Ritual Is Pseudo Experience — an Avoidance of True Nature, Not an Attunement with It: Matriarchal Is a Split from Primal Consciousness and the Natural Self

Ritual As Shadow: Magic, Ritual, and Superstition Occur with the Beginnings of Ego and the Agrarian Desire to Control Nature — the Matriarchal Consciousness

In seeking to … control our lives, we introduce a deathlike pall into normal human experience. Rather than being ever-unfolding renewable Divine laboratories of conscious experience embodying multiple and perpetual lines of inquiry into the nature of That Which Is, we “evolve” to becoming isolated experiments of discrete variables which are planned, initiated, carried out, and extinguished.

Primal Consciousness

Hunter-gatherer consciousness — termed paleolithic consciousness by one researcher — and especially the even earlier forager consciousness was characterized by just such a, relatively, non-dualistic acceptance of That Which Is … for the most part. Its way of life, corresponding, has been called the “original affluent society,” in that it is estimated that only four hours a day were needed for attending to survival concerns.

But a mistrust set in. Fearfulness and intractability in the face of change followed; and hence there arose the desire to attempt to control Nature, rather than to follow Her and conform to Her rhythms.

The Beginnings of Ego

For example, a hunter-gatherer society can follow the food supply. But doing this requires an acceptance of change and an acceptance of a certain irregularity and insecurity in one’s daily regimen.

Whereas, somewhere along the line, people began to become attached to particular surroundings and to a particular pattern of daily activity. Yet there is only one reason why people would want to have things be the same — either to have their physical surroundings be the same or to have their experience follow certain familiar (one might say “ritualized”) patterns . . . and that is fear. So fear leads to attempts to control both one’s external and one’s internal environment. This is the beginnings of ego.

The Natural Self

I say that there is only one reason that one would seek to control things because the natural self enjoys change and relishes the novel. The natural self glories in a life that is an ever-unfolding adventure into the Divine. Such an attitude is the same as a childlike openness to experience and is probably why, in its rejuvenating aspects, there is the myth of such pre-archaic people living such long lives.

At any rate, in seeking to shut down and control our lives, we introduce a deathlike pall into normal human experience. Rather than being ever-unfolding renewable Divine laboratories of conscious experience embodying multiple and perpetual lines of inquiry into the nature of That Which Is, we “evolve” to becoming isolated experiments of discrete variables which are planned, initiated, carried out, and extinguished.

Matriarchy Is Actually a Split from Nature

An important point is that the agricultural lifestyle, which characterized these initial matriarchal beginnings of the fear-and-controlling cycle, was both a splitting off from Nature and then a subsequent act-out of that which was lost. This supposed “matriarchy” was actually a splitting off from the Mother, was a mistrust of Nature and hence a setting up of oneself over against Nature in an attempt to control Her.

It follows that these agrarian cultures would tend to evolve religions which would then seek to appease this aspect of oneself from which one has split. It is only with this change that we have the elaborations of ritual and the beginnings of actual magic, for these are attempts to control Nature — a Nature which is seen as set against oneself, a Nature of which one is no longer a part.

Contrast this attempt to influence Nature from without with the state of the hunter-gatherer, in whom the movements of Nature are felt on the inside and conformed to within. Contrast this matriarchal mistrust with the detached and accepting attitude of such a primal person, for whom Christ’s lesson of the “lilies of the field” would be unnecessary.

Furthermore, in agrarian societies, since there is a split from Nature in an attempt to control her, the individual no longer feels, as the early forager did, those body energies that we call core feelings. So, being cut off from both the body and from the Nature of which one is a part, the neolithic … that is, agrarian … and post-neolithic individual must “act out” those core body feelings.

For the rule we have discovered is that individuals “act out” in the external world — in ways of which they are not conscious — those inner feelings/realities/experiences which they are cut off from … hence they deny and are numb to — unaware of. The finding is also that the manner of the “act out” is symbolic of the (truly) motivating feeling/reality/experience.

Matriarchy—The First Split from the Natural Self

Thus, what I am saying is that one seemingly splits off from a reality, one ends up repressing something, but that does not make it go away completely. One reduces one’s consciousness of one’s identity with a particular reality, but one does not stop being united with that reality. So that reality makes itself known, but not consciously . . . rather, indirectly, symbolically.

Hence, when Nature is presented to the person, it is not directly encountered in the body as direct experience and core body feelings, but rather as symbolic images. These symbolic images, being experienced as separate from oneself, one must therefore enter into a relationship with.

And since these symbolic images are separate from oneself, one finds very often that they are moving and influencing oneself in patterns that are different than one’s consciously chosen ones. The conscious mind finds itself at odds with these symbols (congruent with the fact that the conscious mind has made itself opposed to one’s bodily core rhythms and experiences).

The Beginnings of Magic, Ritual, and Superstition

Therefore, the conscious mind seeks to come to an arrangement with these symbol patterns while still maintaining its stance of separation and control. It is in this final move that we have the beginnings of appeasement and ritual, and hence of magic and “superstition.”

Ritual and matriarchal religion are thus the “act-outs” of our repressed identification with Nature and not a reattunement with Nature as the Goddess-religion advocates would have it. From this perspective, then, ritual is not a way of tapping into a deeper relationship with feeling and Nature, it is an avoidance of real feeling, a running away from Nature, from one’s natural self, from the real, the authentic, the genuine self, from genuine action, from spontaneous and ever-creative being-in-the-world.

Continue with The Second Retreat from the Natural Self — Patriarchal Culture: One Gains the World in Exact Proportion to Which a Man Has Relinquished his Soul

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At the Age of Four or Five, Giving Up, We Become “Them”: Life Is Passed Performing Rituals and Mouthing Incantations in the Service of Others’ Requirements

The Natural Self Slain, the Ego “Is Rewarded for Being Obsequious While the Real Self Seethes in the Prison of Loneliness”: The Third Fall, the Primal Scene, Part One — “Child Sacrifice”

The Primal Scene

The primal scene occurs at around the age of four or five years. It corresponds exactly with Wilber’s tertiary dualism, as also it correlates with the beginning of the Oedipal struggle (in Freudian terms). It consolidates the formation of the ego against the body, severing the Centaur into “a horseman divided from his horse” (Wilber, 1977, p. 149). It may be likened to a third shutdown, a third stage in the removal of self from divinity, a third denial of God—this time under the terrorizing influence of what might be called social or relationship trauma.

The Natural Self Is Slain

According to Arthur Janov (1970), at around the age of four or five there occurs a point at which the child perceives the hopelessness of ever being loved for him- or herself and becomes instead what the parents (and, by proxy, society) want. Their needs become her or his needs.

The real self—the “child within,” the natural self, the God within—is slain and buried in the unconscious (once again) and becomes the unconscious self. Janov (1970) explains this process of losing the real self in a systematic and detailed manner. He writes brilliantly and poetically in his description, and I will let his words do most of the talking here.

Janov points out, first of all, that

We are all creatures of need. We are born needing, and the vast majority of us die after a lifetime of struggle with many of our needs unfulfilled. These needs are not excessive—to be fed, kept warm and dry, to grow and develop at our own pace, to be held and caressed, and to be stimulated. These Primal needs are the central reality of the infant. The neurotic process begins when these needs go unmet for any length of time. . . .

Since the infant himself cannot overcome the sensation of hunger (that is, he cannot go to the refrigerator) or find substitute affection, he must separate his sensations (hunger; wanting to be held) from consciousness. This separation of oneself from one’s needs and feelings is an instinctive maneuver in order to shut off excessive pain. We call it the split. (p. 22)

The split evolves into the permanent disconnection between the real and the unreal selves—between the real, needing, “feeling” self and the self we must pretend to be in order to try to get some our needs satisfied.

Demands for the child to be unreal are not often explicit. Nevertheless, parental needs become the child’s implicit demand. The child is born into his parents’ needs and begins struggling to fulfill them almost from the moment he is alive. He may be pushed to smile (to appear happy), to coo, to wave bye-bye, later to sit up and walk, still later to push himself so that his parents can have an advanced child. As the child develops, the requirements upon him become more complex. He will have to get A’s, to be helpful and do his chores, to be quiet and undemanding, not to talk too much, to say bright things, to be athletic. What he will not do is be himself. The thousands of operations that go on between parents and children which deny the natural Primal needs of the child mean that the child will hurt. They mean that he cannot be what he is and be loved. . . . (p. 25)

Becoming “Them”

The upshot of this process, then, as Sam Keen (1972) described it:

He knows he cannot both be himself and be loved. So he splits into a real and an unreal self. His real feelings are sealed in the throbbing vault of the lonely inner self and he begins to tailor his conduct to the expectations of his parents. His watchword becomes: I will be what you want me to be if you will only love me. Although I feel hurt, alone, fearful, and unlovely, I will act trustworthy, loyal, helpful. . . . Henceforth the budding neurotic child gets plastic approval but no genuine love. His unreal self is rewarded for being obsequious while his real self seethes in the prison of loneliness. (p. 46)

Body Snatchers

The primal scene itself, however, is that crystallizing event that for the child symbolizes the essential truth of all the accumulated interactions that from birth on have demonstrated that in order to get a semblance of one’s needs fulfilled one cannot simply be oneself but must instead struggle to please another—for now a parent or parents, later it will be a lover, a spouse, a boss, society in general.

Giving Up, We Become “Them”

Janov (1970) describes this primal scene:

As the assaults on the real system mount, they begin to crush the real person. One day an event will take place which, though not necessarily traumatic in itself—giving the child to a baby sitter for the hundredth time—will shift the balance between real and unreal and render the child neurotic. That event I call the major Primal Scene. It is a time in the young child’s life when all the past humiliations, negations, and deprivations accumulate into an inchoate realization: “There is no hope of being loved for what I am.” It is then that the child defends himself against that catastrophic realization by becoming split from his feelings, and slips quietly into neurosis. The realization is not a conscious one. Rather, the child begins acting around his parents, and then elsewhere, in the manner expected by them. He says their words and does their thing. He acts unreal—i.e., not in accord with the reality of his own needs and desires. In a short time the neurotic behavior becomes automatic.

Neurosis involves being split, disconnected from one’s feelings. The more assaults on the child by the parents, the deeper the chasm between real and unreal. He begins to speak and move in prescribed ways, not to touch his body in proscribed areas (not to feel himself literally), not to be exuberant or sad, and so on. The split, however, is necessary in a fragile child. It is the reflexive (i.e., automatic) way the organism maintains its sanity. Neurosis, then, is the defense against catastrophic reality in order to protect the development and psychophysical integrity of the organism.

Neurosis involves being what one is not in order to get what doesn’t exist. If love existed, the child would be what he is, for that is love—letting someone be what he or she is. Then, nothing wildly traumatic need happen in order to produce neurosis. It can stem from forcing a child to punctuate every sentence with “please” and “thank you,” to prove how refined the parents are. It can also come from not allowing the child to complain when he is unhappy or to cry. Parents may rush in to quell sobs because of their anxiety. They may not permit anger—”nice girls don’t throw tantrums; nice boys don’t talk back”—to prove how respected the parents are; neurosis may also arise from making a child perform, such as asking him to recite poems at a party or solve abstract problems. Whatever form it takes, the child gets the idea of what is required of him quite soon. Perform, or else. Be what they want, or else—no love, or what passes for love: approval, a smile, a wink. Eventually the act comes to dominate the child’s life, which is passed in performing rituals and mouthing incantations in the service of his parents’ requirements. (pp. 25-26, emphases mine)

In Myth: Isaac’s “Primal Scene”

A good mythic reflection of the dynamics of this third fall from grace is the Abraham and Isaac story in Genesis. In the story, God “tempts” Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his only son Isaac. Therefore, the altar Isaac is to be sacrificed on is that of the parent’s own misapprehended growth needs.

What Is Meant by “Child Sacrifice”

Moreover, just as Isaac, the son, the child, is to be offered in sacrifice to Abraham’s relationship to the divine, to his supposed spiritual needs; so also we, most of us, are asked to forego our own dreams, our own unique directions, for the unfulfilled dreams, desperate hopes, and ego vanity of another—usually the same-sex parent.

To Be Continued with The Third Fall From Grace, The Primal Scene, Part Two — The Philosophic Bands: If Not My Self, Who Then to Be?

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Becoming Not Yourself: The Centaur Stage of Infant and Toddler Learning Involves Learning You Are Not OK and Continues the Separation from Innate Divinity

   

The Newborn Is the Centaur — Half Human, Half Animal … Half Human, Half Divine: The Second Fall From Grace, Birth, Part Four—The Biosocial Bands … The Cultural Veil

To Summarize

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. [Footnote 1]

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

A Vast Screen That We Throw Over Reality

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)

Biosocialization: Nursing and Nurturing Events Create Templates for Later Language and Logic

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.

The Cultural Veil

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. [Footnote 2]

This Postnatal Body-Ego Is “Animalian” Compared to “Vegetative” in the Womb

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.

The Centaur Is the Toddler — Half Human, Half Animal … Half Human, Half Divine

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 Centaur—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.” [Footnote 3]

The “Primal” Person Is to Cycles of Nature as the Baby Is to Mother’s Routines for Caring

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.

Becoming Other Than “I”

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.

Learning to Forget and Forgetting How to Feel

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. 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.

2.  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.

3. 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.

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The Creation of Loneliness and the Expulsion from Paradise at Birth: The Why and Way of Mind, or Ego, Separating from Universal Consciousness

Ejection from “Eden” Happens to Everyone at Birth: The Second Fall From Grace, Birth, Part Three — Suffering Builds a Character

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

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. [Footnote 1]

The newly emergent conceptual bank is ripe for the impressions of society and culture, hence, the emergence of the biosocial bands.

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Footnote

1. 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.

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Becoming Separated from Our Bodies at Birth, We Are Separated from Archetypal and Karmic Patterns, from Our Spiritual Selves: An Angel of Death Guards the Gates of Heaven

The Second Fall From Grace, Birth, Part Two — The Creation of Ego: There Is a Separation from the Natural and the Institution of a Substitute Human Nature at Birth

Nonetheless, in “labeling” this confinedness in the womb, 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.

We Create Time to Escape from an Insufferable Now

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.

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We Create Time to Escape from an Insufferable Now … Therein We Create Death: The Beginnings of Diminishing Divinity and of our Becoming Just an Idea

The Second Fall From Grace, Birth, Part One — The Wall: The Creation of Pain, Time, and Death Occurs with the Encounter with the “World-Obstacle”

The Secondary Dualism

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)

The Creation of Death in Encounter with the World-Obstacle

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.

The Wall

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.  [Footnote 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)

The Creation of Pleasure and Pain

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 in the womb, 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.

We Create Time to Escape from an Insufferable Now

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.  

Footnote

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.

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Womb Existence Is a Separate But Connected State, of Space But Not Time, an Eternal Now: The First Fall From Grace, Part Six — Womb with a View, the Transpersonal Bands of Consciousness

In This “Subtle Realm of Divine and Archetypal Illumination,” Aware of Karma and Past Lives, We Are Instructed About Destiny and Life Purpose: The Chonyid Bardo, Womb, and Collective Unconscious

Duality and the Creation of Death

Nevertheless:

According to the myth, the outcome of the breaking of the vessels was that particles of Divinity were imbedded in all objects and life-forms of creation, serving as divine cores within profane temporal casings. Furthermore, the breaking of the vessels introduced evil to the world; before, only good emanated from the great light of infinity. (Shoham, 1990, p. 36)

In essence, then, as stated above, with the creation of sperm and egg we have the beginnings of form out of no-thing-ness. And with this creation, this first separation, evil has been created, darkness and confusion arise. For that separation is duality; and that duality is evil—the opposite of real life (God), live spelled backwards, and the beginning of the possibility of death.

Transpersonal Bands: Womb With a View

At any rate, in that there is a separate awareness—in this creation of form, this creation of sperm and egg from no-thing-ness—there is a separation (of sorts) from the environment. But this separation is not total, not yet; there is a fluidity of awareness between environment and organism. Spiritually, it can be said that at this level one is still in touch with transpersonal forces or patterns. These are Wilber’s (1977) “transpersonal bands,” which we see relate ontogenetically to the time in the womb.

Chonyid Bardo, the Archetypal Realm, the Womb, the Collective Unconscious

They relate also to the later stages of the Chonyid bardo which, as Wilber (1980) writes, is “the subtle realm of divine and archetypal illumination” (p. 169). The separation from Other at this level takes global, archetypal, karmic forms. One is “instructed” about destiny, life purpose, and so forth; one’s karmic and past lives patterns are still very much “at hand.” This is Masters and Houston’s (1967) symbolic level, Jung’s collective unconscious, and Grof’s transpersonal realms.

Separate But Connected State

Biologically, emotionally, and psychically the organism is also connected to its “environment.” After the sperm and ovum unite to create the fertilized egg, it grows into a blastocyst and implants itself in the uterine wall. Later as fetus, of course, it shares in the mother’s biological processes and substances through the umbilical cord. So the organism here is actually still “attached” to its environment, though maintaining a separate awareness, an awareness of space.

Wilber’s primary duality has occurred, which for our purposes might be described as the separation between self and Other or self and God. The heavens have been separated from the earth, though they still meet at the ends of the horizon. Throughout its time in the womb the organism is attached to the mother (the environment) and shares freely in her feelings, thoughts, moods, and energies. It is a vegetative-type existence, separate yet connected.

Space Without Time — The Womb’s Eternal Now

This is the condition of space without time. This womb period has retained timelessness but not space- or formlessness. One lives an eternal Now that is rooted in a specific form—that is, it has a specific perspective or focal point of awareness.

Note that, contrary to Wilber’s (1977) assertion, the primary and secondary dualisms—those which create space and time, respectively—do not occur together when looked at ontogenetically. This difference from Wilber is significant, and I shall discuss it further on. For present purposes, however, remember that Wilber’s secondary dualism creates a past and future, which place a veil between us and Now. But on the contrary, at this point in the womb, death has not yet entered the picture and time has thus not been generated nor, consequently, a past and future. We therefore have the continuing sense of eternity and of the immortality of form.

End of Innocence — Birth

But something does happen (according to biologists, pre- and perinatal psychologists, and the reports of experiential pioneers). This leads us to the second fall from grace, to the experience of birth.

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