David B. Chamberlain with endnotes by Michael Mendizza
Download the entire post as PDF >
A friend gave me Raymond Moody’s book, “Life After Life.” The book described when people went on near-death journeys, they didn’t take their brains with them. They lifted out their bodies, saw, heard, and learned, but what with? All of their physical equipment was back on the operating table. They went to other realms. They were counseled beautifully. Loved. They had great knowing. They made big decisions about values. And they decided to return to their bodies. They had no brain aboard, yet they came back remembering all of it. Remembering with what? I was beginning to get it.
The mind of the baby is not just in the brain, it is more than the brain. From that I realized we needed a whole new paradigm to describe the nature of a human baby. I ended up titling my book The Mind of Your Newborn Baby for that reason.
In medicine, when they talk about mind, it’s a euphemism for brain. They don’t really believe you need an extra concept for mind. I think this underscores the great separation between Eastern belief systems, whether it’s psychology, or Buddhism, or Western tradition, our academic psychology. The two (brain and mind) don’t mix easily.
I can call this the politics of science, which was not true to scientific principles. It is a betrayal of true science. In true science you follow the truth wherever it leads you, no matter who gets shot in the process.
In the development of 20th Century Psychology politics this is pretty obvious. William James wrote the first textbook for American Psychology. It included the whole spectrum of mind activity; meditation, hypnosis, altered states, psychic abilities, everything. But the American Psychological Association was very conscious of being accepted as a science institution, and so they decided that consciousness (beyond the brain) was out of bounds. They put William James aside in order to appear very scientific. In the process they dismissed a great deal.
It took half a century to begin to recover what they had put aside because it kept creeping back. One of the things that crept back was hypnosis and psychic phenomena.
I discovered that the babies had many abilities that science had not acknowledged. In fact, I would say that in the 20th Century both Psychology and medicine missed the real baby because they restricted their beliefs to what they were comfortable with at the time. This restricted view is the hallucinated baby. That is what they saw and treated.
The real baby has a knowing which includes psychic (nonmaterial, non-brain-centered) abilities. I discovered babies are very often telepathic. I can’t say that every baby is telepathic, but maybe every baby is. We shouldn’t dismiss this possibility. But in fact, it’s a struggle for us to remain open to this possibility.
I found repeatedly that babies knew what their mother was thinking. They knew when their mother was upset in her hospital room when the baby was in the nursery. They know the mother was not ready to cope with the baby coming. They were praying that the nurse would not take them to their mother, because she was not ready for them.
I found babies have this element of compassion and love for the mother. If she was suffering during birth, the child was aware of it. The baby was anxious about it, sorry about it, and was already trying to figure out how to make it up to the mother for having gone through this ordeal.
I found that the baby was conscious and sometimes blamed themselves for things that I wouldn’t blame them for. In fact, as I tried to help babies who had been scarred by false beliefs in the womb or at birth, I discovered they had to be helped like adult clients, to rethink and reconsider what they originally interpreted as true.
It was a burden to them because their belief was a misinterpretation. And I set to work inventing a therapy (ways of encouraging new interpretations), because there wasn’t anything that I knew at the time that held these assumptions or was working at this level. Of course, I wasn’t the only one. Other prenatal psychologists were catching on that babies are very aware and learning things from conception.
I found that babies lived in mother’s aura, so to speak. Mother was the dominating figure. If mother was upset you could be pretty sure the baby would be upset. If the mother was happy the baby would know that and feel good about that. The baby was able to discriminate the state of consciousness in the mother from the state of consciousness in the father. Or in siblings that had already arrived in that family. Babies knew, for example, that their coming was going to make it harder for a male child. This is a girl baby that I’m talking about, because the boy was already having trouble getting his father’s attention. With her coming, his situation would be worse. So, the baby felt sorry for him. She felt compassion and insight and wisdom.
Others would say, “I really understand my mother. I know my mother. But, I don’t know my father. I don’t have any idea where he is. I don’t know what’s on his mind. I don’t know what he’s thinking.” Babies in the womb could perceive that.
On the other hand, I discovered that babies were not geniuses or gurus. They were not coming into this world as finished products. They couldn’t easily sort out circumstantial evidence. They needed help with that. They were overwhelmed by the mother’s fear, or the father’s anger, or the doctors’ clumsiness. And they were learning that medicine was bad for them. Some learned that medical procedures brought them near-death and were torturous. They were operated on with no anesthetic because doctor’s believed babies didn’t need it. This went on for 150 years after the discovery of ether. The medical profession believed that babies didn’t have the brains to know what was happening, so it wouldn’t matter. Operating on newborns without anesthesia kept going right up to 1985.
That seems amazing from our point of view. But look at something like circumcision. I’ve heard lots of stories from interns about this. They found themselves next to their teacher doing a circumcision, being taught how to do it without anesthetic of course, and the babies looked like they were in extreme pain, like they were being tortured. The students would say to the supervisor, who’s very calm about the whole thing, “Isn’t that baby in pain?”
The professor would say, “Don’t worry about it, the baby won’t remember anything. It doesn’t have enough brain to remember or interpret what’s happening. It’s not going to make any difference.” The surgeon saw only the hallucinated baby. Not the real baby.
I found, of course, that the pain made every difference. Babies always knew when they were in pain. The worse it was the more they reacted. These are little premature babies who had major heart surgery for an hour and a half with no anesthetic for pain. In fact, they were knocked out with a form of Curare, which is a muscle paralyzer. They felt everything, but they couldn’t react in any way during the surgery, which only reinforced the surgeon’s hallucination that nothing was being done that would hurt a baby.
When I heard during hypnosis the baby describe its circumcision I was very uncomfortable and that adult-baby was very uncomfortable. He was living through torture, minute by minute, gasping, trying to live through it. That kind of deep impression lives with the baby. It doesn’t go away. The baby has a perfectly good memory of that experience. It may be a deep kind of memory they can’t describe in words except in an altered state of some kind, but it’s always there, guiding how they behave.
For example, if they have been through terrible pain in the neonatal intensive care nursery for three months, where most procedures are painful every day, they can’t act as though they are ignorant of what happened to them. They live it. It expressed in how they behave. They’re guarded. They’re armored. They’re expecting bad things. When things start happening that are anything like what they went through, the babies become neurotic. They’re driven by that latent memory. It’s not objective. They’re responding to the torture that they experienced. This explained to me how a form of consciousness was always there even when the brain wasn’t.
I found that even babies in the womb could have near death experiences during an attempted abortion when they lived through it, but a twin partner died. During a session, they could tell me that story. We now call that the ‘vanishing twin syndrome.’ It’s the syndrome of the surviving twin who was there during the first tri semester experiencing and observing its twin death. We have very little brain development in that first trimester, and yet a deeply buried memory is driving these people.
I refer to it as a syndrome. They are depressed about something but they couldn’t say what it was. Their behavior is being pushed to make up for things that happened. They had a compulsion to find twins or observe twins. They were hesitant about forming deep relationships because nothing would compare with the one they lost. All of these are psychic factors in their minds that they can’t explain, because they could not access the memory in their conscious adult mind.
But those memories are there, encoded in a state or frequency the normal adult mind cannot reach. There is a kind of deep memory that doesn’t require brain cells until you need to talk about it. You don’t need your verbal-thinking brain until you want to describe your near-death experience, but you can have the experience and recall everything before your brain has begun to be much of a brain. The same is true of past life memories, again which is very unwelcome data in science, very uncomfortable to psychology. They don’t teach this sort of thing. They’re embarrassed about it.
David B. Chamberlain with Michael Mendizza
Epilog:
Indeed, there are modes of being and perception that conditioned thought cannot touch. A luminous sentient something that transcends the body’s sensory experiences.
I find my earliest memories covering anachronistic features (something that does not belong to the time it appears) of a previous incarnation. Clear recollections came to me of a distant life, a yogi amidst the Himalayan snows.
The helpless humiliations of infancy are not banished from my mind. I was resentfully conscious of not being able to walk or express myself freely. Prayerful surges arose within me as I realized my bodily impotence.
Many yogis are known to have retained their self-consciousness without interruption by the dramatic transition to and from “life” and “death.” If man be solely a body, its loss indeed places the final period to identity. But if prophets down the millennia spake with truth, man is essentially of incorporeal nature (without a physical body or material form). The persistent core of human egoity is only temporarily allied with sense perception.
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, 1946
End Notes:
Trauma is not the shocking event. Trauma is the way the memory of that event reincarnates now. Our conditioned social identity or ego is a remembered traumatic image, a hallucinated virtual reality. We imagine abstract images of self and gods worshiping the image rather than our luminous embodied divinity, with implicit conflict and violence as our virtual realities clash. Historians estimate that between 160 million and 231 million people were killed in wars and conflicts during the 20th century. Estimates vary, but sources claim tens of millions were killed over centuries of expansion. Estimates up to 170 million deaths attributed to Islam over 1,400 years. During the Crusades (11th–13th centuries), hundreds of thousands killed in conflicts between Christians and Muslims. Millions died in conflicts like the Thirty Years’ War in Europe. Inquisitions and Witch Hunts: Tens of thousands executed or tortured under Christian authorities. Colonial-era missions: Indigenous populations in the Americas, Africa, and Asia suffered mass killings and forced conversions. Modern persecution continues: for example, tens of thousands of Christians are killed annually in regions where faith-based violence persists.
Nearly all of this and the torture of hallucinated babies would be eliminated if we simply did not identify with what we think.
m
