Joseph Chilton Pearce spoke and wrote passionately on the way medical-technological birth negatively impacts what was generally termed ‘bonding,’ the continued merging, shared meaning, and reciprocal dynamic imprinted during pregnancy and extended after. Bonding, in this primal meaning, is not simple affection. It is an identity-defining, and self-world view forming “experience,” not something abstracted by the intellect, as a name and social expectations.
Nonintellectual, primal bonding plants the roots of every new human being in the body of the mother, in a shared, swirling tornado of emotional entanglement, mutual and reciprocal connection that operate beneath conscious awareness, and therefore hidden to what is called thought and its conditioned imaginings.
For 99% of humanities’ biological evolution this embodied, reciprocal entanglement was considered sacred, ministered by women, who themselves experienced and understood deeply the profound and transformative meaning this bonded experience carries forward.
As nature designed, bonding with the mother’s body, in this deep and primal way, provides the critical foundation to expand and bond as deeply, as profoundly with nature, which is the true and authentic nature of that mother’s body. Firmly grounded in this continually expansive development of humanities’ self-world-view the emergent ‘self’ experiences directly the Golden Rule; that they are the world and the world is in them. What they do to the world they do to themselves. A direct experience the fragmented and socially conditioned intellect can never know directly, only abstracted, as a concept.
Intellectually interfere with that primal identity-forming experience, something males don’t and cannot experience because he never embodies, except in utero, the profoundly self-transforming dynamic pregnancy, birth, and the primal shared meaning this opens, only second hand, as an observer, closes for nearly all, including that mother, the mystical experience of; “my mother (meaning nature, creation) and I are one.”
Cripple the embodied context for this direct and mystical experience at birth and beyond, leaves the emerging “self” no option but to bond with intellect, not with its own true nature, which is nature. That intellect-self abstract imagines its meaning from unknown sources beneath its level of awareness, those sources being the far more ancient sensory and limbic-mammalian brain centers, whose languages the neocortex is influenced by, but cannot experience directly, like the male, only second hand. That developing “intellect-identity” can’t however, abstract something that is not there, that never happened. So, it accepts culture’s counterfeit and believes it is that counterfeit and acts accordingly, which was Joe’s central point; the “missing mind’ that spawns our most pressing personal and global challenges.
The intellect that develops in a truly bonded context is completely different from the intellect of the unbonded, which implies a “self” fulfilling prophecy, compounding each generation, something machines or machine-like intellects can never experience or understand.
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