In summary, much of Joe’s life has been exploring what he calls ‘cracks’ in our cosmic egg, our self-world view or reality-belief systems. These cracks represent windows of undeveloped potentials that evolution expects we would discover and develop. But first the foundation must be set and that is where we get into trouble. We neglect the basics and therefore fail to have the foundation to go beyond survival.

In summary, much of Joe’s life has been exploring what he calls ‘cracks’ in our cosmic egg, our self-world view or reality-belief systems. These cracks represent windows of undeveloped potentials that evolution expects we would discover and develop. But first the foundation must be set and that is where we get into trouble. We neglect the basics and therefore fail to have the foundation to go beyond survival.

Now if you will, let's go back and remember William Sternberg.  You'll remember we talked about his ten year research at Bell Laboratory and the discovery that these field of activity once stirred up in the brain continued on their own autonomously, even when the mathematician went on to other things, the mathematical fields would continue to work out all the issues involved in some new proposition that was ushered into the mind at that point.  So there's a tremendous independence of these fields.  And the discovery that two mathematicians who never heard of each other on opposite sides of the globe will suddenly have exactly, precisely the same eureka experience about mathematics, it's happened time and again, or other fields of inquiry in the sciences.  Try again because in drawing on this frequency realm, it's not in time space, there's only one field, the universal field of which all brains draw, and we have this marvelous play between unity and diversity.  The only thing about any field of inquiry or field of possibility, or potential field of any sort, it never repeats itself.  No Quantum Field in physics ever repeats itself.  Out of that you get Heisenberg’s indeterminacy, and all that kind of thing, simply the unified field in expressing itself expresses itself eternally different.  No two expressions are ever quite exactly alike.  No two brain structures are ever alike, they have the same makings, the same stuff, but they're never put together in quite the same way and as a result you get this infinite diversity of unique self-systems up here.

The only thing that seems to be absolutely the same is the heart, you can switch hearts, cardiac transplants and all, because as my teacher said one time, "There is only one heart, one in my chest, one in your chest, one in everyone's chest."  Even there we find on an organic cellular level, the heart takes on the aspects of the personality, of the brain in which its in dynamic, that polar dynamic of the universal and the individual and so we find that whatever happens among us individuals, whatever creates this whole prospect, tends to reflect that.  You see the universal tends to reflect its own diversity back and forth. We had many cases of heart transplants you know, from male to female, and you have cases where women were all the sudden swaggering out, smoking cigarettes, and displaying characteristics they'd never displayed before.  This is well known, well established.  I've talked this over with some cardiac transplant surgeons in Australia and they've had just, this has happened, serious changes in personality with a cardiac transplant.  Why?  Because the heart does, in the dynamic with the brain, take on the aspects of the personalities it grows in the brain.  This is the heart on its cellular, organic, hormonal level.

Now I've just tried to present to you what the highest level of formal operational thinking is, is when we move into the realm of pure possibility and something new appears which never existed before. The laser you see, doesn't exist in the universe.  We have to set up the conditions for it and you have something brand new, that's true creativity.  And if we look into other aspects of creativity, the creativity in music, the creativity in art, and all of that, each one will be an expression of this creative aspect itself.  In the Eureka experience, not one single person ever having Eureka has attributed it to their own mind.  They say it breaks into my mind and I'm overwhelmed with it.  Einstein spoke of each of his great ideas when they occurred, he had about three really tremendous experiences in his life and each one he said broke into his mind like a great flash of lightning accompanied by a tremendous jolt in his gut.  He said he felt this great physical twist happening in his body and saw this great flash of lightning which he interpreted as the Equeran???, whatever it might have been.  You'll find your great saint goes through exactly these same steps.  They're seized by the possibility.  They hear, they get these models, they might even come in contact with somebody who blows them out of orbit, you know.  And by golly, I want that state, and they search for the material.  You know, here's how you do it, you sit this way and you breath this way and you pray this way and so on and so on, and do that over and over and over and over for years ..., nothing happens.  And of course the person's already arrived to expect kind of snickers to himself because he knows none of that does any good at all.  And yet you have to do it, you have to go through with it, all this intense self-discipline, self-denial, all this, finally you've exhausted all those possibilities and you've said my golly, you know I've lived on red water for 50 years and so on, and I sat on top of this post for 50 years, and I'm nowhere.  And you say all this is absolutely worthless, well it in a way was worthless.  You say I quit and you give it all up and whammo, it comes and nothing is ever the same again.  And so it exactly falls exactly the same period.

What do we call the period of stagnation and exhaustion?  What is it called in the spiritual circles?  What did John of the Cross write so beautifully about?  The dark night of the soul, and don't think that the dark night of the soul doesn't hit everybody who's in a passionate search, the scientists, the artists, the artists trying to make it come out right.  Mozart saying no one knows how terribly hard I have worked, even though it's all in my head, make this thing come out right, what I saw as my possibility you see.  And then finally, here it comes, its full expression, ready to be expressed and he has his wife read stories to it that it might express itself freely without him getting in the way.  So now we'll take questions.  Do we have our microphones ready for this?  I'm going to romp through on this because we're running a little bit late.

Q: Going back to the Eureka experience and the unity and diversity, I also get the sense that we get a diversity which, you know, that we get to a new unity and then we try to hold onto that, and it's that business of trying to hold on to the unity to defend against another diversity because it's uncomfortable at some level.

J:There's a marvelous writer called John-Pierre Di Ca Sol, which I would recommend to anybody, even though you had to get used to his Christian frame of reference, it's no problem for me, but it's 17th century Jesuit, but he understood this so perfectly that we hit this great point where we're in a constant movement into the unknown and the minute it's known, then the unknown immediately unfolds before and this is instant by instant, and he calls this the "sacrament of the present moment."  That once you catch on to what the present moment offers, everything, instant by instant, already in the present moment, but the instant you hold the present moment, then you've lost the whole thing.  It's a pure fluid state of freefall.  We have a lot of, it's a very zen-ish, very Akashic, and this was the highest level of real Christian thought, to move into a state of absolute freefall in which nothing was ever guaranteed, in which no moment was ever seized upon in order to keep the decks clear for the next instant moment which is always appearing.  And you move into this state of present now-ness with no past and absolutely no future.  The first thing you have to do to arrive at that point is to give up all hope because hope is always projecting forward into something that might happen later which immediately does what?  It creates the signal, the noise ratio, and blocks off the present moment.  You are then projecting outwardly rather than living what is offered.  And if you follow that then there are a lot of present day people who are talking about precisely the same thing, this movement.  Bernadette Roberts, a really very remarkable woman right here in Santa Monica, who's three books have really turned me around, Bernadette Roberts speaks of this movement into the unknown.  She refers to the unknown as God.  God is something you can never know from here to eternity.  It's simply that which is the unknown.  And as you move into the unknown and it forms into the known, the great trick is to give up the known and allow the unknown to form.  And this is forced, what holds us back from that is this old maintenance system.  Here it is.  What's going to happen to me?  How can I keep my defense mechanisms up?  How can I protect?  How can I predict and control?  How do I know what going to happen in this next moment, it might not be good?  And so the intellect comes in, by golly I'd better move into control over this and what happens to the first moment, it's gone.  And so this business of trying to move into this infinitely open but absolutely unstructured potential is really the subject to this afternoon and I'm getting ahead of myself.  In fact that was the whole afternoon.  I just shot it.

Q: I was thinking about how many different ways to see, that people talk about the Eureka experience.  I was thinking for example, 12 step programs and how when someone's stuck in an obsessional way, in a relationship problem or something, the idea is to do all the footwork possible, that you do everything you can possibly do with your ego and then that you have to learn to let go and wait for what comes.  And that, how hard that is for some people to do and I guess I'm asking, well do you think that can be taught to children, or they have to come to the end of their ego resources?

J:I don't think that all of this is to be taught to children.  What children need to know, and this really sounds awful, they need to know how to survive in this world.  They do need to know how to survive in this world.  They need to meet each of these developmental periods exactly as they unfold.  Don't jump the gun on them.  If at age 11 they want to know about God, you're going to tell them about God in whatever form is appropriate to them.  If they want to know about the father sitting on the throne up there that works, fine, give them that kind of imagery.  All they're looking for is a kind of a frame of reference that gives some meaning for it.  Lay back and what is going to happen later on in the search of the spirit for the unknown will be completely different.  What you need to, at each stage, according to the needs of that stage.  And the great thing about it is you recognize the shift in change that takes place all the time.  So I think that you don't bring up children with the idea of ego and letting go of the ego or any of that, no, they are nothing but ego.  You're not going to tell the 16 or 17 year old to let go of his hormones.  He is his hormones.  She is her hormones.  At 18 we're pure hormonal as we can be and rightly so.  Nature intended it that way for a very good reason.  So you take each stage and you will respond appropriately to that stage development.  Things like the 12 step program are always going to call on this basic system, all things do naturally to escape the trap of his lower structure and move into our true potential, are all going to fall into the same general pattern, but the 12 step program is essentially therapeutic.  It's to go back and patch up the seriously damaged system.  What we want to start doing is like the U thing and EPA, Environmental Protection Agency.  It isn't to try and clean up the constant pollution being performed and to do what, prevent pollution at the source.  What I'm hollering about, in a nation that's involved totally, completely in therapy and trying to patch up damaged teenagers and damaged adults and so on, is to go back to the beginning and stop doing the damage in the first place.  And that's what Michael Mendizza's entire Touch the Future approach, let's get right back to the very beginning and stop doing the damage in the first place.