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Reflections on The Crack In the Cosmic Egg
by Mark Jaqua
Source: TAT Journal #6 (Winter, 1979)
If readers of The Crack in the Cosmic Egg [1] take the book to heart, the results can be world-shattering. The ideas set forth are not new, but Joseph Chilton Pearce brings the insights of philosophers and psychologists together in a concise and highly intelligible way in stating that our world is an agreed-upon mental creation. The world would be different, or become different, if we all agreed it were different. Paradoxically though, this agreement is subconscious and can only be affected consciously through great difficulty and personal adroitness.
1. PDF, large file: 8.1 megs: /science/Joseph-Chilton-Pearce-Crack-in-the-Cosmic-Egg.pdf
Like many great and innovative synthesizers of knowledge, Joseph Chilton Pearce went through a period of intense personal suffering which generated dynamic mental struggle and searching. In his case it was the ghastly specter of cancer. His wife's grandmother died of cancer, then it was a favorite aunt; his wife's mother was barely saved from the disease by the mutilation of the knife. Her father was the next to succumb and it appeared to all that Pearce's wife would follow. It was almost a fiat, then it happened. A tumor was diagnosed which was wildly stimulated by the growth hormones of pregnancy. Pearce's world was tumbling to the ground. She submitted herself to the "priests of the scalpel," but to no avail; her death sentence had been passed.
Something was amiss here. Must his wife die? It almost seemed that she was proscribed by some force from living much longer, and that she must perform her duty to "the way things are" and die, as she was expected to. Was there an unalterable physical cause of the cancer, or was it somehow confused with belief and thus "creation" of his wife's imminent death? Pearce set foot with desperate intention into a "reprogramming" of his wife's mentality. He went on five and six-day fasts. During the day he constantly read her literature on healing, and while she slept, he endlessly repeated suggestions of hope and strength. Then a miracle occurred. In a mere three weeks she had, to all appearances, gotten well. They tramped to the "temple" of medicine and amongst much hysterics on the doctors' behalf, it was agreed that she had miraculously and completely recovered. But then the fatal blow was struck, and they were warned of the "inevitable reoccurrence." A year later, and after the birth of a child with cerebral palsy, the cancer returned and the death of his wife occurred - or was perhaps created. Few people understood his fury when the medical center suggested that he begin bringing his just-pubescent daughter for regular check-ups. Pearce had come to the conclusion or intuition that these things were somehow created or caused by the indoctrinating influence of expectation and belief. His daughter was being "set-up" for her own encounter with cancer. His intuitions were validated years later by a realization which revealed to him the means by which belief and expectation become self-fulfilling and actually create the nature of our reality.
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Joseph Chilton Pearce is a man who has probed the deeper aspects of the human thinking process. Pearce has taught in various capacities in college, high school and junior high school for over fifteen years and has received degrees from the College of William and Mary, Indiana University and Geneva Theological College. He is presently devoting his time to writing and occasionally lecturing. He is the author of three books, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, and Magical Child, and is currently working on another book on what he labels the ''primary process'' in the psyche.
In Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Pearce examines a wide variety of areas including telekinesis, the death concept, guilt, fear, the functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and Castaneda's writings. He claims that through the overdevelopment of the logical and cultural mode of thinking we have split ourselves off from an organic "primary process" thinking, thus destroying our sense of unity and participation in nature. This culturally determined thinking has "turned our Eden into our hell" and destroyed the very roots of modern man's psyche. We have identity crises and feel a lack of authenticity because we have split ourselves from our proper organic role. Pearce maintains that the only means to regain our feeling of authenticity and wholeness is to reintegrate primary processes, which are ''the intricate 'thinking' systems operating below the limen of awareness''.
In Magical Child, Pearce describes the progressive nature of childhood development and brings to light how our present child-rearing practices are not appropriate for this biologically-determined maturation. Children have several stages of mental development and if the child is not allowed to naturally go through these stages, then the child will be literally ''stymied" at a level. A common example of this would be "force-feeding'' abstract learning such as mathematics to a six or seven-year-old in hopes of developing his intellect. His intellect will be developed, but it will be at the sacrifice of the fantasy and feeling part of his nature which is biologically meant to be developed at this age. Pearce devoted the first two-thirds of Magical Child to child-rearing practices and theory and in the last third of the book places childhood maturation within the philosophy of his previous two books. He also relates some personal experiences and experiments in the realms of dreams, hypnagogic imagery, and "rapport group" sittings that are thoroughly intriguing.
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Pearce's philosophy is a result of his own personal struggles and this can be ascertained from the tone of his book. He is never overly abstruse and ceremoniously intellectual like many pretenders of insight. He writes in "his own voice," and you are aware that a man is writing and not an isolated, computerish exponent of dry abstraction. His book has a heart. His research was the result of a heart-felt motivation and bears the stable character of his honestly-felt desire to discover the nature of reality formation. It is paradoxical that the culmination of his search verified the very manner in which he searched.
Pearce's philosophy is unique, yet it contains seeds provided by many great thinkers. This seems to be the process of all great and world-changing theories. Many thinkers tangentially touch on the culminating theory, but one man gathers all in, and is the channel for the grand synthesis. Pearce proved to be such in this case. His sources of inspiration span from anthropology to physics and include such innovators as physicists Leonard Feinberg and David Bohm, psychologist Jerome Bruner and linguist Susanne Langer. Our "cosmic egg" is formulated and altered by scientists such as these, and Pearce has discovered the very ontology by which this occurs.
Inside Our Cosmic Egg
Pearce's "cosmic egg" is our individual or group "world-view" - the picture or mental representation we constantly maintain in our minds of what the world is "really" like. It contains values, opinions, likes, dislikes, what we regard as important and unimportant and, germane to this discussion, what is possible and impossible. We are never directly in contact with what is "out there" in the physical world. The only nearly direct contact we have with the "out there" is a limited amount of raw sensation we are able to receive through our imperfect senses. This raw data is then interpreted or formed into a concept or idea by the personal consciousness. We get such and such sensory stimulation and interpret it as "apple," or such and such sensory data and interpret "she is angry." The only "things" we are directly in contact with are our concepts of things. Our view of the world is a second-hand view and a homemade affair. We make a personal representation of the world and view our own representation.
The world is a mental picture-show we hold up for ourselves and for our children to emulate.
Each of our world views is progressively formulated from childhood. As an infant, raw sensation is the basic focus of attention. An infant notices colors, movements, noises, smells and tactile sensations but has yet formed no concepts from these. He gradually forms basic concepts from the emulation and instruction of his parents. He learns "mamma," "dadda," "doggy," and "cat." He learns to react to particular groupings of sensation as a "thing" or concept. This group of noises and colors is "mamma" and that is "dadda." His conceptual categories have not quite narrowed down, though, because sometimes a cow is "doggy" and Aunt Betty is "mamma." This narrowing down of concepts exponentially progresses through early life in reference to subtler and subtler sensations and concepts.
After time and maturation, the child begins to react to his own concepts, and not just simple sensation. This is when he begins to "think" per se, and this is when his conceptual structure of reality begins to be formulated. The child comes to know that when mother contorts her face in a particular manner she is angry. This "anger" (and the consequences) is a concept in the child's mind. To interpret a particular facial expression requires a thinking process; the information is not contained in the raw sensation. This simple type of concept is even present in animals, but in humans these concepts become more complex in an ongoing process throughout maturation until a gestalt-like world-view of inter-related ideas is created. Constantly new things and relationships are perceived which are not in the present reality-view and must be incorporated or ignored. This process is our individual "creation of the world. "
The world-view is our present mental schema of the world and consists of all our accepted beliefs and "facts" about the world. These world-views differ between cultures and, in smaller ways, between subcultures, families and individuals. Junior may have his whims granted in one family but not in another because of different child-rearing viewpoints. To a westerner a cow means "milk" or "meat," but to a Hindu the same cow is a sacred animal and is not "food." Someone living in a rural area will regard reality differently than someone living in New York City. The world-view is handed down from generation to generation with slight and sometimes drastic changes in each succeeding epoch. We "inherit the sin of our fathers and forefathers" as it may be. We all believe the world is "out there" in some sort of ultimate concreteness but, while still rather concrete, it is really "in here." It is a mental picture-show we hold up for ourselves and for our children to emulate. This is not bad; in fact, it is the only way it can be.
All our knowledge of the outside world is mental knowledge; we are in touch with nothing directly outside our own minds. All we know is that something produces an effect on the mind in the categories of our five senses. The causes of our sensation could just as logically have a totally mental origin rather than a physical origin. In this case "matter" would just be an idea, the idea of "concreteness." Actually this is all we know anyway; we do not know matter directly, but only as an idea. It makes little difference in our practical life that matter may be only a mental construct, but it has great philosophic and possibly spiritual significance. It is never known directly "out there"; it is only known "in here." We just assume it is out there. Subjectively we cannot even tell if an object of sensation - a tree, a dog, or the color blue - looks the same to you as it looks to me. My color blue could be green to you, but as long as we call it by the same name - blue - we'll never know the difference. Dreaming is a completely mental condition and our reality in dreams often seems more vividly real than when we are in the "physical" world. Our reality and our minds are not as definite, stable and unambiguous as we like to believe.
The "crack in the cosmic egg" is a small excursion or peek into the unknown.
Our cosmic egg is an arduously developed logical schema within which man is able to develop his potentials. Man's abilities are innate but he needs a structure of language and accepted facts with which to build. Allegorically, he can build with bricks, or he can build with stone, but he must build with something. Castles cannot be built with air. A person cannot jump beyond the cultural agreement of language and facts and hope to discover anything of practical importance. (He may have a mystical experience of the realm beyond "world views" but would be unable to communicate without world-view terms.) All new theories and insights are the result of recombination and metaphor of existing world-view ideas. The mind is literally a computer and, like a computer, it can only create from a storehouse or paradigm of already existing concepts. If you attempt to create a totally new creature in your imagination, you cannot do so. Your creature may have the tail of a cat, the beak of a bird and the skin of a reptile, but it is still the composite of parts or ideas you have in your storehouse of concepts about already existing animals. There are no new concepts, only recombinations of old concepts and ideas, often in a very creative way.
This logical construction which is our reality Pearce calls "the clearing in the forest." The forest is the great "out there," the dark unknown of infinite possibility. The "clearing in the forest" is our society, culture, science and our agreed upon assumption of what constitutes normal reality. The "crack in the cosmic egg" is a small excursion or peek into the unknown. Pearce relates an experience of his own of the "crack" during his college days. He felt himself enter a dissociated or trance state and was able to butt out lighted cigarettes on his face and hands without any ill after-effects, much to the chagrin of his college friends.
A similar example of the "crack" from my own life concerned my eight-year-old brother. I was once observing him play with a paperclip and a padlock and was amazed that he had unlocked the padlock two times in succession with the paperclip. I asked him to do it again and he dutifully repeated the feat. I expressed my astonishment and after this he was unable to unlock the padlock again even though he tried many times. By expressing my astonishment at his trick, I believe I indoctrinated him into the normally accepted reality-view - the reality-view in which it is impossible for a non-skilled person to open a padlock with a paperclip. Previously, he had no categories for padlocks and paperclips and could turn the trick with ease.
The Normal Aborigine
There are more dramatic examples of cracks in the cosmic egg the world over, mostly in "backward" and semi-isolated cultures. These people are out of touch with what we accept as normal, possible and impossible, and thus have freer minds to set up different concepts of possibility. The Australian aborigines and various cultures where "fire-walking" is practiced are examples. Where fire-walking is conducted in religious ceremonies, participants are able to walk over twenty feet of white-hot coals without being burned or harmed in the least. To our western minds, this is physically impossible, but nonetheless it is a "scientific fact" with sufficient evidence and data to validate it as with any other "fact." Fire-walking and similar "impossible" feats performed in various sub-cultures are definite evidence that western science does not have a complete understanding of what physical reality is, and what is possible and impossible. There seems to be a key somewhere, or an undiscovered law.
The Australian aborigines live in a culture with a drastically different reality-view. Their religious life and practical way of life are totally integrated so that a very complex and complete way of regarding reality is formulated. Upon entering adolescence the male aborigine is submitted to an initiation rite, the severity of which is not known elsewhere. The youth is starved, kept sleepless and frightened in such an extreme manner and for such a long period of time that death sometimes results. The effect of all this is that eventually the psyche is totally shattered. When the boy's mind is completely disjointed as a result of shock (no world-view), he is indoctrinated into the "Totem System" by the elders. The Totem World is a synthetic, complex and complete reality-system or world-view, but it is different. In the Totem System every aspect of the man's life is prescribed and regulated - how he walks, how he urinates, how he talks, how he throws his spear, etc. It is all done in the manner in which the "Two Brothers" did it on the first day of creation in their cosmology. Each aborigine man is in constant rapport with the "Two Brothers" who are simultaneously in every place and every time. Since the aborigine is in constant rapport with the Two Brothers who know all, he is able to hit with his boomerang an animal on the other side of a hill, he is able to run twenty miles across the desert to intercept a sacred rainfall, and he is able to track without hesitation miles of terrain which a man had traveled a year before. In our reality this is all impossible, but in the aborigine's it is possible, normal, and occurs!
As can be seen by the general resistance to new ideas, there is virtually a biological survival urge to maintain the present reality-view. The reason for this can be most easily seen from the personal point of view. A person has to believe he has the correct view towards the world in order for him to aggressively seek to earn a living and promote his personal ego and interests. A person caught in the tumult of self-doubt is robbed of his power to act. He is unable to act because he does not know in what direction to act. His survival possibilities are subtly reduced because of psychological impotence and ambiguity. A person who is sure of his values (world-view) has no doubts in what direction to act. He can be one-pointed. The principle can also be seen in cultures or nations. A nation that has much internal dissension will be greatly weakened in case of war. Pearce puts it: "A mind divided by choices, confused by alternatives, is a mind robbed of power. "
Each aborigine man is in constant rapport with the "Two Brothers" who are simultaneously in every place and every time.
While a confused reality-view can be culturally or personally detrimental, it can also be the seed-bed of creative synthesis and increased complexity - and through this complexity results increased potential. The world-view is the material through which man works out his potentials. The nature of astronomy, mathematics, music, art, economics, politics, linguistics, chemistry, physics, sociology, anthropology, etc. The highly complicated interrelationship between these fields is the mental gestalt of our culture. This labyrinth of correlation is the result of centuries of analogy and shuffling of simpler ideas. As Pearce describes it, "Scientific growth became a process of metaphoric combinations and mutations of existing scientific metaphor, a continual expansion of an inherited web of ideas."
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It is the complexity and not the nature of the reality-system which determines what can be accomplished within it. If the ether theories of nineteenth century science were carried to their conclusions instead of discarded, we would undoubtedly be able to do everything with that system that we are able to now do with our modern physics. That is, if previous systems of science would have developed at the same pace and to the same complexity along different lines up to the present time, then we would have just as an advanced technology, but we would have a different description of it - different theories and "facts" that worked. It seems arbitrary that science has developed along certain lines rather than others. There have been plenty of "eccentric" scientists and theories that did not develop a following sufficient to redirect the course of science. Some eccentrics were followed, like Einstein, but other scientists and theories - like Baron Von Reichenbach and his "Odic Force," or Reich and his "Orgone Energy'' - were ignored due to no inconsistencies in their systems. We are not discovering things or laws "out there" in the material world, but developing a sufficiently complex mental schema to play out our potentials.
Metanoia and Autistic Thinking
How does the possibility that there are different but equally effective reality structures affect us? Can this possibility be used to improve life or provide an avenue of spiritual growth? Pearce gives a law for applying his insights, but the price is heavy. Two terms, "metanoia" and "autistic thinking," are used by Pearce to describe the sudden restructuring of personal reality. A good example of metanoia is the born-again Christian. When the born-again Christian has his experience of faith or conversion, his whole outlook on life is immediately changed. He has a dramatically altered view of the world; nearly every aspect of life has a novel meaning and purpose. Something causes an instantaneous reorganization of his psyche; he exchanges one world-view for a different world-view. This conversion experience is not the sole possession of Christians but can happen to persons in the sciences, psychology, philosophy or any walk of life. The key to the experience is the discovery or realization of a personally unique schema for regarding the world. The catalyst of the experience may be an idea, theory, or system which instigates a rapid mental reappraisal of the world and seeing in a different light. There are converts to physics or a school of psychology as well as converts to Christianity or Islam.
Pearce labels his second type of reality-restructuring "autistic thinking" because he believes it to be the case with autistic children. For varying reasons the autistic child never enters our reality structure but makes and lives in a "world of his own." In normally adjusted people autistic thinking is the temporary or permanent rearrangement of world-view so that things are seen in a different light and have altered significance and value. The fire-walker temporarily reinterprets reality so that in his world-view fire does not burn (and it doesn't). The scientific genius suffers a dramatic and catalytic reorganization of his concepts and a new reality structure and scientific theory is the result.
The autistic process does not come cheaply. Even to temporarily change his world-view the fire-walker must undergo a period of abstinence and rigorous discipline. The aborigine adolescent undergoes a horribly severe initiation rite. The scientific or philosophic thinkers who have undergone the "Eureka!" experience of discovery (Pearce would say "creation") have almost universally struggled through years of questioning.
The conversion experience is not the sole possession of Christians but can happen to persons in the sciences, psychology, philosophy or any walk of life.
The passionate questioning and desire is the key to the creation of the Eureka! experience. Most of the Eureka! experiencers seemed to be victims of the autistic process, that is, they did not know they were unconsciously setting the stage for an illumination. Pearce hints that the experience can be synthetically created. What is needed to set the gears in motion is a constant, total commitment to the answering of a personal question. One's life must be placed on the line and staked on finding the answer to the question. The question may be "Who am I -ultimately?", "Why is there suffering?" or "How can the speed of light be surpassed?" Regardless of the question, the process is the same. The type of answer found will be a mirror of the question asked. Additionally, the question asked must be a question with "heart." If the seeker cannot put his heart into the question, then commitment will not be possible and the catalyst for illumination will not be there.
The autistic process is a subliminal or unconscious process. In the memory banks there is a tremendous accumulation of ideas, facts and isolated theories all relating to the central question the mind is poised upon. It seems that a critical mass is reached when the whole mental structure is in danger of toppling under its own weight. An unforeseen catalyst appears (a brick in the pavement?), and instantly the whole massive mountain of concepts comes tumbling down, the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, and the awe-striking vision, a reorganization of reality and what may be called the experiencing of an idea of an idea, occurs. The realization is usually not in the form of a neat formula, but is an abstraction and an intuition which may take years to interpret in normal world-view terms. The astro-mathematician Sir William Hamilton is a case in point. After years of searching for a solution to a problem in modern mechanics, he unexpectedly experienced an illumination in which the "galvanic circuit of thought closed" and he received a grand intuition. He became aware in the midst of his realization that it would require years to express his insight (Quaternion Theory).
Many people may have the quantity of facts and ideas in their mind that the experiencer of an illumination does, but few experience an illumination. The overwhelming desire proves the impetus which causes the fusion of memory into an illumination. As it is, the desire acts to form a constant tension between all the isolated bits of information in the memory. A "connection" is always subliminally sought to weave all the bits of information into one whole. When the "connection" is found, perhaps on a subconscious level, all the isolated ideas crystallize into one, tremendous idea. In the extremely knowledgeable person - who has no consuming desire or question - this "tension between ideas" is not there, and thus the dramatic integration resulting in illumination does not occur.
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Several years after his wife died, and concluding his own search to discover the meaning of it, Pearce experienced a tremendous illumination which crystallized the ideas in his book. Pearce explains, "And there, in my own little suspended moment out of mind, I 'saw'. The connecting link between the fragmented parts of my search fused. There was a great wash of understanding, powerful, total. I had my answer. Nothing was specific or articulate. It just was, in a perfectly clear kind of ultimate certainty.... in my experience what was understood to be the 'answer' was the very function by which I had achieved my 'seeing'. My answer was a turning in on the process of questioning. That is, the answer to my passionate pursuit was insight into how the answers to passionate questions are formed in the mind. I saw that this was but an extension of the very ontological function by which 'things were' . . . I saw that the only 'truth' for us is the process of questioning what truth might be, and receiving answers in keeping with the nature of our questions." The process of realization proved to be the realization of the process. For Pearce, the mirror had reflected upon itself and the serpent had bitten its tail.
With The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Pearce has opened up new vistas for research and created avenues for unprecedented speculation and possibility. He has not said it all, but provided the kernel that can provide direction to form a "metaworld-view," that is, a world-view which is "one step back" and realizes the very process of world-view formation. Pearce outlines the processes by which realities are formed and thus provides us with the possibility of consciously altering our reality. This has great meaning on the social as well as the personal level. The book is now over seven years old and it has not of yet produced any great furor in the sciences. I fear that the time is not yet ripe for the type of ideas Pearce has presented. My suspicion is still greater that the time may never be ripe. He has provided a formula for "grabbing the tiller of the world" and, as is usual with such esoteric ideas, only a few will be motivated to carry the ideas out of the realm of abstraction and into their personal lives - the only place where they can be realized.
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