Pearce - The heart-mind matrix: how the heart can teach the mind new ways to think

Dedicated to Michael Mendizza

THE HEART-MIND MATRIX

Of the hundreds of books about evolution I have read, some ofwhich Ive written myself, this book best captures the sense ofwhat evolution is. It takes you into a realm of celestial playfulnessto provide a sense of its living presence, of what it feels like. It islike the difference between looking at evolution through a microscope,or laid out in charts on a wall, and feeling yourself withinit, part of itand able to do something about it.

DAVID LOYE,
AUTHOR OF DARWINS LOST THEORY
AND DARWINS SECOND REVOLUTION

In 20 years of personal experience I have found Joe Pearce to beoriginal, provocative, challenging, insightful, courageous, painfullyhonest, humble, and generous beyond reasonwhich placeshim in my book right alongside David Bohm, Ashley Montagu,Krishnamurti, Socrates, and other world teachers.

MICHAEL MENDIZZA,
COAUTHOR OF MAGICAL PARENT, MAGICAL CHILD

The startling arc of Joe Pearces vision has proved true time andagain. We ignore him at our own peril.

LEE NICHOL,EDITOR OF THE ESSENTIAL DAVID BOHM

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Lee Nichol should be listed as coauthor of this little volume of mine, for certainly he was a major force in shaping its structure, making it coherent and logical, and bringing it to publishable form. (He quietly turned down my suggestion of coauthorship.) In well over a half-century of writing and working with editors, however, none has brought the caliber of logical clarity, intelligence, and capacity for literary organization, as Lee. Just to find someone who could intuit my intent and meaning in the often-jumbled hodgepodge of my writing was itself rewarding. So, in this matter of having been blest by a brilliant and splendid editor I must leave much unsaid other than, Thank you, Lee.

This books dedication to Michael Mendizza is a logical parallel-companion to the above praise for Lee Nichol. Michael has been a loyal and constant supporter for some twenty or more years, aiding my efforts in many different, quiet, but critically important ways. Fittingly enough, in their younger years, both Michael and Lee were involved in filming, editing, and helping in the chronicling and publications of the thoughts, writings, and general works of the physicist-philosopher David Bohm (long a hero of mine, cited in my first book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, five decades or so ago, and a serious influence since).

In addition, I am equally thankful to Robert Sardello, to whom I dedicated my last book, The Death of Religion and Rebirth of Spirit. Sardello is easily one of the most important figures and influences in my life, particularly in these closing years of mine. Now I stand doubly grateful to him for his generous foreword to this current effort. Rather unintentionally, perhaps, Sardellos foreword seems virtually a guide to reading the book itself, as well as a key insight to its intent and contents.

So, with these several lines of force converging here, to my good fortune and for which I am grateful, I conclude, last but not least, with acknowledgment of my good wife Karens patient support, and the continual editorial help of my daughter Marian, a skilled and thoughtful writer in her own right. Marians ongoing readings and critical advice have continually helped clarify where I too often and so easily become murky and unclear.

FOREWORD

By Robert Sardello

This book is a many-leveled, polysymphonic writing on the human spirit that can be heard on one level or many intertwining levels simultaneously. I hope to alert you to a reading style that allows the sentences to resonate within your bodily being, wherein the book has the power to heal our disturbed brains. When Joe Pearce writes that the childs most important inner directive is to maintain contact with his or her caretaker or nurturing one, and explore the world out there, he speaks to deep and forgotten recesses of the soul. We can hear a resonance going beyond those who nurtured us initially, and open again to a full soul contact with an all-nurturing Source.

The first half of this book shows how imbued we all are with the pathologies of our present day, and just noticing and becoming aware of these pathologies can be a marked advance for us. To notice, for example, how we are continually beset with subtle contradictions in social directives, such as, Good job, hope you can keep it up. Such everyday happenings are usually passed by, but one begins to sense the contradictory opening up and cramping in of the body that ensues; or becoming aware that our attention is constantly split in dozens of different directions through habits so ingrained they seem part of the inbuilt wiring of the brain, pathologies that are given top value in our multitasking world; or to become aware of and notice our constant anxiety, defensiveness, and underlying fears, amid the equal offerings of ways to medicate or drug them away.

A small dimension of freedom and creativity still exists for us, seated in the prefrontal cortex of our brain, but unnoticed in the ever-present pull toward the fear- and survival-centered lower brain. Just noticing, becoming aware of our capacity for noticing itself, we find such capacity within us existing in perfect calm, a center that can re-establish coherence, an inner body harmony with the widest spiritual reaches, though typically overpowered by the negative commands of a culture of fear. Just holding to the small act of the freedom to notice, to become aware, will show, as your reading proceeds, not only what is at stake in doing so, but how this awareness can intensify and increase in resonance.

Such noticing is quite different from a self-therapeutic psychology. This noticing is of a spiritual nature based in the capacity of attention, an intention that can be very focused and yet diffused at the same timewe might say here within and wide open simultaneously.

This book addresses not just the severely critical concerns of our culture and time, but points toward our capacity and wisdom to go through the thick of the world and discover that right here, in the midst of chaos, is where Spirit is to be recovered. This thankfully spares us the wispy sort of spirituality that abandons the world for some supposed heights of the ecstatic. Indeed, most spirituality is not only otherworld oriented, it is also anti-this worldan escapist spirituality that opens the door for the very abuses that validate our destructive culture.

So to really see what is going on in the chaotic conglomerate of culture, one has to swim in it with acute awareness and be able to recover, by deep searching and sifting for the spiritual elements present, those which provide a re-orientation from within. This project, it seems to me, is the essence of the tactic taken by this book. It comes, perhaps, from the wisdom of a life that never made the false split of spirit and world in the first place.

This may sound heavy, but no self-sacrifice or heaviness is involved in the spiritual endeavor this author has followed for decades. Rather, it comes with the insight of the spiritual nature of playawareness that when one truly plays, one is also being played with in loving care by the spiritual Source. Free of the cultural pressures of competition with its winners and losers, here is the invitation to enter into that true play always at hand, on every level.