The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Challenging Constructs of Mind and Reality

by Joseph Chilton Pearce and Joesph Chilton Pearce

Book Overview

With a new preface by the author. This enormously popular New Age classic, beautifully written and intellectually challenging, has inspired and guided millions of readers to develop new, creative, inventive modes of thinking.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517566613
• ISBN13: 9780517566619
• Release Date: March 1988
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA)
• Length: 207 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Folks dang sure are normally crazy

To quote a saying from the 1960s, "Reality is self-induced hallucination." It was a way of saying, it is normal for everyone to define reality according to personal suppressed, repressed, or conscious preferences that are tainted/caused by nurture or nature. The more conscious person is expected to have a well integrated personality producing sanity/normalcy, but never completely eliminating self-induced hallucinations. Sanity/normalcy, by my friends, was never considered a mental state governed by social/legal mandates, convention, dogma; However, many mental health professional did, almost exclusively, define sanity as the accepted social/legal norm. Most IQ test still follow this fixation of application (mensa). An EU university Spanish student speaking to a German student might say mensa mensa menso (a cafeteria of foolish women and men). A saying for the social/legal mandates, convention, dogma, mensa, C*Os, clerics, politicians (other megalomaniacs) saying, "Dogma affected never reason effective." A possible reason US, EU, RU, PRCN... are failures, our leaders do not think beyond their reward/comfort-shell. Anyway, I guess, it is about time to return to the "60s" existentialism. What is an Adelophobic? Hates unknowns What is an Adelophiliac? Loves unknowns Most things are unknown and almost erotically fascinating for me.

BROKEN COLLUSIVE GAMES OF MUTUAL SELF DECEPTION

I perceived Pearce's insights related to those of R. D. Laing in chapter 6 entitled "Collusion" in his insightful book "Self and Other". When people are "Playing to WIN Collusive-Games-of-Mutual-Self-Deception" and discover that they cannot WIN such Collusive-Games-of-Mutual-Self-Deception" - - - there is a "Crack in their Cosmic Egg" and they are terrified and work harder to WIN. See my related writing at the web site [...] with support at [...] These writings are inter-related in helpful ways!

A treatise on how we maneuver around the constraints of our own reality construction project.

This book was required reading on the military strategy reading list at the Military Officer's finishing school: the National War College at Fort McNair, in Washington, D.C. One could have also gotten a clue that this was an important book without knowing this fact -- simply by knowing that it was recommended by none other than the illustrative John C. Lilly, of CIA fame, and author of several unforgettable books: Programming and Meta-programming in the Human Bio-computer," "A Simulation of God," as well as his several books on the inter-species communication between man and Dolphins, all of which are books that should be on any classic intellectual's reading list. The intellectual feast here utilizes the metaphor of a "Cosmic Egg" to get its point across: that the reality that defines us (and is defined by us), is a fragile, but closed and limited, and self-limiting construction. It, and all that it brings forth, is but a small "clearing" in the intellectual and existential "darkness." Yet, we cannot be allowed to forget that both the "clearing" and the "darkness" are but "mental constructs" that lie within the shell of the egg too. The mind is the only sculpturing tool we have for our "reality construction project." We are indeterminately a large part of the function that shapes the reality from which we do our looking. Our looking enters as one of the determinants in the reality event we see. Our reality is in fact forever condemned to this "Heisenberg effect" of human existence. Reports of "extra-terrestrial" phenomena, such as Gods, angels, juju, religions, and magic are just exaggerated self-creations that indicate the urgency with which we are compelled to get outside the shell of our Cosmic egg -- that is, if are ever to grow beyond its self-limiting confines. How to escape this paradox, and what we find once we do escape, is what this book is all about. Escaping it obviously is a delicate operation, for if the crack is expanded too abruptly -- well, we know what happened to "Humpty-Dumpty? Yet, if it remains too confining, the "reptilian National Security State" brain takes over and the shell becomes a thin, brittle Fascist-leaning construction that is liable to shatter under the least bit of pressure. The idea that there is a world "out there" independent of our minds is as much a fiction and as much a mistake as it is to assume that one "culturally determined worldview construction project" is better than another: All changes in worldviews, change "the world viewed." We are all "reality-adjusted" at birth and then throughout life, "socially-adjusted" so as to make peace with the "orthodox version" of the worldviews we are trained to see. One goes beyond these self-limiting constraints only on pain of social and existential isolation and alienation. We focus on the world through an esthetic prism from which we can never be free except by exchanging prisms. No one is innocent of "social" and "reality" adjustments. According

Still great decades later!

I read this book originally literally decades ago when it was first published. Recently while working on an article I am writing I remembered a reference to uncanny behaviors of Aborigineal tribesmen behaving more like higly in sync migratory animals than what we typically attribute to human behavior. I searched for my old book to no avail and was pleasantly surprised to find that the book is still in publication. Joseph Chilton Pearce is a fine writer. I highly recommend this book.

Opening Your Mind to Possibilities

"The Crack in the Cosmic Egg" will challenge you to think about what is it? What is this thing we call reality? How is it that paradigms and how we view the world works and how is it that sometimes the seemingly miraculous occurs. Where does it come from, that which is so improbable may tomorrow be everyday knowledge. A good book to get your feet wet, into exploring mind and reality.