Posted 2016-09-02Remembering Joseph Chilton Pearce
Last week the visionary author Joseph Chilton Pearce passed away after gracing us with his presence for more than 90 years. Although I met him only once — more than a decade ago at a symposium on parent-child bonding and attachment — his personal warmth, generosity, and passion for human potential were abundantly clear.
I read Pearce’s classic bestseller, Magical Child, when my first born was barely a year old. After The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, Magical Child had the biggest impact on my early parenting experience. (Coincidently, both authors were born in 1926 and both books’ American editions were published in 1977.)
I was especially impacted by Pearce’s concept of a matrix, the Latin word for womb, which he defined as “a source of possibility, a source of energy to explore that possibility, and a safe place within which that exploration can take place.” Every child’s first matrix is literally the mother’s womb, but nature’s blueprint for human development provides for several matrix shifts: from the womb to the mother (Liedloff’s “in-arms phase”) to the earth (an ever-widening circle of the terrain surrounding the mother) to the self (becoming one’s own matrix) to increasingly abstract matrices of higher consciousness. (Magical Child, Chapter 2.)
His later work focused more and more on the intelligence of the heart, which he saw as an underutilized source of wisdom that nature intended to complement the intellect and prevent the kind of “progress” that now threatens the life of our planet.
All of Pearce’s work reveals the elegant beauty and exquisite intelligence of the developmental process bequeathed to humanity through evolution. This gift — largely squandered through modern society’s “advanced” but short-sighted parenting and education practices — can be reclaimed thanks to the understanding Pearce made accessible through his books and lectures.
One caveat for parents exploring Pearce’s ideas: Learning about how children are designed by nature to develop — and the negative consequences of straying too far from that design — may lead some parents to conclude that they must have caused their children to be permanently damaged. Please don’t do that to yourself! I’m certain that Pearce never intended to make anyone feel guilty. And I imagine he would have agreed with me that there is no damage beyond repair through the immense healing power of the human heart and spirit.
Pearce’s contributions to humanity have been championed most enthusiastically by his close friend and colleague Michael Mendizza, who wrote the following reflection last week about his hero...
“I know of no other contemporary who experienced both sides directly and shared his Eureka’s with such relentless, childlike passion and clarity, not for himself but simply so others would be filled and transformed as he was.”
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