The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read Free

particularly

if it could be controlled by a fully operational, conscious person? (I

had surely not been fully operational, and the cigarette trick was

the only expression of imperviousness my imagination could seize on.)

Last but not least, certain of my tough-minded colleagues of later

years were so unnecessarily hostile to my accounts of this and similar

personal experiences. Why did they refuse to believe the experience

had taken place? Why did they insist that I had hallucinated, simply

misinterpreted my data, or was, perhaps, just lying? This threw another

aspect into my search, in addition to trying to determine the role our

concept-percept interaction plays in our reality: why is our ordinary,

logical thinking so hostile to these rifts in the common fabric?

Reality is not a fixed entity. It is a contingent interlocking of moving

events. And events do not just happen to us. We are an integral part of

every event. We enter into the shape of events, even as we long for an

absolute in which to rest. It may be just this longing for an absolute

in which our concepts might not have to be responsible for our percepts,

and so indirectly our reality, that explains the hostility of our ordinary

intellect to these shadowy modes of mind.

Later I will try to summarize how an infant's mind is shaped into a

"reality-adjusted" personality, and show how this representation helps

determine the reality in which the adult then moves. By analyzing how

our representations of the world come about we may be able to grasp the

arbitrary, and thus flexible, nature of our reality. The way we represent

the world arises, though, from our whole social fabric, as Bruner put

it. There is no escaping this rich web of language, myth, history,

ways of doing ,things, unconsciously-accepted attitudes, notions, and

so on, for these make up our only reality. If this social fabric tends

to become our shroud, the only way out is by the same weaving process,

for there is only the one. So we need to find out all we can about the

loom involved, and weave with imagination and vision rather than allow

the process to happen as a random fate.

Our inherited representation, our world view, is a language-made

affair. It varies from culture to culture. Edward Sapir, the linguist,

called this idea of ours that we adjust to reality without the use of

language an illusion. He claimed that the "real world" is to a large

extent built up on the language habits of the group.

None of us exercises our logical, social thinking as a blank slate,

or as a photographic plate, seeing what is "actually there." We focus

on the world through an esthetic prism from which we can never be free

except by exchanging prisms. Them is no pure looking with a naked,

innocent eye. When I found myself in that peculiar twilight world in

which fire no longer burned me, I had not found "the true reality" or "the

truth." I had simply skipped over some syllogisms of our ordinary logical

world and restructured an event not dependent on ordinary criteria. Even

our most critical, analytical, scientific, or "detached" looking is a

verification search, sifting through possibilities for a synthesis that

will strengthen the the hypotheses that generate the search.

Our world view is a cultural pattern that shapes our mind from birth. It

happens to us as fate. We speak of a child becoming "reality-adjusted"

as he responds and becomes a cooperating strand in the social web. We are

shaped by this web; it determines the way we think, the way we see what

we see. It is our pattern of representation and our response sustains

the pattern.

Yet any world view is arbitrary to an indeterminable extent. This

arbitrariness is difficult to recognize since our world to view is

determined by our world view . To consider our world view arbitrary

and flexible automatically places our world of reality in the same

questionable position. And yet we are always changing this world