“The Life and Insights of Joseph Chilton Pearce, edited by Michael Mendizza, reveals how Pearce, a modern-day sage, endowed with the courage, strength and perseverance to challenge conventional world views, offered humanity original and penetrating insights into our transcendent nature and vast creativity. Joe’s brilliant and original works represents a profound and important contribution toward healing our global dysfunction and ensuring the healthy development of future generations.”

Bruce H. Lipton, Ph.D., stem cell biologist, epigenetic science pioneer,
and author of The Biology of Belief, The Honeymoon Effect and many others.

Most of human existence is habitual, sleep walking in a dream cast by culture. Excluded from this semi-alert state are vast fields of insight and meaning that exist beyond these limited borders. Being habitual, reflexive and mechanical, our sleep-walking appears in the dream as normal and necessary, no reason here to wake up. Drugged by our lazy habits of mind, we comfortably repeat tomorrow what we did yesterday, mother and daughter, father and son, calling this conditioning parenting and education. While great technological innovations were being made, human beings remained stuck, like a wagon wheel in deep, sticky mud, repeating. Joe recognized and rebelled against this life-wasting pattern early.

Much of Joe’s life was spent exploring what he called ‘cracks,’ those very real phenomena that manifest, plain as day, but should not, given the limitations of our day-dreaming reality. Joe used the ancient Vedic image of a Cosmic Egg to describe what is allowed, and therefore possible, in our sleep-walking reality, the images and beliefs that cast our self-world-view. When a crack opens in the egg, excluded potentials slip through, illuminating the true nature of our nature, much of which has been excluded by the egg. Hallelujah, we shout. A miracle!

Living in our egg, excluded capacities are, indeed, miracles. Dissolve or crack the egg and potentials we call miracles are seen for what they are, simply the way nature, which is our nature, works. Exploring this core insight, splits our quest in two dimensions, what are the astonishing capacities that are mostly excluded, and what forms and sustains the limiting egg, our self-inflicted limitations.

None of this matters while dreaming, save the sixth great extinction approaching at avalanche speed. Technology, being part of the dream, enshrined within the egg and therefore oblivious to what is excluded, continues to expand exponentially, creating a blinding force that excludes even more, a self-replicating and expanding reciprocal loop. A problem can’t be solved by the source that created the problem.

To break this suicidal pattern demands first that we, at least partially, awaken from the dream, now turned nightmarish, which means a ‘crack,’ a sliver of free attention that is not completely enchanted by the dream. Like a file in the hand of a prisoner, all of Joe’s writings scrape at the bars of our self-imposed jail, inviting this crack. The more we file, the weaker the egg becomes, until, Hallelujah, excluded potentials pour in illuminating the darkness which sustains the dream. What happens next is up to each of us. As he knew, with every particle of his being, this awakening is our only hope.
Joe gave us the file. Please savor Astonishing Capacities and Self-inflicted Limitations, the Life and Insights of Joseph Chiton Pearce.

    Michael Mendizza

An expert in child development, Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926-2016) devoted his life to exploring the optimum development and astonishing capacities within each individual human being. Across his 12 visionary books and thousands of lectures, he blended cutting-edge science with spirituality and explored the amazing power of imagination for both children and adults--the space where we are able to play with our reality--inspiring millions to discover the human birthright of a more magical world.

In this guide to Pearce’s complete vision of transcendent human potential, Michael Mendizza explores 7 of his most influential books, sharing insights and expertise from Pearce’s full range of interests, from child development and conscious parenting to psychic phenomena and altered states to the power of the mind to shape reality.

Offering essential passages interwoven with Pearce’s own commentary, drawn from personal conversations and unpublished material, this book shows how Pearce’s key insights break down core assumptions about reality and human potential. We see the importance of imagination and empathic, non-verbal forms of wisdom, which have been long overshadowed by verbal-intellectual skills.

Pearce’s life-changing insights into why we have become what we are, contrasted with the miracle nature intends us to be, allowing each of us to break through our self-inflicted limitations and realize our amazing and magical potential.