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

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."

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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