Joseph Chilton Pearce is the author of many books including Crack In The Cosmic Egg, The Magical Child, and Evolution's End. For over thirty years he has lectured internationally on human development. Currently he is writing a book on the "biology of transcendence", and co-authoring Nurturing the Early Child, Family & Caregiver, a book and video series with Michael Mendizza. 

Since these paranormal events were my direct experience, not just witnessed, I questioned their meaning, which opened a whole new realm of possibilities, and I wondered how much of our potential this automatic survivalsystem filters out Through studying childdevelopment, I saw how our cultural world view was formed by our social models; and how this view is locked into the very neural structures of our brains, not as opinion but as our worldforming, perceptualconceptual process. When writing my third book, Magical Child, I started giving workshops and seminars to get feedback on my ideas. By the time I completed the book, this feedback had enlarged my original focus to include astonishing capacities and selfinflicted limitations.

Q. So your intention has always been to draw our attention to these undeveloped capacities and limitations we impose on ourselves and on our children?

To grasp the nature of adult spiritual development we must understand the nature of child development which in turn, opens fully to us only when we understand the self organizing properties of the brain and the way our brain draws on fields of intelligence and memory.

All processes are complementary dynamics. Brainmind and world create each other through "structural coupling." Mind shapes its environment, which gives shape to that mind, and the two can never really be separate. An environment for the child includes all the shaping forces, including our misguided notions of schooling, testing, failing, with the inevitable guilt, anger and closure of the absorbent mind.

Within the first three years of life the absorbent mind of the child has either opened up to embrace a benevolent universe or closed down into a frightened defense mechanism on guard against a world it can't trust. Which is the root cause for the social mess we have today.

Stages of development unfold at birth, age one, four, seven, eleven, and concluding (for now) at age fifteen. Except for birth, these are statistical averages. Any child may vary from them as much as a year, but the universality of the stages themselves is beyond question. Each stage consists of a block of potential intelligences and/or abilities appropriate to that age. For optimal development, those abilities must be stimulated and nurtured within the time frame of that stage. This stimulusnurturing implies a model imperative. Just as no teeth could unfold unless the new infant is nourished, no intelligence or ability will unfold unless given a like stimulus from the environment. Not even the physical senses can function until the infant is given sufficient sensory stimulation. No intelligence can unfold unless the child is given an appropriate environmental model of that intelligence someone who has themselves developed that intelligence and, in turn, provides the child with both initial stimulus and ongoing guidance in his or her own development of that capacity. There are no exceptions to this.

As part of this model imperative, the nature, character, and quality of the model determines to an indeterminable extent the nature, character, and quality of the unfolding intelligenceability of the child. Children don't become who we tell them to be. They become who we are and the mother is the first and most important model in a child's life.

Plato said, "give me a different set of mothers and I will give you a different world," which is simply to say that the mother is the most powerful presence in shaping the emerging mind. She is the infant's environment and emotional world, and that infant has no choice except to rough in his basic knowledge of the world as he finds it expressed in her.