We are all too aware of the endless variety of cruel and violent behavior reported to us in the media, reminded daily that in every corner of the world someone is suffering or dying at the hands of another. We have to ask: Is this violence and cruelty endemic to our nature? Are we, at our foundation, really so murderous? In The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit, Joseph Chilton Pearce, life-long advocate of human potential, sounds an emphatic and convincing no.

Pearce explains that beneath our awareness, culture imprints a negative force-field that blocks the natural rise of the spirit toward its innate nature of love and altruism. Further, he identifies religion as the primary cultural force behind this negative imprinting. Drawing from recent neuroscience, neurocardiology, cultural anthropology, and brain development research, Pearce explains that the key to reversing this trend can be found in the interaction between infants and adults. The adult mind-set effectively compromises the infant's neural and hormonal interactions between the heart and the higher evolutionary structures of the developing brain, thus keeping us centered primarily in our most primitive and defensive neural foundations, generation after generation. Pearce shows us that if we allow the intelligence of the heart to take hold and flourish, we can reverse this unconscious loss of our true nature.

Auteur

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926-2016) is the author of The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of the Spirit, The Biology of Transcendence, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, and Evolution's End. For more than 35 years, he lectured and led workshops teaching about the changing needs of children and the development of human society. He lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Contenu

Acknowledgments

Part One
Culture as a Negative Field Effect and the Phenomenon of Mind

Introduction to Part One

1 Culture and Darkness of Mind
2 Culture and War
3 Marghanita Laski and the Tautology of Field Phenomena
4 Mind and Fields of Mind
5 Mind and Intuitive Perception
6 Penfield and Steiner

Part Two
The Conflict of Biology and Culture

Introduction to Part Two

7 Nature's Biological Plan
8 Bonding: Nature's Imperative
9 The Biology of Relationship
10 Imperatives in Conflict
11 The Death of Play and Birth of Religion

Part Three
The Rebirth of Spirit and Resumption of Evolution

Introduction to Part Three

12 Life's Strange Loops of Mind and Nature
13 Brain Change
14 Voices in the Wilderness
15 Eureka! Moments and Cracks
16 Origin and Field

Bibliography

Index