Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg ebook

I've nursed this book since my hippie days. Kind of the clinical side of reading Casteneda's Don Juan stuff. I highly recommend it, and it's a little more comprehensive than "Crack...."

Love all of Pearce's books - if you are interested in finding out what is "under the blanket" otherwise just keep watching TV

a perfect sequel

This book is a sequel to The Crack in the Cosmic Egg which is a classic. Not as good as the original book.

This is an erudite book exploring the relationship of mind and reality—the mechanisms and acculturation that create our self-limiting “cosmic egg” of consensus reality. ‘Cosmic egg’ is simply Pearce’s metaphor for describing the sum total of our notions of what the world is. It is not easy reading because the perspectives Pearce offers require sufficient willingness and flexibility to shift one’s thinking into the unfamiliar. But it is worth the effort, and once understood, will permanently alter one’s perception of reality.

Ordinarily we think of acculturation as social conditioning—as in, being handed a “specific set of concrete ideas concerning reality.” Pearce offers an innovative perspective, which is that the function of acculturation is innate to our biological makeup—as a homeostatic process that preserves stable “identity sameness.” He explains, “Our conceptual patterns form at birth, but the process of acculturation can’t ‘induce’ such patterns into the mind. Rather our concepts are our personal, biological creations. From our beginnings we created such patterns as our response, or ‘reality-adjusted’ to the world. But the first six years [of life] we interacted with the world through primary processing.”

And here is where the ‘split minds’ that Pearce refers to in his subtitle comes into play. Primary processing simply means that as young children we naturally interact with the world as it is. Our relationship to the environment is symbiotic and we do not perceive ourselves as separate from the system as a whole—from the ‘life flow.’ The split occurs as we mature and with the development of language because, as Pearce elaborates, “Through acculturation we learn to trust and use only certain limited acts of mind, and inhibit all other mental modalities. The mirroring effect between our thinking and our reality then gives us a reality isolated from our life-flow system…we act on data [sensory information] with our conceptual sets rather than interacting with data in creative ways.”

The paradox then is that “culture is itself an expression of the homeostatic drive in conflict with creative thinking. At the same time, culture is itself creative thinking, oriented to, warped by, and in the service of this fundamental process.”

The homeostatic demand to respond to acculturation comes about in many ways, but predominantly through fear since our culture largely views our life system as a potential hostility. Our natural, given state of communion through which we interact with the world as children, however, remains operative and effective, and fragments of this reality present through the “crack” in the cultural cosmic egg that we each create. These fragments include what we call “altered states of consciousness”—telepathy, clairvoyance, mystical experiences, and so forth. Both acculturation and primary processing are natural functions of being human, but our acculturation overwhelms our innate interaction with the world as it is, and imprisons us in specific thinking and experiential contexts.

Drawing largely from Carlos Castaneda’s writings about Don Juan and the sense of “body-knowing,” Pearce in the second half of the book explores the varieties of non-ordinary consciousness and ways to restore wholeness to our minds, release us from the cultural fear of death, and re-establish our ability to create our own realities through imagination and biological transcendence. Thinking involves the brain, he says, “but it also involves the body, and lies finally beyond any medium for thinking…The point is that creative, original thinking comes from a play of the modalities of the mind-brain, not from one or the other operating in exclusion.”

Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg presents an outstanding, original analysis of the human experience, taking readers on a journey through mind, culture, heart, and spirit, and into deeper realities where we find the true nature of ourselves and creation.

Note: This book is a reprint of Pearce’s 1974 follow-up to his classic, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. Exploring has been updated to reflect, as much anything, the author’s own evolution of study, observation, and understanding.

When Joseph Chilton Pearce's wife died he began to have a spate of paranormal experiences which caused him to start researching the nature of out-of-the-ordinary experience in general. That research resulted in his book "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg." In "Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg" a follow up to the first book Pearce attempts to explain how paranormal experience is innate in us but becomes submerged and ultimately forgotten by most of us in the process of acculturation. Utilizing the work of many other explorers of mind Pearce arrives at what I think is a brilliant synthesis. We are born and go through early childhood connecting with the world through our fine senses. Later language forms a semantic overlay making direct experience through our exquisite sensorium much less vivid. As most people acculturate they end up cutting themselves off from many if not most of the subtle sense based experiences that are the stuff of mystical and paranormal experience. When that happens people become enculturated that is trapped in a specific cultural context and scarcely able to have or recognize experiences which are not mediated by the semantic limitations of that particular culture. An example of enculturation's limits for present day Americans is their not having a semantic acknowledgment of the experience of mediumship or possession which is common in other cultures such as that of Bali in Indonesia or in a number of African cultures. Thus Americans may experience possession states without having adequate words to describe them. People in the United States having such experiences would therefore be more likely to be labeled mentally ill while people in Bali, Brazil and Africa might be considered blessed by the gods. Pearce later went on to write "The Magical Child" and other books further exploring the nature of extra-normal experience. One of the most intriguing topics in "Exploring the Crack" is the role a fear of death plays in generating anxiety, which often becomes generalized and stands in the way of living fully in the present.

Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Split Minds and Meta-Realities
By Joseph Chilton Pearce and Thom Hartmann
ISBN-13: 978-1-62055-254-4 (Park Street Press, 2014)

It’s been many years since I read Joseph Chilton Pearce’s The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and this was a welcome exploration and continuation of that information. A lot of what he calls “acculturation” I would call “social indoctrination.” We are born free but quickly realize all the social boundaries we must abide by. Then there comes the time in life when something inside overrides the programming and screams to be free. Some of us listen and some don’t; this book is for those who have listened and want to break out and live adventurously without fear of death or what society might think.

Rahasya Poe, Lotus Guide