Joseph Chilton Pearce is an extraordinary man. Even if you didn't know about his books, you would be immediately struck by the poise of this eighty-year-old man who has more passion, energy, and enthusiasm than most people a third of his age. I'm completely surprised to find that one of the most revolutionary scholars in human development, whose synthesis of biology, neurology, and sociology have completely redefined how we think about nurturing children, is actually giving me an interview. The insights of Joe's bestselling books—Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, and many others—anticipated recent psychological research by more than 25 years. More importantly, I'm not used to finding someone who can speak of prefrontal cortexes and the nature of God in the same breath. If you're wondering what education is supposed to be about, especially an education that makes room for the spiritual, this is the man to talk to.
Joe Pearce is no stranger to the Self Knowledge Symposium; as an honored guest at the SKS 1997 Avila Retreat, he lectured on one of his favorite topics—the role of the heart in the development of the self. We contacted Joe at his home in Virginia for this interview in January 2000.
Your writings suggest that there is spiritual dimension to the development of our brains. How can young people cultivate a spiritual life?
There are two great spiritual teachers that come to mind in regard to that. One is Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic, and the other is Ibn Arabi, the Spanish Sufi. They were contemporaries in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Meister Eckhart said: "There is no being except in a mode of Being." Of course he was speaking of the Supreme Being of God. In order to be, God has to manifest in some way, has to become something. That's what the human species is, by its very nature—a mode of God's being.
Likewise, Ibn Arabi said: "The created and the creator give rise to each other." A contemporary way of looking at that is the interaction between the developing individual and the environment. The environmental stimulus evokes the genetic potential that is already there . . . there's a constant mirroring back and forth. That which is can only truly be itself by becoming . . . that is, "no being except a mode of Being." All of creation is like that—Spirit which is giving rise to life, which is giving rise to Spirit.
So, we can't speak of spiritual development as something over and above and special or extra to human development. The development of the true human being is the development of the human spirit. You don't add spirit like you add some flavoring to a stew once it's done. Spiritual development is development itself. Development is a very sacred, pure, and holy thing, because this is God's way of being. Mind, body, spirit, soul are a single integrated thing called life. These arbitrary distinctions, saying "Ah, now we'll have some spiritual development" . . . this has been a primal error.
Even so, there has been a dramatic rise in interest in spiritual matters among young people in the last five to ten years. Students are hungry for meaning and purpose, a sense of direction and belonging to something greater than themselves . . . and for lack of a better word, we call it the "spiritual." Where does this spiritual longing come from?
Well, your observations are well taken, from where I sit. Indeed, I think there is a growing awareness that our society's pursuit of high standard of living, material abundance for abundance's sake, is not working out. We are finding that "standard of living" is not necessarily synonymous with "quality of life." Attaining a high standard of living can leave you with a very barren quality of life. If the parents both work and send their child to daycare, they are surrendering the child's quality of life for a standard of living which has no meaning for the child at all. And it's that barren quality of life that is beginning to bear in on our young people, and they're beginning to demand something of quality.
I think that longing is the manifestation of the next stage of human development. Around the age of fifteen, the prefrontal lobes of the brain undergo a tremendous growth spurt, and they don't complete their development until age twenty-one. Those prefrontal lobes are the latest evolutionary addition to the brain. The Creator has tacked that on, when everything else was in place and ready to support this new way of being. And it's in that stage of development that this huge yearning begins to rise up in young people . . . boy, I've heard it from hundreds and hundreds of them all over the globe. It's like a lump in the throat—they're waiting for something tremendous that's supposed to happen, but doesn't. Around age 21 it grows acute and generally despair settles in, and that's when they throw in the towel and quit struggling and just join regular society and culture. But that is really the next stage of evolutionary development. . . that is our spiritual maturity, a full flowering of the human spirit. I sometimes think that I wouldn't expose a young person to any talk about the spirit until at least 15, and no real serious talk about it until 21, when they've got the full neural structures to deal with it. Meanwhile, you just let them develop as fully and richly as possible.
Return to top of this issue
Read the previous issue of The Symposium
