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Finally, The Head-Heart Connection The Biology of Transcendence by Joseph Chilton Pearce, Park Street Press, Rochester, Vermont, 2002.
Society Versus Sanity It has been said that in an insane world, a sane person would be viewed as abnormal. Here is a sobering lesson of metahistory: insanity can operate in millions of people and pass for normality. What would be regarded as insane behavior in one person can be the norm for entire societies whose members never question the beliefs they embrace and enact. In The Crack in the Cosmic Egg Pearce introduced the term consensus reality for experience conditioned by beliefs uncritically shared by many people. For instance, the belief that material possessions bring happiness is a dominant of cultural conditioning in the present global consumer society. Those who embrace this belief participate in a consensus, not merely by endorsing the truth of the belief, but also by enacting it.Consensus reality is a behavioral control system that blinds its members to any evidence that might cause them to question or alter their behavior. The system relies on the illusion of the Emperors New Clothes: if no one dares to say the Emperor is naked, then he is not naked. In the consensus of consumerism, those who acquire more than they need may ostensibly be miserable people, hostages to what they own, yet they can maintain the pretence of happiness by sharing the consensus belief that acquiring brings contentment (not to mention security, status, and more). The happiness to be gained from consuming may be a pitiful illusion, yet the collective mindset determines how reality is to be perceived, even if experience, or ones innermost emotions, signal the contrary. Consensus reality is a state of behavioral conformity that controls the minds and hearts of those immersed in it. Its power is totalitarian, its influence terrifically difficult to refute. Is there any way to overcome it? Joseph Chilton Pearce, for one, thinks there is. His trenchant expose of the dangers of consensus reality has not changed in over 30 years. He has relentlessly argued that we, individuals in the emergent global society, must break though the consensual spell and claim the genuine reality of human potential. As long as societies run on blind consensus, we will find ourselves living in cultures that reinforce their own prerogatives without regard for the sanity of their members. In The Biology of Transcendence, Pearce uses the term acculturation for the process of conditioning by which we are recruited into the consensus reality characteristic of the culture to which we belong. Acculturation is an awkward term, difficult to pass off in social discourse (Ive often tried, only to get the furrowed brow response), yet unless we see what acculturation is there is no way to correct it, let alone surpass it. Pearce is crystal clear on the way acculturation blinds us to the controls it imposes: That we are shaped by the culture we create makes it difficult to see that our culture is what must be transcended, which means that we rise above our notions and techniques of survival itself, if we are to survive. (p. 3) Among current visionary thinkers, Pearce is outstanding for his critique of culture, but nowhere in his writings so far has he been so direct and ruthless. In this book he proposes that the opposition of culture to survival is absolute: Our culture is what is to be transcended. Pearce shows that in nature versus nurture our biological potential has lost out to a culture that not only does not nurture us, it actually threatens to destroy us as a species. The conflict we now face is our culture against our biology. This argument is a close, if not exact parallel to the one developed in Sharing the Gaia Mythos: The problem unique to humanity is to have produced a global society that works against the best interests of our own species, not to mention the myriad of other species in the planetary habitat. The result is a conflict between nature, which produces us, and culture, which we produce. In the terminal phase of the conflict we find ourselves supporting a culture that is inimical to the survival of species, including our own! By revising the nature versus nurture formula as biology versus culture, Pearce underscores the survival crisis facing humanity and at the same time points to the way ahead, the option for a new approach to survival. Beyond the Triune Brain Among avant-garde thinkers who critique the blind controls of societal and
cultural belief, Pearce is distinguished by his titanic efforts to find solutions
rather than merely probe the problem. To this end he scouts along the edges
of many paradigms and displays a rare talent for discovering the very latest,
state-of-the-art knowledge in fields such as biology, pedagogy, developmental
psychology, parapsychology and quantum physics. Like a far-ranging herald,
he reports on events taking shape on the far horizons of the human mind. But
he does not merely report. He also translates the new findings into practical
insights. He shapes tools out of theories.
There are, however, two potential impediments to this wonderfully designed
evolutionary trajectory. One is the blocking of learning in young people
by input from culture that alienates them from their own innate potential.
Acculturation
often works against the endowment, producing conflicted behavior that spills
over in violence. In his Introduction, Pearce states his unequivocal view
that our violence arises from our failure to transcend. (p.
3) The corollary would be, as we become more violent, we fall more and more
away from the transcendence that is, according to Pearce, our divinely creative
endowment. But due to the leftbrains
ability to overwrite the other brain systems and even continually override
its own modeling procedures,
we risk becoming more interested in the maps we devise than in the territory
we're exploring. At the extreme this cerebral tendency can turn us away
from direct experience and strand us in the virtual reality of computer-supported
games and models. Cyberspace is the cultural sandbox where these games
are played and these models are displayed in the analogic splendor of digital
streaming. The ultimate trend of left-brain cybernetics is deviation
from our own experience,
leading to disincarnation, outright abandonment of the body and senses
designed for us by nature. The Great Accusation Pearce is of course acutely aware of the formidable factors at work against such a dramatic course correction for the human species. He devotes Part Two of his book, The Anatomy of Evil, to explaining why natures plan breaks down (title of Chapter Five). This part of the book carries a frontal attack on acculturation, with a plea to defend children against the bad evolutionary habits by which parents and society suppress and undermine their innate need to play, discover and learn. In Chapter Six, Bioculture and the Model Imperative, Pearce tackles the twisty issue of how biology and culture influence each other, usually to the detriment of the former. He warns that culture absorbs and transforms any content into its own formative structure. (p. 119) In short, it co-opts everything to its own self-serving, preprogrammed ends: Culture is based on fear and loves its own. (p. 160) Also, culture protects and preserves itself against the transcendent functions inherent to our biology by its reliance on the older and earlier systems of cerebral adaptation that we have outgrown:
At one point Pearce discusses counterfeits of transcendence, a fascinating idea that he does not, unfortunately, elucidate as fully as he does the detrimental effects of cultural conditioning. In general his writing is so brilliant and distilled that it can hardly be paraphrased. Many ironically phrased insights could be cited, such as this: All of us know intuitively that we are not by nature savage beasts. Fewer, however, are aware that we are driven to some fairly beastly behaviors by enculturation, despite the fact that the process itself is supposed to prevent this. (p. 134) There in just 40 words is a two-month course in metahistory. The metacritique developed in this site shows that beliefs held sacred in the mainstream religions can drive the believers to some fairly beastly behaviors, or to be passively complicit in such behaviors, even though they genuinely believe that their religion teaches them how to act in good and decent ways. The schizophrenic split thus incurred enforces the fatal effect of acculturation. In a long section on Christianity, Pearce argues that the Christian accusation of sin, Western cultures great belief that without enculturation humankind would be beastly, primitive and dangerous is just a lie and, in his view, a terrible distortion of what Jesus taught. To expose the lie is a major heresy in our or any age. (p. 172) Here as elsewhere in the book Pearces tone is defiant with a Gnostic ring, and his expression is deeply engrained with irony. He cites the great accusation of Christianity, that we are sinners in need of being saved by a transcendent power, only to weigh it against his own accusation that the religious message of transcendence is corrupt. Nowhere is the failure to transcend more evident than in the religious traditions that claim to promote it. Belief in the Service of Life
Although consistently metahistorical in his premises as well as in his manner of handling issues, Pearce departs from a strict metacritical view when stating his unqualified conviction in the power of belief (cited above). In the rigorous view of metahistory, belief is not regarded as causative. Belief does not create anything, but it determines how we perceive all
that heart and mind can conceive and create. Is belief merely a filter
on experience, as metahistorical analysis indicates, or is it a generator
of experience,
a strange attractor, as
Pearce attests? The answer may reside in the desire of the believer,
rather than in the passion that conjoins with belief, as Pearce suggests.
What you desire from your belief will tell you whether it acts as a filter
or a
generator, but belief in itself can appear to be either. Through a long
life of searching and experimenting, Pearces beliefs have produced results
that correspond to what he desires. Thus he sees belief as a generator. |
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Material by John Lash and Lydia Dzumardjin: Copyright 2002 - 2017 by John Lash. |
