motion, another image from literature emerged in my mind – the cyclone that in Frank Baum’s “Wonderful Wizard of Oz” sweeps Dorothy away from the monotony of her life in Kansas and sends her on a strange journey of adventure. There was no doubt in my mind that my experience also had something to do with entering the rabbit hole in “Alice in Wonderland”, and I awaited with great trepidation what world I would find on the other side of the looking glass. The entire universe seemed to be closing in on me and there was nothing I could do to stop this apocalyptic engulfment. As I was sinking deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of my own unconscious, I felt an onslaught of anxiety, turning to panic. Everything became dark, oppressive, and terrifying. It was as if the weight of the whole world was encroaching on me exerting incredible hydraulic pressure that threatened to crack my skull and reduce my body to a tiny compact ball. A rapid fugue of memories frommy past cascaded through my brain showing me the utter futility and meaninglessness of my life and existence in general. We are born naked, frightened, and in agony and we will leave the world the same way. The existentialist was right! Everything is impermanent, life is nothing else but waiting for Godot! Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! The discomfort I felt turned to pain and the pain increased to agony. The torture intensified to the point where every cell in my body felt like it was being bored open with a diabolic dentist’s drill. Visions of infernal landscapes and devils torturing their victims suddenly brought to me the awareness that I was in Hell. I thought of Dante’s “Divine Comedy”: “Abandon all hope ye who enter!” There seemed to be no way out of this diabolical situation; I was forever doomed without the slightest hope for redemption. 5.5 BPM III (The death-rebirth struggle) Many aspects of this rich and colorful experience can be understood from its association with the second clinical stage of delivery, the propulsion through the birth canal after the cervix opens and the head descends. Beside the elements that are easily comprehensible as natural derivatives of the birth situation, such as sequences of titanic struggle involving strong pressures and energies or scenes of bloody violence and torture, there are others that require special explanation. Here belongs particularly sexual imagery, satanic scenes, and the encounter with fire; all these motifs are typically associated with this matrix. There seems to be a mechanism in the human organism that transforms extreme suffering, particularly when it is associated with suffocation, into a strange form of sexual arousal. This explains why a large variety of sexual experiences and visions often occur in connection with the reliving of birth. One can feel a combination of sexual excitement with pain, aggression, or fear, experience various sadomasochistic sequences, rapes, and situations of sexual abuse, or see pornographic images. The fact that, in the final stages of birth, the fetus can encounter various forms of biological material – blood, mucus, urine, and even feces – seems to account for the fact that these elements also play a role in deathrebirth sequences. Another category of motifs associated with BPM III includes archetypal elements from the collective unconscious, particularly those Spirituality Studies 2 (1) Spring 2016 19
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