THE BIOLOGY OF TRANSCENDENCE

BOOK DESCRIPTION:
Uses new research about the brain to explore how we can transcend our current physical and cultural limitations

• Reveals that transcendence of current modes of existence requires the dynamic interaction of our fourth and fifth brains (intellect and intelligence)

• Explores the idea that Jesus, Lao-tzu, and other great beings in history are models of nature’s possibility and our ability to achieve transcendence

Why do we seem stuck in a culture of violence and injustice? How is it that we can recognize the transcendent ideal represented by figures such as Jesus, Lao-tzu, and many others who have walked among us and yet not seem to reach the same state?

In The Biology of Transcendence, Joseph Chilton Pearce examines the current biological understanding of our neural organization to address how we can go beyond the limitations and constraints of our current capacities of body and mind--how we can transcend. Recent research in the neurosciences and neurocardiology identifies the four neural centers of our brain and indicates that a fifth such center is located in the heart. This research reveals that the evolutionary structure of our brain and its dynamic interactions with our heart are designed by nature to reach beyond our current evolutionary capacities. We are quite literally, made to transcend.

Pearce explores how this “biological imperative” drives our life into ever-greater realms of being -- even as the “cultural imperative” of social conformity and behavior counters this genetic heritage, blocks our transcendent capacities, and breeds violence in all its forms. The conflict between religion and spirit is an important part of this struggle. But each of us may overthrow these cultural imperatives to reach “unconflicted behavior,” wherein heart and mind-brain resonate in synchronicity, opening us to levels of possibility beyond the ordinary.

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SELECTED EXCERPTS:
In "The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit", Joseph Chilton Pearce writes,

"'The ability to rise and go beyond' is the definition of transcendence.... While this force constitutes our nature and fires our spirit, an honest exploration of it must contend with this counter question: Why, with a history so rich in noble ideals and lofty philosophies that reach for the transcendent, do we exhibit such abominable behaviors? Our violence towards ourselves and the planet is an issue that overshadows and makes a mockery of all our high aspirations....

"Neither our violence nor our transcendence is a moral or ethical matter of religion, but rather an issue of biology. We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed.

"While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it...."

"Culture, as the collected embodiment of our survival ideation, is the mental environment to which we must adapt, the state of mind with which we identify.

"The nature or character of a culture is colored by the myths and religions that arise within it, and abandoning one myth or religion to embrace another has no effect on culture because it both produces and is produced by these elements.

"Science has supposedly supplanted religion — but it has simply become our new religious form and an even more powerful cultural support....

"That we are shaped by the culture we create makes it difficult to see that our culture is what must be transcended, which means we must rise above our notions and techniques of survival itself, if we are to survive...."

"Creator and created as a co-inspiring dynamic make imperative a simple natural law: Intelligence, no matter how innate or genetically encoded, can unfold within us only when an actual model for that intelligence is given us.

"All dynamics must have their generative source, even if the source can never be factually determined — if there are two mirrors reflecting each other in an infinite regress, which one could we say initiates the reflection?...."

[Gary's note: Perhaps the initiator is the One who placed the mirrors, i.e., the self-existing Source/cosmos of consciousness/One Being which broke the Stillness so that creator Gods/Goddesses and their creations would emerge.]

"From the beginning of our life, the characteristics of each new possibility must be demonstrated for us by someone, some thing, or an event in our immediate environment.... models of nature's new possibility, our next evolutionary step manifested by our newest neural structure, transcending violence to create a new, viable reality...."

[Gary's note: Some few humans may also step out of their cultural confines and be the initiators of a new model — such as, 'I am Source, having a human experience, guided and motivated by my love for Love Itself.']

"I discovered how to bypass my body's most ancient instincts of self-preservation, which resulted in a temporary absence of all fear and subsequent abandonment of all caution....

"This sort of unconflicted behavior manifested, it seemed, from a split-second recognition, without qualification or rationale, that death was a foregone conclusion, an integral part of that very event, that death was already within me. Death was not a possibility to be avoided but a fact to be accepted as it was already accomplished -- death had already happened....

"To find that the structure of reality was negotiable when I was free of all internal conflict was a momentous discovery for me — as was my realization that all internal conflict is produced by our feat of possible harm or death. The irony of this is that there exists for us a state in which harm really can't occur within the confines of a particular single event if we bypass our block of fear and open to this other perspective.

There are many names for, and facets of, the shifts our spirit can bring about. Unconflicted behavior isn't a religious, theoretical, philosophical, or semantic issue, nor a matter of logic. Instead it is the alogical crack in the egg of reality, the way of faith, the way by which creator and created give rise to each other.

"Faith and belief are poles apart. Belief is intellectual and from the head. Faith comes, I can only surmise, from the heart, or perhaps from kath or chi — that center of will in our being."

SPIN on WHOLE HUMAN
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In physics, 'Spin is an intrinsic form of angular momentum carried by elementary particles, composite particles (hadrons), and atomic nuclei.' - Wikipedia