The classic follow-up to the bestselling The Crack in the Cosmic Egg

• Explains the process of acculturation and the mechanisms that create our self-limiting “cosmic egg” of consensus reality

• Reveals how our biological development innately creates a “crack” in our cosmic egg--leaving a way to return to the unencumbered consciousness of childhood

• Explores ways to discover and explore the “crack” to restore wholeness to our minds and reestablish our ability to create our own realities

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.

Joseph Chilton Pearce is the author of several books, including The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, and The Biology of Transcendence. Since the early 1970s, he has been teaching at universities throughout the world about the changing needs of our children and the development of human society. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

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