BIOLOGICAL AND SPIRITUAL GROWTH

[Guest guest]

The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter,

presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed,

Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr.

Mishlove.

BIOLOGICAL AND SPIRITUAL GROWTH with JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Our topic this evening

is the development of intelligence, and my guest, ph Chilton

Pearce, is an expert in the development of intelligence. He has

developed a theory along these lines which he has written about in

five different books, including The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical

Child, and Magical Child Matures, his most recent book. These books

have been translated into eight languages. ph, welcome.

JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE: Thank you, .

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here.

PEARCE: It's a pleasure to be here.

MISHLOVE: In your book Magical Child, you suggest that there is

some kind of human potential in the child, in the human organism, that

gets stifled by our child-rearing practices, by our educational

practices. Why don't we begin there? Perhaps you can elaborate on that.

PEARCE: Well, we hear constantly that we only use a small

percentage of our full potential, and this has become just kind of a

bandied-about term. We hear it all the time; we tend to ignore it.

Some recent information came out from, I think, Cornell Medical School

-- I just got the research in, and got blown away by the research, and

can't remember the exact citation. It points out that the capacity or

ability of the brain to think, to learn, to adapt and all, is

determined not so much by just the neurons, the major cells that make

up the new brain certainly, but by the neural connections between the

neurons -- the dendrites and axons and all those things. It's like

it's not a matter of how many good offices you have, but what is the

communication network of telephone lines between them, that determines

the efficiency of the office. The more lines you have, the more

efficiency you have; the more lines of communication between the cells

of the brain, the more efficiency the brain has, the more intelligence

it will display.

MISHLOVE: In other words, we've got about twelve billion neurons

or so.

PEARCE: A lot more than that, I think.

MISHLOVE: But each neuron might connect to a thousand others, or

ten thousand others.

PEARCE: Well, yes, you run into the neighborhood of quadrillions

and trillions of these neural connectors, you see.

MISHLOVE: Synapses.

PEARCE: All that. Now, at eighteen months of age, when a little

toddler's head is about one-third adult size, he has the full number

of neuronal connectors that we have as adults, same number. By age

six, that child has four to five, and sometimes greater, times more

neuronal connections than we have -- four to five times more than we

have as adults, or than he had at eighteen months -- a fantastic

neural mass of networks prepared to match or adapt to or imprint to

any conceivable kind of model given the child at all.

MISHLOVE: One might think that a six-year-old, then, would be able

to learn much better than an older adult.

PEARCE: Well, a six-year-old is able to adapt to, modify to,

modulate to, imprint to anything. That is, the capacities of the brain

at that point are infinite beyond all infant calculations. Now, you

see, he's ready to imprint to the whole social body of knowledge, the

whole social idea system of his world, all the ideas of his

limitations, his capacities, and everything else. At age twelve, a

chemical is released by the brain and starts dissolving that neural

mass that has not been activated by being given the proper stimulus of

models, people, exemplars out there, who represent these capacities

for the child.

MISHLOVE: In other words, if the neural pathways aren't being

used, then they atrophy.

PEARCE: No, they don't atrophy. They get dissolved, all of a

sudden, with a chemical released into the brain. They'll get

dissolved, and literally absorbed into the cerebrospinal fluid, and

become just kind of food for the rest of the brain. Now, what protects

the neural connectors is a fatty sheathing called myelination, and

myelination takes place any time these neural networks are involved in

patterning, according to the nature of the stimuli given them by a

model out there in the world. Do you follow what I mean? I mean, Mama

comes along, she uses French language, then that immediately will

start myelinating the patterns of the brain according to that unique

pattern above all patterns.

MISHLOVE: As I recall, the study of Einstein's brain indicated

that he had more of this myelination on his nerve tissues.

PEARCE: Well, myelination is the key; sure, you find that. And by

age six, then, the child has this infinite capacity of adapting to any

kind of pattern given. Eighty percent of that neural brain mass is

dissolved by age fourteen from disuse.

MISHLOVE: Eighty percent! That's astonishing.

PEARCE: Eighty percent. Now, that's what has just come out, after

many, many years of some of the most painstaking work, I guess, that's

ever been done in medical research. Now, you then have an adult brain

which has at its disposal only twenty percent of the potential which

it had at age six, and not just one but at least a dozen research

papers have come out over the past ten years which have shown that of

that twenty percent remaining as an adult brain, we utilize

approximately five percent of it. So you're dealing with an

approximate one percent of our potential that we ever utilize. That is

on the new brain, the neocortex -- not so with the two ancient,

primitive animal brains, and we'll talk about that in a minute.

MISHLOVE: Your theory involves what you call the triune brain system.

PEARCE: Well, yes. Any theory of the brain has to include that

now, because McLean's work at the National Institute of Mental

Health's Brain Research Center is not even theoretical. That's pure,

hard-core research. You can't deny it.

MISHLOVE: Perhaps we could just explain what those three portions

of the brain are.

PEARCE: All right. We have three brains in our skulls, not one,

and they're three uniquely separate, distinct brain structures, those

developed throughout all evolutionary history on earth. We have a

reptilian brain, which includes our spinal cord and the brain stem,

which is identical to the brain found in all reptiles. We just have a

little bit bigger one, a slightly more elaborate one, but essentially

the same structure. That's our sensorimotor brain, , as you

well know. And superimposed on that is the great limbic structure,

which we share with all mammals, and that's our emotional-cognitive

brain, that handles emotional energies. Now, emotional energy proves

to be the most awesome thing in the universe. Emotional energy is the

energy that hold all patterns in their pattern form, that relates

everything together in our life. Emotional energy pulls everything

into its formal relationship and maintains all relationship.

MISHLOVE: The great glue of the universe.

PEARCE: The great glue of the universe, the great bonding power of

the universe, is this emotional energy. And then, superimposed over

that, is the neocortex, which occupies eighty percent of the skull,

five times bigger than the two animal brain structures. And that's our

thinking brain, our intellectual brain. That's the one we use five

percent of, that's the one that loses eighty percent of its neural

mass at adolescence, but the two animal brains we utilize one hundred

percent of, and they never lose anything.

MISHLOVE: When people talk about the right and left halves of the

brain, they refer to the new brain.

PEARCE: They're referring to the new brain. You get into a lot of

nonsense about the right and left half business, which I don't really

care to go into. But the issue is, as McLean has clearly shown, the

vast bulk of our ego awareness -- our personality, our awareness of

selves in the world -- translates into our awareness through the two

animal brains, and only the tiniest fragment of it through the

intellectual brain.

MISHLOVE: I'm gathering, from what you said earlier about the

brain tissue dissolving, that it must be very crucial in certain

stages of the child's development that they get a lot of stimulation.

PEARCE: Surely, and it depends on what kind of stimulation, you

see. Hilgard at Stanford, as you know, said around about age seven the

child becomes acutely susceptible to suggestion, of the ideas implicit

in his society -- that is, the ideas his society gives him of his

place in the universe, what the whole show is about, his capacities,

his limitations, and so on -- and imprints to those through his

intellectual brain.

MISHLOVE: Values.

PEARCE: Values, yes, but the values as they apply to his

relationships, which means the way the new brain is then going to

influence the emotional brain that he shares with all mammals.

MISHLOVE: That's interesting. It suggests that we basically become

acculturated through a form of hypnosis.

PEARCE: If you want to call it that. But the issue is that we

imprint, our brain imprints, and makes all its neural patterns,

according to the suggestions given. They don't even have to be spelled

out to the child. They can be psychologically implied within the

child's whole ambient. Now, that brings up another point, , and

that is a whole raft of recent studies have shown that fully

ninety-five percent of all learning and memory that the brain lays

down in that neural patterning takes place beneath conscious

awareness. Only five percent of those neural patterns will result from

all of our training of our children, all of our disciplines of our

children. All of our teaching of them, and so on, can only account for

about five percent.

MISHLOVE: That is, we're unconscious of most of what we impart to

our children.

PEARCE: Totally. Ninety-five percent of what the child is picking

up from us, we're not aware of and the child is not aware of, and

there are a lot of good, solid reasons for that, and they're all

physiological. I mean, none of it's occult or just hypothesis; we know

how this thing works. So it means that if you look at what most of us

think about our child, we want a better world for our child than we've

had. We don't want our child to have the bad behaviors that we have

had. We want him to avoid the pitfalls we've fallen into, and we want

them to have a lot more the few joys we've had, and not know all of

miseries we've had. So immediately, the minute they can use language,

, we start prescribing to them the behaviors that we

intellectually think might help them to avoid all the pitfalls. Now,

we're trying to prescribe verbally, through our teaching,

prescriptions for their behavior that will help them to keep from

being who we actually are.

MISHLOVE: But our nonverbal signals are just the opposite. They

are who we actually are.

PEARCE: But the child is simply imprinting with ninety-five

percent of the whole psychic machinery of the brain to our states of

being -- to who we are physically, who we actually are emotionally,

and to who we actually are intellectually. And every intellectual

ideal I have of myself -- " I am no good, I'm isolated, I'm estranged,

I don't work in the world, and I'm this, that, and the other " -- the

child is automatically imprinting through this non-conscious, or

non-aware -- certainly it's a conscious process, but we're not aware

of it, the child isn't aware of it.

MISHLOVE: Particularly, I gather, self-esteem.

PEARCE: Oh, any of these things. The slightest suggestion, you

see, becomes sort of the command of the child in this respect, and

particularly in all of this our emotional states, because we know that

the child is imprinting to our emotional states continually through

that emotional-cognitive brain structure. Now, of course they do a lot

of imprinting to our physical postures, stances, and gestures, but

those are almost incidental compared to the overwhelming power of the

intellectual-emotional.

MISHLOVE: It sounds like what you're saying reflects the old

Biblical saying, " The sins of the father shall be visited . . . "

PEARCE: " Visited on the third and fourth. " The father eats sour

grapes, and it sets the son's teeth on edge to the third and fourth

generation, too. Indeed it does. Now, the other tragedy of this,

though -- that would all be simple, but you see, the five percent of

our prescriptions for the child's behavior, which he has to try to

follow, because the child is driven by one of his greatest instinctual

intents, to follow the model of the parent, or the teacher, or whoever

it is in the society, at all costs. And really we don't believe this,

but he's trying desperately to follow our models with that five

percent. But since we're telling him to be something we're not, since

we want a better world for the child, the other ninety-five percent is

simply imprinting automatically to who we are, and of course since who

we are radically outweighs who we tell the child to be, the child is

simply split right down the middle.

MISHLOVE: It creates a conflict.

PEARCE: Terrible conflict. And he cannot conceivably be who we

tell him to be, because ninety-five percent of him is simply going to

be who we are. And then, when he fails to be who we tell him to be, as

simply this whole system imprints to who we are in our states that

we're in, we then accuse him of moral failure to measure up to the

lofty standards of our prescriptions.

MISHLOVE: That lowers the self-esteem even further.

PEARCE: Splits him even more. So my teacher, Gurumai, says, until

that which you think, that which you act, and that which you speak and

feel and so on, are all a single integrated unit, not only are you

robbed of your own power and efficiency in the world, but you fragment

every child that you even pass on the street, since the child is

simply influenced by the whole emotional-cognitive-intellectual

ambient of everyone as he passes.

MISHLOVE: Now, I gather from your writing that there are stages in

the development of the child at which the child is more susceptible to

one or another kind of influence. For example, you mentioned at the

age of seven suggestion becomes a very strong influence on the child.

Are there stages in which suggestion doesn't play such a strong role?

PEARCE: Well, no, but it depends on -- we're talking about social

suggestions at age seven. That's when we throughout human history

recognize the emergence of the social ego, somewhere between six and

seven, and the emergence of logical thinking. The church started

administering the sacraments at age seven two thousand years ago for a

very good reason -- because at age seven the kid can begin to catch on

to some real rules and regulations. Well, we could go on throughout

history, how they recognized six to seven as that big turning point

when the society becomes the model, and the child shifts from the

family as his major model to the society as his major model.

MISHLOVE: The peer group.

PEARCE: Not so much peer group as the society of adults around

him. He'll shift to peer group if this adult model's failing, and

therein lies our current failure, you see. We get this very strange

peer group orientation of children to themselves. They're trying to

model for each other because their other models have failed them so

tremendously they've lost faith in them. That kind of what we call

generation gap is absolutely unique in history. We've never had that

before, you see -- when we are not giving the child any kind of models

that follow the needs of the child, and so they try to pick up from

each other cues of what can we do in this kind of abandoned state. But

certainly each period of history -- these are called the optimal

periods of learning. Gardner of Harvard, with his theory of

multiple intelligences, has outlined, I think he has some eight or ten

distinct, unique intelligences inherent within us at birth. These

intelligences unfold for development when their optimal period for

development is ready. You can't have one intelligence unfold until it

has its prestructures of other intelligences on which it draws and is

ready. For instance, sexuality unfolds, or did always universally

until recently, somewhere around age fourteen. You had to wait until

all the physiological and psychological and emotional systems were

mature for it.

MISHLOVE: Recently it seems to be happening at an earlier age.

PEARCE: Do you realize that menarche is now at epidemic outbreak

in the United States? It begins menstruation in eight-year-old girls,

and we have a very serious outbreak of pregnancies in nine-year-old

girls, and an even more, to me, tragic and serious outbreak of

violent, hostile rape against females and males under age ten. This is

at epidemic proportion in the United States. That means it's hundreds

of percent increased year by year. Forty years ago it was never even

heard of. It was inconceivable to anybody it would happen.

MISHLOVE: And this, I understand from your writing, is a result of

hormones that are getting into our food.

PEARCE: Only one of about five major causes. The other major

causes are premature pressures for early academic education, which

forces the brain to fire in patterns of thinking related to

adolescence, and you get with them the entire entrainment of the

brain. Then you have television, which is a major, major cause of

damage to the young child. In fact hospital technological childbirth

is another major contributor, for a lot of reasons. And all of these

interweave; they're all kind of self-supporting, interweaving factors,

and none of them have we ever had before. They have no historical

precedent. So the child's sytem could compensate, perhaps, for one of

these damaging influences, but not all five of them all put together

-- day care, and a whole raft of things which are breaking up the

genetic unfolding, that is, the actual genetic timing. It would be,

, as though all of a sudden half the children in the United

States started either developing twelve-year molars at age six, or

didn't develop them at all, as we find seventy percent of our child

population not really moving into formal operational thinking at age

eleven, which we always considered genetic and built into the system.

That's a breakdown of the whole genetic unfolding.

MISHLOVE: Formal operational thinking?

PEARCE: The pure intellectual, abstract thinking -- the ability to

think in pure abstract logic, pure semantic language structures --

move into pure mentation, pure thinking without any objects, in

effect, which is of course the next stage toward moving toward

divinity itself.

MISHLOVE: And that normally occurs at about age eleven?

PEARCE: Eleven to fifteen is the development for that. This is

Piaget's term, but also all the rest of the developmentalists

recognize this at this point.

MISHLOVE: And that's not happening now?

PEARCE: It's not happening in about seventy percent of our teenage

population. We have about a seventy percent functional illiteracy rate

in the early twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-year-old groups. Functional

illiteracy means they can go through the sensorimotor motions of

literacy, but there's not carry-over into contextual meaning, so they

can't grant it meaning. This is a breakdown in the relationship

between the three brains. It's a breakdown in the limbic structure's

ability to transfer information from one part of the brain to another.

MISHLOVE: It sounds like a massive overhaul of our educational and

child-raising system is going to be essential to correct this.

PEARCE: Well, we've known that for a long time, but we knew that

back in the sixties, and it's only worsened since, and I see no

possibility of that happening. I don't think you change institutions

at all. There's no possible way in the world to change the American

educational system as I see it now. It's just like hospital

technological childbirth, which is without doubt the most damaging,

destructive thing on earth, including the bomb and pollution. and yet

it comes as a great shock to people. Research has gone into this now

for forty years, and the evidence has been conclusive over a long

period of time, but you're dealing with a fifty-billion-dollar-a-year

industry, and there is not one chance of changing that.

MISHLOVE: You mean the child comes out, you whack him on the back.

PEARCE: That's only the beginning. It's a series of serious

disasters, all of which, by the way -- the damage is all primarily to

the limbic structure of the brain.

MISHLOVE: Well, perhaps we can't change the whole educational

system, but there may be some recommendations you might have for our

viewers about what individuals can do.

PEARCE: Well, of course what I think individuals can do and must

do is to examine their own hearts, examine their own life, and

remember that there's no way on earth to heal the child except to heal

the adults and models that they're following. That means the teachers,

the parents, and people who are working with children. If they are

fragmented, if they're at war with themselves, then they're going to

pass that on to the child. You find, for instance, the total lack of

love in a child's life. The child is absolutely starved for emotional

nurturing and love. But how can you love until you have first been

loved, you see? And so again we find that all of the intelligences

that we are given -- and love would be the greatest of all

intelligence, that's kind of the intelligence of all intelligences. We

do know this from developmental psychology, that no intelligence can

unfold in the child from its potential state until it's given the

stimulus of an intelligence developed already out there in the world.

MISHLOVE: You need a model.

PEARCE: Language learning begins in the seventh month in utero, in

the womb -- provided the mother is a speaking mother.

MISHLOVE: This is one of the extraordinary pieces of research

you've quoted.

PEARCE: Forty years we've been working on this.

MISHLOVE: The infant -- not the infant, the fetus actually --

PEARCE: At seven months you've got a pretty functional infant.

MISHLOVE: What would you call it?

PEARCE: I would call it the infant in the womb, at seven months.

MISHLOVE: The infant in the womb shows distinct motor responses to

particular phonemes that it hears.

PEARCE: It has one muscle for each of the fifty-two phonemes that

it responds to. There are fifty-two muscles in the child's body. It

varies with every child; each one will respond to each of the phonemes

as he builds up his sensorimotor aspect of language. The point in this

is, if he's given the model, so no intelligence can unfold without the

model given out there. By the model I mean a person who has developed

that intelligence. Furthermore you find that the intelligence that

then unfolds in the child, from his potential intelligent state into

its actualized state, is determined to probably virtually a

hundred-percent degree by the character and the nature and the quality

of the models that the child follows. So there again you have your

father sets the son's teeth on edge when he eats the sour grapes.

MISHLOVE: We've got a little less than five minutes now, Joe, and

I think what you're saying -- and we should really bring this point

across strongly -- is that for parents who are really concerned about

their children's development, the number one thing they can do is work

on their own development.

PEARCE: They have to bring themselves into wholeness. Now,

wholeness is determined, strangely enough, by the heart. All of the

new research which is now piling in, in mass amounts, is that the

heart is one of the major governors of the entire human experience.

The heart governs the limbic structure, which governs all of our

immune and healing systems, so the heart is intimately connected with

the whole healing process.

MISHLOVE: You mention in your book that the heart is directly

related to the middle of the three brains.

PEARCE: That's the emotional-cognitive structure. The heart

directs all the emotional energies of the brain, literally directs all

of our response to the world out there in relationships.

MISHLOVE: So there's something to this notion of the heart being

associated with love.

PEARCE: The heart is a universal consciousness. As McLean says,

the individual ego translates through the brain; universal

consciousness translates through the heart. That's why the heart can

relate all information together. What has happened to us in this day

and time is a breakdown in mind-heart dialogue -- a breakdown

literally in the mind-heart connection. The way to reachieve, or open

that mind-heart connection up, is to come across someone who has

opened that mind-heart connection up, and who operates out of the

heart. We have the statement, " The cave of the heart wherein God

lives. " That is, in my yoga we believe thoroughly that God dwells

within the heart, and that until you open up and get in touch with

that God in the heart, you are isolated and estranged from everything.

The minute you are opened up to the heart, you are intimately related

and a part of and one with everything. We find that immediately the

heart integrates the brain structure, so that that which we're

thinking, that which we're feeling, and that which we're acting are a

single integrated whole. That gives us a great deal more power and

effectiveness in our life than we ever had before. And so meditation

is the answer to the whole thing. And this sounds phony, but you see,

meditation is one of the natural circadian rhythms that we're born

with, and it's lost in ninety-seven percent of the population. So it's

rediscovering meditation, as I've been following siddha meditation, an

ancient system, for ten years. All I can say is it has radically

transformed my life.

MISHLOVE: The other thing you seem to be saying here is that in

terms of parents and child raising, that more important than providing

children with intelligent role models, or athletic models, are loving

role models.

PEARCE: Kagan's work in Guatemala, Kagan at Harvard, proves

conclusively -- I can't go into all the ramifications of it in one

minute flat -- that strong emotional nurturing of a child is the whole

determining part of the development of intelligence. They can be

brought up in a pigpen with absolutely no standards of life at all,

with just an abysmally low standard of living, but with a high quality

of life, because the only quality of life of a child is their

emotional relationships. Give them a high quality of emotional

relationships and you'll have a brilliant, happy child.

MISHLOVE: That's extraordinary, and I think it's very profound.

PEARCE: But who can do that for a child until they themselves are

integrated and well-knit, you see? You cannot love until you have

first been loved.

MISHLOVE: Well, ph, you've been talking about some

extraordinary, deep problems that we have, and of course we haven't

had time to cover all the solutions. But I think what you're saying

is, if we're going to look at solutions at all, we have to start with

this simple issue of love.

PEARCE: Love, getting in touch with the heart, and a kind of

surrender of the ego-intellect to the great intelligence of the heart,

and then everything is radically changed, including your intellect. My

intellect, seriously, can outperform itself ten to one of what it

could ten years ago, before I found siddha meditation.

MISHLOVE: ph Chilton Pearce, it's been a pleasure having you

with me. Thank you very much.

PEARCE: Thank you, . It's been my pleasure.

From: http://www.intuition.org/idxtran.htm

Two more interviews with J.C. Pearce:

http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/JCP98.html

http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/JCP99.html