Joseph Chilton Pearce

PART 1: THE MONSTROUS MISUNDERSTANDING

"Our children have been signaling us for years that things are critically wrong for them. In our anxiety-ridden concern to "equip them fully for life" we have been deaf and blind to their distress calls. And now our training techniques, our teaching systems, our behavior modification and motivations are turning into chaos, both for our children and for ourselves. Perhaps at this critical point for the survival of the species, we can do more than make another futile gesture toward patching up the holes in our exhausted system of ideas. Perhaps we can seize this cubic centimeter of change that history is giving us and move, not just to correct some of the more blatant and tragic errors we have made with children, not just to curb the battered-child syndrome, but actually to turn again to that 3-billion-year development lying within us, that uncanny wisdom of the body clearly programmed into the child as unbending intent. In learning to learn again, we can learn of this wisdom and allow our children (and ourselves) to become the free, whole individuals this good earth has prepared us to be."

-- Magical Child: Rediscovering Nature's Plan for Our Children, 1977

THE BIOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE: A BLUEPRINT OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

“We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.”

-- The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit, 2004

Works, Library, Biography, Glossary, Reviews

Joe's Books

In over a dozen books over forty years, Joe fearlessly and passionately pointed out our near limitless human potential and our self-imposed limitations. Discover his books, and many he contributed to over his lifetime.

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Joseph Chilton Pearce Library

Visit the largest collection of Joe's teachings, complete with insights and quotes from a treasure trove of video and audio archives at the Joseph Chilton Pearce Library housed at Touch the Future.

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Video and Audio Recordings

Discover Joe's lectures, interviews, classroom teachings, television and documentary appearances on this page.

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Biography

Meet Joe: father of five, humanities teacher, and social visionary who pointed to a way beyond our "self-limiting beliefs" and toward our "amazing capacities."

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Glossary of Terms

Joe's work produced a plethora of new insights that required new language. Discover his world in the New Story Lexicon on Kindred Media.

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Support This Site

This website is an educational initiative of the award-winning nonprofit Kindred World. Please help us preserve Joe's Legacy.

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About Joe

Joseph Chilton Pearce, January 14, 1926 - August 23, 2016

Joseph Chilton Pearce is original, unique. No one has done what Joe has done; passionately and incisively exploring a view of near limitless human potential and the self-imposed limitations that inhibit and block that unfolding, describing both and how they relate.

Joe had a number of para-normal experiences that are impossible given our accepted notions about reality, fire not burning, spontaneous remissions, precognition, telepathic communion, bending spoons like a corkscrew and many others, all manifestations of what he calls unconflicted behavior. These direct experiences represent cracks in our identity-reality-structure, the Cosmic Egg, which became the title of his first book.

Our reality is influenced by our notions about reality… Mind over matter is a misleading notion, and not the issue here. I have, however, traced the relation of mind and reality, as complementary poles of a continuum.

When the Hindu walks through a pit of white-hot charcoal, or the scientist experiences his Eureka! that opens new levels of reality each uses the same reality-shaping function of mind. This book traces the pattern of development underlying this function.

The crack contains an enormous, indeed romantic, optimism, however, by which I hope to counter our current passion for nihilistic self-doubt… The reality-shaping function operates automatically in spite of us, but this breath of life that structures all things is also the deepest level of our very minds, and available to any of us, even now.

-- Michael Mendizza, curator of the Joseph Chilton Pearce Library

Learn more about Joe's work, read his essays and view his teaching videos at the Joseph Chilton Pearce Library housed at Touch the Future.

Joe passed on August 23, 2016. His legacy is carried forward through the nonprofit initiatives of Touch the Future and Kindred World, as well as a devoted following worldwide. Visit his Facebook page to encounter stories of his impact.