Friday is Book Day on the blog, when we take a look at books – old and new — that I highly recommend you not miss. This week’s recommended reading: The Death of RELIGION and the Rebirth of SPIRIT, by Joseph Chilton Pearce.
One of the more remarkable books I have read recently is the extraordinary offering from the author of The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, and Evolution’s End, Joseph Chilton Pearce.
Titled The Death of RELIGION and the Rebirth of SPIRIT, this book carries the subtitle: A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart. It is at once scholarly and accessible, informative and imperative, insightful and inspirational. It is imperative because the insights in this book could truly change the world. For Joseph Chilton Pearce here argues persuasively that only through heart-awareness can humanity’s culture be saved.

Let us be clear here. This book is about love unconfined. Indeed, love as the basis of life and evolution itself. As Pearce himself puts it, “This great force is evolution’s raison d’etre.”
Love rules all, it seems, and it may only be humanity that does not know it — until it does, which is often at the end of physical life. This raises in my mind an interesting question: Do we have to die to know how to live? In this remarkable book, Pearce offers us an anecdote about an experience of the great explorer David Livingston, who was once seized by a huge lion “who jaws actually met through Livingston’s shoulder as the great beast began to shake him violently.
“Livingston knew full well his end had come. He reported, however, that at that instant he went into a sublime state of ecstatic bliss. His accompanying guides arrived just in the nick of time to save Livingston’s life and, like the discomfort in the shoulder that was with him the rest of his life, that ecstatic state never fully left him and confirmed his already firm spiritual anchor.
“Livingston’s mind and heart were one, and heart takes care of its mind.”
The idea being expressed in this tome by Pearce is that…


…the heart is more than a simple organ of the body. It is a Center and Container of Divine Intelligence (as is every cell of the body) and the producer and creator of energy waves of a certain characteristic that can alter (read that: heal) negative forces all around it. Says Pearce: If we open to the “intelligence of the heart” and the practices to which such intelligence leads us, eventually those practices become habit “and we will see the world anew.”
The death of religion and the rebirth of spirit pointed to in the title of this book is about a cultural shift and life alteration on the earth that will return us to our only possibility for long-term survival. Conversations with God has long claimed throughout the nine books of its cosmology that only a change in humanity’s cultural story can save humanity itself, from itself. Joseph Chilton Pearce agrees completely.
There is much here about the latest in brain science, and much, too, about what Pearce calls the mind/brain-heart connection. All far too deep to get into in a brief review such as this, the material here is very much worth your exploring in depth. It could change your worldview…and change your life. If a sufficient number of human begins read and “got” Pearce’s message, it could change the world.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
If you would like to discuss these and other
important spiritual and temporal matters with
Neale Donald Walsch, and, indeed,
if you would like to become a messenger of
the New Spirituality, join Neale in the
Messengers’ Circle, a subscription-based
area of the author’s website at www.nealedonaldwalsch.com
Neale personally responds in that location
on his website to many of the Comments
posted here.

More from Beliefnet and our partners
Close Ad