Attachment Parenting / BondingChild developmentConscious Parenting

The Biology Of Transcendence: A Tribute To The Genius Of Joseph Chilton Pearce

By Jay Taylor On Aug 24, 2016

Pioneering ‘Magical Child’ author Joseph Chilton Pearce passed away last night, aged 90, in his home with his family around him. He is being buried today on the wooded land surrounding the home he built on a mountainside as a young man.

Joe, as he preferred to be called, had lived a long and fabulously insightful life. His legacy will live on in the hearts, minds and lives of many. If you haven’t heard of him before, I hope that this tribute will inspire you to discover his work…

He may not have been a mainstream name, but Joseph Chilton Pearce‘s work had a huge impact on many highly influential minds – indeed, the Touch the Future Foundation which he inspired is a meeting ground for some of the most brilliant authors, thinkers, scientists and pioneers of our times: Bruce Lipton, Marshall Rosenberg, Fred O. Donaldson, Jean Liedloff, Rupert Sheldrake, James W. Prescott, David Bohm, Gabor mate, Michael Mendizza…the list goes on and on. As Joe himself said, “We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of a world, but to the reality of other thinkers.” If you’re going to think in ways that change your experience of the world for the better, you could pick a worse starting point than the likes of these people!

I found Joe’s work in early pregnancy, whilst researching alternatives to school. What I read in his books (first ‘The Biology of Transcendence’ and then ‘Magical Child’, ‘Crack in the Cosmic Egg’, and more) resonated with me immediately. His writing on what he referred to as “unconflicted behaviour”, and the ways in which being in this state this facilitates optimum functioning was exactly my own experience: the crippling doubt put into us by being cast out of this state by the adulteration process holds us back and makes our lives a misery. It also stops us from blossoming fully into the playful, life-serving individual we come here primed to be.

“You can’t have real learning with a child unless they are playing. Real playing is how real learning takes place. You can have conditioning, like Pavlov conditioning his dogs; or behaviour modifications through other means which we look on as very serious, and which we generally call learning, but it’s not learning. It’s conditioning.”

“Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.”

Joe’s writings on the intelligence of the heart were cutting edge at the time of writing – his reportage on the work of the Heartmath Institute, given added depth by extensive research and his own personal experience, was a revelation:“I can’t in a brief time share with you the full implications of neurocardiology except to say three things:

Firstly, about 65% of all the cells in the heart are neural cells which areprecisely the same as in the brain, functioning in precisely the same way; monitoring and maintaining control of the entire mind/brain/body physical process as well as direct unmediated connections between the heart and the emotional, cognitive structures of the brain.

Secondly, the heart is the major endocrine glandular structure of the body, which Roget found to be producing the hormones that profoundly affect the operations of body, brain, and mind.

Thirdly, the heart produces two and a half watts of electrical energy at each pulsation, creating an electromagnetic field identical to the electromagnetic field around the earth. The electromagnetic field of the heart surrounds the body from a distance of twelve to twenty-five feet outward and encompasses power waves such as radio and light waves which comprise the principle source of information upon which the body and brain build our neural conception and perception of the world itself.

This opens up the greatest mystery we’ll ever face.” – Joseph Chilton Pearce

Photo – ‘Magical Child’ by Jay Taylor

Reading Joe’s books helped me to raise my daughter as the ‘Magical Child’ which we all inherently are. Indeed, his work on mother-child bonding was largely responsible for introducing me to the world of conscious, or ‘attachment’ parenting, and thereby gifting us both with the tools to truly fall in love with each other and stay that way: gentle home birth, co-sleeping, ‘extended’ on-demand breastfeeding, baby wearing, natural infant hygiene – all of these topics were brought to my attention (and into the life of my lucky daughter and me!) through exposure to Joseph Chilton Pearce’s research in the field:

Another issue which Joe’s work helped introduce me to was the field of educating young people ‘other than at school’. My daughter, largely thanks to Joe (and the wonderful work of John Holt), has never set foot in a school…

“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.” – Joseph Chilton Pearce

My love of spontaneous, raw art can only come into being by an opening up to possibility – a freeing of the mind and body from the fear of ‘being wrong’. In fact, my painting ‘Follow Your Heart’ was dedicated to Joseph Chilton Pearce, in recognition of his lifetime of work, which has inspired and informed the last 15 years of my own in many helpful ways.

Mixed Media painting – ‘Follow Your Heart’ by Jay Taylor*

I am deeply, profoundly grateful for Joseph Chilton-Pearce’s work and his insight, and I highly recommend adding his wonderful books to your reading list, and checking out his videos and interviews. The Touch the Future website is an amazing resource, full of inspiring information from some of the world’s most forward-thinking people. If you have time to explore Joe’s works, you will not be disappointed, I am sure – he truly was a visionary, and his vision for humanity was as beautiful as it was practical and grounded in physical possibility.

As Joe said, “We must accept that this creative pulse within us is God’s creative pulse itself.” I wish the divinely creative Joseph Chilton Pearce a magical transformation, and send him and his family very much love. Joe was a champion of the ‘Magical Child’ within us all; and a shining example of intellect pursued WITH heart intelligence.

Photo – ‘A Mother’s Love’ by Jay Taylor