The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Read Free Page A

view.

We represent such changes as discoveries of absolutes in order to protect

ourselves from our arbitrary status, and to avoid the implication

that human thinking is a creative process. We deny that disciplines of

mind synthetically create; we insist we are but discovering "nature's

truths." We possess an open-ended potential at considerable variance

with contemporary nihilisms, but we must recognize and accept the dynamic

interplay of representation-response if we are not to be acted on rather

than fully acting.

For instance, years after my little fireburn experience, my world faced

dissolution when two massive "radical surgeries" and other macabre

manipulations on my wife failed to check a malignancy wildly stimulated

by the growth hormones of pregnancy. Finally, having had everything cut

off or out, she offered little for further experimentation. The priests

of the scalpel passed judgment and gave her but a few short weeks to

live. Surely the evidence was in their favor.

Nevertheless, I remembered that strange world in which fire could not

burn, and entered into a crash program to find that crack in the egg that

we might restructure events more in our favor. During five- and six-day

fasts, I subjected her to a total "brainwash" day and night, never letting

her mind alone. Through all her waking hours I read her literature related

to healing, and while she slept I endlessly repeated suggestions of hope

and strength. I had no thought of how the restructuring would take place,

but in a few hours, some three weeks later, she was suddenly healed and

quite well.

We traipsed back to the temple, I with misgivings over such a risk of

the new structure, to have the priests declare us clean. And that we

were duly declared and recorded, with the reaction pattern among the

many doctors of that research center running the gamut. From emotional

talk about miracles, the brass-tack realists soon rebounded with dire

warnings that some fluke had occurred and that we should present ourselves

regularly for constant watches for the "inevitable reoccurrence;" just

the sort of doubt-category I would have avoided at all costs.

True, a year or so later our carefully-balanced private world fell

apart. This began when it became obvious that our last child, born in

the midst of all that carnage, was in serious trouble. When the trouble

proved to be severe cerebral palsy, our bubble burst, the dragon roared

back, and within weeks my world was in ruins.

Nevertheless, by a change of concept concerning possibilities, we beat the

broad way of the statistical world, if only for a while. The social fabric

is sustained by agreement on which phenomena are currently acceptable.

Susanne Langer referred to nature as a language-made affair, subject

to "collapse into chaos" should ideation fail. Threat of this chaos

proves sufficient stimulus to insure a ready granting of validity to

the current ideas. And strangely, even when this ideation decrees that

a particular event must end in death, most people would rather accept

the sentence than risk the chaos.

To be "realistic" is the high mark of intellect, and assures the

strengthening of those acceptances that make up the reality and so

determine what thoughts are "realistic." Our representation-response

interplay is self-verifying, and circular. We are always in the process

of laying our cosmic egg.

The way by which our reality picture is changed provides a clue to the

whole process. A change of concept changes one's reality to some degree,

since concepts direct percepts as much as percepts impinge on concepts.

There are peculiarities and exceptions, such as my no-fireburn venture,

by which our inherited fabric is bypassed temporarily in small private

ways. These are linear thrusts that break through the circles of

acceptancy making up our reality.

Metanoia is the Greek word for conversion: a "fundamental transformation

of mind." It is the process by