Cracked eggs....

I have to say that I was absolutely overwhelmed with reading this week, between this and my Amer. Lit. class, that I really couldn't fully absorb the reading. It's too bad, too; this book seems like it's going to be interesting. I will definitely have to go back and re-read most/all of this.

When I first saw the title, I thought we might be getting into some sort of discussion about which came first - the chicken or the egg. We are getting into something just as good, though. As Hartman puts it in the foreward, our "egg" is the reality in which we live. Using such an analogy, I fancy myself, then, to be the unhatched chicken. Do I have to break out of my shell, break out of my own reality, in order to truly live? Is that too much of a jump here? That warrants some additional thinking on my part, for sure. Pearce goes on to say, in the Preface, that, "The crack in this egg is a mode of thinking and action through which creative imagination can escape this mundane shell and open us to, and create within us, a new cosmic egg." This further intensifies my curiosity. Interesting.

Pearce discusses reality, and what it is. He talks of how we can view the world one way, but experience it in another. By simply being a part of life, even just simply observing, we alter it. I remember taking high school physics and discussing that very point. We always had to list factors that could have affected the outcome of our experiments, and simply our own observation was always on top of the list. He goes on to state that we all experience our own version of this reality, since we all have our own point of view, and bring with us our own experiences. That is a tough concept to grasp. The 20 or so of us in the class each experience the "reality" of our class differently. If reality is different for each of us, how then can we define an altered state of consciousness as an experience of a different reality? We must, in my mind, state that it is truly an individualized concept (an altered state). What may be completely normal for me, my everyday reality, might be perceived by others to be an altered state. Maybe that's why people look at me funny at work???

I thought that the most interesting idea Pearce introduced was the idea of A (autistic) thinking. He defines it as: "an unstructured, non-logical (but not necessarily illogical), whimsical thinking that is the key to creativity. It involves "unconscious processes" but is not necessarily unconscious. Autistic thinking is indulged in, or in some cases, happens to one, in ordinary conscious states." Such a statement begs one to consider autistic children. We consider them to be disadvantaged in life. And for the most part, I think we can all agree that there are considerable obstacles for such individuals to overcome, making it difficult for them to experience what we would consider a "normal" life. However, most of us probably don't think about them as being creative, as Pearce states. I have never been around any autistic children, but I have heard about how tremendously gifted they can be in certain arenas. They are so creative, so gifted even, yet they do it all in an ordinary state of consciousness. For many of us to produce the same results, we'd likely need to experience an altered state, or have our egg cracked.