The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce

of varied responses. Much more difficult is the idea that seeing

is subject to the same qualification. The variables that enter into

seeing prove enormous, nevertheless, and people from different cultures

not only use a different language, but inhabit a different sensory world,

as Hall puts it.

So, when Cohen wrote that the world we see is far from an exact image of

the physical world, I wondered how one could ever tell. He added that this

was the case since perception is highly variable and often erroneous,

and that we can only perceive what we can conceive. Cohen observed

that we tend to see only what can be incorporated into our established

frame of reference, and tend to reject anything not fitting. Cohen

then presumed, however, that our notions of what is "out there" are

based on an "indistinct uncertainty," and I thought of Blake's comment:

"If the sun and moon should doubt, they'd immediately go out." Failure

of nerve is the major sin. Cohen went on to conclude that for all we

know, the "thing called reality may exist, but we shall never see it,"

and at this point I protested.

Is there an "exact image" of a physical world? Consider even

photography. The same subject can be hideous or lovely according to

the skill of the photographer. Photography is an art because it can

catch aspects of reality that escape us, precisely as painting can do. I

can traverse the same tired street year in and year out, familiar with

every twig and stone -- but a photographer can suddenly present me with

a photograph of it that makes me catch my breath much as from a poem or

a piece of music. I refuse to believe the "police lineup" photograph on

my driver's license is my real image; as with all aspects of the police

mentality it somehow has sought out the worst possible aspects of me.

Is the strange abstraction of the physicist an "exact image" of

a world? The physicist is the last to claim this. But his at times

absurd abstractions become contingencies in the processes of a physical

world. Does the word 'real' mean at all what the naive realists and

the tough-minded have claimed? What could the "atomically-verifiable

statement" conceivably mean? Our error is in considering our

concept-percept function to be separate and distinct from reality,

rather than a dominant force in the shaping of it.

The condition called reality exists as an ever-current sum total of our

representations and responses. Whatever we see is what reality is for us,

and there will never be, from here to eternity, any other kind of reality

for us. And this reality will always be in a process of mutation and

change. Huxley's "homemade world" is a necessity in any context. There

is no magic, there is only The Creation. There is no supernatural, but

there are an infinite number of possible natures. A point of centered

thinking organizes and survives by relationship with similar points of

thinking. It is a matter of agreement, a structuring of similar patterns

of shared response.

We know now, according to Jerome Bruner, that our nervous system is

not the "one-way street" it was long considered to be. All minds have

a program of their own. The mind sends out monitoring orders to the

sense organs and the "relay stations." The orders specify priorities for

different kinds of environmental message. Selectivity is the rule. We

used to think of the nervous system as a simple telephone switchboard,

bringing in messages from outside. We know now, Bruner claims, that the

system is every bit as much an "editorial hierarchy" -- a policy-making

device determining what is perceived.

Edward Hall, with his "proxemic research," speaks of 'vision' as a

"transaction between man and his environment in which both participate."

Hall explores how we unconsciously structure our visual world . Perhaps

we can consciously seize the process. William Blake antedated all this by

two centuries. He said he used his eyes to see with , in active