Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg from Chuck Robison on Vimeo.
We interviewed Joseph Chilton Pearce at The Monroe Institute in Fabor, Virginia as part of the 40 Days and 40 Nights Video Tour in October 2011. For nearly half a century, Joe has been probing the mysteries of the human mind. Author of The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, Magical Child Matures, Bond of Power, and Evolution’s End, one of his overriding passions remains the study of what he calls the “unfolding” of intelligence in children.
He is a self-avowed iconoclast, unafraid to speak out against the myriad ways in which contemporary American culture fails to nurture the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual needs and yearnings of our young people. Part scholar, part scientist, part mystic, part itinerant teacher, Pearce keeps in close touch with the most brilliant men and women in each field. He creates a unique synthesis of their work and translates the results into a common language.
His most recent book, Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit: A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart (2007), 
is critically important for where we are now. Our organized religions are stuck in centuries of a particular way of thinking that makes it very difficult to address the changes going on the world of thought today.
Over and over on this tour we met brilliant thinkers and scientists who are making the journey from the intellect to the heart along an unchartered and unmapped path. In our interview, Joe shows us the importance of living from the heart, regardless of what the mind says.
We are also posting this interview on our You Tube Channel where you will find this interview and many of our prior interviews. In the event your internet connection is too slow for Vimeo to work quickly, this is the place to go for a fast solution! We hope you like this addition!
Glad you interviewed Joseph Chilton Pearce. He’s really a
remarkable man. Do you know his age? I think his new
book is exactly for NOW. If people know what sex can do
for them spiritually, the world would change for the better
soon.
I have thoroughly studied over a period of several years some of Mr. Pearce’s books and writings, including his latest book, The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit. I do indeed like the title. I too have similarly studied several of Mr. Krishna’s books and writings. I found them all to be helpful in my spiritual growth and development. Prior to these studies I had undergone several radical Kundalini awakening experiences, which I prefer to call simply spiritual experiences or spiritual awakenings, or a radical rebirth or transformation of conscience. Or perhaps even more preferable, the re-awakening of love and its full cultivation in ‘living action’.
And while I find both Mr. Krishna and Mr. Pearce deeply or even brilliantly insightful into the nature of the human condition, I find too they both have fallen short of the mark. By which I mean that they and their works will have little, if any, impact in bringing the Light of truth, love, and understanding into our dark and ever-so-rapidly-decaying human world in any truly effective manner. While Mr. Krishna can rightly be said to have been enlightened, I find his greatest blunder was his focusing on the scientific investigation of the Kundalini experience in lieu of focusing on total self-knowing/self-overcoming. From which alone he might have developed an effective approach for the genuine awakening of some others. For instance, if he were alive I would ask him just why it was that he happened to experience a genuine kundalini awakening and why it is that so very, very few others ever do? And if they do why do they almost always fall back again into the fundamentally false and spiritless parentally and societally conditioned self, rather then them flowering into full bloom or fullness of human being? I too would ask him whether a genuinely enlightened or transformed mind or conscience is necessarily a sound, harmoniously balanced, and all-knowing mind? Or, let’s say, a mind that is ‘perfectly’ in alignment with the knowledge and the will of God, or the knowledge and the will of evolution, if you prefer. Personally I feel strongly that such a mind has not yet existed in all of human history. Hence the continuing and tragically irreversable (for the vast multitude) moral and spiritual degeneration of the human species.
Mr. Pearce I find is a good example of how deeply insightful and knowledgable a man can be and yet not be genuinely or fully enlightened or of a radically transformed and thereby fully enlivened mind, body, and spirit. And consequently has, like Mr. Krishna, also fallen short of the full glory of God, or again, the full glory of evolution, if you prefer. Quite frankly I feel Mr. Pearce has never ‘let-go-absolutely’ and made the journey deep down into the abyss (“The valley of the shadow of death”). Though I too feel he ‘was’ capable of doing so, but lacked the courage to completely let go of worldly security, which includes seeking security in knowledge. Which must be done if one is to be successful in “making the journey from the intellect to the heart” in its totality. Many people talk of this journey, but unless one fully reaches the heart or the heart-mode they will never attain to ‘Pure Spirit’. Nor will they be of much, if any, value in helping some (a few) of their fellows to successfully make the same journey.
My tragic, and painfully arrived at, view of the human condition is that only 2 to 5% of humanity are capable of radical transformation and attaining to fullness and completeness of human being. These 2 to 5% being those who by the grace of God, or by the hand of fate, if you prefer, have experienced favorable circumstances in the critical early formative or developmental years of their lives, which resulted in their having been ‘gifted’ with a finely-formed and highly-sensitive conscience. A conscience that has an extraordinarily keen perception of rightness and goodness, including the ability to intuitively and rightly perceive what is and what is not full and authentic human behavior and being. I think here of the observations of J. Krishnamurti (who was my finest mentor) that “our conscience is formed by our conditioning” and that “my inner awareness was always there” (‘extraordinarily keen’ inner awareness I would add). Yet in spite of all of Krishnamurti’s insight and brilliance he too was lacking in self-knowledge and also lacked the courage to clearly understand the deeply tragic nature of the ‘fallen’ human condition. As a result he wound up being but another name on the long list of failed world teachers or failed messiahs, which he was clearly aware of at the end of his days. On that list I would also include all of the presently living self-proclaimed enlightened men. And for the same reason. A genuine radical shift in conscience or consciousness may have indeed taken place in them, but they failed to continue on with the total perfecting of their entire organism (mind, body, and spirit). Consequently they become complacently self-satisfied and settle for a shallow and totally ineffective intellectually based understanding of enlightenment rather than one that’s deeply intuitive and painfully experientially based. Which is an indication to me that while they may have a reasonably well-formed conscience they’re still lacking in both sensitivity and the courage for the truth. Beginning of course with the truth about themselves. True and full enlightenment (and the path to it) permits no room for mediocrity (half-heartedness), worldly security-seeking, or self-centeredness. I would add here that writing books can be a meritorious adventure, but more often than not writing books is simply a means of avoiding rigorously honest and unending self-overcoming.
Another critical blunder of Mr. Krishna was that he “purposely refrained from narrating some of the more bizarre incidents (that took place in his awakening) even in his autobiography, “Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man”, because he felt they would be unacceptable to the rational mind” (http://www.ecomall.com/biz/text.htm). He failed to realize that a ‘rational mind’ (a mind that’s inextricably bound up in reason and logic – which is the case with the vast majority of human beings) has no chance whatsoever of awakening and discovering new being and ‘told it all’, so to speak.
I shall end with the following view of Nietzsche, of which I’m in full agreement with: “The hero of the future will be a man of tragic awareness.”
Excellent comment, Robert Michael….