centimeter of nothing
at all, or Jesus moving those mountains with the faith of a grain of
mustard seed.
Piaget felt that autistic thinking corresponded with "primitive
psychological causality, implying magic." Belief that any desire
whatsoever can influence objects, the belief in the "obedience of external
things," sets up a confusion "between self and world," Piaget claimed,
which destroys both "logical truth and objective existence."
Piaget here expresses that intriguing fear the rational mind feels toward
autistic processes. This is the cosmic egg's fear of being cracked. Piaget
is here the voice of our eternal culture-priest, intoning the dangers
of moving outside the common consensus of what constitutes our current
egg-dimensions. Don Juan the sorcerer would be contemptuous of Piaget's
timidity and narrowness, even as Piaget could rightfully dismiss don Juan.
Surely we must be selective. Surely we do not casually choose what
makes up our current criteria for our "irreducible and stubborn facts"
so longed for by the realists. These facts are our given world view and
to question them is to threaten our ideation with collapse into chaos.
Yet, "Logical truth" and "objective "existence" are variables, formed
by cultural agreement. These "Facts" change, much as fashions change --
though to each generation they represent reality as it must then be.
We represent change as our own emerging from the dark and foolish
superstitions of the past and the coming into the light of a final, true,
and really modern understanding. Each age proclaims itself the 'Ars
Nova' and scorns the 'Ars Antiqua.' Each man believes, as did Erasmus,
that the world is just coming awake from a long sleep. Generation by
generation we proclaim ourselves the enlightenment. Each age delights
in singing a new requiem to its fathers. As we change our inherited
representation of the world, the world we deal with changes accordingly.
In our struggle for an agreeable representation of reality, various
systems rise as meteors, pronouncing, in their brief fling, absolutes
concerning what we are. The mind is only this, only that. Each system
is quietly bypassed as the mind and its reality prove always to be more
than this, and more than that. A survey of this parade of self-asserting
notions would be a history of the human race. A fairly recent episode
lends itself well to the problem of autistic thinking, however, as well
as to the nature of our shifting attitudes.
In the early 1960's there was a meeting of psychiatrists in San
Francisco. One important dignitary mounted the rostrum and intoned that
the problem of mental disease had been solved . Mental disease was just a
chemical imbalance in that electrochemical machine called the brain. Now,
chemistry had come to the rescue. Within about three years this certainty
was quietly buried, quietly lest anyone be embarrassed. The issue will
never prove so simple. The cause of this particular flurry was the
growing experimentation with psychedelics, the mind-manifesting drugs,
or hallucinogens, as they are variously called. Queen of the chemicals
was LSD, and great were the wonders thereof. Apparently psychedelics
enabled the mind to bypass the patterns of our ordinary, illusory world
view and experience phenomena that had little relation to the everyday
world. The experiences may have powerful subjective meaning, occasionally
plunging the subject into "universals" and absolutes.
Psycherelics induce a kind of autistic experience and so are valuable to
the present discussion. As stated before, there is no "value judgement" in
the autistic mode of thinking. In the autistic mode anything conceivable
is "true." The nature of the autistically perceived experience can thus
become an exciting area for speculation since ordinary categories no
longer apply.
Hoffer and Osmond, of the Saskatchewan group, in their early (1959)
defense of a "chemical psychiatry," recognized that
at all, or Jesus moving those mountains with the faith of a grain of
mustard seed.
Piaget felt that autistic thinking corresponded with "primitive
psychological causality, implying magic." Belief that any desire
whatsoever can influence objects, the belief in the "obedience of external
things," sets up a confusion "between self and world," Piaget claimed,
which destroys both "logical truth and objective existence."
Piaget here expresses that intriguing fear the rational mind feels toward
autistic processes. This is the cosmic egg's fear of being cracked. Piaget
is here the voice of our eternal culture-priest, intoning the dangers
of moving outside the common consensus of what constitutes our current
egg-dimensions. Don Juan the sorcerer would be contemptuous of Piaget's
timidity and narrowness, even as Piaget could rightfully dismiss don Juan.
Surely we must be selective. Surely we do not casually choose what
makes up our current criteria for our "irreducible and stubborn facts"
so longed for by the realists. These facts are our given world view and
to question them is to threaten our ideation with collapse into chaos.
Yet, "Logical truth" and "objective "existence" are variables, formed
by cultural agreement. These "Facts" change, much as fashions change --
though to each generation they represent reality as it must then be.
We represent change as our own emerging from the dark and foolish
superstitions of the past and the coming into the light of a final, true,
and really modern understanding. Each age proclaims itself the 'Ars
Nova' and scorns the 'Ars Antiqua.' Each man believes, as did Erasmus,
that the world is just coming awake from a long sleep. Generation by
generation we proclaim ourselves the enlightenment. Each age delights
in singing a new requiem to its fathers. As we change our inherited
representation of the world, the world we deal with changes accordingly.
In our struggle for an agreeable representation of reality, various
systems rise as meteors, pronouncing, in their brief fling, absolutes
concerning what we are. The mind is only this, only that. Each system
is quietly bypassed as the mind and its reality prove always to be more
than this, and more than that. A survey of this parade of self-asserting
notions would be a history of the human race. A fairly recent episode
lends itself well to the problem of autistic thinking, however, as well
as to the nature of our shifting attitudes.
In the early 1960's there was a meeting of psychiatrists in San
Francisco. One important dignitary mounted the rostrum and intoned that
the problem of mental disease had been solved . Mental disease was just a
chemical imbalance in that electrochemical machine called the brain. Now,
chemistry had come to the rescue. Within about three years this certainty
was quietly buried, quietly lest anyone be embarrassed. The issue will
never prove so simple. The cause of this particular flurry was the
growing experimentation with psychedelics, the mind-manifesting drugs,
or hallucinogens, as they are variously called. Queen of the chemicals
was LSD, and great were the wonders thereof. Apparently psychedelics
enabled the mind to bypass the patterns of our ordinary, illusory world
view and experience phenomena that had little relation to the everyday
world. The experiences may have powerful subjective meaning, occasionally
plunging the subject into "universals" and absolutes.
Psycherelics induce a kind of autistic experience and so are valuable to
the present discussion. As stated before, there is no "value judgement" in
the autistic mode of thinking. In the autistic mode anything conceivable
is "true." The nature of the autistically perceived experience can thus
become an exciting area for speculation since ordinary categories no
longer apply.
Hoffer and Osmond, of the Saskatchewan group, in their early (1959)
defense of a "chemical psychiatry," recognized that
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