I’m not done with my survey of wacky 1940’s science fiction, but I’m finding that I can’t proceed without taking a break to define more clearly what I mean by “higher knowledge.”

I’ve made a variety of assertions about higher knowledge in the course of these entries. Each of them is true within its own frame of reference, but they come at the subject from different angles and have different implications, and I suspect that even my own thinking on the subject has gotten a bit fuzzy and could use some sorting out.

I suggested two years ago that from a scientific viewpoint, higher knowledge can be understood in terms of a theory that the human brain generates sudden “neuronal avalanches,” which spark intuitive insights by creating novel connections among scattered bits of information.

When I first mentioned this idea, I associated it with recent speculation that an evolutionary leap to a new form of brain organization around 80,000 years ago might have distinguished us modern humans from our equally intelligent but less creative forebears. I still believe that, but I’m now convinced that the change must go back fully 200,000 years, to the very dawn of our species, and that we humans have from the start been the people of higher knowledge.

The theory of neuronal avalanches, however, can only take us so far — because our sudden intuitive flashes lead not only to the recognition of new relationships among existing information, but also to what appear to be profound insights into the nature of reality itself.

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Heinlein’s story Waldo is endlessly fascinating but also endlessly frustrating, because it is so self-contradictory. It starts off as a sharply delineated roadmap of the shift from reason to chaos — but then abruptly turns on its heels and attempts to stuff chaos back into the box of scientific materialism. And there’s no obvious reason why.

The story presents us with two very different representatives of higher knowledge. One is the ancient hex doctor, Gramps Schneider, who still holds by the assumptions of the reason vision and apparently regards the Other World as a literal spirit realm. The other is the mad Dr. Rambeau, who embraces chaos and sees the universe as a place of total uncertainty where anything can happen.

Waldo, in contrast, has absolutely no awareness of higher knowledge and believes only in scientific materialism.. He dismisses Rambeau as unhinged but is willing to give credence to Schneider’s statements — at least to the extent that he can redefine them in his own materialistic terms.

He therefore starts by assuming that “everything Schneider had to say was coldly factual and enlightened, rather than allegorical and superstitious.” This leads him to the conclusion that Schneider must be describing an alternate universe, “a literal, physical ‘Other World’ … even though he had not used conventional scientific phraseology.” And on that basis, Waldo develops a theory in which both occultism and Fortean anomalies can be plausibly explained “from the standpoint of a coextensive additional continuum.”

A similar argument can be found in many SF stories of the period where superstitious native beliefs are shown to have a rational scientific foundation. In this case, however, Heinlein leaves the reader with a not-so-subtle implication that Gramps Schneider is the person of genuine knowledge and Waldo the hapless native trapped in an overly-limited frame of reference.

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I’ve kept feeling that I got off course at the end of the previous entry when I suggested that in the 1940’s the focus of transcendence shifted decisively from matter to mind. That’s not exactly untrue, but it’s a considerable oversimplification — so I think I need to backtrack a bit and start over.

Just before I went astray, I was saying that the primary task of any inner experience-based vision is to reconcile our intimations of higher reality with our experience of ordinary reality — which in practice means formulating those intimations in a way that is compatible with the most recent science-based vision.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, science was understood in terms of a philosophy of strict materialism, and the physical universe was believed to consist solely of atoms hurtling through empty space. This mechanistic universe didn’t allow much room for transcendence, but that didn’t matter as long as it could be viewed as a clockwork mechanism designed according to a pattern in the Mind of God.

It was only when the reason vision failed, and with it the divine guarantee of higher purpose, that the uncompromising nature of scientific materialism became an intolerable burden. Suddenly it seemed that the physical universe was merely a vast but hollow machine and that the human mind — no longer a microcosm of the Mind of God — was a cosmic orphan, staring helplessly into the void.

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The account that the mad inventor in Fredric Brown’s “Paradox Lost” gives of himself may provide the most obvious way to make sense of the story’s wacky events, but we don’t necessarily have to take his assertions at face value. If we focus instead on the experiences of the “normal” Shorty McCabe, a very different picture emerges.

From Shorty’s point of view, the weirdness starts while he is sitting in a boring college class in the year 1943, listening to his philosophy professor drone on about the difference between impossible and unpossible and keeping his mind occupied by thinking up nonsense phrases and watching a blue bottle fly buzz around the room.

Suddenly the fly zooms down from the ceiling, passing an inch in front of Shorty’s nose, and vanishes into thin air. Shorty stretches his hand out to where he last saw it — and his fingers vanish from sight as well. So he tosses a few paper clips to determine the size and shape of this hole into nothingness, then stands up, takes a step forward, and finds himself in “blackness.”

At that moment, someone sneezes.

It’s the mad inventor, of course. He acts annoyed, telling Shorty, “You’ve got no business here,” but eventually he softens up and explains that Shorty is still in the same classroom, only now in the year 1948. He encourages Shorty to grope around in the darkness, and Shorty’s hand encounters “something soft that felt like hair.” He tugs on it and it jerks away.

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Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore were not the only SF writers of the early 40’s who were eager to reinterpret higher knowledge in terms compatible with the chaos vision. The story that immediately followed “The Proud Robot” in the October 1943 issue of Astounding — Fredric Brown’s “Paradox Lost” — was an even more bizarre exploration of chaos and higher reality.

I briefly mentioned “Paradox Lost” a couple of years ago, when I was first discussing the chaos vision. Its central figure is a mad scientist — driven mad, he says, by dwelling on time travel paradoxes — who has invented an imaginary time machine in which he travels to the past to hunt dinosaurs with slingshots. But in addition to the general wackiness of the story, there is a serious philosophical underpinning.

“Matter is a concept of consciousness,” the madman patiently explains to the viewpoint character, Shorty McCabe, whom he has lured out of a boring college lecture and hauled along with him to the Jurassic. “Now there is a normal concept of matter, which you share, and a whole flock of abnormal ones. The abnormal ones sort of get together.”

“I don’t quite understand,” Shorty replies. “You mean that you have a secret society of . . . uh . . . lunatics, who . . . uh . . . live in a different world, as it were?”

“Not as it were,” the little man answers, “but as it weren’t. And it isn’t a secret society, or anything organized that way. It just is. We project into two universes, in a manner of speaking. One is normal; our bodies are born there, and of course, they stay there. … But we have another existence, in our minds. That’s where I am, and that’s where you are at the moment, in my mind. I’m not really here, either.”

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The brief period between 1926, when Lovecraft wrote “The Call of Cthulhu,” and 1928, when it appeared in Weird Tales, was marked by a revolutionary change in the scientific worldview, as the explosive development of quantum mechanics substituted randomness for certainty and chaos for dogmatism.

Modern science fiction was born of this same shift in attitudes. Hugo Gernsback may have hoped when he launched Amazing Stories in 1926 that it would serve as a vehicle for sober scientific anticipations in fictional form, but both the title he chose for it and the original fiction he began to publish by 1928 revealed the untamed magic at its heart.

Amazing and its imitators were generally inhospitable to occult themes, but weird science was their bread and butter. It might be fair to say that the primary agenda of 1930’s and early 40’s SF was to bring weird science under human control and use it to establish domination over the vast, indifferent cosmos and the daemons of unplumbed space.

But although aspects of the chaos vision contributed to the new understanding of science which made that agenda possible, the physical universe as conceived by the cosmic engineers of the 30’s afforded little room for higher knowledge.

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The 1920’s were a strange and dislocated time — and much of that dislocation had to do with the uneasy transition from reason to chaos.

For more than two hundred years, Western civilization had been grounded in a pair of reassuring assumptions. One was that the world was constructed according to a kind of blueprint in the Mind of God. The other was that human reason, being made in the image of Divine Reason, had an inherent capacity to decipher the underlying Order of Nature and thereby approach the Mind of God.

This interpretation of higher knowledge as rational enlightenment remained unquestioned through the 1700’s and into the 1800’s, but during the late 19th century it was progressively undermined by modern science. Darwinian evolution dealt the heaviest blow when it suggested that the order of nature was the product not of intelligent design but of the brutal and indifferent operation of natural selection, but the physical sciences also appeared to be pointing in the direction of a cosmos that was humanly incomprehensible.

Between 1900 and the 1920’s, it became commonplace for writers and artists to suggest that the universe made no sense, that human beings were controlled not by reason but by primitive subconscious urges, and that if there was a God he must be either a gibbering idiot or perversely cruel and capricious.

Charles Fort stands out as the rare individual who was capable of stating these conclusions frankly, humorously, and with considerable generosity of spirit. However, the writer of this period who expressed the emerging chaos vision with the greatest intensity and precision was H.P. Lovecraft.

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Now that I’ve finished my survey of the deep supernatural waters of the spirit, revelation, and reason visions, I realize to my surprise that I’ve never done the same for chaos. I’ve examined the philosophical and psychological aspects of the chaos vision in some detail — emphasizing its focus on intuitive insight and spontaneous action as the keys to dealing with a random and nonsensical universe — but I’ve left out out all the really weird stuff.

If I’ve been downplaying the magical side of chaos in hopes of making it appear more serious and respectable, that was a mistake. Strange beliefs and hallucinatory experiences have been as central to hipsters and hippies as they were to Renaissance mages or Iron Age prophets or prehistoric shamans.

On the other hand, the chaos vision itself hasn’t always been prepared to admit to its true magical heart. It seems as though each vision starts off with a concern to appear plausible in light of existing beliefs and only reveals its stranger side once the preceding vision of the same type has failed. It then loses its transcendent edge again as it gains broad popular acceptance.

The revelation vision, for example, was most fervent in its pursuit of higher knowledge between the loss of faith in the old gods around 800 BC and the reestablishment of religious orthodoxy after 300 AD. The reason vision similarly made its leap to natural magic when traditional religion stumbled in the 1400’s and was reduced to mere rationality after it gained dominance in the early 1700’s. And in much the same way, the chaos vision was at its peak between the great disillusionment that accompanied World War I and the start of the 60’s counterculture.

I first encountered chaos as an adolescent in the 1960’s, which has no doubt colored my perceptions of it. The most epitomal expressions of chaos, however, are to be found among its devotees of the preceding half-century.

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It seems to be a general rule that every one of the historical sequence of visions I have been discussing in these entries is at its most dynamic during the final stage of its emergence — when it is not yet in a position of cultural dominance but serves as the chief center of opposition to things-as-they-are. That is when it draws the most fervent acolytes, entertains the most radical heresies, and generates the most breathtaking works of art and literature.

Since about 1976, for example, the holism vision has fulfilled that role, inspiring both environmentalists and computer hackers to defy the orthodoxies of the era of democracy-and-chaos. But holism is nearing the end of that phase and will soon lose its original purity and intensity as it moves into the mainstream and becomes the template for actual changes in the way our society operates.

The same pattern can be seen in the three inner experience-based visions that I reviewed in the previous entry. The spirit vision, for example, appears to have been at its peak of creative power during the Paleolithic, when it oversaw the birth of art and music and literature and everything else that makes us fully human. But by the Neolithic, the energy was moving elsewhere — first into the technological achievements associated with the domestication of plants and animals and then into the far-reaching social changes that accompanied the rise of civilization.

The primary focus would not swing back to inner experience until the era of profound philosophical and religious speculation that lasted from roughly 800 BC to 300 AD. The doings of the Hebrew prophets and the writing of the Old Testament largely fall within the peak period of that era, between about 550 and 300 BC. So do the rise of Zoroastrianism in Persia, of Buddhism in India, and of Confucianism and Taoism in China. All these philosophical and religious movements came about in reaction to the loss of faith in the old gods, and all attempted to rework the materials of the spirit vision in more credible terms.

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In my recent entries on creative imagination, I’ve been speaking of the chaos vision as if it was past history — but this is very far from the truth.

Chaos may have lost its transcendent edge back in the 70’s, but it’s still one of the dominant visions of our culture and will be for another generation yet to come. This means it is worth looking closely at what role the chaos vision currently plays in public affairs and how it might change under the influence of holism and multiculturalism during the next decade.

Before I can do that, however, I need to provide a clearer account of chaos than I’ve ever quite managed.

A friend who follows these entries recently remarked that he’s never understood why I chose to use the term “chaos” rather than a more obvious label like “consciousness.” I’ve been thinking it over, and my answer is that “chaos” most accurately describes the shifting and uncertain territory of myth space as experienced by rational-minded 19th and 20th century folk who thought they had put all that old, weird stuff behind them. Chaos is the native environment of Lewis Carroll, H.P. Lovecraft, and Monty Python.

“Consciousness,” on the other hand, is a word associated with the holism vision. It refers to a scientific theory of mind as an emergent property of the physical universe and takes little or no account of higher knowledge.

But the deeper question is why the modern Western world should have experienced higher knowledge as chaotic and disorienting — and to answer that I have to refer back to the three inner experience visions which preceded chaos

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