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. [23] 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. [24] 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 [25] 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?
[23] 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
[24] A fascinating description of Grof’s work and the entire range of psychedelics can be found in the forthcoming book
[25] 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 induce 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.