An excerpt from Cosmic Cradle: Spiritual Dimensions of Life Before Birth
SHIFTS IN CONSCIOUSNESS, like shifting gears in a five-speed transmission, hold the key to pre-birth experiences. People reporting pre-birth memories and communications with the soul seeking birth have shifted from the mundane third gear of awareness or consciousness into the fourth and fifth gears of higher awareness.
Pre-birth experiences are not so much due to social upbringing, educational background, or religious training as they are to an individual’s innate awareness. Just as the physical world is experienced through the physical senses, pre-birth experiences become available through the eye of the soul. Intuition is the gateway. Higher realities are grasped by a clear mind, open and without preoccupation, rather than a busy mind cluttered with fears, worries, and anxieties.
Though consciousness is a less familiar term in the modern world, the major spiritual traditions have fine-tuned their understanding of consciousness over the millennia. They elucidate degrees of awareness. Just as a thermometer measures hotter and colder temperatures, an awareness scale registers higher and lower perceptions of reality. When awareness grows beyond ordinary waking, dreaming, and sleeping states, an expanded awareness supports access to deeper memories and subtler perceptions.
A general description follows of three ordinary states of consciousness and two expanded states based on brain-wave research of key frequencies (delta, theta, alpha, and beta):
- Sleeping: We have no awareness of the outer world or inner reality; large delta brain waves dominate; no brain-wave coherence.
- Dreaming: We are aware of worlds conjured up by the imagination; interchanging mental and restful activity with no brain-wave coherence.
- Waking: We are aware and experience the world via our five senses; fast beta waves without brain-wave coherence.
- Brief transcendental bliss: Abraham Maslow coined the term “peak experience” to define this state of inner peace, energy, creativity, and bliss. Mystics call it samadhi. The soul begins to wake up to its true nature. Brain scans show dominant alpha (alertness) with theta (deep rest).
- Permanent transcendental bliss: Being alive is a peak experience of inner happiness, peace, silence, wholeness, wonder and awe, and awareness of higher truth. The soul has awakened to its true nature. Everything becomes sacred and beautiful. Brain scans reveal mixed beta, theta, and alpha. Orderliness increases between the right and left hemispheres.
Pre-birth experiences are clustered at the upper end of the awareness scale. Reports from ancient Greek, medieval Catholic, Islamic and Asian traditions, as well as Descartes, Wordsworth and Einstein, referred to higher awareness when they spoke of the all-seeing power of the superconscious mind. Ancient Greek philosophers recognized that when someone transcends mundane perception, he perceives “everlasting loveliness,” “greatest joy” and “profoundly moving beauty.”
American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau speaks of a higher awareness: “The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”
Chuang Tzu (369-286 BCE), the Chinese philosopher, clarified the lower end of the awareness scale: “We do not ask the blind about a painting, nor invite the deaf to a songfest. Blindness and deafness are not merely of the body: There are souls, too, that are blind and deaf.”
Chuang Tzu acknowledges what happens when an individual attains the upper limits of the awareness scale: “You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog — he’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect — he’s bound to a single season. You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar — he’s shackled by his doctrines. Now you have come out beyond your banks and borders and have seen the great sea…. From now on, it will be possible to talk to you about the Great Principle.”
Cosmic Cradle offers an optimistic message of humanity’s essential spiritual nature. Most people suffer from amnesia of their spiritual roots, and this is why the vast majority are unable to call up their pre-birth memories. Pre-birth experiences can teach humanity about new dimensions of human awareness. They stretch the boundaries of what people consider real and will change the way humankind approaches conception, pregnancy, childbirth and death.
Cosmic Cradle inspires a strong interfaith message, because it lays out a vision bridging major religions and linking a wealth of spiritual wisdom from diverse cultural perspectives. The ideas contained in Cosmic Cradle are unifying rather than divisive. We are all one family.
