The Human Odyssey

The Angel of Remembrance/Forgetfulness: A Light That Shines Above the Fetus

"According to a beautiful legend from the Jewish tradition, the fetus in the womb has a light that shines above his head that sees from one end of the universe to the other.  This light encompasses the unborn's own deep past and his ultimate destiny.  Just before birth, however, the angel Lailah comes to the unborn babe and lightly strikes her finger on his upper lip. This act extinguishes the light and causes the child to take birth in total forgetfulness of all he has known during his prebirth existence.  The purpose of life is to recover this light.  It's said that this is why we bear a little crease in our upper lip called the philtrum:  This is the mark of the angel."

(excerpted from Thomas Armstrong, The Human Odyssey:  Navigating the Twelve Stages of Life, New York: Sterling Publishing, 2007, p. 15).

To read the entire chapter from which this selection was excerpted, get the January/February 2008 issue of Spirituality & Health magazine, or order The Human Odyssey from Amazon. 

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World Congress in Monterrey, Mexico Highlights the Importance of Early Childhood Development

I just got back from the 1st World Congress/7th International Early and Preschool Education Conference in Monterrey, Mexico.  In addition to participating in a colloquium with educators and politicians (see photo above), I also gave a keynote talk on "Awakening the Natural Genius in Every Child" to 4000 early childhood educators.  The Congress was part of the Universal Forum of Cultures, a three-month extravaganza of cultural events involving 1.5 million people in Monterrey (the third largest city in Mexico). I was impressed with all the work being done, particularly in Latin America, to further the lives of young children.  I visited a site in Monterrey created by CENDI (Centros de Desarrollo Infantil - Center for Early Childhood Development) that provides low income parents in Monterrey with child care, medical care, parent training, pre-natal instruction, and many other services (see photo on left).  I couldn't help but think that while I was visiting this full-spectrum developmental center, our president, George Bush, was busy vetoing a bill to provide medical care to more children in the United States.  Accompanying us on our tour to the CENDI site was Dr. James Heckman, the 2000 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, who has been focusing his energies on research demonstrating the positive economic impact of providing for the health, emotional, and educational needs of young children, as opposed to neglecting those needs and having to pay billions of dollars in costs as a result of mental illness, violence, illiteracy, and other societal ills.  His book Inequality in America, sheds important light on the importance of nations' investing in their young children.  Another important individual I met during the conference was Dr. Franklin Martinez Mendoza (below left), who was a key architect in the development of the early childhood development program in Cuba, a country with a literacy rate of 99.8% (higher than the United States). Also impressive was a presentation given by Dr. Osmar Terra, the Secretary of Health for the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, who laid out in most brilliant fashion the latest work in neuroscience chronicling the negative impact of trauma on the brain in infancy and early childhood.  There were in all over 100 presenters at the conference, and I count myself lucky to have met so many wonderful people who are working to make the lives of young children around the world better.

Maps of the Human Life Cycle: Tibetan Buddhism

In the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the human life cycle is just that:  a cycle.  An individual soul is born, dies, and is reborn over and over again until it achieves liberation from all future rebirth.  At that point the cycle ends.  Until then, however, the cycle consists of six bardos or "transitional states."  The first three bardos occur "between" lifetimes (from the moment of death until the time of rebirth).  The Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead) is essentially a guidebook to help the dying individual achieve liberation (or a favorable birth) as it moves through these "in between" states. The last three bardos occur after we have been reborn and are living as human beings on earth.

• The Chi-Kha Bardo - this state occurs at the moment of death, when the dying person has the potential to perceive The Clear Light of Ultimate Reality, and recognize it as his own ultimate being.  If the soul does this, it merges with the light and no longer has to be reborn.  This encounter, however, is quite an overwhelming experience, to put it mildly, and the individual may shrink back from this Light in fear.   If it does so, then the weight of its own karma will pull it into the next bardo.
• The Chhos-Nyid Bardo - this part of the journey is where the soul encounters "Peaceful Deities" and "Wrathful Deities," which are outer projections of its karma, or past experiences over innumerable rebirths.  The soul is counselled not to become attracted or repulsed by these deities, but to regard them as emanations of its own illusory self.  If the soul can do this, it achieves liberation.  However, if the soul ends up getting "caught" by one of these entities, it may end up hanging out in one of six possible "lokas" or "worlds," including those of the hungry ghosts, the warrior demons, the devas (or angels), the hell dwellers, the bestial world of animals, or back into the world of human beings (see next bardo).
• The Sid-Pa Bardo - this is the state where the soul, driven by the winds of its own karma, begins to seek rebirth.  It encounters the Lord of Death, who subjects the soul to a kind of "Judgment Day" that can be quite a painful ordeal.  Eventually it observes pairs of couples copulating (potential future parents), and goes through a kind of pre-birth Oedipal complex where it feels anger toward the same sex parent and lust toward the opposite sex parent.  Since there is no chance for liberation at this point, the soul is counselled to choose a "womb" that will optimize its chances of getting a favorable incarnation for future attempts at freedom from rebirth.
• The Skyes-Nas Bardo ("Life" ) - this is the bardo of ordinary waking consciousness experienced by a soul during its incarnation as a human being.
• The Rmi-Lam Bardo ("Dream") - this is the bardo of dream consciousness that occurs when we are experiencing rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep, or when we are in a semi-waking state of active imagination during our waking hours.
• The Bsam-Gtan Bardo ("Meditation") - this is the bardo of "trance consciousness" when we are in a deep state of meditation during our waking hours.

For more information, there are any number of translations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, including those by:

Gyurme Dorje

Robert Thurman

Frencesca Fremantle and Chogyam Trungpa

W.Y. Evans-Wentz

See also, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

See an online exhibit at the University of Virginia based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Vatican May Release Unbaptized Infants from Limbo

The Vatican this week released a document recommending that unbaptized babies who die should be released from limbo and given salvation.   Only the Pope can make such a definitive declaration, but the fact that Pope Benedict XVI served on the committee that created this document before he became Pope may bode well for little ones. Limbo (from the Latin limbus, which means "edge" or "boundary"), has been part of informal Church history since St. Augustine declared in the 5th century that children who die unbaptized will go to hell.   It has never been official church dogma, but over the centuries, limbo was declared by some in the church to be a place that unbaptized babies would go to in death where they would not be able to see God (only those in heaven could), but they would not suffer either (as those in hell do).  Thus, limbo exists, as it were, "in limbo" between heaven and hell.  The 41-page document, titled "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized," was written by the 30-member International Theological Commission, which acts as an advisory panel to the Vatican.  It suggests that the concept of limbo reflects "an unduly restrictive view of salvation."   To read the full report (online subscription necessary or $5.00 fee sent to site), go to OriginsOnline.com, a branch of the Catholic News Service.  Dante wrote about limbo in The Divine Comedy:  Hell, Canto IV, where he placed many figures from the classical era in the time before Christ.  To see what other blogs have written about this subject go to: State of the Queen, Darwiniana.

The Four Stages of Birth: Their Agonies and Ecstasies

Eighty years ago, Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank theorized that when we are born, we experience a "birth trauma" that affects us for the rest of our lives.  More recently, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof has created a model for understanding in greater depth the kinds of effects that birth can have upon our later lives.  He writes that there are four distinct stages of birth, or what he calls Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM) that give rise to different kinds of traumas (as well as positive experiences), and that have different types of effects upon our future development. 

Basic Perinatal Matrix I (BPM I)represents that point in the birth process when labor has not yet started and we are still fully inside of the mother's uterus.  This can be a "good womb" or "bad womb" situation (or a combination of both), depending upon the circumstances.  Stress hormones from our mothers might create anxiety in utero and/or nurturing hormones could create pleasant feelings.  The surrealist artist Salvador Dali wrote in his autobiography that his own bad womb experience (his parents were in despair over the death of his brother at the time) haunted him for the rest of his life.

Basic Perinatal Matrix II (BPM II) is that point in the birth when labor has started and we are being pushed up against the cervix by the mother's contractions but the cervix has not yet begun to dilate or open.  This can be a very scary experience, and people in later life who were traumatized at this point in their birth may feel claustrophobia, existential angst, depression, feelings of terror, or other negative consequences.  Edgar Allen Poe may have been a BPM II baby as evidenced by his short story "The Pit and the Pendulum"  where a character finds himself in a prison where walls are closing in on him and the only way out is down a bottomless pit. 

Basic Perinatal Matrix III (BPM III) is when the cervix has opened and we start to move out (or push out) through the birth canal.  This can be both thrilling and also violent or dangerous (for example, the umbilical cord might strangle the fetus at this point).  People who get fixated at this point in their births may grow up to become thrill-seekers, but also potentially dangerous individuals. Adolf Hitler may have been a BPM III baby with his violent policies and his fixation on strangulation (he often had his enemies strangled).

The final stage of birth, Basic Perinatal Matrix IV (BPM IV) is when we have left the womb and are now outside in the world.  This stage may be associated in later life with feelings of expansion (possibly even agoraphobia), feelings of rebirth (perhaps associated with religious experiences), and also feelings of separation and loneliness.  People who have undergone dramatic religious conversions, such as the French philosopher Blaise Pascal or the Apostle Paul of Tarsus, may have re-experienced this stage of birth during their spiritual transformations in adulthood.

Grof originally discovered the presence of these four basic perinatal matrices when using psychedelic (LSD) therapy with patients suffering from mental disorders in Europe and the United States (he was the Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in the late 1960's and early 1970's). He is currently using a method he developed called Holotropic Breathwork that both reveals and heals the traumas associated with these basic perinatal matrices (as well as experiences associated with other stages of development such as early childhood).  To find out more about Grof's birth model, or other aspects of his important work, see the following resources:

Stanislav Grof's Website

Interview with Stanislav Grof

Association for Holotropic Breathwork International

Alarming Rise in C-Sections

Cesarean section births are on the rise.  In 2005, 30.2% of all births in the United States were C-sections compared to 23% in 2000 (in other developed countries the rates range between 10-15%).  While some C-sections are medically necessary due to birth complications (e.g. a breach birth etc.), there has been an increase in the number of "elective C-sections"  Many women choose C-section births because they wish to avoid the pain and discomfort of birth.  Others wish to control the time of the birth to eliminate uncertainty.   In other cases, doctors may promote unnecessary C-sections to reduce liability, boost costs, or simply for convenience.  It should be remembered that a cesarean section is major surgery.  Research suggests that there is a greater risk of the mother dying in a C-section compared to a vaginal birth. Other risks include infection, blood loss, respiratory complications, and longer hospital stay and recovery time.  There are also risks to the baby, including breathing problems, low Apgar score, injuries caused by an accidental nick during the incision, as well as the lack of stimulation that normally ensues from a vaginal birth.