good men and women have stated that behind the apparent divergences is a fundamental and important unity; beneath the doctrinal idiocies is a basic and essential truth. There are two very different approaches to a consideration of tenets of belief. On the one hand, there are the believers, who are often credulous, and who accept a received religion literally, even though it may have internal inconsistencies or be in strong variance with what we know reliably about the external world or ourselves. On the other hand, there are the stern skeptics, who find the whole business a farrago of weak-minded nonsense. Some who consider themselves sober rationalists resist even considering the enormous corpus of recorded religious experience. These mystical insights must mean something. But what? Human beings are, by and large, intelligent and creative, good at figuring things out. If religions are fundamentally silly, why is it that so many people believe in them?
Certainly, bureaucratic religions have throughout human history allied themselves with the secular authorities, and it has frequently been to the benefit of those ruling a nation to inculcate the faith. In India, when the Brahmans wished to keep the “untouchables” in slavery, they proffered divine justification. The same self-serving argument was employed by whites, who actually described themselves as Christians, in the ante-bellum American South to support the enslavement of blacks. The ancient Hebrews cited God’s direction and encouragement in the random pillage and murder they sometimes visited on innocent peoples. In medieval times the Church held out the hope of a glorious life after death to those upon whom it urged contentment with their lowly and impoverished station. These examples can be multiplied indefinitely, to include virtually all the world’s religions. We can understand why the oligarchy might favor religion when, as is often the case, religion justifies oppression-as Plato, a dedicated advocate of book-burning, did in the
The general acceptance of religious ideas, it seems to me, can only be because there is something in them that resonates with our own certain knowledge-something deep and wistful; something every person recognizes as central to our being. And that common thread, I propose, is birth. Religion is fundamentally mystical, the gods inscrutable, the tenets appealing but unsound because, I suggest, blurred perceptions and vague premonitions are the best that the newborn infant can manage. I think that the mystical core of the religious experience is neither literally true nor perniciously wrong-minded. It is rather a courageous if flawed attempt to make contact with the earliest and most profound experience of our lives. Religious doctrine is fundamentally clouded because not a single person has ever at birth had the skills of recollection and retelling necessary to deliver a coherent account of the event. All successful religions seem at their nucleus to make an unstated and perhaps even unconscious resonance with the perinatal experience. Perhaps when secular influences are subtracted, it will emerge that the most successful religions are those which perform this resonance best.
Attempts at rationalistic explanations of religious belief have been resisted vigorously. Voltaire argued that if God did not exist Man would be obliged to invent him, and was reviled for the remark. Freud proposed that a paternalistic God is partly our projection as adults of our perceptions of our fathers when we were infants; he also called his book on religion
Why is the opposition to rational discourse and reasoned argument in religion so strong? In part, I think it is because our common perinatal experiences are real but resist accurate recollection. But another reason, I think, has to do with the fear of death. Human beings and our immediate ancestors and collateral relatives, such as the Neanderthals, are probably the first organisms on this planet to have a clear awareness of the inevitability of our own end. We will die and we fear death. This fear is worldwide and transcultural. It probably has significant survival value. Those who wish to postpone or avoid death can improve the world, reduce its perils, make children who will live after us, and create great works by which they will be remembered. Those who propose rational and skeptical discourse on things religious are perceived as challenging the remaining widely held solution to the human fear of death, the hypothesis that the soul lives on after the body’s demise. [27] Since we feel strongly, most of us, about wishing not to die, we are made uncomfortable by those who suggest that death is the end; that the personality and the soul of each of us will not live on. But the soul hypothesis and the God hypothesis are separable; indeed, there are some human cultures in which the one can be found without the other. In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.
Those who raise questions about the God hypothesis and the soul hypothesis are by no means all atheists. An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed. A wide range of intermediate positions seems admissible, and considering the enormous emotional energies with which the subject is invested, a questing, courageous and open mind seems to be the essential tool for narrowing the range of our collective ignorance on the subject of the existence of God.
When I give lectures on borderline or pseudo or folk science (along the lines of Chapters 5 through 8 of this book) I am sometimes asked if similar criticism should not be applied to religious doctrine. My answer is, of course, yes. Freedom of religion, one of the rocks upon which the United States was founded, is essential for free inquiry. But it does not carry with it any immunity from criticism or reinterpretation for the religions themselves. The words “question” and “quest” are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth. I do not insist that these connections between religion and perinatal experience are correct or original. Many of them are at least implicit in the ideas of Stanislav Grof and the psychoanalytic school of psychiatry, particularly Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud. But they are worth thinking about.
There is, of course, a great deal more to the origin of religion than these simple ideas suggest. I do not propose that theology is physiology entirely. But it would be astonishing, assuming we really can remember our perinatal experiences, if they did not affect in the deepest way our attitudes on birth and death, sex and childhood, on purpose and ethics, on causality and God.
AND COSMOLOGY. Astronomers studying the nature and origin and fate of the universe make elaborate observations, describe the cosmos in differential equations and the tensor calculus, examine the universe from X- rays to radio waves, count the galaxies and determine their motions and distances-and when all is done a choice is to be made between three different views: a Steady State cosmology, blissful and quiet; an Oscillating Universe, in which the universe expands and contracts, painfully and forever; and a Big Bang expanding universe, in which the cosmos is created in a violent event, suffused with radiation (“Let there be light”) and then grows and cools, evolves and becomes quiescent, as we saw in the previous chapter. But these three cosmologies resemble with an awkward, almost embarrassing precision the human perinatal experiences of Grof’s Stages 1, 2, and 3 plus 4, respectively.
It is easy for modern astronomers to make fun of the cosmologies of other cultures-for example, the Dogon idea that the universe was hatched from a cosmic egg (Chapter 6). But in light of the ideas just presented, I intend to be much more circumspect in my attitudes toward folk cosmologies; their anthropocentrism is just a little bit easier to discern than ours. Might the puzzling Babylonian and Biblical references to waters above and below the firmament, which Thomas Aquinas struggled so painfully to reconcile with Aristotelian physics, be merely an amniotic metaphor? Are we incapable of constructing a cosmology that is not some mathematical encrypting of our own personal origins?
Einstein’s equations of general relativity admit a solution in which the universe expands. But Einstein, inexplicably, overlooked such a solution and opted for an absolutely static, nonevolving cosmos. Is it too much to inquire whether this oversight had perinatal rather than mathematical origins? There is a demonstrated reluctance of physicists and astronomers to accept Big Bang cosmologies in which the universe expands forever, although conventional Western theologians are more or less delighted with the prospect. Might this dispute, based almost certainly on psychological predispositions, be understood in Grofian terms?
I do not know how close the analogies are between personal perinatal experiences and particular cosmological models. I suppose it is too much to hope that the originators of the Steady State hypothesis were each born by Caesarean section. But the analogies are very close, and the possible connection between psychiatry and cosmology seems very real. Can it really be that every possible mode of origin and evolution of the universe corresponds to a human perinatal experience? Are we such limited creatures that we are unable to
