The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce Read Free Book Online Page B

universal secrets. He would not leave the house but

sat quietly with his soldier-doll, no longer playing or speaking. The

spell lasted four days, when he was suddenly himself again.

Later he voluntarily, if haltingly, explained to me why he had been "so

rude" those four days. It had occurred to him, in a burst of insight,

that his G.I. Joe could become alive for him, as he had passionately

wished and daydreamed about so long, and that they could play together

for ever and ever. But, and here he groped his way carefully, G.I. Joe

would have been alive only for him, not for anyone else, and then he,

my son, could no longer have been a part of us, his family, or take part

in things we did.

The issues were clear-cut, equally real, and equally rewarding. His

decision had been no light thing, weighed those silent days. Why we happened to win I will never know. Perhaps we rather lost. Life should

be a venture of liberty, with a safe harbor for return. Perhaps my son

would only have entered on an adventurous path, as don Juan the sorcerer

might say, and probably that path might have been traversed more freely

than we can imagine. Ronald Laing, the Scotch psychiatrist, would have

understood and sympathized with my boy. Laing knows the social structure

to be every bit as much an exercise in madness as these opposites. He

considers escape from our world a fairly rational maneuver, if rather

an exchange of chains.

Back to the autistic procedures. A-thinking is not reality adjusted,

and so not hinged about by modifications to what can and cannot be

true. Children distinguish from an early age that certain experiences

are considered unreal by their superiors, since eliciting either no

adult responsive-verification or a negative adult response. This is mere

arbitrariness to a child, however, not an absolute. A child's world is

"quasi-hallucinatory," as Smythies calls it, though nonetheless real for

that. Only little by little does a child adopt criteria for true-false

in keeping with the relationship of parents and society. He does this as

the rewards from and demands by that relationship grow. Piaget considers

early adolescence the breakpoint for a new psychological stage and the

full development of logic. It is not just fortuitous that this coincides

with a growing peer group demand for other-directedness, culminating in

that absolutely-other demand, sexuality.

Autistic thinking is self-contained. It operates beyond the restrictions

and modifications of a world. That is why this kind of thinking can make

an unlimited synthesis of experience. Anything is "true" in A-thinking;

any of its constructions are "universals," or cosmic truths. It is just

this capacity, still operating in the adult mind, even though only

peripherally and unconsciously, that creates the postulate arriving

full-blown in the brain.

The Eureka! illumination is unavailable to the constructions of logical

thought, but dependent on the machinations of logical thought with its

selective screening. Logical thought operates by limitation, selecting

from potential some specific isolated desire. The autistic is a continuum,

an "everything," and so nothing. A conscious desire held to passionately,

or ultimately, until it excludes other ideas that would inhibit it, thus

takes on the characteristics of autistic non-ambiguity, and furnishes a

point of focus for this autistic capacity. The autistic can synthesize

this desire into a unified postulate or answer relating far beyond the

limited materials of the triggering passion. The given postulate can,

in turn, change world views, and worlds-to-view.

The free-synthesis capacity of A-thinking, able to draw on the continuum

of reality experience and potential as it does, is what gives all really

new ideas their "initial element of foolishness," as Whitehead wrote of

all genuinely new notions. Consider, for instance, David Bohm and all

those billions of tons of energy from a cubic