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

holds community and "real" world

together. This is the cohesive force of our own center of awareness, the

thin line between loss of self to autistic dissolution on the one hand,

or slavery to the broad statistics of the world on the other. Perceptions

relieved of this natural tension, through drugs or the various occult

religious techniques, may well be profound or frightfully chaotic.

Price, in his preface to Carington's book ( Matter, Mind and Meaning ),

discusses the physiological phenomenon of "ideomotor action." It has been

found that an idea or response tends to fulfill itself or execute itself

automatically through the muscular apparatus of the body, and will do so

unless other ideas are present to inhibit it. Price suggests that this

is indicative of a wider operation in life, namely that all ideas have

a tendency to realize themselves in the material world in any way they

can, unless inhibited by other ideas. This Price-Carington notion will

be borne out, I believe, in the exploration taking place here in my book.

Solley and Murphy spoke of us as immersed in a "sea of stimuli," all

"striving for dominance" within us. We are not so easily impinged upon

by things, however, and the system of reality growing from our given

stimuli is far more dynamic. The "striving" tensions are those of ideas,

or ways for grouping this sea of stimuli. Surely a basic stimulus is given

us, but each culture, discipline, or ideology, strives for dominance as

the prism through which this stimulus will be ordered into a coherent,

shared world. This fragmented striving is the charismatic curse of reason

that drives us from innocence to experience, from circle to circle. The

more thoroughly we search out our past, the more embracing and sweeping

we find this "cosmic-egg structuring" to have always been, even in the

most archaic of cultures.

Aldous Huxley considered our consciousness but a segment of a larger

one. Normal consciousness is that which has been funneled through

the "reducing valve" of brain, nervous system and sense organs. This

protects us, Huxley believed, from being "overwhelmed on the surface

of the planet." Through drugs, or the various mental cult systems,

this valve-reduced reality can be bypassed and "mind at large" partially

admitted by the personal psyche. The schizophrenic has lost the way back,

and can no longer take refuge in the homemade universe of common sense,

the strictly human world of useful notions, shared symbols and socially

acceptable conventions. (Ronald Laing might say the schizophrenic may

be hiding, not lost, or even on a private adventure from which he simply

does not care to come back.)

"Mind at large" gives to a continuum of events an anthropomorphic shape

that the situation may not warrant. Our "reducing valve" may be designed

not so much to protect us from being overwhelmed (by those seven million

shades of color, for instance?) as designed to simplify and realize,

literally select, focus and make real a specific event out of a continuum

of possible events. The only reality available in this universe may

well be a homemade one.

Sherwood wrote of an apparent universality of perception in the

psychedelic experience. He attributed this "universal central perception"

to a single reality. Cohen takes a more nihilistic view, arguing that

once the mind is unhinged from normal categories, regardless of the means

used, it can only go in a limited number of directions. He called such

departures "unsanity" to distinguish them from insanity. He considered

"unsanity" the common pathway of the stressed mind. Variations of

the unhinged experience contain a common core of necessity, according

to Cohen.

In another context, however, Cohen points out that the underlying

motivation impelling the drug taker or systems-follower to break with

the norm is the nucleus for what is then experienced. A combination

of these two observations by Cohen gives insight into the