Even this brief attempt to touch on the problem of form and content starts
branching exponentially, like a tree at every tip, and must be ignored now
to get back to the subject at hand. And that point is the need of a modern
mythos sufficient to give a cultural symbol for organization -- one that
will not be bought at too great a price of potential.
Such a mythos must be psychological, based on the ramifications of
personality and thought, not on media, technology, or any of our
products. We are infinitely more than our things. It is our capacity of
production, not our products, that is the key.
Parapsychology failed also to materialize as an opening through which our
position might have clarified. Like the figures of don Juan and Jesus,
though, it gives indications of the overall picture. Jule Eisenbud gives
amusing accounts, as did William James three-quarters of a century ago,
of the resistance of colleagues to any suggestion of a parapsychological
element in man. Eisenbud pinpoints part of the reason. Psychical data
suggests that man has within him untapped powers and any data offering
evidence of man's being more than a naked ape is met with powerful
negation. Within a generation after James's death, the tough-minded
were attributing to fraud all the extraordinary events he tried to
get his fellow-professors to witness. One thinks of Galileo and his
telescope. Recognition of James's and Eisenbud's phenomena would lead
to every bit as upsetting a crack in the egg as Galileo's, an occurrence
that will not be tolerated by current priesthoods.
Eisenbud agrees with Jung and the depth psychologists that the culprit
is the split of consciousness from unconsciousness, the "Fall" in
mythological terms. The split is widening, too, Eisenbud claims. Man has
tended to project farther and farther from himself his responsibility for
the evil that goes on around him. Modern times may have really begun,
writes Eisenbud, when man could project his own will for the death of
others onto some "out there" power and say: "I didn't do it, he did."
Eisenbud points out that the conspiracy of denial and rejection followed
by science, concerning that "below the limen of feeling," is bred into
its very marrow. All potential not funneled through their peculiar view
of fate is dismissed as not even happening, as occult, delusion,
folie
à deux
, mass hallucination. Avis Dry turned out a very scholarly study
of the "schizophrenia'~ of Carl Jung.
We tend to think of the Golden Age of Greece, that short half-century
of magnificence five hundred years before Jesus' birth, as the Greek
part of our Greco-Hebraic heritage. It was the post-Platonic Greece
of the Stoics that molded our western history, however, that same
"failure-of-nerve" thinking to which Singer attributed the death of
early science. Some scholars attributed to Greece the breaking with the
archetypal cyclic world view, introducing the objective mode of thinking
leading to science. But, as Polanyi and others point out, the Greeks
destroyed only the
unity
of man and his world, while leaving intact
that
world
as a cyclic unit. In the resulting Greek representation of
reality, man is a passive and helpless bit of protoplasm caught in the
grindstones of fated cosmic forces. This was the very view that crushed
Jesus' new ideas, and used his imagery as expression of this very fate.
At root is the age-old battle, whether to recognize the mind as a
whole unit encompassing its reality or to split the mind from its
wholeness. Religion and science too often prove blood brothers beneath
their different vestments, and man proves the victim of their civil war.
Clear lines of demarcation between cyclic and historical thinking are not
easily drawn. More to the point is that both attitudes are ever-present
in varied ways. What depth psychologists fail to understand or point
out is that the split of mind between conscious and unconscious thinking
is a necessity for the mind to achieve objectivity. In order to become
aware of the function of reality, the mind has somehow to stand outside
itself, which it apparently can do only by projection. To attribute
to some absolutely-other thing or symbol a process of our own thinking
entails a split of mind which splits the reality. But objective thinking
necessarily involves projection. It is a form of empty-categorizing that
fills itself, a form of myth-making and realization, the way by which
life bounds forward.
The projection device is not so easily replaced. I am not sure that new
content can structure without forms of it. Surely projection of absolutes
"out there" played a decisive role in the development of science. The
problem is that the projection turns on the projector and becomes a fixed
concept controlling the direction of new-projections. The physicist projects
his imaginary particle or wave, which, because it appears utterly remote
from anything human, is thought to be the ultimate reality.
Blake anticipated Eisenbud's appreciation of this kind of madness,
two hundred years ago. Blake saw that the inversion of Stoic thinking
led to the deadness of the stone as the only real, while the enormous
capacity of life, the imagination of man, is considered the most unreal.
Piaget's stages of logical development enter the picture. To be more than
an infant in the ecological womb, man has to dissociate himself from the
process which he is. To develop your mind to the point where the faith
of a grain of mustard seed can move mountains, you have to dissociate
yourself from the very function by which mountains can so move. By the
time you develop
to
that point of conceptual ability, your very process
of logical development will have split your mind so thoroughly that
the idea of moving mountains cannot be entertained unambiguously. This
is why 'metanoia' -- that adult transformation of world view is the only
apparent way around the dilemma.
Perhaps life will discover a way by which the paradox can be overcome.
That is, a way in which the development of logic will not destroy the
autistic openness. Hilgard's studies indicate partial accomplishment
of this. The intriguing figure of Mozart comes to mind. His reality
adjustment was rather poor, granted, but he apparently displayed almost
from the beginning a complete openness to creative synthesis, operating
beautifully within the strict confines of a disciplined structure.
Paul Tillich understood that logical thinking could only develop by
splitting personal, ego-centered thinking from the whole mind. He failed
to carry through on Jesus as a symbol for the bridge
between
the modes
of mind, however, and in the last analysis surrendered at least in part
to the very Stoic view he, saw as Jesus' rival. Tillich presumed that
ambiguous thinking was the fare of man, leaving us only with the hope
that God would bridge the gap. This still leaves us subject to fate,
and is in itself a projection.
The hero has always been the one who could somehow re-enter his
autistic state with his objective mind, and bring some boon back to
man. As Joseph Campbell states, that message, in its many guises,
has always been that the God-state so entered was the true nature and
real being of man. This implies though that man is responsible for his
reality, and the Greco-Hebraic backlash to Jesus' proposal is not hard
to understand. Projection gives a world of absolutes "out there," and
places responsibility elsewhere -- even as it sets up a psychological
need for heroes that show a crack in the egg so created.
There was a small but passionate impact from Carlos' don Juan, similar
to the perpetual, if covert, attraction found in Jesus. Perhaps many
interpretations will be made of don Juan; cults may spring up in the
shadow of the book; seekers may ascend the Mexican hills in search of
the old sorcerer. For there is an underlying desperation in us, unstated
and inchoate, that is nothing less than a split mind's intolerable
realization of its split world. We long for a way out -- a way down
and out from this current structure that is, as Ronald Laing put it,
rather an obscene madness.
Our current psychosis is no more or less than that of all ages. The
same power structures maneuver man as he has always been maneuvered. The
eternal knaves feed on the eternal fools now as always, fattening them
up far better, in our rich and rare corner of the world, since needing
fatter fools.
There is a difference today, though, and it is neither just in the barrage
of brainwash designed to convince us that we really
do
have the kingdom
right here -- within the grasp of one more round of installments -- nor
that we are told daily that this is the best of all worlds. It is that
we are told that this world is the
only
one, that this is all there
is. It is that we are told not only that man
can
live by bread alone,
but that he damned well
better
since bread is all there is.
All gods are jealous -- and the one in the saddle now, selling all that
bread, has a winning thing for sure, a power and success unknown in
history. The man in the streets has no choice but to believe "those who
know about these things," and the scientific-technological mind convinces
man that those channels controlled by their various, if competing,
priesthoods are the only channels available. God, if he is acknowledged
by this clique, is the god of a Warren Weaver -- made to fit the needs
of the scientific-technician world view, shutting the door on the hope
of man as thoroughly as the most rabid atheism. Meanwhile the split of
psyche grows apace, reaching for a point of nlhilistic self-doubt that
can finally destroy itself as the only reasonable solution.
Recently a little book called
The Cross and the Switchblade
sold
over sixteen million copies. It has been called the "most phenomenal
hidden
best seller in history" (my italics). Perhaps it sold so
well because in it a man told a believable story of a psychic activity
of an extrasensory kind, apparently operating outside the control of
that university-scientific-political-industrial-military complex that
denigrates and denies such modes of mind. The book's coauthor, David
Wilkerson, claimed that this psychic activity moved into, changed, and
specifically directed his life along new and larger lines. He became the
totally unpredictable, guided by a formative kind of synthesis that moved
only in the context of his complete openness to the instant moment. The
little book smacked of the crack in the egg.
By and large, those who hate the world and long for a way out have no place
to go. The only published underground is apparently run by the opposition,
leading back into the sterility from which escape is sought. The church,
by and large, rests on good, solid successful citizens. In return
for support, the church gives sanction for the good life. The National
Association of Manufacturers carried on a lively courtship for years under
the byline: Church and Industry -- Together on the Current Scene. And
this cozy togetherness was not at all misplaced. Not inconsiderable in the
censure of James Pike was his casualness concerning the financial holdings
of his diocese, holdings jeopardized by Pike's stand on race. The Trinity
could look after itself but a bishop's first duty was to the solvency
of his diocese.
In any generation few people really believe there can be something
like a crack in the cosmic egg, a way down and out. Even fewer look for
it. Rarely indeed has anyone ever gotten through it. But the crack is
there and must be used. It must play a part in any viable mythos for
our current predicament. In my next chapter I will defend and try to
explain briefly the crack as represented in don Juan's twilight between
the worlds, and Jesus' Narrow Gate.
I am not so naive that I think Jesus' Way could be revived, though I
know that archetypal energy is still potent. I am aware that his "new
being" was aborted almost from its beginning, killed off by that Stoic
"failure of nerve." Neither do I claim any social value in don Juan's
"Way of Knowledge" (though surely there is energy there, too, as Carlos
found out). My contention is that in these figures we find historical
cracks that should be explored to give understanding of the crack
itself. It is not only a time for bold hypothesis, but for bold analysis.
No decent scientist would ignore such an intriguing riddle as a quasar. He
would leap into the puzzle with glee. There is something cowardly in
that the preacher and the cultist so thoroughly intimidate psychology
that it shuns great examples of the crack. Psychology could open to the
most exciting venture of our history, the role it should have rightfully
assumed, by a new openness of mind. And it is
adventure
that we need,
that we must have. Not just the vicarious adventure shared with rare
heroes exploring the planets, admirable as they are. Every man needs
the personal adventure of finding the true depths of himself. Every man
needs a way out from being only a cipher in a computer, a subservient
cog in the machine. If our cultural confusion is to find its mythos
sufficiently large to orient us into a unity, hero-archetypes, and the
crack they represent, must play a part.
At any rate, cracks in the cosmic egg can always be created, and our
culture needs one very badly. I recall a conversation several years ago
with an Air Force Colonel, a man of education, good breeding, impeccable
manners. He was a frustrated man, though, for he had recognized the
dangers to our country and knew quite well the immediate steps which
had to be taken were our nation to be saved. What he advocated was the
"taking out" of the eastern hemisphere of this green earth. We have
the capability, he pointed out. We
can
do it. Unless we remove
them
they will remove
us
, and the time is now. It was the only expediency
and his logic was clear. His approach was calm, with a dispassionate
objectivity, a certain dignified regret, mixed with icy practicality.