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.* 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.* 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.
It is easy for modern astronomers to make fun of the cosmologies of other cultures—for example, the Dogon idea that the universe was hatched from a cosmic egg (Chapter 6). But in light of the ideas just presented, I intend to be much more circumspect in my attitudes toward folk cosmologies; their anthropocentrism is just a little bit easier to discern than ours. Might the puzzling Babylonian and Biblical references to waters above and below the firmament, which Thomas Aquinas struggled so painfully to reconcile with Aristotelian physics, be merely an amniotic metaphor? Are we incapable of constructing a cosmology that is not some mathematical encrypting of our own personal origins?
Einstein’s equations of general relativity admit a solution in which the universe expands. But Einstein, inexplicably, overlooked such a solution and opted for an absolutely static, nonevolving cosmos. Is it too much to inquire whether this oversight had perinatal rather than mathematical origins? There is a demonstrated reluctance of physicists and astronomers to accept Big Bang cosmologies in which the universe expands forever, although conventional Western theologians are more or less delighted with the prospect. Might this dispute, based almost certainly on psychological predispositions, be understood in Grofian terms?
I do not know how close the analogies are between personal perinatal experiences and particular cosmological models. I suppose it is too much to hope that the originators of the Steady State hypothesis were each born by Caesarean section. But the analogies are very close, and the possible connection between psychiatry and cosmology seems very real. Can it really be that every possible mode of origin and evolution of the universe corresponds to a human perinatal experience? Are we such limited creatures that we are unable to construct a cosmology that differs significantly from one of the perinatal stages?* Is our ability to know the universe hopelessly ensnared and enmired in the experiences of birth and infancy? Are we doomed to recapitulate our origins in a pretense of understanding the universe? Or might the emerging observational evidence gradually force us into an accommodation with and an understanding of that vast and awesome universe in which we float, lost and brave and questing?
It is customary in the world’s religions to describe Earth as our mother and the sky as our father. This is true of Uranus and Gaea in Greek mythology, and also among Native Americans, Africans, Polynesians, indeed most of the peoples of the planet Earth. However, the very point of the perinatal experience is that we leave our mothers. We do it first at birth and then again when we set out into the world by ourselves. As painful as those leave-takings are, they are essential for the continuance of the human species. Might this fact have some bearing on the almost mystical appeal that space flight has, at least for many of us? Is it not a leaving of Mother Earth, the world of our origins, to seek our fortune among the stars? This is precisely the final visual metaphor of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a Russian schoolmaster, almost entirely self-educated, who, around the turn of the century, formulated many of the theoretical steps that have since been taken in the development of rocket propulsion and space flight. Tsiolkovsky wrote: “The Earth is the cradle of mankind. But one does not live in the cradle forever.”
We are set irrevocably, I believe, on a path that will take us to the stars—unless in some monstrous capitulation to stupidity and greed, we destroy ourselves first. And out there in the depths of space, it seems very likely that, sooner or later, we will find other intelligent beings. Some of them will be less advanced than we; some, probably most, will be more. Will all the space-faring beings, I wonder, be creatures whose births are painful? The beings more advanced than we will have capabilities far beyond our understanding. In some very real sense they will appear to us as godlike. There will be a great deal of growing up required of the infant human species. Perhaps our descendants in those remote times will look back on us, on the long and wandering journey the human race will have taken from its dimly remembered origins on the distant planet Earth, and recollect our personal and collective histories, our romance with science and religion, with clarity and understanding and love.
* It is interesting to wonder why psychedelic molecules exist—especially in great abundance—in a variety of plants. The psychedelics are unlikely to provide any immediate benefit for the plant. The hemp plant probably does not get high from its complement of 1Δ tetrahydrocannabinol. But human beings cultivate hemp because the hallucinogenic properties of marijuana are widely prized. There is evidence that in some cultures psychedelic plants are the only domesticated vegetation. It is possible that in such ethnobotany a symbiotic relationship has developed between the plants and the humans. Those plants which by accident provide desired psychedelics are preferentially cultivated. Such artificial selection can exert an extremely powerful influence on subsequent evolution in relatively short time periods—say, tens of thousands of years—as is apparent by comparing many domesticated animals with their wild forebears. Recent work also makes it likely that psychedelic substances work because they are close chemical congeners of natural substances, produced by the brain, which inhibit or enhance neural transmission, and which may have among their physiological functions the induction of endogenous changes in perception or mood.
* A fascinating description of Grof’s work and the entire range of psychedelics can be found in the forthcoming book Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered by Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar (New York, Basic Books, 1979). Grof’s own description of his findings can be found in Realms of the Human Unconscious by S. Grof (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1976) and The Human Encounter with Death by S. Grof and J. Halifax (New York, E. P. Dutton, 1977).
* Astonishingly, oxytocin turns out to be an ergot derivative that is chemically related to psychedelics such as LSD. Since it induces labor, it is at least a plausible hypothesis that some similar natural substance is employed by nature to in
duce uterine contractions. But this would imply some fundamental connection for the mother—and perhaps for the child—between birth and psychedelic drugs. Perhaps it is therefore not so implausible that, much later in life under the influence of a psychedelic drug, we recall the birth experience—the event during which we first experienced psychedelic drugs.
* A different but not inconsistent hypothesis on the Eden metaphor, in phylogeny rather than ontogeny, is described in The Dragons of Eden.
* One curious variant is given in Arthur Schnitzler’s Flight Into Darkness: “… at all the moments of death of any nature, one lives over again his past life with a rapidity inconceivable to others. This remembered life must also have a last moment, and this last moment its own last moment, and so on, and hence, dying is itself eternity, and hence, in accordance with the theory of limits, one may approach death but can never reach it.” In fact, the sum of an infinite series of this sort is finite, and the argument fails for mathematical as well as other reasons. But it is a useful reminder that we are often willing to accept desperate measures to avoid a serious confrontation with the inevitability of death.
* Kangaroos are born when they are little more than embryos and must then make, entirely unassisted, a heroic journey hand over hand from birth canal to pouch. Many fail this demanding test. Those who succeed find themselves once again in a warm, dark and protective environment, this one equipped with teats. Would the religion of a species of intelligent marsupials invoke a stern and implacable god who severely tests marsupialkind? Would marsupial cosmology deduce a brief interlude of radiation in a premature Big Bang followed by a “Second Dark,” and then a much more placid emergence into the universe we know?
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