On our compulsive vulnerability to imagery and failure to meet this challenge. There are one-thousand churches, five-hundred major, and five-hundred lesser places of worship in the old city of Prague. Charles IV (1316–1378), King of Bohemia, along with two other Czech rulers were Holy Roman Emperors. During the middle ages they shaped the religious, political, and cultural landscape of Central Europe. One thousand churches in the relatively small area that made up old Praha left little room for much else. Majestic Gothic architecture and vivid Christian imagery, statues and icons, on every corner, so much so that I began to feel ill.
Exploiting our vulnerability for imagery, the Roman Catholic church built its empire on violence and retained control via forceful and grotesque images of torture, the threat of eternal damnation, and reinforced these threats with dramatically staged theater, public spectacles and confessions. Cathedrals and humble places of worship were filled with graphic depictions of heaven, hell, martyrdom, and divine judgment. These weren’t just artistic expressions—they were tools of emotional manipulation and social control. By design, these visuals instilled fear, reinforced obedience, and emphasized the Church’s role as gatekeeper to salvation.
From MM: ‘It’s so Damn Simple.’
Joseph Chilton Pearce in The Death of Religion and Rebirth of Spirit, viewed organized religion, church imagery, relics and icons as demonic. Disempowering humanity for a price, a diabolical flip of what Joe believed to be Jesus’s true message. That “My father and I are one.” — John 10:30. “The kingdom of God is within you.” — Luke 17:21. “As you have believed, so be it done unto you.” — Matthew 8:13. “The Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.” — John 14:10. “Your faith has made you well.” — Matthew 9:22. Not the church, its overpowering cathedrals, counterfeit emissaries, stained glass, indulgences, and storybook pictures. Unity with the divine source, inner alignment with celestial essence, indwelling spirit and spiritual agency are innate, waiting to be discovered and developed, something that each person must do on their own.
Krishnamurti put it this way, “It is the responsibility of each individual to bring about their own transformation that is not dependent on knowledge or time.”
The word ‘religion’, the root of it I think from observing and looking into various dictionaries, really means gathering together all one’s energy to find out the truth, which implies diligence. A mind must be utterly diligent to find out what truth is. If there is any kind of negligence, there is distraction and a wastage of energy.
When the mind is dissipating itself in all the trivialities, in gossip, getting hurt and wounding others, violence, caught up in its own self-centered activity, all that is negligence. Whereas, a religious mind demands diligence, to be precise, to be accurate, objectively and inwardly, so there is no illusion, no self-deception, total integrity. That is a mind that is religious.
But religion as it exists is not religion at all. All the propaganda, the images in the West, and the images in the East, the rituals, the dressing up and all that business, has nothing whatsoever to do with religion.
When the speaker goes to India and tells them that their religion, their superstitions, their images, all the nonsensical meaningless rituals have nothing to do whatsoever with truth, many of them have said, “You should be burnt” If we were living in the Middle Ages I would be tortured, called a heretic, burnt in the name of god.
A mind that is religious does not belong to any society, any nationality, has no belief. Such a mind exercises a quality of doubt. It questions. Does not accept. Doesn’t obey the edicts of any religious organization, sect, or gurus. So, the mind is utterly free to observe without the observer (the ego).
Our minds have been so deeply conditioned, captivated, enslaved by all the priests in the world. That is their business. It began with the Egyptians, four-thousand-five-hundred BC. The priests were the interpreters of god and man. They were the middlemen, the retail experts! And that has continued until now – in India, Asia, and in the West. Our minds, after two thousand years, or five thousand years, have been conditioned by that. ‘We are told that we cannot find truth for ourselves, somebody must point out the obvious, somebody must lead us to it, point out the way, because our own minds are incapable of it.’ That has been the song for three thousand, five thousand years.
If one sets aside all that, that there is no savior, no guru, no sect, no group that can lead you to it… is it possible to have such a mind? When we are talking about religion, we are concerned with a mind that is religious, not a particular religious concept. If it is a particular religious mind it is not a religious mind. I hope you are meeting this. A mind that is free of negligence, that mind is a religious mind.
J. Krishnamurti, Brockwood, 1984
A common theme is the clear difference between direct experience and the experience created by metaphors and their images. Recall, St. John of the Cross’s definitive statement; “If I have my hands over my eyes, I cannot see the sun. If I have an image of god, I cannot see God.” John insists that any conceptual image or sensory attachment—even one of God—can become a veil that obscures true spiritual vision. Just as covering your eyes blocks the sun, clinging to mental constructs of the divine blocks direct experience of the sacred.
John Lamb Lash, in his masterwork Not in His Image, Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, explores how a cluster of early Jewish sects—especially those linked to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Qumran community, laid the ideological groundwork for what later became Christianity. In texts like the Damascus Document and Rule of the Community, the “sons of Zadok” are portrayed as guardians of divine law, awaiting a purified temple and messianic restoration. Lash interprets these priestly sects as apocalyptic and authoritarian, obsessed with purity, judgment, and divine vengeance. Messianic extremists, linking them to the Essenes, Pharisees, and early Christian ideologues, especially Paul (which Pearce describes later), all psychospiritual disruptors, rejecting nature, sexuality, and feminine wisdom, resulting in “annihilation theology.”
John argues that these cults hijacked Gnostic and Pagan traditions, replacing experiential wisdom with dogma and its images. His themes—Divine Feminine: Gaia-Sophia as Earth’s living intelligence. The dark force of Demiurge (Yaldabaoth), an alien-like, manipulative force behind Salvationism, Christianity and all theistic beliefs. The Gnostics saw Yaldabaoth as a cosmic imposter—who blocks access to true gnosis, or spiritual insight, direct, experiential knowledge of the divine, the cosmos, and one’s true nature—not book learning or dogma. Gnosis is often described as the moment when the soul “remembers” its origin beyond the material world. Salvation comes not through obedience to Demiurge (Yaldabaoth), which is the church, a false image, but through awakening the divine spark within and reconnecting with the Pleroma (the realm of true divinity). Our Human Purpose: reclaim gnosis and reconnect with Gaia, awakening one’s inner divine spark and escaping material illusion. Speaking of material illusion, or our general ‘misuse of memory.’
From The Death of Religion and Rebirth of Spirit – Joseph Chilton Pearce
An enculturated mind is culture, and the force of culture is directly dependent on our mind responding according to our own enculturation. In implicating culture as our hubris and nemesis, we implicate ourselves, an uncomfortable and threatening direction to pursue, one that immediately puts us on guard, for we automatically deflect any direct negative reference to our own personal sense of being. In this we seek to preserve our own integrity, a reasonable survival instinct and effective defense maneuver that operates largely beneath our awareness and often drives us to perpetual or periodic war.
We want to change the effects of culture, but because we are identified by it, loss of culture is synonymous in our minds with death. It is our identity, making the cause of culture and its effect simultaneous, each giving rise to the other…paradoxically, our attempt to change culture and its negative effects on us actually preserves culture.
In fact, nothing furthers the cultural effect so strongly as this compulsion of ours to change it. In our attempts we project our internal disease onto external causes, thus masking our real dilemma. In our projection, we see that our problems, angst, and frustrations are brought about by phenomena or events of our neighbor or the world out there. We are driven by our defensive survival system itself to bring about the needed change in our neighbor or world as we simultaneously hold to our ideation lest we collapse into chaos-and that ideation is culture.
The word tradition comes from the Latin traducare, “to traduce,” “to betray,” to trade or barter away. Tradition is a snare, locking the present into a replication of the past, a dynamic similar to the one that led to the fate of Sanskrit, with its vitality diminished and its fresh content immobilized in formal overlay until it had gone stale, was spoiled and of no use—except to those diehards upholding the tradition, those whose identities are locked into it, whose egos are invested in it, or whose fortunes depend on it. Tradition and religion go hand in hand—two cultural supports tying us to replications of the past and blocking the unfolding of our future in the present.
SOCRATES AND JESUS
The intelligence of the heart, that the later Darwin described, a higher force of benevolence and love, had risen to the occasion through this sacrificial figure who manifested that intelligence—possibly for the first time in history as we know it—only to get strung up for his trouble. This heart solution presented by Jesus would have brought about the complete dissolution of that age-long accumulation of field effect we have referred to as dominator culture—and culture as a self-surviving psychic entity was not about to let this happen . . . not then as not now.
So, Jesus arose at the height of the chaotic axial period, and, as happens again and again with those great beings who are “lifted up,” when all was said and done, he was not so much a victim of the Romans and that cross as he was of his chief chronicler and mythologizer, Paul. Jesus in fact disappeared in the concoctions of Paul, who, once on the scene, turned to his own advantage (as in the way of many followers) all the patched-up scrapbooks that gave Jesus some background—despite the fact that though Paul’s ego needed this, the event at Golgotha did not. (Note: Golgotha, “the Place of the Skull,” is the site of Jesus’s crucifixion, a moment that stands at the heart of Christian theology and spiritual reflection.)
As is so often the case, this extraordinary and giant character, Paul himself became the nucleus of extensive mythological overlay that was destined to eventually overshadow the original figure he exploited. As The Biology of Transcendence discusses at length, if we look closely at this Pauline phenomenon, we can see some of the roots of the mess we are in today and why we have faced trouble for two millennia, instead of living in the peace and harmony of life that that prince of the heart tried, and is still trying, to bring.
EUREKA! MOMENTS AND CRACKS
Cracks in the cosmic egg are generally sealed almost immediately by the egg itself, a point I brought out in my first book, Crack in the Cosmic Egg, a half century ago. The crack that was Jesus’ experience and the subsequent translation, concretizing for all to see, could have given us not only a new face of God but of ourselves and a new understanding of the way this wondrous world works. This crack should have been a light bursting into culture’s cave of mind, but this would have erased that cultural effect and thus was countered in short order.
In the same way that Gould’s Eureka! (laser discovery) lifted the field of optical physics, Jesus’ Eureka! should have lifted the field from which it arose (ancient Israel) into a new order of functioning that, sooner or later, would have spread worldwide. This lifting up, however, though attempted again and again throughout our history, has never yet been fully achieved. Instead, we find repeated the devolutionary breakdown of evolution’s loop. If we consider, as Jaynes did, the long centuries involved in the transition from the bicameral mind* to an individual mind, the translation of Jesus’ Eureka!, which involved this very transition, almost surely would have taken generations to complete, had it been allowed. It was Paul’s intervention, however, that broke the loop, and humanity reverted back to a previous state of mind without knowing anything had been lost.
Thus, Paul’s Christology usurped Jesus’ ‘God in the heart,’ and reinstated old Jehovah himself, resurrected out of the Hebrew scriptures. The God toward which Jesus pointed is found only in the heart, that creative force that rains on just and unjust equally, without judgment. Paul, however, presented Jehovah in new garb, a God who claimed to be the epitome of love, but who raved away as always about laws, demands for sacrifice, foment of wars of retribution, and revenge without end. In effect, the summation of Hebraic history through Jesus and his heart was canceled by Paul and his Christ, and history’s failings were reinstated pretty much intact.
It was Paul the Apostle, then, the most quoted authority in Christendom and its loudest voice, who sealed the crack that Jesus created in the cosmic egg.
UPSTAGING JESUS
Thus, arose Paul’s Christology in which Jesus disappeared and a vaporous heavenly figure formed as the archery pal image of an ethereal otherworld. Toward this image and the afterlife of this otherworld all attention began to center. Like Moses in Jewish antiquity, Paul’s Christ was also backed by the Law—the very Paul had opposed yet had become a chief exponent of in new dress. Paul’s Law of love supposedly made obsolete all other laws (much as we fight wars that are to end wars). Law itself, however, is, like culture and its wars, a primal error regardless of dress, setting in motion endless tangles of sorrow and conflict.
Religion, so focused on God and cloud nine and afterlife, tends to ignore life as a gift given in this moment, which, to be accepted, must be lived fully in this moment. Even more, culture tells us that first we must get our cow out of the ditch, bury our father, tend to this and that—all backed by that grim “Or else!” should we do otherwise. Culture tells the child he can’t live in the joyful world of play but must instead spend those magical, precious years in grim preparation for that which never arrives. Treating this miraculous gift of life as only preparatory to some cloud nine fantasy is culture and religion’s great seduction. But our life isn’t a dress rehearsal for some vapid, abstract eternity. It is the big show itself, and our living earth is the place and our body our means.
jcp
As explored in, It’s so Damn Simple, we are challenged to contemplate and reconcile our use, misuse and identification with two completely different orders of perception and therefore states of consciousness. One direct, and like the Tao or Krishnamurti’s Truth, cannot be captured or defined by words.
The other, the ceaseless and subjective percolations of the neocortex with its abstract symbols, languages, metaphors, and conditioned mental images. Creation, or nature, evolved both. It is our developmental challenge to discover the true nature of each, balance and use them each appropriately.
M
Note* The Bicameral Mind
The concept of the bicameral mind comes from psychologist Julian Jaynes’s provocative 1976 book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It’s not about two hemispheres of the brain per se, but rather a hypothetical earlier mental structure in which humans didn’t experience introspective consciousness as we do today. Jaynes proposed that ancient humans operated with a bicameral mentality—literally “two chambers” of the mind: One part of the brain (often associated with the right hemisphere) generated auditory hallucinations. The other part (typically the left hemisphere) obeyed these voices, interpreting them as commands from gods, ancestors, or rulers. This wasn’t metaphorical—it was a neurological and cultural adaptation. People didn’t “think” in the modern sense; they heard voices that guided their actions. He argued that this mindset was dominant until around 3,000 years ago, during the Late Bronze Age collapse. Jaynes believed that modern consciousness—self-awareness, introspection, and metaphorical thinking—emerged as a learned behavior, not a biological inevitability. It arose in response to increasing social complexity and environmental stress, requiring more flexible decision-making. He believed that as societies grew more complex, the bicameral system broke down, giving rise to introspective, self-centered consciousness and metaphorical language.
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The Missing Mind: Contrasting Civilization with Non-Civilization Development and Functioning
Darcia Narvaez and Mary S. Tarsha
Small Band Hunter Gatherers spend much of their mindspace in polysemy. Polysemy, in this context, is where consciousness swims in a shape-shifting world–there is no solid identity of a thing (Bram, 2018). Polysemy reflects the ability to merge with multiple others, human and non- human and is the product of de-differentiation, finding oneness with others rather than difference and separation. Many non-civilized cultures de-differentiate and creatively respond to the present moment, which is heavy with connection to others, including the other-than-human, to ancestors and other spiritual aspects of a dynamic, fluctuating universe. This inclusive creative space is where they spend/spent most of their lives. When needed, SBHG move into the problem-solving mindspace of univocity—linear logical thinking helpful for solving a particular problem. Though SBHG use both mindspaces, polysemy and univocity, with the rise of the Sumerian and subsequent civilizations, there was a shift toward spending more time in univocity, the problem- solving space brought on by stress.
Bram (2018) describes the gradual shift away from polysemy across the history of western
civilization due to multiple factors including settled agriculture, forced labor imposed by elites, which led to increased hierarchy, writing, measurement and control of people and things, including war and slavery. Univocity depends on differentiation: sorting, categorizing, and abstracting. Differentiation makes distinctions, defining each thing as one thing only. Univocity relies on dualistic, dichotomous logic (something is or isn’t), emphasizing causes and effects which rely on linear thinking. The sense of the present is minimal as people are caught in trying to predict the future based on what was noticed from the past. Obsession with order, precision and prediction becomes normalized—all left hemisphere concerns (McGilchrist, 2009)….
The clash of these vastly different consciousnesses was apparent when Europeans explorers, settlers and anthropologists encountered societies existing primarily in polysemy, but also in paradox – that is, a combination of diffuse or peripheral awareness in combination with focused attention or mental alertness (Berman, 2000). The Europeans were confused by community members’ lack of precise definitions, shifting stories and social configurations, and their lack of leaders. They were not “logical” in the linear, univocal sense. At the same time, First Nation peoples remarked on the soullessness of European invaders, their inflexibility and lack of openness and awareness of a sentient Earth (Narvaez, 2019). Showing similarities to Bram’s analysis, anthropologist E. Richard Sorenson (1998) noted a “preconquest consciousness” (versus postconquest consciousness in westernized nations) among the different Indigenous Peoples with whom he lived around the world over decades.
*Narvaez, D., & Tarsha, M. (2021). The missing mind: Contrasting civilization with non-civilization development and functioning. In T. Henley & M. Rossano (Eds.), Psychology and cognitive archaeology: An Interdisciplinary approach to the study of the human mind (pp. 55-69). London: Routledge.
A comprehensive guide to social visionary Joseph Chilton Pearce’s work on the transcendent and magical potential of the human mind.
• Explores Pearce’s most influential books, including Magical Child, sharing his life-changing insights into why we have become what we are, contrasted with the miracle nature intends us to be
• Features essential passages interwoven with Pearce’s own commentary, drawn from personal conversations and unpublished material
• Shows how Pearce’s key insights build across his books and break down core assumptions about reality and human potential
This parenting guide presents seven principles for guiding and teaching children in today’s turbulent learning environment.
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