Chapter Six:
The Second Fall From Grace:  Birth

by

Michael Derzak Adzema

 

Second Fall From Grace

Ontogenetically, the second fall is birth and correlates with Wilber's secondary dualism, which he relates to the creation of time.  As Wilber (1977) puts it, "the why of time's genesis . . . it is nothing other than man's avoidance of death" (p. 120).

He continues as follows, quoting Benoit (1955):

It is with the arising of the Existential Level that there occurs the infamous debate of "to be or not to be;" because at the moment man severs his organism from his environment, then

Suddenly he becomes conscious that his principle is not the principle of the universe, that there are things that exist independently of him, he becomes conscious of it in suffering from contact with the world-obstacle.   At this moment appears conscious fear of death, of the danger which the Not-Self represents for the Self. (1977, p. 122)

            We see that fear of death arises out of suffering from contact with the world-obstacle.   The metaphorical reflections of this, biologically, are the fetus's encounter with suffering in the later stages of pregnancy.   The fetus encounters the "world-obstacle," the uterus, with the confinedness in the womb and its attendant suffering increasing daily and hourly.  The fetus becomes even more conscious of this obstacle—and more identified with its physical form—in reaction to the Energy eruption from frustration.

            So it is here farther along in the gestation process that we feel the separation (from divinity) with the encounter with the wall of the uterus.   People use that metaphor: "I hit the wall."   In other words, "I've reached my limit."   This harkens back to that time in the womb.   Shoham (1990) writes, "[I]n the midst of his omnipresent egocentricity, he experiences disastrously hostile surroundings" (p. 36).   Though Shoham likens this to the "expulsion" phase of birth, this experience actually begins a little earlier, during the BPM II phase of birth—that is, in the late stages of pregnancy prior to the onset of labor.

            Let me clarify this.  With the primary split, occurring with the creation of sperm and egg from no-thing-ness, one's intention can be different from the intention of Other.   (Indeed, one perspective on this is that a difference in intention causes the creation of sperm and egg—i.e., the foundation of the world is wrought of an initial rebellion from God.) 

            Regardless, up until this point in the developments prior to birth, these two intentions have rarely been at odds:   The self's intentions to grow and to expand have been nurtured and aided, in a wonderfully synchronistic way, by the Other—in this case, specifically, by the environment of the mother's body.1  

            Toward the end of pregnancy, however, the organism's intentions to grow and expand are contrary to the environment's intentions to resist its further growth in response.  By this I mean simply that there are limits to the elasticity of the womb and the mother's body, which result in its becoming an increasing contrary pressure against the fetus's growth.   To the fetus, however, with the possibility of a different perspective—a "bi-focal" world arising with the primary split—it is as if the environment has "turned against" or "betrayed" it.  

            At any rate, this friction of opposing intentions (or perspectives) is Energy, just raw Energy until it is labeled.   As Wilber (1977) put it:

 As an example of this entire movement, let us again use the mobilization of anger, as when a person strikes me.  The actual strike itself, in its simplest form, is just a movement of the universe, but as the primary dualism starts to occur, I sense a mobilization of energy arising within me.   At this stage—before the primary dualism hardens—this energy is still pure, informal, intemporal. . . .   (p. 190)

            In our example, of course, it is not someone striking the fetus.   It is someone opposing the fetus's uninhibited growth.   The pattern is the same, however, in that "in its simplest form" the actual blocking of the fetus's free movement "is just a movement of the universe."

            However, then the fetus does what indeed we all did.   Since we were not "wholly" enough to accept this pure energy as simply our energy, our divinity (the consequence of the primary split), we make it "wrong," we "label" it pain.  This, of course, is not conceptual labeling here since concepts do not exist as yet.   Rather, it is pure, organismic avoidance/rejection . . . a kind of cosmic mistrust.

            Nonetheless, in "labeling" this confinedness or walling-in as "wrong" we seek to escape from it into a world of "right."   Therefore, out of the original creation of self and Other or organism and environment—with its concomitant of organism and obstacle (world-obstacle)—we have created the splitting of primary Energy into energy inside and energy coming from outside, into right and wrong, and therewith, pleasure and pain.  

            Furthermore, since we cannot escape pain into space (we cannot move away or out . . . yet), we create another duality: the duality of time—of past and future.  The fetus, in that time prior to birth ("up against the wall"), seeks to escape into memories of a sweetness just recently removed.  With this move we have created the duality of life and death, of being and nonbeing.   We have created nonbeing in that we are trying to escape the Now into the past which is a mere memory, an idea, a reflection only of the Now.   Herein we have the beginnings of becoming just an idea. 

            Grof (1976, 1980, 1985), in his many works, describes vividly this creation of death at the time of birth.  His growth modality, called holotropic breathwork, uncovers conscious and palpable awareness of death alongside the agonies of birth in thousands of participants and thereby demonstrates their interconnectedness.   Similarly, Janov (1983) points out that for many of us the time of birth is the closest we come to death for our entire lifetime, until of course our actual physical demise.

            In reliving their births, participants gasp for air, turn red, scream, struggle fiercely—exhibiting to all about the terror of death and the titanic will to survive . . . being vs. nonbeing.   But the neonate cannot escape into space, and is only little able to escape into time.

Therefore, as Wilber (1977) put it:

[I]n fleeing death, man is thrown out of the Now and into time, into a race for the future in an attempt to escape the death of the timeless Moment.   The Secondary Dualism-Repression-Projection, because it severs the unity of life and death, simultaneously severs the unity of the Eternal Moment; for life, death, and eternity are one in this timeless Now.   In other words, the separation of life and death is ultimately and intimately the same as the separation of past and future, and that is time!  Hence is the Secondary Dualism the progenitor of time.   And this means that the life in time is the life in repression, specifically, the Secondary Repression.   (p. 124)

Similarly:

[M]an's flight from death also generates the blind Will to Life, which is actually the blind panic of not having a future, the panic that is death. . . .   Under the anxiety of fleeing death, the life of the organism itself is severed, its unity repressed and then projected as a psyche vs. a soma, as a soul vs. a body, as an ego vs. the flesh. (p. 124)

Further on:

 [M]an, not accepting death, abandons his mortal organism and escapes into something much more "solid" and impervious than "mere" flesh—namely, ideas.  Man, in fleeing death, flees his mutable body and identifies with the seemingly undying idea of himself.  Corrupt but flattering, this idea he calls his "ego," his "self."   (p. 125)

            Joseph Chilton Pearce (1980) describes this separation from the natural and the institution of a substitute "human nature" at birth in this way:

Future historians will shudder in loathing and horror at the hospital treatment of newborns and mothers in this very dark age of the medicine man and the surgeon and their uses of chemicals and cuttings.  (p. 44)

   [T]he aftereffects of technological hospital delivery are permanent.  We have built an elaborate body of knowledge not only rationalizing the damage we have done, but also accepting the damaged product as natural and inevitable.   And we accept all the massive problems resulting as "human nature."  (p. 45)

            Having severed its self from its body—the metaphorical reflection of which, from a physical perspective, is the actual separation of mother and child at birth with the severing of the umbilical cord—the newborn has severed itself from its archetypal and karmic patterns, its relation to the Universe, its innate destiny and purposiveness.  These realities lie ever afterwards out of reach on the other side of death.  

            Should there come a time in adulthood when the ego seeks intentionally to retrieve them, they will await a confrontation.   They will be released only upon the acceptance, reliving, and integration of that darkest face from which one has flown . . . whether that integration be a holotropic death-birth experience, a primal-like reliving of birth trauma, a mystic dark night of the soul, a descent into hell or journey to Hades, the crucifixion/ego-death/resurrection scenario of a benign psychotic "break," or a worked-through "spiritual emergency."

            However, this idea of ego into which one has fled is at this point newly formed and empty.  An empty vessel or blank slate, it is ready to be filled with the contents of or written on with the concepts of culture.  Dependent and helpless in its doubly separated state, it is eager now to mold and shape its newly created sense of self—as idea, as ego—with whatever patterns of experience present themselves.   Buoyed up by concept against the tide of death's muted presence, the ego is eager to fortify itself . . . for the smell of darkness is still close; the echoes of hell too recent. 

            This then is what remains of Energy, of Mind, of Absolute Subjectivity, of God.  An angel of death guards the gates of heaven.

Expulsion From Pantheistic Togetherness

Shoham (1990) provides additional light on this second phase of separation.   As mentioned previously, he relates the second phase of separation to that between early and later orality during the toddler stage of development (approximately age two to three).  And I repeat here again that his second phase appears instead to fit more perfectly with the phase of separation at birth.

            Shoham notes, first of all, that the second phase of separation involves being ejected from "pantheistic togetherness" and that it is related to the mythical "expulsion from paradise" (p. 36).   Considering what has been said so far and what is known about the experience of being in the womb and of being born (i.e., BPM I, followed by BPM II and BPM III—in Grof's [1976, 1980, 1985] terminology), it should be clear how the experiential and mythical components Shoham cites relate to the experience of birth.

            Furthermore, he writes that this expulsion from paradise "sees God condemning man to a cursed land in which he will live in sorrow all his temporal life" (p. 36).  This statement expresses, indeed, the consequences of birth pain on a person's life.   However, his statement that "the pantheistic neonate learns through deprivational interaction . . . that he is not with everything but against everything" (pp. 36-37) is not quite true.   It is not through deprivational interaction (not yet, anyway) but through confrontational interaction with the uterus in the manner previously described that the neonate first learns such a hard lesson.   But, surely enough, as Shoham then points out, this event "gives way to the loneliness and encapsulated existence of the human individualized separatum " (p. 37). 

            The upshot is that we become separated at birth; at birth a second duality arises in us.  "This separation," like the earlier separation in the creation of sperm and ovum, "is also perceived by the organism as a catastrophe" (Shoham, 1990, p. 37).   It is coupled with a transition from grace in the womb "to the harshness of temporal stern judgment" (Shoham, 1990, p. 37).   For stern judgment , read birth.  

            Why is birth "stern judgment"?  It is so because something happens in the womb that is with us for the rest of our life.  This coming up against the uterine wall is seen as a judgment by the fetus.   I will explain why in a little bit.  

            First, let me point out Shoham's statement "the light of Infinity was boundless, eternal, imperceptible, and nondifferentiated" before creation (p. 37).   Furthermore: "The motivation of the emanating Infinity in forming separate entities was to be able to confer grace on them" (p. 37).   This makes sense, "because within the unity of Infinity there can be no giving and no receiving" (p. 37).  

            Therefore, one has to have an Other in order to have the joy of flowing in and flowing out.  There was no flow-in, flow-out prior to the time of the creation of form.  

            However, Shoham claims that "the differentiation of the emanant is effected by its swallowing of harsh Dinim (stern judgments)" (p. 37).  So originally, after the creation of sperm and egg, after the creation of form, the "differentiation," i.e., the continued elaboration of form, of the individual, is brought about by the encounter with stern judgments.   On the adult level, we would say "suffering builds character."

            But on the prenatal level, this means that after the original duality there is the continued possibility, not only for there to be giving and receiving (flowing in, flowing out), but for there to be differences in intention between the self and the Other.  And it is through the successive encounters with these differences or frictions of intention that the organism is stimulated to differentiate.   In other words, the prenatal organism must grow in order to survive (see Adzema, 1994b).

            More and more the fetus comes up against "harsh reality" and this causes it to become more and more differentiated, to become more and more complex and less and less unitary.  The prenatal penultimate of this occurs, as mentioned, in the final stages of gestation in the fetus's coming up against the resistance of the womb, which results in a major differentiation or complexity—the creation of another duality.   But all along, as well, there have been the "swallowings" of harsh Dinims that have resulted in differentiation and increased complexity:   the incompleteness and inferiority feelings of the sperm and egg (they have only half the number of chromosomes, after all) leading to the need to unite, the "survivor guilt" of the fertilized egg leading to cell multiplication, and the foundationlessness of the blastocyst leading to the need to implant in the uterine wall (see Adzema, 1994b).

            Yet for this entire time in the womb, while there are obstacles, there are also ways around them, not to mention the experience of grace all about (being synchronistically nurtured by the womb).   It is akin to a stream flowing downhill, over and around rocks and debris; no stopping it.   As a fetus, one's intention is to grow and grow and grow.   So you're expanding, you're becoming blissful—you're "blasting, billowing, bursting forth with the power of ten-billion butterfly sneezes."   Then all of a sudden:  Boom!   You hit a wall.  Now there is no bubbling blissfully over it, no courseway around it; no exit.

            It is felt as a stern judgment:  "What did I do wrong?"  And this causes one to differentiate more.  You no longer say:   "Wow, I'm the whole universe."   Now you have to say: "I'm not what I thought I was."   This is the incipient ego talking.   In a way, there's fear:  there's this "aggressor" (the womb); you have to "defend" in a way.  And the beginnings of defenses is most accurately the beginnings of ego and of ego boundary.

            To summarize, "The breaking of the vessels generated vileness in divinity and then vicariously in creation" (Shoham, 1990, p. 40).   That is, the creation of sperm and egg created the possibility of corruption, of difference in intention from that of the divine.   That is the beginning of evil.   Then, "the expulsion of man from pantheistic paradise, resulted in the creation of the first human polar archetypes" (p. 40).   So with birth there is the creation of the first polar archetypes—the creation of past and future, space and time, and birth and death.

            In such manner, then, are the patterns of ego and "mind" separated and severed from underlying and forgotten (but not unfelt) patterns of archetypal, karmic, psychic, and universal self existing as body.2   The newly emergent conceptual bank is ripe for the impressions of society and culture, hence, the emergence of the biosocial bands.

Biosocial Bands: The Cultural Veil

Most importantly, these are the postnatal, infantile, and early childhood experiences.   Wilber (1977) has a narrower conceptualization of them, yet his elaboration still holds:

[T]he Biosocial Band, as the repository of sociological institutions such as language and logic, is basically, fundamentally, and above all else a matrix of distinctions, of forms and patterns conventionally delineating, dissecting, and dividing the "seamless coat of the universe."

   Thus the Biosocial Band, if it isn't directly responsible for all dualisms, nevertheless definitely reinforces all dualisms, and so perpetuates illusions that we would ordinarily see through. . . .   The Biosocial Band, as a matrix of distinctions, is thus like a vast screen that we throw over reality.   (p. 135)

            Language is important in structuring experience, as well as are all the other factors of socialization alluded to by Wilber above, but the fundamental biosocialization occurs at the mother's breast, so to speak.   Postnatal hospital experiences and nursing experiences are foremost events in the structuring and patterning of all later form, including that of language and logic.  Later on, weaning, toilet training, and other infant and early childhood experiences have secondary but still immensely strong influences in shaping the very way that reality is perceived and reacted to.

            However, compared to earlier (biological and biocultural) experiences, these postnatal experiences are heavily culture-rooted.   Therefore they are hugely variable.   And they in turn serve eventually to shape the exoteric contents of culture.  This is to be contrasted with biocultural influences at the transpersonal bands, the womb level, where (relatively) universal biology makes for relatively universal patterns and structures.3

            At birth we have the beginnings of the idea that is the ego.   But Wilber (1977) points out this is initially a body-ego.   Therefore, if the womb could be called vegetative, this state of body-ego could be called animalian.  The child is severed from direct transpersonal access, but these realities exist as bodily felt feelings.   Through the emergence of the biosocial bands, however, that sense of bodily and transpersonal awareness is increasingly replaced with ego consciousness and consciousness of cultural form.  

            So this initial socialization is patterned upon a foundation of bodily feelings (which are themselves the remnants of transpersonal realities).   Thus, it is fitting that the symbol Wilber (1977) uses is the Centaur4 —half human, half animal—the conceptual, cultural, "civilized" portion melded, as it were, to the remnants of transpersonal reality, which at this point are only experienced as bodily pushes and pulls, patterns of feelings, "instincts."

            The relation to transpersonal realities here is far from identification.   We talk instead of attunement to cosmic rhythms or living in accordance with natural cycles.  For the "primal" or "archaic"   person (the person of pre-history), these rhythms may be seasonal and related to agricultural processes and cycles of nature.   For the young child, these rhythms are biological and cultural.   The newborn must find a way to strike a balance between its own cycles of hunger, thirst, sleep, defecation, play, and needs for touch and affection, and the cycles of its caretaker—whose rhythms, even under optimal conditions, are not going to synchronize with the newborn's as perfectly as was the case in the womb.

            This tension, then, pushes the emergence of the biosocial bands.   For with the passage of time this discrepancy widens.   At first an attempt is made to cater to the newborn's rhythms.   But more and more the infant is required to conform to external cycles:  from feeding on demand to on a schedule, from nursing to weaning . . . eventually there is toilet training.  At each stage the child is told, in unmistakable ways, that he or she is not O.K. the way that she or he is, that she or he must conform to outer patterns.   This continues throughout the infant and toddler years until the age of about four or five.

            Thus, this process of layering of bands of biosocial learning—of learning to forget and forgetting how to feel one's inner pushes, pulls, and feelings—widens, with each new repression, the wall between self and divinity.   And this depiction characterizes the state from birth on and through the infant and toddler years.   It extends up until the time of another, even greater, separation—another major splitting or fall from grace, the creation of another major duality in consciousness.   This phase occurs around the age of four or five and is called by Arthur Janov (1970) the primal scene.

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Footnotes

1.   There is much variation here, but it would be distracting to go into it too deeply at this point.  Suffice it to say that everyone's experience in the womb is not so marvelous.  Too frequently—and more frequently in modern times with the advent of wide-scale drug use, unwanted pregnancies, and unnatural and chemicalized food supplies—the secondary shutdown/dualism occurs much earlier in pregnancy.   The encounter with a "world-obstacle" and a "frustration" of fetal intention can occur even in very early stages of fetal development.   In such cases, later womb experience takes on hellish tones and this has far-reaching ramifications throughout all later life.  [return to text]

2.   This statement is in direct contradiction to Wilber's later formulations of his theory (1980 and on) because he claims that matter, existing as body, is a lowest form of consciousness.   I point this out because this discrepancy demonstrates clearly how he has unconsciously accepted the primacy-of-the-physical-universe postulate of the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm.   The resulting epiphenomenalism is evident in his statements that "the great chain of being . . . can be listed as matter to body to soul to spirit" and that "you are born with a material body, but eventually a fully developed mind emerges . . . [later] when the soul emerges . . . [later] when the spirit emerges" (1989, p. 463).  

           Thus, it seems that, despite the impressively presented new-paradigm vision he brings to us in The Spectrum of Consciousness, Wilber's later formulations crumple under the weight of old-paradigm developmental theorists (see Wilber, 1980) whose theories are based on the idea that mind evolves out of matter, that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain activity and not the reverse.  

           Swayed in this way by the kind of thinking that seeks to understand body (and mind) from the outside—as separate object—the new-paradigm understanding that matter and body are metaphorical reflections of Consciousness fades in its influence on his formulations.  Furthermore, swayed by developmentalists that, in typical Western linear style, assume a progression through time; the new-paradigm viewing point of the Eternal Moment, of the illusory nature of time and, consequently, of the controversial character of cause and effect is also lost in Wilber's writings.  [return to text]

3.   It must be admitted that these biological underpinnings, as universal as they would seem to be, are to some degree culturally affected.   These biocultural influences arise through what the mother eats, drinks or doesn't drink, smokes or doesn't, uses or doesn't, thinks, and feels during the course of the pregnancy.   For these biocultural influences on consciousness see Verny (1981; 1987), Noble (1993), Janov's later writings (e.g., 1973, 1975, 1983), the Journal of Primal Therapy, and publications of the Association for Pre- and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), especially the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal.  [return to text]

4.   I realize that Wilber later changed from his position in The Spectrum of Consciousness concerning the Centaur.  In later works he has claimed that the Centaur should be reserved for only the adult post-ego period.  This change highlights our philosophical differences.  Obviously my analysis here, based upon pre- and perinatal psychology, supports his earlier position and strongly disputes his later one.  It underscores what I consider a glaring discrepancy on his part.  For he both acknowledges a pre-birth existence for soul and consciousness (1980, pp. 160-176) but then constructs his structures of development in a typical Western anti-reincarnational and anti- new-paradigm way as if that pre-birth existence does not exist (and both in the same work). 

           This contradiction may be partly due to his source of prenatal psychology being the Tibetan Book of the Dead.   I get the sense that his use of such a "spiritual" source (as opposed to our empirical Western experiential ones) has somehow prevented him from taking seriously the notion that the person "really" does exist prior to the time of birth.  (He puts quotes around events when discussing the happenings before birth (1980, p. 162), indicating the dubious category he has assigned them.   Also, he says that one may consider these events metaphorically, symbolically, or mythically (1980, p. 162)).  Obviously, prenatal (as well as past-life) psychology affirms the importance of taking such a notion and such prenatal events seriously and regrets his later formulations.  [return to text]

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Go Forward to Falls From Grace:  Chapter Seven:  The Third Fall From Grace:  Primal Scene/ Oedipus

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