Transcending Our Predicament - Some Notes I'd Like To Share

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Some Notes from The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit by Joseph Chilton Pearce (2002, Park Street Press)

This is one of my favorite books on the evolution of the brain, because it’s more than just a book on the evolution of the brain. It provides some incredible insights into human nature that offer a way to overcome whatever obstacles that life presents. I decided to read it again after having pulled it off my shelf and noticing all the little notes I’d made in the margins, which reminded me of its significance to my own understanding of things and how far I’ve come since first reading it. I just want to share some quotes that are quite thought provoking…

Pearce starts off in the introduction with these words:

“The ability to rise and go beyond” is the definition of transcendence and the subject explored in the following pages. While this force constitutes our nature and fires our spirit, an honest exploration of it must contend with this counterquestion: Why, with a history so rich in noble ideals and lofty philosophies that reach for the transcendent, do we exhibit such abominable behaviors? Our violence toward ourselves and the planet is an issue that overshadows and makes a mockery of all our higher aspirations.

Sat Prem, a French writer transplanted to India following World War II, recently asked this question: “Why, after thousands of years of meditation, has human nature not changed one iota?” In the same vein, this book asks why, after two thousand years of Bible quoting, proselytizing, praying, hymn singing, cathedral building, witch burning, and missionizing has civilization grown more violent and efficient in mass murder?

A few sentences further on, Pearce asks:

What are the actual, tangible results of these lofty religious institutions that we have known throughout history? If we examine them by the fruits they produce, rather than by the creeds, slogans, concepts, and public relations that sustain them, we would see that spiritual transcendence and religion have little in common. In fact, if we look closely, we can see that these two have been the fundamental antagonists in our history, splitting our mind into warring camps.

Pearce goes on to point out that throughout history, human transcendence has been sidetracked, and that we’ve learned to project such higher ideals as something that exists ‘out there’ – as something that lies beyond our own personal abilities, something that only rare individuals might have attained, or as a force or god that’s beyond our own reach. At the same time, we project onto each other our own negative tendencies, and it’s these negative tendencies, whether our own or those of others, that we get caught up in a lifelong struggle dealing with.

Further, Pearce defines culture as a body of survival strategies that shapes our biology while at the same time our biology shapes our culture. Religions offer survival strategies for our minds or souls, but in a way that causes us to project those higher ideals that they describe onto something beyond ourselves, thus keeping us in violent conflict with each other and ourselves.

This leads to the subject of fear. We fear the collapse into chaos should our ideation fail us, which is to say that we fear not living up to the demands of our culture, which in turn reflects our common ideals. Science, replacing religion, offers no better means of overcoming this fear. Pearce states:

If our current body of knowledge, scientific or religious, is threatened, so are our personal identities, because we are shaped by that body of knowledge. Such threat can lead us to behaviors that run counter to survival. This book explores how our violence arises from our failure to transcend, and how our transcendence is blocked by our violence; how it is that culture is a circular stalemate, a kind of mocking tautology, self-generative and near inviolate. 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 must rise above our notions and techniques of survival itself, if we are to survive. Thus the paradox that only as we lose our life do we find it.

I must point out here that this relates to the plight we're currently in just as much as it does in any other difficult situation. Our culture is changing very rapidly, and we seem to be caught in its grip with no way to see our own survival when we’re up against both the increasing difficulties of change and the growing uncertainties of where we are heading, both reflecting the hidden ideals of those in power who are forcing this change upon the entire population. For the average person who still has the freedom to enjoy their lives without the added pressures of everything that's going on, it may be less of a concern, but for those of us who face the pressures of being subjected to pressures every minute of every day for years on end, fear is the only certainty that most of us have.

How can we possibly transcend this?

"Only as we lose our life do we find it.” This is the key, and I can attest to this from personal experience. As Pearce explains, when you lose your fear of pain and death, you suddenly see your life in a whole new way and take an approach to it that surpasses anything that is common to others. You move past the ideals that culture has instilled in you from birth, and things become less threatening. Along with fear, anger, rage, violence, sadness, self-pity, the feeling of incapacity, etc., become less of a response to situations and events that you find yourself in. The need to just survive is replaced by the ability to overcome. You learn not to project those higher ideals onto something ‘out there’, but find them inside of yourself, ready to be expressed at every opportunity.

Pearce describes humans as having a five-fold brain – four of them within the gray-white mass of tissue inside our heads (reptilian, old mammalian, neocortex, and prefrontal lobes), and the fifth being our hearts. Yes, our hearts. The fact that the heart is connected to our thoughts, feelings, and actions is something that was lost long ago, but it was originally understood as being the actual center of our being, rather than the mass of tissue in our heads, and now is only loosely seen as such, more in a symbolic sense than anything. Yet, it’s the heart that very often drives our thoughts and actions more than the brain in our heads. We refer to it as the seat of our life force, the primary organ that keeps us alive and through which we feel the physical properties of both fear and love. But in losing the sense that it’s a part of what drives our thinking, we’ve also lost our power over fear and love.

Pearce points out that: the heart-brain is that part of us that our spirit stems from, the part that instills in us the ability to ‘rise and go beyond’. He states:

The intelligence of the heart brain embodies this elusive driving force, a fact we can grasp if we distinguish between intelligence and intellect as we must between the spiritual and the religious. In an efficient biological unfolding, the intelligence of our heart and the intellect of our head should function as an interdependent dynamic, each influencing and giving rise to the other. The breakdown or impairment of this reciprocal action is brought about by its cultural counterfeits of myth and religion. This, in turn, brings about both our fundamental split of self and our self-wrought woes – providing an explanation for why it is that we build bombs with one hand even as we gesture toward peace and love with the other.

And so it is with our persecutors, who, being those few people at the highest pinnacles of power, have been the foremost influencers of our modern culture, and who have forsaken the intelligence of the heart, and have destroyed the dynamic between it and the intellect of the brain. In so doing, through their forced designs on our culture, which influences our minds, they have inflicted this same destruction in all of us, so that we feel compelled to always think in terms of basic survival, losing in that process the connection between our hearts and minds that would otherwise offer us a way out of our predicament, to ‘rise and go beyond’.

Although the greater part of Pearce’s book deals with understanding this connective quality between the heart and brain and the ability to reach a state of evolutionary transcendence through learning how they work together, I won’t delve into it any further here. I only want to point out some things he discusses in regards to overcoming fear – to ‘rise and go beyond’, as he puts it. I want to do this because I feel that we are in a position where we have an opportunity to gain something from our predicament that our persecutors never will, and I feel that this gain will be the only thing that will ever lead to permanent change for the better, so that what we’re dealing with on a daily, even minute by minute, basis, will end and never be given the chance to ever happen again.

In most cases, people don’t have to face the harsh trials and tribulations that the greatest personages of history have had to face, and through which they were able to learn how to ‘rise up and go beyond’, and became cultural icons for it. These are the personages that we normally project our ideals onto and so never achieve for ourselves. The most famous of these is undoubtedly characterized as the man Jesus Christ, who gave the ultimate sacrifice as a lesson to the rest of us about how we should think and act, but few of us can bring ourselves to do. He lived without fear even to the point of his untimely death, and he had a very deep understanding of how to transcend our base human instincts and operate at the highest levels of being that all of us have the ability to do, if we only have the courage to try. Of course, the name and deeds of this man have been misrepresented to the point that many of us (myself included) reflexively cringe because we associate them with all the faults of the religions that have used his name for their own purposes. But the man himself, irrespective of these misrepresentations, embodied great truths that we shouldn’t neglect. As Pearce says, "[I]f we drop the mythical and/or religious projections surrounding Jesus, we will discover a common ground.”

Pearce describes early in his book how he overcame his fears of pain and death, and what developed from it. He had an intense experience that was psychic in nature, the details of which I won’t go into too much, except to say that it was apparently caused by his extreme loving connection to a woman who was about to break it off with him, and the deep connection between them (she loved him just as dearly) seems to have been the catalyst for a series of out-of-body experiences where he visited on three separate occasions while she was attempting to write him a letter to tell him of her decision. Learning in this way that he was about to lose her, it was seen as a death sentence for him. But the three experiences and facing such a loss opened him up to his higher self, and to what he calls ‘unconflicted behavior’. He was convinced that a part of him had died with such a loss, and in the process, he lost his fear of death. But more than that, he discovered through an attitude of recklessness that developed soon after his loss, that he was able to bypass the basic instincts of self-preservation to the point that he could put cigarettes out on his eyelids without burning himself or feeling any pain. He overcame normal human fears and found an inner strength and certainty that allowed him to accomplish things that went above and beyond normal human capabilities.

Pearce writes:

This sort of unconflicted behavior manifested, it seemed, from a split-second recognition, without qualification or rationale, that death was a foregone conclusion, an integral part of that very event, that death was already within me. Death was not a possibility to be avoided but a fact to be accepted as it was already accomplished – death had already happened. I was struck by the hilarity of the thought “You can’t kill a man twice,” and would find myself in a state of ringing clarity I thought of as a world of invisible taut brass wires, though I have no notion of where that thought came from.

Having accepted death without hidden qualification, it was clear to me that I could not be threatened by the possibility of death or harm. During each incident I felt oddly invulnerable – and was, at that particular time.

A little further on, he says:

I found that in any happening, through a kind of willful and voluntary throwing away of self-preservation, the ordinary course of events could be reversed, changed, or modified. This was not one part of my mind playing games of “let’s pretend” with other parts, nor some lofty psychological or spiritual death of ego or loss of self. This was a genuine acceptance of death as a certain part of that moment, of knowing I held my nonbeing within my being. Therefore, there was nothing to lose! I found that in this state not only did fire not have to burn me, but also gravity did not have to hold me in the safety of its usual grip and cause did not have to produce its usual effect.

He goes on to state that:

[A]ll internal conflict is produced by our fear of possible harm or death. The irony of this is that there exists for us a state in which harm really can’t occur within the confines of a particular single event if we bypass our block of fear and open to this other perspective.

[continued...]

Some Notes from *The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit* by Joseph Chilton Pearce (2002, Park Street Press) This is one of my favorite books on the evolution of the brain, because it’s more than just a book on the evolution of the brain. It provides some incredible insights into human nature that offer a way to overcome whatever obstacles that life presents. I decided to read it again after having pulled it off my shelf and noticing all the little notes I’d made in the margins, which reminded me of its significance to my own understanding of things and how far I’ve come since first reading it. I just want to share some quotes that are quite thought provoking… Pearce starts off in the introduction with these words: >“The ability to rise and go beyond” is the definition of transcendence and the subject explored in the following pages. While this force constitutes our nature and fires our spirit, an honest exploration of it must contend with this counterquestion: Why, with a history so rich in noble ideals and lofty philosophies that reach for the transcendent, do we exhibit such abominable behaviors? Our violence toward ourselves and the planet is an issue that overshadows and makes a mockery of all our higher aspirations. >Sat Prem, a French writer transplanted to India following World War II, recently asked this question: “Why, after thousands of years of meditation, has human nature not changed one iota?” In the same vein, this book asks why, after two thousand years of Bible quoting, proselytizing, praying, hymn singing, cathedral building, witch burning, and missionizing has civilization grown more violent and efficient in mass murder? A few sentences further on, Pearce asks: >What are the actual, tangible results of these lofty religious institutions that we have known throughout history? If we examine them by the fruits they produce, rather than by the creeds, slogans, concepts, and public relations that sustain them, we would see that spiritual transcendence and religion have little in common. In fact, if we look closely, we can see that these two have been the fundamental antagonists in our history, splitting our mind into warring camps. Pearce goes on to point out that throughout history, human transcendence has been sidetracked, and that we’ve learned to project such higher ideals as something that exists ‘out there’ – as something that lies beyond our own personal abilities, something that only rare individuals might have attained, or as a force or god that’s beyond our own reach. At the same time, we project onto each other our own negative tendencies, and it’s these negative tendencies, whether our own or those of others, that we get caught up in a lifelong struggle dealing with. Further, Pearce defines culture as a body of survival strategies that shapes our biology while at the same time our biology shapes our culture. Religions offer survival strategies for our minds or souls, but in a way that causes us to project those higher ideals that they describe onto something beyond ourselves, thus keeping us in violent conflict with each other and ourselves. This leads to the subject of fear. We fear the collapse into chaos should our ideation fail us, which is to say that we fear not living up to the demands of our culture, which in turn reflects our common ideals. Science, replacing religion, offers no better means of overcoming this fear. Pearce states: >If our current body of knowledge, scientific or religious, is threatened, so are our personal identities, because we are shaped by that body of knowledge. Such threat can lead us to behaviors that run counter to survival. This book explores how our violence arises from our failure to transcend, and how our transcendence is blocked by our violence; how it is that culture is a circular stalemate, a kind of mocking tautology, self-generative and near inviolate. 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 must rise above our notions and techniques of survival itself, if we are to survive. Thus the paradox that only as we lose our life do we find it. I must point out here that this relates to the plight we're currently in just as much as it does in any other difficult situation. Our culture is changing very rapidly, and we seem to be caught in its grip with no way to see our own survival when we’re up against both the increasing difficulties of change and the growing uncertainties of where we are heading, both reflecting the hidden ideals of those in power who are forcing this change upon the entire population. For the average person who still has the freedom to enjoy their lives without the added pressures of everything that's going on, it may be less of a concern, but for those of us who face the pressures of being subjected to pressures every minute of every day for years on end, fear is the only certainty that most of us have. How can we possibly transcend this? *"Only as we lose our life do we find it.”* This is the key, and I can attest to this from personal experience. As Pearce explains, when you lose your fear of pain and death, you suddenly see your life in a whole new way and take an approach to it that surpasses anything that is common to others. You move past the ideals that culture has instilled in you from birth, and things become less threatening. Along with fear, anger, rage, violence, sadness, self-pity, the feeling of incapacity, etc., become less of a response to situations and events that you find yourself in. The need to just survive is replaced by the ability to overcome. You learn not to project those higher ideals onto something ‘out there’, but find them inside of yourself, ready to be expressed at every opportunity. Pearce describes humans as having a five-fold brain – four of them within the gray-white mass of tissue inside our heads (reptilian, old mammalian, neocortex, and prefrontal lobes), and the fifth being our hearts. Yes, our hearts. The fact that the heart is connected to our thoughts, feelings, and actions is something that was lost long ago, but it was originally understood as being the actual center of our being, rather than the mass of tissue in our heads, and now is only loosely seen as such, more in a symbolic sense than anything. Yet, it’s the heart that very often drives our thoughts and actions more than the brain in our heads. We refer to it as the seat of our life force, the primary organ that keeps us alive and through which we feel the physical properties of both fear and love. But in losing the sense that it’s a part of what drives our thinking, we’ve also lost our power over fear and love. Pearce points out that: the heart-brain is that part of us that our spirit stems from, the part that instills in us the ability to ‘rise and go beyond’. He states: >The intelligence of the heart brain embodies this elusive driving force, a fact we can grasp if we distinguish between intelligence and intellect as we must between the spiritual and the religious. In an efficient biological unfolding, the intelligence of our heart and the intellect of our head should function as an interdependent dynamic, each influencing and giving rise to the other. The breakdown or impairment of this reciprocal action is brought about by its cultural counterfeits of myth and religion. This, in turn, brings about both our fundamental split of self and our self-wrought woes – providing an explanation for why it is that we build bombs with one hand even as we gesture toward peace and love with the other. And so it is with our persecutors, who, being those few people at the highest pinnacles of power, have been the foremost influencers of our modern culture, and who have forsaken the intelligence of the heart, and have destroyed the dynamic between it and the intellect of the brain. In so doing, through their forced designs on our culture, which influences our minds, they have inflicted this same destruction in all of us, so that we feel compelled to always think in terms of basic survival, losing in that process the connection between our hearts and minds that would otherwise offer us a way out of our predicament, to ‘rise and go beyond’. Although the greater part of Pearce’s book deals with understanding this connective quality between the heart and brain and the ability to reach a state of evolutionary transcendence through learning how they work together, I won’t delve into it any further here. I only want to point out some things he discusses in regards to overcoming fear – to ‘rise and go beyond’, as he puts it. I want to do this because I feel that we are in a position where we have an opportunity to gain something from our predicament that our persecutors never will, and I feel that this gain will be the only thing that will ever lead to permanent change for the better, so that what we’re dealing with on a daily, even minute by minute, basis, will end and never be given the chance to ever happen again. In most cases, people don’t have to face the harsh trials and tribulations that the greatest personages of history have had to face, and through which they were able to learn how to ‘rise up and go beyond’, and became cultural icons for it. These are the personages that we normally project our ideals onto and so never achieve for ourselves. The most famous of these is undoubtedly characterized as the man Jesus Christ, who gave the ultimate sacrifice as a lesson to the rest of us about how we should think and act, but few of us can bring ourselves to do. He lived without fear even to the point of his untimely death, and he had a very deep understanding of how to transcend our base human instincts and operate at the highest levels of being that all of us have the ability to do, if we only have the courage to try. Of course, the name and deeds of this man have been misrepresented to the point that many of us (myself included) reflexively cringe because we associate them with all the faults of the religions that have used his name for their own purposes. But the man himself, irrespective of these misrepresentations, embodied great truths that we shouldn’t neglect. As Pearce says, *"[I]f we drop the mythical and/or religious projections surrounding Jesus, we will discover a common ground.”* Pearce describes early in his book how he overcame his fears of pain and death, and what developed from it. He had an intense experience that was psychic in nature, the details of which I won’t go into too much, except to say that it was apparently caused by his extreme loving connection to a woman who was about to break it off with him, and the deep connection between them (she loved him just as dearly) seems to have been the catalyst for a series of out-of-body experiences where he visited on three separate occasions while she was attempting to write him a letter to tell him of her decision. Learning in this way that he was about to lose her, it was seen as a death sentence for him. But the three experiences and facing such a loss opened him up to his higher self, and to what he calls ‘unconflicted behavior’. He was convinced that a part of him had died with such a loss, and in the process, he lost his fear of death. But more than that, he discovered through an attitude of recklessness that developed soon after his loss, that he was able to bypass the basic instincts of self-preservation to the point that he could put cigarettes out on his eyelids without burning himself or feeling any pain. He overcame normal human fears and found an inner strength and certainty that allowed him to accomplish things that went above and beyond normal human capabilities. Pearce writes: >This sort of unconflicted behavior manifested, it seemed, from a split-second recognition, without qualification or rationale, that death was a foregone conclusion, an integral part of that very event, that death was already within me. Death was not a possibility to be avoided but a fact to be accepted as it was already accomplished – death had already happened. I was struck by the hilarity of the thought “You can’t kill a man twice,” and would find myself in a state of ringing clarity I thought of as a world of invisible taut brass wires, though I have no notion of where that thought came from. >Having accepted death without hidden qualification, it was clear to me that I could not be threatened by the possibility of death or harm. During each incident I felt oddly invulnerable – and was, at that particular time. A little further on, he says: >I found that in any happening, through a kind of willful and voluntary throwing away of self-preservation, the ordinary course of events could be reversed, changed, or modified. This was not one part of my mind playing games of “let’s pretend” with other parts, nor some lofty psychological or spiritual death of ego or loss of self. This was a genuine acceptance of death as a certain part of that moment, of knowing I held my nonbeing within my being. Therefore, there was nothing to lose! I found that in this state not only did fire not have to burn me, but also gravity did not have to hold me in the safety of its usual grip and cause did not have to produce its usual effect. He goes on to state that: >[A]ll internal conflict is produced by our fear of possible harm or death. The irony of this is that there exists for us a state in which harm really can’t occur within the confines of a particular single event if we bypass our block of fear and open to this other perspective. [continued...]

[–] • 1 pt

(edited )

As Pearce says:

[F]ear of any kind throws us into an ancient survival mentality that, when fully active, shuts down our higher modes of evolutionary awareness.

Whether this is what our persecutors intend is very possible. In the many secret programs they have conducted over the years, they have explored all avenues of the mind and its capabilities, and they seek to subjugate the greater human population to their control, so they must be well aware of this capacity to overcome our normal human abilities if they force us into too tight of a corner. They seek to maintain a level of fear in us that’s balanced by a certain degree of hope for eventual relief, so that we won’t ever reach that reckless state that invites death, and in the process opens us up to our own transcendence.

There’s one thing that Pearce says will interfere with this state of unconflicted behavior:

Unconflicted behavior opens us to a freedom from doubt, but does so only when we are free of doubt of any sort to begin with – a true catch-22: Because unconflicted behavior occurs only when we are free of doubt, opening to and unconditionally accepting the state are simultaneous, not linear, events and so are not subject to any form of logic. That is, the sudden, intuitive hint of the actuality of unconflicted behavior was not like a question asking me if I was willing to allow the state or to go along with it. Rather, the opening of this state coincided with my instant acceptance of it without qualification.

Further, he points out something that can be taken advantage of to turn the tables against your aggressors:

[A]n unconflicted person has dominion over a conflicted or divided person. Such dominion highlights the difference between the two types of behavior. As an unconflicted person, I was immune to danger or disaster during any unfolding event as long as I remembered to let the force of this behavior take over and avoided the knee-jerk reflex of fear and doubt. Miraculous or impossible events could unfold once I abandoned all hope and turned over matters to this particular force of will.

So, I will conclude this by saying that, like any situation, that in which we are placed by our persecutors is one of potential opportunity, especially in the worst moments when all seems to be hopeless. Perhaps that moment hasn’t yet arrived, but you’re growing weary of the constant fear or pain and the idea of provoking them to finish you off or to do so yourself is looming large in your mind. When you’ve reached the point where there seems to be nothing left to lose and you’re acting with reckless abandon and inviting death, this is your moment to catch that state of unconflicted behavior, and to achieve transcendence from all your past troubles. Your persecutors live in fear and doubt, and for this reason, unconflicted behavior is a table-turning moment where you can defeat all the efforts that they have made to subdue you.

Stay strong.

I’ve experienced this state on many occasions, although not to the degree that Pearce has, and it becomes more and more natural as you learn to grasp it and become familiar with it. As Pearce explains, it doesn’t mean that you lose all fear forever after, but that you can utilize this state and call upon it in times of need. For me, it first developed after a period of suicidal abandon, that recklessness state that Pearce describes himself having had when he first experienced it. It’s a state where fear is tossed aside before it even sets in and threats are faced as challenges, and you jump right in head first, knowing already that the outcome will be in your favor and where you are in control of the situation rather than whatever it is that threatens you. As Pearce says: >[F]ear of any kind throws us into an ancient survival mentality that, when fully active, shuts down our higher modes of evolutionary awareness. Whether this is what our persecutors intend is very possible. In the many secret programs they have conducted over the years, they have explored all avenues of the mind and its capabilities, and they seek to subjugate the greater human population to their control, so they must be well aware of this capacity to overcome our normal human abilities if they force us into too tight of a corner. They seek to maintain a level of fear in us that’s balanced by a certain degree of hope for eventual relief, so that we won’t ever reach that reckless state that invites death, and in the process opens us up to our own transcendence. There’s one thing that Pearce says will interfere with this state of unconflicted behavior: >Unconflicted behavior opens us to a freedom from doubt, but does so only when we are free of doubt of any sort to begin with – a true catch-22: Because unconflicted behavior occurs only when we are free of doubt, opening to and unconditionally accepting the state are simultaneous, not linear, events and so are not subject to any form of logic. That is, the sudden, intuitive hint of the actuality of unconflicted behavior was not like a question asking me if I was willing to allow the state or to go along with it. Rather, the opening of this state coincided with my instant acceptance of it without qualification. Further, he points out something that can be taken advantage of to turn the tables against your aggressors: >[A]n unconflicted person has dominion over a conflicted or divided person. Such dominion highlights the difference between the two types of behavior. As an unconflicted person, I was immune to danger or disaster during any unfolding event as long as I remembered to let the force of this behavior take over and avoided the knee-jerk reflex of fear and doubt. Miraculous or impossible events could unfold once I abandoned all hope and turned over matters to this particular force of will. So, I will conclude this by saying that, like any situation, that in which we are placed by our persecutors is one of potential opportunity, especially in the worst moments when all seems to be hopeless. Perhaps that moment hasn’t yet arrived, but you’re growing weary of the constant fear or pain and the idea of provoking them to finish you off or to do so yourself is looming large in your mind. When you’ve reached the point where there seems to be nothing left to lose and you’re acting with reckless abandon and inviting death, this is your moment to catch that state of unconflicted behavior, and to achieve transcendence from all your past troubles. Your persecutors live in fear and doubt, and for this reason, unconflicted behavior is a table-turning moment where you can defeat all the efforts that they have made to subdue you. Stay strong.

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