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

our beliefs influenced

the way we perceived the world, and that the "mould for world-making,"

once formed, resisted change stubbornly. Psychedelics, they mused, allowed

the mind to divest itself of the "protective yet dulling layers" of acquired

assumptions and rationalizations with which all men are "encumbered." For

a little while, it seemed, psychedelics allowed the mind to "see the

universe again with an innocent, unshielded eye."

These early enthusiasms did not bear up well under experience. For one

thing, a person's given conceptual frame of reference proved formative,

even in the remote regions of psychedelic phenomena. When the patterns

of the common world are fractured, our underlying attitudes still

influence the nature of the experienced data. Cohen, of USC, pointed

out that the "divergent expectations and intent" of the investigators

made the difference between heaven and hell from the same ha!lacinogen.

Cohen quoted Thomas Aquinas in one saying that can be considered a

universal: "Whatever is received is received according to the nature of

the recipient."

Hoffer and Osmond's notion of an "innocent, unshielded view of the

universe" proved no more fruitful. So long as a thinking egocenter exists,

its fundamental assumptions are a determinant in the experienced universe

itself. Stripping off the acquired interests of our world view does

not lead to a 'true universe.' Our "acquisitions," as Hoffer and Osmond

call them, are the very concepts directing the percepts that constitute the world in which we move, and there is no other world for us. We cannot

free ourselves of our clearing in the forest and plunge out into the dark

and find truth. If our acquired interests are a cloak that can be shed,

we would immediately have to weave another, equally arbitrary garb. There

is, in this sense, no going naked in the world.

Bruner of Harvard tells of studies in perception that have identified

over seven million different shades of color between which we can

differentiate. We categorize this spectrum into about a dozen groups,

or families. This makes a practical, limited representation which we

can respond to easily, talk about handily, and think about coherenfiy.

The spectrum of light "as itself" might be analagous to the continuum of

autistic thinking, lying free and untrammeled outside all categories. A

handful of primary colors represent the defining disciplines of social

thinking, our logic and objective reason. We impose our categories on

what we see in order to see. We see through the prism of our categories.

The world view we inherit has been built up by putting things into

objective pigeonholes like this, categories that can be shared . The

psychedelic may fracture these structures. Under LSD, for instance,

the categories of color, by which we help organize our field of visual

possibility, may be dissolved. Then colors may merge, flow together, and

not stay put. Faces may suddenly "drip" and run across the floor. Shapes

may become fluid and mixing.

However, to shatter our working models of the universe does not lead to

'truth,' any kind of new data, or, above all, a "true picture" of the

universe. The universe, like nature, is a conceptual framework that

changes from culture to culture and age to age. Our concepts are to

some extent arbitrary constructs but to disrupt or dissolve them with

drugs does not free us into some universal knowledge "out there" in the

great beyond. There is, instead, the loss of meaningful structures of

agreement needed for communion with others. This can lead to the loss

of personality definition itself, that which don Juan meant by "loss of

soul," or Jesus meant by the "outer darkness."

This "freedom from false concepts" notion is but a recurrence' of the

old Garden of Eden myth, the "noble savage," return-to-nature nonsense of

the romantics. Any world view is a creative tension between possibility

and choice. This is the tension that