INTRODUCTION

RADICAL SHIFTS IN VIEWPOINT

In my book The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, I described reality as our semantic creation and explored how our minds could enter into that creation and change it. Accept the arbitrary nature of any reality representation, I argued, risk yourself to the transformation of it, and there are no limits to your creative capacity.

My experience since that writing has both verified Crack and yet forced certain revisions. For instance, what I called “autistic” thinking in Crack I now call “primary process thinking.” The “reality-adjusted” thinking of Crack I now refer to as “culturally conditioned” thinking. These are not idle metaphoric exchanges, but radical shifts of viewpoint. In Crack, I had failed to grasp certain fundamental principles because of unconsciously accepted cultural assumptions. I was fascinated by the interactions between mind and reality as displayed in metanoia, scientific discovery, spontaneous healings, fire-walking, and other nonordinary phenomena. But I found that “signs” and wonders did not alter our cultural plight in the least. And I found that while our “cosmic egg” is our own creation, not a “given state,” there was a “given state,” a “primary process” lying untrammelled beyond the reach of our verbal warp. This I had denied previously.

I found, further, that we created a Crack for ourselves right along with our creation of our egg; that is, our biological development keeps our options open to the “given state” in spite of our cultural conditioning. Even as we seal ourselves into a word-built world, one function of our intellect breaks that seal and keeps our lines open. These “lines” lie not so much in our head as in what don Juan (see Carlos Castaneda’s trilogy on the “teaching of don Juan”) calls our “body-knowing.” Again the evidence points toward two distinct modes of thinking, as it did in Crack.

Hans Furth (see bibliography) claims that the human intellect grows through living contact with the environment. This growth will take place even where there is no linguistic system available. Furth’s observation runs counter to our acculturated beliefs and surely challenges our educational bureaucracy. A child learns by interacting with reality in what I call our primary program. At the same time, however, the child must cope with the overwhelming impingement of cultural processing. I call this acculturation process our metaprogram. This metaprogram is an abstract semantic construct based not on reality interaction but on fear of reality. The child can only react to that fear with anxiety, and erect buffers to it, until he can intellectually create his own metaprogram concepts. The ability for abstract conceptual creation opens somewhere around the sixth year of life. The child must devote his new capacity to structuring the cultural “semantic reality” in order to survive that reality system. As a result, his primary program, biologically endowed, is overlaid and dominated by a cultural “reality adjustment.” The process is largely completed by adolescence.

Certain biological shifts, nevertheless, take place to offset this acculturation procedure. By these shifts, our primary program continues development. The organism succeeds in retaining its original biological intent, though it must use “nonsemantic” modalities for that end. The existence of this “body-knowing,” apparently below our awareness, is one of the issues of this book.

While my exploration involves “nonordinary” phenomena, I use such material with reservations. The area of “paranormal” phenomena suffers as seriously from the misappropriations of its enthusiasts as from the scoffings of the academicians. So-called “psychic” phenomena are natural expressions of our logical possibilities, a biological “norm” masked by acculturation. I question the validity of such terms as “extrasensory perception” and doubt the validity of using scientific models for the mystery of mind’s interaction with reality. To explore your own Crack, you must first find that Crack. To find the Crack, some understanding of our egg and the texture of shells will help. So in the first half of this work I will explore the “egg” itself and “how” this “spectacular misunderstanding” occurs. The second half will then explore some aspects of the Crack, as far as words can convey this sort of thing.

No “hidden powers of the mind” are to be uncovered here. My aim is to bankrupt your semantic hope chests, and empty the coffers of your pipe dreams so readily provided by culture.

As Joel Latner says, “to be aware, we must have empty heads.” He then relates my favorite Zen story of Nan-in, a nineteenth-century Japanese Master, who received a university professor coming to inquire about Zen. As Nan-in silently prepared tea, the professor expounded at length on his own philosophies and insights. Nan-in quietly filled his visitor’s cup and then kept right on pouring. Alarmed at the tea spilling all over, ruining the immaculate ceremony, the professor exclaimed: “It is full, no more will go in.”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are already full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

So my invitation in the following pages is for you to examine your cup, to discover just how full it already is, and to examine the nature of its contents. Only when we are willing to accept the nature of our cups and contents are we willing to accept emptiness.

Should anyone tell you what happens when your cup empties, he is telling you a tale. Listen if you like—storytelling is fun. But what happens to the empty cup lies beyond all our conjectures, and outside all our speech.