Interview - Joseph Chilton Pearce
The basic intelligence on which life rests, the ability to avoid that which is harmful and move for that, which is beneficial to the continuity of life, is possessed by all creatures, from the first mitochondria right on down. The more complex a creature, the more complex that intelligence becomes. It's always moving for appropriateness, for our well-being and continuity. Intelligence is connected with the deepest intuitive roots of life, the matrix of our being. It's the dark, mysterious interior of life. And intelligence is essentially feminine in its nature, if I may use that kind of polarity. It's subjective and interior.
On the other hand, intellect is objective. It's exterior. It's outwardly driven. Intellect is "brain-centered." Intellect is analytical: logical, linear, analytical. It's constantly questioning. It takes things apart and loves to put them together in new ways. It's inventive. This brain-centered, objective intellect is a highly specific form of intelligence that is evolution's latest achievement and has been brought about by the latest additions to our brain structure.
Nature has a scheme in mind for the awakening and developing of this incredible intelligence and the eventual development of intellect. Just as with the periodic unfolding of physical development there is a periodic unfolding of intelligences or abilities. These intelligences, abilities or capacities, are directly connected with certain areas of the brain. Every time we move into a new block of intelligences or abilities there's a brain growth spurt allowing a new block of learning and intelligences and adaptations to develop.
Nature's agenda is to open up these blocks of intelligences one at a time as appropriate. There is topology of the brain, a certain mapping where certain areas that are devoted to or predisposed to handling certain types of intelligences, abilities, instincts. These must be opened, one at a time, according to the needs of the whole system. Children immediately absorb from their environment everything they need according to its appropriateness because that's what intelligence is always doing.
Ego, or sense of awareness, is embedded in the developmental structure that is currently being developed. If we furnish an appropriate nurturing environment for each of these systems they'll unfold automatically, absorb everything appropriate to the system, and the system just keeps opening and opening and opening.
Development requires a model or event to trigger the brain to open a capacity. If the model is not there, no development takes place. The character and nature and quality of the model determines the character and nature and quality of the developing intelligence to an indeterminable extent. We must be who we want our children to become.
As the later stages awaken and unfold for their expression and their focus of development, that they'll incorporate the lower structures into their service and profoundly change the lower structures. The tragedy becomes when the psychic structure remains embedded in the lower structure and that shift or transformation of the lower into the higher does not take place. Get rid of the words morality or ethics or any of these judgmental things and look coldly at what is happening to this biological system. Heredity accounts for about 65 percent of a young persons capacity, intellect, intelligence, abilities, but the 35 percent furnished by the environment determines whether or not the 65 percent gets any chance to unfold.
From the video series “Reaching Beyond the Magical Child”
Awakening of Intelligence
Pregnancy Birth and Bonding
Imagination & Play
Learning & Education
Critical & Creative Thinking
Beyond Adolescence