The Life and Insights of Joseph Chilton Pearce: Astonishing Capacities and Self-Inflicted Limitations

By Inner Traditions/Bear & Company

A comprehensive guide to social visionary Joseph Chilton Pearce’s work on the transcendent and magical potential of the human mind

• Explores Pearce’s most influential books, including Magical Child, sharing his life-changing insights into why we have become what we are, contrasted with the miracle nature intends us to be

• Features essential passages interwoven with Pearce’s own commentary, drawn from personal conversations and unpublished material

• Shows how Pearce’s key insights build across his books and break down core assumptions about reality and human potential

An expert in child development, Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926-2016) devoted his life to exploring the optimum development and astonishing capacities within each individual human being. Across his 12 visionary books and thousands of lectures, he blended cutting-edge science with spirituality and explored the amazing power of imagination for both children and adults--the space where we are able to play with our reality--inspiring millions to discover the human birthright of a more magical world.

In this guide to Pearce’s complete vision of transcendent human potential, Michael Mendizza explores 7 of his most influential books, sharing insights and expertise from Pearce’s full range of interests, from child development and conscious parenting to psychic phenomena and altered states to the power of the mind to shape reality.

Offering essential passages interwoven with Pearce’s own commentary, drawn from personal conversations and unpublished material, this book shows how Pearce’s key insights build across his books, breaking down core assumptions about reality and human potential. We see the importance of imagination and empathic, non-verbal forms of wisdom, which have been long overshadowed--to the peril of humanity--by verbal-intellectual skills with their abstract concepts and ideological perspectives.

Presenting Pearce’s vision of human potential from the 1950s until the end of his life, this book shares Pearce’s life-changing insights into why we have become what we are, contrasted with the miracle nature intends us to be, allowing each of us to break through our self-inflicted limitations and realize our amazing and magical potential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781644111604

Book preview

PREFACE

Saga of Spirit and Psyche

By Joseph Chilton Pearce

[Note: Joe and I were close when he wrote Biology of Transcendence. Nearing completion, he sent me a draft. Breathtaking was my reply, with one exception. I suggested that readers need to appreciate that Joe’s insights were grounded in personal experience. Joe protested, explaining that he had no interest in personalizing his observations so as to receive praise or self-promotion. After some persuasion, he followed my advice.]

As with many people, spiritual awareness arose in my fifth year, although mine centered on daybreak. Dawn was (and is) a special time, and I generally managed to be up and about to experience it. The first faint light brought waves of some ancient knowing, arising as a lump in the throat, a kind of homesickness, a shadowy remembrance; I knew not of what. Each day’s dawn was a replay of the dawn of the world, and that first dawn had some resonance deep within me. Some part of me had been around.

By my seventh year I tried always to be on Dorchester Hill at daybreak. This wind-swept and barren knoll rose not far beyond our house, and from its pinnacle one could see the sweep of the whole valley and the surrounding Appalachian Mountains. Approaching this high vantage point, longing within me rose to a pitch of intensity. As I made my way up the last yards of the slope I had the clear impression of an invisible veil, like a glass wall that separated me from it there at the top. Nearing the summit, my heart would pound; for this time I would break through and the memory and knowing would be revealed, the thought of which held a peculiar terror as well as a compulsive pull. Each morning I crested the hill; the descent began, and disappointment swept anew—again: IT had not happened, and, in a fashion, it never did.

When I was about eight I began to have a recurrent lucid dream of a gate, a kind of country gate, partly open, a dirt road winding through and beyond it. That road and gate were of ultimate, compelling significance, though of what I didn’t know. The scene was so brilliant, the colors so intense, my presence in it so vivid that I would awaken in great excitement, knowing exactly where that road and gate were. I would be up and out into our small mountain town at the first light, to find it. When I was ten, and the proud owner of an ancient, dilapidated bicycle, my wheels expedited the early-morning explorations, but the searches remained in vain, the gate unfound, the road not taken.

Throughout my childhood I was a passionate lover of the Episcopal Church and the hottest acolyte in the Southwest Virginia Diocese. (As in the Roman Church, the acolyte assists the priest in the various ceremonials at the altar, a stately, dignified, and dramatic pageantry.) At age twelve the diocese offered me a scholarship, which would send me to the best prep school in the South, from there to the university, and finally to the seminary, so that I, too, might be frocked and shepherd a flock. I was elated, my mother scornful. She refused the offer for me, ours being a family of honorable newspaper people, my uncles country editors, city editors, writers. The same country weekly had been in the family for more than a century. With the greatest scorn she said, Joseph, all nice people go to church, but they don’t let it go to their heads. And I was not to let it go to mine. So much for my rich spiritual heritage.

In mid-adolescence three states or conditions of mind arose as the center of my life: one was an intense idealism, a noble set of standards so lofty only Jesus had lived up to them (surely not I nor anyone I knew).

A second issue was an affliction I later termed hidden greatness, a constant exuberant bubbling up of my own enormous, exultant personal stature and importance, a depth and magnificence of being within me that no one out-there could possibly have detected. (I was, then and always, minuscule in size and profoundly nondescript in appearance.) I avidly adopted Walt Whitman’s lines Dazzling and tremendous, how quick the sunrise would kill me, if I could not now and always send sunrise out of me. This sunrise arose as a bubbling exultancy from deep in my very bowels of being and burst out of me like a shout.

The third was even more intense. I later labeled this The Great Expectation. An ever-present conviction that something tremendous was supposed to happen arose and grew continually stronger. And IT—whatever IT was—was supposed to happen immediately, this very day, hour, second, right around the corner, over the next hill. Decades later, following a talk in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a couple shared with me a letter from their son, a junior at an Eastern university, a top scholar, athlete, and big-man-on-campus. His letter addressed, he said, an issue of such magnitude he could trust sharing it only with his parents.

He had awakened in the middle of the night, he wrote, with the cold hand of terror clutching my heart. The issue was—that ever since he was about fourteen—he had been waiting for something tremendous that was supposed to happen. It was something so huge and ultimately important he had no way to speak of it and had quietly nursed the longing in his heart. The terror seizing him in the night, he explained, was his approaching twenty-first birthday, and his realization that for seven years he had been waiting for IT to happen, IT had not happened, and in that dark moment he knew that IT was never going to happen. I can live with the fact that IT will never happen, he concluded, but find it difficult to accept that I shall never even know what IT was supposed to have been.

Long before my own twenty-first year, the great expectation was usurped by World War II and the Army Air Corps where I spent my own late adolescence. There I sat through many an atrocity-based Why-We-Fight film, designed to incite us future pilots and bombardiers toward the mass murder required of all good airmen. In rare spare moments I read snatches of Will Durant’s view of history,*1 and, in light of Will and Ariel’s wisdom and the horrors viewed on screen, I dutifully became an atheist. I secretly held to my long-cherished romantic image and love of Jesus, however, a kind of closet affair of heart that had grown over the years. Of God, I had my severe doubts; of Jesus as the greatest of humans and model for us all, I had none.

In my twenty-second year, warmongering long past, I had three black-out experiences, which ushered me into the world of subtle, or psychic, phenomena—experiences that were to become pivotal. The three episodes took place within the same month, concerned the same event, and followed the same pattern each time. All this upset my roommate, who happened to be there as witness to each occasion. An enormous weight would suddenly bear down on me, literally pressing me out of my ordinary conscious state. The first time it occurred as I crossed the room, and I dropped to the floor like a stone. Each time I found myself in a state of clear, if bodiless, awareness, observing the hand of my girl, who was some three hundred miles distant, writing me a letter. She, the single greatest love of my life, was writing to explain why our intense relationship of four years must end. Three different times she wrote, explaining her case in different ways, and in each case some corresponding knowing within me knocked me out of my body to observe her in the very moment of her writing. On coming back to normal I went into a most abnormal emotional tailspin of no small proportion, my roommate aghast and perplexed.

Each time, the actual letter dutifully arrived a few days afterward. Each time my roommate brought in the mail; each time, without taking the letter from him I quoted him the exact contents of her letter, burned into my brain as it were; each time he opened, read, and paled—my reportage identical to the missive.

Such events could be explained as simple precognizance, remote viewing, or some such parapsychological label, except for one critical point. In that peculiar subtle world, I was directly present with her being itself—the very core and spirit of her. I was not just in her presence but somehow fused with her very presence itself. And her presence had always been the most unique and unmistakable state I had ever or would ever know. In that direct presence, I argued passionately with her concerning her decision, a veritable death sentence to me. And she dialogued with me in just the patient, gentle manner she always had, explaining her case. We were each discrete and separate from our bodies, mine knocked out, hers busy writing, both of us as a peculiar unity of communion, observing that hand writing that fateful letter.

Later, when I read Carl Jung’s theory of the anima, I knew that Jung had but a small angle on this huge, awesome, intense, and magnificent mystery. I had experienced my living anima those three times on a level I had not known in the flesh itself. And precisely this subtle-ethereal mirror world, right beyond the material one, was to prove, years later, the key or gateway to the most intense mystical experience of my life, an event that nearly ruined me for the ordinary world thereafter, in fact. At that time years later, my anima materialized physically when I was in an ordinary wake state, fused with me cell by cell, in a long agony of ecstasy, which then led to our joined state fusing with what I can only call the universal itself. Among many things, this later event led me to know that human sexuality, when it unfolds within a spiritual mantle of love, is the gateway to the highest transcendence.

(We met again in our midfifties, this first great love and I, in the normal domain of the world of fleshly bodies, and realized that the peculiar connection of identity-intimacy on that subtle level had always been there, right below the surface in each of our lives, though we had gone our separate bodily ways.)

The following year—my twenty-third—I discovered a bizarre, non-ordinary state for which I later borrowed, or stole, the scholarly sounding title of non-conflicted behavior. This was an ongoing episode that laid the foundations, and later impelled me to write, my first book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. Although in that book I gave no detailed account of this major crack in my own egg, for concern over reader credibility, I approached the subject obliquely. (I began the book in 1958, which was a most conservative period, in contrast to the seventies wherein the new-age era had burst loose, and I published my book.)

The origins of this non-conflicted phenomenon lay in my conviction that a major part of me had died because of the loss of my anima-love the year before. A kind of pseudo-suicidal recklessness would seize me, an I couldn’t care less disregard of consequence that could border on the irrational. A final gross extremity of this reckless abandon led to a breakthrough of knowing that took place in a split-instant of decision within me, with no transition or preparation. I discovered, as it were, how to simply bypass my body’s most ancient instincts for self-preservation, defense, or protectiveness. This brought a loss of all caution and an absence of fear for that particular time and that particular event. And events occurred that were considered impossible under the ordinary conditions of our world.

Unconflicted behavior manifested, it seemed, from a split-instant decision—without qualification or rationale—that death was a foregone conclusion, an integral part of that very event-moment, already within me; not a possibility to be avoided but one to be accepted since it was already accomplished; it had already happened. I was struck by the hilarious thought you can’t kill a dead man and found myself in a state of a high ringing clarity I thought of as a world of invisible taut brass wires. (I have no notion where that analogy image came from.)

Having accepted death without hidden qualification, I could not be threatened then by the possibility of death—or harm—of any kind, and felt oddly invulnerable. I seemed to stand on the cusp between being and nonbeing, walking the line between subtle and physical, straddling the fence separating the subtle and physical. This shift of perspective gave what the anthropologist Mircea Eliade termed the ability to intervene in the ontological constructs of the universe. This was Eliade’s scholarly description of the non-ordinary events brought about by Tibetan yogis, with whom Eliade spent ten years back in the 1930s. (I read his magnificent account Yoga: Immortality and Freedom years later.

I found that in any extreme or even ordinary daily event, through a kind of willful, voluntary throwing away of self and self-preservation, the ordinary course of events could be reversed, changed, or modified. This was not one part of my mind playing games of let’s pretend with other parts. My whole being moved in total accord with my acceptance of non-being as simultaneously an equal part with my being in that moment. Again, this was not some lofty psychological or spiritual death of ego, loss of self, or any such aggrandizement, but rather a peculiar acceptance of death as a foregone conclusive part of that moment. Therefore, there was nothing to lose! And, I found that in that state, that fire—no matter how extreme—did not have to burn me, nor gravity hold me, nor ordinary cause produce its ordinary effect over a wide range of events.

To find that the structure of reality was negotiable when one was free of all internal conflict was a momentous discovery. And I realized that all internal conflict is produced by our fear of possible harm or death. The great irony of this is that there exists for us a state in which harm really can’t happen within a particular single event if we bypass our block of fear and open ourselves to this other perspective.

To fully rid one’s self of the fear of death or injury is nonsense since the body has a mind of its own, and it never changes its mind. But one can accept one’s death as already an accomplished fact of this instant moment and so can be carried beyond that mind of the body, and beyond the fear of death that lies in a different worldview.

I was delighted to find the work of neuroscientist Paul MacLean and his half century of research at the National Institutes of Health, on the triune nature of our brain, the fact that we have within our heads three radically different brains and behaviors, including that basic body-brain. Through MacLean’s work I saw how fear of any kind throws us into an ancient survival mentality that literally shuts down all higher modes of evolutionary awareness. And these higher modes of our neural system hold an open-ended possibility through which we can modify, modulate, and change the reality structure of that moment. When Carlos Castaneda*2 brought out his remarkable books, I saw that he clearly knew that fear of death blocks us from our full spectrum of humanity and potential. (Whether one accepts Castaneda’s literary vehicle for presenting this fact or not is beside the point. He certainly knew about and must have experienced this truth—and far more fully than most of us.)

Further, I was to eventually realize that this was the very issue of the cross and my hero-model’s willingness to be crucified. Someone had to break through this deadlock on our species’ consciousness if our evolution were to unfold and we were to develop the higher neural structures nature had worked out for us. Through this development alone we can be delivered from our murderousness toward ourselves and each other, this violent murderousness of which our fear of death ironically drives us. So our greatest hero and model did what he could for us, there two millennia back, misinterpreted and mythologized as his efforts were.

During this period of my life I had classes all day at the university and worked an eight-hour graveyard shift all night, six nights a week. I was doing poorly at both and walking in my sleep. In general desperation I found that through the same shift of cause-effect brought about by reckless abandon, I could turn over to IT the actual operation of that infernal IBM machine I ran all night, and IT would run the machine for me. This was a high-speed operation wherein error was frequent and costly. But through unconflicted behavior I could turn the machine over to IT, and I could sleep throughout my entire night shift. And sleep I did, quite genuinely, dreams and all, yet with eyes open and body busy, IT handling everything. The difference was that IT then ran that machine and was infallible. IT couldn’t err so long as I trusted IT implicitly.

The details need not concern us here, but there were thousands of items to process each night. Every operator was supposed to close out at every bundle of sixty or a hundred items, in order to balance—a simple but time-consuming maneuver that checked to make sure no errors occurred either in our work or that of the operator of the previous shift providing us with our items to process. It was a bank clearing house, and an error of one cent would halt an operator’s production until the entry in error was found, even if it took all night and day! Errors occurred continually, and error checkers moved up and down the rows of machines to help trace the mistakes, all of which slowed production. I, a total novice to this work and a newcomer on the job, was suddenly running several thousand more items a night than anyone else, with no errors at all, and balancing perfectly at the end of the shift.

I was immediately the boy wonder. What no one knew was that I never closed out at each individual packet of items as required. I didn’t close out and check my balance until the end of the night when the shift was over since to do so woke me up and broke the flow of things. And for something like three months I ran more items than anyone ever had without making any errors at all. This was near unbelievable to everyone, including my superiors. IT did such superior work I was given two raises.

Sleep, however, was my bonus and my carefully guarded secret, until one morning my supervisor discovered by chance that I had closed out and balanced only at the end of my shift. You would have thought I had violated his mother! An error among those fourteen or fifteen thousand items could have taken all day to trace, and though no errors had occurred, I was threatened with immediate dismissal if I did not close out periodically as required. My explanations were limp and unconvincing to say the least, and with anxious eyes following my work from that point, I had no choice but to comply. The result was that I made loads of errors, ran far fewer items, and again slept through my classes all day.

Closing out itself was not the issue, I realized later. Rather, the issue was that I had to unconditionally trust IT to run the machine and closing out would have been, in effect, admission that IT was not infallible. And such doubt would instantly reinstate my usual human condition of conflicted behavior—not trusting myself. Unconflicted behavior opens only to a state free of doubt of any sort, and while this offers a completely different mode of operations, it is also a perfect catch-22 paradox. Unconflicted behavior occurs only in a state free of doubt, yet only that unconflicted behavior grants such a state. Don’t go near the water till you can swim is a tame comparable paradox. That is why the opening to and decision for the state were simultaneous events, not linear, and so not at all subject to any form of logic. Castaneda’s metaphor of a cubic centimeter of chance seems a rather wide margin of tolerance for the lightning speed with which this opportunity opens and closes almost as a single pulse, unless we fall through it. This is why our Great Model [Jesus] urged us to be aware, awake, because we never knew at what instant IT or he or whatever might come.

The most bizarre unconflicted event of my life happened at the Palos Verdes cliffs some miles outside Los Angeles, the city where I attended university. The cliffs were extremely high and virtually sheer, rising straight up from the ocean, similar to the far more firm and steady cliffs north of San Diego where much hang gliding takes place today. The cliffs were also rotten, as it was called, a loose conglomerate of shale, sand, and rocks that made them extremely unstable. Huge cave-ins occurred frequently, large chunks of earth falling into the ocean. Most of the area within fifty feet of the cliff edge was roped off with warning signs not to go beyond.

Eventually that whole section of peninsula literally slid off into the ocean, and many large elaborate homes were lost. At that time, however, back in 1950, Palos Verdes was undeveloped, largely open, and a favorite picnic and hiking place. Skipping details, friends and I chose to picnic right on the cliff ’s edge, in spite of warning signs, as the young and foolish are apt to do. A friend and I hiked down to the ocean far below by a long winding trail some distance away and picked our way along the boulder-strewn beach to what we deemed, correctly, to be below our picnic spot and friends, high above. My friend, knowing of my extreme vertigo (I had refused to go anywhere near the edge up there) jokingly challenged me to climb the cliff with him, even though it was quite rotten indeed and almost vertical. Not to be chicken, the term for people like me back then, I went along, though terrified. We got no more than ten, maybe fifteen feet up when the whole section began to simply crumble, and down we dumped, covered with sand and shale, white and shaken.

On looking at my friend’s pale face, that peculiar quirk leaped inside me, that instant knowing of what can be done if one throws one’s self away. I’m going up, I said without fanfare, and started up again, my friend shouting that I was crazy, he wasn’t responsible, he wouldn’t carry my body out of there, and so on. I simply started up and kept going, my assuredness absolute. I knew I could not fall or be hurt. Every single handhold, every toehold, collapsed under my weight and almost immediately I could see nothing up ahead of me for the dust and debris that was falling from my handholds. I knew, however, that so long as I didn’t stop, even for a second, as though to search for a hand- or foothold, that all was well, and I would continue to go up. I knew that any hesitancy, the most fleeting shadow of doubt, would be the end of me, and this knowing gave a most extraordinary sense of freedom and sheer joy.

I went up very fast, amid a peculiar whistling sound, which formed around me, perhaps from the enormous gulps of dusty air my exertion demanded. I felt that I was embedded in layers of whistles, layers of sound, which both sustained me, and through which I moved. At one point I glanced down through the dirt and dust and spotted my friend on the beach, a tiny ant figure immensely far below. At that sight my exultancy grew to wild dimensions, and within what seemed but a moment my feet and legs were no longer scratching and clawing into the cliff face as they had been. Only my hands were now in contact, while my body was swinging, back and forth, beneath my upstretched arms. I was not moving vertically, but at a backward diagonal, the cliff face arching overhead toward the ocean behind me.

I had come to the overhang of cliff on which we had made our picnic, an overhang formed by the roots of the scrub growth covering the small area. With my body swinging free, looking down and seeing no cliff at all, just space, I experienced the single most exuberant joy I would ever know, increasing my clawing kind of swimming up and out through dirt, debris, and space. What my hands found to grasp is a mystery, but suddenly they grabbed what I knew to be grass, and I was up and over the edge. And there before me was the rest of the picnic group, astonished, to say the least, over this apparition suddenly coming up from thin air.

The great bubbling up of exuberance within me was now so intense that I was completely incoherent. I began to shout, a peculiar screaming kind of animal Tarzan cry of triumph that roared up from my body without any volition or control. I pounded the ground, pounded my chest, and screamed, for, I was told later, some ten minutes or more. By then my friend, seriously upset, had come up from the long, roundabout trail.

The upshot was we all went back to the site the next weekend to settle the arguments of belief or disbelief by checking out that impossible passage. Some doubted their memory and the whole event when we viewed that treacherous overhang from the vantage point of another neighboring overhang. My friend on the beach was subdued and silent, for indeed, he had watched as I traversed the near-sheer cliff face in a veritable landslide of rocks and sand and then some twenty feet of that reverse incline, going out toward the ocean as well as up. My sensation of body swinging freely below my hands had been quite genuine. The logic of the event just didn’t add up.

In retrospect I realized that my wild and near hysterical elation was somehow connected with having accepted and taken into myself, so to speak, my death, and then in some manner, gone beyond it.

My next discovery was that an unconflicted person has dominion over a conflicted or divided person. This doesn’t have to imply a demonic domination but simply demonstrates the difference between the states of conflicted and unconflicted behavior. I was immune to danger or disaster in any unfolding event so long as I remembered to let IT do the job and not allow myself to have a knee-jerk reflex and fall into fear. Miraculous or impossible events could unfold once I abandoned all hope and turned events over to this peculiar form of will.

Again, however, I found that this was never a negotiable decision; one either accepts this instant opening and falls into it as it opens or not. It is always an instantaneous offering made in a split instant or on behalf of an actual event itself, but only in the moment of that event. And one either agrees or not in that very same split instant. No thought is involved in such a decision since there is no time for such, and thought inevitably brings doubt.

Back in the early 1980s mathematician Ralph Straugh, having completed all the levels of the Japanese martial art Aikido and four years of work with Moshe Feldenkrais*3 in Israel, told me that no person can attack another without a deep, non-ordinary level of agreement between aggressor and victim. I recalled Meister Eckhart†4 saying, Listen, when this birth takes place within you, no creature can hinder you. The birth Eckhart referred to was the birth of God in the soul, but there are undeniable similarities between Straugh and Eckhart’s point of view. There are many names for and facets of the shifts our spirit can bring about. This isn’t a religious, theoretical, philosophical, or semantic issue, nor one of logic. This is the alogical crack in the egg of reality and the way creator and created give rise to each other.

The automatic dominance of a person in unconflicted behavior over an ordinary conflicted person brought matters to a head for me. I found that by shifting into unconflicted behavior I could sell anything to anybody. I dropped my all-night schizoid battle with IBM’s machinery and became a salesman, and of all things—sterling silver (the only opening for a raw recruit who had never sold anything). Selling to poor, innocent, working girls and struggling housewives, I made more in my first two weeks than I would have made in a year at that all-night IBM balancing act.

These extraordinary money coups began to bring a strong resurgence of that exultant exuberance bubbling up that I had known in adolescence and at that cliff event, and like a smitten gambler I began to play with the power, to test it to see just how far and to what wild extremity the effect would work. I found no discernible limits. And though this was more than fifty years ago I recall the final event of this long episode as clearly as though it were yesterday.

It was past midnight; I had run out of appointments to prospective customers and was heading for home. I noticed that the neighborhood through which I was passing was the address of a prospect just given me by my last customer. Why not stop and make one more sale? Who needs an appointment? So what that it was past midnight? I’d just give it a go. The prospect of such a new, unknown, and risky departure shot my adrenaline and expectancy sky high.

The small, modest home was obviously shut down for the night—not a light anywhere. I pounded on the door until a woman in her late middle age cracked the door a bit to demand who was pounding at such an ungodly hour. I asked for the name of the party given, it was her daughter, long since asleep, and the door slammed. Excitement rose in me even more and pounding resumed. One thing led to another, and finally I had my whole magnificent display of silver on their dining room table, under full light, sleepy daughter in hair curlers, distraught mother in her house wrapper, and a big hulking but bewildered father gaping, as I went pell-mell on with my sales pitch. The irate mother kept screaming at her husband to throw me out. Throw this little mouse out, throw him out of the house. What’s the matter with you?

At each new outburst of rage against me, that bubbling up of sheer joy and intense excitement welled up even greater, and I began to laugh until tears streamed down. I knew that they couldn’t lay a hand on me, that I had them already. The more I laughed the more angry and bewildered they became, the more surely they lost control, and the more vulnerable they were. The sale was a foregone conclusion.

Now the odd thing was, when I left some hours later, with the down payment on a very large order in my pocket, both mother and father walked me to the door, arms around me, and begged me to come back and visit them. This peculiar twist of things had happened before under less extreme circumstances, but this one was my undoing. I saw that the average person, in their conflicted state of uncertainty, doubt, and fear, which was surely my ordinary state, was not only powerless in the face of unconflicted behavior but also seriously attracted to the state. Beneath their reactions of anger and frustration a longing within them had been touched. This brought in a whole new perspective to this new perspective itself.

I saw that for myself this unconflicted behavior was a common garden variety of the temptations in the wilderness, just as my hero-model had undergone on his far higher plane two millennia back. And I knew, by my personal reaction of gleeful, gloating exuberance over the domination possible, that I had nowhere near the personal character nor wisdom to handle such a force. I was seriously appalled over the entire affair; that last midnight romp weighed heavily on my conscience. So much more was at stake here, and I was using that stake to con some poor family out of their earnings. My great model had said, To him who has, it’s given, more and more, and to him who hasn’t, it’s taken away, even that little he has. What was growing in me more and more surely had its demonic edge, and my impoverished character and paltry spirit were no doubt further shriveling.

I understood that this principle of growth or shrinkage refers not to some divinely chosen action for us, nor was it in any way a judgment concerning our actions, but simply the underlying way by which our world works, and what happens to our actions and investments of self. If we fall for the demonic it takes over and can grow more and more, just as its opposite, the divine or benevolent. There was a huge difference between discovering that fire didn’t have to burn or gravity hold when life is at stake and pawning silverware off onto hardworking people to line my own pocket. And I doubted that I had neither the discernment to know which was which, nor the character to respond appropriately.

So, not from noble virtue or lofty principle, but from fear and trembling, knowing that I was hopelessly out of my depth, I quit selling then and there and resisted any temptation to monkey around any further with the ontological constructs of my world. Eventually I took another job, held on somehow at the university, and played it straight. And eventually I lost my intimate contact with this opening into another part of myself and reality, though later I fell back on it in a couple of situations of dire extremity.

In my thirty-second year, sitting in my office in silent, wordless contemplation one day, I felt the presence of my hero-model strongly and fell out of my body into a vast ocean of silence that left nothing to report on, once coming back into my ordinary state. Thereafter for some three years I moved in a fluid drive wherein everything worked to perfection, with almost no effort on my part. I knew myself and family to be ultimately cared for, nurtured, intimately loved, and protected by some deep interior place within. This fall into grace was preceded by an intensely exciting period of discovery. I had, among many great writings, read Paul Tillich’s*5 mammoth Systematics of Theology in its entirety, a huge trilogy my department head confessed he had despaired of reading but which I found both a challenge and delight. I read every available work of Søren Kierkegaard’s, and wondered how his book Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing†6 could be at once the most soul-shattering, unhinging event and yet an exquisite intellectual-aesthetic-spiritual feast.

And so, I began working on my first book, which was to become, twelve years later, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg . . .

1

The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (1971)

Challenging Constructs of Mind and Reality

THE BACKSTORY FROM JOE

From an Interview with Michael Mendizza

My first book, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, which I wrote and rewrote for twelve years, was a protest against the prevailing academic consensus view, which narrows our perceptions and limits us to grim necessity, as William Blake would say, to the death of spirit.

In my twenty-third year of life I underwent a series of paranormal events, which challenged the foundations of classical thought. These events took place with abundant objective witnesses. Over time, however, I watched how these witnesses screened out or blurred