THE AMNIOTIC
UNIVERSE

WILLIAM WOLCOTT died and went to heaven. Or so it seemed. Before being wheeled to the operating table, he had been reminded that the surgical procedure would entail a certain risk. The operation was a success, but just as the anaesthesia was wearing off his heart went into fibrillation and he died. It seemed to him that he had somehow left his body and was able to look down upon it, withered and pathetic, covered only by a sheet, lying on a hard and unforgiving surface. He was only a little sad, regarded his body one last time—from a great height, it seemed—and continued a kind of upward journey. While his surroundings had been suffused by a strange permeating darkness, he realized that things were now getting brighter—looking up, you might say. And then he was being illuminated from a distance, flooded with light. He entered a kind of radiant kingdom and there, just ahead of him, he could make out in silhouette, magnificently lit from behind, a great godlike figure whom he was now effortlessly approaching. Wolcott strained to make out His face…

And then awoke. In the hospital operating room where the defibrillation machine had been rushed to him, he had been resuscitated at the last possible moment. Actually, his heart had stopped, and by some definitions of this poorly understood process, he had died. Wolcott was certain that he had died, that he had been vouchsafed a glimpse of life after death and a confirmation of Judaeo-Christian theology.

Similar experiences, now widely documented by physicians and others, have occurred all over the world. These perithanatic, or near-death, epiphanies have been experienced not only by people of conventional Western religiosity but also by Hindus and Buddhists and skeptics. It seems plausible that many of our conventional ideas about heaven are derived from such near-death experiences, which must have been related regularly over the millennia. No news could have been more interesting or more hopeful than that of the traveler returned, the report that there is a voyage and a life after death, that there is a God who awaits us, and that upon death we feel grateful and uplifted, awed and overwhelmed.

For all I know, these experiences may be just what they seem and a vindication of the pious faith that has taken such a pummeling from science in the past few centuries. Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death—especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out. But I am also a scientist, so I think about what other explanations are possible. How could it be that people of all ages, cultures and eschatological predispositions have the same sort of near-death experience?

We know that similar experiences can be induced with fair regularity, cross-culturally, by psychedelic drugs.^* Out-of-body experiences are induced by dissociative anaesthetics such as the ketamines (2-[o-chlorophenyl]-2-[methylamino] cyclohexanones.) The illusion of flying is induced by atropine and other belladonna alkaloids, and these molecules, obtained, for example, from mandrake or jimson weed, have been used regularly by European witches and North American curanderos (“healers”) to experience, in the midst of religious ecstasy, soaring and glorious flight. MDA (2,4-methylenedioxyamphetamine) tends to induce age regression, an accessing of experiences from youth and infancy which we had thought entirely forgotten. DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) induces micropsia and macropsia, the sense of the world shrinking or expanding, respectively—a little like what happens to Alice after she obeys instructions on small containers reading “Eat me” or “Drink me.” LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) induces a sense of union with the universe, as in the identification of Brahman with Atman in Hindu religious belief.

Can it really be that the Hindu mystical experience is pre-wired into us, requiring only 200 micrograms of LSD to be made manifest? If something like ketamine is released in times of mortal danger or near-death, and people returning from such an experience always provide the same account of heaven and God, then must there not be a sense in which Western as well as Eastern religions are hard-wired in the neuronal architecture of our brains?

It is difficult to see why evolution should have selected brains that are predisposed to such experiences, since no one seems to die or fail to reproduce from a want of mystic fervor. Might these drug-inducible experiences as well as the near-death epiphany be due merely to some evolutionarily neutral wiring defect in the brain which, by accident, occasionally brings forth altered perceptions of the world? That possibility, it seems to me, is extremely implausible, and perhaps no more than a desperate rationalist attempt to avoid a serious encounter with the mystical.

The only alternative, so far as I can see, is that every human being, without exception, has already shared an experience like that of those travelers who return from the land of death: the sensation of flight; the emergence from darkness into light; an experience in which, at least sometimes, a heroic figure can be dimly perceived, bathed in radiance and glory. There is only one common experience that matches this description. It is called birth.

HIS NAME IS STANISLAV GROF. In some pronunciations his first and last names rhyme. He is a physician and a psychiatrist who has, for more than twenty years, employed LSD and other psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy. His work long antedates the American drug culture, having begun in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1956 and continuing in recent years in the slightly different cultural setting of Baltimore, Maryland. Grof probably has more continuing scientific experience on the effects of psychedelic drugs on patients than anyone else.^* He stresses that whereas LSD can be used for recreational and aesthetic purposes, it can have other and more profound effects, one of which is the accurate recollection of perinatal experiences. “Perinatal” is a neologism for “around birth,” and is intended to apply not just to the time immediately after birth but to the time before as well. (It is a parallel construction to “perithanatic,” near-death.) He reports a large number of patients who, after a suitable number of sessions, actually re-experience rather than merely recollect profound experiences, long gone and considered intractable to our imperfect memories, from perinatal times. This is, in fact, a fairly common LSD experience, by no means limited to Grof’s patients.

Grof distinguishes four perinatal stages recovered under psychedelic therapy. Stage 1 is the blissful complacency of the child in the womb, free of all anxiety, the center of a small, dark, warm universe—a cosmos in an amniotic sac. In its intrauterine state the fetus seems to experience something very close to the oceanic ecstasy described by Freud as a fount of the religious sensibility. The fetus is, of course, moving. Just before birth it is probably as alert, perhaps even more alert, than just after birth. It does not seem impossible that we may occasionally and imperfectly remember this Edenic, golden age, when every need—for food, oxygen, warmth and waste disposal—was satisfied before it was sensed, provided automatically by a superbly designed life-support system; and, in dim recollection years later, describe it as “being one with the universe.”

In Stage 2, the uterine contractions begin. The walls to which the amniotic sac is anchored, the foundation of the stable intrauterine environment, become traitorous. The fetus is dreadfully compressed. The universe seems to pulsate, a benign world suddenly converted into a cosmic torture chamber. The contractions may last intermittently for hours. As time goes on, they become more intense. No hope of surcease is offered. The fetus has done nothing to deserve such a fate, an innocent whose cosmos has turned upon it, administering seemingly endless agony. The severity of this experience is apparent to anyone who has seen a neonatal cranial distortion that is still evident days after birth. While I can understand a strong motivation to obliterate utterly any trace of this agony, might it not resurface under stress? Might not, Grof asks, the hazy and repressed memory of this experience prompt paranoid fantasies and explain our occasional human predilections for sadism and masochism, for an identification of assailant and victim, for that childlike zest for destruction in a world which, for all we know, may tomorrow become terrifyingly unpredictable and unreliable? Grof finds recollections in the next stage connected with images of tidal waves and earthquakes, the analogues in the physical world of the intrauterine betrayal.

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^* 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.^* 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.