The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read Online Free PDF Page A

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