Arthur Koestler
in Janus: A Summing Up --

The Parable of the Unsolicited Gift

The crucial point is that in creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark... The archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest representative of homo sapiens-- the Cro-Magnon man who enters the scene a hundred thousand years ago or earlier-- was already endowed with a brain which in size and shape is indistinguishable from ours. But however paradoxical it sounds, he hardly made any use of that luxury organ. He remained an illiterate cave dweller and for millennium after millennium, went on manufacturing spears, bows and arrows of the same primitive type, while the organ which was to take man to the moon was already there, ready for use, inside his skull. Thus the evolution of the brain overshot the mark by a time factor of astronomical magnitude. This paradox is not easy to grasp; in The Ghost in the Machine, I tried to illustrate it by a bit of science fiction which I called the parable of the unsolicited gift:

"There was once a poor, illiterate shopkeeper in an Arab bazaar, called Ali, who, not being very good at doing sums, was always cheated by his customers-- instead of cheating them, as it should be. So he prayed every night to Allah for the present of an abacus-- that venerable contraption for adding and subtracting by pushing beads along wires.

But some malicious djin forwarded his prayers to the wrong branch of the heavenly Mail Order Department, and so one morning, arriving at the bazaar, Ali found his stall transformed into a multi-storey, steel-framed building, housing the latest I.B.M. computer with instrument panels covering all the walls, with thousands of fluorescent oscillators, dials, magic eyes, et cetera; and an instruction book of several hundred pages-- which, being illiterate, he could not read.

However, after days of useless fiddling with this or that dial, he flew into a rage and started kicking a shiny, delicate panel. The shocks disturbed one of the machine's millions of electronic circuits, and after a while Ali discovered to his delight that if he kicked that panel, say, three times and afterwards five times, one of the dials showed the figure eight. He thanked Allah for having sent him such a pretty abacus, and continued to use the machine to add up two and three, happily unaware that it was capable of deriving Einstein's equations in a jiffy, or predicting the orbits of planets and stars, thousands of years ahead.

Ali's children, then his grandchildren, inherited the machine and the secret of kicking the same panel; but it took hundreds of generations until they learned to use it even for the purpose of simple multiplication. We ourselves are Ali's descendants, and though we have discovered many other ways of putting the machine to work, we have still only learned to utilise a very small fraction of the potentials of its million of circuits. For the unsolicited gift is of course the human brain. As for the instruction book, it is lost-- if it ever existed. Plato maintains that it did once-- but that is hearsay..."

A Fragment of the Text

...I shall conclude this book with a kind of credo, the origin of which dates some forty years back, to the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 I spent several months in the Nationalists’ prison in Seville, as a suspected spy, threatened with execution. During that period, in solitary confinement, I had some experiences which seemed to me close to the mystics "oceanic feeling" and which I subsequently tried to describe in an autobiographical account. (The Invisible Writing, 1953) I called those experiences "the hours by the window." The extract which follows, though rather loosely formulated, reflects what one may call "an agnostic's credo":

"The ‘hours by the window’ had filled me with a direct certainty that a higher order of reality existed, and that it alone invested existence with meaning.

The narrow world of sensory perception constituted the first order; this perceptual world was enveloped by the conceptual world which contained phenomena not directly perceivable, such as atoms, electromagnetic fields or curved space. This second order of reality filled in the gaps and gave meaning to the absurd patchiness of the sensory world.

In the same manner, the third order of reality enveloped, interpenetrated, and gave meaning to the second. It contained ‘occult’ phenomena which could not be apprehended or explained either on the sensory or on the conceptual level, and yet occasionally invaded them like spiritual meteors piercing the primitive’s vaulted sky. Just as the conceptual order showed up the illusions and distortions of the senses, so the third order revealed that time, space and causality, that the isolation, separateness, and spatio temporal limitations of the self were merely optical illusions on the next higher level.

If illusions of the first type were taken at face value, then the sun was drowning every night in the sea, and a mote in the eye was larger than the moon; and if the conceptual world was mistaken for ultimate reality, the world became an equally absurd tale, told by an idiot or by idiot-electrons which caused little children to be run over by motor cars, and little Andalusian peasants to be shot through heart, mouth and eyes, without rhyme or reason. Just as one could not feel the pull of a magnet with one’s skin, so one could not hope to grasp in cognate terms the nature of ultimate reality. It was a text written in invisible ink; and though one could not read it, the knowledge that it existed was sufficient to alter the texture of one's existence, and make one's actions conform to the text.

I liked to spin out this metaphor. The captain of a ship sets out with a sealed order in his pocket which he is only permitted to open on the high seas. He looks forward to that moment which will end all un­certainty; but when the moment arrives and he tears the envelope open, he finds only an invisible text which defies all attempts at chemical treatment. Now and then a word becomes visible, or a figure denoting a meridian; then it fades again. He will never know the exact wording of the order; nor whether he has complied with it or failed in his mission. But his awareness of the order in his pocket, even though it cannot be deciphered, makes him think and act differently from the captain of a pleasure-cruiser or of a pirate ship.

I also liked to think that the founders of religions, prophets, saints and seers had at moments been able to read a fragment of the invisible text; after which they had so much padded, dramatized and ornamented it, that they themselves could no longer tell what parts of it were authentic...."