Culture, Control and the Madness of Man

With Joseph Chilton Pearce

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Originally published March 2014. Link to audio below.

Joseph Chilton Pearce discusses some of the ideas in his book 'Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg'. Originally published in 1974, the book has just been reissued.

Although most human beings consider themselves sane, as a species we exhibit almost total insanity. From endless wars to the wholesale destruction of the environment, our actions wreak havoc on all around us, and in the end, on ourselves. But what is the cause of our mass psychosis, and why do so few of us acknowledge it? Do greed and violence truly reflect human nature, or are we victims of some long forgotten tragedy that lives on within the dark depths of our collective unconscious?

'Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg' asserts that our fear of death and belief that the universe is fundamentally hostile are at the root of all our problems. Beginning in childhood, the development of language and the process of acculturation render our direct experiences of the world much less vivid and our innate states of non-ordinary consciousness become suppressed. Trapped in a specific cultural context - a 'cosmic egg' - we are no longer able to have or even recognize mystical experiences not mediated by the limitations of our culture which itself literally splits our minds and prevents us from living fully in the present.

'Exploring the Crack...' explores the varieties of non-ordinary states that can help us return to the unencumbered consciousness of our infancy. Just as we each create our own cosmic egg of reality through cultural conditioning, we also innately create a 'crack' in that egg through which we can restore wholeness to our minds, find freedom from our fear of death, and re-establish our ability to create our own realities through imagination and biological transcendence.

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