The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (10 page)

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.