An Evolutionary Jihad against Devolution

	Book review on The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit by Pearce, Joseph Chilton (2007) Reviewed by Martin Lockley, 2008 published in Network Review No 96
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As always, Joseph Chilton Pearce is provocative, intriguing and incisive, while at the same time often blunt, repetitive and frustrated by civilisation's needless follies. But, he always remains a staunch advocate of breaking with detrimental cultural conditioning in order to nurture spiritual potential, especially in our children. For Pearce, the highlysensitive infant is a 'Magical Child'' alas, too often subjected from the moment of birth in western hospitals, to unnatural and damaging assaults from the affect-starved, unnaturallymechanised infrastructure we call culture.

In this 3-part book Pearce's themes, touched on previously in Transcendent Evolution (Network Review, 83), address the power of the unconscious mind, and its ability to function intelligently while the conscious individual conducts unrelated tasks.

Parts I and II deal with culture's negative field effect on mind and biology. Pearce also explores the relationship of this mind 'field' or 'universal memory bank' to individual heart and brain fields. According to Pearce, those who gain conscious access to this universal memory bank have, like Swedenborg and Steiner, 'knowledge of higher worlds.' Others like Edgar Cayce had the same access but only in 'a somnambulistic, trancelike state' while most of humanity is oblivious to the power of these faculties and unaware of their potential. As in previous books Pearce recounts accessing altered states that permitted him to accomplish extraordinary physical and mental feats which he continues to explore using 'field' metaphors. These heart fields require proper nurture between fetus, newborn and mother: i.e., 'in arms' closeness (breast feeding). Even two experimentally separated heart cells require proximity in order to beat in rhythmic entrainment and not collapse into fatal fibrillation. Likewise, loving nurture is essential to activate the brain and all its visual, cognitive and linguistic potentials, especially in early months, while the prefrontal cortex is undergoing critical formative development. Failure to nurture the infant accounts for many of the ills and  eficiencies we witness in individuals and society. These shortcomings in turn stunt our individual and  collective potentials more than we know, actually retarding physical brain development and robbing us of our natural empathy and compassion.

Nature will compensate as best she can, but her remedial action is a poor substitute for the cooperative partnership we can offer her by being compassionate parents throughout the developmental process. This bonding partnership represents 'the greatest love affair in the universe, one on which the wondrous nfolding of human life depends.' If mother does not engage in this love affair and 'is depressed, fearful or anxietyridden, she will give birth to an infant with heavier musculature, enlarged hind brain and reduced forebrain.' (Do we recognise such devolution, figuratively, when we speak of Neanderthals among us? Is evolutionary advance, literally forward into the pre-frontal sphere, so heavily dependent on nurture)? Pearce's 'personal conviction' is that religion and culture, and its fundamentalist advocates 'rob us' of our  natural birthright- which is to seek resonance with 'pleasure and joy...the simple state of love within and by which the universe manifests itself' in us.

Conversely 'a minute or so of anger and fear can depress the immune system for hours.' At each stage in development we can potentially act to 'move on to higher intelligences,' or devolve into defensive hind brain posturing. Our actions will literally affect myelination of neurons and the physical opening and closing of neural pathways that fix or block creative evolutionary progress. In short, conscious positive relationship generates a field of positive 'coherent waves.'

Part III, the rebirth of spirit and the resumption of evolution, suggests ways to undo the negative field effects of culture and religion. Pearce is not optimistic about the present potential of love and spirit to transcend the forces of devolution. Despite his outspoken denouncement of violence and abuse, Pearce adopts stern, antireactionary postures and strong dualistic arguments: love and nurture are good for prefrontal evolution, while TV and violence and religious cultural repression are bad, devolving into hind brain emphasis. Likewise 'advanced' technological cultures are mostly on the road to ruin while native cultures (Aborigines, Senoi, Polynesians and ancient Minoans) maintain a purity of heart, mind and consciousness to be admired  and emulated. Certainly love is good and violence bad, but is Pearce a little too much of a postmodern protester? Does he allow that culture's excesses are a passing phase and that the road to spiritual growth requires outgrowing institutionalized religion (This echoes Thompson's phrase: 'post religious spirituality': Network Review 93). Even Pearce's poignant reference to human 'longing' for the peace that passeth all understanding is set dualistically against the contemptible cultural edifice we've constructed to shut out this  happy state so completely that we don't even realize what we've lost. But, doesn't one consciousness structure always tend to dethrone another?

I'm inclined to be more optimistic seeing more manifestations of the new spirituality. Pearce is a progressivist who laments evolution's slow progress. He repeats this refrain in reviewing Julian Jaynes' hypothesis on the breakdown of the bicameral mind which holds that the oncedominant right hemisphere generated 'schizophrenic' disembodied voices 'out there' commanding the underdeveloped left brain to execute un-'reason'-able impulsive acts. It may be that evolutionary integration of the brain (whether left and right, or fore and hind) is slower than Pearce desires, but I see no reason not to expect an interplay between advances and setbacks analogous to the life cycle and our cycles of unconscious sleep and awakening. Our biological and psychic makeup requires a balance of conservative and novel forces. Emerging left brain reason demanded the silencing of unpredictable right brain commands, but once the deafening silence was felt the mind may have missed the familiar voices!

This to and fro of old and new forces, the tension between light and dark, good and evil is the heroic quest of axial sages and seekers: 'the struggle of God to rescue his bride, the soul of the earth and heart of mankind,  from the forces of darkness.' Love and good struggle to emerge perennially, and so as Steiner suggested in  Approaching the Mystery of Golgotha, the paradigmatic Jesus represented a turning point in history, when  the struggle between Ahriman (god of darkness) and Lucifer (angel of light) was brought into focus and Jesus' 'heart solution' threatened to break the field effect of the dominator culture. In this moment Jesus  made history's first explicit statement about the unconscious ('forgive them for they know not what they do': Grotstein 1997).

But the dominator culture wasn't ready to be won over by love: nor, according to Pearce, did Paul - despite his epiphany - understand that Jesus was the Son of Man - the human manifestation of the newly emergent evolutionary property of love and compassion - not some pie in the sky Son of God monarch promising afterlife salvation rather than heaven on earth. Although frustrated by our evolutionary sluggishness and setbacks, Pearce is surely right that we must ourselves harness the creative energies and apparently limitless potential of universal mind and not put off nurturing ourselves and our brethren until tomorrow lest we kill our spirit with religious fantasies of saviours who save those who don't help themselves. Pearce transparently voices his own internal jihad. Despite longing for Utopia, there is, as his title suggests, no rebirth of new spirit, mind or consciousness fields without death of the old.

 

Grotstein, J. S. 1977. The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 57: 317-335.

 

 

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