality adjustments of science are made to the continual metaphoric mutations occurring in the scramble for success and fame within the brotherhood. The only humility ever exhibited is when their systems fail or are in process of being outmoded by their very techniques.

Edwin G. Boring writes that examination of new facts, new truths, new theories, immerses one in the history of controversy. Men get their egos tied up with their theories and their facts and "fight one another for intellectual self-preservation." Boring speaks of science as a policy, not a picture of truth, but a policy that has to work to be retained.

McKellar says the biggest error that underlies much thinking today is the belief that scientific concepts refer to things which actually exist, that science cleverly isolates existing things and measures or uses them. The idea that scientific principles are parts of nature can seriously impede the progress of our knowledge, McKellar wrote. In the same sense, Bruner referred to scientific discovery not as "engineered tinkering," as commonly conceived, but as an enterprise of thinking.

It is doubtful, however, that science could have built its constructs and sustained its passion without the sure confidence of those earlier scientists that they were only discovering God's preordained secrets and laws. Policies are put into effect by people who believe in them. It is doubtful that even today scientists will concede that they are involved in synthetic creativity rather than discovery of a priori truth. As doubtful, in fact, as that theologians and preachers could open to the same possibility for their own systems.

Michael Polanyi wrote of the 'metanoia' changing a student into the true physicist. A brilliant array of facts, proofs, laws, theories, and an impressive body of empirical evidence, will not in themselves create a science, Polanyi claimed. Only as all this is given meaning and purpose through the intellectual passion of a true believer does the real science emerge. A belief in the basic tenets determines the criteria by which an investigator works. Science, states Polanyi, can provide no procedure for deciding issues by systematic and dispassionate empirical investigation.

The scientific audience is won over to a new system by intellectual sympathy. A hostile audience may deliberately refuse to entertain novel conceptions for fear of being led to conclusions they abhor, rightly or wrongly. Sympathetic listening allows one to discover what cannot be understood in any other way. This kind of openness, which alone can lead us into true agreement and "hearing," Polanyi notes, is a self-modifying act. To elaborate on Polanyi a bit, I would explain this self-modifying by saying each of us has an autistic openness for unlimited synthesis, but agreement on another's synthesis then limits our openness. It defines a specific area that can then no longer be open for us.

Hardness of heart, the refusal to listen sympathetically and open-mindedly, with its corollary, unbelief, is the stumbling block which no theoretical system can overcome.

Polanyi claims that "intellectual passions" affirm the scientific interest and value of certain facts as against lack of such interest and value in others. Without this selective function science could not be defined at all. A "vision of reality" serves as the scientific guide to enquiry. Passion and vision are the "mainsprings of originality." A new idea may impel a scientist to abandon an accepted framework of interpretation and commit himself, by the leaping of a logical gap, to the use of a new framework.

Note how Polanyi's picture fills Bruner's outline for creativity: the scientist detaches himself from the commonplace assumptions of his discipline; commits himself to a new construct; his passion gives him his selective blindness to ignore the contradictions and negatives, and, by his superior degree of attention, he sees what he needs to see; his decorum assures the love of form, the etiquette toward the object of desire, that keeps him in the brotherhood. Having placed his intellectual and professional life on the line (losing his life that he may find it), he has the freedom and willingness to be dominated by the object until the work of creation takes over. Then his life both serves the new work and is justified by it.

A scientific education does more than develop the skill to handle scientific ideas. It brings about that change in thinking that determines the ideas which will be accepted to begin with, the new ideas most likely to occur to mind, and the phenomena accepted as factual. "Unscientific" ideas tend to be dismissed, should they even occur, and "unscientific" facts tend not to be recognized as phenomena.

Claude Bernard admits that "facts" are necessary materials, but points out that it is their manipulation by experimental reasoning, or theory, that establishes and builds science. "Ideas given form by facts," was his expression. The idea is the 'prime movens' of all scientific reasoning.

We point to a "realized fact" that was not a part of former realizations, and insist that the fact must have always existed. Existed as what may well be asked. The atom did not "exist" for Democritus, or even Dalton, as it exists for us today. A rich network of explorers had to develop correspondences to the point where inclusion of the atomic fact would be, if not observable, at least possible and maybe even necessary to the resulting framework -- a framework which itself may prove to have resulted from the acceptance of the idea of atoms. The long-nourished idea may well have brought about the facts to support the idea. This does not imply that we can pull a rabbit out of the hat whether or not there is first a rabbit in the hat. It means that we must question the nature of rabbits and hats. Perhaps we can breed any number of varieties of rabbits in the hat, given time, effort, passion, and all the rest of the triggers for catalytic synthesis.

Bruner wrote of how science postulates empty categories on purely logical grounds, and then, when appropriate measures have been found, "discovers" the content needed to fill the category. When the neutron was disintegrated, its products, the electron and proton, did not behave according to the law of the conservation of momentum. Something had to yield; surely it was not going to be the law, on which too much else depended, so the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, postulated a third particle of zero charge and zero mass, which he called the "neutrino" or littie neutron. The mysterious third particle, without mass, charge, or much of anything, was finally considered to have a spiral orbit; several years after its hypothetical beginnings, evidence for it took on more and more reality aspects until finally it was "discovered."

Discovery of the planet Neptune followed the same pattern. Twenty-three years separated Bessel's logical conclusions that a trans-Uranian planet should exist, and the computing by Adams and LeVerrier of the possible orbits for the undiscovered planet, which finally led to its "discovery." The elements in the sun were identified through spectroscopic research. During an eclipse in 1869, the solar spectrum was found to include an unknown gas which was named helium. Twenty-seven years later the gas was discovered or at least identified on earth.

Bode's Law of 1772 offers a fascinaling example. Bode found that if you took the simple sequence; 0, 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, and so on (each number doubling the previous one), and added to each member the number 4, then producing: 4, 7, 10, 16, 28, 52, 100, and so on, you obtained approximately the proportionate distances from the sun of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn -- but, disturbingly enough, with a blank for the number 28. The numbers game gave rise to a great search for the missing planet (so great our faith in numbers). In 1801 Guiseppe Piazze of Palermo found at the required distance a very small planet, only a fourth as big as our moon, which he named Ceres. The attention of all astronomers then focussed on this orbit and in time over a thousand of these "asteroids" or pieces of planet were found. The lapse between postulate and discovery was twenty-nine years.

David Bohm notes that the evolution of scientific concept has been due more to scientific experience than to observations of everyday experience. Imaginative analysis of the experimental and theoretical results of the science of mechanics has given rise to our concepts of the motions of bodies. Observing and measuring actual bodies in motion has not played much part. Mathematics in general, (justifying Roger Bacon's thirteenth-century observation), and differential calculus in particular, Bohm says, have played the key role in guiding the development of a clear concept of accelerating motion, just as our concept of wave motion comes from theoretical and experimental studies of the interference and propagation of waves in the various sciences such as optics and acoustics, not from watching water waves themselves.

The physicist Pauli wrote that intuition and the direction of attention far transcend mere experience in the erection of a system of natural law.

Polanyi went to great length to show that true discovery, in its scientific sense, is irreversible. That is, the procedure cannot be traced back stepwise to its beginnings and repeated 'ad lib.' any number of times. True discovery is not logical in its performance. Polanyi describes the obstacle to be overcome by any new idea as a "logical gap." 'Illumination' was his term for the leap by which the logical gap is crossed. The scientist stakes his life on his leaps, and science grows and changes thereby.

Gerald Feinberg spoke of James Clerk Maxwell's desire for a mechanical model of the electromagnetic field, and Albert Einstein's desire for a deterministic substratum of quantum phenomena. The world, Feinberg sighs, is not so simple. The proper understanding of matter requires, he says, the imagination to invent entities not apparent in everyday phenomena. It is the enduring miracle of creative thought, he wrote, that the mind is equal to the task.

William Blake considered our capacity for imagination to be our "divine genius." Jesus was Blake's most truly imaginative man, since he could bridge the logical gaps. In his marginalia to Reynolds, Blake claimed that our truest self was in our innate ideas with which we are born. He did not mean this in the Platonic sense, but as the capacity for creative and original thinking, independent of mechanical information from a world. Biological and economic necessities as formative devices were denied by Blake. "The eternal body of man is the Imagination, that is, God himself . . . It manifests itself in his works of art (in Eternity all is Vision). Man is all Imagination; God is Man and exists in us and we in Him."

What Blake's vision releases on earth is released in heaven. If an imaginative seed, the gist of an idea, can be planted, even though contrary to existent evidence, the seed can still grow and sooner or later produce confirmation. Data can be found to bolster the conviction. The desire for conviction can produce its own data, its own metaphoric mutation, even to its visual demonstration.

A system is outlandish only to opposing systems. How great must be the pressure before a new idea succumbs depends on the "correspondence gap" and the tenacity of the believers. Even if the gap is great, even if there is no evidence at all, even if the bulk of current belief would have to be sacrificed to give the new idea grounds for growth, a tenacious adherence in spite of all the contrary evidence will nevertheless slowly build up the possibility for the needs of the new idea to be met. It may take more than one lifetime for the new evidence to accumulate, establish correspondences, and bring about a new seeing.

Jean Ladrier wondered about the mysterious connection between our own potentials, the power for action we bear within us, and the potentials of the world. In the same vein, the physicist Pauli asks about the nature of the bridge between sense perceptions and concepts. Logic, Pauli notes, has been incapable of constructing the link. Pauli feels it satisfactory, however, and to him necessary, to postulate a "cosmic order" independent of our choice, and "distinct from the world of phenomena." The relation of sense perception and idea remains predicated, he claims, on the fact that perceiver and perceived are subject to an order thought to be objective.

Pauli's notion is a commonly held one, but questionable. We are prone to resort to a 'deus ex machina' when forced into a corner. We are always plagued with the idea that "out there" is a great, eternal, and a priori state of truth. That the "realness" of our lives might hinge on our choice is disquieting. All postulates, systems, and accepted facts tend to be superseded by future systems, however, as even today the inevitable margin of error grows in the Einsteinian system. Desire frets always at the boundaries.

David Bohm rejects "eternal forms" as well as randomness or strict causal laws. He holds that all things are interconnected and influenced by contingencies with all other things, traceable to so remote an interrelation that they may be considered chance for all practical purposes. To associative causes and contingencies Bohm adds the element of satisfying necessary relationships. Opposing and contradictory motions are the rule throughout the universe, he believes, an essential aspect of the very mode of things. The existence of anything is made possible by a balancing of contingent and opposing processes. These very processes will tend to change a thing in various directions, and eventually always will change it.

In Bohm's "Natural Law" there is no limit to the new kinds of things that can come into being, to the number of transformations, both qualitative and quantitative that can occur. This echoes Whitehead's "structure of evolving processes," and brings to mind Carington's theory that an idea tends to realize itself in any way it can unless inhibited by opposing ideas.

Teilhard spoke of a "biological change of state" terminating in thought, a comparatively recent development in evolution, and affecting life itself in its "organic totality" on the entire planet. I think, too, of Jung whose "unconscious contents" were always in a process of new combinations and syntheses.

Bohm's "natural law" is of a "nature" shot through and through with the mind of man. Thinking is the most important of all the "necessary relations" that must be satisfied. Singer mused that the philosophical method might have a share in determining the nature of change. An energetic focus of thought weighs heavily as a determinant among the contingencies in any context. To focus is to narrow to a specific, to agree on a single aspect in an infinitely contingent possibility. The wider the agreement, the wider the context influenced. In oder to achieve focused agreement there must be a nucleus of ideas around which the participants -- and possibilities -- can organize. The ideas come first. The mythos leads the logos.

Bohm writes that scientific history is full of examples in which it was fruitful to assume that certain objects or elements might be real long before any procedures were known that would permit them to be observed directly. The atomic theory, a subject very near to our lives, is the best example.

According to tradition, Leucippus and Democritus first proposed an atomic theory, some two thousand years ago, though Singer says they got the idea from the Pythagoreans. Though abandoned in that great "failure of nerve" suffered in those waning years of antiquity, the notion never completely died. Atomic views were coming to the fore again in Galileo's day, stimulated by discoveries of the microscope. A considerable philosophical literature on the subject grew, now largely forgotten since it led to nothing dramatic, but the curiosity it aroused had a decided influence in "directing the biological observation" of the generations that followed.

Newton incorporated atoms in Question 31 of his Optiks. The whole subject was very much in the common domain before Dalton moved the idea directly to the fore of tangibles by postulating the existence of individual atoms to explain the various large-scale regularities, such as the laws of chemical combination, the gas laws, and so on. Dalton gave the old idea new life by drawing up a hypothetical table of atomic weights, treating the imaginary things as actualities and giving them a real place in the sun. Putting things on paper, backing them with mathematical correlations, relating them to the basic stuff of the world, proves to be a strong catalytic tonic.

It was possible to treat these large-scale regularities of gasses directly in terms of macroscopic concepts alone, without the introduction of new notions. Certain nineteenth century positivists, notably Mach, insisted on purely philosophical grounds that the concept of atoms was meaningless and nonsensical because it was not then possible to observe them as such -- and, indeed, by their very nature they could never be observed. Nevertheless, Bohm points out, evidence for the existence of individual atoms was eventually discovered by people who took the atomic hypothesis seriously enough to suppose that atoms might exist, even though no one had actually observed them.

James B. Conant claims that a theory is only overthrown by a better theory, never merely by contradictory facts. Certainly the contradictory facts for atoms were many and severe. But the "questions" had been asked, and a long series of believers set about directly and indirectly contributing to the gathering of material for the answer. The unfolding history covered many generations and gives a fine example of the question-answer function in cultural form, moving over many lives, a cultural drift taking on power and characteristics. That people took the idea seriously enough was the key.

Only a sustained passionate belief could have leaped the logical gap between that "imagined," created within the mind's eye, imaged from possibility in spite of the lack of sensory evidence, and the final answer, translated into reality through enormous expenditures of time, effort, group belief, money, and with even the passionate urgency of war to hasten its final birth.

Interestingly enough, Newton's laws of motion could not cover the new atoms, and the emerging postulates of Einstein and Planck shook the early twentieth-century physicists who had felt satisfied with the world system long since discovered and formulated. Weaver mentions how the new ideas recharged all the scientific fields. Journals and learned magazines which were thin and anemic burgeoned into fat and exciting adventures in every issue.