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

vision -- a process in which creative imagination played a principal role. He

did not look from his eyes as through a window, in passive sight,

as Descartes or Locke would claim.

How can firm statements be made about a world to itself? The very

statement enters as a contingency in that world. What is real is a

variable. Though a regressing contingency stretches back to a hypothetical

First Day, the visual world is what we practice day by day, and our

capacity for practice is infinitely varied. Our "editorial policies"

are more flexible than we dare imagine. Our range of selectivity is

boundless. All things are possible to him who believes -- that is,

to him who believes in the possibility.

We feel that surely, to a man of good will and honesty, an honest

look should inform of an honest reality -- and we mean, of course,

our reality. This common assumption has been questioned in our day --

and this is a crack in the cosmic egg of the realisms of the past few

centuries. Our survival may well depend on this crack splitting the blind

world of politician and pentagonian. The crack should lead us to find

an open-ended possibility, provided we can open to other world views,

those of Oriental and archaic cultures for instance, as valid, rather

than as objects for destruction that our own might reign supreme.

The open end of human potential is built into the blueprint of mind, and

is contained in that mode I have called 'autistic.' This is blocked,

however, by blindness of viewpoint , and yet the autistic can be

structured and realized only by assuming viewpoints. The openness

nevertheless happens to us in peripheral and unsuspected ways. One of the

most intriguing of these ways is the procedure of ultimately asked and

passionately adhered to questions . The ways in which questions form

in the mind and are answered is the next part, and the central part,

of my exploration.

4

questions and answers

The English scientist, Edward de Bono, writes of "lateral and vertical

thinking." Since Aristotle, he points out, vertical thinking, which

I have called reality-adjusted thinking, or logic, has been given the

place of supremacy. In actuality, de Bono writes, all truly new ideas,

by which new eras of reality have come into play, have been products of

lateral thinking. Following on one great lateral opening of mind, the

vertical thinkers can busy themselves for generations. De Bono likens the

activity of vertical thinking to digging post holes deeper and deeper,

along the lines established by lateral breakthroughs of thinking.

In this chapter I will elaborate on how the postulate, the Eureka! discovery, the illumination, of lateral thinking, come about. A few

examples were given in Chapter Two, when I claimed that these "autistic

eruptions" into logical thinking suggested a clue to the way reality

shapes, the way the potential of the "dark forest" is given shape by

ideas arising from our cultural clearings.

The relation of questions and answers is an example of the mirroring

function between the modes of mind. Answers are shaped by the questions

demanding them, just as the question is finally shaped by the nature

of the answer desired. In this way our experience shapes and moves as

desire reaching for the unknown.

A question is a seed of suggestion which we plant into that continuum

of synthesis I have called autistic thinking. The question's germination

takes place in ways unavailable to conscious thought, but only in a ground

prepared and nourished by conscious thought. The synthesis flowers as

the Eureka! illumination, that dramatic breakthrough wherein we are

convinced of having received a universal truth.

There are no limits to the kinds of Eureka! we may experience.

Verification of any prejudice, fulfillment of any desire can be

obtained. Polanyi pointed out that the procedure of mind involved

here follows St. Paul's formula of faith, works, and grace. Faith

is a neutral function,