Product Description Social visionary Joseph Chilton Pearce’s indictment of cultural imprinting as the cause of humankind’s cruel and violent behavior • Refutes the Neo-Darwinist assumption that violence is inherent in humanity • Identifies religion as the sustaining force behind our negative cultural imprinting • Shows how infant-adult interactions unconsciously block the creative spirit We are all too aware of the endless variety of cruel and violent behavior reported to us in the media, reminded daily that in every corner of the world someone is suffering or dying at the hands of another. We have to ask: Is this violence and cruelty endemic to our nature? Are we, at our foundation, really so murderous? In The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit, Joseph Chilton Pearce, life-long advocate of human potential, sounds an emphatic and convincing no. Pearce explains that beneath our awareness, culture imprints a negative force-field that blocks the natural rise of the spirit toward its innate nature of love and altruism. Further, he identifies religion as the primary cultural force behind this negative imprinting. Drawing from recent neuroscience, neurocardiology, cultural anthropology, and brain development research, Pearce explains that the key to reversing this trend can be found in the interaction between infants and adults. The adult mind-set effectively compromises the infant’s neural and hormonal interactions between the heart and the higher evolutionary structures of the developing brain, thus keeping us centered primarily in our most primitive and defensive neural foundations, generation after generation. Pearce shows us that if we allow the intelligence of the heart to take hold and flourish, we can reverse this unconscious loss of our true nature. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. from Chapter 11 The Death of Play and the Birth of Religion In 1975, while working on my third book, Magical Child, a school teacher asked how he was supposed to teach children anything and prepare them to face the hard reality of life when all they wanted to do was play. I was working on the book’s chapter on play and looked for some authority I could quote to defend or justify what so many saw as a waste of time. I knew this teacher’s “hard reality” was a fiction made real by eliminating play. I realized that all I had wanted to do as a child was play or be told stories, and all my own children had wanted was to play or be told stories. Play is the very reason for life, the reason why nature built such a lifelong compulsion into us to play every chance we get. Play is life living itself, nature celebrating herself, with no explanation or need for justification. We are born to play. The church comes along with some annual mea-culpa day of solemnity, sack-cloth and ashes, and we turn it into a carnival; the night before All Souls’ Day becomes the celebration of Halloween, with its pranks and mischief; Christmas becomes Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and jingle-bells; Easter becomes bunnies and new bonnets. From the moment of conception, life expands through bonds of belonging, pleasure, and joy. Relating with each other and the earth is play. The more complex the organism, the higher its intelligence and the more complex its play of relationships, with the highest of all being the ever-unfolding expressions of love. Play expresses life’s love of itself, the highest moral imperative. THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY IN RELATIONSHIPS AND LEARNING Early on, the infant plays with the nipple, plays peek-a-boo with that benign face up there--indeed, with great delight it plays at everything, knowing of nothing but play (until we set about to adjust it to reality and teach it to take life seriously). In play, every action is a learning, our brain free to imprint without censure or pressure. Under any such pressure, energy shifts back to the hindbrain, making forebrain actions such as learning difficult. Mothers an