Waking Up To The Holographic Heart
Starting Over with Education
Joseph Chilton Pearce 1998 Interview
Casey Walker, Wild Duck Review
Reprinted from Vol. IV No. 2, the Corporatization of Education edition of
WILD DUCK REVIEW, with permission from editor & publisher, Casey Walker.
For sample copy or subscription information call 831.471.9246, write to
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The following conversation took place between Joseph Chilton
Pearce and Casey Walker on May 20, 1998 with the production
assitance of KVMR, a community-supported radio station in Nevada
City.
Casey Walker: Will you begin by assessing education as we know it
today?
Joseph Chilton Pearce: Over the past thirty years I've given some
2,500 talks to thousands of people on these issues, and it seems
our whole nation's mental set is too locked into a radical denial
over education. I'm pessimistic because of our capacity for denial
-- what 14th century Spanish Sufi, Iban Arabi, called "our
enormous capacity for self-deception" -- and our simple desire to
maintain things as they are. The other criticism, of course, lies
in looking at schooling as a concept. I don't think it is at all
correctable as it is.
I recently received a beautiful paper from a school teacher
who spent twenty-five or thirty years right in the front-line
trenches, in the classroom. She gives the perspective that
armchair generals sitting back in their ivory towers just don't
have. Her title tells it all: "Torch This Tower." She states there
is no facet of the American school situation which is at all
redeemable and believes we ought to eradicate the entire thing
down to the very rock bottom, clear the grounds totally, and
rethink what do we do from here. This has been my position for
years and years.
If we look at any system and find that it has an error within
it, we can address the error and consider the possibilities of
correction. But, if the entire system from beginning to end is one
whole, integrated, total error, then there is nothing that can be
done. There is nothing, zero. That, I believe, is the American
school situation today. Nothing can be done.
Further, the school system produces -- as John Gatto claims --
exactly what the system needs to keep itself going, and that is
uncorrectable. We can't change institutions. And, we can't give
the public an answer to a question they are not asking. People
simply aren't asking the questions that everyone is rushing around
with answers for.
My one exception would be a Waldorf education, and I think the
original Montessori had a lot of great, great value. But, I would
champion a Waldorf approach as a true educational procedure.
Unfortunately, Waldorf is beginning to modify and accommodate,
little by little, and take on some of the dreadful errors of the
public school system in order to survive.
In its original, genuine sense, Waldorf is not preparing the
child to be a dollar commodity in the marketplace, but is meeting
each stage of a child's life with the environment that allows the
child to be fully and completely and wholly a child at that time.
My statement has always been that the three-year-old is not an
incomplete five-year-old, but a complete, total and whole
three-year-old. If a child is given all the nurturing to be here
as a three year old, they'll be the perfect five year old later
on, and so on.
The first thing I would say about any true educational system
is that it is not founded on the notion that we are preparing a
child for life. The theory we are preparing the child for life, or
for the future, is a terrible travesty which betrays every facet
of the human being. We don't prepare for life, we equip the child
with the means to live fully at whatever stage they are in. The
idea we're going to train a child at seven to get a good job at
age twenty-seven is a travesty of profound dimension. It makes for
a world where every 78 seconds a child is attempting suicide, as
is true today. It is this kind of terrible despair we breed in our
children when we don't see the difference between preparing and
equipping our children to be present to life.
Will you speak to the neurological damage in modern children, as
you've described in Evolution's End, which renders them
"ineducable"?
It's been ten years since I wrote Evolution's End, and, believe
me, the situation today has worsened by thousands of percentile.
Most people involved in educational reform are speaking of
curricular programs when the truth of the matter is the children
they are dealing with now are, by and large, damaged past the
point of educability in any real sense. The public has yet to
recognize this is so. The clearest indications of such damage
recently came out of Tunbingen University in Germany with a twenty
year study of four thousand people. It shows three significant
findings as a result of the failure to furnish appropriate sensory
stimulation for growth. First, there has been an average of one
percent per year reduction in the sensory sensitivity of the human
system and the ability to bring in information from the outside
world. Compared to children twenty years age, the children we are
looking at now are comprehending or registering information from
their environment at eighty percent, which simply means they are
twenty percent less consciously aware of where they are and what
is happening around them. Secondly, the kind of stimulus that does
break through the reticular activating system in the ancient
reptilian brain, the brain stem, is only highly concentrated
bursts of over-stimulation. That is, the only signals they're
really bringing in from their environment are those bursts of
stimuli which are highly charged. If it's sound, it must be a loud
sound. If it's touch, it must be an impact. If it's visual, it
must be intense. Subtleties cannot catch their attention because
they are not sensitive to their environment. One comparison is
that twenty years ago a child or young person was able to
differentiate 360 shades of red, and today are down to something
like 130 shades, which means the subtleties are lost to the pure,
heavy impact of red now necessary to penetrate the reticular
system. Once we look into the whole developmental system, the
implications are profound.
The impediments to proper development from birth on are
attributable to a whole raft of causes -- from technological
childbirth, a failure to nurse, day care. Often what occurs is a
substitution of proper care with highly inappropriate, massive
over-stimulation of non-growth stimuli of the kind a child gets
with the average day care, exposure to the television and music
meant to pacify and entertain him or her.
Has an actual, physical atrophying been documented?
Yes, it's a physical atrophying of the whole sensory system.
This is right in line with Marcia Mikulak's work that I wrote
about in Evolution's End. Fifteen years ago, she found there was
anywhere from a 20-25% reduction in sensory awareness of the
technological child as opposed to the pre-literate, or "primitive"
child in the grass shacks of the jungles.
The third finding of the German study is that the brain is
maladapting on a level which seems almost genetically impossible.
That is, the brains of these young people are not cross-indexing
the sensory systems, so there is no synthesis taking place in the
brain. Sight is simply a radical series of brilliant impressions
which do not cross index with touch, sound, smell and so forth.
There is no context created for sensory input, each is an
independent, isolated event. It explains why so many kids get
intensely bored unless they are subject to intense input.
On hearing a certain sound, it doesn't bring up all sorts of
memory patterns and other senses that resonate with it. They are
single shot affairs in the brain system. All of this is from the
failure of appropriate stimuli and the massive over-application of
inappropriate or high level, artificial stimuli. Now, Jerry Mander
and I just spent a weekend in New England at a conference with a
medical doctor, Keith Buzzel, studying the effects of television
and computers. There is simply an unbelievable amount of medical
research on the neurophysiology of television viewing that shows a
serious breakdown in the whole genetic encoding. Bruce Lipton, a
cellular biologist and brilliant man, has pointed out that the
internal emotional state of these children is radically altering
the whole DNA structure.
So, I can't talk about education, the future and so forth,
unless I'm willing to deceive myself about the halt and reversal
of damage now being done to the majority of children in the first
three years of life. If we could just get that across! Appropriate
nurturing in the first three years of life is critical. Of course,
there are always a small number of people who are aware and trying
to do something about it, but most err in trying to change
institutions with hundreds of billions of dollars of vested
interest in the television industry, in medical technological
childbirth, and all the rest of it.
I was in Thailand last year at a birthing conference put on by
the World Health Organization and UNESCO. Thailand imported our
American way of birth and television about thirty years ago, and
they are now in complete shambles -- their family structure
destroyed, their schooling in shambles, their whole social
structure collapsing. They were once called, "The Gem of the
Orient, The Land of the Smiles." Few will look at the fact that
Thailand imported our two deadly twins of medical technological
childbirth followed by television, both of which deny appropriate
sensory stimuli for growth and substitute the radically
inappropriate stimuli which brings about a totally conditioned
mind. Huxley's Brave New World was timid, a lollipop, compared to
the type of conditioning that comes with interfering with the
natural processes of a mother, child, and community.
So, these are the three issues. First, we have to realize that
education really begins in the womb and that the first three years
of life are when ninety percent of it takes place. Secondly, never
waste effort or energy on trying to bring down institutions, but
put every bit of effort and energy into doing what must be done
for as many children as can immediately be reached. Look to the
tangible and real need in a child, in a family, or in a
neighborhood.
Let's turn to the idea of intelligence -- what we are yet to
understand -- with a systemic function between the body, the
heart, and brain.
Yes. To me, the most exciting single thing happening -- which I
touched upon in Evolution's End throughout the whole last part of
the book -- is about the heart. The medical and scientific world
is just now producing evidence to verify much of what I explore
through my last three books: the intelligence of the heart. Hard
core researchers, including the National Institute for Mental
Health, have massively ignored these questions.
I thought I had put it together pretty well -- what the heart
actually was and what was going on -- but I was a babe in the
woods. I knew nothing. In 1995, I came across the Institute of
HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California, and found that they were
gathering together research from all over the globe. They brought
me up to date on neurocardiology, which is the general title of
the newest field of medicine. Oxford University brought out a
huge, thick volume of medical studies from all over the world
entitled, Neurocardiology, which includes studies that haven't
worked their way into the journals yet. Discoveries in the field
of neurocardiology are, believe me, far more awesome than the
discovery of non-locality in quantum mechanics. It is the biggest
issue of the whole century, but it's so far out and so beyond the
ordinary, conceptual grasp, that a lot of the people doing the
actual research are yet to be fully aware of the implications.
Close to a century ago, Rudolph Steiner said the greatest
discovery of 20th century science would be that the heart is not a
pump but vastly more, and that the great challenge of the coming
ages of humanity would be, in effect, to allow the heart to teach
us to think in a new way. Now, that sounds extremely occult, but
we find it's directly, biologically the case.
I can't in a brief time share with you the full implications
of neurocardiology except to say three things. First, about sixty
to sixty-five percent of all the cells in the heart are neural
cells which are precisely the same as in the brain, functioning in
precisely the same way, monitoring and maintaining control of the
entire mind/brain/body physical process as well as direct
unmediated connections between the heart and the emotional,
cognitive structures of the brain. Secondly, the heart is the
major endocrine glandular structure of the body, which Roget found
to be producing the hormones that profoundly affect the operations
of body, brain, and mind. Thirdly, the heart produces two and a
half watts of electrical energy at each pulsation, creating an
electromagnetic field identical to the electromagnetic field
around the earth. The electromagnetic field of the heart surrounds
the body from a distance of twelve to twenty-five feet outward and
encompasses power waves such as radio and light waves which
comprise the principle source of information upon which the body
and brain build our neural conception and perception of the world
itself. This verifies all sorts of research from people such as
Karl Pribram [+, ++] over a thirty year period, and opens up the
greatest mystery we'll ever face.
Roger Penrose, for instance, in England, has just recently
come out with a new mathematics to prove that where dendrites meet
at the synapse -- of which you've got trillions in your body and
brain -- is an electromagnetic aura. And, we find that the
electromagnetic field of the heart produces, holographically, the
same field as the one produced by the earth and solar system. Now,
physicists are beginning to look at the electro-magnetic auras as,
simply, the organization of energy in the universe. All these are
operating holographically -- that is, at the smallest,
unbelievably tiny level between the dendrites at the synapse, the
body, the earth, and on outward. All are operating holographically
and selectively.
The next discovery is of unmediated neural connections between
the heart and the limbic structure, the emotional brain. Now
they've found that neural connections go right on up through the
amygdala or the cingulate cortex into the pre-frontal lobes. Now,
the pre-frontal lobes, or neocortex, are the latest evolutionary
addition to the human brain because they were only rudimentary
until, perhaps, 150,000 to 40,000 years ago. They are what we call
the "silent areas" of the brain simply because we are using only
the lower part of them so far. The higher parts of the pre-frontal
lobes are not even complete in their growth patterns until age
twenty-one, which is about six to seven years after the rest of
the brain is complete -- when we thought the whole show was over.
And yet, if you look at Demasio's recent work in Descartes'
Error, he writes about the role of emotion in reasoning and about
the lowest levels of the pre-frontal lobes. He talks constantly
about the pre-frontals being the whole show, but he's talking only
about those parts that are developed in the first three years of
life and the great, long dormant period following. Around age
fifteen, the pre-frontals undergo a huge growth spurt and begin a
massive, rapid growth which isn't complete until about age
twenty-one. It is that area that then remains silent and unused.
At twenty-one, Rudolph Steiner said the true ego is designed
to come down into the system and begin what he called the
exploration of the higher worlds. Now, of course, that hasn't
happened historically because of the entrenched positions of the
lower structures of the brain system itself (which means that the
entire thing is biological). We resort to philosophical concepts
and moral, ethical issues -- but we're really always talking about
the biology of our body and brain.
Even Paul MacLean at the National Institute of Mental Health,
who is one of the brightest in brain research over the past fifty
years and is still doing research in his eighties, spoke of the
pre-frontals as the "angel lobes," as the origin of all the higher
human virtues. That is exactly what Demasio was pointing out in
Descartes' Error, and yet both are only talking about the lowest
of the pre-fontal structures, which complete themselves in the
first three years of life, and not of the new growth that takes
place between fifteen and twenty-one.
For this reason, I am the arch-optimist of all. I think these
discoveries, the implications, are terribly exciting. Of course,
our whole cosmology will shift dramatically when we realize what I
call the "holographic heart." But, you see, at the very time we're
moving into a period of total chaos and collapse, this other
incredible thing is simply gathering. I think of Ilya Prigogine's
comments that so long as a system is stable, or at an equilibrium,
you can't change it, but as it moves toward disequilibrium and
falls into chaos then the slightest bit of coherent energy can
bring it into a new structure. What you find in Waldorf families,
and people who read Wild Duck Review, and others, may seem small,
but they will be the islands of coherent energy which then bring
about the organized, entrained energy for a new situation. I think
it will happen very rapidly.
In the next issue, I expect to work with the idea of one's
capacity for metaphor as one's capacity for a full life.
Jerome Bruner once said the great beauty of human language is its
metaphoric capacity . . . that we could represent the world to
ourselves metaphorically, mutate our metaphors and change
ourselves in the world. Bruner came up with that very beautiful
and brilliant insight thirty or forty years ago.
There is a book by a medical doctor living in Seattle, Leonard
Shlain, called Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time
and Light. In it he says art is always presaging what will happen
in the whole scientific, social world. He gives the most
incredible defense of this idea over the past 600 years -- how art
has always shown exactly what will happen in the scientific and
social structures a century later.
The great Margaret Mead once said, "No education that is not
founded on art will ever succeed." I think the beauty of the
Waldorf system is that they don't teach art -- it's not a subject.
Art is the way by which everything is taught and learned. Art is
"high play" and only through high play does real learning take
place. Yes, this is the way to a real life. The rest of it is
conditioning to another's employ, another's motive, another's idea
of life.
Joseph Chilton Pearce is well-known as author of six books: The
Crack in the Cosmic Egg; Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg;
Magical Child; Magical Child Matures; Bond of Power; and
Evolution's End.
Also well-known as an exceptional public speaker on human
intelligence, creativity, and learning, Pearce has presented over
2,500 programs to date at most major universities in the United
States and various institutions worldwide. His most recent
addresses have been as a participant in a closed symposium on
computers in education, U.C. Berkeley; in a closed symposium on
educating for healthy children, Columbia University Teacher's
College; at a conference on education in Bangkok, Thailand; and
two addresses at a medical conference on birth-bonding in Chiang
Mia, Thailand, sponsored by W.H.O. and UNICEF.
All of our perennial philosophies, spiritual paths, religions,
dreams and hopes, have spun out of an intuitive knowing that these
higher intelligences exist, that life is more than just an
economic knee-jerk reflex, that we are not just glorified
Skinner-box pigeons or naked apes. On the one hand we have
divinized our potential, projecting who we are designed to be onto
an abstracted cloud nine rather than fulfilling our evolutionary
potential, and falling victim to the politics of that projection.
On the other hand, and far more destructively, we have denied our
evolutionary nature, grounding ourselves in the more primitive,
physically bound modes of our brain/mind, and subjecting ourselves
to the magician-priests who can best manipulate that physical
realm. Evolutions End, pp. xv-xvi
Split between these lower and higher neural systems, with
evolution pressing to break through into its new modality, our
situation can get precarious. Our personal awareness, with its
ego-intellect, makes up an estimated 5 percent of the total
intelligent energy of our brain/mind. (The rest provides the
environment and maintains the conditions of, this personal 5
percent.) Yet with this paltry percentage we try to manipulate
universal forces of unknown magnitude and then wonder why
everything goes wrong. Over and again we hear the clarion call
that we must take evolution in our hands and do that which
bumbling nature, in its fifteen billion years of incredible
creation, has obviously not had the intelligence to do. While the
ego-intellect loves such arrogant, bootstrap nonsense, operations
of this sort plunge us from one personal, social, and ecological
catastrophe to another, and we are apparently incapable of
catching on to our error. As architect Henry Bergman once said,
"Each and every problem we face today is the direct and inevitable
result of yesterday's brilliant solutions." Evolutions End
pp.xvi-xvii
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