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Joseph Chilton Pearce

Prescott, Pearce, Mendizza - Pleasure Bonds

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Pleasure and happiness provide the “glue” that attach and bond human relationships.

Joseph Chilton Pearce – Play as Learning

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MM: Joe, I have been using the phrase "the intelligence of play for many years. What is the relationship between play and learning?

Joseph Chilton Pearce - Amazing Capacities & Self Inflicted Limitations

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Through studying child-development, I saw how our cultural world view was formed by our social models; and how this view is locked into the very neural structures of our brains, not as opinion but as our world-forming, perceptual-conceptual process.

Joseph Chilton Pearce - On Insight

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No knowledge will spontaneously self-actualize in a child, not even basic survival-maintenance instincts. Regardless of the nature of the knowledge in question, appropriate environmental stimuli must be provided, and, for optimum results, at the appropriate developmental stage. This is nature’s Model Imperative.

Joseph Chilton Pearce - Shame

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Joe explores how shame is dominate tool used by culture (parents, teaches, coaches, church and other institutions) to insure conformity – at the expense of true development.

Joseph Chilton Pearce - Learning & Conditoning

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Joe explores the difference between learning and conditioning. One flows from the natural intelligence of play. The other is imposed by culture.

Joseph Chilton Pearce - Insight & Intelligence

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Insight is a unique and natural state in which intelligence, unmediated by thought and conditioning, bursts into consciousness. 

Joseph Chilton Pearce - Conflict Between Biology and Culture

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A breathtaking survey of bonding, its critical importance and how culture blocks, prevents and interferes.

Joseph Chilton Pearce - Bonding and the Clash of Biological and Cultural Imperatives

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How American technological childbirth prevents normal bonding and therefore weakens the social fabric that knits our world together.

Paul MacLean, for many decades head of the Department of Brain Evolution and Behavior at the National Institutes of Health, wrote a paper on three fundamental needs critical to all mammalian life, particularly human, from the moment of birth. These three needs (each calling for voluminous description) can be stated, in their barest terms, as Audio-visual communication, Nurturing, and Play. All three are interdependent; all are established and stabilized by mother-infant bonding at birth. Deprived of bonding, all subsequent development (of both infant and mother) is compromised.

Years ago Muriel Beadle asked why is it that the human infant seems born into the world in a state of alert excitement that quickly reverts to distress followed by conscious withdrawal. (This withdrawal lasts for ten to twelve weeks on average.) Answering Beadle's query leads to a richly woven fabric of nature's proposing and man's disposing.

First, all mammals, on preparing to give birth, seek out the most hidden, preferably dark, quiet and safe haven available. At the first sign of any intrusion, of any sort - even the snapping of a twig - and the natural intelligence of the old mammalian brain, which controls birthing, signals that birthing procedures stop, and the mother wait for the coast to clear. We humans are mammals and our old mammalian brain's instincts and intelligences are still right here in our head, and absolutely in charge of birthing, interpreting environmental signals, giving and initiating intelligent responses. In situations of complete safety, unquestioned support and security, fully in touch with herself and nature, a human mother can give birth in as little as twenty minutes - sum total of time from first signal to birth-passage accomplished. But at the first sign of any interference of any sort, regardless of the nature or reason for it, the birthing process will be disrupted, slowed down, or even halted, by very ancient and powerful intelligences within.

If disruption does occur, the smooth muscular coordination of resonant responses found in a mother "in the flow," where thinking, feeling and acting are a single harmonious response, is lost, and chaos generally reigns within her - muscle fighting with muscle, instinct with instinct, inner-knowing confused by well-wishing helpers, nature's intentions clashing with culture's attentions, mother and infant losing on all fronts - all of which is sadly the norm for the majority of modern women, and a primary cause of an ever increasing world-wide upheaval.

What's new

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The complete works of
Joseph Chilton Pearce

Two Day Symposium
with Joseph Chilton Pearce and Michael Mendizza
April 8th - 9th / Ojai, California

Plus a Two Day Conference

The Awakening of Intelligence through Education:
Real Learning or More Conditioning?
with Joseph Chilton Pearce and Michael Mendizza

Saturday / Sunday, April 10th - 11thpearce banner
The Oak Grove School, Ojai, California

pearce_sympCrack in The Cosmic Egg
Magical Child
From Magical Child to Magical Teen: A Guide to Adolescent Development
Spiritual Initiation and the Breakthrough of Consciousness: The Bond of Power
Evolution's End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence
Magical Parent - Magical Child
The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit
Death of Religion and Rebirth of Spirit
plus his new unpublished manuscript...

It is rare for a small group of serious people to gather in a beautiful space and explore the ideas and observations Joseph Chilton Pearce has shared in his many publications. This is our goal: Twenty to thirty people with Joe for two days.
Selected quotes beginning with Crack In The Cosmic Egg through his latest unpublished manuscript will serve as our guide.

The Pepper Tree Retreat, Ojai, California(see below)
Symposium Space Limited to 30

In advance of the symposium registered participants will receive a collection of quotes from Pearce's major works beginning with Crack In The Cosmic Egg through and including his latest's unpublished manuscript.

Co-Sponsered by
The Association of Humanistic Psychology (AHP)

Registration Including Catered Lunch $225
(plus accommodations - see below)

Two Day Conference

The Awakening of Intelligence through Education:
Real Learning or More Conditioning?

Saturday / Sunday, April 10th - 11th
The Oak Grove School, Ojai, California

In advance of the conference registered participants will receive a transcript of Learning and Education, part of Reaching Beyond Magical Child, a collection of six one hour DVDs spanning Pearce's' vision of human development.

Registration Including Catered Lunch $40/day

Session One - Saturday
9:00 - 9:30am
The Nature of Intelligence

Introduction Michael Mendizza
Real Learning or More Conditioning?
True development - a balance between learning and habituation

10:00 - 11:30
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Age and Stage Specific Development of the Human Brain

Pearce describes age and stage specific learning, brain development and the differences between real learning and conditioning.

You can't have real learning with a child unless they are playing. Real playing is how real learning takes place. You can have conditioning and a Pavlovian conditioning of his dogs, or behavior modifications through other means which we look on as very serious, and we generally call learning, but it's not learning. It's conditioning. Real learning takes place by what Maria Montessori would call the absorbent mind of the child. Simply absorbing their universe, absorbing it, becoming it, and they do this through play. So you have those two things. What we think of as learning is conditioning, training is conditioning, but real learning is that stage of play. We have to interrupt the child's real state of learning or play in order to bring about what we think should be their training and their conditioning.

Summarizing the difference between Intellect and Intelligence

11:30 - 11:45 Break

11:45 - 12:30
Michael Mendizza
Form is Content - How Structure Shapes Experience

State Specific Learning - Exploring optimum states of learning and performance
The Zone, Flow, the Intelligence of Play

Drawing on video highlights of interviews with world class athletes Michael Mendizza, co-author with Pearce of Magical Parent - Magical Child, introduces state specific learning and performance - how the state of the body-mind as it relates to the present moment shapes the content being experienced.

12:30 - 1:30 Lunch

1:30 - 2:00 Session Two
Education as Learning vs. Education as Conditioning

Video Interview of John Taylor Gatto describing how the very form and structure of public education is Dumbing Us Down.

By 1940, literacy as a national number stood at 96 percent for whites and 80 percent for blacks. Four of five blacks were literate in spite of all disadvantages. Yet, six decades later, the Adult Literacy Survey and National Assessment of Educational Progress reported a 40 percent illiteracy rate for blacks – doubling the earlier deficiency – and a 17 percent rate for whites, more than quadrupling it. Yet, the money spent on schooling in real terms had grown 350 percent.

2:00 - 3:00
Facilitated Small Group Explorations
Who is being served - self actualization or culture

3:00 - 3:30
Panel of Educators
Growing Real Individuals vs. Standardized Models
What does this mean in terms of relationship, structure and curriculum?

A panel of local educators and parents exploring how teaching to the tests (No Child Left Behind) has altered the learning experience for children and educators.

3:30 - 4:00 Break

4:00 - 5:00
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Amazing Capacities and Self inflicted Limitations

Pearce explores our 'amazing capacities and self inflicted limitations,' by describing how our self-world view (The Cosmic Egg) is formed and how this conditioned reality excludes vast realms of human potential.

Session Three - Sunday
9:00 - 9:30am
Education as Transcendence
Introduction - Michael Mendizza

10:00 - 11:30
Joseph Chilton Pearce
The Death of Religion and Rebirth of Spirit A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart

Joe begins the day by exploring themes developed in his last two books, The Biology of Transcendence and The Death of Religion and Rebirth of Spirit - A return to the Intelligence of the Heart - the role cultural conditioning plays in limiting true development.

11:30 - 1145 Break

11:45 - 12:30
Panel Exploration
Exploring the challenges Krishnamurti's views of education pose to parents, children and educators.

12:30 - 1:30 Lunch

1:30 - 2:00 Session Three
Exploring New Models
A brief overview of emerging educational alternatives

2:00 - 3:00
Conflict as Opportunity
Small group discussions exploring two related issues:

1.) Shifting into Creative Mode
I have listened, and I have heard. I can see, more or less, the insidious nature of cultural conditioning and the limitations it places on deep creativity. Now what? I don't want to become an echo chamber for negativity. What can I do, in my daily life, to begin to shift the nature of these limitations? Are there in-the-moment strategies that concretely impact the cultural momentum, without creating another form of conditioning?

2.) Conflict as Creative Action
Rather than viewing the inner sense of conflict as a problem to be resolved, this very conflict may be an avenue for opening radical creativity. A non-analytical approach allows conflict to surface in our immediate experience, revealing unexpected and surprising meanings. It is possible that such an approach - using conflict itself as a basis - is a gateway to a different quality of mind and heart.

3:00 - 3:30 Break

3:30 - 5:00
Joseph Chilton Pearce - New Frontiers
Exploring themes developed in Joe's newest manuscript and relating these to our challenge:
Real Learning or More Conditioning

Accommodations

Pepper Tree Retreat
is a bed and breakfast with vegan and vegetarian cuisine, is the former home of philosopher J. Krishnamurti. Krishnamurti lived here from 1922 to 1986, welcoming visitors from around the world who were challenged by his penetrating inquiries into the fundamental questions of life. These included such 20th Century luminaries as Annie Besant, Aldous Huxley, John Barrymore, Greta Garbo, David Bohm, Dr. Jonas Salk, D.H. Lawrence, Jackson Pollack, Igor Stravinsky, The Beatles, and many others. The retreat guest rooms are named after these visitors, some of whom stayed in the rooms that are named for them.

retreatAccommodations at the Peper Tree Retreate are limited.
Rates for the events $89 t0 $180 per night.
Please make your reservations early. mm
Pepper Tree Retreat, 1130 McAndrew Road (P.O. Box 1560) Ojai, CA 93024 • 877.355.5986 • 805.646.4773 • email:retreat@kfa.org
http://www.peppertreeretreat.com

The tranquil beauty and subtle sounds of the Ojai Valley can best be appreciated with a quiet mind. That is why the Pepper Tree Retreat has no television, no amplified music, no bright lights. It is a true spiritual retreat. Guests are encouraged to relax in the garden, take walks, and use their time on the premises for reflection and exploration of relationships. Of course, guests can balance their time at the retreat by partaking of all the Ojai Valley has to offer. The retreat staff can advise guests on a variety of cultural, recreational, and healthful activities in the Ojai Valley.
Ojai Valley's Pepper Tree Retreat Offers:

• Nine guest rooms in a vintage 1910 farmhouse and more recent cottages.
• All rooms have a private bath, writing desk, wi-fi connectivity, and air conditioning.
• A large front porch, trellised outdoor dining area, gardens, and lovely views.
• Use of a large, shared kitchen. Three rooms have their own kitchen.
• Public rooms and outdoor meeting areas for individual and small group use.
• A vegetarian breakfast buffet is offered each morning; tea or coffee always available.
• Beautiful views of the surrounding hills and valleys.
• Access to the nearby Krishnamurti library, where guests can draw inspiration from Krishnamurti’s insights into life.

Other Ojai Bed & Breakfast
The Ojai Retreat, 160 Besant Rd - 805 646 2536
Lavender Inn, 210 E Matilija St - 805 646 6635
Blue Iguana Inn, 11794 N Ventura - 805 646 5277
Inn Harmony, 308 N Signal St - 805 640 6524

Hotels, Motels & Resorts
Chantico Inn & Suites, 406 W Ojai Ave - 805 646 8100
Suite 1 Inn, 602 E Ojai Ave - 805 646 7869
Su Nido Inn, 301 N Montgomery St - 805 646 7080
Ojai Valley Inn and Spa, Country Club Drive - 805 646 1111
Casa Ojai, 1302 E Ojai Ave - 805 646 8175

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