Free The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce

found cases in madmen of experiences beyond the personal

background. He told of a schizophrenic patient in his thirties,

hospitalized since his early twenties with delusions of grandeur, visions,

demonic seizures, and so on. One day the patient, blinking up at the

sun, stopped Dr. Jung and showed him how by scrooching up his eyes,

he could see the sun's phallus, swinging below the rim of the sun. When

one moved one's head from side to side, the phallus could also seen to

swing from side to side, and that was the "origin of the winds." This

was such a strange hallucination that Jung carefully noted it, along

with the patient's history.

In the course of his studies of mythology, Jung was sent a new book

of translations by Dieterich, including the Paris Magical Papyrus ,

thought to be a liturgy of the Mithraic cult. Here Jung found, stated

in the same terms, but in cultic poetry, the identical sun-phallus-wind

vision described by his patient. Cryptomnesia, or hidden memory, was

ruled out. Jung later came across other references to the vision from

Greek and medieval sources.

Jung used such cases to establish his three-tiered cosmology: consciousness,

personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. Adopting his system,

things can be seen in just this way, though others might use the material

as grist for other mills. Anticipating my fourth chapter, on questions

and answers, I would mention that the patient's history suggested just

the kind of vision he experienced. It was the kind of esoteric, cultic

"information" and secret insight for which he had longed in his mundane,

uneventful and uneducated adolescence, the very drift which had eventually

brought on his reality suspension and produced his retreat from the world.

Fulfillment of desire was surely one of the elements in the experience.

The patient called up from the continuum of past experience the sort

of thing he desired. The sun was the trigger for the ancient imagery,

and the imagery was as valid to the patient as anything else, since all

criteria of ordinary reality adjustment had long since been suspended.

None of this validates Jung against McKellar. Rather, it shows McKellar's

"recent or remote" perceptions to be active on a wider scale than at

first evident. The roots of our garden clearing in the forest are not

shallow, and the common core of the unhinged mind may run deeper than

Cohen suspects. This does not give to this background of ours a character

of its own, however. If this continuum of experience is Huxley's "mind

at large," such a mind has no criteria or value, and as such, "mind" as

we know it is hardly the right term. A phallus swinging from the rim of

the sun and causing winds is just as "true" within this continuum as the

most sophisticated recent scientitie jargon for the origin of solar winds.

In his book on mysticism, Princeton's elderly philosopher, Walter Stace,

included an experience by the writer, Arthur Koestler. Koestler was in

solitary confinement for several months during the Spanish Civil War. He

was supposedly awaiting execution, and to while away the time he revived

his esthetic interest in analytical geometry, scratching theorems on

the wall. Euclid's proof that the number of primes is infinite led to

a classical example of the spontaneous mystical experience.

Koestler became enchanted with the idea that a meaningful and comprehensive

statement about the infinite could be arrived at by precise and finite means,

without "treacly ambiguities." One day the significance of this swept

over him "like a wave," leaving him in a "wordless essence, a fragrance

of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue." This led to a "river

of peace, under bridges of silence," that came from nowhere and flowed

nowhere. Finally there was no river and no I. Koestler's I had ceased

to exist -- he had become one with that infinite.

Koestler apologized for such an embarrassing confession, stating that he

had