CHAPTER FOUR

THE GESTALT OF CREATION

The human creation happened all at once with a crackling and bursting of the hominidal dam. It was a "gestalt," a configuration of nearly simultaneous and transacting developments emerging from a central change.

A plausible scenario of the birth of mankind might be reconstructed. Let us attempt it.

There follows now a charting of the total process of humanization, to be followed by its discussion.

Postulate now a set of terrorizing natural disasters and distraught faunal populations. Problem now posed is: How could a human be created and survive?

A second phase now occurs, organizing the world schizotypically.

Without time lapse, a third phase fashions the culture.

The gestalt brought forth the prototype human instantly (which explains our use of the world "creation"). Whether by mutation or by trauma, the central event was a splitting of the mind in an essentially schizophrenic reaction. The split mind "recognized its other self." That is, it was forced into a basic, irreversible delusion that it had to deal with an inner person. Self-awareness began. It was an awful feeling.

A permanent blockage (or suppression) was laid down before all instinctual behavior, creating a constant anxiety. The "anxious animal" could no longer act with instinctive ease although it could act more intelligently and with greater versatility.

Now we have the answer to the questions: Why is human instinct so blunted in comparison with primates? How does it happen that all "animal instincts" in humans are within reach of psychosomatism? Instinct is the hair-trigger, set to go off without time for decision-making. Many critical human instincts are reachable by will and can be controlled; indeed they must be. They are set as slow triggers. This happened during the gestalt of creation.

Generalized delays of milliseconds in response time between the limbic and cortical systems and between the left and right brain hemispheres, experienced as environmental, electrical, and chemical impulses, introduce conflicts between the systems and the hemispheres. The delays occur not once, but repeatedly and continuously, because the external forces are not withdrawn immediately. The delays add up to a general depression of instinctive responses, which is sensed by the hominid as both crippling and frightful. Even with microseconds of delay, the organism senses piercing inner contradictions that call for proto-decisions by "itself vs. itself."

A host of proto-decisions fill the behavioral response-space left by the depression of instincts. But there is little experience to help understand, control, and guide the mass of proto-decisions. This new anarchy requires organization, but from what sources and how? A pure anguish, it might be suggested, should drive the hominid back into the archaic limbic system whence no self-awareness would ever emerge. But this cannot occur because the stimuli for the new order of mind have blocked the regression and thrown the bewilderment into the cortical arena.

It is too late to regret the passing of the animal. Either one or another of a pair of cortical referents will triumph by making a decision. Still, the several egos cannot contest indefinitely in a battle of all against all, else, like the warriors who sprang up from the teeth of the dragon that Cadmus slew, they will kill each other. The organism, to survive with its one stomach and conjoined limbs, must act as a whole.

The resolution comes from moving forward, not backwards. The organism widens the gap rather than closes it. What began as a set of millisecond delays becomes an alter ego. The alter ego grows though performance, habit and training into a weltanschauung (a world view). The world order emerges, reconstructed by the human mind in a schizoid form. Drinking and eating, bowel movements, fear-flight-fight, copulation and many other behaviors are animal as well as human, but the human way of performing these operations encases them in schizotypicality. All the behavior that is authentically and ineradicably human is schizotypical.

Impulsiveness begins to become a vice, not a virtue, for the human. The organism comes to realize that at any moment it has the capacity to ask itself questions. As frightful as the experience is, the new human cannot resist the asking. The boundary of the brain hemispheres is the main locus for the sensing of the gap. The left hemisphere, losing slightly its near perfect coordination with the right hemisphere, accomplishes reflection. The reflection is fearful, but effective.

Fright was all-pervading, both for what was happening inside the person and what happening outside. Because of the terror and the split, a recollective memory leaped into being and with it instant amnesia. Recollective memory was a form of control, occasioned by the delay of instinct. Hominids might remember, but not recall. The voluntariness of recall summoned up the mechanism of the repression of recall.

Meanwhile, the new creature began to talk to himself. (He was, it should be borne in mind, a child without human antecedents). As soon as he questioned his own behavior, he became superior to all hominids around him. He would think, "I should do this," meaning "we should," and the all-important act of will was born. Will is the spearhead of the drive to control oneself and the world. Now it was necessary to turn this weapon of will into a weapon of control. For the flood of terror demanded relief. A rapidly growing stream of symbols crossed the bridges between the two selves and flowed out to attach the symbols to the outer world and especially that part of the outer world that was threatening destruction, the turbulent skies and the effects they were producing on Earth.

Great fear was never to be eliminated from the human. It dominated his mind and set limits upon all of his behavior. It was the fear of his own schizoid character and fear of the outside world (and the gods). Of all unpleasantness, being two people is perhaps the most continuously unpleasant. Out of such fear comes the desire to control and somehow stabilize the situation, preferably by merging dissimilar selves into the original unity. Assuming some success in achieving stability, any increase in internal or external fears will excite the fear of loss of self-control.

In all of this a large role for human aggressiveness is prepared, for the world must be controlled if anxiety is to be relieved. Or one must delude oneself into believing that it is controlled and that one can take part in the control system to insure that it will work. It was a formidable assignment. Still, for a madman nothing is impossible, as we shall see.

When the sensitive brute could not endure the intensity and scale of internal and external disasters that confronted him, he explored, besides flight and fight, other means of control to cope with "reality." And immediately upon seeking control he found it in the new exigencies of his constitution: in the ability to recall and forget, to perceive his individuality and duality, in "flights of fancy" and in the symbolization of his lines of communication within himself and between himself and the outer world.

When finally given respite from panic, these mechanisms could be used pragmatically, with brilliant and instant success, to organize and invent for all aspects of life. The human had become unconquerable, and lusted for conquest.

Ordinary animal fears, with which hominid was not unusually beset, given his many abilities, were inadequate to move him into a new phase of development. With its uncontrolled and widespread displacement, the great fear, however, threatened all existence and, by inference, every life-value of the organism -- procreation (sex), health, food, sense of control and adaptability, and affectional ties of the primal horde. Hence, the changed character of the mutant human affected all life-values and thereupon all the new institutions that came to be.

The very fact that the changed hominid could reflect upon itself meant that it was not itself, but split self. So to primordial fear was added existential fear, the fear of one's own self-awareness, the distress of standing off from oneself, the basic schizophrenia of humankind, largely delusory from the standpoint of physiology since the same organs served the plural selves, but of course the schizophrenia was itself physiologically founded.

The origins of human nature were connected with the fearing components of hominid nature, and the subsequent history of human nature, as a result, has been mostly unhappy. The misery is generic, and therefore persists even when the rude clutch of disaster is released, as it was for periods of time, early and lately. The structure of the readily mutable mammal, the hominid, was such that a "benevolent" mutation, if conceivable, might have been utterly destructive. Generally, nature adds in evolution; it complicates; the easiest thing to capacitate in man was his brain; so he got a multiple head.

"What happened to me?" was the first question. Then came the gestalt of creation: it was composed of awareness, symbolizing, and projection. The proto-human strove to recollect himself amidst the turmoil of his kind and of nature. To exist and survive he had to discover himself amidst the disruptions of memory. His subconscious now existed in a way that it had not before, as a well of confusion, that overflowed with images that did not belong to the present, that offered uncoordinated seemingly unrelated elements that were taken care of by "unmechanistic ways" unfamiliar to animals. Before he could say "I am," or "I think, therefore I am," he had to come to terms with a new subconscious that distorted all perceptions of himself and others. His character was born of delusion.

The broken mind of the beast sought to restore itself, but could only do so under new terms. Restoration of the previous state was destructive to the organism. A consciousness had to be organized to seek materials to guide the organism in its disorganized condition. It had to pull what it required from the forgotten, which was not really forgotten, but which would no longer normally emerge in a flow of instinctive, directed, utilizable unconscious information that characterized the hominid. The tortures and triumphs of memory then began. The accommodation of an awareness to an uncontrollable but recognized history began. The conscious and the willful assembled together upon this small island in a sea of suppression.

Dominating the transition from a brutish to a human character was the psychological mechanism of projection which sprang from the creative gestalt. Projection is the imputation to another perceived existence or being of one's own motives and wishes. Once projection is achieved, and a world of transactions, real and imaginary, is set up.

As his own self divided through self-awareness, man's gaze was fascinated by the sky. As he questioned himself, he questioned the intangible and uncontrollable world of the skies and all its mundane effects. The fact that the heavenly forces were abstract and impersonal became a matter of concern much later for a few generations of philosophers. Primeval man did not own a neuter gender. Everything in the world was alive. He did not have to acquire an illusion permitting him to reify or anthropomorphize. For he never had made and had now no reason to make a distinction between the living and the inorganic. Projection to objects as living things was immediate. The gods came into being. What traits the gods came then to possess were the actual traits of a god as witnessed, the traits (later on) of remembered gods, the feelings and traits of mankind in chaos and birth, and such traits of life forms on earth as mankind perceived and found to be analogous to his own and those of the gods. What he saw in the sky confirmed and strengthened his projections and let them be retrojected into his own traits even more strongly. Each time this happened, there was a self-fulfilling prophecy, a growing obsessiveness, an enhanced belief that one was being threatened by sinister forces (paranoia).

Self-consciousness, the poly-ego, was a village built upon piles driven into the sands of permanent existential anxiety. It was and is a patterned and integrated architecture accommodating to the neural blockages that deter instinctive solutions. The neural blockages are stabilized by socially elaborated mechanisms that take certain forms such as rituals, theology, and logic. Further, self-awareness involved the use of symbols, first to institute an inner communication system, and then to introduce transactions with others and the outer world so as to keep the far-flung egos fully operative. Once achieved and begun, physiochemically constituted and socially founded, self-consciousness is revived post-natally in each generation.

The human poly-ego was both individual and social. Those possessed of it sensed themselves unique, and at the same time identical with their groups. It produced an anarchism at one extreme and a regimented discipline at the other that go far beyond the capabilities of the mammals. Herein lies the eternal cooperation and conflict between the individual and the group, which is the subject of so much philosophy, sociology and political science.

Self-consciousness in humans is not only awareness, as in a wakeful animal, but it is awareness of the (other) self or selves as entities. Further, the self looks at itself and at other people and objects with the same dynamic. Thus, in terms of psychopathology, the self -- the poly-selves -- is a form of delusional thought in the schizophrenic category of the split self. This usage may have developed as a convenience for considering therapy; but in actuality the poly-ego is the only human self to exist and is a system of normal and sane delusions. Since self-consciousness did not exist until the catastrophes began, the fundamental breakdown occurred only once, this in the days of creation. Repeatedly, in subsequent catastrophes, the mind might drift from its first moorings, but, with the help of culture, it would arrive at another anchorage in a new set of self-conscious delusions.

An ancient set of events is incorporated in the story of Adam (man) and Eve (woman); after having eaten of the tree of knowledge, they became shameful in their own eyes, shameful for their nakedness. From a blissful lull of unthreatened self-consciousness they passed, under the harsh command of their god, into a renewal of their self-awareness. In the millennia before the new disaster struck them, they had apparently developed a religious and symbolic world of a humanistic kind. This was the Garden of Eden, a "Golden Age" to other cultures, where apparently threats to the poly-ego, now stabilized, were few. Analogously, Giambattista Vico comments that it was the thunderbolting electricity of Jupiter that produced the first Muse, who defined "knowledge of good and evil," a power only later called "divination," [1] which then, much later, is regarded as a kind of superstition.

In the age of Yahweh, perhaps millennia afterwards, new catatstrophes of Exodus and the wilderness occurred, and the Hebrew Deuteronomy declared, (28.27-9), "The Lord will smite you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind; and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness." Thus whole groups of people might lose their ordinary minds, but never their human minds. Typically, the blows bludgeoned the self-aware mind into extreme pathological states (in human terms), but afterwards the mode of recovery was always the same. The mechanisms of the human conscious proved to be functional not only in obtaining relief from anxiety, but also at the same time in providing the goods of life. The proto-typical "madness" was "superior" for coping. So the mechanisms of the conscious found themselves to be generally released from their total service to emergency needs of disastrous times. They came to be used pragmatically for many other purposes, including the development of the useful arts and crafts and for social organization. Ultimately there occurred an everyday dissociation of the emergency and pragmatic functions of the self-aware ego.

The emergency functions, that are similar in effects to the superego, are more particularly the primordial functions, ordinarily engrossed by theology. When a new disaster occurred, when the polyego system again was deeply disturbed and dissolving, the old self displaced the new pragmatic self and recapitulated the mechanisms of defense as they were employed in the days of creation. In times of great stress and fright, it is the primordial human self that takes command, not the unconscious nor the beast. A human organism will fall into a catatonic coma or die before releasing the self-consciousness it received upon creation. It will temporalize, symbolize, and control, up to the brink of eternity. Oblivion marks the surrender or death of self-awareness.

The problems typical of the human species are in the regression of the ego-mechanisms to their primeval but human state, and not in the resurgent total triumph of the hominid. The unconscious, when reviewed, is seen to be the reservoir of hominid instincts and the suppressed or forgotten materials of experience. However, it is commanded and transformed by the primeval ego, even though physiologically coordinated with the aboriginal instinctive animal.

Whence might come such lines as these of Baudelaire?

The corridors of art and culture everywhere echo with the cries and gasps of remote recollections.

R. G. Hoskins, in his essays on schizophrenia, writes how patients describe their mental illness:

Mnemosyne (Memoria), according to a Greek legend, was the daughter of Ouranos but she bore the muses of the arts and sciences from Zeus, grandson of Ouranos and a much younger god. Thus Greek cosmogony assigned memory as an immediate effect of creation. Memory would have begun in the self-awareness of the gestalt of creation. Heavy terror worked to forge memory and forgetting. Out of the material of all things, it hammered the deepest memories.

There was too much that was too bad to remember easily, and it was forgotten [3] . Also too much was forgotten for even the unconscious sectors of the mind to bear. Recall may be regarded as the most obvious and 'rational' function of the memory mechanism, mnemotechnology; it operates, however, only if the recollection does not destabilize the poly-ego. The 'forgotten, ' that is, the memories that tend to destabilize the ego's confederational balance, provide essential subject-matter and forms to sublimate activity. They force their way into remembrance via the routes of theology, myth, literature, the practical arts and sciences, and social behavior.

The pride of man in a memory that is superior to that of the beasts is inordinate. Memory is a weak, self-imposed tool for displaying material to the conscious in a light that poorly reveals its sources. The special human memory, like everything else uniquely human, is a device that the beast may not need. But the human must have it. He does not go around picking his fundamental qualities like pretty spring flowers in a meadow.

Accompanying the primary amnesia of events themselves, is a secondary amnesia that is associated with the forgetting of events. The amnesia of man came from the primal terrors and set up the mechanism of denial, which first insists that nothing was forgotten, and then persists in denying all sorts of traumatic memories, until we find him today the congenital liar, lying both consciously and unconsciously.

Man does not remember his experiences as Hominid 'X, ' because the hominid had a conditioned reflex system that typically registered reaction, not selection; they were too boring and useless to recall; they were not layered by meanings, symbolized or acculturated; they were not history.

Further, the shock of humanization was also a shock of de-hominization. Forgetting that we were once hominids is part of the amnesia of the trauma of creation. The autonomous system of selective (though usually only apparently so) memory began with the creation condition which we chose to remember and the sublimation of the larger part of the events. All cultures have creation stories. Before creation, man was clay or animal or part-god. The gods, they tell us -- and what gods are not crazy -- give us our special schizoid minds.

The memories were in the brain, memories of all except the most trivial and fleeting of events. They were diffused around the brain but could not be called up indiscriminately. The call had to come from one of the poly-selves and then would be subject to a veto from another self or from the central government of the selves. An endless complex track or network became probably an index of symbols, an inner language. When this language was developed as a political process, in communications with others, it formed an outer or public symbolism or language. But this is only a small fraction of the inner language that connects memories. In the public language that ultimately developed were contained clusters of words that grew into creation stories, which purport to describe the days of creation of the world and of humanity. We expect the stories to be heavily veiled accounts of a true history, much like dreams that are internally distorted and censored but nevertheless lend themselves to scientific interpretation up to a degree. We see in the need for creator gods a determination to tell the truth in some way, to assert that the human was distinctly born.

Also stories were told of the environment before and during creation. In the new public language, the legends agree that there was a chaos, a formless, mindless order of the world, going nowhere until the divine intervention. We see two types of important 'fact' in this chaos. First, there is a reality, an Earth with a dense translucent encircling high firmament clouds. Second, the human is not there but is about to appear. Man appears as the canopy breaks and the gods appear.

Beyond this core of agreement, which I have not fully described here, the stories diverge. Running them together is like reciting a stream of dreams, all apparently referring to a single theme. This earliest extant public language is just what we would expect it to be, and what dreams are like, too, and what the world often appears like to persons suffering from mental illness. They hold a truth which can be deciphered.

The modern schizotype or schizophrene may get up from bed late because it takes hours to sort out his dreams from his reality. Primordial homo schizo must have had the same problem, and, if it were not for the fact that primates waste a lot of time anyhow, the new human might have been victimized for this trait. But, on the 'positive' side, he acquired many new displacements (by analogy) from his dreams, a great many wish-fulfillments that encouraged his ambitions to control the world, and a number of incredible (to us) believable orders (to himself) to sally forth and conquer the world.

To dream is to sleep, and, as the poet says, to sleep is to dream. Tinbergen says more about sleep in humans:

I can attest to this, having sleepily observed sleepers under the circumstances. I note, too, that the Spartan warriors at Thermopylae, having sent home their allies and decided to die in the approaching overwhelming assaults of the Persians, spent their time dreamily, mutually combing their long tresses, much to the surprise of Persian scouts. Tinbergen adds, then, that

The human is sleepier, or at least sleeps much more deeply and determinedly, than animals except when these hibernate. Sleep, dreams, hibernation, self-hypnosis in crisis expectancy, drifting hazes of schizophrenic displacement, catatonic cultures, sleeping culture pockets, and retreat from the dreaded or impossible; there is here an interrelated complex that helps to index some of the catatonic control operations essential to homo schizo.

The ancestor of homo schizo carried a bilateralized brain; two generalized and equally functioning hemispheres operated with a minimum of conflict. The cerebrum of Hominid 'X' was large, perhaps too large already to escape conflict arising out of intra-brain and central nervous system dyscoordination. Homo schizo inherited a larger brain, with immediate problems of electro- chemical and nutritional supply, and of neuro-transmission speeds. In homo schizo the brain conflict evades the earlier physiological compensation by moving out in all directions. So it gets less rest, is more continuously restless, awake and asleep. Rest often takes the form of diversion. As already pictured, specialization within the brain was sharply increased, and right-handedness developed. A general feeling of fear, inadequacy, and weakness was instituted that demanded obsessive attempts at self-control, which extended outwards as attempts to control the environment.

The mind of the hominid was shattered. The quantitative leap was great enough to be termed a quantavolution, a qualitative change. One of the sometimes enviable and endearing traits of higher mammals is their consistency of behavior. But we are often so bored with this quality that we search for the smallest indications of character in horses, dogs, and apes. After a night in town a drunk can mount a donkey and be carried asleep over the mountains to home; the animal is 'given his head. ' Many species, we note admiringly, have 'minds of their own. ' Actually, they do not; it is easy to trace the instinctive sources of the behavior. They do not perform many behaviors where doubt and decision are present. We can assume that the hominid was not plagued by indecision nor driven by strong needs to control himself and the world.

The human mind that eventuates is a troubled regime. The ego is a would-be dictator whose position is shaky. He can be toppled at any time when his foreign possessions - the outer world - revolt and attack him, and his inner subordinates have sufficient autonomy to join the foreign alliance or to launch a rebellion on their own initiative. Hence we say that the hominid mind broke down in quantavolution and the human ego, basing itself on the large 'lower-level' elements of the central nervous system, grew out of the chaos of the "higher level" elements. The ego, then, was never hominidal and never absolute. It came into existence as a suzerain and would-be dictator, and can be toppled or changed as its components grant or withhold loyalty. A great step of the suzereign ego is to consolidate its control by seizing and managing the right hand. In a typical neglect of transactional philosophy, it is conceived that righthandedness is "logical" inasmuch as the right side of the body is controlled by the "dominant" left brain hemisphere. May it not be more logical to conceive of the right hand as being developed by the left brain in order to strengthen the dominance of the left brain? Right-handedness is genetically predisposed, but only because the left cerebral hemisphere is genetically dominant. The left brain commissioned the right hand to be commanding officer in order to bolster its shaky regime.

Similarly, a struggle of the selves took place outside the mind, in the environment, in outer space. In this arena, we see the stars and planets, the comets, the clouds, the moon and sun. Homo schizo first saw these objects in a way that no hominid could see them. He was, we recall, striving to establish a dictator-ego, preferably to carry himself back to his golden age of instinctive bliss. The situation was, however, chaotic, and other selves were offering themselves as candidates for authority, or worse, were practicing anarchists. Here is where symbolism might play a major role as a ally of the dictator ego. If everything was to be called by name, and the code for the names were locked in the code counting and sorting computer of the brain, then whoever held the computer key was the master of the brain and body. So language was seized upon and developed by the left brain. With symbols and a strong right hand, a viable regime could be and was established.

Too, there were no limits to the symbolism. As fast as fear erupted and displaced itself, even to far space, the symbols could pursue it and control it. To name an object is to rule it. Always the principal ego was to be an uncertain despot, yet to be a magnificent one, on whose infinite territory not the sun, not even the stars, ever set. The substance of all of these operations may have taken time to occur and be realized by the self-aware human. But the implications of them were already present upon the gestalt of creation.

Humans probably became totally committed to stand and walk on two legs upon genesis. They were shifting their anatomy to conform to the global reconstitution of their mentation. Students have now shown that australopithecus was bipedal, and feel confident that homo erectus was as well. Hominid 'X', the common ancestral form of them and the human, can be imagined as preadapted to the point where he might, if he would, be bipedal. Like handedness, as soon as the ego-struggle occurred, bipedalism was pressed into service by the dominating left brain.

The human stance is unique, but the anatomy of standing is only presumed to be unique. We remind ourselves that the Indian feral child, Kamala, was totally adapted to quadruped motion to the age of perhaps eight years, and several years of training were required to get her to stand and walk voluntarily. Her muscles, tendons, hands, feet, knees, and probably her total body posture were quadrupedal. She walked on her tough palms with a full heel-to-toe motion.

A number of physiological and anatomical changes accompany bipedalism, but perhaps all are ex post facto, such as the stretching of lungs and swelling of blood vessels to the head. Most likely, bipedalism is an adaptation for which an intense determination is required. There are no commonsense reasons for it. Kamala was comfortable on all fours and could run well. The human infant, of course, crawls for a year and more before being able to stand up and toddle. Only for sophisticated human activities is bipedalism superior, which presumes that humanism came first. Primates and other mammals are physically and socially more intimate than humans, even including the great cats within their own families; they might be called more 'tangiphile. '

Bipedalism had some motive in the schizoid complex, in which aversiveness to others and ambivalence are prominent. Standing erect is a gesture of retreat and removal from others, which individuates beings. It is also a threatening and offensive posture, including the conspicuous chest-thumping that fiction-writers overrate in gorillas. It goes along with (deliberately) smelling less, and with offering less in the way of hindquarters and front-features to nuzzle and smell. It encourages genital privacy because the hand and upper torso can exercise protective movements. The first homo schizo, one may conclude, would voluntarily seize upon bipedalism, if it were not an already confirmed behavior.

Bipedalism, therefore, matched the character of homo schizo and he is determined to master it. But what was this determination or voluntariness or will? Man was supposed to possess a will; philosophers and hoi polloi have thought so for thousands of years. Recently, however, the will has been removed by the philosophers of determinism, although retained by the masses. Did events occur during the gestalt of creation to give humans a will, yet permit it to be taken away under later rational analysis?

The 'will' in hominid, we postulate, must be a 'want, ' typical of animals, therefore an instinct - basically a will to feed, fornicate, flee or fight. In the disaster of creation, the new human achieved a new primary 'want, ' to control himself and the world, to rid himself of fright. All of hominid's will - the aforesaid 'Four F's' - is subordinated, rendered secondary, to the primary will to control.

Since the will to control is conveyed to a bewildering variety of human displacements and identifications, it acquires a new complex aesthetics that deludes humans as to its nature. People (philosophers and theologians among them) came to think that they were dealing with a qualitatively distinct mechanism, whereas it was a highly diffused aspect of all human activity, capable of exponentially more fixations than the simple 'Four F's' of the beast. Some acts of obsession and compulsion came to be called 'will, ' when they pertained to objectives of positive or negative value. These, however, if we ignore value preferences and their large variety, can be reduced to the great gestalt of instinct-delay, split self, existential fear, and consequent promiscuous and obsessive need to control.

The world is as will, then, just as Hegel said. It is a delusional creation of man's poly-ego confederation playing with its kaleidoscope. This game, with its dexterity and intensity, put all other animals to shame. And individual men came to be distinguished infinitely, in their applications of will, by the way their particular minds shook their kaleidoscopes. So that one man's iron will was to win a battle, another's to win a certain mate, another's to gather money, another's to die, another's to conquer will itself by willing nothingness. Much of this diversity probably occurred promptly after the time of the primeval gestalt. Its diversity elaborated into virtuosity, which doubtlessly played a part in intimidating all surrounding conscious animal forms, including our erstwhile hominid cousins.

The hypothesis pursued here is that the gestalt of creation happened to one or two hominids, and diffused as a new dominant gene system. Were this proven untrue, we should proceed to a hypothesis of changed atmospheric constants. If this should be proven incorrect, we should retreat to a theory of psychosomatism, that combines psychosomatism, the 'omnipotence of thought, ' and potentiation of everpresent lines of development of essential living matter. If this idea should be overthrown, we would put up a last-ditch defense with a purely cultural theory of catastrophic fright overturning the hominid mind. All of these are conceived to have been quantavolutionary changes, occurring quickly and hologenetically, from the one Hominid 'X' species to the present homo sapiens schizotypus. Further, it is likely that elements of all of three entered into the actual rise of homo schizo and his further development up to the gates of history. The theory of mutation-by-mutation, adaptation, rung-by-rung, millions-of-years' evolution that is generally held today seems to be mistaken and useless. In the quantavolution of homo schizo, what happened to the Hominid 'X' ancestors, and to diverging strains such as homo erectus and Neanderthal? Many mutated, sickened, and died under the catastrophic conditions that were required to generate the new dominant gene system of mankind. Furthermore, the character of the new species was such as to intimidate the hominids and drive them into marginal living niches. Inasmuch as interbreeding was common, the human population would contain for some centuries or millennia hominid members and human members with hominid genes.

The sharp differences between the two types of creatures would encourage eugenics as a matter of course. There are many examples, in social and historical practice, of obligatory or authorized infanticide and of celibacy enforced upon special groups, tribes, serfs or slaves. Holy wars have been many. The hominids, then, insofar as they were not eliminated by segregation and extirpation, could have been subjected to absolute interdiction by the rules of birth and social nurture.

In a quantavolution by atmospheric change, the scenario of the gestalt would have been replicated in many hominidal settings. A number of humans would have promptly appeared. The transition from hominid to homo would nevertheless proceed under the conditions just stated. Might the mutations required for humanization have occurred in several hominidal settings, and thereupon and later be fed into the human gene pool via miscegenation? We would then witness, for example, a fire-making band joining a speaking band, from which speaking fire-makers would be born. But the theory of homo schizo requires that his traits should fall out from a central trait change, which we have pinpointed as the splitting of the self. The single genetic incident is fully explanatory, and it cannot admit of any but minor exceptions to the hologenesis of traits.

The necessity of natural catastrophe has been recognized, if a critical mutation of species is to be experienced. In other works and in earlier pages, I have presented the theory and evidence for such catastrophes. Strictly speaking, this external catastrophism is distinct from the internal catastrophism of creation. Man is a catastrophized animal: both external catastrophes and the internal catastrophe of his genesis have awarded him this title.

Confusion between the two types of catastrophe can occur, as it did in some earlier passages that I have published. For, not only is there the outer chaos and the inner chaos but there is also the overlapping of the natural catastrophes with the earliest experience of homo schizo. He speaks the language of catastrophe out of experience.

Critics of quantavolutionary theory can turn this around and say that homo schizo, being what I have said him to be, naturally imagines all kinds of natural catastrophes to have occurred to which he was witness; that is, he would normally have hallucinated world-destroying catastrophes; that is, he would normally have hallucinated world-destroying catastrophes. For instance, Fenichel alludes in his Psychoanalysis to the manic's desire to control the world and Sebastian de Grazia in his Political Community to the ever-present ideology of the destruction and reconstruction of the world. Can I not keep the skies swept clean and in order, leaving catastrophes to occur solely in the mind?

To this, I would respond that homo schizo's stories of great disasters are too well supported, and too well detailed, to be either imaginary or highly exaggerated tales. It might be expected, too, that people who were genetically frightened, to appease their fears, would tell stories of a golden age and a gradual progressivism of mankind, which they do; these are partly there, but by their temporary historical framing they lend support to the disaster stories, so that both types of recollections must be accorded historicity, and thereupon further analyzed.

Because the terrors were sensible manifestations of high-energy forces, delusion and reality were forever commingled in the new species. The range of thought and sense material was great, including as it did the practically infinite combinations of sense data of the high-energy events and the immediately and infinitely symbolized associations of the events with the self and group. Not only are the earliest records loaded with catastrophic events and languages, but so also are Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies.

The great variety of detail in man's innumerable culture traits is an expectable and understandable resultant of all the psychological and real events attending the creation. For every controlled and uncontrolled construction that the mind emplaces upon events and objects, there are real events to fit into it. De Santillana and H. von Dechend explicitly commend a large, though unmeasurable, quantity of historicity in Ovid's work on metamorphoses. The palaetiology of the concept of metamorphosis may rest upon an abundance of mutated and damaged organisms accompanying atmospheric and radionic disasters. To hear it told, life was never dull illo tempore.

A portion of all religious expression and practice relates to such quantavolutions, among other things. These spectra horribilem then serve as religious lessons, teaching groups and individuals of the punishing power of the gods. The same events serve to connect the celestial with the mundane, inasmuch as sky images and stars are connected with the mostly terrible changes. The lack of control over mutants raises the level of terror. Therefore, what appear to non-quantavolutionists to be unconnected, inconsistent, and unexplainable varieties of the production of human minds here and there throughout the world, acquire under quantavolutionary theory a simple logic within a single framework of explanation.

Ideally, the general scenario of the hologenesis of homo schizo would provide a highly specific scenario such as the following:

There is little more to be witnessed. As we take our leave, we are satisfied that a human culture, up to the standards of the twentieth century in most respects, will manifest itself in a scenario of fifty years into the future.

If the reader is interested in comparing scenarios, he may refer back to the "evolutionary ladder scenario" set forward earlier or to one of the "quantum speciation" school of thought, in Steven Stanley's New Evolutionary Timetable (157-8).

The human probably was born from Hominid 'X' in a brief incident that, for reasons given elsewhere, might be placed at 13,000 years ago, perhaps even a millennium or two later, but also perhaps within a 300,000 years period earlier. It would be well to fix the Holocene boundary at the point where the humans appeared. The aggregate of data on australopithecus and homo erectus promotes them to adjunct humans, also descended form Hominid 'X. ' Hence, in the preceding chapter, they were projected up the ladder of time.

John Pfeiffer, in some unusual passages, tells of how competent are the economics and how full the minds of the people of today, the Bushmen and the aboriginal Australians, deemed the simplest of humans, though living in an environment incomparably more difficult than what it once was [4] . He reports on their high mobility, the thousands of square kilometers over which they regularly range. He tells us too, of the charming dream of Louis Leakey, of a kind of dynamuseum, as I once termed such, where visitors would, each week, be transported into a different stage of human development, living as an early australopithecine one week, and the next week according to another way of life. Week by week it goes -- as if time could be collapsed and we might develop so quickly, which is true enough to be suggestive.

The homeland of mankind cannot yet be ascertained, even though we agree with Washburn and Moore that man was born only once, at one time, in one place [5] . We speculate that out of Hominid 'X', whose behavior and appearance were distinctly different from those of the "hominids," "proto-humans," and modern humans of whom we know at present, there came a macroevoluted or quantavoluted type who intermingled with and dominated these families in short order. In Chaos and Creation I drew a schematic diagram of the continents of the Earth as they were once gathered together in an all-land world. In this Pangea there occurs a location which can only be imagined today because of the ocean's opening up and the continents separating. The Caribbean region and the entrance to the Mediterranean dividing Europe and Africa were probably a single landed area with shallow seas, the legendary and geological Tethyan Sea.

This kind of area can be regarded as a possible original home of mankind, and I shall sketch here an idea of it. Basic to the argument is that Hominid 'X' existed in numbers everywhere and became human before the globe cracked, before the continents moved to their present positions, and that all of these events happened between 14,000 and 11,000 years ago. The defense of this time scale is carried in Chaos and Creation, The Lately Tortured Earth, and Solaria Binaria.

Our choice of location may be preferable to the African rift, a treasury of early finds because it has been exposed by geological erosion. Our guess may also be preferable to the speculation of Thomas Huxley (accepted by the polymath co- founder of communism, Frederick Engels) that mankind originated in a now sunken area called Lemuria, a presumed tropical zone of the West Indian Ocean alluded to in Indian and African legend; this idea does not account so well for northwestern man. The location is more likely, too, than the high Iranian plateau, which more plausibly provided a refuge for disaster survivors and only much later a mobilization area for the later descent of Indo-Europeans towards the west and south.

A race 'Atlanticus' may be represented in the proto-Mediterranean type and the aboriginal Europeans, North Africans, and seemingly Caucasoid traces of types reported in earliest American depictions and myths. The homeland is postulated at a point not too far from the focus of Atlantean legends. It follows educated guesses by early anthropologists such as Frobenius, who thought that man moved first from West to East and then back in later times. Nor does it contradict the evidence of relative movements and superposition of fossil data in the fossil and cultural discoveries of the past fifty years.

The Americas are usually considered to have been barren of human life until Holocene times, or until late in human development. I think it more likely that existing incidental evidence of man's presence in the Americas will ultimately be augmented to the point of acceptance. At present we have hundreds of items such as inter-racial picture albums (Wuthenau's Unexpected Faces), an incredible upper left second molar associated with pliohippus and other Pliocene animals, in Nebraska (evaluated between pithecanthropus and Neanderthal), and Hooton's claim of finding negroid skulls among pre-Columbian inhabitants of Mexico.

With a compacting of time, what appear to be long gaps in human development will disappear as illusions. It is probably no more implausible than other theories, that australopithecus, evolving with its Hominid 'X' form, and neo-humans moved through the then tip of South America, also down throughout Africa, thence through then-joined India, Madagascar, Antarctica, Australia, and eastwards, also, through what is now the Near East, Arabia and the South Asian islands.

Neanderthal's mixed hominidal-human group would have moved eastwards following the shores of the Tethyan belt through Turkey, Iran and China. Homo erectus, in combined human-hominidal form, would have struck North and South to the farthest extremities of Greenland and South America, and in a wide sweep westwards through Africa into the now South Asian Islands and farther north to China and beyond.

"Beyond" here means, by the Pangean theory, all the land, into which elements of all races found their way, which was exploded and blasted away in the greatest of catastrophes, that which saw the material constituting the Moon pulled out largely from what is now the Pacific Ocean Basin. Once again, the reader is referred to the statement of this theory in the aforesaid volumes.

I have mentioned earlier the controversial works of Ameghino that claimed an extremely old date for the fossils of men of the Pampas. Nor can the halt always lead the blind; a radiometric dating by the uranium-thorium method gave an age of 81,000 years for a human tool made of mammoth bone. It is from Old Crow Basin in the Yukon, and was reported by Richard Morlan of the Ottawa National Museum of Man. In California and Mexico, claims of around a quarter of a million years of age have been made for two sites of human operations [6] . Artifacts at the Calico site (California) were assigned by uranium-thorium tests an age of 200,000 ° 20,000 years. Similar dates were assigned by both fission-track dating of volcanic material and uranium dating of a camel pelvis to the Hueyatlaco (Vasequillo, Mexico) site containing sophisticated stone tools, by a second group of scientists [7] . Once again radiometric dating is thrown open to question, but also the persistent, and I believe incorrect, theory that humans came to the Americas at a very late date following the humanization of the Old World.

Upon a probable mutation, which has been described, the hominid was subjected to a general instinct-delay that left only "lower-level" and instinctive operations largely untouched (but not unreachable). The instinct-delay can be termed depersonalization, which was the first feeling of homo schizo, to be promptly succeeded by a splitting of the mind into multiple entities that ultimately became a typical human poly-ego. The depersonalization aroused the new creature to a high level of fear, a general anxiety, an existential fear, integral to its being, ineradicable. The response to the fear was a grasping for control of the selves to reestablish the former hominid consciousness and its instinctive nature. This was also permanent. The human was marked by a mania for control.

The control-mania could not stop with the selves, because the selves did not stay with the body. In the struggles among the personae, the whole world was embroiled; a splatter of displacements occurred. Streams of affect or identifications were ejected, with attachments ensuing, minimally at the level of attention. Attention extended to habit and to obsession and to a sensing of property, all being mental strategies to fix upon objects to control, thence relief of anxiety. The 'return on the investments' in real or sensed or illusory affect consummates the transactions, no matter whether with people, objects, or spirits; the transactions could be termed, also, projections and retrojections.

The outcomes of this unceasing and uniquely human transactional process are numerous. They can be grouped into:

a. Perception and attention with typical overlappings into perception disorders, hallucinations and illusions.

b. Thought, logic and analogy, moving into rationalizations, delusions and thought disorders.

c. Selective, recallable memory, often employing amnesia for fear-reduction. d. Emotional ambivalence respecting all persons and things, a mild anhedonia and general negativism, anxiety-freighted, as distinguished from the hedonic animal.

e. Aversion or the non-acceptance of apparent prima facie resolutions of human relationships, including paranoia with its fearful denial of retrojected affect and the substitution of alternative hypotheses of threat.

f. Psychosomatism, the stressing of the body to achieve higher control levels, often with healing and destructive effects.

g. Guilt and punishment, ranging among all persons, objects and spirits to discipline and erase fear.

h. Discipline and work as an outcome of attention, habit, and obsession.

i. Drug addiction for anxiety-therapy and orgiasm. j. Anxiety, which continually presents problems for solution, and, when overabundant and impractical, engenders neuroses, neurasthenia, epilepsy, and depression.

k. Internal speech, the coding of information bits and sets, in time and space, for quick retrieval by association or for computation, including speech disorders when pieces of code are compulsively expelled as speech.

l. Language, public speech, to signal and control the outside world, real and delusional, using internal code elements that others agree upon.

m. Sublimation, the elaboration of symbolic activity in a low-anxiety area of displacements.

n. Basal activities closely paralleling earlier primate behavior, such as eating, sexuality, mother-love, aggression, and fear-flight resulting from immediate threats, except that these activities are continuously subject to uniquely human interventions.

In the outpouring of his new nature, the proto-human thus exhibited new methods of handling large portions of the range of animal behavior. He could think about, talk about, and do something about a world of problems of which his ancestors were unaware. He would give a new aspect to all the ordinary activities of the earlier hominid. However, if eternal 'angst' be considered as a cost, the new person paid heavily for his virtuosity.

1. The New Science, 82.

2. "La Géante," in Baudelaire, Scarte, ed., Baltimore: Penguin, 1961, 25.

3. A. De Grazia, "Palaeoetiology of Fear and Memory," in Milton, op. cit., 31-46.

4. Op. cit., 210.

5. From Ape to Man; cf H. H. Wilder, Pedigree of the Human Race, N. Y.: Holt, 1927, 156-7; E. A. Hooton, Apes, Men, and Morons, London, 1938, 185.

6. Ruth D. Simpson, 20 Anthropological J. Canada 2( 1982), 8.

7. Virginia Steen-McIntyre et al., 16 Quarternary Res. (1981), 1.