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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. [26] 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.

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[26] A different but not inconsistent hypothesis on the Eden metaphor, in phylogeny rather than ontogeny, is described in The Dragons of Eden.