S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 2 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 1 6 5 Stanislav Grof consciousness evolution with the undifferentiated pleromatic experience of the newborn, Ken leaves out the entire embryonal development between conception and the moment of birth. I find this to be an astonishing omission for a system that is otherwise worked out with meticulous sense for detail and has received much acclaim for its logical cohesion and clarity of thinking. Even if the fetus had no conscious awareness during these periods and the pre- and perinatal events were not recorded in the brain (a position taken, increasingly implausibly, by academic psychiatry), this omission would leave a strange gap in Ken’s cosmic cycle. After all, we are talking here about a period of nine months of embryonal life during which the fetus undergoes a complex process of development from the fertilized ovum to a fully formed and differentiated organism. This is then followed by many hours or even a few days of a potentially life-threatening process of biological birth in which the fetus experiences a radical transformation from an aquatic organism to an air-breathing one. However, there exists important clinical and experimental evidence indicating that the fetus might be conscious during these nine months, that pre- and perinatal events play a cri- tical role in the individual’s psychological history, and that the memories of these early experiences are available for conscious recall and reliving. The memory of birth represents an important reservoir of difficult emotions and physical sensations that can contribute later in life to the development of various forms of emotional and psychosomatic disorders. Reliving and integrating pre- and perinatal traumas can have very beneficial effects; it can result in healing and profound psychospiritual transformation. Therapists working with powerful forms of experiential psychotherapies, such as primal therapy, psychedelic work, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork, or with individuals in psychospiritual crises, see these phenomena daily in their practices. Reliving of such events often is photographically accurate and occurs even in people who have no intellectual knowledge about their birth. The fact that it is often possible to verify various details of these experiences leaves little doubt that they represent authentic memories (Grof 1988). In addition, episodes of this kind are often accompanied by various specific physical manifestations that can be noticed by an external observer. The postures and movements of the body, arms, and legs, as well as the rotations, flections, and deflections of the head, can accurately recreate the mechanics of a particular type of delivery, even in people without elementary obstetric knowledge. Many details of such experiences can be confirmed if good birth records or reliable personal witnesses are available. In his recent book, Ken calls this evidence “controversial” (Wilber 1994, 585), which the practitioners of experiential therapies would certainly contest. The fact that the psychological importance of prenatal and perinatal events has not been accepted by mainstream psychiatry reflects the rigidity of deeply ingrained beliefs rather than the ambiguity of clinical observations. The most important of these is the conviction that the brain of the newborn is not capable of registering the traumatic impact of birth because the neurons in its cortex are not fully myelinized. This is not a well-substantiated scientific fact, but a ve- ry problematic assumption that is in conflict not only with observations from experiential therapy, but also rich experimental data concerning prenatal sensitivity of the fetus and its capacity to learn (Chamberlain 1988; Tomatis 1991). In any case, it is hard to imagine that hours of dramatic and often life-threatening experiences during biological birth would be psychologically less important than the immediately following pleromatic experiences of the newborn which receive much of Ken’s attention and have an important role in his scheme. We will return to this problem later in the section discussing Ken’s ideas about psychopathology. Besides leaving out the entire pre- and perinatal periods from his cosmic cycle of the involution and evolution of consciousness and ignoring the extensive evidence from modern experiential psychotherapies indicating the great psychological significance of these periods, Ken also fails to acknowledge the pioneering work of Otto Rank (Rank 1928), who emphasized the paramount importance of the intrauterine experience and of the trauma of birth. Rank is the only major figure in the history of depth psychology whom Ken treats in this way. Without any explanation, he neither incorporates Rank’s work concerning the birth trauma into his scheme of spectrum psychology, nor subjects it to critical analysis. In addition to ignoring all the clinical and experimental data concerning the prenatal and perinatal periods, Ken shows the same selective bias in regard to spiritual sources. Since in the discussion of cosmogenesis he draws so exclusively on Tibetan sources, it is particularly striking that he does not pay any attention to Tibetan texts that discuss in detail the challenges of prenatal development and birth (Sgam.po.pa 1971, 63–66). In Vajrayana, the intrauterine state is actually described as one of the six intermediate states or bardos (Evans-Wentz 1960, 102). And the Buddha himself made specific references to the trauma of birth as a major source of human suffering.
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