A treatise on how we maneuver around the constraints of our own reality construction project.

books:

	• The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality Joseph Chilton Pearce, Thom Hartmann Park Street Press, 2002 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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What's next, a cosmic omelette?

I thought from the title that this book told the story of my less than illustrious birth, but silly me, it's actually a philosophy book. By way of perhaps egging you on to crack this book, I would say it's actually a pretty decent one, and the author discusses the ideas of writers as diverse as Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Tillich, C.G. Jung, Jesus, Carlos Castaneda, and Jean Piaget to show how we may envision a different existence for ourselves and a different future for the human race.

Still great decades later!

I read this book originally literally decades ago when it was first published. Recently while working on an article I am writing I remembered a reference to uncanny behaviors of Aborigineal tribesmen behaving more like higly in sync migratory animals than what we typically attribute to human behavior. I searched for my old book to no avail and was pleasantly surprised to find that the book is still in publication. Joseph Chilton Pearce is a fine writer. I highly recommend this book.

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A treatise on how we maneuver around the constraints of our own reality construction project.

This book was required reading on the military strategy reading list at the Military Officer's finishing school: the National War College at Fort McNair, in Washington, D.C. One could have also gotten a clue that this was an important book without knowing this fact -- simply by knowing that it was recommended by none other than the illustrative John C. Lilly, of CIA fame, and author of several unforgettable books: Programming and Meta-programming in the Human Bio-computer," "A Simulation of God," as well as his several books on the inter-species communication between man and Dolphins, all of which are books that should be on any classic intellectual's reading list.

The intellectual feast here utilizes the metaphor of a "Cosmic Egg" to get its point across: that the reality that defines us (and is defined by us), is a fragile, but closed and limited, and self-limiting construction. It, and all that it brings forth, is but a small "clearing" in the intellectual and existential "darkness." Yet, we cannot be allowed to forget that both the "clearing" and the "darkness" are but "mental constructs" that lie within the shell of the egg too.

The mind is the only sculpturing tool we have for our "reality construction project." We are indeterminately a large part of the function that shapes the reality from which we do our looking. Our looking enters as one of the determinants in the reality event we see. Our reality is in fact forever condemned to this "Heisenberg effect" of human existence.

Reports of "extra-terrestrial" phenomena, such as Gods, angels, juju, religions, and magic are just exaggerated self-creations that indicate the urgency with which we are compelled to get outside the shell of our Cosmic egg -- that is, if are ever to grow beyond its self-limiting confines.

How to escape this paradox, and what we find once we do escape, is what this book is all about. Escaping it obviously is a delicate operation, for if the crack is expanded too abruptly -- well, we know what happened to "Humpty-Dumpty? Yet, if it remains too confining, the "reptilian National Security State" brain takes over and the shell becomes a thin, brittle Fascist-leaning construction that is liable to shatter under the least bit of pressure.

The idea that there is a world "out there" independent of our minds is as much a fiction and as much a mistake as it is to assume that one "culturally determined worldview construction project" is better than another: All changes in worldviews, change "the world viewed."

We are all "reality-adjusted" at birth and then throughout life, "socially-adjusted" so as to make peace with the "orthodox version" of the worldviews we are trained to see. One goes beyond these self-limiting constraints only on pain of social and existential isolation and alienation. We focus on the world through an esthetic prism from which we can never be free except by exchanging prisms. No one is innocent of "social" and "reality" adjustments.

According to the author, the (proper) escape from the egg, this self-limiting prison that protects us from the larger threat of psychic chaos is the "empty category," a kind of backdoor wormhole tunnel away from our self-confinement.

It is what Levi-Strauss has called "mutations in the metaphoric fabric of our semantic word-built universe." The author suggests that we plot our escape by "filling in" these mutations, these empty categories buried within our own ability to create. And then after the fact, after we have escaped, in order to preserve our "reality-adjusted" and "socially-adjusted" status, we give all the credit for our own creation to the Gods, to magic, and other forms of juju and religions. This keeps us inside the egg at the same time that we have effectively achieved our escaped from it. The author describes how we do this through mental illness, autism, the "external view" of experimental drug use, scientific discoveries, etc. And this summary is just a start. Every page of this book is a five star effort. No wonder it is on the reading list of the top Military Academy in the U.S. Touche to NWC!

The number of stars: 5 times 195. Amen

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The classic work that shaped the thought of a generation with its powerful insights into the true nature of mind and reality.

? Defines culture as a "cosmic egg" structured by the mind's drive for logical ordering of its universe.

? Provides techniques allowing individuals to break through the vicious circle of logic-based systems to attain expanded ways of creative living and learning.

The sum total of our notions of what the world is--and what we perceive its full potential to be--form a shell of rational thought in which we reside. This logical universe creates a vicious circle of reasoning that robs our minds of power and prevents us from reaching our true potential. To step beyond that circle requires a centering and focus that today's society assaults on every level. Through the insights of Teilhard, Tillich, Jung, Jesus, Carlos Castaneda, and others, Joseph Chilton Pearce provides a mode of thinking through which imagination can escape the mundane shell of current construct reality and leap into a new phase of human evolution.

This enormously popular New Age classic is finally available again to challenge the assumptions of a new generation of readers and help them develop their potential through new creative modes of thinking. With a masterful synthesis of recent discoveries in physics, biology, and psychology, Pearce reveals the extraordinary relationship of mind and reality and nature's blueprint for a self-transcending humanity.

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