Michael Mendizza - The Life and Insights of Joseph Chilton Pearce

THE LIFE AND INSIGHTS OF

JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE

The Life and Insights of Joseph Chilton Pearce, edited by Michael Mendizza, reveals how Pearce, a modern-day sage, endowed with the courage, strength, and perseverance to challenge conventional worldviews, offered humanity original and penetrating insights into our transcendent nature and vast creativity. Joes brilliant and original works represent a profound and important contribution toward healing our global dysfunction and ensuring the healthy development of future generations.

BRUCE H. LIPTON, PH.D.,STEM CELL BIOLOGIST, EPIGENETIC SCIENCE PIONEER, AND AUTHOR OF THE BIOLOGY OF BELIEF AND THE HONEYMOON EFFECT

For many of us, Joseph Chilton Pearces 1971 book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, was an early introduction to the mystery and awe of creation. The journey he took through his subsequent books is even more astonishing. This brilliant recap and summary of his work is a must-read for anybody interested in finding the deeper meaning of life and lifes experiences.

THOM HARTMANN,AUTHOR OF THE LAST HOURS OF ANCIENT SUNLIGHT

Joe Pearces rare genius was the way he applied his multidimensional wisdom to a deeper understanding of a childs total development. In my case, he was literally the teachers teacher. I will never forget him once telling me, Teachers teach who they are, not what they know.

CHRIS MERCOGLIANO,AUTHOR OF IN DEFENSE OF CHILDHOOD: PROTECTING KIDS INNER WILDNESS

What a gift to have this distillation of so many of Joes insights in one place! Being with him was an experience of the model imperative that we all must have. His writings represent a unique contribution to the deepening challenges we all face today.

RAHIMA BALDWIN DANCY, WALDORF EDUCATOR AND AUTHOR OF YOU ARE YOUR CHILDS FIRST TEACHER

Joe remains a giant. The Life and Insights of Joseph Chilton Pearce is priceless. Joe validated, enriched, and added practical substance to my lifelong quest to better understand the critical importance of play. Without Joes clear descriptions that play is learning, my explorations would have been less complete. Joe was inspiring, a role model and mentor.

STUART BROWN, M.D.,FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR PLAY

Joseph Chilton Pearces insights into what human beings can be inspired the founding of Kindred World. Michael Mendizza guides us through Pearces decades of synthesized, cross-cultural fields of science and deeply integrated wisdom toward a welcome and truer vision of humanitys amazing capacities. This book describes the new story we all need right now.

LISA REAGAN,FOUNDER OF KINDRED WORLD

When I first found Pearces work after training as a psychological researcher, I was enthralled. As I moved away from a rigid mind-set, oriented toward material measurement and control, and back to an interdisciplinary perspective where all truth exists, the seeds planted by Pearce are now reaching fruition at the Evolved Nest. I am forever grateful that he had the courage to share his wisdom and that Michael Mendizza has kept it alive.

DARCIA NARVAEZ,PROFESSOR EMERITA OF PSYCHOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME AND AUTHOR OFNEUROBIOLOGY AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN MORALITY

EDITORS FOREWORD

Joes Quest for Discovery, Awakening, and Renewal

One can mechanically copy, imitate, and repeat; but real learningat any agethe kind of learning that is experienced by the elite athlete, creative artist, or true scientist, is a focused act of discovery about ourselves and our place in the world. Because life is so vast, subtle, complex, and mysterious, the greatest challenge every human faces is to know thyself. This supreme and forever deepening and expanding act of discovery is a personal and private inner experience. It is a revelation much grander than any idea or concept to be studied. And for the rare, the very few who make this ongoing discovery, their lifes passion is revealed and must be shared. And so they do.

Because of their passion, because of their depth of personal experience and synthesis, every once in a while that thing called greatness emerges. Not great in comparison to another, but great in the unique story being shared and how that sharing awakens something fresh, new, and powerful in others, something that may never have been discovered without this new story and the unique way it is being told. Joseph Chilton Pearce would turn up his nose at such a pompous accusation of greatness. But he was, and his insights are, potentially life-changing for all who listen, behold, and embody the stories he shared with millions around the world.

There was a single driving quest, something mysterious yet so real and tangible that Joe could not let go. When asked why he explored the unifying mystery in all of his writings, he replied, To understand our astonishing capacities and self-inflicted limitations.

And what are our self-inflicted limitations? Very simply, we dont understand the nature of our own mind. Therefore, our approaches to parenting, schooling, higher education, organized religions, the corporate and private sector, each of these, in their own way, creates a reality that is in conflict with our true nature, which is nature with its astonishing creative capacities.

Joes collected works are one coherent, lifelong exploration of these basic questions: What are we and are we expressing the miracle nature intended, and if not, why? Each of Joes books represents a new vista, a unique point of view. Each book is also simultaneously part of a larger whole. Each volume digs deeper, expanding this mystery and creating a new vantage point to launch the next exploration.

As author/businessman Stephen Covey wrote in Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, The first habit is to begin with the end in mind. This anthology of Joes life and insights offers this endto begin ones journey with Joe into the mystery of what we are and might still become.

Joe complained of being pigeonholed. Indeed, childhood is the experience that sculpts the adult. To understand where we end, we must look carefully at where we began. Approaching Joes insights is often like the parable of three blind men describing an elephant. One declares, The elephant is like a snake. No, it is like a tree, says the next. No, no, insists the third, it is like a wall.

Readers of his best-known book, Magical Child, will assume that Joe was interested in child development, and he was. Reading The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, one assumes he was interested in altered states, ESP, and so-called psychic phenomena. All these assumptions are true but miss the larger meaning that Joe explored and shared.

The Life and Insights of Joseph Chilton Pearce is the first book to draw together and explore Joseph Chilton Pearces complete vision of our transcendent human potential.

My twenty-five-year journey with Joseph Chilton Pearce began in a room, in the late 1980s, with twenty wide-eyed adults, staring in amazement and complete attention. Some of us sat in chairs, some on cushions, in a meeting room at Esalen Institute, high above the rugged Big Sur coast of California. For two days, eight hours each day, chalk in hand, a shrimp of a man, but a giant in vision, without notes, hardly taking a breath, carried everyone in the room on a wild ride into unknown yet longed-for territory. He told us that in the years since World War II, the environment we call childhood changed more and faster than any time in history. It was frightening and exhilarating. We had an opportunity to parent a completely new and more evolved generation, and Joe was handing us the key.