David and Lev in Abiquiu, NM
Photo Courtesy of Amy Sweet

Perinatal Psychology and the Birthing Experience

(from The Way of Freedom: An Eon Book)

Anyone who studies psychology should look to the birth process as the key for understanding the beauty of every human. It's not always the key to understanding their problems, but it is the key to understanding their happiness. The happy self inside is always still there.

[Eon sings:]

There is darkness all around me, but light within me
There is darkness all around me, but light within me
Open up, open up, open up, open up
I'm coming through
Open up, open up, open up, open up
I'm coming home to you

There is darkness where I'm heading
But light within me
There is darkness where I'm heading
But light within me
Open up, open up, open up, open up
I'm coming through
Open up, open up, open up, open up
I'm coming home to you

There is light around me
And light within me
There is light around me
And light within me
Open up, open up, open up, open up
I'm coming through

Ah, dear ones, how wonderful indeed it is to speak to you.

The most important word in this whole talk is "psychology." The reason it's the most important is that psychology is the study of mental process: how people begin to think, what is the way they think, and what do they think in life.

You actually do not begin to think until the birthing process begins. Until contractions begin, the mind is not functioning. After birth the mind is the dominant force in your life-much more significant than your physical form, your emotional form or even your spiritual form, until you start to control the mind. So you switch on at birth an incredibly powerful vacuum cleaner. It sucks up all reality, puts it into a bag called consciousness, decides what it means and spits it back to you.

For the rest of your life, until you conquer that mind, you are breathing vacuum dust. It's like you've got your mouth up against the bag, inhaling, and thinking you've got fresh air coming in. To some extent you do have oxygen in there, but there's a lot of garbage coming in there, too. That's because it's the mind, and the mind is a scavenger.

The significance of the birth process is much greater than separation from the mother, much greater than entry into the world. Its most significant aspects are often unseen. You cannot observe what is happening to someone because it is an internal process.

We will take you step by step through the birthing experience, beginning with incarnation, so that we will give you a clear outline of what it means to come into this world and become a freestanding human being. Once you have heard that, we then want to tell you just a couple of simple things about how to correct any difficulties that have arisen in this process.

Obviously, the most important correction needs to be the control of the mind, because you have never known such agony or such ecstasy as when you were being born. When you were being born, you have never else in your whole life known such highs and lows of wonderful and horrible experience. That time, those few moments or few hours, sets the foundation for your capacity to feel. It defines the limits of your ability to experience physical and emotional feeling.

This does not mean you are limited, because most people never come even near twenty per cent of that feeling later in their life. No one should think, "Oh, I'm bound by what I felt at birth." Instead, what you felt at birth is a goal to pray and hope you may come near again. Most people will never, ever touch it again, even in the death experience.

You should know that you have survived the best and worst you ever could experience, and everything else is much more moderate-even the loss of a love; even the loss, through death, of a very close one; even the loss of many emotional or physical attachments. Even the greatest blessings that may come to you in life cannot touch the ecstasy of birth. Everything from now on is rather moderate. Moderation in all things merely says, "Be happy to be living a life of fairly equanimitous keel."

Most people believe that it is hard work to become completely balanced-that you must spend twenty to thirty years in a meditation retreat center, a monastery; that you must undergo severe austerities-perhaps become an ascetic-in order to have complete poise and balance of mind, and be unaffected by everything. The truth is, you are so much closer to that than you were at birth that only a little extra will nudge you into what we might call a "flat line." But unlike in the cardiac care unit, that is a good thing: unaffected by all, meeting only your body's needs as they arise, and no more nor no less. Absolutely ready, willing, able and desirous of being present for all human beings who may come to you, and yet desiring none to come to you. Having no needs and no wants, but only being.

None of you is far from that. You've come so far from birth toward that that you're really almost there. All the techniques that you develop to assist people to achieve this equanimitous poise are important, but you must never feel that the amount of work to be done on any person is overwhelming and that their case is hopeless, because everyone is very close to being free.

Dear ones, you are not completely occluded of memory of where you came from. Many of you, indeed, have had intensive experiences of your oneness, either within this life, or memories of from whence you have come.

One of the things that makes it hard to understand where you've come from is that there is no sense of time there. Your sense of time is inherent in your world. It's inherent in your mind. You've borne yourself into a world and a mind that includes time, and that is a great limitation on you. It changes your perceptions. It makes it very hard to understand how something could happen before something else, if it actually happens afterwards. Outside of time restrictions, it's easy to understand these things, but within this world, your mind cannot truly grasp the meaning of it.

That is the main reason why you don't have perfect recollection of from whence you've come: because there actually is no whence about it. It didn't happen before. You still are just as lodged in Divinity as you ever have been. It is an illusion and a trick that you think you have come from someplace and will be going back to someplace: an illusion and a trick that for almost everyone will stay with you all your life.

You will not conquer this illusion, nor will you reveal to yourself all of this trick. But you will be able to have greater and greater peace, having a good humor about this trick, knowing that it is an illusion, and that it has a value-that there's a reason for it. It is such a perfect world that it seems hard [Eon taps the wooden floor on which he is seated]. It seems warm. It has reality inherent in it, apparently. It is such a divine creation.

Without this illusion of time you wouldn't believe you were really in a real world, and you wouldn't live a real life then. But with this illusion of time it's almost impossible to recollect your true source. Don't agonize too much over it, but know that it is a very short time you're going to be here in this world-a very short time when you will not have perfect knowledge of yourself.

God being omnipresent, and God being in all times and all places, and in fact there being nothing that is not God, you are right now installed inside God. No one should feel the slightest bit of self-regret that you do not fully comprehend that, nor should you be hard on yourself about it. God has appointed you to have this experience. In fact, having God within you, you have appointed this experience for yourself. But we will say it in terms of time and in terms of a story so that we can illustrate the process you went through.

Every one of you went through the same exact process When you were one with God, and when God was one with you-when you still had a sense of "you-ness," but when that "you-ness" was so huge that it puts your current sense of "you-ness" to shame-it was a sense so vast that all of the universe was you. In fact, all of God was you, and you were all of God. There was nothing other than God. And you were God. It was that intensity of union.

At that time--which had no time and extended forever, and even extends at this moment--you accepted the mission to perceive a self. God desired to create the concept of self, and you took the orders to fulfill that desire. In that instant, the play of this life was decided.

We have sometimes said it was like a roundtable negotiation, where you met with the higher selves of all the people you will have contact with and you worked out the details. And it's true. But it also didn't happen in even [snapping his finger] that much time. With the decision to be "self," this life was shaped and placed here.

In fact, it was placed here not as a destiny for you to follow, but as a completed experience. Your life is over. It never had to start, because only when you have this illusion of time do you feel that your life begins, carries on and ends, and everything in it has the same beginning, middle and end. In reality, your entire life exists as a complete entity. With the moment of agreement to be "self," you were born. Your physical birth is only the time-limited experience of this divine decision.

What happened next also was before time began to weigh upon you. You traveled with this umbilicus stretching out, just as a flare leaves the sun, connected to the sun until the last moment when it finally breaks free. The solar flares are huge and dramatic, and that is exactly what the experience of coming into a self from the Oneness is like. You are still the Oneness, even as you reach out until the very last instant, and then you are not perceiving yourself as the Oneness. It is the perception that changes. You have named the moment of that perception, "conception."

We do not speak here of the union of the egg and the sperm in a physical conception. For the soul that will inhabit that body, the moment of conception is the moment at which the perception of oneness changes to a perception of selfhood. The soul does not then come into that form immediately, but it comes inevitably to it. For different people it can be anywhere from a few seconds to a few months after physical conception that the soul enters the body. The mother knows. The mother always knows when the soul has come.

The incarnation experience is not too difficult because the physical experience that the embryo is going through does not really contradict timelessness and spacelessness. For most of the time that the baby is developing there is no real challenge to the soul's lingering state of bliss. Even though it has now got a sense of selfhood, and a body to justify that sense of selfhood, the soul continues to linger fairly much in bliss. Even some difficult things-such as accidents that may happen in the process of amniocentesis, where the needle may go into the body of the fetus; even surgeries that are performed occasionally-do not disturb the state of bliss that the baby is experiencing. These things challenge its bliss but cannot overcome it. Its bliss remains triumphant.

All this time it is correct to say that the baby has not got a mind, because the mind is not the brain. The mind is the source of thought and judgment. The baby does not judge what is happening but it merely experiences, just as somebody who has recovered from having a mind no longer judges but merely experiences. You can know these great ones. Someone who has spent fifty years in a cave conquering his or her desires now only experiences, without judgment. So it is with the baby.

And that means you, dear ones. Let us not think for a moment that we're talking about some other baby, but you: you were lodged in a state of total bliss without any judgment.

The beginning of contractions, whether they are early or late in the labor process, marks the real watershed for the mind. It actually makes the mind, because it is such an overpowering physical experience: such a contradiction to the blissful floating and timeless blissness that the baby has been experiencing.

The mind actually is--its definition is--the reaction to this shaking out of the bliss. The mind is actually not a thing, but it is a response: a response that echoes throughout the rest of the life because it is so powerful. It is like the purest, purest, purest, stillest, watery pond. If it is all perfect, and a huge stone is thrown in, those ripples will rebound for many, many years. This is what happens when contractions begin. The ripples begin to rebound.

Those who experience birth without contractions, such as through the Cesarean process, have an almost identical shocking experience to their bliss. Their minds develop in an extremely similar way. There are unique aspects to the thought forms that come, but the actual nature of the mind is fairly identical.

Now, dear ones, everyone should take a nice healing breath and reflect for just a moment right now that you're really glad you're here on Earth. You're really glad you're here.

Birth is very hard and very wonderful. As we mentioned, it is the limitation of your ability to experience the good and the bad in life. It is more good, and more bad, than anything else.

So nobody should ever have the slightest feeling of regret that they developed a mind in this process. It's like trying to keep the flames down if you light a match in a gasoline tank-trying to bat them out. If it's in a huge tank of gasoline and you've lighted this match, you have no chance. Likewise, you cannot worry that you didn't prevent a mind from developing. You had no chance. It was impossible. And it was a perfect part of life for you.

When we have talked about the mind and labeled it as your major enemy in your spiritual progress, the major deceiver of you, what we have meant is: this experience of being born into this life created the deception. Healing that experience can lift the deception. Period.

There's no more to the mind than that, except your accumulated habit of using the mind, of experiencing the mind, and of letting it be yourself for you. The mind is much less powerful than it feels.

When the contractions begin, thought-forms do not yet exist. Those who have regressed in the life experience's consciousness and have re-experienced the process know that this is a truth: that they know things without thought, in a pure way, from the state of God-knowledge. Most people have a difficult time knowing without thought now. They even call it "intuition." But it is your true mind, your God-mind, when you know without having to think.

You have got an umbilicus to God that is flapping now, after you have become a self and incarnated into the body. When you've done that, after conception, after incarnation and birth begins, you become extremely aware once more of this umbilicus. Suddenly, what was nothing special to you becomes the escape hatch for you. Many people-not because they resist this world, but because they feel that this is the end-desperately attempt to escape back from where they've come. But they find that the ladder of the fire escape is missing. The self has spun off from the Oneness, and there is no direct connection.

So there is a moment of betrayal, without thought-form, because the mind at this point doesn't think. There is an experience of betrayal: that one hadn't needed that escape hatch, and now when one needs it, it's not there. Panic. Anybody who has got a panic disorder-we don't like that word "disorder," but a panic problem, a constant problem with panic-it is because they are remembering this over and over.

It's quite understandable. Everybody should know that they have had this panic, and that when you found the way was blocked, you turned back to the fire and walked through it. Everyone who's been born found, when they tried to get out, that the way was blocked. They turned around and went through the fire, which means through the birth canal into this world.

All the while the mind is consuming and processing experiences in a very pure way, at a billion sensations per second. There is so much happening that's fresh and new. Imagine a piece of paper that has never been touched by even wind. It's so flat, clean and pure. All of a sudden, it's being wrinkled and soiled and ripped and torn and shredded and burned and made back again-all of this happening instantly. That paper has been irrevocably transformed into a never-to-go-back kind of thing. That's what's happening in the birth canal.

Specific experiences are not as critical in the birth canal as the ability to absorb these sensations. People who find that they cannot take in most of what is happening, or stop taking it in, often then go through life trying to find other ways to feel things rather than just taking in life. It is not unusual for them to turn to substances such as tobaccos, coffees, beers and other things in order to experience feeling. They don't actually do these things to numb themselves. Many people believe that. They do it to feel, because life itself is numbing to those who have stopped feeling in that moment of intensity.

When the crown of the head comes through the cervical opening that is a moment of real healing. It is wise that at that moment there is sometimes a pause; there is some time spent while the opening is relaxing and stretching to accommodate the head, if it is a birth with the head through first. While it's relaxing and stretching it massages the scalp in this way and it forms a very healthy bond around the skull, because in the infant at this point in time the physical form is very sensitive, and this hold that the cervical opening has around the skull of the newborn is a very reassuring hold, a very loving hold. That is why the newborn frequently spends a little time there.

And then it comes through, allowing it to be massaged over its whole self. In the birth canal it is being massaged also, but it is actually the cervical massage that is the most tremendous, because it tends to perform an auric sweep of the infant as it comes through: cleaning away its aura, preparing it to be fresh as a human. It is really the moment, going through the cervix, where the infant is for the first time really in the human world, not in an in-between state. For the first time, it has now entered humanity with no way of going back to that in-between state.

Then through the birth canal, which is essentially an experience of trust. Psychologically speaking, trust is one of the very first thought-forms that the mind starts to develop. Previously the mind is not working with thoughts, just experiences. Remember, the mind is just a reaction to what's happening, and it just works on experience. But thoughts of trust begin to develop in the birth canal: "Will I make it?" Thoughts without words, but thoughts, nonetheless. "What's happening to me?" "Am I going to be betrayed again?" Remember, the first betrayal just happened a few moments earlier.

So many accumulated experiences begin happening before the little one actually comes into the light of day. You can imagine the difficulty of it, the greatness of it. Many people have written extensively on the experience of coming into the light of day. We aren't going to belabor that point. The light, the air, the gravity, the coldness, the hands, the people, the touch, everything is quite amazing. But it is not more than the experience that the baby has just been having. It's just different kinds of experiences.

By this time, the mind has already begun thinking. Imagine: what is the length of time between the beginning of contractions and the exit of the baby? Perhaps some hours; perhaps less or more. In that amount of time the self goes from having no mind to having a mind that is fully functioning, with thought-forms and decisions and judgments.

It is indeed the birth of the mind as much as the birth of the body that you are witnessing in these kinds of experiences, and so to discuss perinatal psychology is extremely wise. Anyone who studies psychology should look to the birth process as the key for understanding the beauty of every human. It's not always the key to understanding their problems, but it is the key to understanding their happiness. The happy self inside is always still there.

After the birth experience, for the first few minutes, then the first few hours, then the first few days, then the first few months, then the first few years, in a sloping downward manner, experiences are accumulated within the mind. The mind develops, with external sensation and internal sensation, experience upon experience. Judgments and thoughts accumulate very rapidly at first, and then slope off as the mind begins to be full of judgment and has no more room for it.

Simultaneously, as the mind can no longer accommodate much more judgment, it can't accommodate much more experience. It doesn't need all that extra fuel for judgment. It's made all the judgments it can use, so it stops experiencing so much. That is why, by this point in time in life, most people only experience a few things every second: the hardness of the floor, the warmth of the air, the light, the sound, the sight-just a few things, whereas there are a billion things to feel right now. But the mind no longer looks for all that fuel, because it's already got enough product stored up on its shelves-and that product is judgment.

So, dear ones, if you are to release judgment, you are simultaneously to open yourself up to more experiences. Many people believe that the release of judgment means that they will be happy all the time. Actually, it just means you will feel more intensely all the time what is already here. New experiences won't come to you more intensely. You will feel what's already here now much more realistically. The less you judge, the more you are aware and awake.

Everyone should be aware--and indeed, dear ones, be honest--that the mind is constantly saying, "This is good," and "That is bad." "I don't like that one. I don't like the way they're talking, acting, working." "I do like that one. I approve of them." "I don't like this food." "I do like that tree." "I like this day." "I hate yesterday." The mind is very busy with these kinds of accusations against the world.

A praise and a blame are both an accusation--a declaration, really--that, "This is something other than me," for most people see the world as separate from themselves, since they are now feeling very separate from God.

The truth is, you and the world came here simultaneously. There is no reason to believe this world existed before your birth. The best attitude is to say that, "This world was born with me and it will die with me, and this world is bounded by my life, and by my power this world is powerful." This is the best way to decide that you have a right to change your world and affect it.

In the birth process, most people begin to decide this world is here to affect them, whereas you are here to affect your world. Great ones have always overcome this deficit; have always been able to convert that feeling that, "The world is here to affect me," into a feeling of, "I am here to affect my world." It is an internal comfort, an internal peace and an internal feeling that one deserves to be here.

Dear ones, each and every one of you is wanted. Every one of you is wanted; whether by your earthly mother and father is not that important, because God, meaning you, wants you.

As you can see, the biological parents are merely building a home for you to live in. They are not your true parents. They must be respected and there must be gratitude, for without their building and constructing of this home you would be floating without any home. You'd be a homeless soul. So you've been given a beautiful home. But beyond that, they have primarily merely done their duty. You are your own parent. You are your father and you are your mother.

Your earthly father and mother should be regarded as your brother and sister, because they are your equals. Most people eventually demand equality with their parents. But they demand it, refusing to give it to themselves. It's within yourself to assert your equality with your parents, and you should, for they are equal with their parents and all their parents before them. You merely came later, and others will come after you.

If you are above the age where you depend on your parents for your subsistence, you should then say, "They are my brother and my sister." You don't have to say it to them, because that may confuse them; they may become very upset. But to yourself you certainly should, because it really is an extraordinarily freeing experience to hold your earthly parents as your siblings-as your co-explorers.

There's obviously a lot when you experience the birth process that later in life becomes relevant, and the easiest ways to clean these things out are available now. There are no secretive techniques, although there are better ways to heal the birth process than others. All of the techniques that can heal this experience work at the birth moment, at the incarnation moment, and at the conception moment. They also work for many of the early mental experiences.

There is not as great a distinction between these various events as you might believe. The mind has judged them as distinctive, but they really are, each one, a kind of birth. They are each a time when you must say, "Open up, open up, open up, open up, I'm coming through. I'm coming home to you."

Even though the soul incarnates after physical conception, you still can recall and experience conception, because that happened to this body. The physical form was conceived, and the physical cells have a memory of that conception that you can know fully. You can easily visit those seconds or moments or months that this body developed before you inhabited it, but in order to do this you really do need to be in an extremely opened and relaxed state.

All of the techniques for healing birth-related experiences require that you be safe, that you be assured, that you be brave, fearless-terrified is fine, but fearless too-and that you be purposeful. That is probably most important of all: that you not be doing it for a thrill, or to experiment, but that you do it for a reason, even if the reason is only self-improvement. That's good enough. There should be a reason why you go back; otherwise, the kind of help you need to do it effectively won't rally to your cause.

You see, you cannot individually go to birth and re-experience it, because in your illusory world you can't turn back the clock. However, with help from those who are not bound by time you can be carried to a place that has already happened and then be brought safely home. No one ever gets stuck in a time like that because their carriers ran off! They may get stuck because they refused to leave an earlier time and come back, but it is never the fault of those who carry you there and back. They always do their job properly.

The rebirthing technique* is an extremely helpful way to relax, open and intend to experience. But that is essentially what it does. It does not, of itself, re-create an experience. Rebirthing is a breathing-specialized technique that allows you to cease controlling your environment so much, to stop grasping onto this moment and every control you have about it, like clinging to the face of a cliff. It causes you to be willing to let go. By being so willing, these angelic, guiding beings carry you where you need to go. Without being told, "Take me to the birth," generally that's where you do need to go, so that is where they bring you.

Often in the rebirthing you see surprising experiences. You feel unusual and unexpected things. It's because you didn't know where you needed to go. You were taken where you needed to go. You can say, "Today I'm going to heal the incarnation experience," and you can begin the rebirthing and find that, instead, you are healing something that happened when you were two years of age, because these guides are not bound by your agenda. If you open to healing, they follow the heavenly doctor's agenda. They take you where you need to go.

The reason you must experience events again-rather than think about them, or affirm, "My birth is healed and whole," which is fine-you must experience them again in order to understand how you thought and felt at that moment. From this moment you can't understand it, because you are a different person now. But if you go back intensely in time and re-experience the moment of birth, you will remember, recall and get to know again how you felt and thought. It is not from your current, quite sophisticated mental perspective, but from that perspective of great simplicity and newness of mind that you may make reaffirmations.

In the birth canal, if you re-experience that process, you can say, "I am warm, safe and propelled forward toward my destiny." That's a very good affirmation. It can easily contradict the thought-form of, "Oh, my God, I'm going to die."

But you cannot contradict that thought-form from this moment. You can't say, "I probably thought I was going to die, so let me affirm, 'I am always safe. I am always guided.'" That has very limited value. You really need to go back to the moment of genesis of these thought-forms and see your state of being at that time. Since there is no real time, you will realistically, intensely re-experience that moment just as though it really is happening, because it really is happening.

We want to affirm for you that if you have intense feelings in any technique such as this, they are the same intense feelings, happening in the same way, that you have already known. As we mentioned, you've already lived through the highest and the lowest, so you should never think, "I can't stand this healing of stuff. It's too much." You've already survived it. By all means, keep going through it.

Rebirthing is a very good door, but as we've just now mentioned, affirmation is critical. In the rebirthing experience, when you enter a state of mind where you can recall something that you feel, without thought perhaps, needs to be reaffirmed in a different way, then you must create a new decision about it, even without words. If you are now re-experiencing a time when you didn't have words in your thoughts, you should use no words. You should visualize the new experience, the positive experience, as you go though this. Rebirthing is the door. Affirmation is the first few steps through the door.

We also want you to know that documentation is critical for you. You should keep a very careful record of what you notice were negative thoughts and what you experienced as your re-creation-your new positive thoughts or positive decisions, judgments, or decisions not to judge-your contradiction to the negativity. You should notice both of these things. If possible, notice as much of the physical as you can: what you see, what you feel, what you hear, what you smell, what you taste, all of that-squeezing, pushing, open space, warmth, cold-because most people who have gone through this process forget why and how they changed as a result of it.

It will make all the difference in the world if you can remember how you were before this healing versus how you are after, because most people who go about healing their life find that the world starts to treat them strangely. It's uncomfortable, awkward and it's unfair. But you can accommodate that world's strange reaction to you very easily if you are keeping careful track of the healing work you're doing. That documents for you-for your current mental mind, which isn't really present during these intensive healings-exactly what has been taking place, so you can adjust to your own changes. You can much more smoothly navigate in this illusory and sometimes awfully annoying world if you're remembering step by step how you've just changed, yourself.

It is not always possible to consciously guide this healing process in meditation. That is why we recommend letting angelic guides do the guiding for you. We recommend not trying in meditation to merely see and experience, because too much of the self is still in control. It's better to have an experience of complete surrender and trust, and let the process happen to you.

99.995% of who you are is composed of your judgments. All of those judgments come from the things we've mentioned. That period before the mind tapers off it's accumulation of experience, from having too many judgments already in storage, is who you now are-99.995% of who you are. Obviously then, you can see how important it is to recreate.

There is nothing else to say about this that wouldn't drive your mind into some circles. We've said the truth. You've felt the truth. We are very, very pleased to talk with you about this subject!

* "Rebirthing" is a breathing technique developed in the 1970s. It is a specific process that primarily consists of lying down and breathing in a certain way, under the supervision of a trained rebirther. Other processes that may have little or no similarity to original rebirthing are sometimes also called "rebirthing."