Full Description
In this classic follow-up to his bestselling The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Joseph Chilton Pearce explains the process of acculturation and the mechanisms that create our self-limiting "cosmic egg" of consensus reality. Laying the groundwork for his later classic Magical Child, Pearce shows that we go through early childhood connecting with the world through our senses. With the development of language and the process of acculturation not only do our direct experiences of the world become much less vivid but our innate states of nonordinary consciousness become suppressed. Trapped in a specific cultural context--a "cosmic egg"--we are no longer able to have or even recognize mystical experiences not mediated by the limitations of our culture. Motivated primarily by a fear of death, our enculturation literally splits our minds and prevents us from living fully in the present. Drawing from Carlos Castaneda's writings about Don Juan and the sense of "body-knowing," Pearce explores the varieties of nonordinary consciousness that can help us return to the unencumbered consciousness of our infancy. He shows that just as we each create our own cosmic egg of reality through cultural conditioning, we also innately create a "crack" in that egg. Ultimately certain shifts in our biological development take place to offset acculturation, leaving an avenue of return to our primary state. Pearce examines the creation of the "egg" itself and ways to discover its inherent cracks to restore wholeness to our minds, release us from our fear of death, and reestablish our ability to create our own realities through imagination and biological transcendence.
Contents
Foreword by Thom Hartmann
Introduction: Radical Shifts in Viewpoint
Part One
Prelude
1 Stable Sameness
2 Sensory-Mediant-Perception
Building the Semantic Universe
3 Prediction and Control
4 Feeding and Feedback
5 Lying
6 The Death Concept
Fear and Anxiety
7 Guilty!
Until Proven Dead
8 Will to Power
9 Ace Up the Sleeve
Hope
10 Roof-Brain Chatter
The Mature Mind
Part Two
Interlude
11 Double-Mindedness
And Single Vision
12 I-Not-I
13 Mind Engineering
Operation Bootstrap
14 Playful Spirit
15 Reversibility Thinking
16 Embracing Despair
The Acceptance of Death
Notes
Bibliography
Index
