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

mind. Infant thinking is probably

autistic, gradually structuring into reality-thinking, but even autistic

thinking cannot arise from a vacuum. The mill of the mind is the chief

element in reality, but before it can grind, at least for our table,

it must have some of our kind of grist. Missing this, a mind might still

grind marvelous stuff, but we could never know it.

In the last chapter I presented evidence against a universal pool of

knowledge or a common logic of thinking. Evidence points toward the infant

mind being prestructured along clearly marked drives toward communion

with others, toward speech, response and so on, but the content for

the drives is acquired. Bruner points out that intent precedes both

acquisition of knowledge and ability to do. Acquisition of language

and the ability to do in an infant are brought about by nurturing

and fostering the inborn intent. Raw material must be given the mind;

the blueprint must be filled in by responsive and guiding actions and

reactions from other minds. The infant mind then makes syntheses of

these acquisitions of possibilities.

The kind of syntheses that can occur, once material is available to

mind, is varied, however. Smythies, as mentioned before, assumes that

hallucinations are a part of the normal child's psychic experience. As

the child grows older, he selectively represses the hallucinatory

fabric according to the "current negative social value." Syntheses

accepted as the "current social value," and given "positive reward"

are considered real.

Bracken pointed out that the distinction between autistic and

reality-adjusted thinking corresponds with the German theory that new

and more complex neurological structures, as the mid-brain and cortex,

grow as superimpositions upon older and more primitive brain structures,

such as the "old brain," or brain-stem. These older thinking devices

(there is no being but in a mode of being,) continue to function,

however, even after the higher ones are developed. McKeller presumes

that A-thinking takes place in these lower centers, and Smythies'

hallucinatory psychic experiences of childhood would fall into the same

classification. Jung's notion of a collective response would fit in with

this kind of representation. The mid-brain, old brain and stem being

structures shared by all animals, one can see how the psyche might be

peeled layer by layer down to the psychology of lower creatures. Polanyi's

"primary process" thinking of animals and children could be understood

in this sense.

Perhaps, then, the education of a child is unlearning as well as learning,

and perhaps many possibilities are lost through lack of triggering

response, possibilities that may have been of worth. James Old, in his

experiments on rats (giving electrode stimulus to various parts of the

brain), presumed a kind of ecstacy-response was created by stimulus of a

certain area of the mid-brain. In the human, stimulus of this area makes

"all the bells of heaven ring," as one subject expressed it. Hallucinogens

must occasionally stimulate this area, as well as dissolving the ordinary

categories of reality.

This kind of ecstatic experience is negated by logical thinking. Old

found that the rapture faded as the stimulus was moved away from the

mid-brain and toward the rat's thin layer of cortex. And life has moved

toward an abundance of cortex, this thinking material giving us our

superior discontinuity over the animals. Our logical process has been

bought at too stiff a price, though, and life moves toward the further

possibility of getting around the price paid. That is, life moves

toward correcting the imbalance of mind that the development of logic

has brought on. If balanced, a logical process could then selectively

direct an infinite potential.

At any rate, while we can say the chicken-child was not really human, we

cannot say his experience was that of a vegetable. A low level of cortical

activity