Joseph Chilton Pearce (January 14, 1926 - August 23, 2016)
Ancient Encoded Wisdom
What Babies Want
audio interview series - volume 1 (excerpt)
“I think one of the surprising things about the 21st century is coming into full awareness of what’s involved in the birth process. At one time we probably had that awareness, way back there, women just carried it in their genes, but it kind of just got lost in the shuffle, particularly in the Middle Ages and male domination and so forth. And so the rediscovery, the full dimensions of what birth means, I think has been one of the great scientific discoveries of the world, if you like.
There really is no such thing as a natural childbirth, because we are nature. What we do with childbirth is what nature is doing with childbirth. And I think we have the chance now, through all of the research and study that has been done, to seriously bring about a revolution of the type and kind of human being we have on this planet.
We have the chance to erase all forms of violence through the proper approach to pregnancy and birth and the first three years of life alone.
And that is a big statement but I am convinced of it by the research that has been done and that is opening up now.
I think of the work the Swedish pediatrics group has done in Sweden and the way their government has picked up their research and brought about a real revolution there in the elimination of crime and violence, saving all the great human tragedy and expense that kind of violence is. We could do the same thing here.
Research now shows very clearly that the mother's emotional state during pregnancy determines the actual shape, nature and character of the brain structure that grows in the infant; this has been established without question. All mammals follow the same pattern.
If the mother is in a state of high anxiety, fear, worry, and so forth, she gives birth to an entirely different brain structure, one with much larger - what we call the old hindbrain - the survival brain, the sensory motor brain and a much reduced size of intellectual, creative brain.
It is though, at every birth, nature is saying, well, ‘can we go for more intelligence or do we have to defend ourselves again?’
The fact that we know that now, we know that it makes a profound difference on the types of citizens we have in our country.
Through that then, we can simply, by serious massive support of the mother from the moment of conception on, we can bring about tremendous change - just in that support of pregnancy.
And then the discovery of people like Allan Schore and others that show that within the first 18 months of life the shape of the brain is literally, again, transformed or deformed by the emotional state that the mother is in in her dealings with the child.
Research and information like that, especially neuro-cardiology, the new discoveries about the brain, literally the neurostructures in the heart, and the unmediated neurostructures that connect the heart to the emotional brain and the affect this has if those connections are made, and those are the connections made at bonding or are lost, and if those connections are made you have a totally different operation in that child than if they are not made.
James Prescott, 14 years as the head of all of child development at the National Institutes of Health turned out a study, he and his whole department, on the Roots of Violence.
He said the roots of violence are right there in the delivery room and of course we know it is also in pre-natal as much but that was not known really at that time, and the first critical year or so after birth.
So we know that the result of that constant betrayal of the child, feeling betrayed by the world, we know there is a great rage factor. We know the rage factor is caused by literally hormonal imbalance in the body. If you read Allen Schore’s studies of what happens to the betrayal of the toddler is they are caught between the conflict of maintaining a relationship with the mother and the same time to trying to explore their world.
He points out that the average American mother issues a harsh prohibition against their, child’s behavior, once they get on their feet, not so long as they are in the crib, they are safe there, but once they get on their feet and start exploring the world, the average American mother issues a harsh, negative prohibition every 9 minutes that the child is in a waking state. That is they hear a constant ‘no’, ‘don’t’ from every direction, about their behavior.
And the result of this is a collapse of the neurostructures in the brain that produce such things as dopamine and all of those hormones which keep us in a tranquil state. And a tremendous activation of those fight/flight hormones that put us on alert against a world we can’t trust, so that we are constantly on guard and defensive and quick, reflexive, retaliation for anything we interpret as an insult to us or a threat to us.
And so you get the hindbrain, with its reflexive survival instincts accentuated and the forebrain with its reflective, intellectual, nurturing kind of intelligence suppressed by the treatment of the caretakers of that child during that critical period.
And as Allen Schore shows in the huge work of his 2,300 research citations, by golly, that this affects the infant’s behavior for the rest of his life. And he traces all pathologies of the adolescent and the adult to that critical period between the 11th and 18th month. And he has got massive research behind him.
Conflict between the child’s caretaker and the child’s need to build and structure and explore his world as a toddler, that conflict, profoundly affects the emotional brain itself which shows up as the rage factor and violence later in life.
So it is a very specific and very easily spotted biological response to treatment of the child in the earliest period.
Bruce Lipton said we are just a glorified cell. When nature created a cell a billion years ago it was the most incredible creation in the universe and everything since then has just been an expansion of this cell, which is just its own brain and everything else. And he said ‘When this new life, whether human or anything else, comes into this world it has only two choices, it can expand and embrace the universe or collapse and defend against it; it can’t do both.’
And our children, through betrayal in their world out there, collapse into a harsh, defensive reaction against a world that they can’t trust.
So it all depends on whether or not they are met with love and unconditional love and support and nurturing by their caretakers in the first three years of life or if they feel abandoned you will have violence later on. It is a one-to-one correspondence between the two behaviors."
JCP - "What Babies Want" interview back cover: Joseph Chilton Pearce is a well known author of many books, including Crack In the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, Evolution's End and more recently, The Biology of Transcendence. He is an exceptional speaker on human intellignece, creativity, and learning.
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