Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg - Softcover

Pearce, Joseph Chilton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671448633 ISBN 13: 9780671448639

Publisher: Pocket Books, 1975

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

“...Pearce’s transcendent work still motivates us to explore the true nature of ourselves and creation, and is as relevant today in a world dominated by a sociocultural mata-program as it was when it was first written about in 1971.” (Ruth Parnell, Nexus, June 2014)

About the Author

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926-2016) is the author of The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of the Spirit, The Biology of Transcendence, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, and Evolution’s End. For more than 35 years, he lectured and led workshops teaching about the changing needs of children and the development of human society. He lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Publication date: 1975
• ISBN 10: 0671448633
• ISBN 13: 9780671448639
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English