Here Joe describes the heart of his life quest, to understand our amazing capacities and self-inflicted limitations. ‘Crack was simply a great huge protest. It was literally kind of a cry of protest that was far more than was being allowed on the current scene. I had started writing it while teaching in a most conservative college and a most conservative state, Virginia. At the same time grappling with such things as degrees and Ph.D.’s and so on and so forth and the enormous demands. And the narrowing down, the constant narrowing down and exclusion of things in order to toe the line, in order to be politically correct which was true then on certainly a very rigid level.’

 

It started with my writing of the “Crack in the Cosmic Egg” and I was looking at all the phases of my own life and of my children’s life and there were a whole series of things that happened that were inexplicable within any modern academics, scientific framework.  And it wasn’t that I was interested in the paranormal or the occult or anything else.  It just seemed to build a whole series of events that would not fit in with any normal paradigm and I wondered in looking at my self in my own life and I know there were critical points in my life when my potential was really very high.  And I knew it and I sensed it.  I intuitively expected certain things to happen. 

And instead you might say environmental disasters occurred which literally were so shattering that I could feel things simply eroding and disappearing, slipping between my fingers. 

And I began to realize what I would now term to be betrayed by a primary caretaker, literally fractured, it’s like taking a piece of glass and fracturing it.  Things don’t come back to focus after that.  You’re compensating rather than functioning.  And then moving up and pretending to observe my children I would see certain things unfold in them literally and then simply decay or disappear, it’s fine.  And I began to wonder what it is.  What is the potential that unfolds and what is it that disappears? 

The Crack was simply a great huge protest.  It was literally kind of a cry of protest that was far more than was being allowed on the current scene.  I had started writing it while teaching in a most conservative college and a most conservative state, Virginia, and at the same time grappling with such things as degrees and Ph.D.’s and so on and so forth and the enormous demands.  And the narrowing down, the constant narrowing down and exclusion of things in order to tow the line, in order to be politically correct which was too thin on certainly a very rigid level.  Here was my own life which had this series of extraordinary things that had happened, particularly in my 23^rd year when a whole for months and months and months what has been called paranormal things occurred and in quite striking ways. And to me they were simply indications of what was really there and the enormous tendency of us to screen those out on behalf of a far more timid limited and apparently safe but deadly common consensus.  And so my book which I worked on for 12 years was started off and for a long time remained a protest against my teaching colleagues for their own narrow way of thinking.  And then the things had occurred in my graduate work in different travels, ran across this stone wall. 

Now you either come around to the conventional way of thinking or you simply can’t make that kind of a grade.  And the great crisis I found I came to, you can either continue writing the book Crack or go and head on to the degree program and continuing in college and the great crisis of that, which was a long drawn out thing, and I found I had to leap off of a cliff with my wife and four children on my back, so to speak, and on behalf of going for what I felt to be true.  So then my second book follows up on Crack and I would then stumble across the whole thing of child development in the Pieje and Montesorri and others had not dealt these stages which I had sensed but I couldn’t articulate.  One thing leads to another and the picture grows and grows and grows.  Then I began giving those seminars as I wrote Magical Child, just simply to explore ideas in public. I’d throw it out and get shot down and that was perfectly alright with me.  I had no image to defend.  I was really looking for exploring a whole series of phenomena in our lives.  And so by the time I finally got the book published I received from my audiences already a great deal of material that changed the shape of that book and then from there on I found myself caught up in, I often thought that I got type-cast like a Hollywood movie person, I’d gotten type-cast with child business.  And I started branching away from that bond of power and when Magical Child material came along as a way of trying to correct the errors of Magical Child, the shortcomings and that’s the way it’s gone.  But now of course I’m locked into that grid of concerns over childhood.  My original viewpoint was far broader than that.  I was looking at the whole kind of cosmic drama we’re caught up in and how we limit ourselves, why we limit ourselves, and what our dimensions really are.