Broca's Brain (50 page)

Stage 3 is the end of the birth process, when the child’s head has penetrated the cervix and might, even if the eyes are closed, perceive a tunnel illuminated at one end and sense the brilliant radiance of the extrauterine world. The discovery of light for a creature that has lived its entire existence in darkness must be a profound and on some level an unforgettable experience.
And there, dimly made out by the low resolution of the newborn’s eyes, is some godlike figure surrounded by a halo of light—the Midwife or the Obstetrician or the Father. At the end of a monstrous travail, the baby flies away from the uterine universe, and rises toward the lights and the gods.

Stage 4 is the time immediately after birth when the perinatal apnea has dissipated, when the child is blanketed or swaddled, hugged and given nourishment. If recollected accurately, the contrast between Stages 1 and 2 and 2 and 4, for an infant utterly without other experience, must be very deep and striking; and the importance of Stage 3 as the passage between agony and at least a tender simulacrum of the cosmic unity of Stage 1 must have a powerful influence on the child’s later view of the world.

There is, of course, room for skepticism in Grof’s account and in my expansion upon it. There are many questions to be answered. Do children born before labor by Caesarean section never recall the agonizing Stage 2? Under psychedelic therapy, do they report fewer images of catastrophic earthquakes and tidal waves than those born by normal deliveries? Conversely, are children born after the particularly severe uterine contractions induced in “elective labor” by the hormone oxytocin
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more likely to acquire the psychological burdens of Stage 2? If the mother is given a strong sedative, will the baby upon maturity recall a very different transition from Stage 1 directly to Stage 4 and never report, in a perithanatic experience, a radiant epiphany? Can neonates resolve an image at the moment of birth or are they merely sensitive to light and
darkness? Might the description, in the near-death experience, of a fuzzy and glowing god without hard edges be a perfect recollection of an imperfect neonatal image? Are Grof’s patients selected from the widest possible range of human beings or are these accounts restricted to an unrepresentative subset of the human community?

It is easy to understand that there might be more personal objections to these ideas, a resistance perhaps similar to the kind of chauvinism that can be detected in justifications of carnivorous eating habits: the lobsters have no central nervous system; they don’t mind being dropped alive into boiling water. Well, maybe. But the lobster-eaters have a vested interest in this particular hypothesis on the neurophysiology of pain. In the same way I wonder if most adults do not have a vested interest in believing that infants possess very limited powers of perception and memory, that there is no way the birth experience could have a profound and, in particular, a profoundly negative influence.

If Grof is right about all this, we must ask why such recollections are possible—why, if the perinatal experience has produced enormous unhappiness, evolution has not selected out the negative psychological consequences. There are some things that newborn infants must do. They must be good at sucking; otherwise they will die. They must, by and large, look cute because at least in previous epochs of human history, infants who in some way seemed appealing were better taken care of. But
must
newborn babies see images of their environment?
Must
they remember the horrors of the perinatal experience? In what sense is there survival value in that? The answer might be that the pros outweigh the cons—perhaps the loss of a universe to which we are perfectly adjusted motivates us powerfully to change the world and improve the human circumstance. Perhaps that striving, questing aspect of the human spirit would be absent if it were not for the horrors of birth.

I am fascinated by the point—which I stress in my book
The Dragons of Eden
—that the pain of childbirth
is especially marked in human mothers because of the enormous recent growth of the brain in the last few million years. It would seem that our intelligence is the source of our unhappiness in an almost literal way; but it would also imply that our unhappiness is the source of our strength as a species.

These ideas may cast some light on the origin and nature of religion. Most Western religions long for a life after death; Eastern religions for relief from an extended cycle of deaths and rebirths. But both promise a heaven or satori, an idyllic reunion of the individual and the universe, a return to Stage 1. Every birth is a death—the child leaves the amniotic world. But devotees of reincarnation claim that every death is a birth—a proposition that could have been triggered by perithanatic experiences in which the perinatal memory was recognized as a recollection of birth. (“There was a faint rap on the coffin. We opened it, and it turned out that Abdul had not died. He had awakened from a long illness which had cast its spell upon him, and he told a strange story of being born once again.”)

Might not the Western fascination with punishment and redemption be a poignant attempt to make sense of perinatal Stage 2? Is it not better to be punished for something—no matter how implausible, such as original sin—than for nothing? And Stage 3 looks very much like a common experience, shared by all human beings, implanted into our earliest memories and occasionally retrieved in such religious epiphanies as the near-death experience. It is tempting to try to understand other puzzling religious motifs in these terms.
In utero
we know virtually nothing. In Stage 2 the fetus gains experience of what might very well in later life be called evil—and then is forced to leave the uterus. This is entrancingly close to eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and then experiencing the “expulsion” from Eden.
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In Michelangelo’s famous painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is the finger of God an
obstetrical finger? Why is baptism, especially total-immersion baptism, widely considered a symbolic rebirth? Is holy water a metaphor for amniotic fluid? Is not the entire concept of baptism and the “born again” experience an explicit acknowledgment of the connection between birth and mystical religiosity?

If we study some of the thousands of religions on the planet Earth, we are impressed by their diversity. At least some of them seem stupefyingly harebrained. In doctrinal details, mutual agreement is rare. But many great and good men and women have stated that behind the apparent divergences is a fundamental and important unity; beneath the doctrinal idiocies is a basic and essential truth. There are two very different approaches to a consideration of tenets of belief. On the one hand, there are the believers, who are often credulous, and who accept a received religion literally, even though it may have internal inconsistencies or be in strong variance with what we know reliably about the external world or ourselves. On the other hand, there are the stern skeptics, who find the whole business a farrago of weak-minded nonsense. Some who consider themselves sober rationalists resist even considering the enormous corpus of recorded religious experience. These mystical insights must mean something. But what? Human beings are, by and large, intelligent and creative, good at figuring things out. If religions are fundamentally silly, why is it that so many people believe in them?

Certainly, bureaucratic religions have throughout human history allied themselves with the secular authorities, and it has frequently been to the benefit of those ruling a nation to inculcate the faith. In India, when the Brahmans wished to keep the “untouchables” in slavery, they proffered divine justification. The same self-serving argument was employed by whites, who actually described themselves as Christians, in the ante-bellum American South to support the enslavement of blacks. The ancient Hebrews cited God’s direction and encouragement in the random pillage and murder they sometimes visited on innocent peoples. In medieval times the Church held out the hope of a glorious life after
death to those upon whom it urged contentment with their lowly and impoverished station. These examples can be multiplied indefinitely, to include virtually all the world’s religions. We can understand why the oligarchy might favor religion when, as is often the case, religion justifies oppression—as Plato, a dedicated advocate of book-burning, did in the
Republic.
But why do the oppressed so eagerly go along with these theocratic doctrines?

The general acceptance of religious ideas, it seems to me, can only be because there is something in them that resonates with our own certain knowledge—something deep and wistful; something every person recognizes as central to our being. And that common thread, I propose, is birth. Religion is fundamentally mystical, the gods inscrutable, the tenets appealing but unsound because, I suggest, blurred perceptions and vague premonitions are the best that the newborn infant can manage. I think that the mystical core of the religious experience is neither literally true nor perniciously wrong-minded. It is rather a courageous if flawed attempt to make contact with the earliest and most profound experience of our lives. Religious doctrine is fundamentally clouded because not a single person has ever at birth had the skills of recollection and retelling necessary to deliver a coherent account of the event. All successful religions seem at their nucleus to make an unstated and perhaps even unconscious resonance with the perinatal experience. Perhaps when secular influences are subtracted, it will emerge that the most successful religions are those which perform this resonance best.

Attempts at rationalistic explanations of religious belief have been resisted vigorously. Voltaire argued that if God did not exist Man would be obliged to invent him, and was reviled for the remark. Freud proposed that a paternalistic God is partly our projection as adults of our perceptions of our fathers when we were infants; he also called his book on religion
The Future of an Illusion.
He was not despised as much as we might imagine for these views, but perhaps only because
he had already demonstrated his disreputability by introducing such scandalous notions as infantile sexuality.

Why is the opposition to rational discourse and reasoned argument in religion so strong? In part, I think it is because our common perinatal experiences are real but resist accurate recollection. But another reason, I think, has to do with the fear of death. Human beings and our immediate ancestors and collateral relatives, such as the Neanderthals, are probably the first organisms on this planet to have a clear awareness of the inevitability of our own end. We will die and we fear death. This fear is worldwide and transcultural. It probably has significant survival value. Those who wish to postpone or avoid death can improve the world, reduce its perils, make children who will live after us, and create great works by which they will be remembered. Those who propose rational and skeptical discourse on things religious are perceived as challenging the remaining widely held solution to the human fear of death, the hypothesis that the soul lives on after the body’s demise.
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Since we feel strongly, most of us, about wishing not to die, we are made uncomfortable by those who suggest that death is the end; that the personality and the soul of each of us will not live on. But the soul hypothesis and the God hypothesis are separable; indeed, there are some human cultures in which the one can be found without the other. In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.

Those who raise questions about the God hypothesis and the soul hypothesis are by no means all atheists. An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed. A wide range of intermediate positions seems admissible, and considering the enormous emotional energies with which the subject is invested, a questing, courageous and open mind seems to be the essential tool for narrowing the range of our collective ignorance on the subject of the existence of God.

When I give lectures on borderline or pseudo or folk science (along the lines of
Chapters 5
through
8
of this book) I am sometimes asked if similar criticism should not be applied to religious doctrine. My answer is, of course, yes. Freedom of religion, one of the rocks upon which the United States was founded, is essential for free inquiry. But it does not carry with it any immunity from criticism or reinterpretation for the religions themselves. The words “question” and “quest” are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth. I do not insist that these connections between religion and perinatal experience are correct or original. Many of them are at least implicit in the ideas of Stanislav Grof and the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry, particularly Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud. But they are worth thinking about.

There is, of course, a great deal more to the origin of religion than these simple ideas suggest. I do not propose that theology is physiology entirely. But it would be astonishing, assuming we really can remember our perinatal experiences, if they did not affect in the deepest way our attitudes on birth and death, sex and
childhood, on purpose and ethics, on causality and God.

AND COSMOLOGY
. Astronomers studying the nature and origin and fate of the universe make elaborate observations, describe the cosmos in differential equations and the tensor calculus, examine the universe from X-rays to radio waves, count the galaxies and determine their motions and distances—and when all is done a choice is to be made between three different views: a Steady State cosmology, blissful and quiet; an Oscillating Universe, in which the universe expands and contracts, painfully and forever; and a Big Bang expanding universe, in which the cosmos is created in a violent event, suffused with radiation (“Let there be light”) and then grows and cools, evolves and becomes quiescent, as we saw in the previous chapter. But these three cosmologies resemble with an awkward, almost embarrassing precision the human perinatal experiences of Grof’s Stages 1, 2, and 3 plus 4, respectively.