Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [166]
It is difficult to see why evolution should have selected brains that are predisposed to such experiences, since no one seems to die or fail to reproduce from a want of mystic fervor. Might these drug-inducible experiences as well as the near-death epiphany be due merely to some evolutionarily neutral wiring defect in the brain which, by accident, occasionally brings forth altered perceptions of the world? That possibility, it seems to me, is extremely implausible, and perhaps no more than a desperate rationalist attempt to avoid a serious encounter with the mystical.
The only alternative, so far as I can see, is that every human being, without exception, has already shared an experience like that of those travelers who return from the land of death: the sensation of flight; the emergence from darkness into light; an experience in which, at least sometimes, a heroic figure can be dimly perceived, bathed in radiance and glory. There is only one common experience that matches this description. It is called birth.
HIS NAME IS STANISLAV GROF. In some pronunciations his first and last names rhyme. He is a physician and a psychiatrist who has, for more than twenty years, employed LSD and other psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy. His work long antedates the American drug culture, having begun in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1956 and continuing in recent years in the slightly different cultural setting of Baltimore, Maryland. Grof probably has more continuing scientific experience on the effects of psychedelic drugs on patients than anyone else.* He stresses that whereas LSD can be used for recreational and aesthetic purposes, it can have other and more profound effects, one of which is the accurate recollection of perinatal experiences. “Perinatal” is a neologism for “around birth,” and is intended to apply not just to the time immediately after birth but to the time before as well. (It is a parallel construction to “perithanatic,” near-death.) He reports a large number of patients who, after a suitable number of sessions, actually re-experience rather than merely recollect profound experiences, long gone and considered intractable to our imperfect memories, from perinatal times. This is, in fact, a fairly common LSD experience, by no means limited to Grof’s patients.
Grof distinguishes four perinatal stages recovered under psychedelic therapy. Stage 1 is the blissful complacency of the child in the womb, free of all anxiety, the center of a small, dark, warm universe—a cosmos in an amniotic sac. In its intrauterine state the fetus seems to experience something very close to the oceanic ecstasy described by Freud as a fount of the religious sensibility. The fetus is, of course, moving. Just before birth it is probably as alert, perhaps even more alert, than just after birth. It does not seem impossible that we may occasionally and imperfectly remember this Edenic, golden age, when every need—for food, oxygen, warmth and waste disposal—was satisfied before it was sensed, provided automatically by a superbly designed life-support system; and, in dim recollection years later, describe it as “being one with the universe.”
In Stage 2, the uterine contractions begin. The walls to which the amniotic sac is anchored, the foundation of the stable intrauterine environment, become traitorous. The fetus is dreadfully compressed. The universe seems to pulsate, a benign world suddenly converted into a cosmic torture chamber. The contractions may last intermittently for hours. As time goes on, they become more intense. No hope of surcease is offered. The fetus has done nothing to deserve such a fate, an innocent whose cosmos has turned upon it, administering seemingly endless agony. The severity of this experience is apparent to anyone who has seen a neonatal cranial distortion that is still evident days after birth. While I can understand a strong motivation to obliterate utterly any trace of this agony, might it not resurface under stress? Might not, Grof asks, the hazy and repressed memory of this experience prompt paranoid fantasies and