Free The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce Page A

read the Meaning of Meaning and nibbled at logical positivism, and

considered himself as tough-minded as anyone. He nevertheless recognized

from his experience an "interlocking of all events," an interdependence in

all things. He spoke of a "universal pool," and a unity of all things. He

had many recurrences of the experience in prison, though they faded and

disappeared after his return to normal life.

Consider now that Koestler's world at that time consisted of four grey

stone walls. The only window was a tiny opening high in the wall, from

which only a patch of sky could be seen. Week after week passed with no

voices, no communications, no modifications to another. It was a kind

of "sensory deprivation." All remaining was his growing fascination

with geometry.

Consider, too, that he had been subject to an unannounced firing squad

for months. Daily he had heard neighboring cell-mates being led into

the courtyard onto which his tiny window opened. Daily he had heard the

volley of shots. As with Feinberg's frustration at Einstein's speed

limit, did the idea of infinite have real meaning to Koestler as a

crack in his finite egg? As the full meaning of "finite" bore in on

him inescapably, did his own synthesis of "infinite" begin? Was his

finally-occurring experience not a Eureka! illumination in keeping

with the nature of the trigger? Did his deep strata of desire not use

as vehicle the only outlet available to his tough-minded world view,

namely, geometry, free of those treacly ambiguities he had found in

systems of belief? Was his experience, then, not only in keeping both

with the nature of the trigger and the materials available for synthesis,

yet satisfying the underlying ultimate desire? This is the case with all

other mental experiences, regardless of the nature of the experience,

as I will try to show with the scientific "breakthrough."

Was Koestler's experience not similar to my friend's Mozart-sonata,

or my apple tree illumination? In Chapter Four, I will outline other

experiences in science, religion, philosophy, and so on, some of them

radical ideas that have played a formative role in our modern world,

and will show that they all follow this same general pattern. So we

cannot disparage this type of experience as subjective illusion. Rather,

it is the way by which the crack in the egg literally materializes.

The spiritually-minded may be upset that this greatest of human

experiences, the religious illumination, is described as the synthetic

production of a stressed mind, and not an opening to Huxley's mind at

large, James's Over-Soul, the Stoic-Christian moral governor of the

universe, or what have you. If the surface nihilism can be penetrated,

however, a possibility more profound than either spiritualism or realism

can be found. The same function of mind that gives Koestler "intimations

of immortality" produces the scientific postulate that changes a

reality structure, or allows the Ceylonese Hindu to walk through beds of

fire. That the experience is a synthetic construct made by an ultimately

committed mind does not lessen its realness, or the implications of the

maneuver. Every aspect of our reality has this undercurrent of synthesis.

For now, I hope to have given some idea of what I mean by "autistic

thinking," and the peculiar way in which it is unambiguous. I hope I

have given some of its ramifications and suggested some of the ways

it mirrors or responds to passionate commitments, tacit beliefs,

unambiguous notions. I hope I have suggested how such notions tend to

"realize" themselves. Understanding this mirroring capacity of thought,

we can avoid the spiritualist trap of granting an authentic or stable

character of its own to this nebulous, indefinable, and haphazard play

of mind, while yet recognizing the fathomless potential available there,

a potential that goes beyond all naive-realist, biogenetic acceptances.

Jung, Carington, Teilhard, and others