The cosmic egg is in effect culture, culture being a virtual reality created by forcing us to comply with sets of behavior from the moment of birth on and modifying our own behavior and world view according to that of our culture around us.  This includes the world as we’ll ever know it so to escape this is not an easy thing.  It happens continually.  But the culture denies any experience that is not part of culture.” Our true development begins when we transcend the limitations imposed by culture and this implies discovering a new identity.

What is the cosmic egg?  What is the crack?  And what do we see when we look through the crack as opposed to looking through the egg?

Of course the cosmic egg is an ancient imagery.  It really is I think the end of ages.  Looking at the world we experience as the cosmic egg and when you say I began with my book “Crack”, of course my discovery of the “Crack”, “Crack in the Cosmic Egg” was long before that, just really long before that time.  I would summarize by seeing the cosmic egg as the whole realm of thought in which we are born and brought up and that shapes our whole perceptual conceptual system.  We think we have a perception out of which we then draw some conceptual ideals.  But the truth of the matter is you can never draw a line between concept and percept. They each derive of the other, one of those strange loop interacting processes within the mind brain.  The sum total of all this that makes up our livable world and gives us a place in which to be, we could call it culture, I call it culture, or the cosmic egg.  The cosmic egg is in effect culture.  Then we have to define culture and I would simply say almost a virtual reality created by forcing us to comply with sets of behavior from the moment of birth on and modifying our own behavior and world view according to that of our culture around us.  The culture around us includes the world as we’ll ever know it will be that culture.  So to escape this is not an easy thing.  It happens continually.  There are breaks or cracks in our cosmic egg continually but the eggs moves instantly to seal the crack.  That was a comment I made in my very first book.  Oh sure we’ve got a crack in the cosmic egg but that egg will re-seal in a big hurry and maintain stability of the cultural structure.

The sealing of it over is generally from the whole ambient in which we’re taking part, the whole culture.  And to find that trying to move through a crack in that cultural egg brings sensor from everyone you meet because as Suzanne Linder said, “Our greatest fear is a collapse into chaos,” should our ideation, our idea of what things are, our whole conceptual system, should that fail us, because then we’re in chaos and we really are afraid of that.  So if we break through into a realm beyond the cultural realm, immediately the whole culture is going to point their finger at us.  We fell that and then we’re suffering not only isolation from the culture but the fact that we are a threat to the culture.  Let this happen to even the infant child a few times and it’s an unpleasant place to be.  So little by little we capitulate and give in to the cosmic egg and don’t go near any boundaries that it sets up for us because it’s risky in every sense.  The scientific world operates that way.  The religious world operates that way.  The social, all the rest of it, their boundaries which maintain themselves and you don’t break those boundaries lightly.