The new directions outlined here in my book can be seen as harbingers of a new and larger season in our own cycle, and we will manage, I do believe, to hold through this winter of confused discontent. Leonard Hall, Carlos Castaneda, Levi-Strauss, Polanyi, Hilgarde, Bruner, Langer, and all the rest -- these tend toward recognition of the arbitrary character of reality. There is a growing acceptance of Carl Jung's understanding of mind, though his insights are adopted under different imagery, and his genius not credited as the source. The impressive impact of Teilhard de Chardin may well resist attempts by cyclic thinkers to warp his illumination into their deadly circles. Parapsychology suggested a direction, but a more tangible and "scientific" approach will probably be the key, since this is the path already taken. The scientific tool may well prove the bridge, but even so there will come a time when such intermediary devices and projection techniques are obsolete. Such a transition will be gradual and natural; one stage will fuse easily into the other. We may always be simply "discovering Nature's Laws."
In Berkeley, California, for instance, the Carnegie Institute has pioneered a program for developing a kind of free intuitive creativity in young children. The young child is presented with problem-filled adventure readings, situations without formal, logical conclusions, where no prestructured logical "answer" exists, even in the minds of the creators of the system. The child has to create a "solution" freely in order to continue the adventure, and the self-motivated technique avoids those arbitrary absolutes which act as constricting, goal-oriented motivations in ordinary education. With no a priori answer, and no outside criteria, the child develops a trust and confidence in an inner, open logic too often stifled by formal schooling. Developing this free-synthesis capacity has led, in turn, to impressive leaps of the intelligence quotient itself -- that questionable gauge of reality-thinking.
The whole experiment is a gesture toward bridging the modes of mind, and the results could reach beyond science fiction. We may yet see the day when the tragedy of school is overcome.
Prophetic, in a Teilhardian way, was Arthur C. Clarke's little mythos-fantasy, Childhood's End. Here science and all intermediate mechanisms of projection had finally given way to a direct "intervention in the ontological constitution of the universe." There was an absorption and loss of individuality implied in Clarke's little dream, reminiscent of a problem never solved by Teilhard. But there was also an odd, if strained, similarity between Clarke's extrapolation and that "coming again in glory" of Jesus' misplaced and misunderstood Apocalypse.
For now the kind of nonambiguous thinking demanded by a don Juan or a Jesus seems highly improbable. Too many priesthoods have too tight a control and domination over our fragmented minds. That Childhood's End where in we might "level this lift to rise and go beyond" will have to encompass, perfect, and make obsolete a vast number of brilliant but, restricting disciplines. We will have to become more righteous than a host of Pharisees, but we will get around these stumbling blocks by the only creative method -- which is "agreeing quickly with your adversary," the way to use stumbling blocks as stepping stones.
As for myself, however, today is the day, and I dare not wait for some slow cultural drift finally to pave the way that I might easily float into some nebulous social salvation. I cannot depend on "them" "out there" to order into coherency this small sphere of my only present now. And I find, fortunately, that the process of reality remains unchanged. Ultimate allegiance to a symbol of openness really does open things. The search for the proper materials, the passionate intensity, the decorum and respect, the willingness to be dominated by that desired, leads now as always to the needed synthesis. The fusion still arcs across the gap -- the crack surely follows.
If some single, lonely reader is desperate enough, and "hates" an obscenely mad world sufficiently to give it up and open his mind to a restructuring for love of that world, things can be different for him, even now. And if he could find two or three to gather with him and agree on what was mutually needed, in this highly-specialized form of agreement even more things could be different. That -- strangely -- is the way, and the only way by which the broad social drift itself will ever be changed for the better.
So I would urge you to remember, when the forces of despair and destruction hedge you round about, that you need not succumb to their dark statistics. The nonstatistical is even here -- closer than your very self, and it is yours, and it works. The relation of mind and reality has been but dimly grasped -- surely only hinted at in these pages of mine -- but even these brief glimpses are blinding. As Whitman said "I am ever shutting sunrise out of me, lest sunrise should kill me." And surely we must channel with care, and take our waking slow, for even in these tentative gestures of ours, outlined here, even in this our infancy of awareness -- people do walk fire. We are an open possibility.
10 vision and reflection
When Carlos started down the mountain with the bags of Mescalito, he found them impossibly heavy and suffered cruelly carrying them. Don Juan warned him not to let the bags touch ground lest the god be lost to Carlos permanently. After a grueling time the bags suddenly became "light and spongy," and Carlos ran down the mountain and caught up with don Juan. The god is never obtained cheaply, but he wears easily and well.
In mythology every Tree of Life is guarded by a dragon, a monster hideous and deadly to behold. The priest in us brands this monster the great evil and warns us away for the safety of our souls. William Blake claimed that this dragon grows only in the human brain -- as does the priest himself. When the bravest of heroes ignore all warnings and throw their lives to the winds to reach the goal, they find the dragon a phantom spun out of their own fear and doubt. They push the flimsy image aside, and enter their kingdom.
Perfection, Northrop Frye claims, is the full development of one's imagination. The timid reflective thinker sees perfection as a quality abstracted from a real thing, and thus the sole property of an abstracted and unreal god. Perfection is the utilizing of all the modes of mind, finding that the Trees of Life and Knowledge are twins from the same taproot. Perfection is daring to embrace the universe itself as our true dimension, daring to steal the fire of the gods, to walk on water or fire unafraid, to heal, to claim plenty in time of dearth, to behold boldly that desired and become what we have need to be.
There have always been two predominant and rival views of man and his position or predicament. Tough- and tender-minded come to mind, as do cyclic and linear, hawk and dove. Blake saw our ambivalence in terms of biblical 'vision' and Greek 'reflection.' 'Reflection,' relying on material things, ends in the dead inertia of the rock as the only real, the mind as the unreal. 'Vision' is creative imagination using the eyes as windows to see with actively and not through passively.
Vision sees life as an "eternal existence in one divine man." Reflection sees life as a series of cycles in nature. Northrop Frye says we vacillate our life away between the two notions, never fully conscious of either. Reflection is Blake's Diabolos, the nihilistic impulse of self-doubt reminding us of our helpless frailty and increasing our dependence on the current priesthoods. If the fire-walker listened to this side of his nature, he would never walk fire. As Blake said, "If the sun and moon should doubt, they would immediately go out."
The victory of the cyclic theory becomes the view of a fallen, deadlocked world, a mechanical horror. In Eastern terms this world is a cosmic error to be overcome, from which to escape back into an undifferentiated continuum. In Western terms the universe is a monstrous necessity , grinding itself out in a great entropic road to folly and nothingness. Frye points out that we are incapable of accepting this view as objective fact. The moral and emotional implications of it become mental cancers breeding cynical indifference, short-range vision, selfish pursuit of expediency, and "all the other diseases of selfhood."
Reflection inverts the "eternal mental life of God and Man, the Wheel of Life," into a dead cycle. Wonder, joy, imagination, ecstasy, even love, are smugly diagnosed by these
cyclic destroyers, who test the blood count, analyze the temperature, the oxygen content, the background of the subjects, and learnedly dismiss as aberrations the highest capacities life has yet produced. All free actions are held in ridicule, only reactions are left. The belly and groin are made supreme, the only point of realness, and the strings by which the vulture-priests think to make the Naked Ape dance to their grindings. But the ape is not controlled thereby, he merely goes mad and dies or destroys.
Saturation with images of violence creates violence, and saturation with ideologies of reflective thinking creates suicidal despair. We need an image, a mythos, representing a way upward and outward where creative longing can be released and not denied. But reflective thinking seizes the insight given by vision and turns it into a dogma that makes for reliably ineffective, lifeless supporters of the world, in that world and hopelessly of it.
The cyclic religious view loves to speak of God's plan for mankind. We are a theatrical group, they say, our roles preordained according to some shadow script. As free actors we do not follow the prescribed actions, as interpreted by the ruling hierarchy of those who know. Or there is God's great symphony spread out for all to play, if we would just follow the notes properly and watch the beat of that great-baton-up-yonder, a pulse which synchronizes strangely with the heartbeat of the current powers that feast on fools.
Science has only a small shift to turn this preordaining god into an inflexible and other-to-us Nature, with all the universe laid out on a grand economy of laws. To discover these laws is the Promethean goal, the religious duty in new vestments. And cultures are crushed, the young gods are condemned to years of a madness-producing attempt at 'metanoia' called education, and whole civilizations are whipped into line to serve the new god.
We are not involved with a preset script on a preset stage. We are a magnificent and terrible improvisation in which we must be spontaneous playwrights, actors, critics, and audiences. There is no orchestral score up there with every note assigned and waiting. We are, at best, an aleatoric performance. Cacophony and discord are inevitable, yet infinite combinations await us. We err and are bound to err in this open system, yet we are never bound to our errors, as an infinite ability to correct these errors is built in.
We long for an ultimate and our longing is itself the ultimate. Our need is the universal, that with which we satisfy is the particular and never sacrosanct. There is no absolute "out there" of logic, reason, love, goodness, or perfection. Nature is amoral, indifferent, operating by profusion. Needing these things we can only become them by boldly holding them as our rightful due. Life creates myth and then strives to fill it by imitation.
Susanne Langer warned that our losses to science should not be taken lightly. And what we have lost is our psyche, our very soul. Mass psychosis, sickness of soul, is the price we are paying for letting a product become our absolute, letting a tool become master. The young rebel lashes out blindly at this living death to which he is condemned and which he must support, for which he must fight. The tragedy is that by the time he senses a deadly trap he has become, by the very process of reality formation, that against which he instinctively rebels. The only logical tools with which he can fight create the very situation he hates. As don Juan said, "When you find the path you are on has no heart, and try to leave that path, it is ready to kill you." Very few men, he observed, can stop to deliberate at that point, and leave the path.
Any path we choose is arbitrary, but in our choice we shape the world as it is for us. Cohen felt that whatever reality is, we will never know it. I have claimed that reality is what we do know, that the world as it is for us is one we represent to ourselves for our own response. So it is with nature, God, "ultimate matter," and so on. We can never get at these as such. Everything we say about them, our sciences, dogmas and creeds, are only representations we seem fated to make and to which we are fated to respond. God, as surely as Nature, is a concept shot through and through with the mind of man.
And yet, who for a minute believes that nature is only a projection of man's mind? Nature is something of which I am a part, and which I must represent to myself. But it is also something which I am not. My thinking and that nature thought about create an event, but they are not identical. Man is not God or nature because he projects gods and natures for his life. Projection is not the whole mechanism even though it shapes the ground on which we stand. There is always more than this.
Teilhard projects his longing onto a great 'Omega-Point' "out there." But even there we would find some super-shell, and we would itch to find its crack. In a peculiarly prophetic vision a century and a half ago, Walt Whitman asked, looking up at the vast universe of stars: "When we have encompassed all those orbs, and know the joys and pleasures in them, will we be satisfied then?" No, he realized, "we but level that lift to rise and go beyond."
Without man there is no leveling to rise and go beyond. We give the direction and meaning to the process of becoming. It is time to see man in his true perspective, as Whitman did when he wrote: " . . . in the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass, I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name."
Blake put it in this quatrain:
God appears and God is light To those poor souls who dwell in Night, But does a Human form Display to those who Dwell in Realms o] Day.
And yet, how easily Blake assumed as given that light that gave his Realms their Day, that light by which his Human Form could be displayed. Whitman writes, "I am ever shutting sunrise out of me lest sunrise kill me." This is the given premise on which the function rests, that which we can shape into a level to lift, that toward which we can rise to go beyond -- a light of which I cannot speak except to those who would know already of what might then be said -- beyond our words, where speech itself is superfluous, a knowing beyond the clouds of all unknowing, an answer beyond all questioning.
For here is the catalyst that shapes Eureka!s and gives syntheses beyond our mind's wild reach. Here is the catalyst that acts when it has something to catalyze, and always remains unchanged in so doing. Here is the unattainable, that I cannot will or think into my being, falling into my life even as itself, fleetingly, unbelievably, outside all structured thoughts, strivings, system, and games. Here all paths are opened and synthesized, our freedom underwritten and assured within.
Here in this universal swirl is found the knowing of all the nameless griefs and joys, the dregs of all our bitter cups, our agonies, our questions why, our rages, our impotences and despairs. Here, too, is that long, hard dying, held in arms helpless to sustain a fragile breath. Here are both lover and loved split by that Liebestod that tears one's universe asunder.
But here is More! More! Here is our need and the fulfilment of all need. Here is the balm for the unbearable, the arc across the unbridgeable. Here is the ongoing of loser and lost.
So I find that my concern and love for life, my longing and desire, have sowed a wind within this orb of skull, and here in this spiraled fire I reap the whirlwind of all the worlds.
guide to the reference and bibliography system
Source credits, references, explanatory notes, and bibliography are
listed in the following pages. They are not indicated in context but
are easily found in the reference section. For example, if you are on
page 7 of Chapter 1, and find reference to Michael Polanyi's observation
that education is a form of conversion, you will find in the reference
section the following:
CHAPTER 1 CIRCLES AND LINES
7 Polanyi: education = conversion. (79) p. 151.
Under Chapter 1, page 7, is Polanyi's name; the key-words education --
conversion; the bibliographical source number corresponding to Polanyi's
book in parentheses (79), i.e., number 79 of the bibliography; and
the page number in Polanyi's work, p. 151, from which the reference is
taken. Commentary, if any, is included after the key-words.
references and notes
CHAPTER 1 CIRCLES AND LINES
Page
1 Bruner: direct-touch. (9) p. 130.
2 Bruner: concepts-percepts. (9) p. 6.
4 Bruner: social fabric. (9) p. 130.
4 Sapir: illusion. (36) p. 87.
7 Polanyi: education = conversion. (79) p. 151.
8 fire-walking. (see chapter 6).
8 Lévi-Strauss: semantic universe. (61) p. 268.
9 Bohm: zero-point energy. (see chapter 5).
9 Jesus: mountain-removal. (72) Matthew 17:20,
Mark 12:22, John 14: 12.
10 G. Feinberg: tachyons. (26) p. 42, 43.
11 Polanyi: indwelling. This is Polanyi's principal
thesis running throughout his work. (79, 80, 81).
11 Whitehead: value = limitation. (103) p. 95.
14 Jung: inner-contradiction. (45) p. 71.
14 Lévi-Strauss: archaic intellect. (61) p. 268.
15 Teilhard: destiny. (92) p. 47.
16 innate ideas versus realism. Two views of the old
argument from one issue of Synthese. (15, 33).
The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Page 22