The Life and Insights of Joseph Chilton Pearce

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926-2016) was an expert in child development who devoted his life to exploring how we could actualise our highest potential and capacities while drawing on the power of imagination and play. This book provides a contextualisation featuring seven of his major books over a 40-year period, each of which builds on the last towards a biology of transcendence, the rebirth of the spirit, and the centrality of the heart-mind matrix in developing creative intelligence at the level of wisdom-insight that also requires secure bonding. The verbal-intellectual knowing of the left hemisphere is insufficient, and it is fascinating to see how he draws on the work of David Bohm, regarding his Implicate Order as the source of such wisdom-insight while also emphasising the importance of spiritual practice in the emerging process. Our bodies also contain multiple intelligences that can be compromised by stress. Pearce regards the brain as the way mind is in physical reality where thought, consciousness and insight form a trinity: 'body is an instrument of brain; brain is an instrument of mind; mind can be considered an instrument of consciousness, which, in this sense, can be considered as an instrument of insight-intelligence' - as also noted by Wilder Penfield.

Insight-intelligence is also the level of Spirit and Self to which we must open for a full expression of our potential, which includes heart-mind bonding – completely absent from academic settings. It is only through the heart that unity and communion can arise: 'without brain, heart is nothing. Without heart, brain is nothing.' We now find ourselves in the dangerous situation of having created what Pearce calls a cultural counterfeit in virtual reality, which constitutes 'about 90% of a young person's entire experience on a sensorimotor level in this world.' The average six-month-old infant already spends two hours a day in front of a backlit screen, and the average five-year-old American child has spent 6,000 hours watching TV – hence the construction of reality has now become virtual rather than real, bypassing 'all the structures of the brain involved in relationships' and replacing real-life play with computer games – a situation exacerbated during the pandemic and potentially leading to a further diminution of empathy. The book contains important messages which we neglect our peril.