The anthropologists established a second point: not only does insanity vary from culture to culture, but sanity itself also varies from culture to culture. They found that the ability to see reality is not only a difference between the sane and the insane, it is also a difference between different cultures of the sane. Each culture presumes its beliefs correspond to some sort of external reality, but a geography of religious beliefs shows that this external reality can be just about any damn thing. Even the facts that people observe to confirm the truth are dependent on the culture they live in.
Categories that are unessential to a given culture, Boas said, will, on the whole, not be found in its language. Categories that are culturally important will be found in detail. Ruth Benedict, who was Boas' student, stated:
The cultural pattern of any civilization makes use of a certain segment of the great arc of potential human purposes and motivations just as… any culture makes use of certain selected material techniques or cultural traits. The great arc along which all the possible human behaviors are distributed is far too immense and too full of contradictions for any one culture to utilize even any considerable portion of it. Selection is the first requirement. Without selection no culture could even achieve intelligibility and the intentions it selects and makes its own are a much more important matter than the particular detail of technology or the marriage formality that it also selects in similar fashion.
A child in a money-society will draw pictures of coins that are larger than a child in a primitive culture. Moreover the money-society children overestimate the size of a coin in proportion to the value of the coin. Poor children will overestimate more than rich ones.
Eskimos see sixteen different forms of ice which are as different to them as trees and shrubs are different to us. Hindus, on the other hand, use the same term for both ice and snow. Creek and Natchez Indians do not distinguish yellow from green. Similarly, Choctaw, Tunica, the Keresian Pueblo Indians and many other people make no terminological distinction between blue and green. The Hopis have no word for time.
Edward Sapir said,
The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group… Forms and significances which seem obvious to an outsider will be denied outright by those who carry out the patterns; outlines and implications that are perfectly clear to these may be absent to the eye of the onlooker.
As Kluckhohn put it,
Any language is more than an instrument of conveying ideas, more even than an instrument for working upon the feelings of others and for self-expression. Every language is also a means of categorizing experience. The events of the real world are never felt or reported as a machine would do it. There is a selection process and an interpretation in the very act of response. Some features of the external situation are highlighted, others are ignored or not fully discriminated.
Every people has its own characteristic class in which individuals pigeonhole their experiences. The language says, as it were, notice this, always consider this separate from that, such and such things always belong together. Since persons are trained from infancy to respond in these ways they take such discriminations for granted as part of the inescapable stuff of life.
That explained a lot of what Phædrus had heard on the psychiatric wards. What the patients showed wasn’t any one common characteristic but an absence of one. What was absent was the kind of standard social role-playing that normal people get into. Sane people don’t realize what a bunch of role-players they are, but the insane see this role-playing and resent it.
There was a famous experiment where a sane person went onto a ward disguised as insane. The staff never detected his act, but the other patients did. The patients saw he was acting. The hospital staff, who were playing standard social roles of their own, couldn’t detect the difference.
Insanity as an absence of common characteristics is also demonstrated by the Rorschach ink-blot test for schizophrenia. In this test, randomly formed ink splotches are shown to the patient and he is asked what he sees. If he says, I see a pretty lady with a flowering hat, that is not a sign of schizophrenia. But if he says, All I see is an ink-blot, he is showing signs of schizophrenia. The person who responds with the most elaborate lie gets the highest score for sanity. The person who tells the absolute truth does not. Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
Phædrus had adopted the term static filter for this phenomenon. He saw that this static filter operates at all levels. When, for example, someone praises your home town or family or ideas you believe that and remember it, but when someone condemns these institutions you get angry and condemn him and dismiss what he has said and forget it. Your static value system filters out the undesirable opinions and preserves the desirable ones.
But it isn’t just opinions that get filtered out. It’s also data. When you buy a certain model of car you may be amazed at how the highways fill up with other people driving the same model. Because you now value this model more you now see more of it.
When Phædrus started to read yachting literature he ran across a description of the green flash of the sun. What was that all about? he wondered. Why hadn’t he seen it? He was sure he had never seen the green flash of the sun. Yet he must have seen it. But if he saw it, why didn’t he see it?
This static filter was the explanation. He didn’t see the green flash because he’d never been told to see it. But then one day he read a book on yachting which said, in effect, to go see it. So he did. And he saw it. There was the sun, green as green can be, like a GO light on a downtown traffic semaphore. Yet all his life he had never seen it. The culture hadn’t told him to so he hadn’t seen it. If he hadn’t read that book on yachting he was quite certain he would never have seen it.
A few months back a static filtering had occurred that could have been disastrous. It was in an Ohio port where he had come in out of a summer storm on Lake Erie. He had just barely been able to sail to windward off the rocks through the night until he reached a harbor about twenty miles down the coast from Cleveland.
When he got there and was safely in the lee of the jetty he went below and grabbed a harbor chart and brought it up and held it, soaking wet, in the rain, using the boat’s spreader lights to read by while he steered past concrete dividing walls, piers, harbor buoys and other markers until he found the yacht basin and tied up at a berth.
He had slept exhausted for most of the next day, and when he woke up and went outside it was afternoon. He asked someone how far it was to Cleveland.
You’re in Cleveland, he was told.
He couldn’t believe it. The chart said he was in a harbor miles from Cleveland.
Then he remembered the little discrepancies he had seen on the chart when he came in. When a buoy had a wrong number on it he presumed it had been changed since the chart was made. When a certain wall appeared that was not shown, he assumed it had been built recently or maybe he hadn’t come to it yet and he wasn’t quite where he thought he was. It never occurred to him to think he was in a whole different harbor!
It was a parable for students of scientific objectivity. Wherever the chart disagreed with his observations he rejected the observation and followed the chart. Because of what his mind thought it knew, it had built up a static filter, an immune system, that was shutting out all information that did not fit. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.
If this were just an individual phenomenon it would not be so serious. But it is a huge cultural phenomenon too and it is very serious. We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past facts which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don’t throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for
a long time before they see it too.
Just as the biological immune system will destroy a life-saving skin graft with the same vigor with which it fights pneumonia, so will a cultural immune system fight off a beneficial new kind of understanding like that of the bruj’o in Zuni with the same kind of vigor it uses to destroy crime. It can’t distinguish between them.
Phædrus recognized that there’s nothing immoral in a culture not being ready to accept something Dynamic. Static latching is necessary to sustain the gains the culture has made in the past. The solution is not to condemn the culture as stupid but to look for those factors that will make the new information acceptable: the keys. He thought of this Metaphysics of Quality as a key.
The Dharmakaya light. That was a huge area of human experience cut off by cultural filtering.
Over the years it also had become a burden to him, this knowledge about the light. It cut off a whole area of rational communion with others. It was not something that he could talk about without being slammed by the cultural immune system, being thought crazy, and with his record it was not good to invite that suspicion.
But he had seen it again on Lila tonight and he had seen it very strongly back in Kingston. That’s sort of what got him into all this. It told him there was something of importance here. It told him to wake up and not go by the book in dealing with her.
He didn’t think of this light as some sort of supernatural occurrence that had no grounding in physical reality. In fact he was sure it was grounded in physical reality. But nobody sees it because the cultural definition of what is real and what is unreal filters out the Dharmakaya light from twentieth-century American reality just as surely as time is filtered out of Hopi reality, and green-yellow differences mean nothing to the Natchez.
He couldn’t demonstrate it scientifically, because you couldn’t predict when it was going to occur and thus couldn’t set up an experiment to test for it. But, without any experimental testing, he thought that the light was nothing more than an involuntary widening of the iris of the eyes of the observer that lets in extra light and makes things look brighter, a kind of hallucinatory light produced by optic stimulation, somewhat like the light that comes when one stares at something too long. Like eye blinks, it’s assumed to be an irrelevant interruption of what one really sees, or it’s assumed to be a subjective phenomenon, which is unreal, as opposed to an objective phenomenon, which is real.
But despite filtering by the cultural immune system, references to this light occur in many places, scattered, disconnected, and unrelated. Lamps are sometimes used as symbols of learning. Why should they be? A torch, like the old Blake school torch, is sometimes used as a symbol of idealistic inspiration. When we suddenly understand something we say, I’ve seen the light, or, It has dawned on me. When a cartoonist wants to show someone getting a great idea he puts an electric light bulb over the character’s head. Everybody understands instantly what this symbol means. Why? Where did it come from? It can’t be very old because there weren’t any electric bulbs much before this century. What have electric light bulbs got to do with new ideas? Why doesn’t the cartoonist ever have to explain what he means by that light bulb? Why does everybody know what he means?
In other cultures, or in the religious literature of our past, where the immune system of objectivity is weak or non-existent, reference to this light is everywhere, from the Protestant hymn, Lead Kindly Light, to the halos of the saints. The central terms of Western mysticism, enlightenment, and illumination refer to it directly. Darsana, a fundamental Hindu form of religious instruction, means giving of light. Descriptions of Zen sartori mention it. It is referred to extensively in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Aldous Huxley referred to it as part of the mescaline experience. Phædrus remembered it from the time with Dusenberry at the peyote meeting, although he had assumed that it was just an optical illusion produced by the drug and not of any great importance.
Proust wrote about it in Remembrance of Things Past. In El Greco’s Nativity the Dharmakaya light emanating from the Christ child provides the only illumination there is. El Greco was thought by some to have defective eyesight because he painted this light. But in his portrait of Cardinal Guevara, the prosecutor of the Spanish Inquisition, the lace and silks of the cardinal’s robes are done with exquisite objective luster but the light is completely absent. El Greco didn’t have to paint it. He painted what he saw.
Once when Phædrus was standing in one of the galleries of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he saw on one wall a huge painting of the Buddha and nearby were some paintings of Christian saints. He noticed again something he had thought about before. Although the Buddhists and Christians had no historic contact with one another they both painted halos. The halos weren’t the same size. The Buddhists painted great big ones, sometimes surrounding the person’s whole body, while the Christian ones were smaller and in back of the person’s head or over it. It seemed to mean the two religions weren’t copying one another or they would have made the halos the same size. But they were both painting something they were seeing separately, which implied that that something they were painting had a real, independent existence.
Then as Phædrus was thinking this he noticed one painting in the corner and thought, There. What the others are just painting symbolically he is actually showing. They’re seeing it second-hand. He’s seeing it first hand.
It was a painting of Christ with no halo at all. But the clouds in the sky behind his head were slightly lighter near his head than farther away. And the sky near his head was lighter too. That was all. But that was the real illumination, no objective thing at all, just a shift in intensity of light. Phædrus stepped up to the canvas to read the name-plate at the bottom. It was El Greco again.
Our culture immunizes us against giving much importance to all this because the light has no objective reality. That means it’s just some subjective and therefore unreal phenomenon. In a Metaphysics of Quality, however, this light is important because it often appears associated with undefined auspiciousness, that is, with Dynamic Quality. It signals a Dynamic intrusion upon a static situation. When there is a letting go of static patterns the light occurs. It is often accompanied by a feeling of relaxation because static patterns have been jarred loose.
He thought it was probably the light that infants see when their world is still fresh and whole, before consciousness differentiates it into patterns; a light into which everything fades at death. Accounts of people who have had a near death experience have referred to this white light as something very beautiful and compelling from which they didn’t want to return. The light would occur during the breakup of the static patterns of the person’s intellect as it returned into the pure Dynamic Quality from which it had emerged in infancy.
During Phædrus' time of insanity when he had wandered freely outside the limits of cultural reality, this light had been a valued companion, pointing out things to him that he would otherwise have missed, appearing at an event his rational thought had indicated was unimportant, but which he would later discover had been more important than he had known. Other times it had occurred at events he could not figure out the importance of, but which had left him wondering.
He saw it once on a small kitten. After that for a long time the kitten followed him wherever he went and he wondered if the kitten saw it too.
He had seen it once around a tiger in a zoo. The tiger had suddenly looked at him with what seemed like surprise and had come over to the bars for a closer look. Then the illumination began to appear around the tiger’s face. That was all. Afterward, that experience associated itself with William Blake’s Tiger! Tiger! burning bright.
The eyes had blazed with what seemed to be inner light.
27
In the dream he thought someone was shooting at him, and then he realized no this was no dream. Someone was pounding on the boat hull.
OK! he shouted. Just a minute. It must be the marina attendant wanting to get paid or something.
First mate Jamison reporting for duty, sir! he said and snapped a smart salute, still grinning. The tunic had big shiny brass buttons. Phædrus wondered where he had found something like that. He seemed to be grinning at his own ludicrousness.
What do you want? Phædrus said.
I’m here to start workin.'
You’ve got the wrong boat.
No I ain’t. You just don’t know me in this uniform. Where’s Lila? he said.
Phædrus suddenly recognized him. He was Jamie, the one he had met in that bar.
She’s still sleeping, Phædrus said.
Sleeping!? Jamie threw his head back and laughed. Man, you can’t let her get away with that. It’s past ten in the morning.
Jamie pointed to his gold wrist watch. Time to get her up! His voice was very loud. Phædrus noticed a head from another boat was watching them.
Jamie started to laugh again, then looked up and down the boat with a smile. Well, you sure had me fooled. The way Lila told it this boat was at least five times this big. And all you got is this pee-wee little thing.
He glanced twice at Phædrus to check the reaction to this. That’s all right. That’s all right. It’s plenty big enough for me. It’s just Lila had me fooled.
Phædrus tried to shake the cobwebs out of his head. What the hell was this all about?
What did Lila tell you? he asked.
Lila told me to come here for work this morning. So here I am.
That’s crazy, Phædrus said. She told you wrong.
The grin disappeared from Jamie’s face. He looked puzzled, hurt. Then he said, I think I gonna have a little talk with her, and stepped aboard. The way he jumped over the life-line showed he was no sailor: no permission, dirty street shoes on. Phædrus was about to call him on the dirty shoes but then suddenly he saw Richard Rigel coming down the dock. Rigel waved to him and came over. Where did he come from?
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals Page 37