 
### MOTHER'S UNIVERSITY SERIES

### BIRTH

### by

### Stephen W. Taylor

Agented on Smashwords by Robert Michael Taylor 2015

Copyright 28th May 1991, 26th August 2003

All Rights Reserved

Edited from a draft written in the mid-nineteen seventies, this book examines Childbirth in context of the teachings of Grantly Dick-Read, but also explores its mechanism in terms of the genesis of mind in the mother-infant relation. More than a physical act, birth is the bridge across which the spirit of humanity moves down the generations. In my opinion, its gross mismanagement throughout the developed world is due to a mechanical approach that utterly fails to comprehend the psychical, that is spiritual component in birth, and that until this one-sidedness is overcome, no effective remedy will eventuate.

### CONTENTS

Contents, Definitions & Abbreviations

The Birds and the Bees

Preamble

Introduction

Classification

1. Early Days

2. Obstetric Patients not Accepted

3. A New Beginning

4. A Medical Practitioner is Converted

5. Experiences in Birth

6. The Affliction of Civilization

7. Read's Moment of Inspiration

8. Success turns into Failure

9. To Allow or Stop the Labor?

10. The Socratic Midwife

11. The Unity of Birth

12. To Flee Cultural Childbirth

13. The Physiology of Pain

14. The War of Man against Woman

15. The Mind in Labor

16. Drugs on and off the Street

17. Control

18. Hypnosis

19. Read's Expectation

20. From Theory to a Science of Mind

21. Cultural Childbirth across the Generations

22. The Rosetta stone

23. The Origin of Mind

24. A Training Program for Natural Childbirth

25. Program Guide

26. The First Session

27. The Mother's Experience

28. Coaching

29. Stressed Relaxation

30. Differential Relaxation

31. Physical Fitness

32. The Baby's Position in Labor

33. The Exercises

34. The Primal State

35. Hypnotism Revisited

36. The Philosophy of Love

37. The Genesis of Mind

38. Gating

39. Physics, physiology and psychology

Appendix: The Classification of Pain

Definitions

The words physical and psychical allow us to distinguish between body and mind. The body is physical, while psychical, from 'psyche' refers to the mind. Briefly, the two match in that the body is objective material; the mind is subjective mental.

body n. Old English bodig Old Norse buthke box

matter n. from Latin materia cause, from Greek mater mother, having mass and occupying space through time.

mind n. Old English gemynd Old High German gimunt memory. The immaterial context of materiality.

physical adj. Latin physica from Greek, phusika natural things. 1. Of or related to the body as distinguished from the mind or spirit. 2. Of related to or resembling the material things of nature: the physical universe.

psychical adj. from Greek, psukhikos 'of the soul or life'. Appertaining to the mental as opposed to the physical world.

The body is a box, whilst matter, to the ordinary understanding, is that which is common to all forms of tangible existence. Mind is not anchored at this level, but philosophically, it contains matter within itself in the form of objects, and is itself contained within God, being our sense of the durability and oneness that overreaches all existence and change.

We need the words physical and psychical, but unfortunately they look confusingly alike, so here I am defining them at the beginning. Physical refers to the world of material things, everything from polar bears to coke bottles. Psychical refers to their ideal representation in the mind, along with other mental products such as intellect and emotion. So far everything matches: now the important part. Physics is the science of physical things. Psychology is the science of mental things (e.g., ideas).

Physics and psychology are the extremes, corresponding to body and mind, with physical and psychical as their working adjectives, but there are three sciences, physics physiology and psychology. Fortunately, it all comes together.

Physics comes first. Physiology, a word modeled on physics, comes second. Then comes psychology, which we use to analyze human behavior. Now, although the word physiology is modeled on physics, there is a gulf between them, in that as a science, physics grounds the inanimate or non-living world. Physiology is the basic science of conscious life, the world of living things, and in particular, physiology grounds psychology, the science of human behavior. Physics tells us why rockets take off, physiology why wounds heal, and psychology why we think and behave as we do. The Introduction adds to the discussion of these relations.

### Grammar

As the 20th Century advanced writers became aware that misuse of the pronouns he him and his, more than an abuse of truth and sense, pointed to a psychosocial imbalance in relation to gender and sex. It was flagrant, especially in relation to babies, infants and children in a blatant expression of sexism that excused itself on the ground that it was the done thing and would never change. It runs even through the Bible:

A woman, when she gives birth to a child, has grief because her hour is come; but when the child is born, she no longer remembers the trouble, on account of the joy that a man has been born into the world. John 16:21

It has changed however, even though many writers find it difficult to fall into step with the dawning spirit of the age. Its persistence dwells in the fact that the paternalism involved falls as a shadow across the writings of more than two thousand years, biased and continually impinging upon the present. The answer is to stay with reality and use the neutral 'it' or plural 'they' when necessary. If something has to suffer, let it be the grammar, which after all is governed by fashion.

### Abbreviations:

E.J. Progressive Relaxation, by Edmund Jacobson, The University of Chicago Press 1929, Second Edition 1938, Midway Reprint 1974.

2nd Ed. Childbirth Without Fear, by Grantly Dick Read, Wm. Heinemann Medical Books Ltd., 1942, Second Edition, Heinemann, 1943, reprint 1951.

4th Ed. Childbirth Without Fear, by Grantly Dick-Read, Wm. Heinemann Medical Books Ltd., 1942, Fourth Edition, Pan Books Ltd., London, 1963.

5th Ed. Dick-Read's CHILDBIRTH WITHOUT FEAR first published 1942 by Wm. Heinemann Medical Books Ltd. First published 1963 by Pan Books Ltd, London. Fifth Edition published 1969 by Pan Books. (A ghosted work not under Read's hand.)
The Birds and the Bees

Asleep in the dawn, a flash of white light vividly lit my dream world. Again, a flash, and sleep resumed; but so did the flashes. My mind, finally responding, rallied from the cave of sleep to become aware that the light was coming from an open eye. However, I had not opened it. As my eyelid closed, and then fluttered open again, I looked to see what was causing it.

It was Jena, our pet magpie. She was lifting my eyelid by the lashes in her strong beak. I shied back violently and fixed her with an alarmed glare. She could have had my eyes for breakfast!

It was her custom to fly into my room in the early morning. This time she was standing on my pillow, lifting my eyelids by the lashes and letting them fall back again. Was it just curiosity or did she sense that I was asleep, for had she squawked I would have known she was there!

She was the gentlest of birds, at least with those she knew. One morning she walked into the kitchen and called for attention, wanting to be fed. I was sitting at the table writing, and I ignored her. She flew onto the table, walked across and stood on the page I was writing. Still ignoring her, I continued to write around her feet, whereupon she fell onto her back, grasping a finger of my left hand in one strong claw, and the pen and finger of my right hand in the other. With both hands locked in her strong grip and her on the paper I could not continue. There was nothing voluntary about it. She had my attention!

On another occasion she did something whose accidental consequence led me to a new awareness. My hobby was keeping bees, and I happened to be standing by when a hive began to swarm. I watched as a packed torrent of bees flew from the entrance in a broad band, not walking out and then taking off, as was their usual practice, but literally hosing forth in free flight, begun while they were still in the hive. Soon the air was full of bees, a great yellow cloud of circling insects fifty yards across. Staying where they were thickest, I found the queen as she landed and had her run onto my hand. The swarm concentrated around me and began landing on my body. Soon they were all settled and I was a walking swarm.

It was an interesting thing to do, something I had seen in a picture. The trick is not to wear gloves or veil, which makes one clumsy, and to move with deliberate caution. The bees remain peaceful and you have someone take a snapshot before shaking them off into a waiting box; but as I crouched down for the photo, Jena, who was usually terrified of them, let out a squawk, or should I say war whoop, and rushing forward snapped a bee in half. She then retreated, but of all the millions of bees on offer, she had to choose the queen! Her sharp eyes had singled it out and she swiftly took her revenge on the stinging terrors, leaving it severed into two parts.

I was dismayed when I realized what she had done. It was a terrible blow, for it was equivalent to destroying the colony. Unfortunately, this was not just any queen, but a special purebred, acquired after much procedure, letter writing and cost. However, I could do something.

Without a queen the bees returned to their hive. They would raise a new queen, but in the meantime I would graft queen cells from her eggs, which were still in the hive, and re-queen the whole apiary. The situation was that most of my hives were wild stock, chopped from hollow trees and the walls of derelict buildings. They were hybrid strains, such that, with the slightest bump on a hive, they would pour out as winged furies; but from the one good hive, I would raise twenty.

I never did understand Jena's behavior. How did she find the courage to rush into the thick of the bees and snap the queen in half, and why did she single it out? She had accompanied me to the hives one day, and running too close to an entrance, they had got into her downy tail feathers. Her loud squawk and sudden jumping flight across the grass indicated that they had found their mark. She never came back to the hives, and I knew that, not surprisingly, she was frightened to do so.

The rest of the story is technical. Following book instructions I prepared the special equipment needed to raise queens; an egg implanting tool made from a bicycle spoke, pipettes and a wooden former to shape the special queen cells from melted wax and so on. The big thing was to arrange a hot room where I could carry out the operation without a chill occurring, for bees maintain a high temperature in the brood chamber. A sunroom at midday with all the windows closed did the job. I collected royal jelly from a brood comb, grafted in the selected embryos and set the queen frame into a colony prepared for the purpose.

Each hive then had its own plan and all went well. The 'take' was a surprising hundred percent, twenty-three out of twenty-three as I recall. I would shortly have queen bees and to spare.

On the morning of the anticipated hatching, I removed the unwanted hybrid queens from the previously drone-trapped hives, and at 10 a.m. opened the brood colony. The yet non-hatched queens were talking to each other in high-pitched 'pip, pip' sounds, being their challenge, I presumed, to the shortly expected fight for possession of the hive. However, there was not going to be a fight. Each would find itself in possession of its own colony.

Looking at the nearly mature queen cells I could see a dark ring near the top of each, where the queens, working from within, turned around and around, cutting a groove for the lid to pop open. In about two hours, they would hatch, and a fight to the death would begin, but before that could happen, I would have distributed just one ripe queen cell to each hive. Curiosity tempted me to open a cell to see the queen. Yielding to impulse, with the tip of my hive tool I touched the delicate top of a cell where I could see an exit ring forming. It flipped open and I watched, rewarded by the sight of a beautiful creature emerging.

Sleek, large and light yellow, she eased herself out of the opened cell and stood on the comb while I admired her color and markings. She was radiant, more beautiful than I had seen, perhaps because she was so newly emerged. Her wings gleamed in the sunlight. I looked again. They seemed slightly crinkled. Were they perhaps a fraction short? As I watched, I felt like rubbing my eyes, unable to credit what was happening. They steadily shriveled until, like wax touched by fire, they had become useless black stumps.

My mind reeled in disbelief. A wingless queen, she would never fly. Unable to mate she would become a drone-laying queen, a catastrophe for any hive. Not yet realizing why it had happened, and struggling to stay abreast of the on-going sequence of events, I thought, in a moment she will disappear into the thick of other bees in the combs. She will search out the other queens and sting them to death before they could hatch, spelling ruin to my apiary. Sensing the danger, with a feeling of horror I pinched out her life. There was no time to lose. I had to distribute one queen cell to each waiting queenless hive immediately

Finally putting the events together, gloom descended on me like a cloud. Yielding to temptation, I had assisted nature in its task, giving aid where none was required. My help was a work of destruction. The lesson burned itself into my mind. Exposed to sun and dry air a few hours too soon, her wings, wanting just that extra time to mature, had shrivelled into useless stumps. Curiosity and interference had created the opposite of what I intended. Nature had planned for every detail except my unwanted help. It was a lesson I was never to forget.

Preamble

This book began as a simple manuscript on natural childbirth endorsing the teachings of Grantly Dick Read. It was overtaken by Read's death in the late nineteen sixties and the sudden reversal in the natural birth movement that followed. It had been a simple text describing methods and results, but the new situation called for a response to his posthumous editors who had thrown his teachings overboard. This required a massive research into particulars when I had scant time and resource for such work.

My own theory of mind had come to me in the form of a vision some years earlier. I had become intensely interested in the study of hypnosis, which dominated my attention for more than two years and the vision interrupted this. As a subject hypnosis crossed my conventional understanding of medicine at right angles. It quite amazed me. A simple statement made to a subject in trance, I found, could bring about results that ordinary methods could not approach. To give but one example, induction of trance and a simple statement would stop an asthma attack in its tracks. Through the stethoscope one could hear the wheezing simply fade and vanish away. How could the mind, I wondered, a virtual nonentity, exert such a powerful influence upon an individual's bodily functions?

It began when a patient tossed a book onto my desk, said, "read this," and walked out. It was about hypnosis. Challenged by his self-assurance I did so, skeptically thinking, "What nonsense." However, I also thought I should give it a try, so more as a joke than anything else I suggested to my wife that if she would like to be a subject I would hypnotize her. She agreed and I followed the steps outlined in the book.

Nothing occurred except that I felt a fit of laughter coming on. Trying to suppress it I was about to lose control when something strange about my wife's demeanor penetrated my consciousness. Was this, in fact, trance? As quickly as I saw that this was indeed the case my impulse to laugh gave way to the seriousness of observation. Hastily I switched to the required steps laid down in the book for ending a trance without mishap.

It marked a turning point in my life. It was not my wife and patients who had been under a cloud of incomprehension, but me. The power of speech to command, control and communicate dawned upon me, not only in the context of trance—which is simply a depth in consciousness—but all the time, in everyday conversation and consultation. My medical knowledge, until then a dry-as-dust burden, useful I thought, only in a mechanical sense for removing particles from eyes, fish bones from throats and of course the occasional appendix, suddenly became a valuable resource. What medical school had failed to teach me was that I was the agent, the one who had to use this, and most importantly, how to do so. That required an ego awakening within.

Healing, I learned, is more than diagnosis and prescription, but as this dawned upon my consciousness so did my desire to learn more about it, to explore its depth. What is trance and how does the mind 'work'? I plunged into its study, spending all my spare time in the hospital libraries with no other subject in sight, and in practice devoting all my energies to this one end, what is hypnosis and why does it work.

One day, sitting in a theatre audience with a group of professional hypnotists watching a Franquin hypnosis show, intrigued by the display and striving to understand what I saw, I noticed that the theatre was shaped like the inside of a skull. Then, the spotlight on Franquin, the colored lights, music and other features, including the group on stage dancing the can-can to Franquin's baton, began to fit themselves into the anatomical shell. The picture then transformed into my textbook understanding of the brain itself, its function and process.

Possessed by the vision I leaned forward and cupped my head in my hands and it continued. Instead of the theatre and its play, I was now observing my conception of the working brain picked out in a 3D multitude of colored points. For a moment I examined the details, then as I watched it began to demonstratively change. Sequentially, in area after area it realigned itself, and then the vision was over. For me it was a moment of enlightenment, a 'eureka experience' that had me wanting to get up and leave. There were more important things to do than to sit there watching a stage show. I wanted to return to my books and review my knowledge. I knew. That was the important thing.

What I knew was something vague. Importantly my previous bewilderment had fallen away, but I needed to make a fresh start. In upshot I ceased my practice of hypnosis. As against conventional medicine it had begun to claim so much of my time that I would have to choose between one or the other. I now realized that hypnosis is superficial, a paralysis of the conscious will induced by an unconscious memory. It is only an aspect of mind, which as the greater entity is central in our attention. I decided to give it up. I would have more time to devote to the task of understanding my patient's problems in terms of their lives and beliefs. Trance is a quick fix, a patch remedy in an area that deserves a more serious approach.

My interest in the psyche remained unabated, and I now began to study religion; its beliefs teachings and divisions and its expression in other areas such as philosophy physiology psychology and physics, where I felt the more profound answers relevant to a science of mind must reside.

This occurred early in my career. My interest in natural birth arose only some years later, at a time when I had left the practice of hypnosis behind, along with my former views and habits such as smoking and drinking. I came to see the various religions as message-bearers, each having a specialist role in one or another area of society. What we believe is not negotiable. What we do, and how we behave, are negotiable. Belonging to no religion I felt that they must belong to me, providing me each with a pattern in some or other social domain to which I must conform. "What is set forth as binding for the adherents of each," I would ask, "as distinct from what is marginal?" and I would adopt that core teaching and move on. Taking from all, but belonging to none provided me with a guide for my social outlook and practice; religion as a pattern for this world, leaving the other quite alone, for I did not sense them as apart.

My interest in a theory of mind eventually led me to the study of Hegelian philosophy, and this in turn to the study of mathematics, not as such, but in terms of its 'in mind' foundation, which I perceived as circular. Success ensued, and I came to see that all mathematics traces back to a circular framework.

Mathematics is not a product, that being in a given form it could take no other. It is the reification of the laws of the universe, which our mind, being of the same distillation, accurately reflects. It is thus intermediate between our thinking and the world, and this is one side of mind.

Science had always been my first interest, beyond which resides the general social and political milieu; but within this mix, as a specialty in its own right, is the question of natural childbirth. This took my attention, not only in the course of my practice in obstetrics, but also from my interest in the generation of mind in every individual life cycle. Increasingly I began to see that the subjugation of birth to medical dominion turns the truth and reality of the world on its head; that instead of being the answer it is itself becoming the best part of the problem. For this reason I now give it the best of my attention.
Introduction

This introduction defines some terms and looks at some of our subject's more basic ideas. If it seems like jumping in at the deep end initially, it should begin to read more easily once its theme, terminology and ideas are grasped.

A natural birth is one that takes place in an advanced society with medical care available, but unused, the mother accomplishing the whole task without assistance, there being no injury or pain, drugs being neither required nor used.

One becomes two; two becomes one. The pregnant mother (one) becomes two (mother and baby). The mother and baby (two), become one in a mutual bonding response. The '1 becomes 2' is physical; the '2 becomes 1' is psychical. Mind-affecting drugs (psychoactive or psychotropic) damage the bonding process.

If we define _the unity of complementary opposites_ as signifying a perfect and complete whole, then in viewing the mentioned symmetry we are looking at the spirituality of birth, which is as much devoted to preserving the mind as the body across the generations.

Cultural childbirth is the norm for our society. It is a disease peculiar to our human kind; a birth in which tension occasioned by the play of conscious and unconscious psychological forces disturbs the desired course of labor. Delay, accompanied by a marked increase in complications results for both the mother and baby.

Our mothers are susceptible to the cultural influence because they are human. That in the nature of mind, which makes us human, opens the door to cultural childbirth. It is a disorder of the individual birth, but a disease of our species. Because we have an advanced mind we are prone to this defect. Known as the curse of Eve it is the oldest disease on written record:

"To the woman he said, I will greatly increase thy travail and thy pregnancy; with pain thou shalt bear children; and to thy husband shall be thy desire, and he shall rule over thee." Ge 3:16

Before it was written it belonged to the oral tradition of ancient Egypt, while tracking the other way it is the central theme about which the Biblical narrative develops. The ancients saw it as significant, not only from the point of view of our nature, but as determining our very experience as conscious living beings.

The condition has a peculiar relevance for us today for it escalates with civilization. The more advanced our knowledge and technology, the more severe it grows, canceling out the good results of our human state and adding a marked disadvantage. The world's houses and huts better serve birth today than the biggest of hospitals. Those who do not believe this either do not have, or are not using the relevant information.

Genesis tells us that Adam (meaning earthy or formed from dust), and Eve (mother, so men and women), became human by eating 'the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil'. The affliction of cultural childbirth was the immediate consequence. It tells us the cause, but the more knowledgeable we become, the less we understand it or ourselves. Science is weakest where it should be strongest, namely in mathematics, and medical knowledge draws a blank where it should be full, in our knowledge of thought as the brain's special product.

Cultural childbirth is a disease of society and an affliction of civilization, and beyond this it is the paradigm type for the class of reflective illnesses whose disorder is peculiar to our human kind. This includes the neuroses and more deep-seated mental disorders, of which cultural childbirth is the archetypal manifestation.

Paradigm type refers to the model upon which these afflictions rest. If the model is present, as it is said to be in all progeny of the fallen Adam and Eve, but no consequent disease accrues, nevertheless the mind, beyond first childhood, is also affected fallen or unenlightened. If a consequent disease is present, and these are legion, this is an added burden. Enlightenment, which may be of one or another degree, surmounts the original paradigm, at which time any consequent affliction lifts, even though not specifically addressed.

The trance of hypnosis corresponds to a temporary collapse of the mind, consequent upon conditioning, where the latter is taken in its Pavlovian sense. The sense of space and time is lost, as in a return to a stage wherein it was not yet present. This is in contrast to the higher state of enlightenment wherein a sense of space and time is present but as superseded. Because in both this sense is absent, the two conditions are remarkably similar.

From the 18th Century on, coincident with the onset of the scientific revolution in medicine, man has invaded the temple of woman's hegemony, the birth chamber. Along with this invasion, cultural child¬birth has escalated beyond control, capped and supplanted by medical childbirth, eroding the human foundation of the nations involved. A predominantly male workforce has replaced the midwife in the industrialized world and nature's process has been trampled underfoot.

If birth were a simple physical act, which the unenlightened male commonly supposes, and the cultural influence did not exist, about five percent of births would call for some degree of medical intervention. To put it another way, in this imagined circumstance, about five percent of births would falter or fail if every mother were left to her own devices. This rate is high. No other human occupation is so fraught with hazard, but we are left with a problem. It leaves ninety-five percent of births free of defect, without damage or disorder. Why then do all births in modernia end up on the operating table?

They are brought to this pass by the affliction we have been discussing, the intrusion of a cultural influence — the essentially male ethic of domination help and interference — into a self-sufficient process, where Nature has planned for every detail except unwanted help. This, indeed, is the curse of our human kind.

Grantly Dick-Read wrote in his Childbirth without Fear:

... this theory is only possible in normal and uncomplicated labor, and as that comprises probably over 95 percent of all labors, unless made abnormal by attendants, its influence may be very considerable. 2nd Ed. p.9

and:

... the course of nature... leads 95 per cent of women, at least, to motherhood without accident or injury to themselves or their babies. 4th Ed. p.12

Born in 1980, Read qualified in Medicine and went on to become a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. His books published in multiple editions and reprints and translated into many languages brought him to fame, because he was qualified and because he was uniquely at variance with the practice of his colleagues and profession.

In contrast to his approach he observed sagely:

The teaching of abnormal midwifery is so stressed in our student days that as beginners we lose sight of the normal and natural, and unless we observe for ourselves, we may easily fall into the trap of searching only for the abnormalities in antenatal care and suspecting some subtle ambush in every labour from which the devil himself may leap at any moment. 2nd Ed. p.144

The quoted 95 percent figure, which he maintains throughout his writings as a criterion and standard, is significant because no such figure existed before his work, and none has emerged since, for the simple reason that his colleagues could not duplicate his method and results. Including all forms of surgical intervention, from Cesarean section to incision of the outlet, it quantifies the limit of medicine's legitimate interest in birth. However, given 5 percent, the profession will take no less than a 100. It sees birth as man's business.

Birth as a frightful ordeal began in the hospitals of 17th and 18th century Europe with the spread of puerperal fever carried unknowingly by midwives and doctors from one infected woman to another. The existence of germs was unknown, and those causing sudden death when introduced into the parturient womb, particularly 'staph and strep', were carried from one woman to another by attendant's dirty hands and instruments. Multiplying explosively in the newly vacated womb they killed the mother at short notice. Over a monitored six-year period at the Vienna maternity hospital, one in ten women delivered died of this single cause alone. Birth came to be feared as tantamount to a death sentence, and knowing mothers would dally and give birth under a bush before entering the hospitals.

With the advent of the microscope and aseptic technique medical science discovered the bacterial cause and the means for preventing sepsis, but the psychical aspect of birth continues to evade the understanding of a male-dominated profession, whose role would be transferred to other hands, if they admitted the cause and the consequence.

Birth does not initiate the personal memory that makes us uniquely human beings. This sits characteristically as a 'first memory' at about two or three years of age. The varied nature of these memories for different individuals is indicated below.

"My mother was sitting in a chair with a baby on her lap. It was my first awareness of my younger brother."

"I was sitting in the sand looking in a drain to see where the dog had gone."

"There was this pink ball. I was pulling at it. It was me, dressed in an angora wool jersey."

"I was in long grass looking at the flowers. One floated away. It was a butterfly."

Usually mundane, these experiences strike a nostalgic chord for their possessors. Some claim to remember being born, and even earlier, but our enquiry asks for a spontaneously volunteered first memory in response to a request, not something that came to the claimant's attention in the context of a therapy session, religious process, in reverie or under hypnosis. Our interest is simply in the first ordinary memory indicating the onset of childhood.

Coinciding with the time of a child's first memory, its mother will become aware of its quickening interest in details and keenness to learn. In nature she is the first teacher as described in Hindi culture, a term which means more than just the fact that children learn from everyone, and the mother happens to be there. It applies for every child and all humanity. The mother becomes, by imprint, the deity or genius in the child's mind, which not only develops in her presence, but from her presence, incorporating the latter, her psychical nature, as the mind's formative template. Through this channel the tide of life flows for all humanity from generation to generation.

To whatever she draws its attention the child will attach significance throughout its life, especially learning from activity she shares with the child. The baby learns from the mother and does so rapidly, not in the way we learn, for there is no mind there initially to 'learn', but imprinting, a mental photograph forming the mind's pattern, as distinct from something 're-membered'. It founds and shapes the mind that will later 'learn'. This is nature's way. The baby draws its nourishment from the mother, and so also its mind. The human mind, as expressed in all knowledge and in language itself is bi-polar, and this formation reflects the bipolarity that exists in the mother-infant relation.

Procreation and birth account for the generation and regeneration of mind, short of which any policy for natural birth cannot be understood, let alone applied. However, when we ask for an explanation of mind in scientific terms we come against a brick wall, for in our culture, mind is the hidden mystery in physics, the riddle of philosophy and the unresolved question in medicine. We cannot however, discuss birth as a step in the process of the generation of mind across the generations, without having some idea of what, precisely, we mean by 'mind'.

Birth remains a problem area because mind remains a problem area. Consciously or not, these aspects are reciprocally linked. Science is elevated in modern knowledge to the degree it lacks a comprehensive philosophy, and knowledge remains a crown without its jewel. We must redress this if we would make any progress at all.

This is the genesis of the human psyche and mind as it arises in the physiology of our living being. We need a Theory and Science of Mind, precisely that which is missing in our current science. We have reached a point wherein science cannot help us, and we must therefore help science.

Awed by the accomplishments of modern science, we may seem then to be in deep water, but in fact the want of a viable theory of mind is the scandal of our century. This defect is not unrelated to the fact that a true investigation must necessarily shed light upon the unwarranted male dominance and consequent imbalance that pervades society from top to bottom and historical beginning to end.

To study mind we must ask, where and how does it originate. It is not then difficult to see that it arises through conception birth and infancy. If we accept that to understand mind we will need the help of a scientific philosophy, to which many thinkers have contributed down the ages, we may also begin to see that an understanding of mind will reciprocally contribute powerfully to the philosophy; for the philosophy that explains mind's organic existence will come forward as being correct.

As the science of knowledge, philosophy applies to all subjects including itself. Through it, all receive their adequate foundation, and then, in this totality of explanation its own nature comes into view. As Hegel pointed out, it cannot therefore be objectively understood in advance of its own process. We all know what mind is subjectively, but this subjective knowledge falls short of science. The task of explaining our own nature as conscious beings is thus the final task and culmination for all science. We could draw back, assuming it is too great a step to take, but the nature of our times indicates that such completion is not only possible but an urgent necessity.

It is not a question of raising our understanding one more notch, but a revolutionary reappraisal. A new logic is in order. We enter the arena therefore, knowing that the path is difficult, a final summation. If, however, we perceive that the difficulty is but the cost of our accession to a higher way of life it will arm us, and so invite the effort.

Specifically, a new subconscious on unconscious logic is proposed. It need not concern us that it was developed long long ago, for we must further develop it past that original statement and fit it into the framework of our current understanding. It has its own rules, strange to our ordinary thinking, of which it is the basis. It is a world in contrariety, thought, 'inside out' to itself, subject to its own procedure. But we can be more specific. It is a depth of understanding deep to ordinary logic, exactly as subatomic physics is deep to atomic physics.

This is not to make it sound difficult. It all fits into the picture. Once we say, "the mind is construed such-and-such," our understanding begins to revive. Working with something new we can afford to be patient, on the grounds that we will find all the resources needed to complete it in the work itself. The basis for the philosophy will therefore be developed in this book, going past the simplistic surgical definition, that birth is no more than "emptying the pregnant uterus at term."

Birth is a two-sided, physical and psychical process. If we see physics as the ground or science of physical existence, and physiology as the similar ground of psychology we have a three-step system, physics physiology and psychology. As physics grounds the inanimate world, physiology grounds the living world. These divisions are discussed on page 6.

Physics describes the material, psychology the mental world, so that matter and mind stand against each other as complementary opposites. The physical physiological and psychical domains then constitute the first great triplex division in objective existence. In terms of consciousness, as extended in great time, materiality (from Latin mother) corresponds to the unconscious. The physical, in the form of ponderable events and objects, finds its existence in the subconscious, the latter being the heart or centrality of mind that develops between the external and internal (material and mental) worlds; the internal skeleton of our human form. Psychical refers to the conscious division of the mind's three states (unconscious subconscious and conscious). The whole is thus in the form of a locked circle, and the world as such is but the mind expressed.

As humans we are material in that we can be considered as so much gravitating matter. We are physical; we have a given patterned material form. We are psychical; we think. Inanimate objects are material and possess form, and in this sense they reach up to the physical, but no further. They exhibit characteristic behaviors and enter into relations, but passively, without purpose or insight. Animal behavior is purposeful, but only marginally insightful. Human behavior is not only purposeful, but insightful. We think about thinking, and this internalization of the mind upon itself constitutes our human status, the spirituality that animates the eternal being of transient existence.

Science must now take a giant step forward, emancipating itself from subservience to the authority of potted knowledge. It must acquire insight. Our knowledge is composed of sense-garnered conscious experience. Our physical body is "a substance that thinks," essentially a genetically transmitted racial memory, and this too is a distillation of "sense-garnered conscious experience" back along the course of evolution. As human, we are, in ourselves, godly, or (after Aristotle) "thought thinking about the nature of thought," the process that defines our human nature and founds our civilization.

Talking about the mind we will be talking about something objective, having physical and psychical sides, unconscious and conscious aspects, and a thinking or subconscious 'mind-proper' in between. Only in birth and its process can we understand the mind, and only in the context of mind can we understand birth and its process.
Classification

Read's initial classification into normal or natural childbirth, average or cultural labor and abnormal or surgical delivery (2nd Ed. p.95), gave way before the attack later made on his work, allowing his detractors to classify surgical delivery as normal. We must therefore distinguish between the words normal, abnormal and natural, and then use them only in the sense defined:

1. When birth by normal means is possible and takes place by the vaginal route, whether assisted or not, it is to be classed as normal. Assistance can include incision of the outlet and instrumental extraction under anesthesia if necessary. However, if vaginal delivery is inadvisable or impossible, the status (requiring Cesarean section) is abnormal.

2. Given that the state of normality, as defined, exists, the birth still has the option of being one of several kinds, including natural cultural medical etc.

The term 'normal' in this classification refers only to the route. It means by way of the vagina. It excludes delivery by incision through the abdominal wall (Cesarean section).

Natural childbirth, as a physiological birth undisturbed by mental tension, wherein no drug is used because none is needed, is described and advocated by Grantly Dick-Read. It takes its name from the title of his first small book published in 1933. In the Readian sense, it implies a preparatory training course to counteract the cultural influence of misguided interference, or imposed management where none is needed. It does not, however, exclude the availability of medical assistance should it become required.

The use of necessary medications such as antibiotics insulin or digoxin, unrelated to the birth, are not contraindicated and do not invalidate the classification of natural birth. The use of sedative analgesic narcotic or anesthetic drugs, intended to alter or affect the state of consciousness, does however rule out the term 'natural' in classification, regardless of dose. Once the lines are blurred, for instance, if a 'whiff of gas' were disregarded, so would be the theory of natural childbirth, which involves recognition of the spiritual state of consciousness _extant in nature_. The criterion is whether a drug is psychoactive (mind-influencing) or not, and this includes tranquilizers, antidepressants etc. even though given for reasons not related to the birth. 'Whiffs of gas', along with misrepresentation and dishonesty cancel the 'natural' classification.

This strictness in classification has everything to do with the theory and practice of natural childbirth, and nothing to do with the freedom of practitioners and patients to follow whatever guidelines they see fit. To those for whom natural birth is a desirable goal, or simply of clinical interest in context of the wider subject, the careless or designed misuse of words to unsettle the subject makes no sense at all.

### Classification of Birth by Type

0) Animal Birth

1) Wild Birth

2) Atavistic Childbirth

3) Cultural Childbirth

4) Medical Childbirth

5) Natural Childbirth

6) Immaculate Birth

### Animal Birth

Animal birth is almost self-explanatory. If we understand the term animal, then animal birth, as available to observation is virtually given. As human, we are of course animal in essence, but there is something higher added. Somewhere back along the track of time, just prior to the emergence of the human species, a pre-human species must have existed. This species would have had animal birth, and human (child) birth would have developed from that point, just as the human developed from the pre-human species.

Now, the thing about animals is that they do not talk to each other the way we do. In some species the mother seeks seclusion in order to give birth, in others they stay in the herd, and other animals standing around simply take no notice. Molestation and attack will arrest an animal birth, turning it into an approximation of human cultural childbirth, but the latter is different just in this, that talk alone, _thinking_ and harbored fear is sufficient to turn on the cultural syndrome.

### Wild Birth

Wild birth refers to the experience of human mothers giving birth in wild surroundings. Patches of wilderness exist even in cities; for instance, a mother giving birth in a taxi caught in a gridlock traffic jam. In primitive society — and this must have been the case for untold thousands of years — the cultural aspect would be present, but only incipiently. A woman would drop behind in the march, or otherwise be gone for a few hours, and return with a baby in arms.

Many instances of unattended birth have been described, such as young women giving birth in empty railway stations or in cities under bombardment with explosions all around. These are often cited as surprisingly trouble-free and easy, though no reason is given as to why this should be the case.

Wild birth is just over the line from animal birth where the cultural influence does not exist. An animal reacts to danger, and this may have a profound impact upon a proceeding labor. The human, in contrast, suffers the same impact through involuntary anticipation alone. The mechanism involved will concern us here. Unprepared mothers are psychologically overpowered in modern surrounds into a state of tension, distress and labor arrest, leading to surgical intervention. Those who create the effect are unaware that their belief and behavior creates the consequences they see.

### Atavistic Childbirth

Atavism, reversion to a former or more primitive type, applies to birth in primitive conditions, just across the line from animal birth. It represents the incipient beginning of the cultural form, which arises along with the human condition. To be human is to be prone to suffer from cultural childbirth. There is no period of grace between the highest animal and the lowest human-type (cultural) birth, but the cultural influence in atavism is marginal. A human mother in involuntary isolation, that is an isolation that neither she nor anyone else contrived, nor can undo, reverts automatically to the animal/ atavistic type of birth, because the psychological structure of civilization is shorn away.

### Cultural Childbirth

This is a troubled birth caused by dis-ease of the mind. Its possibility resides in the form of the human mind itself. The mother is susceptible because nature has determined in advance that her mind is to be renewed in the process of bonding, a process built into the physiology of labor. This transforms the woman giving birth psychologically into a mother for that child.

In the course of the birth her conditioned mind is renewed akin to the manner in which our ordinary mind is renewed in sleep, only in the dimensions of a 'life' rather than 24-hour cycle. As in sleep, regression takes place, except that consciousness is not lost but for a final 'moment of forgetfulness'.

Against this background any doubt aroused by an external influence inhibits and stops the labor. This 'applying the brakes' is the cultural response that mars the otherwise natural birth. A state of tension, pain and delay, with liability to shock follows. The medical answer is to cut the outlet, which would otherwise tear, and if this does not suffice, to apply forceps to the baby, or conduct a Cesarean section.

Birth in the higher animals is similarly affected in the presence of environmental commotion; the proximity of predators, physical assault etc., but only the human is sensitive through mental disquietude alone. In this way cultural childbirth is precipitated. When this mechanism is understood insight is also given into another class of disorder, psychosomatic and other mind-related diseases. If cultural childbirth is first understood, these others fall largely into place.

In modern society the mother is very likely driven beyond cultural childbirth into the next form, which is medical childbirth.

### Medical Childbirth

This is a subdivision of cultural childbirth. It is childbirth under medical care and direction and it divides into two categories:

Legitimate and unavoidable

Medical attention, given for reasons that would still exist if the phenomenon of cultural childbirth did not, is legitimate and unavoidable, in keeping with standard medical practice. This includes care for conditions not arising out of the pregnancy, such as diabetes, nephritis, heart disease, etc., as well as for miscellaneous conditions arising from the pregnancy, such as malpresentation, locked twins, placenta previa etc., independent of the cultural syndrome as such.

Illegitimate and avoidable

Medical attention, given for reasons occasioned or exacerbated by the cultural childbirth syndrome, which would not otherwise require care, is illegitimate because it is avoidable. For want of knowledge, insight and understanding a condition amenable to psychological correction ends up as a surgical operation.

Figures can be allocated to the categories. According to Read, those unavoidably requiring medical care will number about 5 percent (he says slightly less). Those capable of proceeding to a natural birth will be about 95 percent.

Given this basis, all sorts of variations may then apply, according to region, local conditions, standards of medical care and interpretation. Some women, requiring medical supervision for conditions not arising out of the pregnancy will be able to deliver naturally. Against this, a small percentage, originally given the green wave, will develop an unforeseen complication. But the greatest potential for variation continues to hinge upon success or failure in the management of the cultural syndrome, which, _not being understood_ , leads to delay in the labor, exhaustion in the mother and danger to the baby with the need for operative intervention.

This does not imply that a slow labor is dangerous in itself. Labor can be extended and leisurely or precipitate, and natural at either extreme. Delay plus drugs spells disaster. Sleep is impossible. Exhaustion and tension increase concurrently even though the labor has been going on for only a few hours. A natural birth, however, may be remarkably prolonged yet proceed to an excellent result, with the mother quite reposed and able to relax profoundly, if not sleep during the labor itself. Each case must be observed for itself, exercising a healthy wariness against dogmatic judgments.

### Natural Childbirth

A natural birth is a normal birth, where normal, for the purpose of classification, means born through the vaginal canal (as explained), without psychotropic drugs or medical treatment because none is required, and without harm to the mother or baby. A number of conditions and consequences attach:

1/. Mental poise in the absence of conditioned nervous tension.

2/. No requirement for consciousness-altering drugs and none taken.

3/. Medical care available, but not required.

4/. A natural outcome without tissue damage.

These conditions will now be discussed.

1. Mental poise is paramount. It can be approached by means of a special training program, though not one composed or administered by individuals still within the grip of cultural bias. The program will give attention to three points:

• The mother's ability to maintain an appropriate state of mind.

• The birth environment with emphasis upon choice and training of attendants.

• The evolution of the mental state that accompanies labor and completes in mother-baby bonding.

Natural childbirth's touchstone is autonomy. It implies self-centeredness, which in its completion is equally its opposite. The birth turns in its own relation no less than the planetary system around the sun. It is elemental. What help does it need? Physically mentally and spiritually none, so long as her autonomy is secured, safe from external infringement. Paradoxically, medical care provides this. It shuts out or at least controls the access of clamorous society, without however understanding the significance of its action in this respect — birth's instinct to seek out socially approved quietude.

2. No requirement for psychotropes. Natural childbirth within our current civilization requires special training, a shield if you like against its sympathetic intrusion. Expectant mothers must understand that mind-influencing drugs and natural childbirth are antithetical. Of her own will she will reject any suggestion, demand or instruction that she resort to them. This is the thin line, the 'cost' of a natural birth.

3. Provision for medical care, should it be needed, is an essential requirement in natural childbirth. If no provision is made and no such care is available the outcome may be excellent, but we cannot claim it as natural within our system of classification.

Medical care implies no standard. It is simply care given in a medical or health-related context. From Latin _mederi_ to help or heal, it can be extended by anyone. A child who brings a mother in labor a cup of water when it is needed is extending medical care, an action again, that is peculiarly human, but in practice the best available care within a given society will be sought as a matter of routine.

Given this consideration, a mother cannot secure a natural birth for herself by taking refuge in isolation. She may retire to her room, cottage or mountain resort and meet cultural childbirth right there, so long as she has not mastered the whole circumstance. If fear takes her there it will remain her companion. In itself, isolation is not the answer.

This inability to escape the cultural condition does not mean that no advantage accrues to seeking out the most propitious environment. There is every reason to do so. It does not however go to the heart of the problem, which — other things being equal — revolves around the mother's state of mind.

4. A natural outcome without tissue damage. 'Natural outcome' implies not only the delivery of the baby, but that the next step, mother-infant bonding and breast-feeding follows. 'Without tissue damage' means that a birth cannot be judged natural before it has occurred. The definition is result-dependent. It must have met all the necessary requirements. The birth and result are critical. Was it natural in fact? Anything else supports the cultural illusion and clouds the judgment.

### Immaculate Birth

We can visualize natural childbirth taking place in an immaculate society as an ideal but currently unattainable goal. Natural childbirth is possible but seldom attained. We are headed in the opposite direction, and only the constraints of a still existent sanity stays the hand of those who might otherwise advocate 100% Cesarean section.

Reversing this idea, we can visualize a mature society, cooperative and fully informed, wherein natural birth is regarded as not only standard and attainable, but also has no social tide running against it. This would be a step ahead of the present situation wherein natural childbirth is little understood, and when attained, is so within an indifferent if not hostile social environment. It would warrant another name, and we could well call it immaculate birth.

A natural birth is intrinsically as perfect as nature itself. However, because civilization is putting nature under great strain, and it is for the occasional rather than the many mothers, we have to say it is falling short in practice. Its implementation would involve and imply a social revolution, not through guns and force, but sociality and reason. The current 'climate' in the social arena for birth reflects that which prevails for womankind as such. If we ask, what is motherhood's role in economic society, taking care not to confuse the individual mother, or even mothers in general with motherhood, the social status that attaches to this position is nil, zilch, unrecognized. This is a gross defect, which must make us wonder what the word civilization means.

While we cannot draw conclusions from the economic position of a particular mother, the role of _motherhood_ in economic terms can be determined. Women as mothers are supported but not paid for their work in bearing children and raising families. Only slaves of old enjoyed such high standing. However, this non-recognition of economic role in the social foundation is the material factor behind cultural childbirth. Woman's lack of autonomy, reflecting social dependence, surfaces in labor and birth where the exact opposite should prevail. This is the curse at work, the collapse in labor, the patriarchal overturning of ancient matriarchy at the root of the problem.

In an ideal society, each mother desiring a natural birth would find her aspirations fulfilled in society as a whole. Its various divisions would lend their support, and the transition from natural to perfected birth would be on the agenda. Perfected birth in this all-inclusive context would warrant the expression immaculate. Perfect birth would lead to perfect bonding and this to perfectly founded minds in keeping with nature's intention. Society would begin to heal its wounds as it moved towards its true intentional existence, experiencing spirituality in the fullness of individual life. For ages we have navigated by the stars. Why should we not continue to do so?
1. Early Days

After years of onerous study at the desk, the prospect of clinical training suggested a welcome change. In our first clinical assignment a group of us would live in at the delivery suite to attend births. We made our way over to the hospital and innocently bedded down to sleep as instructed in the starched white sheet bunks, only to be awakened suddenly by the strident ringing of bells. We would scramble into surgical kit, white shoes, trousers and singlets, grabbing gown, hat and mask on the run. In a few minutes we would be in the delivery theatre.

As senior students we were to remain on call until we would have performed our required number of deliveries under supervision. For several weeks we would live in this ship-like environment, attending lectures by day and taking calls through the night. It was hell, because we would no sooner bed down to sleep than the bells would sound. Once in theatre we would walk cautiously around the screens to find a female rear end pointing at us, from which, eventually, a baby would emerge.

The screens were set up before we arrived, but we would later learn to set them up for ourselves. The mother would be lying flat on her back on the operating table; her knees raised and legs in stirrups. Then a sterile pack would be unfolded containing leg guards. Picked out with forceps and handed to a masked, gowned and gloved operator, one would be swept over each leg, stirrup and all. The exact motion was carefully supervised. Then a series of drapes would be spread over the mother's body, and finally a high steel frame plugged into the side of the table.

A high-tension was sensibly present. We would stand around, not quite to attention. In turn we would take scissors and perform the ritual episiotomy cut where shown; God help anyone who stepped out of line! We did exactly as told, as strapped into discipline as the patients into their stirrups.

Everything was sterile, ordered and performed to clockwork rules. The nursing staff snapped at us and at each other, exchanging cross words upon the least provocation. On one occasion, I made bold to look behind the screens, and mentally putting the sides together exclaimed to myself, "Yes! This is a rump, and that is a woman!" Her glance met mine and I quickly turned back to where my attention belonged.

Whether the screens were to keep us out of their area, or them out of ours I could never be sure, but I suppose the latter. I have heard it said, and I tend to agree, that the elaborate 'sterile field' ritual is telling the woman, and anyone else for that matter, "Look, this is our area. You keep out." It is a question of proprietorship. No stranger to the prohibitive atmosphere, I could sense it here if full force. A sign should have been erected, DANGER! HIGH VOLTAGE!

I sensed my glance behind the screen as a breach of discipline, or was it 'fraternizing with the enemy'? A 'them' and 'us' attitude prevailed. Later I visited the mother on the ward. In the theatre she had been silent and I dared not speak, but now it was delightful to talk to her and we shared an enjoyable conversation without the slightest trace of embarrassment. I had expected a frozen antagonism. Whether she benefited from my visit I do not know, but for me it was therapeutic. I came away feeling more balanced about the whole thing.

In the theatre a student (not me), had spilled some talcum on the floor. When the delivery was over the incident suddenly exploded into a violent altercation. Carelessness was not going to be tolerated! Who did we think we were? Thoughtless, it seemed, we trampling around, getting in the staff's way, thinking we could do as we liked, disturbing their routine! Even though I was not the target, I recoiled before the fury of the attack and the bad atmosphere that prevailed. For some reason, not to do with talcum, the nursing staff hated our presence. But for the constraints of civilization, I thought, more than talcum would have been spilled!

One day there was a sudden change. I noticed immediately and wondered. The staff had suddenly become human. Then, behind the masks and gowns I saw a stranger in our midst; not easy to discern, but there he was, standing by the abdomen and talking to us. Instead of cutting him short the nursing staff answered politely. The change was so blatant that it seemed almost contrived. Who he was I never discovered, but I realized that we were being honored by a visit from the chief, a consultant no less. Such was the hierarchy of command!

"This is going to be twins," he said, and I felt a strong sense of approval, not only because we were being spoken to, but because he cast a glance at the mother and included her in the conversation. It was the first time in several deliveries I had seen the mother treated other than as an object on the table. He discussed the various ways twins could be diagnosed. The size of the abdomen, we learned, was not that critical, but it could be a significant clue for the observant and experienced. The point was well taken for the abdomen, as rotund as the dome of a mosque was impressive. I was full of admiration for the powers of observation.

Shortly the baby was delivered. He put his hand up to feel the abdomen. It was as flat as a pancake! There was no second baby there. He said nothing, nor did anyone else. If there were smiles they were hidden by the masks. That could have been the end of the matter, except that the very next delivery brought forth twins. In this case the abdomen was more modest in a larger framed mother and there was no discussion. However, one after the other (the second being my turn to 'deliver'), there were two beautiful big babies! Had the consultant given us a valuable lesson or just mistaken the patient?

About that time a fellow student claimed my attention as we were walking across the tarmac. I should get a book, he said, _Childbirth Without Fear_ by Grantly Dick Read. He explained that it was not actually forbidden, but be careful about it, for it was not in favor either. It was helpful, but not the sort of thing to mention in the exams. In fact it was best not to mention that one had read it. "They," and he gestured vaguely in the direction of the stone buildings, "are too conservative to understand. They can't change their views, and don't expect it of them." He could have been speaking about an alien race from another planet.

Persuaded, I purchased a copy. Something was wrong in the maternity arena, but I had no idea what it could be. My interest in the subject was to complete the course, pass the exams and have nothing more to do with it, so I read the book with little interest and less understanding. My lack of background spelt out unreality, besides which I was sure that my life plans were heading in a different direction. Still, from that cursory reading I gathered the gist of what Read had to say, and instinctively agreed with him. The message otherwise would have escaped me altogether. In retrospect it planted the seeds of understanding, which then steered me in my subsequent conduct of maternity practice, gradually shaping my ideas in the direction of natural childbirth long before my conversion, which was yet to come.

Two years later I had graduated, married and taken a job. No longer a student I now had the right to wear a _long_ white coat, make decisions and take responsibility. What a dream-world way to live, and make money in the process, after so many years slogging with pick and shovel to get through medical school. To be respected for one's opinion, to give advice, to do this genteel work and be paid for it! What a change! Besides which, the job would go on and on. Financial security lay ahead. It was almost unbelievable.

Enter the Real Teacher

Three years after graduation found me driving with my wife and infant son to join a country practice attached to a regional cottage hospital. Our little car was packed to the roof and above with our worldly possessions. Pulling into the township just after dusk I spotted the hospital and went in to inquire where our house might be. No sooner had I entered the crowded waiting room and asked for directions than I was taken by the elbow and pushed into a chair to begin seeing patients while someone was dispatched to take my wife and son to the house.

Thirty two patients, and some hours later, when I arrived at the house everything was unpacked, and my son, still on his feet was keen to show me into every nook and cranny he had discovered.

For a year a colleague and I managed an extensive country practice with deliveries in the cottage hospital averaging five or six a week. Then with my year's contract ended I moved into the city to begin my own practice. I had by then a fair grounding in the use of drugs along with obstetrics as I had taken over any required anesthetic work. My later antipathy to the use of mind-affecting drugs, beyond their use in surgery, was thus based on knowledge, not any difficulty in their administration or management. My third post-graduate year, before the country practice had been as anesthetic registrar in charge of a theatre block running six surgical teams. It kept me busy around the clock, overseeing the work of house surgeons and visiting practitioners and managing the more difficult cases.

Anesthesia had become my subspecialty, so that when I began my city practice I was accepted onto the visiting staff of three major hospitals. At each I conducted a weekly session until the demands of my own practice forced me to relinquish this hospital work. Over the years my own family grew to four sons and a daughter.

In obstetrics my outlook was conventional. Once again I had beds at the major woman's hospital, as well as conducting deliveries in private, but the yeast of Read's thinking had begun to work under the surface. My strategy was to trust nature, allowing it to have its way, limiting myself to a watching brief, not intervening unless I had to. If I had to act, I would do so decisively.

Skill, as I saw it, depended upon scoring on both sides, getting as many cases as possible through without intervention, and securing the best possible outcome with the others. I was pleased when mothers did not need my help, or it was so unobtrusive as to be negligible. I noticed that there was less drama in my caseload than in some of my colleagues, and that I had to call upon them less often than they on me, and that this reflected a lower frequency of occurrence. Luck may have had something to do with it, but cultivation of that luck was my sole investment in each case.

Nevertheless, my approach was still conventional. Fear stood at my one elbow and caution at the other. Dimly in the back of my mind I recalled that Read advocated antenatal training, but his teachings were innovative. It was not the accepted thing, and it had never been taught officially. That was sufficient to keep me from attempting it. Convention is a silent, but strong persuader!

Antenatal training given in hospitals, usually in the form of optional clinics, would almost invariably be entrusted to ancillary workers, physiotherapists who did not have final responsibility, a severance that undercuts its importance. My impression was that they were a sop to demand, but only reinforced the mother's dependence upon the medical team, while achieving little or nothing in setting the stage for natural childbirth. Their message, described to me by mothers who had attended, seemed to fit the advice, "Do as we say, we will look after you," and, "The doctor knows best."

In the back of my mind the question whether I was doing all I could for my patients sat there with a negative response, and although the thought represented itself to me, I could not, without a jolt of some kind, do anything about it. Beneath the surface however, my understanding was beginning to mature, and my attitude to change,.

In the meantime, cultural childbirth struck savagely at each of my wife's births. This was something I did not understand at the time, for I had no reality upon it as a condition. What _is_ cultural childbirth?

It is labor and birth arrested in its own self-tension; nature's process gone wrong, fear of death expressed but not understood. It devastates mother-baby bonding, thereby sowing vulnerability in the foundation of the baby's newly forming mind. It is like driving a car full-throttle with the brakes on. The anesthetist and obstetrician then step in to cut the brake cables.

For our first I only knew that my wife had gone into labor when I received a phone call that she had been admitted to the obstetric wing. At that time I only knew enough about obstetrics to be terrified, and I waited anxiously to hear more, using all my discipline not to go near or make inquiries. They would contact me when it was proper to do so. A day went by, and then another. My mind was numb with anxiety. I recall looking out a window at nothing, wondering why I had received no word. Then, on the third day, I received a phone call. We had a son!

Off I went to the maternity annex. In the corridor on the way I met a nurse carrying a baby. As she slowed to a stop so did I, not knowing why, and looked at the baby. My heart went out to him immediately as he looked at me from a lopsided face. I could see the forceps marks and knew that he had had a hard time. "This is your son," the nurse said, and I knew I had seen my son. However, I could not see my wife. She was still recovering from the anesthesia. I sat and waited. When, finally, I did see her, she was hardly conscious.

It had been a slow labor. Years later my wife told me that she had anxiously waited for me to arrive, but I had not come. I had to explain that I had wanted to come but did not know that I was allowed. Medicine is not called a discipline for nothing, and if you get it wrong that's just too bad, the sort of thing that would not happen if one's uncles aunts parents or grandparents were around. I had been drilled to obey orders and my mind was still that of a child in strict upbringing, daring not to volunteer an inquiry, let alone intrude where not invited. Again later, my wife told me that the labor had come to a standstill, until finally one doctor said to the other, "We'll have to finish her off." An incredible detail now emerged.

To them it meant using forceps. To my wife it meant that they were going to kill her. "How was it possible," she asked, "for me to think that?" At the time, I did not understand the literal frame of mind that possesses a woman in the second stage of labor, so I could only reply that I did not know. It was strange to me also.

It is easy in retrospect to see that my wife's sense of security, and hence her state of mind and labor would have been different had I been there. The labor would have proceeded easily. However, we have to learn what we have to learn, and nothing in my experience had prepared me to be other than fearful and to stay away. Life teaches, and error is her occasion. I was now in the hands of the real teacher, with much to learn!

When the second birth announced itself — a month early — we had an eighty-mile drive to the hospital ahead of us. Why her specialist had booked her into the city hospital instead of the more pleasant local hospital was incomprehensible to me. They were not my arrangements. I had not been consulted, and although I felt they were inappropriate I had not sufficient grasp of the situation to question them or counsel differently. I had referred her for specialist care, and blithely assumed that everything would be for the best. So, we set out in our tiny car in the early morning hours across a moonlit desert landscape.

Halfway there, in a pine forest, fog slowed us almost to a halt. Then, thankfully, we were through and making good headway, surrounded now by tundra desert, glistening in a white hoar frost to almost daylight intensity. A few anxious words from my wife made me think that we would have to stop and deliver the baby by the roadside. It was freezing, even in the tiny car. What would it be like outside? How would we keep the baby warm?

There were no cell phones in those days, nor did we meet another vehicle on the way. There was no heater in the car and we were chilled; however the course of nature was stayed and we managed to arrive. I swung the car into the reception bay in a rapid turn and took my wife straight into theatre and gowned up.

Minutes later, with staff beginning to arrive, the baby was born. Then to my surprise the obstetrician, who had just arrived, immediately cut the cord and in a dramatic gesture swung the baby high in the air, ankles grasped between the fingers of one hand. I gazed at the inverted dismal face. It seemed to say everything I felt. Inwardly furious I wished I had the opportunity to swing a fist at him, but it was out of the question. I well understood that the maneuver was to keep the airway free of fluids, but to me he was grandstanding. The cord should have been left intact and the baby held level or just lower than the mother's body, for there was still vital blood in the placenta.

However, this was not to be, for the birth was conducted according to a pre-arranged routine. Before the baby was fully born, in its very process, the theatre sister had jabbed a needle into my wife's thigh; oxytocin designed to force the womb to clamp down, expelling the baby and placenta together. This miserable trick — for it was no better than the latest fad — was to have the placenta expelled with the baby so that all could go home. Unfortunately it only works sometimes, and I felt that I had come to an exhibition of obstetrics practiced by clowns.

In theory the baby and placenta are delivered together, and the womb clamps down preventing hemorrhage, but in this case, a premature birth, this was not to be. The womb clamped down all right, but on the placenta, which was then dangerously retained. The failed attempt to cheat nature left us waiting in the chilly theatre for an hour, looking at each other until the duty anesthetist could arrive, and the placenta be manually removed. Meanwhile the baby had vanished into the depths of the hospital, as if, for the mother, it had never existed. Incidentally, if you are ever going to need medical assistance in an emergency, do not choose breakfast time.

Between us, we men in charge of birth had managed to do everything wrong, beginning with my unprepared drive through the night and ending with an excess of technical innovation.

By the time my wife was carrying in her third pregnancy I had become a little more vigilant. I would not be caught this time as with the first and second. Happily, nothing went wrong, except that, the evening before her labor commenced she developed a mild cough and fever. The signs were those of pneumonitis, but labor began the next morning and she was delivered in hospital without mishap. Again I was not there, for as a doctor's wife she was under specialist care, and I still believed, in the stronghold of conservative opinion, that I should keep my distance unless invited. I limited my participation therefore, to delivering to the specialist a verbal and written report on the cough and fever.

In result, the baby, immediately upon being born was sent to isolation, and from there to a Karitane nursing home, and my wife to X-ray on her way to an infectious ward. When the mother and baby met six weeks later, they were strangers.

There was no hard evidence that the separation was necessary. Then it dawned upon me that there was something very wrong with our management plans. We seemed to be jinxed. In fact it was a dangerous brew, my ignorance coupled with a supposedly scientific understanding. We lacked the corrective influence of family relationships, elders who, in other circumstances would have offered words of sensible advice on such occasions. Separated from kith and kin we went out into the world to establish a family, and in the circumstance my medical training only magnified my liability to error.

We seemed to have beaten the jinx with our fourth. There had been no illness during this pregnancy at all. Labor commenced normally. Now possessed of a more refined judgment we managed to arrive at the hospital as late as possible just before the birth. We had climbed the steps and walked half way along the corridor when my wife grabbed my arm in a vice-like grip. She crouched down indicating that she was going no further. Her time had come. I wondered, should I pick her up and carry her the rest of the way, or 'catch' the baby on the polished floor? I glanced around and spotted a trolley. Seizing it, with its help we reached the theatre. As we approached the doors they suddenly opened, and out poured the full complement of staff as if they had been awaiting our arrival. Actually they had just finished a delivery and here was another!

Not scrubbed and gowned I stayed near the door as some lifted my wife onto the operating table, and others turned, asking me to leave, virtually pushing me out the door and closing it on my face. I should have asserted myself, but I would have had to enter the theatre to scrub, and by the time I had done so it would all have been over. My main thought was that _this time_ we had managed it nicely. It was too late for them to give drugs and these medically trained people could do no harm now.

How wrong I was! The intern, sitting there performed an unnecessary episiotomy the moment I was pushed out the door. I picked up the nearest phone and rang the theatre, to learn that the baby had been born. Then came the time-honored phrase, "It's a boy. The mother and baby are both well." I had patients waiting so I returned to my surgery pleased that we had beaten the jinx!

The first visiting hours were the next morning and when I arrived the baby was not there. Why, I asked? My wife told me he was sleeping. I sat and talked to her, feeling a bit negative. It was usual to have the babies on the ward at visiting time, but I understood that this could be waived if a baby needed sleep. I would see it tomorrow, but I felt uneasy.

The next day arrived and again the baby was not there. This was a disappointment. It had to be a quick visit; for once again I had had to leave a busy surgery. We discussed why the baby was not there. It was now a complicated confused and confusing story, which left me bewildered, but I could see that my wife was just as confused. "The Sister has promised to look into it. She had not reported back, but had left a message; but due to the staff shift it had not been delivered... Someone else was looking into it..." The explanation went on and on, a tangle of crossed messages, promises and intentions. Giving up trying to follow its twists and turns I left slightly irate. Twice I had missed the baby. Was it coincidence or bad management? I would see it tomorrow without fail!

The third day I was prepared for battle. Should the baby not be there we would sort it out, writing down if necessary the feeding times, messages and reasons. I would then come back at the stipulated time whatever it might be; but the conversation took an unusual turn.

"Where is the baby?" I asked. Is it here or on its way?"

"I don't know where the baby is."

"Well, we are going to sort it out. It is just past two o'clock. How long is it since you last fed it?"

My wife's reply caught me completely off guard. With tears springing into her eyes she exclaimed, "I haven't _seen_ the baby since it was born! What is wrong with it?"

A bomb explosion could not have jolted me more. As my anger shot from astonishment to fury I headed for the main office and was shortly confronting the head pediatrician. "Oh," he informed me, talking hurriedly, non-stop, stammering and repeating himself. "There is nothing wrong with your son. Nothing at all. He is perfectly well, perfectly well. Not a thing wrong. No need to worry. We have done every examination possible. He has had the best of attention, the best, most thorough examination that could be done. There is nothing wrong. The results are back and they are all normal, perfectly normal. Nothing wrong, nothing to worry about, a most thorough examination, X-rays, blood tests," he began to rattle off, "hemoglobin, cell counts, bilirubin, blood sugars, urinalysis. All normal." Then to my dismay he added, "We did a lumbar puncture and it was normal too..."

He stopped, and I just stared at him. If there was nothing wrong, what justified all these tests? For three days the baby had been separated from its mother and subjected to batteries of laboratory tests beyond the limits of conceivable intelligence. Did he not understand the significance of bonding, of the mother-infant relation? I felt as if I had come to a road accident after the event, where there was nothing to do but to pick up the bits. For some things we can make allowances, an error of judgment in looking after the family of a colleague. But it still did not add up. Why had there been no consultation? Warily, I observed my colleague, listening to what he was saying and trying to put the facts together. As I did so I formed an opinion. He was, I thought, stark staring mad. His mind had snapped. And with that I felt sorry for him, and turning on my heel I walked back to see my wife, who by this time had the baby.

Pondering the matter carefully, whether it was my duty to inform the hospital superintendent that a staff member had become insane, I made the wrong choice. Two aspects concerning the bizarre events concerned me. Was I endangering others if I failed to do so, and did I have a duty to him in the same respect? On the latter point I decided negatively. I knew that as a consultant he was regarded as over fussy, but the fact that, as I thought this had crossed a boundary and become insanity, did not involve me directly, because he did not fall within my jurisdiction as a patient. Furthermore, his case was so florid that I thought that they must be aware of it already. Regarding a duty to the public, the idea that he had given me, that he had ordered the tests because I was a colleague, stayed my hand. Not every baby born would be put through the same diabolical procedure. The possibility that the whole thing could have a different basis did not engage my attention.

Some months later I observed that my invitations to the monthly post-mortem analyses of infant mortality had ceased to arrive. Only some years later, when I read in the papers that the hospital had been running unauthorized research programs on its patients, mothers and babies alike, did I come to the chilling opinion that my son could have been used as a research guinea pig. Nothing else made sense.

The Cartwright Inquiry, as it was called, may have only scratched the surface. It reported among other things that hundreds of newborn babies had been subjected to routine vaginal instrumentation to gather evidence supporting a theory that cervical cancer-in-situ is not pre-invasive, and to this I could now add that at least one baby had been used as a laboratory test agent. Too late I realized that my opportunity to gather the evidence, collate and protest had receded into the past, but why the invasive tests? Was it to calibrate their procedures, or was there something more sinister behind it, such as the testing of pharmaceuticals for the ubiquitous international drug companies?

In any case my initial interpretation had been sadly wrong. Far from an insane favor for a doctor on staff, our son had been separated from his mother for three days and subjected to a battery of laboratory tests for clandestine reasons unknown because it was _not_ realized that I was on staff. Economic tides had closed the small community-based maternity units in order to channel obstetrics into the newly arisen glass and steel palaces in a commercial operation that trampled the mother-infant relation underfoot, inciting press and politicians against the midwives and the very idea of natural birth, as if women were incapable of managing their own affairs.

The report gave me the consolation of knowing that I was not alone in my misgivings. All the drum beating about ethical committees established to monitor doctor's behavior was as much defensive as offensive, part of war being fought for the corralling of funds. I had been part of the system, and suffered from it as well. Women's opinion contrasts too sharply with medical interests to be ignored. The globally rising rate of Cesarean section to indefensible levels testifies that obstetrics, like psychiatry, sits uncomfortably in medicine.

It is easy to see the opposing argument. If mothers _want_ Cesarean section, why should they not have it, and who knows what they want? The answer is that they take their advice from expert counselors, and that overall, a male-dominated obstetric profession that defines birth as 'emptying the pregnant uterus at term', does not understand its psychical aspect and depth. Have I not sat in on antenatal consultations in disgust, where the examining doctor has turned a mother's concern about possible hazards into the suggestion to take the Cesarean route, and upon receiving no rebuttal immediately set a date and made the arrangement?

Obstetricians have traditionally played down the vital aspects of natural birth and mother-infant bonding, not only because they cannot achieve the desired results, but because natural birth runs counter to their immediate interests. Individuals among their ranks who go against the current are singled out and neutralized. The force at work, powerful because it is indirect, is money. To champion natural birth is to swim against the current, something that can be managed, but for an individual only for a brief time.

The blame does not sit wholly with the doctors, but also with the politicians who listen to them and shape the laws, and the public who put them there. Finally, it is a question of knowledge. Do we understand the problem sufficiently to know precisely what steps to take in its correction?

Separating a mother from her baby inverts the natural relation and implants a time bomb. The natural bonding fails and the deep emotional forces reverse. The mother wards off the baby on some occasion. The baby senses rejection as a threat to its survival and redoubles its efforts. The mother responds by getting angry for that is how her response-mechanism is set. Modern sociologists are perplexed by the rise in the battered baby syndrome. They establish help lines and counseling services but miss the cause. The same dynamics apply in the case of youth suicide, and much more, too abundant to mention here. I stirred myself to inspect the hospital records. There was no documented evidence of the procedures.

We had four boys and again my wife was expecting. She had booked into the same hospital, but I had a different plan. It was evening when she told me that her labor had begun. "Leave it to me," I replied. "I will tell you when to go in." Without a qualm, I prepared a delivery bed in the next room. The labor appeared to be proceeding normally. My wife was relaxed and unconcerned and hardly a word passed between us. I called in a neighbor, herself a mother of experience to assist in case of need, but there was none. The birth proceeded without any tension and the baby delivered easily. The moment to make the dash into hospital just did not arrive.

The only excitement came after the baby was born. My wife's delight with the birth was unabated. She was enraptured that it was a girl. How different from the previous births! It had been unassisted, and for the first time there was natural bonding. She gathered up the baby and chuckled with delight, radiant in her possession.

Meanwhile, trained to worry, I watched for blood loss. In hospital practice measuring it is a ritual. You scoop it up, add this lot to that, pour it all into one vessel and estimate how much there is on the swabs, sheets and floor. If it exceeds 500ml you take careful stock of the situation. If it is over a liter you hit the panic button. My problem was the reverse. Where _was_ the blood?

The placenta was intact and clean. I stared at a single watery drop of blood that followed it out on the tail of the membranes. Zero blood loss was unthinkable! Alarm flashed in my mind. What was I missing? Was my wife too short of blood to bleed? But no! She was happy and vibrant. Had her blood pressure dropped catastrophically? Nothing fitted. She was holding the baby. Her demeanor was good. She was smiling, alert and of good color. There was no pallor or pain. The womb was firmly contracted. With relief and some astonishment, I had to accept that there was not going to be any blood loss. It was just that I had never seen this before. Evil however was standing in wait.

Then Jehovah said to Satan, Where are you from? And Satan answered Jehovah and said, from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking back and forth in it." Job 1:7

Still a victim of conventional stupidity, fully an hour later, when everything had settled down, I said, "It is time we left for the hospital!" So maintaining the charade I took my wife and newborn daughter and admitted them to the labor ward in the early morning hours. I was not about to tell a lie, but neither was I going to say anything. I was spared the embarrassment. No questions were asked.

Nothing bad then happened, except that from the moment of arrival my wife could not sleep. When she told me on day two that they had given her a big dose of barbiturate sleeping pills and she had still not slept my stupidity retreated. I went to the office and arranged her discharge. As I anticipated there was immediately no more problem with sleeping. For once, I had made a correct decision and knew that I had done so. I had learned!

2. Obstetric Patients not Accepted

In the early seventies a course change was forming in my mind. On the surface all was the same, but underneath my attitude to birth had been maturing. I was now fairly competent in the presence of labor and birth, though I did not fully relate this to my changing attitude; much as travelers in ships and planes may lose the sense that they are moving. Coincident with this development was an increasing dissatisfaction with the way my obstetric patients were harassed and regimented in the hospitals to which they were committed. Paradoxically, the private hospital staffs were more marionettes in this respect than the public. Finally, the clash between my obstetric and consultation practice forced itself upon my attention.

In the background the balance was gradually moving birth out of the home and into the great hospitals, away from the family-orientated elders and midwives to the medical practitioner, and away from the latter to the nine-to-five salaried specialists. These fought, through committees, journals, press and political lobbying, to starve the home and community based services of funds, a battle winnable for them in a technologically developed society, not aware that birth is the sanctuary of its strength from the ground up. It meant that obstetrics was taking much of my time, but providing a negligible fraction of my income.

Besides night calls, I could be seeing my first patient in a busy morning surgery when a phone call could notify me that a patient in one or other hospital was ready for delivery. It meant step in the car and go. My morning would be devoted to navigating in traffic and a single patient. On my return the waiting room would be half full of patients who had already waited hours, while my staff would have rescheduled others. Clearly, something had to change. The injustice to patients on each side of the fence was too obvious to disregard, so against my instinctive judgment, I decided to abandon obstetric practice.

All it required was a notice in the waiting room: 'No further obstetric patients will be accepted.' A piece of cardboard, a pin, and it was done. I had simply fallen into line with the general trend, not however, without a twinge of conscience that in doing so, I was no longer offering the rounded service that I felt belonged.

A year passed and it seemed to have been a wise decision. I was able to devote the recovered time to the more remunerative general practice and sleep more regularly, but in the back of my mind a gnawing doubt remained. In capitulation I had turned my back upon a small but important section of those seeking a possible service to which they were entitled, and in doing so I was indirectly endorsing an ill-defined pressure group, whose policy was to manipulate the maternity services by promoting an unfavorable price differential guided by their own parochial interests.

Occasionally a house call would turn out to be a mother in labor. Quietly I would assess the situation, and if all was well allow the birth to go ahead rather than phone the ambulance and move on. Then, confirming the mother's implied decision for a home birth I would arrange for follow-up care in her own home. Why should she labor in a racing vehicle? We are told "born in hospital," when the reality may have been "on the way to hospital." At the other extreme, some women arrive on the ward, and with a lull in their labor are told, "Go home and come back when your labor really starts." Others find themselves in city traffic, taxis and ambulances, or shifting from room to room when they should be in their own peaceful surrounds, the sort of environment nature expects and favors.

Aware of the prevailing medico-legal climate, I carried as much equipment with me as possible, but it fell short of that available in the smallest cottage hospital. The unnamed risk had to be balanced against that which obtains in a speeding vehicle. Ambulance crews — and I had much experience in working with them — were not trained obstetricians. On the other hand, to reach for the phone carried no risk for me or anyone else involved. It accrues only to the mother and baby.

My reputation was good and I had no problem with the authorities, however I knew that I was on the wrong side of the line should something happen to go wrong. To permit home births was to invite retaliation. Every stop would be pulled to damage one's reputation. On the other hand, no blame would attach to a death in the ambulance or on arrival. Everyone involved, having done their duty would get the green wave. It was not these considerations however that led me to terminate my obstetric practice, but calls coming on top of a busy surgery.

3. A New Beginning

Asked the usual question, "What can I do for you?" the young woman facing me replied that she wanted me to accept her for delivery. I declined, drawing attention to the statement that I no longer accepted maternity work. She acknowledged that she had seen the notice, but asked me if I would attend her anyway. In response, I began to explain why I would not. I was not at all happy with the way the maternity services were run. There was too much regimentation and tension. She was a good listener, and as I racked my mind for justification my indignation came to the fore and I began to deliver an impromptu lecture.

Drugs were used too freely. They interfered with the natural process. Through them, the conduct of birth had become distorted. It was not just a local problem. It was universal. The situation was beyond my tolerance and I had decided to have nothing to do with it.

Then, as if she had not got the message I summed it up and heard myself making what I thought would be regarded as an outrageous statement: _"Drugs should have no place in labor at all. They do not belong. The use of drugs and anesthesia in delivery is a fault which has insinuated itself into modern thinking..."_

I stopped, awaiting her reaction, expecting rage, that she would get up and leave, but it was not happening. The idea that drugs were essential was apparently stronger in my mind than hers. The fact that I had opted out of obstetrics, and especially that I was not about to accept her as a patient had lent courage to my opinion. As well as convincing me, it was meant to cause her to abandon her request. What she said however, and what I expected were two different things. Her words were, "That is what I want." Then, seeing that I had not apparently understood her reply, she added, "I do not want any drugs in the birth. I want to have my baby the way you described... without drugs."

I stared in disbelief. Her reply had cut away my defense, but perhaps she had misheard, or not understood what I had said. Then came the obvious thought: she was agreeing with me so that I would accept her as a patient. Later, when the arrangements were made, she would change her mind, back out, but still claim the delivery. Therefore, choosing my words carefully, I made the point with what I considered to be rude frankness: "No drugs? No anesthetic? That means that when labor comes you will have to go through it without any painkiller at all. If you feel you need an anesthetic or something for pain that will be too bad. There will be nothing. There will be no turning back."

She replied that that suited her well. She agreed with the conditions, but I was still unsure that she really understood. I had to spell it out. "It has to be total abstention; no tea coffee cigarettes or alcohol from now until and beyond the birth, not even an aspirin. No drugs on any occasion." I had this vision, that the mind cannot be free in the sense of possessing insight, unless it is free of the least psychotropic chemical over an extended period of months and years.

"Yes! I agree to that!"

The implications were swimming before my mind. Was such a project even possible? Some deep reasoning process said, "Yes," but because it was a first birth, and nothing in my experience confirmed that it was possible, I was not ready to accept that answer.

An operative incision of the outlet, called episiotomy, was in my experience routine in all first births, and very often, forceps extraction. For this, anesthesia, local or general is essential. This was not always so in subsequent births, but then, the thinking goes, the first birth 'loosens up' the way. It did not occur to me that it might also 'loosen up' the mind, relieving the mother of a considerable burden of cultural fear. According to Read, and my mind was scrabbling back decades to an uncertain single reading, first births without any tissue damage were not only possible, but should be routine.

However, that vague memory had to be pitted against my practical experience. A burst perineum is a mess. It requires considerable patience and skill to stitch it up. An incision is much easier to repair. This adventure that beckoned, should it begin, could only end in catastrophe! The thought of accepting the challenge brought me to the edge of panic. How could I get out of it?

Clutching at straws, I thought 'policy'! Did not the notice say that I was not accepting maternity work? All I had to do was to smile and say, "Sorry. You have seen the notice." However, I had already drawn attention to it and the discussion had flowed around it. There was only one resort left. How could I frame it? I played it over in my mind: "It is a question of convenience and cash. I make more money sitting right here, than doing deliveries, which are difficult and come at inconvenient times."

Then my mind added, "It is part of the strategy to freeze home delivery and small hospitals out of existence..." but whose side was I on? A glance at those reasons told me that, to invoke them would win the point, but at the cost of my self-esteem. The damage would be irreparable and could not for a moment be considered. My defense had run out.

With that, came a compensatory thought. I have given up all that conventional obstetric work. Perhaps I could allow this one case? It could be rewarding in itself. It will require a special training program, take up an inordinate amount of time and be economically unrewarding, but I would learn whether Read's method works. So I accepted.

"It will involve special training. I will prepare a course for you." She assented and I asked her to make an appointment for the first session a few days ahead.

### Dusting off an old book

Searching the old trunks in the attic I was pleased to find Grantly Dick Read's book, "Childbirth Without Fear", Second Edition, still there. I dusted it off and began reading, but this time with care, no longer a tyro, but with considerable experience behind me and a real reason for wanting to understand every detail. My first observation was that it talked about a program, but did not give one. My panic flooded back. With no program, how could I proceed?

The thought that I should call the whole thing off possessed me. Sick and depressed, I put the book down and returned to my surgery routine, but a few hours later the depression lifted. I could do it! Retreat was not an option. I would devote myself to it, and write my own program, and so I began. With pen in hand I began reading his book again.

My first discovery was that, although it lacked a specific chapter labeled 'program', it was a mine of information, full of reasoned analysis, discussion and advice. It _did_ have a program, but scattered through the text. Read's reference to Jacobson's _Progressive Relaxation_ caught my attention. I ordered a copy, and when it arrived it proved to be the key, the skeletal foundation one might say, to what I wanted to produce.

With an eye to the intended result I sketched in the outline of a plan, and began to shape it into individual sessions. The whole thing I decided was about control. Whose will was to prevail: that of the mother in labor or that of the bystander and authority? The identity of the authority does not come into the equation. Birth, in its nature, has to be an internal authority, that no more yields its own initiative than the sun its power or the earth its rotation. The purpose of training is to move the subject upscale, not into self-control in the sense of obedience, but of irreducible autonomy. The method must identify develop and strengthen the subject's latent self-will.

The birth will look after itself if the mother is impervious to external influence. Her role will be to _reject_ any suggestion advice or instruction that does not conform to her intuitive intent. Giving birth is irrevocably her thing. Its center of control is her being. It is to life as the sun is to the earth, not vice-versa. Its plan can only unfold from within. It does not, and cannot share its responsibility with another. She must heed no instructor but her own counsel, and abandon herself to this inner voice. One word describes the desired state: autonomy. The training must help her to find this.

This goal would be embodied in the program. Should it begin then, with an instruction to that very point? I thought wryly: "For a natural birth you have to be autonomous. You are to decide everything to your liking. You must allow no one else to exercise any influence over you. Take no notice of what anyone says, demands or instructs!"

"Oh, well," the mother-in-training replies, "I will take no notice of what you have just told me."

What is the recourse then? Hypnosis?

Close, but not close enough. The idea is there, but because the goal is to be, and remain impervious to instruction, it cannot be imparted as instruction. Even if the subject absorbed the message it would only count as negative conditioning, and the task is to eradicate the sway of conditioning. Autonomy is the hallmark of the self-possessed spirit, to be found and nurtured within. It cannot be pasted on from the outside like a sticker onto a board. Practice, not instruction, is the key.

But what practice? Giving thought to the goal only one candidate answer seemed to fit: it had to be practice in disobedience. The mother-in-training must learn to hear and take no notice, to be instructed and not respond. I imagined to myself the uproar such an intention could provoke! Teaching disobedience? It is against the flow of the social order, the last thing our educational system needs. I could imagine the screams; "There is enough disobedience already without it being taught." However, this would only prove that the project had been misunderstood.

Exactly the opposite is the case. Disobedience would describe the _direction_ the training was to take, but autonomy, its result, is not _quite_ the same thing; rather its very opposite. Only the autonomous, the technically 'disobedient' and self-willed are truly human, able to know the worth and reality of obedience. Those who would lay down their lives for others are self-willed to the point of death, and lucky are those who have them as neighbors and friends. Conditioning underlies the biblical curse. Deconditioning, a will to face and resist the tide of social conformity is required. With this broad canvass in mind, I drew up a course and the first lesson began.

### The Program as Challenged Relaxation

Beginning with a status quo, the _found_ state of the individual mind, the first thing to do is to take this back to its zero point. As a new day begins in sleep, and mathematics pivots upon the zero, reconditioning (if we call it that) must begin in the zero of muscular relaxation. The first goal, relaxation, is thus set.

My sense of direction was to be **the opposite of hypnosis** , something I now understood quite well. Its commands would be as clear-cut, but rewarded only if they were disobeyed. It was to be hypnosis run backwards, designed to unlock susceptibility. My method was to present hypnotic commands with this codicil, that if they were obeyed the subject would be immediately reprimanded. Beginning low key, intensifying the process, would then be the exercise. What I did not know or expect, but it occurred, was that the method would take hold as easily and effectively as hypnosis itself.

In the first session the subject (expectant mother in training) lies down and relaxes with the eyes open. That is all there is to it. The starting position is not mandatory. Later, the advice is given to take no notice of inner thoughts or external disturbance. Later again, commands are introduced. If she ignores them she will be rewarded by an approving acknowledgment; "Good, you ignored that instruction." If she obeys or responds in any detectable way, she is handed a flunk and that session is ended.

The session framework is thus reward and punishment, hypnosis run in reverse, and the model, scientifically, is therapeutic _deconditioning_ of whatever _conditioning_ may be found to be already present. The Readian program for natural birth was then to be incorporated into this framework.

In this plan the mother in training learns to relax deeply, and then _retain_ this state of relaxation in the face of attendants (helpers), who use all imaginable forms of suggestion, proposal command question taunt, sudden noises, humor and denigration, praise etc., any and every disturbance within reason, but of titrated intensity. Their task is to bring to bear whatever challenge might break her power of non-response and impel her to act and react, but in a gradient manner, their success in doing this being equally their loss. They are to go as far as possible without actually breaking her equanimity. As she becomes more immune to their provocation, they have to try harder, and the sessions become a controlled, but living exercise for both sides.

The mother's first win is to realize what it will take on her part to steer her way through a natural birth in the given circumstances of our existent society; to be fully relaxed, intent upon her own bodily and mental processes, while aware of and at the same time discounting the clamor rush and hurry of external events and happenings.

Constructing the program ahead of the sessions, the training began and time passed. As it did so one thought remained my perpetual companion, "Would it work?" There was only one exam at the end of the course; the birth itself, and this would give the answer. Nothing else mattered. Once the pattern of the program was established, birth positions were practiced and appropriate exercises included, Readian content within the framework of controlled disobedience. The goal was to achieve an active and competent, but totally non-responding subject, who could stare through onlookers, disregarding everything they might do, command, plead or say, even if the house was falling down. And over it hung the sword of Damocles: would it work?

The answer was more important to me, failure or success, than the actual way it might tip. Investing so much time and effort in the project, I saw a danger, that when the birth came I might judge it favorably, even if it was run-of-the-mill ordinary. Human nature tends to be self-serving. To subscribe to an illusion would lead to an eventual loss. It would be in my interest to err in the other direction and judge harshly, so I fortified myself by thinking, "the delivery will be like any other, only different. _Every case is_ _different_!" Every birth is so different from the next that it is almost impossible to compare them in a meaningful way. The delivery could turn out to be better than average and that could be just chance. I must therefore lean over backwards not to be impressed.

If all goes well I thought, but for a small tear or incision I will treat it as a failure. To do otherwise would be self-deception. It had to be no drugs, no episiotomy and no tear. I had never seen this in a first birth so the challenge was clear. I pictured an episiotomy as usual, an incision of the perineum as big as a fist to be dutifully stitched up, first the inner layers, then the more superficial and finally the skin, everything in its correct place. How surprised our patients would be if they could see the wound in its open state, not the final neatly stitched line! The other possibility, a delivery under anesthetic would be equally decisive. A bad result would do me a favor by eliminating a difficult assessment. It would dispel my Readian ideas about natural birth, freeing me from the obligation to do any further work of a similar nature.

A breakdown in the patient's intention to persist in the labor without recourse to drugs would work in the same way. The biggest problem would arise if the result was good but not perfect. In that case, I thought, I will not do any more. Everything has its cost. If it is too high, one decides against it. It would not be wise to proceed upon an uncertain course fueled by illusion. Read's teaching is either right or wrong. The exercise must tell me which. If wrong, I would know that natural childbirth is a siren song for those who want to believe in it. I was still very much the orthodox practitioner.

I did not share these gloomy thoughts with my patient. There was no place in the program for 'education'; it was all training. The time was drawing close. We would soon know. Then came the morning of ringing bells. Labor had commenced. On a yacht, you can be sitting there peacefully when suddenly the boom strikes you on the back of the head sending you into the water. It was about to happen to me.

4. A Medical Practitioner is Converted

"I'm afraid we've lost her."

The voice of the matron over the phone just before six o'clock on a wintry morning was choked with dismay. My patient had phoned me earlier to say that she was in labor and I had advised her to go directly to the hospital where she was booked in. Shortly after five a.m. I rang the details through to the sister on duty, not mentioning that it was a special case for natural childbirth, because there was no need. It simply meant that she would not be asking for any medication and I would not be prescribing any. Otherwise, the case was like any other. It was not to be classed as a _natural_ birth, because it was not yet proved, and this aspect could fail. As I would be conducting the case, and no drugs could be given unless I ordered them, there was nothing to say. Everything was covered by standard procedure.

But this was not standard. Instead of the statement, "the patient is ready for delivery," came this dreadful message.

I was not about to jump to conclusions. Doctors are forever working with death in all its forms, but I had never lost a patient in labor, and I was not about to accept it. There had to be a reason. My mind raced over the possibilities, eclampsia, heart failure, a hidden internal hemorrhage... I needed a quick description of the facts.

"Sister-had-to-leave-the-room-for-a-few-minutes," the matron said, squeezing each hesitant word, gritty with emotion through closed teeth. When she got back it was too late. She was gone."

A collapse can be mistaken for death, but even as the thought came a sinking feeling rejected it. This was a vital young woman in labor. Shock can mimic death, but only in the elderly and ill, whose life is already close to, and so similar to its end, and these were trained staff. The chance of error was vanishingly small, and even if it were the case, a collapse at this stage would have grave implications. I was hanging onto her every word for some information that would clarify the situation. She began to emphasize that the patient had been unattended for only a short while, but I wanted the clinical details, and I wanted them fast.

"What did the sister _see_?" I cut in.

"There was nothing."

Leading questions, such as, had there been a twitch or convulsion indicating eclampsia, would only delay getting the facts, so I just prompted, "Did you notice anything yourself?" I was not about to believe that my patient had just given up the ghost like someone dying in their sleep. It did not add up.

"No. There was nothing. She just disappeared."

CLANG!

That did not fit!

Like the zigzags on the old television screens, that would suddenly wobble, straighten and then resolve into a picture the words began to take on a different meaning. 'Lost' 'afraid' 'too late' 'gone', but now 'disappeared!' It broke the pattern, as was immediately confirmed, "We have looked everywhere for her, in the rooms corridors basement... We have searched the lifts and staircases." Then with finality she faced the situation and her words flowed clearly, "She is not in the hospital!"

Well, that was better than not in the world!

"Did she call a taxi?" I asked, doing a double take.

"We didn't see any. The girl in the office didn't have any message, so we think she could not have got a taxi."

"Very well. I will be over shortly and take responsibility for finding her."

The matron was relieved to have the difficulty taken off her shoulders. I was soon on my way. Nearing the hospital, I began cruising the blocks and adjacent streets. The night air, frosty and cold, was just beginning to give way to the half-light of dawn. Lakes of fog hid the lower lying areas. A light went on in the front of a house. The streets were deserted. It occurred to me that they would soon be bustling with people, and that would make the search difficult; then, in the distance I spotted a lone figure walking up an incline, slowly emerging from a sea of mist. I pulled up alongside and she got in.

In a few bitter words she told me what had happened. She had been ushered into a room and told to sit on a chair and wait. The nursing sister then arrived. There was some routine questioning which did not go well — as I could imagine if my patient was practicing her drills! By the time the sister asked her to get onto the couch for a shave and enema, the sister was already cross, and when she replied that she was not going to have a shave or an enema the sister stormed out in a, "we'll see about that!" attitude. However, no sooner did the sister leave the room to summon help, than my patient also left, walking out of the hospital onto the street. She was in labor, but she was going to walk the miles home.

The unexpected turn of events immediately struck me. The idea of refusing the shave and enema was novel to me. In recent years it has become less of a formality, but at the time it was never questioned. Pubic shaving had first been introduced to counter body lice, and then became ritualized as a supposed contribution to sterile technique. More recently, surveys have shown that shaving increases the incidence of infection, the very thing it was touted to avoid! As for the enema, it is rational if the patient is constipated, but not otherwise. Such procedures, imposed as routine, merely herald the beginning of unwarranted interference.

Accepting her flight from the hospital — neither I nor anyone else could have reversed her decision at that moment — I was now concerned what effect the emotional upset might have on the birth. When I inquired she said that the labor had been regular and strong, but stopped when she began walking. This remission had lasted for about a quarter of an hour and it had started up again. I surmised that she was in late first stage. She used few words and I said equally little. Silently I drove to the surgery and settled her down on a bed with blankets and pillows. Labor was strongly established. The presentation was vertex, which was good. There was no sign of complication apart from the dramatic circumstances. It was just a matter of waiting.

I now gave thought to the overall situation. Was it justifiable to allow the delivery to proceed here? Already the patient had experienced an unusual amount of stress. It was her first baby. The contractions were powerful. I thought of every emergency I had ever encountered or read about. What equipment did I have or could I now improvise? A rapid advance could lead to tearing and the need for an incision; too little, the need for forceps. I had neither forceps nor anesthetist. Inevitably I saw a big repair job ahead. There would be blood everywhere. I had a good mobile light, plenty of suture material and local anesthetic. My instruments were sterile and ready. I had emergency drugs and drums of sterile guards and swabs, but no oxygen or suction apparatus for the baby. After all, I had not expected a delivery in my surgery!

I felt reasonably prepared within limits, but my mind cringed before a thousand imagined difficulties. The labor was progressing well, but the coward in me took over.

"How do you feel about your progress?" I asked unnecessarily.

She looked at me quizzically.

"I mean about having the baby here? I can ring an ambulance. We still have half an hour before the baby will be born. We can be at the hospital in twenty minutes. We could be there in good time..."

She fixed me with a piercing stare, her eyes narrowing like gimlets. Reduced to silence my words stopped. Then quietly she spoke: "No! I'm doing fine!" A moment's silence then came the coup de grace. With incredible scorn, she added: "How could you _think_ of such a thing?"

I knew the answer perfectly well. "Groundless fear and cowardice," I could have replied, "the desire to evade responsibility." Transfixed, my fear gave way to shame. I squirmed inwardly and returned her gaze in mortified silence.

I had wrapped my suggestion in good sense, at least so it seemed to me, but there were two wills here. Hospitals run on teamwork. Expecting trouble, I was conscious of the fact that I lacked not only vital equipment, but backup. In a hospital environment, one takes responsibility, but has access to all needed equipment and support. One can always consult with others and ask for advice or assistance if necessary. It is not unusual for one surgeon to be called in to finish what another has begun, but how does one fare when this support is removed? One's fear may then come to the surface. Besides which, my reputation was on the line.

The contractions were now one after the other. Possessed in their grip she cried out my name — which startled me — then the baby was born. What was the result? Perineum intact. Not a scratch as they say; a big first baby just short of eight pounds. To me it was a miracle.

In my experience over hundreds of deliveries, conducted by myself, and those of colleagues I had never witnessed a birth like this. I had seen births without tear or incision _but in women who had already borne children._ Least of all had I reason to doubt the reported incidence of required episiotomy for first births in the United Kingdom in the mid sixties: _A hundred percent!_ But here that malevolent spell was broken. A strongly built young mother of a first child had defied all my experience and confounded the statistic. Only one case, certainly, but to see one airplane fly gives you the idea that another may do so as well.

The labor had been quick, less than three hours from beginning to end. The placenta was delivered readily with no bleeding. I had tried out Read's method, admittedly with certain variations, and it stood validated for me.

Later on, at a postnatal visit, I inquired about pain. I explained that I wanted a carefully considered account for the record. To my mind this was the moment-of-moments to settle for myself Read's contention that pain is _not_ experienced in a natural birth. She could give me the answer.

She had had no drugs, no operation, no tissue injury and no hypnosis. I had but to ask. We had never discussed the question, so the answer she would give me would be unclouded by any prior suggestion. As far as I knew she had never read or heard about Read, and we never discussed the theory of birth in the training sessions. Nor had I exposed her to any 'education', medical models or wall charts of the kind recommended by Read, for I disagreed with his opinion in this respect. Would she please describe carefully. Was the labor painful? I sat poised over her medical records, pen in hand, waiting for the final answer.

"Yes," she said, she would give me her answer. She thought about it long and carefully. I felt a touch of impatience. Then she said, "Yes, um ah... It is difficult to recall. I think... perhaps there was no pain." There was a pause, then, "Hmm... Maybe... there was not any." Then, catching the inquiry in my eyes, she added: "I don't recall any."

It was enough. Her indecision told me that I could not take her word in the unequivocal sense I was seeking. She had said she "could not _recall_ any pain," but in such a way as to leave me in doubt. It was more like the biblical reference to "a woman's moment of forgetfulness," but there it was.

If she had said that the labor or birth had been painful I would have accepted that. She made no reference to pain during the labor, nor was there any evidence of tissue injury, so vague or not, I just had to accept it as it was. The labor and birth had proceeded through stressful conditions, far from the ideal of security and repose, and I was left without the strong statement I thought would have been possible.

The only difference in this case, affecting the outcome, was the program of preparation, including the absence of drugs. My program, modeled on Read's teachings had passed the test. When he began his program, he said, "I was soon more astonished than my patients." I know now what he meant. The conception of birth I had built up over the years had been swept away in an instant. I was not so much convinced as converted.

Not, however, by the physical aspect. I had expected to make a judgment, but the tide of events had swept me off my feet, setting me down on different ground. My conversion left no option. It was complete. Accepted standards did not enter into it. The experience, qualitatively different, had a spiritual as well as a physical dimension. A 'slip of a girl', barely out of her teens, one whom we would think was in no position but to take advice and bow to opinion, had called the shots at every step of the way in a rapidly developing unpredictable situation. In terms of results, she had been exactly right. She had managed and accomplished the birth herself. She had needed no help or protection, except against 'help and protection'. Had any opinion prevailed but her own, had she been shaved and prepped, delivered on her back with her legs up in stirrups she would have ended up as another semi-drugged birth by surgical intervention, possibly with forceps and certainly with episiotomy and stitches.

The training had aimed at the result obtained, but the outcome had outclassed anything that could reasonably have been ascribed to the drills. These taught the principle of autonomy, as against the influence of an external will. The result confirmed the procedure as valid, but also outreached the training. Something deeper was at work beyond the limits of personality, a power called into being by the training, but independent of it; the unconditioned, the impersonal unconscious that underpins our everyday conditioned existence, actually present. In religious terminology this is 'God manifest', the foundation of human life when all weakness and doubt falls away.

The expression of unforeseen talent and power in human experience has often been remarked in the face of extreme adversity. Challenge is its catalyst. Weakness and indecision drop away; something deeper takes over. Can we understand this?

It is my belief that the power of which we speak is naturally present in labor and birth, not as a secondary process, not summoned as in adversity etc., but there by intention, in its original form. In every other situation in which it manifests, it comes on the scene as a stranger, unexpected, but in labor and birth it finds its natural place, where it reigns.

Only in the human is its presence contested, as if we would improve the will of God, the moment when, stepping between the generations it shapes the mind of mother and baby alike. It fashions the distinct mother baby bonding relation, and herein is the will of god fashioned and founded. This is the birth in the birth, the ground and foundation of the human mind. Upon this our species and civilization depends. It underpins our normal consciousness, but here it comes on the scene directly, as the physiological expression proper to labor and birth, the font of mind and wellspring of civilization. It is the touchstone of natural childbirth, and here, when we read the message correctly, Man will eventually step back out of woman's domain, except to uphold and defend her sovereign right to autonomy, but this is subject for further perusal.
5. Experiences in Birth

How _do_ mothers behave in labor? Observation seems to show that there are as many behaviors as there are situations. It is variable and to an unpredictable degree. It defies easy description but has a quality of its own, even if only in this, 'difficult to define' modality.

To do it justice, accounts would have to be gathered from many sources in order to obtain a broad cross-sectional view. Midwives and doctors commonly have much experience within a narrow band of birth type. We tend to think that the cases we see correspond to a standard, overlooking the possibility of a wide and unexpected variation in different geographical areas and historical times.

The use of drugs has transformed the conduct of labor in the industrialized nations in recent years. Earlier this century, before drug use had become prolific, some labors were quiet and peaceful. Others, especially in the hospitals, would groan, wail and shriek. Rooms were commonly set aside for the most vocal cases, but this did not even begin to address the problem. One mother in labor would go berserk, and others, hitherto quiet would join in unison, indicating the contagion of affect.

### In the Old Labor Wards

On one occasion I was called for a routine check on a new admission in the late evening. There were about twenty beds, a pace apart in the ward, all occupied. I was shown to a woman sitting in a crouch on her hard bed, propped up by thin outstretched arms. Her state, desperately pale, alarmed me. She was tense, restless and unable to stay still for a moment, but most noticeable was the ghastly expression on her face.

Still a student in the mid 19th century, but on an intern assignment, it was my first call to a woman in labor beyond those of our supervised course. Not understanding the situation or knowing what to say I began going through the motions of checking her pulse and blood pressure. Both were satisfactory, so what was wrong? I was talking to her, trying to discover what it might be, and she was not answering, when a piercing scream rent the air. A blast on a train whistle could not have been louder. I looked up, and in the gathering gloom saw a wave of restless movement sweep the whole extent of the ward. The previously resting bodies all tossed and turned at the same time.

Understanding, my mood began adjusting to that of my patient as the screaming broke out again. Closer to us several patients, previously quiet, began groaning in labor pains, and then another joined in screaming. Nurses suddenly entered, flitting like shadows from one to another, calming where they could. Panic had cracked its whip and the ward was in the grip of terror. I completed my examination and physically moved away, but the scene stayed with me mentally. Years later, when trying to fathom the mother's essential state in labor, it was there in my mind as a backdrop.

Read describes the case of one of his mothers being terrified by the frightful commotion of another close by, losing control, but that sort of thing no longer happens. Drugs and architectural modifications have quietened obstetric and psychiatric wards alike. The essential problems however, still exist. A drug-blanket has been drawn across the whole scene, making it more inscrutable than before, deeper and more pernicious.

### A Change of Mind

Towards my later days in conventional obstetrical practice I had just completed a routine antenatal check, and was recording the details thinking, "second baby, no problems," when my patient began to speak.

As if sensing my attitude she began telling me that it _had_ to be a girl. She could not tolerate it if it turned out to be a boy. Her first was a boy, and everything had gone wrong in her life since then. If this second were a boy, it would be beyond her endurance. She would reject it. She would not keep it, wish to see it or have anything to do with it. It would have to be adopted and she wanted me to make the arrangements before it was born. She went on and on, sparing me no end of reasons why this had to be the case.

I listened patiently, waiting for the punch line of her message, but it never came. My initial surmise had been wrong. She had an obsession, a form of mental illness that exhibits irrational anxiety. It occurred to me that it would not take much to unbalance her mind altogether, just a word out of place, but I also thought, "the problem hinges upon an unknown. It is a sleeping dog. I will leave it sleeping!"

We would not know until the birth whether it would be a boy or a girl so there was no need to respond to her request that I should initiate steps for its adoption. The undesired outcome might not arrive. Aware that obsessions do not go away, but if frustrated change their direction and attack in some other form, I hoped that fortune would smile, and that if we could not solve the problem, it might nevertheless pass us by. In fact this was not to occur.

She had an easy labor requiring no medication. There was no outlet damage. The birth was perfect, but as the baby was born I noticed that it was the 'wrong' sex. With some misgiving but a somber face I wrapped a napkin around it, discreetly leaving its arms free, and handed it to her without comment. She accepted it in a like manner, not knowing whether it was a boy or girl. No one spoke and that was message enough. The tension was relieved by the quick arrival of the porter with his trolley to wheel her off and we dispersed about our ways.

On the ward next day she had the baby in her arms. I waited for the outbreak but none came. As she turned her attention to the baby I thought, "This is it. Now or never!"

"A boy?" I said invitingly.

No response.

She seemed not to notice my remark, but supremely calm, gazed at the baby in rapture.

Perhaps she did not hear, I thought, though I did not believe that was the case. It was as if I had said something inconsequential, not meriting attention, like "nice day." Determined to precipitate a showdown, something I had until then avoided, I asked, "How do you feel about its being a boy? You wanted a girl."

She now raised her eyes to mine directly, and as if explaining something to a young child, said, "Doctor, when a baby is born a mother loves it just as it is. Whether it is a girl or boy makes no difference. The only thing a mother looks for is to see that it is perfect in every way."

I was flabbergasted. I could see that this was the case, that the baby was perfect, and that she loved it very much, and I marveled. In peace and calm it could have been a picture of the Madonna and babe. Not only had she taken the words out of my mouth, but she had gone succinctly to the point, whereas rehearsing my lines before the visit, and not liking my chances, I would have been the one stuttering and stumbling. Somehow the situation had become reversed. The desired change had come about of itself, and she had made clear to me what I thought I would have to make clear to her. How had this come about? I tried to reason it out.

The only thing that had happened in between was the birth. However, to my still conventional thinking, this was only a physical process. The labor, muscular activity and birth do not lecture. It does not reason and point things out. It is deep to thinking, yet it had effected this change. Nothing else could account for it. Nature had done what was required, not just 'somehow', but perfectly. There was mechanism at work, but what could it be?

I had been prepared to reason with her that we all have to accept the inevitable. I would challenge her attitudes and shame or bully her into social compliance, but this was on a different plane. It had taken the form of a spiritual transformation, something altogether more powerful than my ability to persuade. A suggestion made in trance would have done the trick, but this, I sensed, was more powerful. It was clear that, natural, and in harmony with life's purpose, it had given her a new mental set, which unlike a hypnotic command would be permanent. It had swept away her previous conditioned attitude without trace.

My attitude to labor and birth changed in that instant, for it told me that, more than a mechanical process birth is unified, physical and psychical at once. It takes the mother's mind back to its unconditioned foundation and builds it anew, reconstructing it in harmony with its original intention. This is the truth of our kind, replenished in every life cycle, binding the mother and baby in a spiritual identity in exchange for the physical separation visible to an observer. In this, human sociality is perpetually renewed.

The trance of hypnosis belongs to the side of impending injury and death. Its mission is to save what is already there, seizing nature's best option in a losing situation. The state in labor is creative, on the side of life building from the bottom up. As sleep refreshes the mind in the 24-hour cycle, this refreshes it in the life cycle, stabilizing civilization across the generations. My patient had become my teacher, and I knew that, because her attitude was in harmony with her life circumstances and reason, nothing would alter it.

### Baby on a Conveyer Belt

The most remarkable birth I have ever witnessed came at a later period when I had decided to rule out the hospitals, public and private, as suitable places for conducting natural birth. Warring sections within the profession, seeking legal entitlement over the maternity services had made conditions in the hospitals inimical to natural birth. They wanted everything, including the mothers, regulated and tied down.

This mother informed me that she had had a home birth for her first baby. It was successful, but there had been no arrangement for any medical presence or supervision. She wanted the arrangements for the second to be the same in terms of freedom, except that she would like a medical presence if this could be arranged. I told her it could, and booked her in for my training program, which I now ran several times a week.

Because it was to be her second birth and all the signs were favorable, the thought crossed my mind that this training left me little to do. It was almost unnecessary. Still, it was her wish and I was pleased to accept her onto the program.

She had an extended support group and they rented a house next to my surgery for the occasion. I saw her, as was my custom, once a week, and both she and her support team participated in the training, for by initial agreement with the mothers I would allow no one to be present at a birth who had not been trained in deportment and behavior.

When I was called for the birth, it was two hours since she had had a show, followed by her first contractions. She had chosen to give birth in her living room, where the sun sloped across the floor and her family stood quietly by.

She lay on her back on a table-like padded couch, which kept her about ten inches from the floor. She was lightly covered about the chest, with her abdomen free in the sunlight streaming in from the window. I had expected her to adopt a squatting position, but these were her arrangements and no one spoke. The training had taught all present that small talk is best suppressed, and no one would question a mother's ongoing decisions. In giving birth she would obey no will but her own.

She glanced at the door and someone closed it, at the window and someone adjusted the curtains. It was her time and her slightest indications were obeyed. We all understood and no one stirred or spoke. On arrival she had briefed me on her progress and I made no examination except for a light touch on the abdomen to determine the baby's position. All was well and I settled down to observe development.

A busy doctor must ask questions and make examinations but the rules were different here. Just by being there, staying and observing I could learn all I needed to know. I watched her as keenly as in a training session, wherein one looks for any movement or break in the mother's relaxation, but all I could see was the quiet respiratory movement of her chest. She was relaxing totally. I looked for signs of contraction in the abdominal muscles. This would tell me how frequently her contractions were coming, but I could see none. Nor could I detect any change in the depth or rate of her breathing.

My silent attention coincided with her silent performance. Her family members, equally silent, stood by; a product of the drilling procedure, but it could have been the waxworks.

In the drills, the mother practices an indifferent relaxation, while those standing by endeavor to take her attention and upset her by all sorts of goon behavior and remarks. She wins by achieving an ever-greater ability to disregard the clamorous 'outer world', and loses if she responds in the least degree. At the birth it is the same, except that those present, equally drilled, no longer endeavor to excite her. Without being told the months of training have taught them what upsets her, and what does not. They know now what they must _not_ say or do, for they understand that the birth, as natural, will be successful to the degree the mother can remain completely self-possessed, oblivious to all but the imperative of her inner call. Where before they did their best to upset her, they now offer no challenge at all.

In spite of the stillness there was orchestration here. The family, and there were six, were choosing to neither move nor speak, and the mother by her behavior was willing it so. After about twenty minutes, I could detect that her relaxation had become profound, but there was no indication that her labor was progressing in any way. She was looking straight ahead into the distance with unseeing eyes, perfect, as in a training session, but when I took careful note, with a slight jolt of surprise, I saw that there was something else here as well.

She was 'looking straight ahead' but not 'looking'. She was not playing the part, but lost in a world of her own, a deep trance-like state whose origin was at the time unknown to me. Her expression, initially blank, now possessed a faint smile. This was unusual because she was not smiling at anyone. In a session it would have invited comment, but now the smile gradually intensified. An angelic smile, there was nothing strained about it. It was as if she were communing with herself. Then the top of the head peeped.

I was startled because I had seen no sign of effort. How had she managed it without straining? If her abdominal muscles were contracting — and I could see no sign that they were — would this not have been reflected in her breathing? But there had been no tell-tale increase in the depth or rate of her breathing.

She was slim, so it was not just a question of being unable to see what was happening. A few minutes passed and the peeping head began to grow in size in a slow and steady crowning as uniform as the moon appearing over the horizon.

This was breaking all the rules of labor's rhythm, for in every labor I had seen, there would have been an intermittent downwards pressure, followed by relaxation, with some retreat of the presenting part, and then, after a longer or shorter interval a repeat of the process, but there was none of this here.

Still I could detect no sign of her making any supportive effort. There was no bodily movement, no respiratory or abdominal muscular exertion. Her whole demeanor was that of profound relaxation. Except for the quietly emerging head, her state of relaxation appeared to be unbroken.

The crowning continued in uninterrupted development. The usual pattern of pushing and then relaxing remained conspicuously absent. She now had a radiant smile on her face. The head and then body came into view in one slow continuous movement. I was utterly transfixed because I could not see what was propelling it. It was riding out as if on an invisible conveyer belt.

Possibly there was nothing strange about this birth. It was just strange to me. I had seen what I had considered to be good births, but they were all accompanied by one or another degree of effort. If there were any in this case, it escaped my attention. The baby seemed to have been born entirely by the action of the uterus, squeezed gently forward like toothpaste issuing slowly from a tube.

Unconcerned, the mother took up the baby—no one else moved—looked at it intently for a few moments, and then put it to her breast. The baby suckled. There had been no crying. Everything completed normally. For years later, I received an annual postcard inviting me to visit, but they lived a long way away. I was pleased however to know that all was well across the years that followed.

### Death on a Film

As students, we saw films on birth. In one of these the mother was on the operating table as usual, legs hoisted high in stirrups. All was standard procedure. The doctor stood between her upraised legs to lift the baby out. People on all sides chattered away, passing instruments, giving and receiving orders like automata in an elaborate ritual. Then we saw a face shot of the baby crying. It was a beautiful baby and certainly looked healthy enough as it was wrapped in towels and swung from one to another like any merchandise. The doctor meanwhile busied himself sewing the mother up. All was bustle and efficiency between the raised legs. Then the camera returned for a replay. "See the mucus," the dubbed voice boomed. The film suddenly ran in slow motion and an arrow shortly appeared pointing to a gob of mucus, which then disappeared. The baby, who in a few minutes was shown dead, had inhaled it.

We got the message. When the baby is born, be quick with the swabs to protect its nose and mouth. Hold it so fluids drain away. Suck out its mouth and nostrils. It will squirm and protest but you have to do it.

I used to follow the instructions carefully, making sure that I had suction and resuscitation apparatus on hand. I learned how to hold the babies and watch their airways. It took me years to work out what had happened. The missing factor — what the film did not point out — was that the birth was medical. The mother was anesthetized and the baby was born drugged. That was why it was shocked into crying and had involuntarily sucked mucus and membrane into its airway.

For this reason we plunge rubber tubes into the newborn's mouth and nostrils, not according to need but routinely, causing them to jerk their heads back and cry. But how is it that babies can be born under water and not inhale wrongly? Clearly, the danger exists in the medical setting because the birth has been disturbed.

Every birth is unique. Some will be medical births by necessity. All those involved in a birth must be guided by their own knowledge, experience and sense of the fitness of things. A mother who strives for a preconceived ideal, rather than first doing her best and then submitting to the order of nature is very likely out of touch with her own nature. What is typical for one is not typical for another. Still, in contemplation, it is my opinion that the more perfect a birth the less the effort and final rush to expel. The latter has all the hallmarks of a cultural influence, and a slow steady emergence every appearance of being in harmony with nature's original intention.

### The Lorenz Observation

Imprinting as a phenomenon has been firmly in place since Lorenz studied it in fowl, but the subject has never reached up from those first empirical findings to the genesis of the human mind. Its implications have not therefore been extended and realized, partly due to the fact that society does not credit the mother's preeminent role in the social domain, partly due to a question of scale, that in the higher species, imprinting escalates exponentially in importance, to the point where its features lose their coherent visibility, much as we tend to miss the curvature of the earth because of its grand scale.

We must single out the role of the mother, disregarding the fact that a caregiver or mother surrogate can replace a mother's presence, for this is a secondary phenomenon, especially in wild nature where it is comparatively rare. We must also carefully observe that bonding is not a modification of ordinary thinking, for are latter would not exist if its foundation were not already in place. Just as sleep is primal, and we cannot do without it, so is bonding. We can work long hours without sleep, but we cannot dispense with it. Total sleep deprivation leads to mental incoherence in a few days. The mind disintegrates and a psychotic stage takes over. So too, nations and civilizations deprived of natural bonding on a large scale, as is occurring in the world today, will collapse and disintegrate within a few generations.

Bonding is the psychical bud that unfolds into a world and ego in the creation of a new mind, for the individual and society as a whole. The process of this regeneration, its mechanism, as displayed in the structure of knowledge and behavior, equally prescribes the mechanism at work in thought and understanding. It is the 'engine' that sustains our intelligence, logical understanding and behavior. In this we have the nucleus of a Science of Mind, capitalized because its centerpiece, the mother-infant relation is in place. It cannot be studied in the context of medical childbirth, for this begins where nature's process breaks down. Mind, however, belongs to life. Its origin is physiological, precisely invested in the natural processes of pregnancy labor and birth.

We cannot take the love of a mother for her newborn for granted; it has to be explained in context. Bonding, which is essential for the survival of the species, is as real as the species itself. It can be described _within_ a science of mind, but only as its foundation, upon which the mind itself stands. It must, therefore invoke a deeper understanding and an objective explanation. What every mother knows, subjectively in herself, must become objective knowledge for science, so that those who frame our laws, determine our institutions and condition our way of life can be intelligently guided. Birth is central to motherhood, motherhood to womankind, and womankind to every problem and accomplishment that bedecks our human world. To reverse this is to look through a telescope held back to front; it needs to be turned through 180 degrees.

Notes on the Significance of Labor and Birth

The idea that nature makes a _psychical_ preparation for birth, creating the special relation that holds between a mother and her baby should come as no surprise. We only need to think about it to realize that to be given the need is to be given the fact. It is an axiom of rationality, a categorical imperative in nature, something which _is_ , and must have been for our species to gain its 'sapiens' title.

A baby must bond to live. This is a clinical fact. Babies whose every physical life-support, such as warmth feeding changing etc., is met, but deprived of fondling, fail to thrive and succumb. The other side of this coin is that babies included in a bonding relationship develop the mental powers necessary to survival, but only to the degree, and in conformity with their actual imprinting. This can be normal or average, as in the case of children bonding to their mothers in the course of nature, or qualitatively remarkable in some notable way, such as talent or lack of expected talents. For instance, the fact that Mozart was nurtured through his first three years in his parent's living room, which also served as his father's studio, wherein he practiced _as a music teacher_ , need not surprise us. The two factors at work were this musical background, and his imprinting to his mother within this background.

The 'wolf-child', immortalized in the saga of Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of ancient Rome, is in stark contrast. A few more recent similar examples exist. Support, throwing light upon the mechanism at work in the mind's formation and function, is then given in clinical experience; for instance, children born with perfectly good but sealed eyes, the lids never having opened, remain permanently blind, unless an operation allowing light to enter the eye is performed before their third or fourth year of life.

An operation later than this does not help. As confirmed by a mass of clinical findings, this tells us, that a special formative platform is created for the mind in the first three years of life. Technically it is the psychical unconscious, upon which the subconscious and conscious stand; an otherwise silent, but directive hub, sourced in the mother-baby relation. The imprinting process ends suddenly in an inversion, creating world and ego from the antecedent faith/ love and imprint/ sense maturity attained in the baby/ mother relation at about the third year of life.

As an intensely concentrated foundation it carries human culture across the divide from one generation to the next, being the psychical side within the process of labor and birth which sustains our human kind, with its culture and civilization, upon a self-renewing psychologically stable foundation.

The process, to various stages of maturity, exists in many species, especially in birds and mammals, but to a marginal degree even in some fish, but is remarkably developed in ours, as the bridge to our humanity. Without it, our individual social and national life would lack the cohesion that sums to purpose and intelligence. We do not intuitively observe the formation of this process within ourselves, for until it is complete we lack an observation-capable mind, and once it is in place we no more see it than we see the lens system when we look through a microscope or telescope.

The Ancient Lore of Artemis and Phaenarete

Discussing the role of midwives, Socrates relates that, as he learned from his mother, Phaenarete, herself a midwife, "it is beyond the power of human nature to acquire skill without experience."

Only mothers, who alone are party to this primal experience, which they comprehend intuitively, are therefore competent to be midwives. It no more lends itself to objective communication than the colors, green yellow red etc., nor do mothers experiencing natural childbirth remember their state than we remember the renewal of mind that occurs in sleep, even though we are fully aware of it intuitively.

Sleep and birth have this in common, that they both refresh life, sleep in the daily cycle, birth in the greater cycle of the generations. Instead of drugs and operation, we need to go back to the ancient Grecian wisdom and reinstate the hegemony of Woman alongside that of Man, neither as a patriarchy nor matriarchy, but their balanced relation within coherent society. The first step is to restore obstetrics in its entirety to the direction, not of women, but of mothers, by juridical legislation. Motherhood will thus obtain legal status. In effect it will restore birth to the mother, implicitly enthroning her autonomy.

The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, and this is how it should be, but it will not come about of itself. Nor will it come about through the self-organization of mothers, organized into pressure groups, for this is far from motherhood's intrinsic role. It can only be brought about by those who are _not_ mothers, and principally, in this respect by men. Love, which is the deep foundation of intellect and truth, and is forever created in nature's process of birth, loses itself in its object. Like intellect itself, it is pure recognition of an other, or another; able to receive but not command recognition, for the moment it commands, or even requests, it is no longer pure love.

Man is the driving force of the world. Woman is the guiding force. Without a guide, drive is of no value for it destroys as readily as it builds. This arrangement exists primarily in nature, because through imprinting a mother looks out from every pair of human eyes. The political task is to recreate this natural balance in society and civilization.

Women may enjoy this station at two levels; first as women, in which role, as members of society and/ or agents in the workforce they constitute driving units like any man; but then, optionally, as mothers as well. In the latter case the matriarchal element exists, both intrinsically, as in each and every individual; but also in a summated maturity (Latin, _Matuta_ goddess of the dawn), created in nature's font of motherhood. If a nation channels its will through a ruler, as is the common way, it should also channel it through a judge, and this is the role for a presiding matriarch, empowered by a matriarchal system with veto power over all enactments.

When human intelligence places motherhood on the throne of the world its moment of maturity will have arrived, and suitable vessel for the truth of our kind, the days of folly crime violence and war, symptoms of the curse, will be numbered.
6. The Affliction of Civilization

Grantly Dick-Read, an English physician and obstetrician born in 1890, established the subject of natural childbirth upon a scientific footing within the medical environment of his day. His initiative, against the grain of orthodox thinking, was _not_ welcomed by his profession and did not survive his death. Today we must build on the value of his work and the reasons for its failure.

The term natural in 'natural childbirth', as distinct from the more prosaic normal, is from _nature_ , Latin _natura, natus_ , past participle of _nasci_ to be born. It means birth, 'according to nature'. Unfortunately for us, the human intellect is at war with nature, and in birth this state of antagonism has become an open conflict. Every social function, ordered or disordered, goes back to birth, where every individual mind-based human life-experience begins. To get something right, we need to get it right from the beginning, and here, in the foundation of mind, is the beginning of everything relevant to our experience and understanding.

Natural childbirth promoted as a goal implies that an unnatural form of birth exists. Read reasoned that birth is so fundamental that we should expect its occurrence to be simple effective and quick without pain or disorder. This contrasts sharply with the actuality now found in modern industrial civilization, where medical intervention is increasingly overtaking the natural process altogether. He called this disturbed form, cultural childbirth.

The problem seems to be that birth, in the wilds of nature across millions of years, has been groomed to meet conditions no longer encountered, but that new hazards have arisen not experienced by our progenitors. The baby gestates within the safety of the womb until a relatively advanced stage of cerebral maturity is attained. It is then born in a process that achieves a remarkable transformation in the space of a few hours. To dramatize the situation, consider the crustacea. As they grow crabs periodically change their shells. For them this is a moment of vulnerability. Suddenly bereft of their hard chitinous shells, they seek security in a rocky crevice. Now, in the wild, mammals giving birth are equally vulnerable, and this is where we come in. Mothers are driven by an instinct, as of old, to seek a place of refuge, and this instinct is present as a special state of mind. Look at it now from nature's point of view.

Nature uses labor not only to bring the baby to birth, but also to prepare the mother psychologically to receive it. In life mind guides our behavior, but 'our' unconscious is the real controller. Nor does labor and birth count as 'behavior' in this sense. It (labor and birth) created and underpins the mind, and is not subject to it.

Granted, the unconscious (so labor and birth) takes stock of what the mind can tell it, but capped by a time schedule, it drives through on a one-way program. It 'throws away' the mother's formed mind, much as crustacea throw away their shells. The womb, as a muscular organ, does not beat like the heart, or contract and relax like any voluntary muscle. In their contraction its strong muscle fibers shorten and thicken, and in the process they become relatively more powerful. They are not built to relax at all. The process can pause and stop, but has no power to relax and reverse.

Labor, when it begins, is thus a one-way street, in which transformation is designed to take place on two sides. The baby must change from placental life to air breathing, and the mother must undergo a spiritual transformation, so that the new generation of life beginning will start at the pre-drawn line that nature has set for the species.

A massive program exists for the birth and an equally massive system for stopping it, but nothing for its abatement and reversal once it has begun. Now, the arrest process, which takes the form of an unconditioned reflex, is only designed to allow the mother time to escape the danger, predator fire or flood. Nature hands the keys for invoking this reflex to the laboring mother, whose mental awareness is rapidly being stripped to that of a spiritual trance. She is shedding her shell of conditioning that the human race might be renewed, that she may become the model and architect of a new mind forming; and she is totally vulnerable. Instead of following the Artemis Phaenarete advice, modern civilization puts her in the hands of a hired blade, a fee-for-service medical profession.

### Ancient Advice and the Human in Evolution

The emergence of humanity is a turning point in all evolution. One of natures' creatures begins to see itself within the context of all being, and this, touching off language, is the origin of the human mind. The account, famously described in the third chapter of Genesis is from the oral tradition of Egyptian civilization. Moses learned it at the school of Pharaoh and transcribed it into the written form that remains today the expression about which human self-consciousness turns. We laugh at the snake and apple story, but it does not go away.

Read discovered that antenatal training can eliminate the cultural influence, and devoted his life to the study of this relation. His first observation was that familiarity and ignorance had led opinion to regard cultural childbirth as the norm for all births, and that this expectation creates the fact. The distress and damage in cultural childbirth is due to cultural tension, which triggers an unconditioned reflex whose task is to pause or stop the labor in the presence of life threatening danger. This makes sense in the wild where predators abound, but not in civilization. Read does not use this illustration, but his first small book established the _term_ natural childbirth, and his subsequent work brought it to worldwide prominence.

Taking Semmelweis as his model, he argued that in a climate of fear, medical supervision creates the disorders it treats. A vicious circle takes hold, which then drives all birth into the medical net. In this manner a new category, _medical childbirth_ is created, with an incidence of surgical delivery approaching a hundred percent, with Cesarean section multiplying into the tens and twenties of percentage, as prevails today.

In retrospect, he won the battle, but lost the war. With his death his project was buried in a tide of opposition, magnified by sheer want of understanding. His work however has created an awareness of the problem, able to survive its eclipse in a momentary defeat. Light has shone where there was none before, and a broad inchoate movement sprang up, not necessarily crediting Read's pioneering role.

However, nothing fails without cause, so we must look for the abetting influence of fault, and ask why his work succeeded under his own hand, but failed when others endeavored to reproduce it after his death. We cannot go back to square one, as if his work never existed. His original books, Editions One to Four, are out of print. The 'Fifth Edition' is a cuckoo egg, and his teachings are in danger of being lost.

### Cultural Childbirth in Focus

It is difficult to bring cultural childbirth into sharp focus because its effects are protean, nor can we stand back from it and view it in isolation. The processes that flow from birth, control the very way we think. They expand in all directions across the whole of life. Because birth founds mind, anything that disturbs the mother-infant relation casts its shadow upon all that follows. Disorders having their origin in cultural childbirth are thus ubiquitous. They can be seen everywhere and for that reason they are taken for granted on the one hand, and ascribed to a variety of causes on the other. The condition itself is overlooked, and this invisibility is its signal characteristic, as a curse.

The malign consequences of the cultural influence are central in Biblical thought. For a thousand years, along with Euclid's Elements, the Bible was the almost exclusive guide to Western thought. The cultural effect, as thus described is the first disease of our kind, an affliction of the mental state that defines us as a species. It exists in a relation with natural childbirth, in that each is seen in context of the other. Only those who know natural birth can identify and describe cultural birth, and only those who know cultural birth can, in comparison, know and describe natural birth. They are to be understood together as mutually exclusive. Each has its own social context, so that those who deal with the one tend to have little contact with the other. Those who see both, must then go further and distinguish, as they may, the disorder central to cultural birth, and the consequences that flow from it.

This disorder affects the mother in labor directly, but also the child indirectly, whose well-being depends upon successful bonding. In this way it impinges upon a succeeding generation, and in cyclic fashion carries forward into successive generations, gathering a cumulative effect as it rolls forward.

It affects birth in communities untouched by wealth and modern culture, but less severely. The relatively good experience of birth in the more populous non-industrialized nations does not count as natural birth, for we reserve that term for untroubled _birth in the presence of available, but not called medical service_ of a reasonably high standard of excellence. Compared to birth in the built-up Western metropolis, birth in such regions commands little attention. It is a natural function that each woman performs for herself. The idea that it is other than a simple natural function hardly exists.

The easy spontaneity of such births is to be distinguished from the elective natural birth attained through a specially designed training course. Those who benefit from the easy spontaneity mentioned are ignorant of the severity of the fully developed cultural affliction. They 'know' how to give easy birth, for they have done it, but they are not going to teach or preach it, for they would not know how, and they do not see themselves as possessing any special knowledge. To them it is a normal natural unremarkable process. It is like asking, "How do you breathe," when the answer is, "You just do it."

To look at this in another context, until Konrad Lorenz replaced a brooding hen by a hat, just as the chickens were hatching, that is, until he engineered something 'wrong' in nature, and observed the result, we remained ignorant of the behavioral science latent in imprinting. "It is natural," we would say, "for chickens to follow their mother." Why would they do otherwise? Until Lorenz showed that, under different circumstances they would just as readily follow a hat pulled on a string, the idea that there could be a _mechanism_ in the processes of mind and knowing never surfaced.

Cultural childbirth does not yield to empirical science, for it is not a physical entity that can be isolated for the purpose of study. It is an attitude and emplacement in the social mind, and thus impalpable and elusive. As distinct from those communities wherein a relatively easy birth is still the norm, for those wherein the disorder has taken hold, the very effort to manage it becomes its cause and trigger. What prediction can be more self-fulfilling than trouble in a birth that is conducted upon an operating table, with masked and gowned operators standing around? The scenario in short, is ludicrous, especially when the operators practice their art where no medical indication exists.

By shifting birth into the hospital and onto the operating table, modern society has conjured up the disorder it intends to relieve. Even the antenatal programs designed to contain its depredation work in reverse. Their design is dislocated from their intention. They offer an _easier_ labor and birth, where easier implies that difficult and disastrous is the norm. They provoke thereby, the disorder they profess to avoid.

The history of cultural childbirth warns those who set out to establish a different course of events, not to expect it to yield easily. Or rather, it _may_ yield easily, but if so, only in the process of creating a temporary illusion and pitfall. The subject is fraught with contradiction. The fact that a natural birth may be achieved in a careless manner, while on another occasion the most careful preparations meet with disaster, obscures the issue greatly. Conversely, when success in careful preparation is achieved with great skill, the practitioner's contribution reciprocally becomes zero. This must be written into the picture beforehand, for the achievement belongs wholly to the mother and nature alone.

It can be built into the training bias by making success depend solely upon the mother surrendering herself to her inner nature and ignoring all external influence. Great indeed, we must say, is Artemis, the goddess of labor. Credit is due to nature; no other stands besides her. The mother will see the birth properly as the expression of her own nature. Practitioners, whose true role is self-effacement, can only take credit for acting as a wall against encroachment by the social environment and its culture.

The cultural condition, inseparable from our human nature, has been with us since the beginning of civilization, but it has escalated beyond all proportion in the past two centuries, coincident with the technological revolution. In the West it is undermining the fabric of society; in the East driving communities into gender separation, paradoxically inclining to the matriarchal influence which Socrates recommended two thousand plus years ago.

It affects labor, because this is associated with the beginning of a new life, a beginning that turns the physiological clock back to a new beginning. Even in our evolution, we must perpetually begin life's cycle anew in each new generation, from a single-celled stage in the womb of the mother, and from that point proceed once again. Birth, in this repeating cycle, corresponds, not to the beginning, but to a point in evolutionary time just before our accession to the human state. The mechanics of the human mind are such that a transmission of 'living intelligence' necessarily occurs. This is initially manifest in what is known as 'oral tradition', which matures in religion, which in turn, both matures and fades away as mythology.

The cultural impact upon birth can be considered under two headings. The first is its direct impact upon the birth, converting it into something dependent and passive, a 'delivery'. To meet and understand this is to bring natural birth within reach. The second concerns the consequences that flow from this impact, through the resultant disturbed mother-infant relation, consequences that radiate throughout succeeding generations. The question arises, what is the cultural condition and why does it impinge upon birth at all?

The short answer, as given above, is that labor can proceed or stop according to nature's interpretation of the suitability of the environment. Note that it is _nature's interpretation_ ,not that of the reasoning mother, and the reason for saying this, is that if it is imputed of the mother, that _she_ stops the labor, then in the process she is dealing from the bottom of the pack, from her unconscious. This is possible, but not easy to do. It is for the rare, the courageous and brave soul, and it always requires a mental preparation, for no one challenges the fates, makes the supreme sacrifice for something they do not understand!

A clash now takes place between two possibilities, that of nature's urgency to proceed, and the mind's decision to hold or stop. The result is conflict and tension, a battle of wills, between urgency and restraint. Nature commits the decision to the state of the mother's mind, at the same time that, in its preparation for bonding, it is reducing it to the clairvoyant state of an absolute trance.

7. Read's Moment of Inspiration

Early in his career Grantly Dick Read (no hyphen in his name then) cycled through the rain to a house call in a squalid London area. Arriving wet and mud bespattered, he found a woman in labor in a room lit by a single candle. Sacks served as bed covering and rain came through a broken windowpane. Beyond the destitution, he sensed a serenity that contrasted favorably with the tension to which he was accustomed as births drew near. The only discord came when he tried to chloroform her as the baby's head was crowning. Refusing, she pushed the mask away.

Later he asked her why she had refused the mask, but we should have the reply in his own words for the moment was historical:

She did not answer at once, but looked from the old woman who had been assisting to the window through which was bursting the first light of dawn; and then shyly she turned to me and said: "It didn't hurt. It wasn't meant to, was it, doctor?" Grantly Dick Read 2nd. Ed. p.5.

This simple truth, expressed by a young mother, not as the result of hundreds of cases analytically studied, outranked the thinking of a trained obstetrician and the entire learning of the profession to which he belonged. They so impressed themselves upon his mind that they altered his understanding and belief, and eventually brought light upon a much greater scene.

In all his hospital practice he had never witnessed an undisturbed labor proceeding in peace. He knew instead the torment and agony of distressed labor, the use of drugs and the presentation of anesthesia. Early in that century, operative procedure was advancing rapidly. If the birth canal was not incised, laying it open from below, it would almost invariably be torn open from above as the mother tried desperately to stop the birth, while the labor had no option but to complete it. The profession, not understanding why, accepted this as normal. Nature's failure was its call to duty.

Influenced by the experience of Semmelweis, Read sensed that his profession was implicated in a hidden cause-and-effect relation to disordered birth. The 'Woman in Whitechapel', as he called his star patient, provided him with a peaceful model, that enabled him to see in contrast that the kind of birth he was accustomed to experiencing in the medical environment was disordered and far from nature's plan. Guided by this insight he went on to develop his theory of natural childbirth.

He reasoned that gestation and parturition had to be nature's ultimate perfection, the consummation of its purpose. It cannot have been designed to end up as an agonizing ordeal ending in failure and operative delivery! So where was it going wrong? Why were the mothers under the 'best' medical care, primarily affected? Until he had seen that significant case and been asked the incisive question: "It wasn't meant to (hurt) was it, doctor?" he could not ask that question, let alone answer it.

He now had a contrast to the births he and his colleagues were accustomed to seeing in hospital practice. These, he reasoned, were inconsistent with nature's purpose. It made no sense to him that nature would build pain and injury into a natural function, nor could he think of any other example where this was the case. The more he pondered the subject the more he became convinced that his chloroform-refusing patient had been right. Something escaping the profession's knowledge and understanding was at work in the background.

He was later to rail at his colleagues who gave routine anesthesia, declaring that few, if any could claim to have seen a baby born naturally to a fully conscious mother, and he added darkly that the financial success of obstetrics depended upon, "the agony that women would have to endure if they were not anaesthetized." Money, not intuitive reasoning was driving organized medicine.

Such statements were not calculated to endear him to the profession, but he felt committed to standing against the tide of the prevailing attitude. The attendants of mothers in labor, he declared, misinterpreted the mothers' experience and behavior. Giving thought to the nature of pain, he formulated a law:

"There is no physiological function in the body which gives rise to pain in the normal course of health." (2nd Ed., p. 17)

According to this law, pain signals a transition from physiology to pathology. Instead of being ordered, a function or condition has become disordered. Pain is physiological in itself, as valuable to us as our sight or hearing, but it points to the pathological side of the fence. His law tells us, that since birth belongs to physiology (not pathology, for if birth were a disease where would that leave life?), it is therefore, in nature's book, pain free. Pain signals that it has become derailed.

Upon whom or what did the blame rest? His law gave him a choice. If it holds, society's cultural state must be pathological, for pain and tissue damage attend upon its form of childbirth. Surgical intervention, cutting and sewing up the perineum to avoid tearing are themselves forms of damage. Instead of drawing this conclusion, he reformulated his law:

"A stimulus of fixed magnitude applied to any specific sensory receptor produces a motor response commensurate with the intensity of its interpretation." (2nd Ed., p. 20).

"Intensity of interpretation" implies that the critical element is subjective. He makes this clear by his reference to the difference between Mrs. Jones Smith and Brown. Faced with the choice of laying the blame on the culture or the laboring woman, he chooses the latter. To 'educate' her is to tell her that her ideas are wrong. To locate the fault in her 'intensity of interpretation' is, in circumlocution, to blame it upon her imagination and herself.

To tackle a pathological culture is a greater task, but necessary if it is the only way to get at the root of the problem. The woman's situation in labor is the issue, but it is not a local problem. It cannot be resolved, short of re-examining her role in society. Read did not so much side with convention, as fail to grasp the dimension of the problem. Just as the greater part of the electromagnetic spectrum is off-limit to our physical vision, and can be appreciated only in science, the cultural influence, which in civilization impinges upon birth, is off-limit to all but a religiously informed point of view. Beyond this, its detailed aspect can surface only as part of a science of mind, in which theology and science meet.

Semmelweis, a century earlier, had been expelled from his hospital position and died un-reinstated for having discovered that the unwashed hands and instruments of surgeons and midwives were spreading puerperal sepsis. Before the existence of germs was known he introduced hand washing and carbolic rinsing before examinations and operations, and it was his success, rather than the imputation of blame that fell upon his colleagues that angered them and sealed his disgrace.

Read felt the same chill wind. Through their association his obstetrical colleagues accused him of unprofessional conduct and promoting cruelty to women, but when it came to the hearing the charge was not pressed. Their court barred him from practice for a year and after that he was able to resume his pioneering work. The opposition however continued until his death, when his teachings and publications were quickly dismantled. The movement that he hoped would take off and flourish subsided and failed. We must examine his work and experience, for the path is still ahead.

### Read's Search for a Theory

Responding to the challenge of his intuition that the Whitechapel birth was nature's true model, and the cultural form a deviant, his problem was how to achieve it in an ordered way. What plan should he follow, and what should be the first step?

The answer was not self-evident. He made a careful study of birth in its medical perspective, considering the anatomy of the womb, its muscular structure, innervation and blood supply. He included a study of pain; drawing upon his wartime experience of soldiers forced to march wearing tight puttees, and discussed the problem with his colleagues, staff nurses and patients. He sat through individual labors from beginning to end, observing inquiring and exchanging viewpoints. He compared good cases with bad; noted the "unbalanced, almost maniacal behavior of women in late second stage," and drew attention to the adverse influence upon labor of husbands who "worked themselves into a frenzy." He observed that women in labor could spot doubt in their doctor's minds, "as quickly as kestrels see rats in stubble." Gradually he formulated a path and theory.

His impression in the Whitechapel case had been of serenity and relaxation, contrasting sharply with the nervous tension that reigned in the hospitals. From this he reasoned that the mothers were initially afraid. The fear gave rise to tension, and this led to disordered muscular contractions in the womb and pain. This heightened the tension, setting up a vicious circle. The drugs given to mothers to allay their nervous state led to mental confusion, torpedoing nature's plan, exacerbating the disorder and leading to a breakdown in the labor process, necessitating operative intervention.

The drugs, which included the likes of morphine and pethidine, were cause not cure. The damaging results that followed raised fear _in the minds of the attendants_ , leading them to press for greater doses and anesthesia. He focused on fear as the trigger. This was accurate, though he did not sufficiently identify and stress the peculiar form of this pathway in the long journey of practice and discovery that lay ahead of him. When he wrote his larger book, he called it, "Childbirth without Fear."

He postulated 'fear tension pain' as the mechanism; leading to more fear, more tension and more pain in a vicious circle until the labor became disordered, precipitating surgical intervention. Eventually, surgical intervention feeding upon itself engulfed all cases conducted under medical jurisdiction. According to locality this became whole nations; birth no longer natural or normal on nature's rails.

### A First Attempt Fails

Because the cycle began with fear, Read reasoned that this should be tacked first. He therefore created an educational program for his mothers, tailored to their need, which they would study before the birth. That would cover the subject for his patients, but the greater need, he saw, was a public campaign to eradicate the fear at its very origin, the misinformation and ignorance throughout the society that was feeding it. He was shortly to discover that his program, so conceived, was neither adequate nor complete.

Working on the thesis that the fear stamped upon the public mind by the ravages of puerperal sepsis a century earlier was being reactivated by his colleagues, but in another form, aided by ignorance along with the prestige and monetary benefit that attached to its prevalence, he launched his campaign.

The parallel between himself and Semmelweis was apt. Semmelweis had campaigned against unwashed hands. He was campaigning against fear in childbirth. Puerperal sepsis, caused by the 'H' or hospital bug, previously devastating, was conquered by the simple procedure of hand and instrument washing. Doctors now scrub their hands for ten to twenty minutes before donning sterile gloves gowns and masks, and if they prick a glove during the course of an operation, they discard it and don another. Puerperal sepsis is still possible, but not in its previous massive form.

Semmelweis did not know that his intuition was right until the comparative results of his hygienic practice began to appear. Read's intuition proved to be similar. In each case we have a correct surmise, and in each case an inadequate theory. Semmelweis thought that unwashed hands caused puerperal sepsis, but could not say why. Read thought that fear caused cultural childbirth, but could not say how.

The germ theory of disease only came later, when the microscope, combined with the institution of sterilization and culture plates revealed the hitherto hidden mechanism of contagion. Semmelweis's work was therefore no more than a step in the right direction. It served however to focus attention upon the opposition and hostility that every real advance in knowledge brings. Einstein, we may note, only escaped persecution because his theory was little understood in its early days, and he fled Germany in 1937. The portent of atomic energy and nuclear explosions then stunned the world.

Read examined the Bible and common prayer books to support his public campaign. He found little of comfort for his theory, but many references to the pain of childbirth. Much of his chapter on the fear of childbirth is devoted to an analysis of these statements. He reasoned about the translation of certain words, but instead of seeing them as portentous — an invitation to look at a wider horizon — he was led to declare that these ancient representations were fallacious:

When we review the Bible and the teachings of the Church, we find nothing that could give comfort or courage to women who are about to become mothers, but today a vast number of women know these ancient representations of childbirth are entirely fallacious. 4th Ed. p.107

In keeping with his view that misinformation was the problem, he deplored the sensationalism he saw in fiction and film, especially that which depicts birth as a frightful ordeal, and scores box-office receipts by having the mother die in the process.

This led him to an exchange with the writer A. J. Cronin, whose skill in such narratives was being exploited at the time to raise money for obstetric hospitals. He admonished mothers and grandmothers not to pass on their fears to their children, and all and sundry to refrain from idle gossip. He believed that talk was a virulent cause of fear in childbirth, and canvassed public support for a broad educational program covering sex and birth, oblivious of the fact that if his supposition was correct, its propagation could be counter-productive. If the problem began and ended there, his task, like ordering the waves of the ocean to retreat, would have been hopeless. The cause is deeper, and of such a nature as to make it almost insuperably difficult, _but at the same time possible._

Meanwhile he conducted classes for his own patients. The question is; how did they fare? His program was systematic education, comprising lectures, group discussions, wall charts and slides covering all aspects of pregnancy and birth. It was a miniature medical course and its intention was to inform, enlighten and dispel fear.

Acquiescing in his belief that birth should not, in theory, be trial by suffering, his patients responded enthusiastically. They cooperated in his educational effort. So much was rational. However, when the months passed and it came to the test, the result was failure. It did not work.

As soon as labor commenced, the accepted principles upon which it was conducted actually produced a state of tension in the body. 2nd Ed. p.78.

In other words, he drew his bow, released the arrow and it missed the target altogether. His course of intensive education acted in reverse, bringing about what he was trying to avoid. Something in the mind he could sense, but not grasp had, "swept aside every good intention," precipitating cultural birth.

It is easy enough in retrospect for us to see that education is a form of domination, the very thing that causes the problem in the first place, but in fact the nullity of the result was a valuable step forward. He did not abandon his theory, but sought to improve it. Moving on, he made the second step in his fear tension pain triad the target, adding relaxation to his educational program.

### Failure turns into Success

His theory was the triad of fear tension and pain. His program had targeted only fear. He now targeted the tension as well, utilizing the relaxation techniques developed by Edmund Jacobson of Boston, U.S.A. This was a course in muscular relaxation. In the months before the labor, his mothers now practiced Jacobson's deep relaxation.

When the testing time came and these mothers began to give birth he was astonished. They flowed through their deliveries. He had recreated his 'Woman in Whitechapel' experience.

His patients would not have been astonished, for the mothers individually would know in themselves that labor and birth are natural in nature. Once they found the manner and environment wherein to manage it, there was no cause for wonderment. It simply fell into place as their natural function. Only obstetricians and occasional mothers, despairing of a natural/ normal result have room for astonishment. Grantly Dick Read was astonished, for natural childbirth had fallen into his lap.

For the first time, he declared, he could study the process of labor in its true light, understanding it in its natural form. Within two years he had good reason to believe that his theory was fully vindicated. The majority of the women whose labors had been conducted in accordance with his method developed an entirely new attitude to birth. This was indeed gratifying.

His detailed course thereafter will not concern us. Accumulating experience confirmed his success. His ideas were accepted in ever-widening circles, imitated and changed, but ever making headway. But as soon as he died, the movement he had initiated lost its direction and collapsed.

I was not aware of this backlash when I set out to trial his ideas, for the 5th Edition had not at that time reached me. I accepted maternity patients for natural delivery and expanded my own training program, based on his teachings as I could divine them from the 2nd Edition over the course of three or four years. My caseload steadily increased, but in no sense was I promoting a cause. I just performed the work to the best of my ability, not questioning the effectiveness of his method. My own program was uniquely distinct. It involved no 'education', but added a program of incrementally increasing challenge to the mother's relaxation, and in the births it 'worked' in case after case. I had just begun to write it up, along with case histories, intending to send it to him, when I learned of his death, and with astonishment the news that his method, subjected to a dedicated trial in England, had been shown _not to work_.

Knowing that it _did_ work, I read the account with skepticism. I could see that the authors of the posthumous 'Fifth Edition', which should not have purloined his title, had missed the point. They were his colleagues, supposed to be putting his teachings into practice. The fact that they reported failure was sufficient evidence in itself that they had not grasped his teachings. In summary, Read's methods were successful, but his endeavor to pass them on was not.

If anything is to be learned from this, it is that the difficulty inherent in the subject is not to be underestimated. Many people in independent endeavors have achieved success in natural birth from time to time. The difficulty is to know what brings it about. Others invest energy and intention and unexpectedly fail. Because Read's initiative failed upon his death, it too must be criticized, for only in criticism can hidden defects be brought to light and the work made good. This will be studied in the pages ahead.

On the clinical side, I had no problem with Read's theory or instruction. I seemed to have caught the spirit, if not the letter of his intention. Only when his work lost its direction did I realized that I would have to begin reviewing it with particular care, in order to understand the reason behind the course of events. My attention gradually focused upon the combination of his insight, dedication and medical knowledge fortuitously present in the one individual. I came to see that whereas the required results were possible, the cultural influence had won the day as soon as that combination ceased to exist. The mothers, who in nature would have the purpose and insight, lacked the authority. The Authorities lacked the insight and disparaged the will to pursue it. It resolved therefore into a social and economic issue, and the cultural influence, holding the whole of society in its grip, had proved to be too strong.

It is not a social problem in the ordinary sense, for it afflicts, or potentially afflicts all humanity. As this dimension began to reveal itself to me I was daunted and discouraged until I accepted the finding. I would just have to set the whole thing aside, at least in the meantime. The key to the problem is correct knowledge, and the downturn simply meant that we had part, but not all of the answer.

8. Success turns into Failure

In his lifetime Read's 'Childbirth without Fear' ran to four editions in eighteen reprints selling over half a million copies. After his death a Fifth Edition appeared, edited by specialist colleagues. They had intended to continue his work carrying on his tradition, having at their disposal the best of facilities in the hospital he himself had pioneered. They could not reproduce his results and had to report failure.

Not taking this as a reflection upon their competence, or oppositely upon Read's results, but a judgment handed down by history, it casts a shadow upon the whole subject as presented and taught by Read. His method worked when he was alive to monitor its progress and answer criticisms, but failed immediately after his death, when colleagues, appointed to continue his work, could not do so.

Instead of writing their own book, the Editors amended Read's teachings, substituting their own views, thus destroying the subject he had taught. The essential Read was buried, but it is still present in his out-of-print writings. Taking their criticisms as valid, we must now review his original work in terms of the supposed errors.

The first thing to establish is that there was indeed a failure to reproduce Read's results. The "Childbirth without Fear," 5th Edition Editors wrote:

"Dr. Dick-Read in his original text was very definitely against the common modern practice of episiotomy and we feel it necessary to offer some advice which is contrary to the original text. We refer to the practice of episiotomy which means cutting the tissues to allow the birth of the baby to be easy, rather than taking the risk of tearing, sometimes unavoidable, and sometimes leading to irrevocable damage to the soft tissues of the outlet of the vagina." 5th Ed. p. 75

This presents episiotomy in 20th century England as 'common and modern'. Their advice is not rational, but they present it as such. Anything that allows a birth to be 'easy' must recommend itself to men of good will, even if it is cutting open the vagina. Practiced on females and sewn up again it is good training for young doctors and remunerative for the profession. A cut is better than a tear. It secures 'control' and demonstrates the superiority of modern medicine. Read was _definitely_ against it, so we should look at it a little more closely.

### Episiotomy

The Editors call episiotomy controlled relaxation. Grantly Dick-Read would have been amazed at the verbal, if not manual dexterity. It is certainly an incision of the perineum and it directs nature, telling it where and how to tear (for the birth is not satisfied with the initial cut). The substitution is blasphemous. Jacobson too, with whom I corresponded, would have been amazed. Relaxation is required for a natural birth, but episiotomy is not relaxation at all. The Editors say:

On many occasions, with well prepared patients we have endeavored to avoid tearing of the tissues but only rarely have we succeeded and sometimes the results of attempted avoidance, even in labors conducted with the most scrupulous care and by the most dedicated attendants, fully versed in the principles of natural childbirth and with patients fully trained in those principles have resulted in tearing of tissues which could have been avoided if a carefully considered episiotomy had been carried out.

This sentence says that an episiotomy can forestall a tear. To which they add:

We feel most strongly that episiotomy, which means controlled relaxation of the tissues surrounding the outlet of the vagina, carried out with the assistance of local anesthetic is desirable in many first confinements. 5th Edition. p. 75

Had they gone onto the street and gathered a small group of mothers of large families, beyond their childbearing age, as Phaenarete, through Socrates, stipulates, and asked them to conduct their 'well prepared patients' through their labors, they would have achieved the Readian result they so vainly sought.

They say 'many first confinements', but the independently published episiotomy rate in England at the time was a hundred percent. Relaxation is essential as the baby is born, but it has to be _physiological_ , in harmony with nature's process. An episiotomy, although later neatly sewn up, heals by scarring. The mother's tissue, which they say should be incised, is elastic. It is composed of _elastin_ , the same virtually infinitely elastic tissue that in the walls of arteries allows them to expand and contract with the pulse, without failure throughout a lifetime. The collagen scar involved in its healing will _not_ expand or give way in subsequent births.

Nor does the incision make the birth _easy_ , any more than a Cesarean section, carried out upon an unconscious mother. To call it _controlled relaxation_ is deception. Episiotomy, from Greek - _tomia_ cutting, is another name for perineotomy. The perineum is the tissue between the vulva in front and the rectum behind, but the cut, directed diagonally away from the rectum, is said to spare it from the tear. Well, it just might, but the whole thing is very rough. The incision is through the skin and vaginal tissues, including the deep fatty and muscular layers that are pushed down in the process of the birth. Nature has designed these tissues to expand, but also, in emergency, to hold against the ongoing birth. In cultural childbirth this ' _also_ ' is invoked, triggered by what the mother's unconditioned state determines is an inimical environment.

'Pudenda' from Latin _pudeo_ to feel ashamed, refers to the external genitals, but why the shame? The answer, God help our modern civilization, is a social equation, which has something to do with the presence of men predators and strangers.

It is the curse of Eve. "Man and Woman were naked and not ashamed" (Ge. 2:25). Their accession to a higher form of knowledge, albeit humanity, is followed by shame, fear and hiding from God's presence, which is cultural childbirth.

In the maturity of technological development the product has seized the producer. Man, in the form of a skilled operator has seized the citadel of Woman's nature, the process of giving birth. This intrusion upon her God-given role is the final indignity. Are there not enough women in the world, who following the advice of Phaenarete under Artemis, are capable of managing obstetrics in its every aspect and entirety?

If Man is the might of the world Woman as mother is its light. The mother, as matriarch, holds the answer to the crisis that afflicts our tortured society. The central figure about which civilization revolves is not man but woman, who is the hub of its universal relationship, that between a mother and her newborn.

Parturition brings a baby to birth, and in the birth a new mind is conceived. The nine months in the womb, given to physical gestation, is followed by a similar time in the mother's arms, and this is the _psychical gestation_ of mind in terms of its imprinted foundation. Cultural childbirth is the eye of the hurricane of human social disaster.

Episiotomy, literally _cutting the shame_ , imposed upon all mothers giving birth in the hospitals of industrialized society, is a Cesarean section performed upon the external outlet. Shame and fear derails nature's process. Instead of correcting the cause, life's first sacrament is violated and the outcome is cultural childbirth. Surgery then compounds the disaster on the path to destroying the society within which it (surgery) has evolved. There is no sense in it. As an obstetrician and physician Read's insight was correct. However, the problem is greater than he saw, and its correction requires a revolutionary change in our social outlook. Man needs to step back from the birth chamber. Let ancient writings stand, but also this question, did Paul advance Christianity or derail it in the commotion that arose over Artemis of the Ephesians? (Acts 19:27 ff).

Cultural childbirth afflicts human society still in transition, which has not yet found its destiny. Beyond its horizon, but 'in its image', we find psychosomatic disease, being a host of conditions, that, partly mental, partly physical, single out our human kind. There is a relation therefore, between the woman in labor in an obstetric hospital who cannot give birth, and an individual surrounded by air who cannot breathe (as in asthma). The social mental and cultural conditions that impinge harmfully upon birth also impinge upon health. In a fully mature and balanced society they would have no hold over us.

The Editors of the posthumous Fifth Edition were qualified obstetricians chosen to continue Read's work in charge of the obstetric hospital he left behind. It they had set out to fail they could not have done so more profoundly. Their work compares to that of the Committee appointed by the French Academy of Science to evaluate Mesmer's work on animal magnetism. Unable to comprehend the results, they found against Mesmer, but mesmerism lives on, while they are remembered only through their negative association with it, through him. The time is come to see that mind, and psychical knowledge, as against physical, is the sun about which science turns, and that Woman, not Man is central in this relation.

Those who wish to command natural childbirth by imposing conditions upon it will never succeed, because it does not lend itself to control or fit into a standardized pattern. Some mothers make extraordinary efforts and fail, while others achieve it without trying. Neither of these groups can provide the answer; for those who fail are not qualified, and those who achieve are not aware of having done anything but abandon themselves to nature's process. As a participant on the medical side Read was able to see both, first in terms of his original orthodoxy, and later within the context of his intuitive understanding. It is our task to fathom his success, and the failure that then overtook it immediately upon his death.

The editors of the Read's so-called Fifth Edition assumed, that because they were technically qualified and had set out to achieve natural childbirth, they had achieved it, and that where they deviated from Read's teaching and program, they were right, and he was wrong. To be natural, birth had to fit their findings, not some pattern of its own. It is as if a qualified team sent out to find gold could only find pyrite, and to validate their expertise, or some other tongue-in-cheek reason, insisted that the definition of gold be changed. If birth under their hands required operative means, that must be natural for humans.

Episiotomy is more than a hundred years old, but they saw it as a "modern innovation." Well, to apply it routinely, a hundred percent might fit that definition! It is the first step in forceps extraction, but rarely used in the home environment, where up to the early 20th Century the vast majority of births occurred. At that time less than two percent of births worldwide took place in hospitals. The situation then rapidly reversed, as we may now note in the case of China.

### The Chinese Experience

When the Communist Party of China swept into power in 1949, two decrees were promulgated. One was that women should have as many children as possible for the sake of the motherland (a counsel soon reversed). The second was that, beginning in the cities, all births were to be conducted in hospital. Until then, home birth was the norm, attended by the family elders. In a short time, less than the planned ten years, birth for a quarter of the world's population had been shifted into the hospital environment.

Traditionally, mothers, upon giving birth were themselves 'mothered' by the family. For four weeks they were not required to perform any work but were waited on hand and foot, so that they could give their full attention to feeding and caring for the baby. Breast-feeding was then routine for a year. A peculiar phenomenon was then noted. The nation had taken 'a giant step forward'. Birth responded by taking two 'giant steps' back. The first step back was that breast-feeding stopped. The second was that almost all births became first births. Hardly any mothers went on to a second or third, a trend soon supported by a decree requiring single-child families.

At the same time, routine episiotomy became universal, as in the technically advanced countries. Teams were organized who did nothing else but cut perineums. Officially, the months respite from all work, and a year of breast-feeding was endorsed, but the latter's duration fell, against the order, from a year to a week.

The newly trained barefoot doctors were perplexed. Enthusiasm for the hospital way was high. The plan was to secure the advantage of modern technology but still retain that which was recognized as beneficial in the old. All mothers attended antenatal courses. These stressed the importance of breast-feeding, and instructed them upon how to do so. They were then sent home for their month's rest, to breast-feed and report back at the end of the month. When they did so, they invariably reported that they had stopped breast-feeding.

Seeking the cause, the doctors found many reasons. The mothers were obedient. They agreed with the instructions, and wanted to follow them, but their milk dried up. In discussion, some blamed the water, others the air. Some said it was the food, and others thought it was due to infection, colds and flu. However, when the doctors came to think it out they realized that none of these things had changed since 'before the liberation'. Finally, the doctors blamed themselves. They were so busy with episiotomies and other operations that they had no time to spend with the mothers and remind them to breast-feed!

It never occurred to them that breast-feeding is built into nature, and that it does not depend upon instruction from men, or young doctors of either sex. They overlooked the fact that mandatory hospitalization had dragooned motherhood to its final subjugation, depriving labor and birth of its last stronghold, the home and family environment. Their enforced procedures trampled the spirituality of birth under foot, robbing it of its autonomy and destroying mother baby bonding. Episiotomy came in the door and breast-feeding flew out the window. They blamed the mothers who reported that their breast milk had dried up in the words, "You are too late now comrade. You should have reported it earlier."

### Read and the Genesis of Mind

In Read's theory, cultural childbirth is ascribed to an escalating cycle of fear tension and pain. This can be accepted as a first approximation, but it needs to be extended. The mind is a three-tier structure, with conscious subconscious and unconscious levels. In conscious life, all three are simultaneously operative in a transparent unity, where 'transparent' indicates that, though logically all are present, they work as one. Sleep, however, is a process wherein the mind surrenders its higher consciousness, and turns through the subconscious to the reassertion of a mindless or relatively unconscious state.

Life is an ever-repeating cycle of the three mental states, wherein we are commonly aware of the rotation between waking and sleeping. We go from consciousness, through the subconscious into the unconscious, and back again. If we say that 'being awake' and 'being asleep' are two fundamental states, with a third — which we identify as a subconscious lying between them — we have to say that this is only the beginning of our understanding of the mind, and that in labor we will meet a further mental relationship of supreme importance.

Read was aware of the broad outline based on his clinical experience. Thus he describes the mother's changing consciousness in labor, speaking of her 'reduced consciousness.' To this he variously links the terms maniacal strange and unbalanced. He mentions the Biblical reference to the mother's 'moment of forgetfulness', and refers repeatedly to her 'increased susceptibility to all forms of suggestion,' but he does not build these into a working sequence and structure. It is not easy to see how this can be done.

Labor has its own state of mind, intent upon one result, the coming birth. It retains the moment of consciousness, but entirely focused in service to nature's supreme goal, the successful emergence of a new life. To this end it is now wholly subordinated, even as its surface conscious element is progressively diminished.

The mothers themselves cannot report this, any more than we can report the mental processes at work within us in deep sleep, or passengers in totally enclosed vehicles can report upon their relative motion. The mother's consciousness has become a passenger in a foreordained sequence. Conversely, observers overlook this, just as they overlook the mental evolution at work in the newborn baby, and it thus remains a hidden factor in the labor and birth. To the casual observer, women in labor are conscious, and this is so, but the conscious in labor is directly in tow to life's controlling power. Highly focused, it is not its usual calculating and otherwise free multifaceted self.

Not everyone has spent sufficient time with laboring women in order to understand its distinctive states, and still fewer, in the presence of those who have not been given drugs that alter its presentation. Many observers have reported these changes, but mostly in anecdotal form. The fact that they exist has acquired a diffuse presence in the public mind. For instance, describing his attendance upon his wife when she was giving birth, comedian Bill Cosby recounted that, "she suddenly told everyone in the theatre that my mother and father were not married."

The burst of laughter that followed, 'getting the joke', indicated that his audience was sympathetically aware of the implicit significance, that women in labor are prone to expressions of a strangely pertinent, but otherwise illogical nature, something plucked out of the mind's depth. If the sympathy were not there, the euphemism would not have turned into laughter. Many clinicians have remarked upon this identifiable characteristic of the labor state. Their reports, taken together, show the strangeness, and more than this, the variety in it, mirroring its particular setting.

Read describes an initial state of exhilaration just prior to the beginning of labor, an elevation of mood and enhanced consciousness. As the first stage progresses a gradual change takes place beneath the surface of consciousness. This 'surface' — our ordinary consciousness — remains, but the _conditioning_ that informs and supports it is steadily diminishing, until at the onset of the second stage it deepens into tranquility. By conditioning, after Pavlov, we are to understand the protective shell of response we acquire as we grow up within the context of life's vicissitudes. Like the subconscious, which peeps in the twilight zone of sleep, labor's second stage is intermediate, a transitional state, in parallel with, but not identical to the ordinary subconscious.

Once the second stage begins, compulsive pushing, reinforcing the intrinsic uterine action may occur. The interaction between conscious and subconscious/ unconscious forces ceases and the physical action of birth takes over. The mother's conscious state 'rheostats down' but maintains its external orientation. Her state in labor therefore retains the balance we attribute to consciousness, while in focus and depth it is being steadily subordinated to the determination of birth. Then, in late second stage there is a momentary recession into absolute unconsciousness equivalent to deep sleep. This is the biblical 'moment of forgetfulness', wherein her sense of self and world is lost altogether, the bonding-potent spiritual moment that completes in birth.

The new mind, not yet the baby's mind but its foundation, is conceived simultaneously on both sides, that of the baby and the mother. In the baby it is the initiation of a future individual mind. In the mother it is life's renewal of the social mind. In the baby, if we concentrate upon its pure state, we see it as faith, there subsisting as imprinting. In the mother, the same, expressed in the context of a mature mind, is love. The sides join, and in this way mind spans the generations without interruption.

Labor is thus life's renewal, just as sleep is every individual mind's renewal. The mother's love for her baby becomes, through imprinting, the spiritual element in consciousness, which in its developed form is our sense of knowing a world. The progressive attenuation in consciousness, leading to the moment of forgetfulness, is _physiological_. It belongs supremely to life sanity and health. It is not a deviation in nature's intended course. There are other set pieces, model states of mental existence. The trance of hypnosis can be mentioned as one, and again the 'near death' experience, but there are only three primal states; awake asleep and the elemental state now described, as proper to, and finding expression in labor and birth.

We customarily suppose that our conscious state is an entity in its own right, for our perpetual viewpoint resides in it, but actually it is a composite, a 'three-in-one' and in itself a third. Sleep is before it, and the primal or elemental state that surfaces in labor is before that again, and all subtend conscious expression. Each is physiological in the full sense of the term. Each is a _component_ in the mind's overall function, and each is infinitely rehearsed and so suited exactly to its purpose. The rehearsed states can be described as resultants.

Rehearsal here refers to states that come into play in successive generations and are therefore run time and time again in successive life cycles; sequences that repeat over and over on the evolutionary pathway. For an example of such a state, other than that active in labor, consider starvation. The body interprets the cessation of nourishment as life threatening and invokes a strategy to meet it. This seems to have little in common with labor, but comparison reveals parallels; for instance, in both the conscious is up front, but in both it is actually in tight leading strings to the unconscious.

### Starvation

The response to starvation, deeply set in the organism, is independent of whether the cause is famine (involuntary), or fasting (voluntary). The first is beyond the control of the conscious mind; the second is within it. Fasting individuals are subject to the response, even though they know that they could break the fast at any time, but the unconscious nevertheless assumes total control within the shell of consciousness. Its survival plan includes many adjustments, some available to introspection, others such as blood sugar and multiple cellular parameters, only to laboratory investigation. Prominent amongst the former is quietude of body and mind, which conserves energy behind the tranquility of a pervasive supreme but quiet vigilance.

Energy is conserved. All unnecessary activity, bodily and mental, is cancelled, but not the alert vigilance that holds the subject able to seize any opportunity to end the fast should circumstances change, or the famine should food become available. Bodily activity is damped, but the mind remains as focused and reflective as ever.

The conscious mind's decision is respected to the end. In labor, two imperatives are synchronously locked together. Just as in life, body and mind constitute the essential sides within intelligence, labor's two sides are physical, the harmonious separation of two bodies hitherto intimately joined, and psychical, their reunification in bonding. An exchange takes place. The physical unity between the mother and baby yields. It is surrendered, and a physiological/ psychological unity takes its place, and this is the _foundation_ of mind, essential to human existence. We are dealing at once, therefore, with the origin of mind, both in the life cycle and our species existence.

Birth is a separation and joining, the harmonious unification of the two sides mentioned. The opposed processes (separation and reunification), are complementary. Only _together_ do they constitute a whole. Those who do not, and especially those who cannot understand this, simply should not be in the birth chamber. The term, 'spirituality', refers to the perceived unity of these radically distinct sides.

In labor, a _physiological_ manifestation, which in its maturity will prove to be the higher state of mind proper to all humanity, namely its constitutive foundation, makes its first appearance. In spiritual maturity, which is the realization of our inherent potential, and is thus our proper destiny, we but regain a state of mental balance that previously existed in babyhood. The state of mind manifesting in labor, birth and motherhood is a stepping-stone between the two; that is, between the initial natural, and the later developed spirituality, and as such the state manifest in labor is a form of spirituality in its own right.

The threat of death conditions the mental state during starvation, regardless of the latter's cause. The promise of a new life similarly conditions the mental state during labor. This is the comparison. The lesson is that the elemental state operative in labor and birth, which has its own in-built program, eclipses and governs the state of conscious knowledge that remains on sentry standby. It is an error therefore, and a gross error to suppose that this conscious state conforms to that which obtains in ordinary life. The boot is on the other foot. Life conforms to it, for it comes before, and is therefore senior. Its manifestation is that of God in the world, and our failure to comprehend this ushers in the curse of our kind, cultural childbirth.

In labor and birth mind's original foundation comes forward without condition, holding consciousness as a passive window on the environment, its only question being whether the latter is favorable for the birth to go ahead or not. The phenomenon of cultural childbirth in this context manifests as a condemnation of the state of society altogether, telling us that the social environment is _not_ favorable.

9. To Allow or Stop the Labor?

The onset of labor subordinates the mother's conscious mind to the task of monitoring the suitability of the environment for birth, not according to any conditioned standard, but in unconditioned and unconditional evaluation. It is placed upon an all alert, with access to every mental resource, at the same time as its conditioned or learned basis is being steadily vacated. Another way of explaining this is to say that, in preparing for the mental spring-clean that is bonding, the unconscious comes forward in its primal state. The higher consciousness is maintained, but only as a sentry on duty, the mind's former station of rational liaison with its world, maintained as a passive reflection on the suitability of the environment as its acquired conditioning is effaced, and the moment approaches when all such liaison will be established anew.

The process carries the species-mind across the gap between the generations in terms of its inner genetic patterns and its outer developed environment alike, and this is nature's greatest triumph. Through it we are human, and in it we experience our greatest exposure and liability. Here, Pandora's box, alternatively known as the Fall, comes into view as cultural childbirth, our human nature acting against itself. Threatened by our own technological competence, we now, as a species, tread a path between error and destruction, which we see or appreciate as evil and insanity. The only way out of this hall of mirrors is ahead. We must unravel the problem and push our knowledge to the limit in order to find the answer to our parlous state.

Exploring our vulnerability first, the threat of death stands before us, for nature knows predators. Our responsive or nervous system is our answer to threat, but in labor and birth the need to establish bonding comes to the fore. Physical and psychical needs are equally important, but the non-contingent positive factor (the establishment of bonding), takes precedence in determining whether the birth faces a green light or red. Finally, giving birth takes precedence over stopping it. Unfortunately, the presiding unconscious lacks the ability to tell the difference between life in a primordial jungle and civilization.

Three primordial states of mind, which normally succeed and build upon one another, rotate, and in labor the first of these, which otherwise remains in the background, comes to the fore. Instead of appearing transiently, or not at all except as an interface, it remains on duty throughout the labor. This deep foundational or primal state, the essence of conscious life itself (which latter is nothing else than consciousness), corresponds, as a state of mind, to the unconscious. In evolutionary perspective it is prior to, and therefore deeper than the conscious, just as sleep is prior to being awake.

We can see this in the fact that human awareness is relatively recent in the totality of life forms. It is merely tens of thousands of years old within the greater span of millions. The subconscious, commonly regarded as the mind proper, is itself an interface, which mediates between the primordial unconscious (whose objectivity is matter) and the conscious. The latter, compounded on itself, is self-conscious mind. However, the primal or elemental state that presided over labor and birth is senior to consciousness, and therefore to mind as a whole.

The state that presents in labor and birth, as the mind's primal or physiological form, is in maturity once again the highest state of mind. As birth and death manifest in cyclical progression, so do states of mind. The mental process in labor is as essential to birth as matter in the form of the body is essential to intelligent life. Birth, as a physical separation of bodies, which coincidentally reunite in a psychical union, is life's transitional moment, its jump from one generational cycle to the next, and this is the template of religion, according to its Latin stem, ' _re_ \+ _ligare_ ' to bind back again. Religion in turn is the foundation of social mind. The word for spirituality, sensed objectively by a third party not immediately involved, or pure subjectivity viewed objectively, is sacred, from which, as a stem, the term sacrament arises, indicating religion's foundation.

Spiritual maturity, as the realization of inherent potential, is every individual's proper destiny. In it we regain the state of mental balance that first existed in fetal life, and then took form, by imprint, in babyhood. We climb life's highest peak, only to find that our mother was there before us. The elemental state of mind that presides over labor, initiating birth and motherhood, is the nucleus of the balance in mind that in humanity's formative step carried it over the threshold from its prehuman, to its later evolved spiritual existence, a sequence re-established in the life cycle of every individual mind.

### Read's Theory Revisited

Read attributed cultural childbirth to the cycle of fear tension and pain. He identified fear as the primary cause and principal factor, but fear is only an emotion, though, next to love it is the primary emotion, commanding retreat. Love combines identification and attraction; fear discrimination and repulsion. However, as an emotion, fear assigns the blame to those who fear, namely the mothers. In order to distance himself from this imputation, Read shifted the blame to those whom he felt were responsible for spreading the fear, namely to those who, in gossip, alarmist stories and movies etc., spread misinformation.

The fact however, is that hearsay, no matter how alarmist, is superficial. It is stored as a reference in the conditioned intelligence, and the mother in labor is already beyond this level. Read's own experience proved this, for the complete educational course he provided for his mothers failed. They studied pregnancy labor and birth in a medical setting, heard his opinions and beliefs, listened to his explanations and insights, and still, when their time came they experienced cultural childbirth.

He then added Jacobsonian relaxation to his program and this brought the results he sought. He did not however, abandon his belief in education, but kept it in place, adding relaxation as an afterthought. However the equanimity that goes with relaxation is the goal, and to realize this, he should have relegated education to a supportive role for the mainstream product, the mental quietude and indifference that goes with undisturbed total relaxation. The phrase, to 'play possum' describes it well.

Had he done this, centralizing relaxation as the hub about which all else turned, his program might well have survived his death, for the thought seems inescapable that, had he got it right, it would have been transferable. Its failure indicated that, in its constitution or presentation something was out of place.

His experience showed him that relaxation training is pivotal. Omit it, and the sought results vanish. The required step then, was to dismiss the educational aspect altogether, except as a referential context, for it belongs to the aggressive confrontational side of competitive life. He left it in place however, a foothold for its future collapse, for he had built his theory upon it, reasoned as follows:

1/. Cultural childbirth is due to fear.

2/. Fear of childbirth arose from the devastating mortality associated with puerperal fever in hospital deliveries a hundred years earlier. Mothers were so afraid of the hospitals that they would stop and give birth under a bush before going in.

3/. The fear is kept alive by alarmist news media and hearsay.

4/. To end the fear, the media, and even the Bible should be muzzled.

5/. Success accrued to his program when he added deep relaxation.

Because of his belief in the potency of sensationalist propaganda spread by the mass media and the attitude of the medical profession, Read never saw past it to the more generalized loss of autonomy that accrues to women in a patriarchal world. Cultural childbirth measures this deprivation, upon which the havoc of routine surgical intervention stands.

Education in the usual sense implies teachers instilling pre-packaged knowledge into children and young people. As such it is coercive and contraindicated in antenatal training, which is designed exactly as a corrective for this unwanted social control and dominance. For just as sleep leaves the mind's conditioned content _behind_ in the twenty-four hour cycle, so natural birth leaves the mind's conditioned state as such behind in the seventy year life cycle. In it humanity is born, stepping away from the beast, but also failing, at least so far, to regain the shore of a higher life. Read became keenly aware that the attitude and activities of the mother's attendants compulsively influence her state in labor, but he did not carry this insight to its conclusion.

We have to address, not the content of mind, its educational stuffing, but the mind itself. An antenatal program implies the ideal of a natural labor. The mother does not need to be able to recite the nerve supply of the uterus, go through a pocket edition of the medical course or study wall charts of the pelvic organs. Let anyone learn or teach this who wills; it is superfluous to the task of acquiring insight into the nature of spiritual autonomy through experience.

Mothers would arrive at my antenatal courses thinking that they were going to be educated, and for this reason they were highly apprehensive. They would raise a hundred points, defensively seeking an argument, or querulous, polite and tight-lipped indicate exactly the suppressed agitation that needed to be shed. An education was in view, but not in the manner they expected.

I had arranged my course, after Read, to teach mothers how to work around the social aggression embedded in our modern culture, with never a thought for education, especially the drip-feed variety dispensed in systematic schooling. This may have been because I never liked it myself, or it may have been because I recalled the easy labor of an islander woman who failed to respond to the instructions she was given by medical and nursing staff, because she did not understand a word of English. Not responding to their anxiety, which would only aggravate it, I would answer that the best way to understand the program was to experience it. This could be done in a few minutes. Would they lie down, relax and neither move nor saying anything. I would then say, "Start," and wait patiently, without myself stirring or saying anything for a full two minutes. Then I would say, "That's it."

Given this simple experience their anxiety would be gone. A few words would suffice to bring the interview to a close. They would realize that the course is not a matter of being educated, but shedding conditioning, something they would sense as correct the moment they experienced it, and they would return later for their first session.

The truth of the subject however, lies in another direction. It is that the mother, _and those around her at the birth_ must learn to behave in a special way. Conversely, just as academic education is useless for the result intended, positive training in non-response, for them still to come, is essential. Without it, the endeavor to engineer a natural birth is doomed to failure. _Unless the mother undergoes a correctly designed training course, or acquires the needed knowledge in some other way, her expectation of a natural birth will be in vain._

'Some other way' here can mean association, meditation or a prior good birth. Two observations apply. The first is that it is essential to include the mother's intended birth help in the training; the second is that she must practice the required drills. Talks teaching and instruction of the kind useful for passing exams are irrelevant in the preparation for a natural childbirth.

Running instructors know that they must get their subjects out there on the track. They have to run, not spend their time learning the actions, attachments and innervations of the leg muscles. Nothing is lost if they want to do this, but nothing is gained either. There are many aspects and factors to take into account, and every applicant must be assigned a course appropriate to her situation. Training bites within weeks and within months the expectant mother becomes an imperturbable block against provocation; able to relax profoundly without responding overtly or with neuromuscular tension to anything her associates may throw at her to upset her equanimity. They try to break her resolve and composure. She strives to ignore the challenge of their opinions, remarks, questions, instructions and orders without succumbing to the least tension, and this resilience is the essence of the program.

She is not told what to think. The intent of the lesson is self-implied. No one tells her that she must 'help' the labor by bearing down, and it would not matter if they did, for every social influence is 'fair game' for mock challenge and derision, and her role is to take no notice. The lesson is that if she can relax, Nature and her own powers, quite competent, will do the job for her.

The main planks of the program are practice, reaching a professional standard in relaxation and developing immunity to chatter and challenge. The goal, natural childbirth is fixed, and the path is equally sure, to be free of drugs, starting with tea and coffee, against which the mind has no defense. Given these conditions and agreements, her bystanders, who will be with her at the birth, endeavor to break down her equanimity. The process is stressed relaxation. It takes the form of a contest, and the course succeeds to the degree that the mother becomes able to remain relaxed in the face of commotion. Conversely, her helpers, who lose if they win, become aware of the impact of their attitude speech and behavior. That which disrupts her poise, equilibrium and self-control will equally disrupt the birth. Training scores 1, teaching scores 0.

Every session is a rehearsal for labor and birth when it comes. Drills will anticipate possible contingencies and guide the mother to meet them in advance. When we talk to people, especially when we 'instruct and educate', we expect them to sit up and take notice. However, this only reinforces the cultural influence instilled by our disciplinary civilization, which comes to the fore disruptively as cultural childbirth.

Natural childbirth training has to nurture a quality that is already there, something to be invoked, not instilled. The mother to be must discover the wellsprings of her self-assurance within herself. Throwing off her conditioning she must submit her mind to the will of Artemis, the goddess of birth, and in obedience to her become independent of the social graces, expected responses, innuendo and chatter of onlookers, resisting intemperate advice and interference, responding only as her inner nature commands.

Nothing in the training is specific; everything is generalized. Read endeavored to exclude fear, but shame, 'hiding from god' opens the door to fear in the first place. These attitudes, the compact of shame and fear, are contagious, and they exist in the minds of those standing around. In labor the walls come down. The mother's environment _becomes_ her mind. We do not experience shame and fear when asleep, neither does the mother in labor discern the conditions around her, unless by 'discern' we mean that they become her mind. If their import is inimical, her body tenses against the birth, and this tensing is the hallmark of cultural childbirth. Nature is the benchmark, the reality and the staging.

Read mentions a pre-labor aura and a heightened sensitivity to suggestion during labor, but not a sharp difference of state. For example, he describes the dissemination of fear in everyday life, as in books and films, and then includes fear-inspiring remarks made directly to women in labor, as if there were no difference in the receptive mechanism involved:

"The suggestion of pain is conveyed by the atmosphere of the labor room; it emanates from doctors, nurses and relations." 2nd Ed. p. 32

We can add that those who expect pain in labor, and presume its presence, create the result as surely as hypnotists create trance states in their subjects. Their language and behavior convey it directly, while the preparations for anesthesia and operation confirm it indirectly.

He does not take the observed quantitative difference in mental acuity to the point of an absolute jump, a change in the mind's _qualitative_ _state_ , linking it to nature's bonding intention. Only those who understand and include this latter reason can truly appreciate the significance of the overall process.

This qualitative difference opens the door on a world of new understanding. It means that not just a few words, facial expressions and preparations create the effect, but the very presence of the medical team, and the existence of the theatre and hospital system.

Psychologically, the hospital is fear objectified; fear in the solid form of bricks and mortar. Against this, there is no protection other than a spiritual autonomy, a state of mind beyond fear itself.

Dirt does not cause puerperal sepsis, but the golden staphylococcus does. Now see the contradiction. Dirty hands can be free of staph, and scrubbed hands can convey it. For this reason surgeons wear sterile gloves. It is the same with spiritual contamination. In ordinary life we are hardened to it, but not so the woman in labor, for her mind is on a mission, returning to its primal state, as innocent and vulnerable as that of the baby she is about to bear.

We can do two things about this 'spiritual bacillus'. One is to keep it as far as possible from the laboring woman. This is like scrubbing the hands. It is not the total answer, but it helps. The other is to prepare her so that she may remain indifferent, shut it out and rise above it. But it is present originally, not only in the expressions and suggestions of attendants, not only in the very presence of the medical preparations, and so the hospital itself, but also in her conditioned mind. A training plan must address all three elements.

### The Social Dimension

Read postulated a vicious circle, one that builds upon itself. Taking this as a beginning, what non-circular force drives it? The answer is, woman's subservient role in the wider world, of which cultural childbirth is but a symptom. Understanding this we can see why Read's theory put him on side with natural birth and offside with his profession; and further, why his teaching spread across the world, and then like a spent wave subsided.

He visualized the movement as a reform within society, led by an enlightened medical profession, but neither society nor the profession was ready for such a development. He had a reverence for childbirth, which he saw as sacred, but not as woman's scepter, drawing its power from her rightful place in the world. His viewpoint did not include an economic perspective, or comprehension of the paternalism embedded in the culture and its social formations. If motherhood is to rise to autonomy, capable of freeing birth, and so the human race from the grip of its cultural affliction, it must command the economic power to assume responsibility throughout its own proper domain.

His expression, 'an interloper has crept in', suggests that all that is required is to find and remove it for birth to regain the normality of its earlier days when peace and harmony was supposed to have reigned upon an Earth created by God as Man's ancestral home, a stationary world about which the very heavens rotated in acquiescent acclaim. The belief however, was a myth.

There was however, no prior era wherein human civilization enjoyed a tranquil existence free from the cultural stress of our current era. The First World War revealed the tension within society, fraught with the seeds of conflict, neighbor against neighbor, and state against state. Genesis, the most ancient biblical text, names the condition directly. As the heat at the focus of a concave mirror is the sun's rays — not a self-caused manifestation — cultural childbirth is a focus of social forces implicated in our human nature, and it must be addressed at this level.

If there were no more to cultural childbirth than the cycle of fear tension and pain, then as a self-creating fear of fear it would be inescapable. The worry, however, is imaginary, for fear, along with all the emotions belongs to our conditioned state, which labor, upon its onset, sets aside. The same force that swept Read's initial anti-fear educational program aside, can be counted upon to sweep aside fearfulness itself. How then, does fear get into, and dominate labor at all? We know that it does, and the answer is that:

1. The mother's state in labor is one of vulnerability. It is nature on the scene, transcendent and bare (the crustacean stripped of its shell).

2. The uncertainty fear and so commandism is resident, present and alive as a contagion in the minds attitudes and remarks of her attendants.

3. Staff, relations and friends who take social drugs and see no harm in them, and approve medical prescription as a matter of course exercise a blind compulsive persuasion, that coupled with the force of institutional ritual, all impinge upon the mother to lower her guard and take a drug, which slips the latch and leads to nature's defeat.

Medical childbirth is cultural childbirth in escalated form. We cannot strip the medical aspect away and still have natural childbirth, therefore we have to proof the mother against this complex of circumstances, and it can be done. To overcome the problem society must create a suitable interface between the complex of circumstances needed to ensure natural childbirth, and medical surveillance and care as and when this may be necessary. No one however, should attempt to build it, not beginning from a proven ability to oversee the creation of natural childbirth in the first place.

The task is to find the right formula. We have two resources. One is competent medical science. It lacks however, the ability to comprehend and reproduce the phenomena of natural childbirth. The other possibility is that specialist midwifery services could add medical competence in obstetrics to their capability. Read's thinking and plan fitted the first option. In view of its failure we must look to the second.

10. The Socratic Midwife

**Socrates** Consider the general practice of midwives ... none of them ever attends other women in childbirth so long as she herself is capable of conceiving and bearing children, but only when she is too old to do so.

**Theaetetus** Of course.

**Socrates** They say that is because Artemis, the patroness of childbirth, is herself childless. She would not allow barren women to act as midwives, because it is beyond the power of human nature to acquire skill without experience; and she therefore assigned the duty to women who were past child-bearing, as a mark of respect for their resemblance to herself.

In this, Socrates draws upon his knowledge of myth and midwifery to explain the relation of experience to knowledge. It explains why the midwife must be a mother, but not why a mother _herself past childbearing_. For surely, the mother of one or more children can be said to have had the required experience, even though she may herself be capable of doing so again. For this, Socrates appeals to the religion of his time, the instruction of Artemis, patroness of women and childbirth.

Only those rules instructions and commands become religious lore that in long process have grown from, and within the soul-wisdom of a people over long ages. They cannot be added or dismissed quickly, for they belong to society's foundation. Artemis was the Grecian goddess of the moon, the virgin huntress and sister of Apollo, later identified with Diana in the Roman era. As a goddess she was childless, not in the sense of being deprived, but because, as the moon is renewed in its waxing and waning, she was the perpetual maiden, sister and protectress of woman, beyond death and dying.

Socrates' mother, Phaenarete was a midwife, while he described himself as a midwife of men, for these, he said, were often pregnant with the truth but needed a little help in getting it out. His pursuit of the truth so embarrassed the authorities that they responded by summoning him before their assembly and sentencing him to death, for "debasing religion and corrupting the youth." In fact, as we see in his reference to Artemis, he did not oppose the religion of his time but utilized it, as in philosophy, in explanation.

It is the way of philosophy to complete religion by realizing its truth in pure form.

Is it really beyond the power of human nature to acquire skill without experience? If we take it back to bedrock and assert that without experience there is no mind, let alone understanding, Socrates' position can hardly be challenged. It was his custom to reason from basic propositions. Our goal is natural birth and to achieve this we must appreciate that, in birth, nature is sufficient to itself. We must learn to flow with nature, not interfering in its process and intention. If we fail, it is because our knowledge falls short of the required mark. Our medical intervention is not too sophisticated, but too crude. We have not yet managed to grasp the spiritual aspect, the psychical reality that flows through the whole process, so that we can adapt our intervention, when occasion demands, to it.

Socrates' statement (Artemis "would not allow barren women to act as midwives, because it is beyond the power of human nature to acquire skill without experience"), clearly has reference to the _psychical_ process active in labor and birth. If the reference had been to physical skill, then any man, let alone barren women, could have qualified. Phaenarete, through Socrates, was speaking of the experience that only birth can give.

If this psychical experience, unknown to men and barren women, counted for nothing, there would have been no ground for a myth, religion or even custom. Yet there was, in fact, this pointed teaching. The psychical aspect was therefore known in those days, even if only intuitively. Indeed the level of understanding was high, while in keeping with the nature of wisdom, it is found in its pure state only in detachment, hence the codicil: "mothers themselves past childbearing."

Ancient midwives, for untold thousands of years, were not governed by orders-in-council. It was their _general practice_ not to attend other women while they considered themselves still likely to bear. In this they recognized a ranking. A man cannot fulfill the role, just as he cannot bear a baby. To the ancients these divisions in the natural order were self-determined. In Socrates' time this intuitive wisdom had coalesced with the observable waxing and waning of the moon, to which the wisdom was tied, that midwifery must be ceded to mothers beyond their childbearing age.

The message is perennially valid. Not to expunge, but reinstate it on a different footing we must say that the management of labor and birth must be assigned to experienced women, exactly as described, who will not only be experienced in childbirth, wise in the maturity of years, but also trained in physical and psychological medicine. To their management and care we should commit all obstetrical services. Men, equally blessed with wisdom, will also play their part, but this part will take the form of ensuring that the services, socially economically and politically, will conform to the Artemis's standard.

11. The Unity of Birth

The unity of birth is noticeable to an observer. Its unity is also intrinsic, the whole process of labor and birth, and finally it is creative, producing a new physical and mental being. We will look at its intrinsic unity first.

Nature has fashioned birth as a complete whole. Like head and hand in a single body, mother and baby are made for each other. Their relation is a foreordained mutual belonging. All the baby's needs are satisfied in the mother. The mother equally finds the resource she needs for the care of the baby within herself. Provided the birth has been natural, this mutual self-sufficiency is birth's spirituality, the wholeness characteristic of the mother-infant relation in its perfection.

In its perfection or physical and spiritual unity the mother-infant relation is exclusive. This does not mean that the mother and infant cannot be recipients of loving care and attention. A 'third' may be there, but whether this third is a husband, partner friend or other family member, or a social entity, whoever it is, however composed, they will show their love by recognizing the unity of the mother-infant relation and protecting it. Love does not disturb anything intrinsically perfect in nature.

As mentioned, we see something spiritual, in objective viewpoint, as sacred. To witness the spiritual is to appreciate the sacred. Defined negatively, the sacred is, "that which cannot be reduced without reducing the self." In other words, if through wishing to be involved, and not understanding the relation, one intrudes, coming between the mother and her infant, one destroys the very thing one is trying to possess. The reason for the interference does not mitigate the result. A civilization that indiscriminately undermines the mother-infant relation undermines the wellsprings of its own existence.

Birth's intrinsic unity, as we have seen, is described in the words, "to join in parting," for it is equally a separating and uniting. That which is parted is just as much bound back together. This founds religion, a word from Middle English, from Latin, _religio_ , fear of the gods, religious awe, sacredness, scrupulousness. Its stem, _re ligare_ , is _re_ , 'back', and _ligare_ , 'to bind', so 'to bind back again' (that which has been parted). Literally then, to be religious is to be in the state of oneness with the mother, as this state originally exists.

This _binding back_ is as important to the species as the physical separation of the bodies, for if the newborn were treated as something inessential, and abandoned, it would die. A mother could think, "Glad to be rid of _that_ ," and walk away, but in nature she gathers up the infant in her arms and cares for it as if they were of one soul. This mothering impulse is universal throughout the animal kingdom. It does not spring therefore from our thinking human reason. It is not the product of teaching or the result of public opinion, pressure or influence. It has its origin in the deepest wellsprings of our mind.

Labor shapes the mother's mind during the labor, but without coercion just as there is no coercion in sleep. It is not against her will, and the change is the patent form of that which is recognized in adult life as enlightenment. It rides therefore upon the mother's own will inclination and spirituality, the very center of her intention. It is the birth in the birth of the spiritual mother, the origin of motherhood and humanity in general. In nature it is a deep physiological change that prepares the mother to see the newborn, not as apart from, but integral with her own psychical nature, a spirituality that transforms the original physical unity into a spiritual unity, an establishment on the _psychical_ plane.

The state would then pervade humanity from beginning to end, were it not lost in our newly acquired mental powers, and this relation determines the blessing and the curse of our human being. This original psychical unity however is required back of the mother in labor. She is required to renew her acquaintance with life's origin, in order to find her own nature in her baby.

Finally, as a third aspect and synthesis of the first two, birth is a creative unity in the launching of a new life. To understand birth in this manner is to advance to an understanding of the formation, and so nature of the human mind. The mother-infant relation is definitional for love. We know love for what it is, because it arises in this relation. First comes physiology. Then, in the process of procreation, labor and birth create the relation of mother and baby. This is the first expression in nature's cycle of that which we later experience and recognize downstream in its various derivative forms.

Mental acuity or intelligence then arises out of and from the mother-infant relation as a natural psychical development. Faith in the baby and love in the mother hold between them the new mind's formative structure. Mind has no other genesis. It is intelligible in no other context. We can think of the baby as being in the mother's arms or within the sphere of her loving care. This relationship, reversed and projected in maturity, colored by personality (the inimitability of a given mother within given circumstances) constitutes our self within an environing world. We, as adults, by reversal, think of the mind as internal to our physical self, while the world, we say, is outside us, yet at the same time _within_ our consciousness, which fits the mother-infant relation.

These relations, whose factors emerge within the domain of birth, constitute in turn the beginning of philosophy. Our sense of reality depends upon the independence of things and the concatenation of their events, an external reality, whereas our consciousness in mind depends upon our genesis in the life cycle. Their independence is secondary to our dependence, being the fact alone that establishes them, as independent, within our mind.

Our mind is simply a mental process, which like a heartbeat proceeds automatically below the level of our thinking. Its continual work to resolve the contradiction between our internal needs and the external presentation is at once our thought and understanding. Now, this study is necessarily advanced, but it is also close to, and potentially rewarding for mothers in general, for it supports the mother's role in life and society. We must distinguish carefully between the fact that every individual, male and female has a mother, while only some of one sex, the female, become mothers, and the fact that motherhood is central to sexual reproduction. Insofar as discrimination exists, the role of women in society turns upon this centrality, which must therefore be resolved correctly if all and sundry secondary gender issues are to follow suit.

12. To Flee Cultural Childbirth

A young woman visited me out of surgery hours, declaring that she came not as a patient, but just to tell me that she was going to have her baby in private by herself without anyone else around. I offered to attend her but she refused, explaining that she had an antipathy for doctors going back many years. She was determined upon her course of action and declared that nothing would shift her from it. Why then had she come to see me? It was not at all clear.

I had never seen her before. I did not know her name, address or anything else about her. She talked quickly and laughed easily and I wondered how serious she was. She said that she had a room prepared and that when her time came she would lock herself in and have the baby alone. She described the preparations she had made, the details of the room and her privacy arrangements.

Her plan did not seem at all sensible to me, but I did not argue with her. Individuals will often drop an unwise intention given the chance to talk it over, and some need to make several visits before they are ready to unburden their real thoughts, hopes and fears. She did not, however, come back until some six weeks later, when she appeared, once again unannounced and out of hours, but this time slim and with no baby.

"How did your plans go?" I asked.

"Very well," she replied, and she told me that she had carried out her intention, locking herself in her room with food, drink and all she needed. She described what seemed to be a fairly normal labor and declared that the experience had been without incident.

"Well, that's great," I congratulated her, "Can I see the baby?"

"Oh yes," she said, and disappeared out the door.

Fifteen minutes later she was back with the baby in her arms. I looked at it, then at her, seeing her confusion. It was a big and beautiful baby, but instead of eyes it had two swollen mounds the size of ping pong balls. With the help of swabs I endeavored to part the flesh where the eyes should have been, but all I could see were wells of pus. Then, for a moment I caught sight of a blue iris. The baby was suffering from a once common infective cause of blindness, now rarely seen. Why, I thought had she not sought help before this? She must have seen it coming on for days.

However, this was not the only thought going through my mind. Without immediate treatment the baby would lose its sight. The mother, to me was an unknown quantity. I did not have her name or address. If I began suggesting treatment options she might just walk out. I would not allow this, but could I, legally, forcibly detain her? I quickly decided that if she did walk out I would go with her, and stick to her like a burr until an answer surfaced.

Fortunately that crisis never eventuated. Choosing my words carefully, I told her that the baby needed hospital treatment, and that I would ring the ambulance. It would pick her up right where we were, at my rooms.

There was a pause, which I felt indicated assent. Then she asked if she would be able to stay with the baby. I explained that because she was breast-feeding she would be admitted with the baby, and that she would care for it on the ward. She immediately agreed, and I made the necessary arrangements. I monitored her to the ambulance and the ambulance by phone until she had been admitted.

In just over a week she was out of hospital and came back to see me. The baby was now fully recovered and I marveled at its serene gaze from sparkling clear eyes. In those days penicillin, still in its prime, was the miracle drug and completely effective. There is a saying, "all's well that ends well," but in sidestepping medical care this mother had come close to an avoidable tragedy. For me it was a lesson that, although something major has to be done about the delivery of medical care in relation to birth — which is not and has never been a disease — flight is not the answer. I did notice however that she was devoted to the baby and breast-feeding, hallmarks of a physiological birth and consequent bonding.

There are so many things that can go wrong in a birth, that though they are individually rare, they add to a sizable risk. The message that flight is not the answer applies to the need for a medical standby, and the underlying social and psychological causes of cultural childbirth. It is no secret that some mothers take off to a remote area, just as some in earlier days arranged to give birth before going into the puerperal sepsis hospitals, but in doing so, they take their cultural childbirth problem along with them, for the move only changes the scenery. The point is that neither home birth nor birth in a remote area correlates automatically with a natural childbirth.

Pandemonium can erupt in private homes and remote areas. Things go wrong, relatives and neighbors panic and telephone lines run hot with aid being summoned from far and near. The birth can come to a full stop for cultural reasons. The home may be a refuge, and often is, but it is not so automatically. The human factor is critical.

But what if the mother can effect real isolation, as this young woman achieved in her locked room, or has it forced upon her by unforeseen circumstances, such as war fire or flood? A mother is sensitive to the expectations and mood of those around her, but what she has consciously apprehended at an earlier date will not affect her. The labor annuls it, whether it was intended as support (as in the case of Read's educational programs), or is alarmist chatter that could instill fear. It cannot, however, set aside the attitude of her attendants, and once labor has begun it jumps from there to the mother. If however, in unavoidable isolation she has no attendants whatsoever, she has no access to medical assistance, and the birth is not natural but atavistic.

Medically trained competent midwifery would fulfill the need, but only an enlightened program, promoted nationwide, with the backing of political social and economic support could bring this about.
13. The Physiology of Pain

Natural childbirth, as taught by Dick-Read, is an easy birth within medical jurisdiction. This definition began with the insight, given to him by the 'Woman in Whitechapel', that birth is not necessarily painful; in her words; "It didn't hurt. It wasn't meant to, was it, doctor?"

Building upon this he developed his theory, and was eventually able to achieve the result he sought in practice. His ideas engendered intense opposition. His profession disciplined him, but after the lapse of a year he was able to resume his practice and his ideas gained worldwide publicity.

He dwelt upon the fact that pregnancy labor and birth belong to the domain of normality and health, and therefore come before, not after medical care. Pregnancy is not a disease. Labor is not a sickness. Birth is not a medical crisis. The entire process is physiological, and pain is not a manifest accompaniment in any known physiological process, be it breathing, eating, drinking, excretion, hearing, seeing and so on and so forth. When pain appears, pathology has manifested a presence.

Birth belongs to life, humanity and the mother. Only secondarily does it come under medical surveillance and jurisdiction. Medical process and intervention must attend upon the mother, not the other way around. Read, we can say, was the Copernicus of birth. He would have it revolve around the mother, as Copernicus had the earth revolve around the sun. His colleagues would have it revolve around themselves, their knowledge, services and profession.

To his teaching that birth is a physiological process and therefore not painful in itself, his colleagues retorted: "Why, then is it painful?" They found substantiation for their views everywhere they looked; in their perception of the labor process, the affirmation of women in labor and as historically confirmed in the Bible.

Read answered that he was seeing labors of a different sort, hearing affirmations of a different kind and he wrote off the Biblical references as misinterpretation and translation error.

He agreed that labor, as commonly experienced, is painful, but argued that it did not have to be. The pain meant that something was going wrong. In illustration, our bowels contract in the process of digestion and this is not painful. But if their contraction is disordered the result is colic, which can be extremely painful. Similarly, if labor is disordered it is also painful, and this was what his colleagues were seeing. The culprit in his view was fear, precipitated by those around the mothers. As in the case of puerperal sepsis he declared that his colleagues were the inadvertent cause of what they were seeing. For this calumny he was arraigned.

His theory, although astute, did not go far enough. He did not fit the psychology of labor into a greater framework, namely that of nature's process in preparing the mother for bonding. The ground of cultural childbirth is intrinsic to the very quality that renders us human, that which in evolution creates our objective sense of reason, wherein we begin to operate upon the planet and other life forms to our individual and species advantage.

The state we see, or rather overlook in labor and birth is a moment that is neither sleep nor yet ordinary consciousness, but a primal state, seldom openly expressed, whilst physiologically it is sandwiched between the main contrasting states, those of awake and asleep. For the mother it is as if she were in a waking sleep, a living dream anterior to her usual conscious self, no longer separate and apart from her environment. It is a natural trance, therefore not a trance at all but the mind's intended state, deep to ordinary consciousness in preparation for bonding. It is the identity upon which all forms of consciousness stand. Brought to a focus she will identify completely with her baby.

If then, onlookers indicate that they expect her to experience pain, she will experience it, for they are in her environment as if in her mind. Their belief is her reality and she reacts accordingly. Her attendants on the other hand experience not what they know, but what they believe and fear. The mother in labor mirrors this, which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy in the realm of social reality.

The experience does not stop there. Anxiety calls for help. Onlookers feel that they must do something. They see themselves in the role of superintendence, and they activate this role by calling for help. When this arrives, medically armed, it administers drugs and the labor is taken over by medical procedure. It becomes a medical crisis.

But more than this, the whole thing is generalized. Once, in social practice, labor and birth are visualized as painful, they are judged so in their very nature and categorized as belonging to the medical domain from the beginning. The mother, in this viewpoint, no less than the baby, becomes a passenger.

Pain in labor therefore comes into focus as a question of singular academic importance. The belief that labor is painful _in nature_ is the original self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the Jack at the bottom of the beanstalk of modern civilization. Unbelievably, natural childbirth and independent midwifery are targeted as social enemies in a patriarchal world. To take its measure we will need to look at pain, quite apart from its exciting cause.

### The Nature of Pain

We all experience pain . Our knowledge of it is subjective, but because it is universal, immediate and commanding, this subjective knowledge is easily taken as sufficient evidence. We cannot go beyond this subjectivity. We cannot feel another's pain. We can see inflammation and hear other's cry. In empathy we can feel for each other, but no one actually feels another's toothache.

This seems to leave pain outside the sphere of objective science. However experience in another field, namely that of weight in physics, suggests that we could, with advantage, think otherwise. Adding an objective side to our knowledge of pain would raise our general and scientific knowledge onto an altogether higher plane.

We can begin by noting that pain is the lowest level in the scale of conscious mind. It is not the lowest level in _mind_ (it is not the subconscious or unconscious), but the lowest level in conscious mind. If it can be shown that mind can be treated objectively — and this will be our intention — then pain will fall automatically within the range of objective science.

Pain belongs to consciousness, so if consciousness is extinguished, so is pain. This is commonly experienced. If we have a pain — it can be severe — but we manage to go to sleep, the pain is gone until we wake up. The same applies if we faint or are made temporarily unconscious, as in the administration of a general anesthetic. To the ancient Greeks pain was the 'the barking watchdog of health'. The metaphor is apt, because it is assertive, but like a dog it can also sleep. In sleep a level of mind below that of our higher consciousness remains vigilant, but this pilot level does not support pain, so is not troubled by it.

Pain is not alone. It has an opposite nature partner, namely pleasure. Just as the mind as a whole has three levels, conscious subconscious and unconscious, so in consciousness there are again three levels. Viewing the latter (consciousness), we can see that pain, and its partner, pleasure, occupy the basement. Emotion — and here we have a veritable tribe — occupies the middle ground, and the intellect, wherein thinking reigns, is above this again.

There is nothing in consciousness, no localized sensation deep to pain and pleasure. The latter experiences are but sides of a single activity, which is living matter. Injury is deep to pain; growth and reproduction are deep to pleasure. Injury is biological loss; growth and reproduction represent biological gain. Loss and gain, pain and pleasure, are therefore biological direction indicators on the path of life.

Translated into behavior, pain says, "retreat; move away." Pleasure says, "advance; move towards." Below the level of 'p and p', therefore, is the domain of behavior, the bodily motion that sustains life in its physical and social environment.

As mental forces, p and p can possess the mind, in which capacity they constitute a completed mental stage of low level. We need to see how a higher stage can be erected upon this foundation. The answer is that these lower level forces are absorbed. Their mechanism and power is used or incorporated as the basis of a higher awareness. This 'taking over' is sublimation, meaning 'to divert into another channel'.

In sublimation, the two feelings (p and p), no longer arise. The directional energy they formerly commanded is diverted into, and becomes the energy of the emotions. Instead of pain, fear arises. Instead of pleasure there is love. Pain, and so fear both command retreat. Pleasure, and so love both command approach. The difference is that the higher, in this case, emotional level, carries within it differentiation and complexity of response in place of the sublimated level's magnitude and orientation. Quantitative distinction is unraveled into qualitative differentiation.

It is not that pain turns _into_ fear. Once it is pain it is experienced, and that is it. In the elaborative mechanism we are discussing, energy is diverted _before_ it becomes pain. The underlying biological command to "move away" is subordinated to a higher discrimination, which asks, "is it possible" (to move away), and, "is it wise?" If it _is_ possible _and_ wise, the energy becomes conscious as fear, commanding a retreat appropriate to the situation. Fear is thus a form of thinking, which trading time for choice costs a brief hesitation.

Sublimation, which sacrifices a lower level energy to a higher discrimination, can be compared to a river that divides into multiple sub channels as it reaches an alluvial plane near the sea. But what happens if the decision is negative, if the higher mind, served now by the senses, eye and ear, says, "Retreat is... _impossible_ , or it is unwise; it spells loss, danger and death."

In this case, the energy immediately switches direction. Biologically, it remains "move away." That fact cannot be altered, but instead of fear as "flee," it becomes anger as "attack" in order to confound, or destroy (the source of danger). So anger is fear "turned around" in the _physical_ plane. But biologically, psychologically, it is still energy that commands, "Move away."

A hunted animal flees. If it is cornered it attacks, regardless of whether its attack can be successful or not. Pain fear and anger all belong to the side of biological retreat. Once anger has been aroused, if the adversary retreats, the animal may still pursue, seeking to destroy. In this case, the emotion has stepped down to its lower form, to fear, for if the adversary is not destroyed it may attack again.

Similarly, feelings of pleasure, from tranquility to erotic sensation constitute the biological foundation of love. This bids approach. Frustrated the force reverses. Hate, the impulse to overpower the obstructing influence appears. Understanding the relation of biological and physical direction, we can build up the pattern of all known emotions, which, after pleasure and pain build in a two-sided approach-retreat pattern.

The higher thinking mind arises on this emotional foundation. Each higher level comes about through suppression of a lower impulse to act. Our picture of the mind appears as a great branching tree, intrinsically dynamic, balanced and tied to experience, related to action on the one hand and thought and understanding on the other.

In terms of practice nervous activity is perpetually a two-sided thing, riding the tide of a supporting wave. This is the key to its governance and control. Through meditation and allied practices we can learn how to reduce the input or excitation, and so extinguish the conditioned response. The mechanism is negative, but it subjugates the entire mind to the organism's spiritual investment, taking us out of the category of mere machinery, into the domain of conscious thinking beings.

Read on the Physiology of Pain

We resume our story where Read stated:

"there is no physiological function in the body which gives rise to pain in the normal course of health" (4th Ed. p. 42).

If we call this his first axiom, and take as the second his statement that, "we are not concerned with disease but with healthy women carrying out a natural function," it follows that, because it is physiological, there is no pain in a natural birth. This was his conclusion.

Those who believe that birth is naturally painful cannot accept the above reasoning. If the first axiom is true — and no one can deny that birth is a natural function — it means that 'normal' birth in our society is disordered. The axiom is like a sniper's bullet, a single shot, but deadly in effect. Accordingly, in the Fifth Edition, as a comment upon this axiom, the editors wrote,

"...this we submit is not entirely accurate." p. 57

For them the bullet has to miss, so for them either birth is not a natural process, or our understanding of pain is wrong, for they are saying that birth is a painful physiological function. They do not reason it out, but simply 'submit' that it is not _entirely_ accurate. Throwing Read's teaching out of the window they part company with his initial insight and the whole tenor of his work that originated in the comment:

"It didn't hurt. It wasn't meant to, was it, Doctor?"

Pain is a subjective sensation and it is reasonable to assume that everyone experiences it in more or less the same way. However, an assumption will not pass as a law. Subjective experience, which is private, cannot be traded. Only individuals know whether they feel pain. Others cannot speak for them, any more than they can speak for others. To become science, its objective counterpart must complement the subjective experience. Only then can the certainty of law replace dogmatic assertion.

A law allows us to understand a particular behavior in all circumstances, even in limiting cases. For example, the law of gravity still holds in an orbiting space station, even though objects float around within it. The Earth floats in empty space, and the law of gravity explains that too. Similarly, Read is saying that birth, free from pain, is not only possible, but is nature's norm. Just as a stone can be without weight, birth can be without pain. The question is, under what conditions?

Science is true only when it is philosophically balanced. Conception and birth are limiting cases or biological absolutes, exactly the type of experience that warns us against accepting doctrines, no matter how fashionable, lacking this philosophical requirement. Read's axioms are at least aligned within such a principled framework.

His Editors counter with the statement that, "in conditions of stress, especially against a background of chronic anxiety and morbid depression, _psychosomatic_ pain frequently arises," and they put this forward as an example of pain without a cause, but it amounts to no more than an appeal to belief, beyond which it is pure assertion.

Read agrees that pain exists in both psychosomatic disease and cultural childbirth, but this is precisely because abnormality exists, both in the case of the disease and cultural birth. It is just a question of finding and identifying it, and in the case of birth this task comprised his life's work. Who would imagine that stress, chronic anxiety and morbid depression are not themselves signs of a diseased state?

Philosophically, mind itself is an objective factor in nature, traceable to an origin in time, and with it, the pathological conditions affecting it are equally objective.

Our position will be that in cultural childbirth a disorder exists, whose cause and mechanism can be explained, even though it is an affliction of society rather than of the individual mother. To understand this, we will need to understand the nature and operation of mind itself.

The Editors, as we will see further on, depict Read as naive, and otherwise just plain wrong, but _their_ _theory_ is far from consistent, along with _their_ claim that the pain in psychosomatic illness is uncaused. Their attitude brings to light a fallacy in current medical thinking that calls for redress. Beyond birth itself, Read's insight is the beginning of the understanding of a whole range of specifically human disorders, which afflict us just because we are human; because we possess the neural arrangement, the particular form of mind that makes us so.

A note on the mentioned time basis of mind's objectivity.

(1). Great time is the experience across evolutionary history, which governs the _physical_ form of the various interrelated species.

(2). In the human, the first four years in every generation, from conception to first childhood, sees the development of the physical body in the womb followed by the imprinting and maturation of the brain. The two springboards from which mind and its attendant behavior then arises are cellular DNA, and beyond this, the organ-formed body under the control of the central nervous system.

(3). The unique time, from first childhood to death of each individual, being the conscious life span at the coalface of unfolding on-going human experience.

14. The War of Man against Woman

In Europe, up until the sixteenth century, it was a crime, punishable by death, for a man to be present at a birth. Medical obstetrics on a major scale is as recent as this century, though its scientific foundations were laid in the nineteenth. Grantly Dick-Read begins his Fourth Edition of 'Childbirth Without Fear' with an historical review, then makes the tone-setting statement: "there is war between man and woman for the possession of motherhood."

War is an absolute polarization of viewpoint with division into sides and resort to violence. Do these characterizations apply to man and woman in a struggle over motherhood? It is an unusual proposition, but it makes Read's meaning clear.

It is a potent reference, setting the tone for his book, but it is omitted from the Fifth Edition. Instead, the Editors explain that, in the course of making extensive alterations to his written statements, the distinction between Read's words and their own becomes blurred. "Read's 'I' and our 'we' become confused," they say, "but it does not matter because we are in _complete agreement_ with the principles he set out." This must have been difficult for them to write for they disagree with everything important he had to say.

They were employed to continue his work, not destroy it, but unable to reproduce his results they rewrote his book, countermanding his teachings and bringing them to an end. To use a timeworn adage; the operation was a success, but the patient died.

The exercise however served a purpose, for it established that, as trained obstetricians, not only could they _not_ reproduce his results, they could not even understand them. The success of Read's method is moot; this is how it comes out, but it definitely fails in one respect, it did not transmit, as Read had hoped, to other obstetricians endeavoring to follow his lead. Their failure, in this respect, is Read's failure.

Natural childbirth's elusive response to conditions is a factor in the result. All the effort and intention in the world cannot command a natural birth, but then it suddenly appears where no effort is made. Then it appears in response to the _right_ effort. It can be 'ordered' as Read's work has shown, only to just as suddenly disappear again. Clearly we are dealing with a subtle influence, and this influence is the factor whose presence constitutes the foundation of the human mind.

Finally the Editors attributed Read's results to _an unconscious personal mesmerism._ No conclusion could have been as close to the mark or more false or damaging. The secret of natural childbirth is autonomy; the exact _opposite_ of mesmerism, but total opposites, like North and South poles of the earth can be surprisingly alike. So history is repeated, always with a twist. A committee of the French Academy dismissed Mesmer's work as ineffective. Their efforts to reproduce his results failed. Read's work was dismissed for the opposite reason. He was " _using personal magnetism_." His condemnation at least justified Mesmer against the Academy!

The Editors said: "We have thought it appropriate to remove some of his more protesting comments." Why? Because, they said, "the battle has been won." They were using Read's words, but not his meaning, for he spoke of a battle "for the possession of motherhood." They were intent upon claiming victory. He wanted victory for the mothers; they for the doctors.

### Home or Hospital

In their account the battle was to shift birth from the home to the hospital, and they felt that they had won. In their words:

"That there is a trend to a 100 percent, hospital confinement in this country cannot be denied, and it appears to be the choice of the large majority." 5th Ed. p. 36

Read knew, and his evangelicalism was for natural childbirth. He also knew that this meant 'returning' birth to the mothers, giving them the opportunity and conditions they needed to give birth naturally. He added:

"(Motherhood)... is a prize of incalculable value for the Church, politicians and the doctors.

The leaders of all manner of religious organizations, sects and denominations recognize the holiness of motherhood and the basic value of the newborn child. We do not forget the significance of Christmas or the manger in the stable of the wayside inn." 4th Ed. p.7.

His editors wrote:

"...we are in _complete agreement_ with the principles he set out."

His words:

"Ideals and beliefs are subjected to committees formed for and by those who have specific purposes apart from both beliefs and ideals. So motherhood becomes the shuttlecock, and is beaten willy-nilly by strong persuasion into a permissive state. It sacrifices itself without the ability to resist the indoctrination of man — where I speak of man in this sense I include women doctors, a few of whom, unfortunately, have accepted the normal male attitude towards this supremely feminine function. It is difficult for those who believe in the maternal mind to understand how men dare to dictate to a woman a mechanistic routine for her maximum achievement in childbirth. " 4th Ed. p. 11.

In view of this proclamation — it is nothing less — perhaps we should call to mind that mistakes are the cobblestones to success, and pick up where Read left off, resurrecting his writings and initiative, advancing on all fronts to the goal, whatever it takes to restore "the holiness of motherhood and the basic value of the newborn child."

Feminists who are keen to advance the freedom of every woman to pursue the lifestyle of her choice should continue their work, but not, in the process, disparage the home or neglect the role of those who choose motherhood. If they do, and it is easy to make this mistake, then their house divided will fall, and they will wonder why, after years of commitment, rank discrimination persists and advances like an inexorable tide.

These are Read's words:

"Rockets and satellites, space ships and hydrogen bombs absorb thousands of millions of the wealth of nations.... "

"the cycle starts again in the birth of a baby. But no provision is made for this branch of education. The teenager is not taught the elementary rules of womanhood. Examinations of schools, colleges, and universities do not include in their curriculum the supremely important subject of motherhood." 4th Ed. p. 11

It is not enough to demand a role in existing educational systems. Given the prevailing mentality such courses could only be infantile and/ or perverted. The citadel to take, the point of attack, the Bastille must be obstetrics, to secure this underneath the banner of Phaenarete. This is the true possible and correct goal. Win it and the machinery will be there for the next step, to restore the original spirit of humanity to all education and social life in the salvation of our kind with the end of the curse. Obstetrics, from Latin, _obstetricius_ , from _obstetrix_ a midwife, literally means ' _woman who stands opposite_ ' from _obstare_ , from _ob_ \- against + _stare_ to stand. Restore it to its original state!

Read's Editors were not far from the mark when they said, "The battle has been won," but they were not on it either. Mothers are being regimented worldwide by economic political and organizational forces that systematically destroy midwifery and any choice a woman may have. Great hospitals have been built and equipped and the profession disciplines its members. Mothers, however, are picked off, not by an attack upon their person, but upon anyone, not medically authorized, who may assist them in labor. It is wildly misleading in the circumstance to talk of this as being "the choice of the large majority."

The moving force to create this result (every birth on the operating table) is, of course, Moloch, money, against the background of advancing technology. There is no real intelligence at the helm, no balanced understanding. Mothers cannot easily be attacked directly because any law that would govern them would be difficult to enforce and socially repugnant. The mother and baby command a natural reverence, and should a mother be prosecuted for giving birth not according to the rules of the men in council, what is a judge to do with her? Such attacks would be as popular as Herod's slaughter of the innocents. The laws are therefore kept on the books to threaten rather than to use, lest the law itself be the one brought down. Because the moment when labor will begin can only be roughly estimated an expectant mother can leave the hospital area and have her baby elsewhere. Law, in many respects, is often a paper tiger.

The effective attack is upon the mother's helper. This 'law of helping' is comparable to the law of harboring. It is a crime to harbor an escaped convict and it is a crime to help a woman in labor without medical approval. This applies even to the mother's husband and other family members. She is not a convict but she is treated in much the same way. Anyone not medically licensed who might help her in lieu of such qualified assistance, may be charged with committing a crime.

The law is symptomatic of the fact that a woman, as a mother, is a non-person. The law, economy and press are marshaled against her freedom, just so long as she herself is not targeted.

And Satan answered Jehovah and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his soul; but put forth thy hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and see if he will not curse thee to thy face! And Jehovah said to Satan, Behold he is in thy hand; only spare his life. Job 2:4,5

The inculcated nonentity of motherhood is the taproot of woman's social inequality in general, as well as the driving force behind the phenomena of cultural childbirth.

The Editors chose to see Read's real battle, finally won with their help, as the struggle to make the hospital "more like the home." In a radical move they even came out in favor of allowing good husbands, approved by the hospital staff, to attend at the birth.

Read himself said little or nothing on the home v. hospital question. As a specialist working in the hospital system he stood for hospital confinement by implication. His vision, seeking the best of both worlds, was professionally conducted natural childbirth in a hospital setting. Reality proved to be more complicated.

In my first response to his work I saw only the positive side without criticism or insight into the deeper problems. My experience was simply that his methods worked. A patient to whom I had recommended his book returned to tell me that she was puzzled. Her difficulty with it, in turn, puzzled me. I therefore asked her to bring it along on her next visit. It was the posthumous 'Fifth Edition', which I then saw for the first time. I scanned a few pages and handed it back to her with the comment, "throw it away." She responded by giving it back to me, saying, "You keep it. Perhaps you can do something about it."

The result was to open my eyes to the fact that securing a natural birth was a more complicated issue than I had thought, with social and political overtones going way beyond the question of training. The contrasting views expressed highlighted the points that called for attention, and finally I saw that the real task was to criticize Read's own work. This was not easy, but it brought the most important aspects into focus.

Theoretically a woman could give birth naturally on an operating table and this might sometimes occur, but medically trained staff in today's world lack experience in this, and besides they have their own specific function and work to perform. They are there to intervene operatively when the need exists. However, the peculiar nature of cultural childbirth is that it rests, not upon any particular abnormality, but upon _the natural structure_ of the human mind. The 'abnormality' is our human nature. The disease's presenting cause, spiritual in nature, exists within the relation of mind to mind in the fabric of our cultural system.

Read succeeded because he brought extraordinary dedication and insight to bear upon a specific problem. He became the exception proving the rule, combining the talents of two mutually exclusive disciplines, medical intervention and natural childbirth in the one person. Nature requires no actors in a birth other than the mother and baby, and it makes provision for every requirement within that specification. Medical care turns upon intervention, which is contrary to the very spirit of natural childbirth.

### Tension and Crisis

Treating injury and disease is a high-profile high-tension activity on an operational battlefield wherein the doctor is pitted successively against emergency after emergency. Doctors work under constant tension. No sooner is one crisis handled than another takes its place. Doctors are trained to be diagnostically suspicious and aggressive and their work constantly reinforces this attitude. Their work impels them to make decisions, to take responsibility and manipulate situations on behalf of others. They are authority figures whose demeanor is characteristically benign but persuasive. All this is contrary to natural childbirth, which calls for quite a different approach. Experience has shown that natural birth and medical care can only be combined across an interface, carefully designed to meet the needs and limits of both, and achieving this calls for a major social investment.

Natural birth rests upon an autonomy in the mother that leaves the bystander with nothing to do, unless to act as a shield against possible interference. A natural birth falls from heaven like sun and rain without our assistance. No Phaenarete quality midwife will tell a mother how to push or breathe, though her guidance may be helpful and her presence a blessing.

Medical obstetrics focuses its attention on the perinatal mortality rate. Called the pmr, this measures the relative efficiency of operative intervention, as if death were the only birth related criterion. It may be pushed up or down a point by the skill or lack of it, wherein a surgical team may or may not save the life of a baby born with multiple congenital defects. This is fine for comparing the relative skills expertise and equipment of dedicated teams in pursuit of infant and operational care in different countries. It provides an easily understood numerical index that lists the world's countries in order of excellence suitable for press and political release in support of funding. We can all be proud together that our infant mortality rate is so low, compared with other countries where, due to poverty and famine the rate is so high, without a word said about the fact that their population increase, all breast fed, is two or three times higher than ours. It is not so much the speed of the ball but the spin you put on it that counts!

Because motherhood is the foundation of society, but not _in itself_ consciously organized — there is woman's suffrage but no mother's suffrage — it remains economically unrecognized and politically isolated. Mothers face the disciplined force of hospital-based professions, steeped in routine, as individuals. The result is that birth is wrested from the midwife by economic and political means, and motherhood then 'beaten into shape' as Read said, by the most powerful profession in the modern world. This is cultural childbirth in its most deadly form.

It is a war Man wins by destroying Himself. As regimentation rises the birth rate falls. As the in-hospital operationally delivered rate attains a hundred percent in the so-called advanced nations, it gains hardly at all on the world scale. Chased into the hospital it regains the home by stepping across international boundaries. Small but dedicated home birth movements have sprung up in the developed nations to throw the victory of Man over Woman into doubt. The front lines are shifting in a mobile play as birth joins the trend towards international specialization.

In the meantime, enormous damage is inflicted upon mother-infant bonding. Generations grow up without parental instinct, prone to drug abuse and suicide. Children born of culturally disturbed births, whose mothers were themselves born in such relation, receive the disturbance both directly and intellectually in their imprinting, so that the condition compounds in successive generations. Technology offers humanity a choice: millennium, or disaster in a series of catastrophic imbalances. Humanity needs to take another step forward on the evolutionary pathway. It must re-establish its spirituality. In this we are not facing something that has sprung upon us suddenly. The problem has been maturing for thousands of years. It is time to face it.

Mentally and physically, birth is and will remain the foundation of human life. If we get the mother-infant relationship right, the stage is set favorably for all others, because all relationship arises upon this one foundation, as surely as mind establishes the nature of our kind. With birth in trouble, so is life. Conversely, if we can attain to perfection in birth, upon which bonding within the mother-infant relation naturally follows, if we can get this area of life right, so equally will we be able to master all other problems that confront our human destiny.

15. The Mind in Labor

A number of writers, beginning with Read, have described changes in the mother's mental state in labor, contrary to the orthodox opinion that it possesses no special state of its own. The latter corresponds to a similar assertion in relation to the trance of hypnosis. The misconception rests partly upon the fact that the electroencephalogram trace in both labor and trance corresponds to that obtaining in normal consciousness, partly upon a widespread inability to recognize the changes, by observers the one hand, and mothers in labor on the other.

A special state is thought _not_ to exist, because if it did the women themselves would surely know about it and make it public. The ancient teachings, more intuitive than our modern pabulum, do not say this. Instead, they refer to a state of forgetfulness. We need only consider our awareness in the state of sleep; it has its own EEG tracing, but we, in experiencing it, are unaware in it. When asleep we do not 'clock up' the passage of time, nor do we recollect what it is 'like' in deep sleep. It is just a missing section in our time track, and so it is for the mother's 'moment of forgetfulness'.

In its nature the mind is transparent, aware only of that which is objective. We are no more aware of change in the subjective basis of our mind, than we aware of external motion when in a totally closed inertial vehicle. Similarly, we are not aware of the earth's motion in space, except in deduction and inference.

Still, deduction and inference are possible, and mothers are strategically placed to be able to supply the relevant information. However, this is offset by the social climate, which holds woman and her intimate affairs in little regard. It does not interest the medical press, and natural childbirth, being an economic non-entity, has no press of its own.

Routine medication is the norm in hospital procedure so that almost all births in hospital are drugged. This scrambles the psychical process but this is not publicized. Information of this kind comes mainly through the publications of the home birth movements, which represent only a small fraction of births in industrialized nations. Even in them, the mothers have no organization of their own, but are represented by a tiny remnant of home-birth midwives, who in the present scheme of things are largely paramedical. Individual mothers can be wealthy, but motherhood itself, in terms of classification, is an economic dependency. It does not have two _spare_ coins to rub together. It is incapable therefore of maintaining an independent expression of its interests and this is a sign of our imperfect society.

Far from having no special state of its own, labor is a symphony of physical and mental processes leading to the birth and bonding. It is the manufactory of the human mind. Based upon time and physical occurrence its first stage is from the beginning of labor to full dilatation of the cervix. The second is from there until completion of the birth, and the third is from birth to the expulsion of the placenta.

Read discusses an initial buoyancy of mood that ushers in the first stage. Psychologically, this indicates acceptance and compliance, at peace with the world. Compliance coincides with the mother's need for security in the labor and support in the months that follow, where in uncultivated nature she has to fend for herself and her baby. The spirit of birth knows these needs and provides the appropriate mood, which is not an automatic obedience, but an acquiescence that will ignore non-essentials rather than pick a quarrel in a tribal or family setting, for that is her resource.

This passivity differs from that found in hypnosis in the way its factors are ordered. Hypnosis is a collapse of the structured mind, whose roots go back to infancy. In labor there is a _psychical_ recession, but no collapse of this nature. Instead there is an ordered muting of the conscious mind, an easing in its tension, but no overturning. The relations proper to the higher rational mind are preserved. As in sleep and conscious awareness, the mental state in labor is both unique and physiological. As physiological _and_ unique it is a primal state in its own right, and as earlier discussed it represents a window open directly upon the unconscious; it is its pure expression.

In hypnosis the balance in mind is overturned. The state of compliance is reflective and infantile; it is a regression to the imprinting stage. It exhibits a rational background, in that a subject, confronted by an unacceptable demand may struggle against it and suddenly wake up rather than comply. This tells us that the trance of hypnosis undercuts rationality, for an either-or balance of mutually exclusive conditions exists, which is incompatible with arriving at critical decisions.

The balance in mind is retained in labor, so that even though the conditioned mind is progressively reduced, a sentinel consciousness remains. To the unpracticed eye the state seems to be that of our ordinary aware consciousness, but it is a special state adjusted to the mother's need. It meets her best interests, not through conscious anticipation, that she plans or 'thinks ahead', but like an inverted dream, provides an indication of what is happening around her.

The power of this obedience, stemming from the state described, is such that once a mother has sought medical advice, accepted the status of patient and entered the hospital, she will be utterly compliant rather than protest. If then her vital interests, being her self-esteem and autonomy, are infringed, she is thrown into the grip of cultural childbirth. It may then eventuate that nothing short of an anesthetic and surgical instruments will extract the baby.

This disastrous reaction occurs as soon as the mother comes into contact with the hard cutting edge of our ordinary culture, which to us is the play of repartee, but to the mother in labor is a world of shrouded aggression and covert hostility against which she has no defense. Nature requires her to assume a spiritual state the world no longer knows, but those who receive her onto the ward 'know' that she will need drugs, and proceed to make them available.

This attitude in their mind transfers to hers, and she accepts them with the implicit obedience just discussed. This does not mean that she cannot hold her ground and refuse them if she has already formed a contrary opinion beforehand, but such is the coordination of the estimation in their favor that this rarely occurs. Once she takes them the possibility of a natural birth is undermined at a chemical level, below her awareness, disturbing the balance of mind the natural process requires.

Attendants are accustomed to the voluntary compliance. They take it for granted and order all things for convenience and immediate ends. Over the years, experience and results take a hand and a degree of efficiency comes to exist, but this efficiency has but one end in view; an operative medical birth.

Because premedication, which readies a patient to receive a general anesthetic takes time to take effect, many hospitals, in which the administration of drugs and anesthesia is second nature, find it convenient and time-saving to administer it routinely. If no operation is needed it just works itself off. If the staff encounter resistance they adopt a team spirit in order to overcome by 'kindly force'. Seeing birth in a different light, Read protested strongly against routine anesthesia, saying:

"I must emphasize ... the unforgivable custom of anesthetizing a woman as routine, irrespective of her wishes ... In the British Isles, the United States of America, and many other highly civilized countries this astonishing and deplorable interference is accepted as normal treatment...

His Editors recommended differently:

"Routine sedation in labor is no longer accepted procedure, but pethidine or pethidine plus one of the phenothiazine derivatives, such as promethazine, is offered in support of the antenatal preparation..."

They might as well have said:

"Routine execution is no longer accepted procedure, but a blow to the head plus a shot to the neck is 'offered' for the sake of peace of mind..."

They do not call it routine, because that cannot be logically defended. It is "offered in support..." One caught driving a car under the influence of pethidine or promethazine, let alone their combination would be rightly fined or imprisoned, but this state is not only sanctioned but pressed upon a woman in labor. Once administered a natural childbirth is out of the question. There is no insight in this, just awareness that routine sedation and anesthesia should be hidden behind a smokescreen of words.

The drugs, surgical preparation, swabbing, enema, shaving of sensitive parts, painting with antiseptic and positioning upon an operating table with legs hoisted in stirrups and draped with surgical sheets means nothing else than surgical delivery, and it is made routine. The mother surrenders to this the moment she takes the initial drug. From that moment she is not treated as a rational being, any more than a drunk, no matter how indulgent we may feel. She will receive care, but as a patient, not as a woman on the path of a natural birth.

If she refuses the offered drugs, as in law she is entitled she is caught in the backlash of her own feelings. She is 'offending' or 'being difficult'. She may be told that she is "making it difficult for herself," or that she should "think of the baby." Different attendants will repeat the offer in different ways, and a continued refusal will be taken as blameworthy behavior. The conflict throws an internal switch, precipitating cultural childbirth, and it then really does look as if she has wished it upon herself.

### Second Stage, Absolute Compliance

As the first stage of labor passes into the second, compliance becomes absolute. It is not a _trance_ , which from _transir_ to go over, means to faint or pass away. It is a coming-to-be, accession to nature's basic state or _identification_. We malign it if we call it trance for it is cause, not result, just as the dawn is not the sun's setting. It is the mind's original form appearing. Trance is its disappearing, the echo of the first state in mature life.

Again, we might hear that the mind, in everyday consciousness, 'mirrors the world' where in truth it creates it. In identification there is no world apart, no place therefore for a mirror. In this state, ego with its reflective thinking does not yet exist. As in the consciousness of dawning humanity, before the fallen state, before death entered the world and humans 'hid from god', mind and world are one. Upon this as a base, a new and higher state, that of motherhood, will arise, the foundation of our human being.

The sign of trance under hypnosis is dependence. Its stem is suppressed conditioning. The sign of this state is autonomy, which in sequence is the mind-resetting process that initiates bonding. We saw its origin in compliance, which then deepened or became absolute in psychical identification. Just to pursue its nature, this is the stem of our _knowing_ , which in maturity constitutes our human state, that in our separation from the world we still _know_ (what) it (is). Appearing in labor it is a psychical balance, in harmony with the birth leading directly to bonding, but if it is tripped into its opposite by inimical circumstances it becomes the force that triggers the unconditioned reflex, which then manifests as cultural childbirth.

Dick Read says of the second stage of labor,

"acquired social habits and manners" drop away, and... "she becomes oblivious to her surroundings and careless of her appearance, expression and speech." 2nd Ed. p. 84

He calls it the amnesic state, saying,

"In the absence of any dominating fear the woman in second stage is devoid of any consciousness of herself."

Dominating fear is absent because he, Read, attending her, is not fearful. Were _his_ mind suddenly fearful, so would be hers, because she no longer holds those in her presence as aloof in a world _external_ to her.

Momentarily she has regained the state described in Genesis 2:25. If we could take it forward from there, that would be the beginning of the human millennium.

Understanding this affords us two insights. First is the direct influence of unwanted attitudes in thought speech and behavior that can derail an intended natural birth. Second is the inverse consequence, that fear, occasioned by the memory of something previously read seen or heard about, does not do this, because in the course of the labor all such conditioned information drops away, along with the conscious mind and acquired social habits and manners.

Describing the typical birth his colleagues encounter in unprepared second stage labor, Read says,

"Every contraction is the harbinger of renewed torture. There is no pretence or play-acting in this." 2nd Ed. p. 85

This is true because play-acting springs from a conditioned ego, a thinking (devious) intelligence, and that has now been superseded by a state which does not 'reflect upon' but reads the existing reality directly. Read continues,

"the woman suffers; she cringes and writhes in agony. Her pitiable appearance rightly calls for all the encouragement and relief within the power of the physician to give."

Here we encounter ambiguity. We might have expected: "Her pitiable appearance rightly calls for anesthesia," but the expected word has been plucked out and replaced by a circumlocution: "... _all the encouragement and relief within the power of the physician to give_." While he does not approve of drugs and anesthesia, for he is aware of the closed circuit of cause and effect, he leaves the door open for their use as a concession to his colleagues. In the Fifth Edition they seize upon this to recommend the use of pethidine in his name, a drug use that terminates his teachings on natural childbirth altogether.

He tried in vain to wean his colleagues away from a too-ready resort to drugs and anesthesia, believing that he could convert them to his approach, but still clinging to his educational theory, and not seeing the background reality he ceded ground in order to strengthen his explanation. His continued reference to the impact of cultural childbirth upon _uninstructed_ women shows that he still nursed the idea that they act from erroneous belief, a fault in their knowledge, yet he himself had proof in the very beginning that his educational course did not work. Reflecting their attendants' belief in pain the mothers suffer actual pain, and their attendants are unable to suffer their suffering, especially when they can do something about it. A shot of drug and an anesthetic will carry the whole scene away by deleting her consciousness, and the knife will do the rest.

In sheer ignorance they escalate cultural childbirth to its maximum expression. With this comes the appalling power of birth to tear the tissues open. The mother is oblivious to this as it occurs, but it strikes fear into her medical attendants, the only response at this late stage being episiotomy, an elective incision of the outlet.

If a mother is, ab initio, drug free, and psychologically prepared, she can, in (Read's) ninety five percent of cases deliver naturally without tissue damage or pain. Furthermore, some of the problematic five percent can be diagnosed in advance, which means that the figure of ninety five percent improves with correct selection, guidance and care.
16. Drugs on and off the Street

A young woman in her early twenties was booking in for her second baby. She had had her first when she was barely sixteen, and she told me that all had gone well then until she went to the hospital. She was told she would have to have an injection for the relief of pain. She declined, saying that she did not need one, but they insisted, and suddenly stuck it into her arm anyway. What then followed was a nightmare experience, told as follows:

"I was not in pain at all but they kept telling me I was and giving me these injections. They would not listen but kept jabbing them in. I'd no sooner emerge from the influences of one than they would say I was in pain and give me another. I had no chance to recover from one before the next would arrive. It was a horrible experience."

Needless to say she was anesthetized and delivered by episiotomy and forceps extraction. She hoped it would not occur again. Without comment or promise, I just nodded in agreement, and in the event her wish was fulfilled. Her second birth was unremarkable, peaceful and without drug or untoward event. She needed no episiotomy and suffered no injury.

Medical intervention in childbirth depends upon the use of drugs. Without them it would never have got its foot in the door of childbirth, let alone come to dominate it; neither could it maintain its present advantage without them.

Read objected to the use of drugs, supposedly to ease pain in otherwise normal labors where no true indication existed, but not in order to effect legitimate intervention. He saw that improper use, to 'help' mothers give birth where nature calls for none, actually work in the opposite direction. They destroy the mother's nature-given autonomy and wrest control away from her.

The 'war' began when doctors assumed the right to decide whether or not they should be taken, and then insisted upon prescribing them in every case. They then took the resultant difficult labors, and the many complications as proof that birth is not a natural phenomenon, but a medical emergency, turning the essential facts upside down. Read's teachings upon the misuse of drugs therefore became a prime target for the editors of his Fifth Edition, who wrote:

"Morphia and heroin, both drugs in great demand in more recent years have now largely been abandoned in favor of another opium derivative called pethidine... The present writers would support the judicious use of pethidine in many normal labors."

Needless to say, the 'new' wonder drug soon joined morphine and heroin as a banned substance worldwide. Read had pointed out, and his editors failed to mention, that every new analgesic drug has a honeymoon period during which it is touted as non-addictive and free of bad side-effects, until these become self-evident and addiction shows up. Chemists soon had their premises, vehicles and dwellings broken into by burglars searching for pethidine, but the doctors continued to support its 'judicious use', wherein it plays havoc with nature's process in birth.

Until the mid 20th century heroin was a common prescription drug, also available over the counter as a cough mixture. There was no ban and no illegal trade. Fifty years earlier morphine could be bought over the counter. Addiction at that time was so rare that the case histories of known addicts were reproduced with their photographs in the world's medical journals. Today, in an age of drug abuse, they number in their tens of millions. The following outline of mechanism may help to bring the subject into focus.

Psychoactive drugs or 'psychotropes' differentially poison the body and particularly the nervous system thereby altering its psychical function, changing mood and the state of conscious awareness. They are addictive because the deeper 'DNA' mind, which sets the body's control indices, and in particular the balance within consciousness, then moves _to readjust the disturbed balance_. The drugs create a sense of pleasure and euphoria, normally attained by effort and success, by changing the body's metabolic state. The deeper mind, in its overall command function, takes stock of the change and alters its control parameters so as to restore its original settings. It eliminates the unwarranted pleasure and euphoria by psychical adjustment, restoring the mean and lean basis of consciousness to what it takes to be appropriate to its reading of the world.

A greater dose of drug is then required to recreate the pleasurable effect. Again the body readjusts, and so it goes on until the chronic state known as addiction is reached, between the subject's drug intake and the mind's reassertion of its intentional state. An unstable balance between conscious and unconscious impulse replaces the previously stable basis of mental function.

This is not too difficult to understand. Central in mind, underpinning our consciousness is a desirable state, referred to in religious experience as "the peace that surpasses all understanding." To locate this desirable state in the _life_ cycle we must go to the mind's origin in fetal life. Here, we can postulate, the original setting, commensurate with the self-assurance of the newborn and the tranquility of sleep, will reside, as a benchmark state of mind, as yet undisturbed by life's changing experience of hunger and satiety, pleasure and pain, fortune and misfortune.

Experience, oppositely, is the struggle to survive in the front line of conscious existence, overshadowed by loss suffering and death. Our conscious life is the journey we take towards fulfillment, that the mentioned inner state of poise (the said tranquility), may pervade the outer as well as inner consciousness, that we may realize our deepest aspirations in life and in the world. Drugs appear in this relation as a shortcut to the desired result, achieved through a chemical trick. We deceive our self. Enter asceticism, resolve and religious dedication, the only way out of the trap for those caught in this predicament. In parallel with our discussion of labor, the same polar difference between autonomy and compulsion reigns; except the addicted person achieve the result through sheer understanding and insight into the nature of life, the remedy will not endure.

If we think of cultural childbirth as the lightning flash, then Read's "war against women" is the first rumbling of thunder, and the artificial worldwide drug war, as a symptom of a sick society is a dependent result. The answer to drugs is simple. Neither take them nor promote; neither prescribe them nor proscribe. This formula alone will set the stage for success, allowing human intelligence to resolve the whole issue.

The mother who enters upon a training course for natural childbirth is already on such a path. In choosing to take no drugs, she will meet no real opposition if she refrains from yielding to pressure, and in particular it is highly recommended that she refrain from mention or endeavoring to influence others in their chosen indulgence. One must not only decline to take a drug offered, but also decline to influence another in their habit. In this way no head to head conflict will arise. Furthermore, there must be no exception. Taking no drugs, leaving the mind in its natural spiritual state, includes social, legal and medicinal drugs, plus illegal drugs, where 'drug' means psychotrope, from caffeine (tea coffee chocolate) to nicotine and alcohol, and the medicinal psychotropes (hypnotics tranquilizers sedatives).

Unless exaggerated in the mind, it is not a big step. If an expectant mother wants a natural birth, she must understand that it is no ordinary accomplishment she is demanding, given the state of society. We are free of drugs when we realize that we do not need them, but it has to be a logical step. Those addicted, especially to the social drugs, not realizing that addiction is a mental act, notoriously deny that their habits have any addictive propensity. Give them their freedom. Do no endeavor to reason or argue them out of their habit. A drug is merely a chemical, but addiction is a practice locked into place by advice, persuasion and prohibition.

17. Control

If we look at humanity in the context of birth, and this in context of biology in general, we are compelled to recognize that birth as such is a critical focal point and foundation in our nature. It is in fact a sovereign self-sufficient and self-regulating autonomous process in its own right.

In physiology, the _science_ of function, the 'autonomic' is that division of the nervous system which controls vegetative and involuntary functions. As such it comes before, and is the foundation of the higher systems.

In philosophy, autonomy is the doctrine that the individual human will contains its own principles and laws. Applied to a country it means independent, _subject to its own laws only_. Because it is the underlying principle governing birth in nature our approach to the question of natural birth will be appropriately guided if we take it as the basis of our understanding.

If autonomy is _birth's_ principle, its own principle is competence: the inherent ability for self-regulation, self-action and self-control. But besides the mother's in-built or autonomous ability, there is the question of governing circumstances. These, too, must be permissive within limits.

Within these parameters, an inspection of birth now tells us that, during the course of labor the center of control in the mother begins to pass naturally from her conscious, to subconscious and finally unconscious mind. Anything that unsettles this transition will lead to a cultural birth. A natural birth therefore requires special conditions, more easily obtained, at least in our current world, in a hut than a hospital.

The phenomenon of sleep may help us to understand this, for here too, the unconscious is in command and remains so for a characteristic period of time. Sleep goes through pre-set stages, until having prepared the ground it gives way to the intelligent consciousness its preparation makes possible. But the state of sleep can be interrupted by a mere noise. The natural birth is similarly threatened, not by noise, but anything capable of upsetting the mother's emotional equilibrium.

As a noise may disturb our sleep, activating a transition to consciousness, anxiety can disturb a birth, switching it from a natural to a cultural course. To avoid this happening, the mother and those who will attend her at the birth can undertake training that will lead them to understand and observe the required not-to-be-infringed conditions.

In an ideal society men and women would be autonomous, spiritually mature, self-directed self-sufficient beings, and society itself would partake of this nature. Currently, a social imbalance prevails. Women, as mothers, may enjoy social recognition in keeping with their role, but _motherhood_ , as the value-creating foundation of civilization is submerged in this individual role and is otherwise economically unrecognized. The imbalance rests upon this anomaly, with the result that the entire system is in a state of turmoil, where neither men nor women find themselves in a social environment conducive to their full and proper development.

Spiritual autonomy in the sense described is lacking. At the same time nature anchors autonomy in the mother and requires it back of her in the birth. Natural demands that she 'touch base' at this moment. To picture this, we can imagine it saying, "I made you autonomous. Show it now."

The woman, disobedient to her original nature, who may _not_ be autonomous on other occasions, is required to be so in the labor and birth. If she is not, cultural childbirth, the "Curse of Eve," follows. The prevalence of such experience is a measure of the extent to which society as a whole falls short of the ideal. Civilization is dragging the anchor, straining to break free from its proper station, to our detriment and self-destruction. Behind the scenes is a struggle for control. Is Man and the male ethic going to command Woman even in the process of giving birth?

... and to thy husband shall be thy desire, and he shall rule over thee. Ge 3:16

It is part of the Curse.

### Training Programs

Training programs offered in modern clinics attached to obstetric hospitals all over the world have turned 'breathing control' into a means of _controlling the mother_. This is upside down. It suits the world, but is out of step with nature. A typical example, though it is not what he taught, can be found in Read's so-called 'Fifth Edition'.

In this particular program, batteries of instructions are given on how the mother is to breathe in the various stages of labor. She is to 'pant and blow' and 'puff' according to a rigmarole. One type of breathing serves for the early "short mild contractions", and others for all manner of intermediate steps. The way it is presented suggests that the labor is a complicated ritual _conducted under somebody else's orders_.

It is a program not of autonomy, but dependence. The instructor is the one who knows it all. If the mother finds it difficult to follow, it must be because she is not very good at following orders. It undermines her confidence and that is all that such exercises do. Its patterns are unnatural, so how can they be part of natural childbirth? The aim of the breathing exercises, the book says, is:

"To be able to alter breathing quickly in response to commands. During labor, mental states and the effects of drugs can undermine a mother's powers of concentration and help in maintaining control can be provided if an instructress is present at this time." 5th Ed. p. 238

If the Editors understood their own words they would understand why they could not reduplicate Read's success. Who is giving the commands and why? If the mother's mental state is undermined and dulled by the drugs why were they given?" The female overseer present 'at this time', is an 'instructress', maintaining control as an agent of the absent doctor, not a midwife responsible for the outcome and the mother's care.

Seeing birth as their business, something to be regimented and controlled by outsiders, they turn the mother into a puppet on strings at the very moment when nature demands her independence. What she really needs is a shield of peace and privacy against all manner of intrusion and interference. It is her supreme moment, her tryst with nature in the foundation of our kind. The doctors and the medical system are the product of nature, not its creator. Their presumptive interference is counter-productive, creating the difficulties it proposes to combat.

Breathing exercises should not be taught so that the mother can follow a prescribed routine during labor, for that is 'making the sun shine'. Such exercises may well appear in an antenatal program aimed at natural childbirth, but she will practice simple setting-up exercises, and do them not to music, but to the rhythm of her natural breathing. She will focus her mind upon her breathing, nature's pendulum, in order to maintain control within the quietude of her own jurisdiction. She will prove her ability to do them with metronome precision, _but also her ability to disobey disregard and neglect such advice whenever she feels it is in her interest to do so._

Breathing is the natural conductor of the mental orchestra. It is the carrier wave upon which our language and thought arise. It is the impulse that initiates all action other than the heartbeat. It must therefore be free, taking orders only from one origin, the breathing center and font of consciousness situated in the brain stem. There is no precondition in natural birth except autonomy, whose only demand is that there be no demand. Nothing is to command the mother but the stem of her own nature.

The following extracts from the Fifth Edition indicate the kind of exercises discussed. They could be sourced in Dick-Read's own program, we are not told, but it is their intention, not the humdrum detail that is important:

Method

inspiration and expiration... mouth only slightly open so that the air does not irritate the throat... ... ...

5. Late First Stage

As above but with breathing progressively quickening — 26 to 28 breaths per minute over peak of contraction. Always rhythmical as contractions get stronger.

6. Variations at Transitional Stage

Breathing nitrous oxide and oxygen to ease discomfort. AIM — nitrous oxide will be effective before onset of pain." 5th Ed. p. 239

The extracts shown above give but a small fraction of an extensive rigmarole. Before 5 and 6 there is 1 2 3 and 4, each much more elaborate than shown, and the whole, from the point of view of natural childbirth is not sense but insanity. Item 6, which converts the breathing exercises into a means of inhaling nitrous oxide has to be the Editor's own invention. It could never have come out of Read's books, for he wrote:

"It has become the custom in some maternity organizations to describe the various methods of inducing **anesthesia** or **analgesia** ; different apparatuses are demonstrated and the women are taught how to use them. I have found this introduces a serious fear that the rest of their instruction will be of no avail in labour. If doctors teach them how to take gas as part of their preparation for labour, gas _will_ be required to relieve pain which they are expected to suffer." 4th Ed. p. 294

The Editors were engaged to emulate and expand his work. That may have been their intention, but in the event they destroyed it. They completely missed the point, and in view of their presentation we can only conclude that they were _incapable of grasping it_. That being the case, some blame must attach to Read's theory as well, and we will join them in their error if we cannot grasp the incorrigibility of the uninformed and inexperienced human mind.

The remedy is to do what Read did: declare the failure, determine where and why it went wrong, and correcting the shortcoming, take the program to its next step. This will mean adopting an 'Artemis Phaenarete Socrates' system (as we can call it) that will achieve the goal of natural childbirth, in clear understanding of its every factor needed to ensure its success.

At the same time we must avoid the pitfall of underestimating the task and the potential for opposition and hostile response. Read underestimated cultural childbirth, seeing it as a medical problem, when in fact its cause is more deeply rooted. We must say, "We know he was on the right track. We are going to demonstrate this. We can get birth right and we will get birth right, and when we do it will be but the first step in getting society as a whole right, the beginning of a thoroughgoing social revolution.
18. Hypnosis

The trance of hypnosis vests control in the hypnotist. That is its most immediate effect. Subjects fall into compliance and obedience. Light repartee, opposition and controversy give way to stolid acquiescence; the flux of indecision and uncertainty of the conscious mind is stilled. The subject is released from a hidden compulsion, and it is this release, replaced by reasonable instruction, that appears on the surface as healing. However, the compulsion is left in place as the agent of the new behavior, which as merely window-dressing will eventually be swept aside in relapse or symptom substitution. True healing requires insight through the self-directed conscious mind. This alone will not relapse.

In trance a subject returns or reverts mentally to a state of mind that is infantile, and is so because it is _before_ a traumatic life-endangering experience that involved loss of consciousness at the time. This could be near drowning, toxic illness injury etc. in the baby/ infant period of life. The trance is a summoned memory of this time, but an 'empty' memory, because its content is the traumatic unconsciousness. This explains why some individuals, but not others are trance susceptible, for not all have experienced the causative sequences. Everyone who is born however is subject to the risk.

The nature of memory tells us that, if its causative experience was so severe as to suspend consciousness — and this can happen on either side of the erotic/ injury fence, we could be free of it, only if, mentally, we were returned to a temporal state anterior to it; for the conscious mind would not have the power to deal with it. This balance is the mechanism in repression, as well as in conditioning and hypnotic trance. In terms of control, hypnosis and autonomy are opposites.

They are polar opposites and for this reason they share a superficial resemblance. No place on earth is further from the North Pole than the South, and no two places are so similar. Those who advocate hypnosis as a means of achieving natural childbirth have reached a level of understanding, which is not, however, a full understanding.

Read was a determined opponent of hypnosis. Introducing the subject his Editors said:

"It would be reasonable to say that, in general, Dr Dick-Read was rather opposed to hypnosis..." 5th Ed. p. 287

This turns the facts upside down. Read consistently warned against its use, regarding it as abhorrent, but they disparage his thought and teaching, stating that his opposition was due to ignorance and that he used it without realizing what he was doing:

"In his anxiety to dissociate himself from the suggestion that he hypnotized his patients he failed to differentiate clearly between the full practice of hypnosis — the induction of deep hypnosis; and the use of hypnotic methods to induce a state of relaxation without loss of consciousness and indeed without loss of any of the faculties or the powers of reasoning and thinking. Ibid

He understood it better than they, for the author of the above paragraph, in describing what he thinks is hypnosis is describing anesthesia. This can be 'light' or 'heavy' in any given subject. The mechanism in hypnosis is quite different and does not fit his belief. Read was neither anxious or confused. He investigated and he made himself clear, saying:

"When instructing in relaxation we must be careful not to make a mystery out of it."

But the Fifth Edition says,

"There are many methods by which a hypnotic state may be induced; a bright light, movements of the hands of the hypnotizer, concentration upon an imaginary mark upon the ceiling and the reiteration of various words. 5th. p. 289

Read had said:

"I strongly urge those who put this natural childbirth method into practice not to associate the dramatic changes they will notice in their patients with suggestion, mesmerism or hypnotism. 2nd Ed. p. 152

The Editor's said:

"the technique of light hypnosis the preparation for which is carried out by an expert is in our opinion entirely compatible with safety in all senses for the expectant mother..."

Again the misleading reference to 'light hypnosis' occurs. Either the subject is in or out of trance, and trance is not psychologically safe for expectant mothers or anyone else. The reference, "carried out by an expert" is a false assertion.

Read's program consisted of education, plus relaxation training. He confessed to having no interest in hypnosis until a colleague accused him of using it, to which his response was to call in an acknowledged specialist in the medical field to review his procedures. After a thorough study he was assured that his approach did not involve hypnosis at all. Nevertheless his Editors reverted to the accusation after his death. They reasoned in their disordered way that he 'must' have used it, for his results, and the very idea of natural childbirth were foreign to their comprehension. Unable to think of birth as other than a medical emergency, they could conceive of no other explanation.

Read expressed the popular view when he said:

"Nothing is more frightful to the lay mind than the mystical application of psychological influence." 2nd Ed. p. 153

His Editors declared:

"This is no place to embark upon a detailed discussion of hypnosis nor attempt to explain the phenomenon which is indeed not yet entirely explicable or entirely understood, even by psychiatrists." 5th Ed. p. 289

The word 'entirely' is a concession to the fiction that _psychiatrists_ who use hypnosis know what they are doing. They themselves do not understand it, nor do they think that psychiatrists understand it, but to escape the boomerang they push in the softener, "entirely." We, in turn, can be _entirely_ thankful to be spared their detailed discussion, which would no doubt have told us about colored lights and imaginary spots on the ceiling, the sort of details offered in any penny-dreadful on hypnosis.

The trance of hypnosis and the state of mind in labor, are opposites, and as such, each holds a reversing mirror to the other. Through contrariety we can be guided as to the nature of each. We can study them together, allowing their identity and difference to paint in the picture of our knowledge. As always, understanding begins when and where we can compare something with "what it is not."

Trance has been known since ancient times. Mesmer discovered that he could induce it by using ritualistic procedures. It then became an object of study in an age when science was beginning to determine and quantify everything. Mesmer's approach was scientific, experimental and observational, and also, necessarily, flamboyant. Those who did not, and could not comprehend the significance of his wizard's hat; flowing robes and mystical gestures dismissed it. Guided by the science of his time, he called the phenomenon animal _magnetism_. Later generations changed this to hypnosis when they realized that magnets were not essential to its manifestation.

To understand trance we must first understand the mind's genesis in the orchestrated development that occurs from conception to early childhood. Here, the bonding that springs from a natural labor and birth assumes signal importance, constituting the key to the mind's formation. The mother is the baby's first externally known, internally understood entity, and in this bi-polarity the mind takes shape.

It is inseparable from our life cycle, and the ever-repeating round of our daily waking and sleeping, wherein we forever refresh our mind, 'touch' our mental origin and bring it forward again from its foundation. Sleep winds up our mind much as we wind up a twenty-four hour clock. Then, to see how the trance of hypnosis resembles, but differs from the mental state in labor we need to see how the mind is affected by two opposites, a coming birth, and — in quite reverse circumstances — the imminence of death.

The nature of mind, when we study it, is given to us through its genesis in time. Here, our own life experience contrasts with that which occurs in the vast expanse of evolutionary time. The period we spend in the mother's womb connects the two (our life experience, and evolution's experience) as a bridge _when we take, it as joined to another significant time, namely the months immediately following birth._ Our attention here will focus particularly on the latter. The trance of hypnosis amounts to a mental falling back or regression onto the mind's formative stages, characteristic of late fetal life, babyhood and infancy.

The psychical organization appropriate to these times will tell us much about the phenomena of trance, but its basic nature is something else again. Its physiology — for it has a normative side — rests upon a built-in survival mechanism we all possess, namely the body's optimum metabolic and behavioral state thrown into action just prior to what appears in our higher conscious mind to be an unavoidable violent death. This has been widely remarked, studied and known as the sudden death syndrome, whose mechanism is built into our nature.

We have then three states in view; the trance of hypnosis, the automatic adoption of a special survival state just prior to an impending catastrophe, and the state that manifests, either as normal and appropriate in natural labor and birth, or as abnormal and inappropriate as in the experience of cultural childbirth.

In this context we can begin to see just what hypnotism really is. Its trance is modeled upon the physiology of the sudden death syndrome. 'Physiology', as a word, immediately signifies normality. It is not a pathology or abnormality. Hypnotic trance however, which revivifies that state, falls into the category of abnormality and is therefore a pathology.

The state that exists and manifests in labor, is of course, supremely normal, but in cultural childbirth it becomes a pathology or abnormality. Taking these different states together, we can see how they fit together, within the context of mind as such, and the latter (the mind) comes into focus as soon as we see it in terms of experience, and experience alone, so evolutionary experience in great time, formative experience within the context of the mother-infant relation, and finally within the context of our conscious experience as individual operative beings.
19. Read's Expectation

The mother in labor exhibits an absolute psychological flexibility. Those in her environ will see nothing they do not expect, and unless they are already aware of the potential, they will remain oblivious to the very idea that there is any sort of special mental state involved. Those who expect to see pain and arrested birth will see pain and arrested birth, for their attitude calls it into being. As a result they find themselves called upon to exercise the surgical skills that justify their presence. Those who expect to see 'a great deal of hard work' will see 'a great deal of hard work', exactly as Grantly Dick-Read described:

"Take, for yet another example, the grunting moans during a second stage contraction ... these moans have no association with physical pain ... The large majority of undrugged and fully informed women have very little if any discomfort with second stage "pains," but a deal of hard work. It is the grunt and groan of a man who pulls successfully on a rope ..." 2nd Ed. p. 87; 4th Ed. p. 160

Read uses the simile of a tug of war to impress upon his readers that groaning and facial contortion does not necessarily indicate pain. We can be sure however, that in his presence, his patients, aware of his teaching, would grunt and groan a great deal.

Those who expect to see peace and total relaxation may well see that, for birth is a mirror wherein attendants and bystanders see their own attitudes dramatized. In this situation our expectations determine what we see. A rare staging of humor rewarded Bill Cosby when he attended his wife's labor. Unease and fear emanates from attendants not experienced in natural labor and birth. The mother catches this and reflects it back to them. In result the labor slows and stops, caught in its own tensions. The incidence of complications increases. Again, doctors, having sublime faith in drugs, administer these initially, afraid that their patients, if not 'helped' will collapse in exhaustion. They promptly do just that, while the drugs, compounding a reversible condition, make it irreversible.

As a self-fulfilling prophecy the expected imposes its sway, and because there is no shadow of doubt to cast it into relief, it goes unnoticed. The attendants are confirmed in the belief they bring with them. Whatever they expect largely happens, while the birth proceeds like a ship responding to wind and sea alike, physical and psychical forces comprising for it but a single element.

### Masters and Johnson

The onlookers are not deceived, but neither are they informed. Another factor seals the liability to error. Drs. William Masters and Virginia Johnson submitted human sexual response to scientific analysis. Their subjects performed sexual acts while wired for sound, cinematographic and electro-physiological recording. They reported:

"myotonic response [muscular contraction] is clinically obvious from forehead to toes of the responding individual. In reacting to elevated sexual tension levels the individual frowns, scowls or grimaces as facial muscles contract involuntarily in semispasm." Human Sexual Response, Masters and Johnson.

They describe spastic contraction of the muscles around the mouth, gasping reaction to hyperventilation, jaws clenching spastically, nasal flare, involuntary sweating and so on. Then, in a subsequent clinical paper they report that, _given films and recordings which did not betray the circumstances, observers interpreted the expressions as those of torture._

Adding to this they collected a sequence of films depicting human beings in various tortured states, from mild pain to agony, and presented these to skilled observers along with others showing facial expressions in the sexual act. In the absence of circumstantial clues, the observers were unable to tell the difference. The authors concluded that torture and sexual orgasm have objectively identical expression. Only inner distinction and testimony determines one from the other.

If we combine Masters and Johnson's findings with the fact that sensation is not amenable to objective measurement, it becomes clear that assertion in its respect rests on common experience and speculation. The importance of labor and birth in nature's economy suggests that a significant, vital and imperative effect could be involved. Some mothers have described the process of labor and birth as one of supreme fulfillment, but again this is subject to the same construal. We are at the mercy of subjectivity. Read based his theory upon the fact that birth is an essential moment in the physiology of life. Pain is associated with injury, and erotic sensation sexual activity. Birth's role is more central than either of these more variable extremes.

If research cannot tell the difference between ecstasy and agony by means of its manifest expression, we can assume that neither can busy obstetric attendants do so, especially when, in preconceived opinion, they administer analgesic and anesthetic agents, often against the mother's wish.

It is widely assumed that doctors know best, even when, following ritual and hearsay in support of their professional interests they do not know at all. Once an intravenous drip is in place staff can administer drugs without the patient's awareness. Our civilization has so lost touch with its foundation that it calls for birth to be performed upon an operating table under the glare of arc lights, with attendants empowered to order drugs to meet whatever they think the mother requires. This devastates nature's plan. The following points hold.

1/. Labor is a special state in the foundation of the human life cycle. The assertion that it is merely a physical process, the expulsion of a fetus in the birth of a baby, without an equally important _psychical_ intention, can be dismissed as untenable.

2/. No observer can divine the mother's experience exactly. She, and only she knows intuitively what is going on. Only women who have themselves born children in a natural way can interpret and understand the sequence of events that occur.

3/. Labor operates on the pivot of a psychical balance that can switch in a moment. Intellect emotion and empathy attest to the reality of mental processes, but we are speaking here of something deeper, namely the foundation upon which these thought-engendering levels arise.

_Transference_ , wherein subjects glean and act out the expectations of analysts, is well known in psychiatry. Add to this the fact that in labor, the pure state, of which transference is but a shade, prevails and we can see that those who expect 'grunting and groaning' will get exactly that; but what _do_ medical attendants expect in labor? We will take the case of the male doctor, for historically these have established the patterns that govern our current obstetrical environment.

Freud shocked Victorian society when he attributed sexual feelings to infants. In terms of Freudian analysis we would have to say that male doctors unconsciously interpret labor as a sexual act, with themselves as onlookers. Freud would have said that in suppressing such thoughts sublimation occurs. On one side he feels impelled to be a participant; on the other his social and economic interests demand that he suppress that attitude altogether. His unconscious desire to participate and possess, in suppression, joins forces with paternalism, leading him to adopt the attitude of 'knowing best' and giving orders as to how the birth is to proceed.

This attitude comes to a head when he sees labor, not as a natural act that can go wrong, so needing help on occasion, but as an act wrong in itself, a pathological and painful business to be dealt with by drugs, anesthesia and operation. When he orders this course he quickly finds that it coincides with his social status, mana and income.

At the same time it plays into fantasy's hand, requiring the laboring mother to be on her back, trussed up with her feet in stirrups, the worst possible position for labor, but allowing obstetrician and anesthetist to jointly operate. In this way medicine induces the failure of labor that justifies its presence.

Medicine, which studies disease and treats it by physical means, is failing in two areas where it does not belong, at least in its present form. The first, where its presence should be no more than marginal, is obstetrics. The second is psychiatry. These two disciplines, both mind-orientated, should stand over and against, rather than with medicine. Birth deals with the inception of mind, a point which modern obstetrics overlooks, and psychiatry with its disorder, but in a patriarchal world both disciplines have caught the chill of a subterranean misogyny, enemy of mind's true expression.

### Shame

The first historical reference to a condition is noteworthy. This is especially so, when the condition precedes all known medical knowledge and is posited as the cause of all exclusively human illness. Our knowledge of a thing's beginning is an aspect of its truth. With this in mind, we may now look at Genesis 2:25. Describing a state of primitive innocence it says:

"And they were both naked, Man and his wife, and were not ashamed."

Genesis 3 immediately follows as a sudden change and fall from grace. The sequence presents shame as coming before fear and the fall. This identifies it negatively, not as the origin of humanity, but the ground of the flaw in humanity, our species condition. Fearing their nakedness they hid from God, their essential nature, in a sequence, described as a curse that struck at labor and birth. Evil and sin, about whose description the biblical narrative then turns, emerges as the midwife of our kind.

Shame is a painful emotion associated with a sense of disfavor and lowering of self-esteem. It humbles us the eyes of others. It is a fall from grace, or dis-grace, and first expression of the dis-ease, which in its full development is cultural childbirth and the train of psychosomatic illness that follows in its wake.

With the loss of self-respect and diminution in our social standing, shame measures our loss of spiritual autonomy. This hits the target. We no longer feel at one with our kind. Our human state gives us dominance over the other creatures, and to a degree the elements, but at a cost, that we may fear death, or alternatively, wish we were dead. The curse procures its dominion in and through the process of giving birth. The way to overcome it, both for individuals and the community, is to face into the storm and prevail. To that end we are born, our life set on a given course even before we are born. Each of us in this sense is a zero, nothing in the face of the whole, and paradoxically a necessary part of that whole; just as every jigsaw piece is part of the final picture.

Not drugged, the mother's percipience in labor and birth, short of the moment of forgetfulness, is acute. Whether distraught or calm her state is spiritual. She is devoid of guile and will not be deceived by an affected respect. If the general attitude is one of tension, carelessness or superiority she will reflect it unerringly. It is critical, therefore, that her attendants be trained as much as she herself, for only in this way will they know what is permissible and what is not. Those not in harmony with the mother's psychical state should not be present at the birth.

In labor and birth a mother is physically and spiritually naked. Nature, at this moment, has to return upon its primeval state. The mother must be 'naked and unashamed'. If, unconsciously, she senses inimical circumstances it is as if death were present, for instance, the presence of a predator, and her body will tense to stop the birth as in an emergency. The option then is episiotomy, alternatively a tear of the outlet tissues. Prehuman nature, which has yet to catch up to human nature, provides only for fight or flee. Neither of these is an appropriate response in second stage labor within the circumstance of modern conditions. She would be immediately drugged and restrained. Short of a social revolution, the consequence is universal cultural childbirth, with knock-on erosion and suffering across the whole domain of human life. A brief review of animal birth will help to throw some light on this.

### Birth in the Wilds

Picture a woman giving birth, not in a backward or even primitive society, but in the wild at the dawn of history. Eagles fly overhead and in this nature, birth is very likely to attract predators. Such attack is the cardinal danger. The infant is helpless. The odor of its liquor amnii, and the blood exposed in the separation of the placenta announce the birth afar. Inevitably the mother is immobilized physically and mentally at least briefly. For this, sensing the need, she will have exhibited security-seeking behavior before the birth, in retreat and quietude, but also seeking the approval and protection of her tribe or family, in most cases the most significant form of protection.

The human mother has these instincts, no less than her mammalian cousins — in whom they are well enough known. Also, beyond this need for safety in the birth there is the fact that she will have to support herself and the baby in the weeks, months and years that follow, when she may be handicapped by the duties of care, as well as having to find sustenance for two or more. As the support of her tribal fellows is paramount she will be sensitive to the mores of her tribe, as well as the play of power within its structure. Upon this the survival of her self and children depends.

However, regardless of preparation, something unexpected may happen, for no more than we can change the past, can we foresee every nuance and turn of the future. With catastrophes, natural and of human origin — flood fire earthquake and war — who can say what lies ahead? Nature therefore makes her plans in advance and drives blindly through the birth.

At least that is how it seems to us. In labor a mother only has to be distraught or uneasy for her body to act compulsively, _as in the presence of mortal danger._ Her instincts tell her to fight or flee. The system of unconditioned reflexes and muscular responses that will enable this, turn on to give the mother an opportunity to defend herself or escape. An emergency of this kind is rare in modern circumstances. In an operating theatre or public place she can do nothing effective. Her state of mind chronically persists and the reflexes turn on harder. The labor proceeds locked in the tension of its own force-counterforce field.

Nature, and we must say here blind nature, knows that delay is fraught with danger. The impulse to give birth and the effort to stop it join in battle, with cultural childbirth as the outcome. What, in ancient times might have been a campfire is now the arc lights of an operating theatre. The ring of hostile eyes beyond the fire now peer from between mask and cap. The mother's conscious mind seeing this is destined for momentary extinction in nature's plan for the birth, but no longer as in control. Muted, it gradually ebbs and fails, but until the last moment it will remain on duty, operating as a relay station to ensure that the forces available to delay or stop the birth are active, in support of the conflict that her unconscious mind expects to occur. Deciding upon intervention, her medical attendants administer anesthesia and perform an outlet section, lifting the baby free with steel forceps from the immobilized mother. Birth becomes a medical delivery.
20. From Theory to a Science of Mind

Birth is a singular moment for every baby born. Visibly and significantly it begins to breathe. More dramatically, its senses awaken in a new way to the world, and it imprints its environment. Imprinting is a one-way flow, comprehensive and all-inclusive, but without understanding. For this reason casual observers overlook it. The baby's brain works unseen, while its senses, each specific, awakens to a new order of experience. In coordinating them, the brain works from sensory input to motor output, and vice versa as orientation selects the kind and degree of sensory exposure.

For several months the subconscious will build, developing and consolidating its content until it completes in a further stage, as we will see shortly, but we should pause first to check the meaning of this middle level or subconscious.

Because it is in the middle, so wholly dependent, it may not seem initially to be very important. What can it contribute? The extremes command our attention. What, then are the extremes? Well, we are talking about the mind; so one extreme is the foundation of the psyche, the psychical unconscious formed in the later months of womb life. This begins forming when the brain first becomes functional, and proceeds in this manner until birth, when imprinting, the next stage begins. The other extreme is the higher consciousness (the conscious as 'higher' than the subconscious), whose origin will signal the shift from infancy to first childhood.

As the middle section or medium between the extremes, between the unconscious and the conscious, the subconscious is nothing in itself. It is only an interface. But it mediates by drawing upon the power of each extreme, reflecting each in itself. This makes it the true nucleus of the whole, the unity of that mental engine we call the mind. When conceived as an entity and given status in the olden days, it was identified with the heart, considered to be the seat of the emotions.

Through imprinting the baby indelibly remembers its environment, but not as a memory in the ordinary sense of the word, for there is no remembering. Nothing at that stage has the capacity to form images. There is no completed mind ready to do the 're-membering'. We are talking about the mind's engraved foundation. For example, the baby hears and imprints its mother's language in song or prose before it begins to speak, but without, in the process, understanding a single word of it.

The only meaning the imprint holds is the baby's unconditional acceptance of its mother, and when it comes to outwards expression it does so as the phenomenon known to mothers as babbling. The baby, from a few months old, begins to babble the language it hears with its inflections and intonations intact, in mock communication before meaningful speech occurs. This is possible because the baby has _imprinted_ the language; learned it 'en grosse' over months without understanding a single word.

The imprint is an island of relationship that contains the foundation of what is later referred to as the individual's mother tongue. It explains why someone, exposed as a baby to a language in addition to their own, for instance by a nurse or mother surrogate, and the exposure then ceases so that they grow up knowing only their own language, will learn that additional language if they come into contact with it later in life, much more quickly than someone not so initiated. The imprint is there, ready for use.

The next step is that the infant begins to form and use individual words, and the underlying process is that each is learned in context of the whole-language imprint. As it is brought into use it thereby gains a comprehensive _internal_ connection to that nucleus of the whole language, at the same time that, through its external focus (the word cat linked to an actual cat), it acquires a comprehensive external identity and background. Each word is a unique presentation of the _same_ imprinted whole, which is the conduit system within the coherence of language as such.

Babbling indicates the presence of the holistic operational imprint that makes the later learning of individual words possible. Through the imprint, each word is in a relation with its neighbor and the whole internally as well as externally, and the babble transforms, step by step, into the thousands of words of a language, providing each with a known meaning.

In this way math and language are similar, for we can see (as in circle math), that the same organization serves each. Math too, is a complete and undivided whole, or it is nothing. The same principle governs math and language alike.

Each word is supported by, and makes sense only within the context of the language as a whole. Then, just as words exist within, and are related to their containing _language_ , the language exists alongside two other forms of knowledge within the individual mind, number and form, or mathematics and art. "This table, and this Grecian vase constitute two (2) items." The whole then exists within the social mind, for language is nothing if not social.

Imprinting and imaging belong to babyhood and infancy respectively, and bear a relation to each other parallel to that of being asleep and being awake — for they equate as unconscious/ subconscious and subconscious/ conscious. Ancient writings, as durable as any tooth fragment can help us to understand this. At Genesis 3:7 we find:

"And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked."

Adam and Eve had been walking in the garden, admiring the trees and talking to God and the beasts alike. Their limbs were functioning and their eyes were open, yet the verse states that only when they had eaten of "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil," did their eyes _become_ open.

The statement refers to the opening of their _mental_ eyes, which is the beginning of our human understanding and so race. This event, which initiated our human kind, repeats in every infant, in a two-step process that brings its imprinting and imaging stages to an end. During imprinting the baby seems to be aware, and this is so, but not in the way adults are aware.

They seem to sleep and then awaken, look around and respond, smile or cry. They examine anything that takes their attention, but with unabashed gaze, called a 'lizard stare', that is neither looking nor understanding, but an absorbing or 'taking in'. The baby is building an 'imprint mind' in color and sound that will one day launch a higher, comprehending state, aware at a higher level. To this the verse applies, "the eyes of them both were opened." This 'moment' of humanity's racial origin corresponds, in individual life, to the ending of infancy and the beginning of first childhood.

Three significant junctions occur in the genesis of the human mind: conception birth and the just mentioned moment of psychical awakening. The first (conception) remained hidden until the invention of the microscope. Birth is obvious, but its inner process has remained hidden until now, while the third, because it is subjective is easily overlooked.

Piaget object-recognition marks the transition from babyhood to infancy. This depends upon the fact that a baby, shown an object of interest, will reach for it, but 'forget' it immediately a sheet of paper is interposed between the object and its eyes. There is no real forgetting however, for the baby is not composing that object in its mind, but merely reflecting it in a quasi conscious state, which lacks an independent content and corresponding ego self. A sense of space and time is still lacking.

No independent world therefore, stands over and against the imprinting baby. _That_ sense — of an externality — comes into being suddenly in the _creation_ , whose exposition will unfold as a science of mind.

If we understand this, we can also understand the psychical evolution that takes place in labor and birth, for the mother's devolution in labor repeats the evolution in the dawning mind. She goes back, so to speak, to meet and match the baby's state, and they walk forward mentally, hand in hand from there. The reader will sense in this, that the evolutionary history of our race, its religious self-account, and the structural process that creates mind externally in the mother-infant-relation and internally in the formation of its actual working mechanism, all mesh in the one coherent fashion, whose totality constitutes the very fabric of what we call our human mind.

Through imprinting maturation, which corresponds to the incipient development of the self, as opposed to a world in space and time, the baby becomes an infant, and the infant a child. This corresponds to the pre-human becoming human in the history of the species on the broad front of evolving forms of consciousness in Nature.

For the baby this true awakening arrives spontaneously. It breaks through the surface of imprinting, just as, for the race, prophetic visions, ushering in a more developed under-standing break through the surface of existing consciousness. It will help to set these relations forth in graphic form. The first line in the diagram below shows imprinting alternating with sleep. The baby sleeps, and then awakens into an _imprinting_ state before sleeping again.

A true awakening ('a' in the middle line) then appears within the imprinting time. Mothers responsive to their babies will usually be aware of this. The period of true awakening stabilizes and becomes wider as time goes by. It consolidates its hold until all that is left of imprinting is a fringe state on its either side (third line, 'f' in the diagram). We sleep, wake up and sleep again, hardly aware of the transition sequences in between.

Figure 1

The first true awakening, designated 'a' in the second line above, splits the imprinting time into two portions, i before, and i' after the moment of being awake.

As the time spent awake expands, imprinting is squeezed until it remains as no more than an inactive vestige, known as the hypnoidal fringe state (f in the diagram), at the beginning and end of sleep.

As shown, there are _two_ fringe states, f, of identical origin, one before and one after true sleep. That before sleep is called hypnagogic. That which comes after sleep, and heralds awakening is called hypnopompic.

Hypnoidal, which means 'resembling sleep', designates a sub-awake state, intermediate in the normal mind between sleeping and waking, during which visions, dreams and hallucinations characteristically occur. Belonging to the mind's normal function, they are physiological, having characteristic patterns on the electroencephalogram (EEG or brain wave trace). The trance of hypnosis, explained earlier as a manipulated regression, has a waking EEG trace.

The fringe states remain relatively wide in the infant. Their virtual disappearance marks the transition into childhood. They characteristically expand during a fever, so that even older children may lapse into delirium. Younger children are prone to see lions in the garden even when perfectly well, a sign of their residual infancy!

Babyhood and infancy together comprise a vital stage between birth and early childhood, where they initiate the subconscious, at once a bridge between the extremes and the center of our future higher understanding. The subconscious is the 'heart' of mind, the 'join' or working machinery between the unconscious of genetic origin, and the conscious of sensory origin. It is equally the 'join' on the EEG between our being asleep and awake. We pass through it more or less rapidly on going to sleep, and again on waking up, but just as a coin can be stood on edge, so we can balance in, and so prolong the hypnoidal state, as a special (trance) frame of mind.

From Conception to First Childhood

Our story begins with conception, to whose pattern all subsequent stages of mind conform, including that of the whole. The next significant stage in mental development is the brain's functional unity 'in utero' or fetal life before birth. This is a hidden moment to the observing world, but in terms of viability it signifies a mind able to operate, though not yet called upon to do so, and a possible live birth.

The transition between in-womb life and first childhood, so from birth to about 34 months of age, is customarily divided into babyhood and infancy. They meld into each other, but their characteristic processes are antithetical, for they need but exclude each other, and they work together like the conscious and unconscious as manifest in being awake and being asleep in mature life.

The subconscious in this (between the unconscious and conscious) corresponds to infancy between babyhood and the mature life that begins with first childhood. Now, it may surprise that first childhood is set down as the beginning of mature life. To explain this, the step from infancy to first childhood corresponds to the 'Adam Eve moment' described at Genesis 3:7, which takes the evolutionary sequence across the threshold from animal to human life. It corresponds therefore to the origin of our species. Before it, in the biblical record, there is only 'God'. As _human_ life begins at that historical moment, _mature_ life in terms of human consciousness begins at the corresponding step, from infancy to first childhood. In this way we keep in view and align our species development, the individual life cycle's progress and the mind's function.

Imprinting is total at birth and becomes zero at first childhood, as the cortex of the brain hardens against prescriptive sensory impression or imprinting. This corresponds to the maturation of mind with the onset of childhood.

Prescriptive here, refers to that sensory pattern, which falling on the inexperienced brain affects its state permanently, much as light affects (imprints) a photographic plate. The imprint keys the unconscious to interpret later sequences of incoming sensory pattern, and it does so entirely upon faith. This is the physiological faith of the baby in the mother. It can be deceived, as Lorenz discovered, and this fracture between reality and nature's intention gives us insight into the mind's entire formative process.

Beginning at birth, this prescriptive imprinting reaches a noticeable balance point at about six months of age, which divides it into two stages. The first corresponds to true babyhood, the second to infancy. We must now look at these states a little more closely.

If, as a significant moment, we allot zero to birth, then the brain's 'in utero' functional unity, -1, is two or three months before then, and conception, as -2 is nine months before the zero. The first junction in the mind's development then occurs at about six months of age, so +1, and the second at about 32 months, so +2. This gives us a concise reference to the stages. From 0 to 1 we have the baby, and from 1 to 2 the infant.

The signal that babyhood has ended and infancy begun is given at about six months of age by the Piaget test conversion. The mind, in pure imprinting, so from 0 to 1, has no enduring image screen before it. The equivalent state in animal life is that of reptile and amphibian, snake frog etc., which respond only to movement.

The next junction in our numerical schema is 2, between infancy and first childhood. The image screen, as we have called it, that belongs to infancy is now consolidated as a material 'other', wherein objects appear holding a meaning of their own.

Such objects exist in our adult awareness against an indeterminate background, for instance, a vase on a table, a tree in a field or a star in the sky. In each case the object (vase tree star) occupies our attention, which as memory-dependent is in time, while its background (table field sky) is a 'throwaway' placement indicator, a spatial reference. Now the _thing_ and its _background_ point to the mind's form and process. The baby's first object is its mother, and here we can see the two-step origin of this awareness experience. The baby imprints its mother but is not aware of her as apart, either as a screen image or a world object. Then comes Piaget conversion, ushering in infancy between babyhood's imprinting stage and first childhood.

This is like taking first pressure on a trigger. It is still short of the mature consciousness that characterizes the human, an insight that holds a world before it, framed in its own 'mentality', which we call time and space. Time and space is our insight externalized, but we need to see how this comes about.

Piaget conversion ushers in infancy as a stage in development wherein imprinting is no longer totally unconscious. On the basis of imprinting the baby is able to create coherent images, but they are yet without individualizing 'sense' or meaning. This 'image screen' has to be grasped as a meaningful whole before it can support (objects and events). How does cognition, _knowing_ , step from imprinting into the screen?

Initially the imprint has only one meaning, namely identity, and it is identity with the mother. With the appearance of the screen, which signals that the imprinting process has reached a stage of maturity, its identity transfers to the image. In this it not only continues to imprint, but it also sees its mother, but _not as distinguished from a 'non-mother' background, i.e., not as we see objects._

The mother is its whole world at this stage, but now existing in a twofold form, an inner identity and a projected image. The infant however, progressively begins to distinguish between 'mother' and 'not-mother' in a stage that completes in a sudden inversion, this being the onset of the truly human stage, the Adam/ Eve moment of first childhood.

These landmarks, which first come to light in the history of the race, and then repeat in every individual life cycle, plus Hegel's identity theory of mind — which holds that the physical and mental worlds are irrevocably one in their difference — constitute the adequate framework for a comprehensive Science of Mind, in which the mother is the Rosetta stone, conduit or translational focus between one generation and the next.

The _physiology_ that governs birth is the _focus_ of the DNA/ brain emplaced understanding that carries the wave of our human nature across succeeding generations. Subjectivity, present to us as a known world around, finds its objectivity in language. In subjectivity we have insight. In objectivity the same is viewpoint, and what was before _focus_ is now the complexity of signals, whose integrity, in the first place is the image screen or medium we call language. We see the screen, or rather do not see it, for we sublimate it, and this sublimation is the process of knowing, whose content is present to us as knowledge or social meaning. Matter, from _mater_ , mother, is our mind _objectified_.
21. Cultural Childbirth across the Generations

The cultural influence described in Genesis 3 as the curse is leveled against misuse of the insight that makes us human. Its first aim is at cunning and deception which it finds in that poisonous ground-hugging creature, the snake. Many creatures are dangerous, but none is more feared than the snake for its venomous attack. We are to hate the cultural influence as much as we hate the snake.

It then falls upon the woman, specifying travail in childbirth and domination by the husband. Both the travail and domination are downstream products of the curse.

Finally, the wrath is directed at Adam, the emergent master of the patriarchal order that has overturned and supplanted ancient matriarchy: "In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you will return."

It is telling us that we are blessed by knowledge, but also cursed by it, to the degree we, as humans, turn away from our mother's voice (the imprint that founds our mind), and listen to the wavering advice of others, wives husbands relatives friends in cultivation of our own day-to-day passing self interest. It also points to the mechanism through which the curse wreaks its effect, namely labor and birth, nature's generator of the mother-infant relation wherein each new mind is formed.

Impinging upon labor and birth, the cultural influence disorders mother-baby bonding. This leads to an immediate expression, but also to secondary tertiary and fourth order effects in subsequent generations. Each expression radiates further consequences, and the whole advances in an overlapping manner as an amorphous tide, the misery of our human world. As spanning the generations its true subject is not the individual mother and baby, but human society. Choosing our words carefully, we can say that it is a disorder of birth, but a _disease_ of civilization. It is a disorder for the individual mother but not a disease, because she is subject to it through no stigma other than her humanity, to which it originally belongs, and being human is not a disease.

### Cultural childbirth compounded

Natural birth exists widely in the world where it is not recognized, but hardly at all in the industrialized nations, where it is a rarity beyond isolated pockets of understanding. Even less is it understood as the generator of the mother-infant relation, forged in the vital few hours of labor and birth as the stem and conduit of intelligent mind, the pivot around which civilization turns.

It is incumbent upon those who can see this to cultivate the understanding, without which birth's cardinal import and manifestation will remain inscrutable. We must also see the finer mesh; that while the cultural disorder impinges primarily upon the mother it also translates to the infant as a secondary expression. This is just as serious in terms of ultimate consequence. In sequence, the disturbed birth leads to a disturbed mother-infant relation. This leads to an imbalance in the newly arising mind, and this in turn to a complicated knock-on effect. On the female side, it will affect the next birth in the generational line, and on both provide a platform for mental imbalance and psycho¬somatic illness. The latter can take many forms, but asthma can be cited just as an example, while beyond such consequences stretches the vista of addiction and crime.

### Expression and Consequence

Cultural childbirth brings to our attention the fact that the human state imposes a challenge and commitment, that we adhere to a higher standard of behavior, beyond which it becomes a frailty and liability. Positively, this is religious expression; negatively it is cultural childbirth, with its train of social deterioration, which links our new found ability to manipulate our environment to our inability to exercise this power wisely, to despoil the earth and bomb our neighbors from the stratosphere.

In application, its current _medical_ form destroys the spiritual unity of birth, initiating an extended chain of immediate and distant consequences. Civilization does not so much advance as stagger forward from achievement to collapse, and the cause is not in the world of ecological and climatic conditions, but the fragile state of the human intellect, agent of its own disruption. Cultural childbirth wreaks havoc in the lives of those it touches, and in society as a whole, and then, like a fire that burns itself out, limits its own advance. In cyclic fashion it compounds from generation to generation, but in a process so diffuse that its pattern escapes immediate detection. Its evidence is everywhere around, while the cause itself is overlooked for want of a viable science of mind able to take its measure.

### The Primary Expression

Across the range of mammals, as known and shown in many species from mice to monkeys, molestation of mothers in labor adversely affects the outcome. The result is a slowing of labor and rise in complications. This is magnified in the human, first by a structural frailty that opens the door to cultural childbirth, and then by the incompetent means employed to remedy the fault.

### The Secondary Expression

Adverse experience in babyhood and infancy predisposes to adverse behavior in adult life. Conversely, favorable experience has the opposite effect. Furthermore, it has been shown experimentally in the higher primates that individuals deprived of a close bond with a caring mother develop into adults lacking normative skills in courtship and parenting. In one bizarre but revealing experiment, surrogate 'mothers' composed of fur stretched upon wire mesh cages reared baby monkeys. The young survived this artificial nurture, but when they themselves grew up they proved every bit as careless as their wire cage surrogates, treating their own young as if they were wire cage objects.

In this manner, the adverse impact of cultural childbirth also falls upon births in a second generation. As a force affecting the _next_ generation in line, this is a secondary expression in the cultural sequence.

The influence of baby and infant experience upon mature life is well known because instances of it are as common as there are cases that lends themselves to close scrutiny, for the relation is universal. However, to comprehend it adequately or at all requires a sufficient theory and science of mind, short of which the knowledge is dissipated as anecdote and hearsay. Such a science can arise in no other context than that in which mind itself arises, namely in the mother-infant relation. The genesis of a science of mind cannot be separated from the genesis of mind itself. The task is to elevate this primal relation from being a form of knowledge latent in our culture into that of a coherent scientific theory.

A theory of mind becomes a science when, correlated with philosophy and mathematics it finds application. In this case it points to the need to comprehend labor and birth in terms of the genesis of mind, whilst mind itself is the stem of all science, central to all subjects; in other words, universal. Philosophically it links to the Hegelian dialectic, which it takes through to mathematics, and beyond mathematics to neurology, while its intimate dependence upon the mother-infant relation delivers it into the hands of the principle figure in all human relationship, the mother.

### The Compounding of Expression

Cultural childbirth's primary expression, affecting labor and birth, can impinge adversely upon the mother and child in various ways. Its effect upon the physical side of birth — throwing it into tension and multiplying its complications — is the first to be noticed. The hidden side however, its _psychical_ aftermath, is equally important. A natural birth leads to close mother-infant bonding. Cultural birth not only disturbs this bonding (for instance breast-feeding flies out the window), but leads to its reversal. Just as love, in the mind's alchemy, reversed, becomes hate, acceptance reversed becomes rejection. This can be total, in which case the mother experiencing it will become depressed or even psychotic, or it can be partial, resulting in subtly blended patterns of emotional tension. A mother may love her baby yet in a moment of blind rage assault it.

Animal mothers act out their rejection when the natural relationship is disturbed. Birds abandon a touched nest and cattle butt the young away. Rejection in the human is not only socially disapproved, but comes into conflict with the mother's higher understanding. Unlike the animal she can adjust, but only at the cost of developing a suppressed mental tension. This is no minor thing, for it is equivalent to its opposite state, the breaking of a positive attachment, as in the loss of a baby, which leads to sorrow and mourning. The sign is reversed but the hardship is similar in each case.

To understand the mental side of birth we have to realize that its physical side amounts to a psychical conception. Just as a _physical_ conception takes place in the meeting of a sperm and egg some nine months before the birth, so at the birth itself a _psychical_ conception takes place in the meeting of the mother and baby face to face. A mother, giving birth naturally, without interference or disturbance, will herself take the baby, no longer inside her body, into her arms in a mutual recognition. The _conceptus_ in this case is a mother-baby bond, wherein faith and love join in the creation of a new mind. The empathy established generates the new mind that will transform into the intelligence of the infant after a mental gestation of similar duration, and after that into the process that begins with first childhood.

The _process_ in this period of mental gestation, comparable to the physical gestation from egg to baby that occurs in the womb, is _imprinting_. Both 'in-womb' and 'in-arms' are periods of astoundingly rapid development. Together they constitute the junction between our long ancestral past and our present human life. One is physical, readily seen, the other _psychical_ , hidden to all but understanding eyes. Comprehending this and asserting our respect for nature's course in labor and birth will allow us to outreach the curse, that humanity may re-establish its harmonious integration with God, or nature's absolute expression.

### The Traducian Process

To traduce is to 'bring low', into evil or disrepute. The word gives its name to the theological doctrine developed in mediaeval times, that the soul is transmitted to a child in the act of generation, which thus inherits the sins of its parents along with their physical characteristics.

"... visiting punishment for the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons to the third and fourth generation." Exodus 20:5

This translates quite accurately into the domain of modern scientific thinking, so much so that reflection upon it suggests that theological doctrine gives rise to scientific advance much as gathering charge in the clouds gives rise to the flash of lightning.

'Original sin', about which the Bible turns, came to Adam and Eve, meaning, "the first of our species." There is no sin in nature. Its concept would therefore be without ground, if not for the doctrine of the curse, which amounts to the stem theory of our existence, "from God," but also, as in the separation of knowledge into 'good' and 'evil' against an adverse side; the curse, subjugation of woman to man, and awareness of inevitable death. The means of its propagation is given in the quotation:

"To the woman he said, I will greatly increase thy travail and thy pregnancy; with pain thou shalt bear children; and to thy husband shall be thy desire, and he shall rule over thee." Genesis 3:16

Today we may see this externally as paternalism and the inequality that goes with the overthrow of the natural, so ancient matriarchy, while internally it corresponds to woman's loss of autonomy, which surfaces in the phenomenon of cultural childbirth, whilst on its general side it represents a serious imbalance, both within human society and in the latter's relation to nature.

We are currently in a transition stage between pre and mature humanity, a stage which has come to a head and demands that we tackle it directly. It puts mind squarely at the head of the scientific agenda. As with all things, we must look at its genesis, and this takes us immediately to childbirth, which is calling out for intuitive attention.

### Further Ramifications of Cultural Childbirth

An original mother A, free of defect, gives birth to B, who as a result of a cultural birth, and its consequent disturbed mother-infant relation, grows up harboring a state of mind that leads to chronic nervous tension. B now gives birth to C.

The granddaughter C, daughter of B, is now affected in a two-sided way. From her own birth she is affected directly, as was her mother before her, and she has also imprinted to the disturbed state of mind harbored by her mother (B). The pattern thus transmits, both internally and externally in the tide of social practice and thinking.

B was affected directly, but she imprints to a normal mother. C was affected directly and indirectly, for she imprints from a culturally deranged mother. She is the target of a rejection response, and she also receives the mother's disturbed mental patterns on the _content_ side of her mind.

To vividly portray this, consider the case of the wolf child, where human babies are suckled and reared in the litter of a she-wolf. Instances are rare, but when they occur they are so remarkable that they attract particular attention. The aspect that comes to the fore is the intractable nature of the acquired wolf-like temperament, which, once implanted resists all rehabilitation efforts.

Imprinting is nature's branding iron. Innumerable examples of its refractory nature are on record. Its nature is well known clinically, but the wolf child example brings its significant features into focus, that after a normal birth, a baby, adopted by a wolf acquires an unyielding wolf-like nature, not attributable to any cause other than its mothering.

It is clear, therefore, that a distinction must be made between the bad results flowing from a culturally caused rejection by an otherwise normal mother, and normal imprinting to an unnatural, or herself mal-imprinted mother.

A mother who is psychically disturbed, having a 'touch of the wolf', will pass this on to her child as a mental _content_. The mother's psyche takes station in the child's mind as an imprinted content, not as the subconscious, but as the 'genius' or template that organizes the subconscious. The mal-imprint will act, but only as a subconscious, giving substance to the mind, but leaving it free in its relation to the world. The child of a wolf child therefore regains its human perspicacity. As conditioned the mother responds compulsively in certain respects. The child imprints this, and so is affected, but not in the way that leads to conditioning.

Returning now to the successive generations: 'C' has imprinted to a disturbed mother, and her mind is affected external to this as an aftermath of her own cultural birth. In addition, the cultural pattern ('touch of the wolf'), existing in her mother's psyche, also comes her way as an imprinted content. The primary disorder thus acquires an ally deep in her own mind, justifying and reinforcing it.

From the original mother, free of the defect, B was born directly affected. She gave birth to C, who is affected directly and indirectly. C now gives birth to D in a typical cultural birth, but in addition to its primary impact, D imprints her mother's psyche, which has the reinforced defect mentioned. D is more severely affected than C, and C than B. Compounding in this way, the affect gains a social dimension, becoming more invidious, but we can draw a line here, indicating that the expression has reached its final intensity, at least in the local sense which we have been tracing. It continues, however, to become more diffuse, making its way into the community as a social affliction, the 'curse' of our human kind.

Male children are equally affected and pass on the result, but only amorphously to society in general. This also compounds, as we see today, where men, confused in themselves, step between mothers and their children, and also, at a different level, take over and disrupt the environment of birthing and the mother-infant relation.

The consequence for society is so diffuse that all but the most direct relation of cause and effect is lost. What remains precise, and is now well known, is that in nine months, a single cell, generated in the womb by the union of strangers (ovum and sperm), becomes, in the unfolding of genetic pattern an organically formed baby, which encodes the history of our origin, going back before the dawn of our species. Then comes birth, and again strangers meet. The newborn baby and its mother see each other for the first time, and this is a second conception, but on a higher, a mental plane.

The mother and her baby are pre-designed complementary opposites. As mature, the mother is realized potential. As newborn, the baby is unrealized potential. The mother is caring; the baby cared for. The mother is a psychologically developed being, product of a conscious life in the medium of sense experience. The baby has no such experience, but is born of an organic alchemy in the darkness of the womb. Nature's process in labor and birth unites them in the harmony of their difference.

The baby now imprints, capturing the mother's psyche as a social impress that indelibly founds the particularity of its mind. This inward impression and seed of mind is the stepping stone between the intelligence sequestered in the DNA pattern, and the more conditioned brain-based intelligence that will mature experientially in the process of growing up. The lesson is that everything in the mental domain, as in the physical, is comprehensively linked.

If we take our knowledge process as a whole and follow it back to its earliest beginnings we find an inverted cone, going back to the origin of our kind. It all comes from that single point. Conversely, there is nothing in our current experience, including our science and the whole of our knowledge that does not find its roots in that developing whole. We can no more dismiss any aspect of our current social life in terms of such ancient origins, than we can dismiss anything that has occurred to us on our own personalized life's track as affecting our being and behavior. Everything in our understanding of the modern situation traces back to an origin or complex of origins on the track of past time. This defines the integrity of ancient texts, which in myth and religion live through the ages, while conversely we live through them, because, as children, we necessarily recapitulate the childhood of our race, so that that ancient knowledge dwells incipiently in our own experience.

In this sequence, born along by language, we are human not because our brains are quantitatively bigger or refined, for this is more result than cause, but because our minds are _qualitatively_ different from the preceding animal model. We are psychologically detached from our environment and irreducibly united, in the same way that physically, we are detached from, but united with our thought, and the template for all this is given in the mother-infant relation.

22. The Rosetta stone

The first signal moment in the life cycle is conception. This results in the formation of a zygote, a single cell that will develop into a single organism. The process in this step is governed by the mechanism built into DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) molecules. 'DNA' then, is the true or deep foundation of life in terms of its combined physical and mental existence.

The zygote finds itself in a womb, whose truth is the female member of a previous life cycle that created the mother. In birth a higher-level conception will occur, between the baby and its mother in the foundation of a new mind. If we were to call the product of this higher-level conception a _mental_ zygote, then we could say that the process in _it's_ development is governed by the organization built into the brain, and only at second remove by the DNA.

The new mind will not however, be wholly new but stamp of the old, the reason being that the mother meets the baby's faith in love, while the baby's faith, is faith, in virtue of being a stamp-copy (on-going imprint) of the mother's mind as presented in her attitude and behavior. In this plan, modeled on the ovum sperm zygote process, we have nature's theory of mind (its form and structure), whose further elucidation in terms of articulation and detail is the deep foundation of a science of mind as such.

In developing the structure we have here, these points stand out as firm bastions: first is that the 'story' of mind begins at conception. Nine months after conception birth is the next great moment, wherein the new mind's operative moments move into position. Birth founds the _psychical_ mind, or mind in the accepted sense as the agent in thought and feeling, but it is only a way station in the greater picture.

The mind's operative moments are, (1), the baby, and (2) the mother. We take them in this 1, 2 order because the baby represents the DNA and its process, whilst the mother 'speaks for' or brings to the process the higher-level contribution of the brain. Insofar as _mind_ is concerned, the baby is 'agent' of the DNA, and this _agency_ corresponds, in the mind, to the unconscious. Again, the unconscious, projected into the world constitutes (what we call) that world's matter.

This leaves thinking and feeling to the subconscious, and all the dance and fury of song and language to the conscious. In these steps we have set in place the terminals for a theory and science of mind, with its genesis and mechanism in babyhood and infancy, leading to first childhood, still ahead.

Looking now at the mother's contribution, this contains two distinguishable elements. The first, physiologically based, is the aspect of mothering in general, that which nature provides, and demands in the generation of the new mind. This element, as a feature, is universal. It is not peculiar to an individual mother. In the new mind, when mature, it will take up station alongside the physical unconscious (the baby's agency as mentioned above), as the _psychical_ unconscious.

The second 'distinguishable element' in the mother's contribution is that which belongs to her psychological nature, presence and actual behavior, a 'packet' which is absolutely unique, peculiar to each individual mother. This, entered into the imprint as a side, distinct from the universal aspect mentioned, will create and constitute the new individual's _personality_.

### The Role of the Mother in the Wider Picture

The 'wider picture' here is nature's plan. To see this we must consider the story of the Rosetta stone, a fragment of carved basalt found in the Nile Delta in 1799. Inscribed in three languages, and dating back to 200 B.C., it points to the significance of a start or beginning in deciphering a language. Two of the inscribed languages were known. The third, Egyptian hieroglyphics, had until then remained undeciphered. For generations it had defied translation, resisting scholars every attempt. Then, from a single clue in the Rosetta stone, hieroglyphics unfolded the whole of its meaning.

It is called cracking the code. We now return to the situation of the newborn baby. Its circumstance is like that of the baffled scholars. They needed but a single clue to unravel the enigma of an entire ancient language. The Rosetta stone gave them this, without which they had no purchase from which to start.

The baby seems to be in an even more insoluble difficulty. A massive sensory intake impinges upon its brain. How does it begin to make sense of it? The Rosetta stone reminds us that a starter is needed; that understanding requires and builds upon an already established basis or primal conception, a seed core clue or starter. The answer is that the mother provides this. She is the baby's Rosetta stone, its admission to the world of knowing and touchstone of its understanding. How does this occur?

The baby imprints. Pattern builds on pattern, everything recorded nothing understood, but for one meaning which infuses the whole — the baby's sense of its mother. The baby understands the mother, and this understanding takes the form of trust. Imprint, trust and blind acceptance all have the same meaning here, and this is template for the mind to be. The baby understands the mother because the mother, caring for its every need, meets it in love, and the two, love and trust, constitute the formative sides of the mind to be. This is the psychical conception, the beginning of the new mind. As Lorenz showed, deception can enter in here, but if it does so it is not as part of nature's pattern.

The mother's love is thus the foundation of meaning in every mind. She is the baby's Rosetta stone and pillar of its emerging intelligence, while motherhood generally stands in a similar relation to civilization as a whole. When bonding is disturbed breast-feeding is disrupted. When it is totally removed babies pine and die.

### Breast Feeding

In industrialized countries, where operative birth has been uniformly imposed, and nostalgic souls seek advice about breast-feeding, the oracles of wisdom thumb the pages, and tell them that, "to make milk," they must be healthy, well nourished and drink plenty of fluids. Despite this sound advice breast-feeding still manages to fail in all but short of a hundred percent of cases. We are left to wonder how it is that in the poor world short of a hundred percent of slight half-starved mothers manage to work continuously while breast-feeding their babies long term.

### Deprivation of love and fondling

Early in the 20th century, babies sent to orphanages unexpectedly failed to thrive and died in spite of meticulous care administered under rigorous scientific supervision. They were kept warm, dry and adequately fed with sterile vitamin-rich milk in hygienic surrounds, washed and changed at set intervals. With their every need supposedly met, they still deteriorated and died.

The problem resisted all attempts to remedy it. The bacteriology of infectious disease, along with the need to sterilize baby's formula milk had only just been discovered, and applying this knowledge was the 'in' thing. However, the more rigorous the scientific care, the more the problem asserted itself. The answer, strange to the scientific mind of the time, was that babies need a mother's love, care and fondling. They had overlooked the importance of the mother-baby relation altogether.

In an age when science, blind to its own nature, had turned its back upon mind, failing to see its origin in labor birth and the mother-infant relation, such intangibles as faith, love and fondling held no place in the scientific curriculum. The challenge was beginning to become a 'cause celebre' when someone pointed out that babies need mothering. When this was added to the mix the situation immediately reversed and the deaths ceased.

The doctors learned that their sterile no-touch technique, applied to nursery care was fatal to babies, and that it had to be broken down and fondling allowed. The unexpected finding was freely admitted and widely promulgated, but its inner mystery, why it should be so, attracted no further notice.

When we focus upon the biblical curse and its consequence, which we now identify as cultural childbirth, and interpret this in context of the genesis of the human mind, the whole begins to form a coherent pattern. A similar intuitive answer is now required to meet cultural childbirth itself, whose grip has forced birth onto the operating table, confounding every tenet of intelligence and sense.
23. The Origin of Mind

All knowledge develops in time and our process of knowing seeks to fit everything new into the pattern of the old. When something new emerges we therefore ask for its origin, where did it come from, and how did it arise. When the human mind itself becomes an object of inquiry, its origin in time must immediately engage our attention, and the subject before us, properly expresses, is that of a theory and science of mind.

Subjectively, as the center of our thinking self, we already know what mind is. We have needs and we are prone to injury and loss. We are aware of having capacities and powers to secure those needs and avoid injury and loss, and we have a sense of worth and self-esteem against the background of our mortality. We equate mind with the sum total and center of that complex which constitutes our life, holding it together and maintaining our integrity through all changes of circumstance and time. What, however, is mind _in itself_ , objectively?

We cannot begin to grasp the question unless we can conceive it as having an origin in time. We must therefore seek this origin in order to understand our self-nature objectively as well as subjectively. In doing so, we soon realize that asking, what is the origin of the human mind is the same as asking, what is the origin of the human species, for we are human insofar as we are the _sapient_ species. We are not intelligent because we are human, but human because we are intelligent. Sapience is the signal and sign of our humanity.

The subject has long been debated. In result two opposing theories have emerged. One is the doctrine of sudden creation, the other that of gradual evolution, and both of these viewpoints go back to antiquity.

### Creation v. Evolution

If mind in which we participate exists, and this is the assumption, it is reasonable to assume that individual mind has a natural history within this context, and that our physical body represents its evolutionary development. Mind and body constitute essential sides of every living thing, but whereas physical development can be seen, its _psychical_ side must be inferred.

Two opposing accounts of the origin of the human species, creation and evolution, are advanced, each claiming to be the truth. A third option is that the truth lies between them, that they can be reconciled. Both agree, perhaps without noticing it, that abundant life existed on earth before the advent of the human. They differ in that Darwinists assert the idea of gradual evolution from animal progenitors over long ages, a quantitative development punctuated by incremental jumps. Creationists propose a sudden emergence. Now the Darwinists could be right in their gradualism, and the creationists in their sudden appearance, if the human appeared as the result of a sudden qualitative leap interrupting a slow quantitative process. The Genesis account then reads into the evolutionary setting and a new interpretation is possible, casting new light upon the whole scene.

In practice, occasions wherein sudden qualitative change overtakes a slow progressive development are commonplace. We are therefore familiar with the idea, as when water, progressively cooled turns suddenly into ice, or heated, into steam. Again, the earth turns slowly and suddenly there is dawn. In biological science, birth interrupts the slow progressive development in the womb. The proposal that the origin of our species could have been a sudden unprecedented development, interrupting an otherwise slow and progressive physical evolution over the great time spans envisioned by evolution, is therefore familiar rather than strange, and with this, the rift between the ancient religious and modern scientific accounts, potentially closes. To seal this idea, bringing the relation into actuality requires but the formulation of a mechanism, which in itself will represent the formulation of a science of mind, the step science must take to effect its maturity.

The question, where we should look for evidence of the proposed prehuman to human transition, finds its answer, first on the path of evolution, the origin of our kind, and secondly the same as it must repeat endlessly in the lifecycle of every individual born.

### Steps in Development

Our individual life, unique in itself, also replays an infinitely rehearsed drama, altering slightly on the way, much like paths initially follow bullock tracks, which turn into roads, and these into super highways, continually straightened as time goes on but adhering to the original contours. Each new life cycle begins from zero. 'Straightened on the way', the whole path remains as the form of our growing up. We begin as a single cell and finish as a mature adult. Thus on our path from cell, to embryo fetus baby infant child and adult, we must come to and experience the moment which carried our species across the borderline from pre-human to human life. At what moment do we cross the animal-to-human threshold?

The genesis of the physical body, in both evolutionary and individual perspective, is a genesis of mind. The _psyche_ is not separate from the physique. It preserves the physical in its unity through all its stages of development. Our attention will now focus upon a single step in the course of this long development, namely, that mentioned, from the animal to human stage of existence. Clearly this can be studied both as an historical leap of a qualitative kind in racial evolution, and as the corresponding leap in transition from infancy to first childhood.

We may then be surprised to learn that the mind has a functional structure based on this evolution, and that everything in mind, from our inherent logical awareness to our intellect and emotion, as well as our wake/sleep cycle can be explained in this context.

The data on the evolutionary track, and that observable in each individual life cycle should then coincide. If this is the case, it is powerful confirmatory evidence, but is it available? We will have to see. We are looking for, (1), a development in remote time giving rise to the human species, and (2), a corresponding development in each individual life, somewhere between conception and maturity.

The gradualism of classical evolution implies that there is no crucial difference between the human and animal mind that cannot be explained on the basis of a greater or lesser amount of gray matter. This would have us believe that babies think in the same way that we do, only on a reduced scale, for they have less content to deal with.

Creationism however infers that the difference is qualitative. It declares (Genesis 1:26), that we are 'like God'. If this is so it remains to point out exactly in what this qualitative difference consists. Is the evidence there?

We must say that it is. Its detailed exposition will emerge in a philosophical framework. The postulation is that, at a critical threshold in a slow evolutionary development over long time, a new stage suddenly eclipses the old. The psyche tips and in a moment of insight grasps its own nature, its existence as the focal center of an externalized conception. Accompanying this development, as a necessary prerequisite is a comprehension of the being and reality of space and time. This is part of the new picture, the objectification of mind coming into view.

The former operative state, of animal innocence and spontaneity, vanishes in becoming the functional basis of the higher stage of mind, as suddenly and completely as our mental state of sleep vanishes upon our awakening, but again, like sleep, it remains there as a state into which we can still revert. There is nothing in physical evolution of comparable speed. In the same way, the mind of the baby/ infant, completing, becomes the inner or subconscious foundation of the higher mind with the same suddenness as awakening from sleep.

Hegel uses the term 'sublate', modeled on sublimation, to describe his application of Spinoza's maxim that negation, in its negativity, preserves the implication of that which it supplants. We cannot, in other words, forget its history. We see this in the living and thinking world, wherein something, _entering into unity with its opposite_ , ceases be what it was, but remains, nevertheless, preserved as an operational element in that to which the union of opposites gives rise. Reflecting on this, we can see the mechanism at work, the parents in the children so to speak. In the dialectic these submerged or _sublated_ elements are called Hegelian _moments_.

In the process as it applies to the baby, it has imprinted its world, which in effect is its mother. Its soul, to use the religious expression (we would now have reference to DNA), is therefore also newly born, no less than its body, for it gains purchase upon a world in sense. Infancy and first childhood then follow.

The next question is when, historically speaking, did the animal or pre-human mind become complete? When did it reach a destined maturity, becoming a _finished consciousness_ , able, indeed compelled in the wider circumstances, to transform into the human? Is there any milestone to mark this past event, any way it can be determined? Teeth and bones persist as fossil remains, and shaped flints, weapons walls etc., as evidential records, but a _psychical_ development — what record could _that_ leave?

This most vital of all evolutionary steps, involving mind rather than hard structures, seems unable to leave any trace. However, human society does create a record in the form of its culture. How far does this go back? Does it reach back to the beginning of the species?

This would seem to be too much to hope. Records such as history exist in the form of language, but language itself is a cultural product with its own period of development, and this suggests that a period before the full development of language must also have existed during which no records were kept or even possible, and with this, the trail goes cold.

Such is the case in the theory of evolution, as popularly assumed. A great lapse of time is supposed to have occurred between the emergence of the first humans on earth, and the memorable consequences that followed in the form of developing languages and recorded history. Physical evolution is assumed to have been continuous, uninterrupted, but the critical moment of humanity's origin is presumed to have been lost in the sands of time.

Scientists examine fossil skulls and adumbrate upon whether the late occupants were human, despite the fact that there is no agreement upon what constitutes the human in the living. Even those who suppose it to have taken place, give little, if any attention to the exact nature of the beast-to-human change. It is speculated that humans first appeared somewhere on earth. Then, across millions of years they gradually flourished, inventing things like axes spears and wheels. They mastered fire, and somewhere along the way, language gradually came into being from an initial medley of grunts and sounds.

The other possibility is that the human mind and language are sides of but one process, developing irrevocably together, and that in doing so they necessarily forge an indelible record of the beginning. This is the lesson of religion and history. It explains the universal existence of religion in history and affords it a moment of organic truth. Language, a product of the human mind in reciprocity is an essential component of that development.

Central within this hypothesis is the idea that our culture is formed around a core of understanding, a dynamic _function_ passed down from generation to generation on the understanding pathway, something inherent in the living form. To pursue this, consider the following quotation:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1,1

A word is simply a facet of meaning within the unity of language. The word, chair table book whatever, equates to an identifiable object or event, and this, 'with god', is at once an internal and external (mental and worldly) focus, where language's unity is its founding imprint, and god refers to the entire circumstance, social relation and natural history wherein human life and language take effect.

Language, as the property of a nation or an individual mind, is the embodied whole of meaning as this is symbolized in the knowing 'I'. We can knit words into sentences, and sentences into comprehensive language because they spring from an original unity. Human cognition, in the sense of a great flowering of knowledge is the result of an initial fully completed stage in the development of mind.

We could describe the Bible and similar ancient works as a fossil record of our species, with this difference that it points back through the track of telescoped time to the origin of our sapient species, as distinct from a physically identical precursor, who, however, lacked the sapient or psychological machinery that makes us at once blessed and cursed. Neural physiological and psychological machinery distinguishes the human, not the shape of its skull teeth or pelvis. Fossil skeletal remains can point to the possibility, but not actuality of human or Homo sapiens existence.

There are two steps here. One is to possess the higher cerebral machinery required, the other is to have accumulated, over many generations, a matriculate imprint within this machinery sufficient to human purpose.

### Matriculation

I have used matriculate, as in matriculate imprint above as an adjective. This is to make the point that imprinting builds over an extended period of time, and that the change from babyhood to infancy, and then from infancy to first childhood does not occur on cue or as an accident, but only upon the completion of each stage in a due maturation.

This applies to the origin of our species and the development of the stages of mind in every individual. It overcomes the weakness in the Darwinian approach, which has the origin of the species dependent upon a genetic mutation, and thus an accident. Maturation, on the other hand, is a slow development, but it has an inbuilt time cap.

Matrix in common use today refers to that from which or in which something originates or takes form, at once an environment, and as in _matriculation_ , a qualification for enrolment in a higher educational institution.

In mathematical use 'matrix' specifies in row and column order the indices operative in vector transformations where change is nursed within maintained limits, exactly the process that empowers thought and so behavior in living organisms. Linear math does not realize this possibility (its applicability to living and conscious process), which also invokes an operational transformation into a pan-circular mathematical expression. The reciprocity between linear and circular mathematics then underpins the subjective/ objective relation that sustains conscious intelligence.

Linear, or ordinary mathematics is the standard and criterion of objectivity. Circular mathematics, the generational stem of linear mathematics, or the form that mathematics takes in the mind, is the corresponding standard and criterion of subjectivity.

To revert to the initial point, a _matriculate_ imprint is that mature state of imprinting ready to invert or transform into the next or succeeding stage. Now this (imprinting) refers to an initiating process in the life cycle. Evolution, as this builds up to the prehuman stage is a much slower process. Imprinting, we must now recall, occurs in all mammals and many species, including fish and birds.

Given the prehuman stage in evolution, the imprinting process is occurring in each (prehuman) life cycle. The origin of humanity, that is forms 'in the likeness of God', as distinct from the mature but still animal precursor, requires the 'Adam Eve moment' (Genesis 3:7), the sudden development of insight that signifies the origin of our species, in the same way that imprint maturation in infancy initiates first childhood in every life cycle.

The human race is thus incubated, and once formed, maintained, in the imprint given by the mother to her offspring in its two-stage (baby infant) process. This imprint is pure in babyhood, and still pure, but shaped in infancy. It is equally the unbreakable stem of humanity and the origin of religious conviction. To dramatize this, if our species was wiped out but for one male and one female baby, and they were reared by a she-wolf, and subsequently increased, it could take thousands of years before a new origin of our species might occur.

Starting with a clean slate our Romulus/ Remus couple would have no language beyond wolf calls. Their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren would be in much the same boat. Given their physical form the social imprint, carried from mothers to infants would build relatively quickly, but it would take eons of history to reach the matriculate stage of humanity.

This tells us that the human, more than bones and teeth, is still more than bones teeth and brain. In other words, we could not ascertain a human presence from fossil remains alone, even if these remains, in some ice cavern were preserved in perfect form, all organs, including the brain intact.

Imprinting, like the spot under a candle that lights the whole room, is dark. We can no more recall our own imprinting than we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps. Something has to be forgotten for it to be remembered, and there is no forgetting in the imprint. It is captured as a pattern on the brain as surely as light on a photographic plate. Then, because there is no forgetting, there is no recall. There was no mind there when it was taken, and memory implies an antecedent mind. The imprint is forever present to us as our understanding.

If we reflect on this, we can see that our understanding, as a logical process, demands a prefix, an antecedent. An understanding without a footing would be vacuous. If the imprint translates as our understanding, and has no antecedent understanding, for there is no mind to receive it, it fails completely. However, there was something there, and this 'something', which 'contains' or holds our understanding in place, is a sense of an empty but all-sufficient reality, the sense of God that founds all minds.

More concretely, the mother is the organizing deity in the child's mind. The imprint, which springs from her presence, is then the perpetually renewed foundation of humanity. Through it, sense is parceled into things (entities), which step into existence through motion. A 'thing' is therefore something living before it is an object. We see this in the delight that infants and children extend to motion pets and moveable toys.

The imprint, the internal organizer, and this is the mother, is the subconscious on unconscious conductor of the mental orchestra. It articulates thing relation and motion in our understanding. Because another, not the original mother can step into the mother's place, nature can be deceived. This rarely occurs in pre-human existence, but in civilization it is the fault, which inseparable from the forever-turning life cycles that attend sexual reproduction,
24. A Training Program for Natural Childbirth

Birth is the end of pregnancy and equally the beginning of the all-important mother-baby bond within which a new mind and personality receives its first shaping. It is therefore a vital moment in the life of mind, a moment of psychical _conception_ , of key significance for the quality of the life to follow.

We can no more help a natural birth than we can help the rain's falling or the sun's shining. Thus, anything arbitrarily introduced into the _cycle_ of the mother-baby relation is superfluous and potentially harmful. This includes unnecessarily nursing, feeding the baby water or glucose solution from a bottle and other such meddlesome procedures before the mother has the opportunity to do these things for herself. In this the attendants may be looking after the baby's essential needs, but they may also be playing out their own motherly feelings, at the expense of the real mother and the vital mother-infant relation.

Similarly, another should not officiously hold dress weigh and otherwise possess the baby. Any injury, accidental or necessary, such as chilling hitting suctioning injecting operating upon or stabbing for routine blood testing, is not so much hurting the baby as damaging its future state of mind and mental health. The mother-baby relation begins at birth and ceases when the baby becomes an infant. As a process, it can be placed between defined time limits, but technically, it is between birth and the baby's taking its first steps. More intuitively, it is between birth and its first foray from its mother's presence by crawling away and coming back.

Deep to these markers a gradual change occurs, wherein the baby slowly matures into infancy. Damage to the natural relationship is conditioned by this gradual change, so that when, as necessary, such procedures cannot be avoided, they should be postponed as long as possible, and especially kept away from the first hours and days of life. No one should step between the mother and the newly born, touch or take it before her. It is the mother's prerogative.

Drugs administered during labor are harmful, not only to the mechanism of the labor, but as affecting the mother's ability to assume immediate responsibility for the baby, which, as damaging the immediate relationship, is pernicious.

These principles are to be understood, not rules for our behavior, but for our guidance. They do not cut across necessary medical care, but only the otherwise assumed carte blanche for medical attendants to intervene and interfere at will as if birth were a transaction across the counter, rather than a developing moment in the spiritual life of a new mind. Nor do they contradict the performance of any service performed in love and consideration; anything the mother may wish and request, but only those actions, not specifically requested that interfere with nature's intent.

Principles, which exist for our understanding, merely interpret reality as it is. They must not be turned into rules, or directed against the mother and baby. A correct balance will accrue if those in attendance realize that birth is a spiritual process as well as a physical action, and that this duality governs its every development. Nature's process is the ceiling for human perfection. As such, this natural process has positive rights against every proposed medical action and intervention.

As the hours closest to the birth are the most sensitive in this respect, so is the conduct of those closest to the mother the most potentially damaging or rewarding. The stranger who appears at the door during a labor can be turned away and the telephone silenced, but a close relative's uninformed opinion can be greatly disturbing. They may, for instance, wish to take charge, calling for unplanned medical assistance, involving the mother in unwanted tension. Only a trained team, alert to such possibilities can manage this sort of conflict. Their brief is to foresee and guard against such disturbance, neither interfering themselves, nor allowing others to do so.

Hindi culture recognizes the mother as the child's first teacher. 'First' here applies not to the truth of the time factor but to the spiritual connotation, a relation which is natural and divine. It is quite opposed to the Western idea of teaching through discipline and training, a procedure, which imposed upon the mother-infant relation, is cultural pernicious and harmful. Mothers, relatively rare in the West, who do establish a spiritual bond with their newborn, are already fulfilling that role. Those, however, influenced by well-meaning but quite ignorant authorities, whether family friends or other advisers in the magazine-sponsored culture of baby training, twist the very foundation of their baby's minds into unnatural shapes.

### The Steps Required

Our world at this beginning of the Third Millennium runs not by democracy capitalism communism etc., but runaway science, gagged, lacking maturity and any form of self-consciousness. If we said it was run by freedom, we would have to add, freedom for a blind economy to run amuck, bouncing from pillar to post, a car (science) too powerful for its inebriated driver (the blind economy).

The background of this unsatisfactory state of affairs is camouflaged but otherwise arrant paternalism. The way forward is to concentrate upon establishing the importance and means of achieving natural childbirth. We can do this by means of perfecting the technique to secure it within the current inimical culture, as pioneered by Grantly Dick-Read and others, whilst recognizing that the real objective is to re-establish woman's control over childbirth and hegemony in the world.

This is a major but attainable goal. Its organization, once established, will expand until an entire sphere of woman's competence in social life will emerge, quite distinct from the current confetti decoration of women's participation in a one-sidedly male-dominated world. The lead to its establishment will fall paradoxically upon men, for it will be part of a broad non-sexist ideology. It depends upon recognition, and the active role in this is always the opposition, the other; but the result, through the mother, will be the rule of God in a balanced world. The technique of natural childbirth as applied to individual births will but light the way.
25. Program Guide

Every woman's nature has within it an adequate blueprint for birth as surely as it is equipped for breathing, but something interferes with its expression. A tranquil state of mind is required in the mother and her attendants, rarely encountered in civilization, but which can be cultivated in a training program. The aim for the mother is to be able to achieve the desired tranquility in spite of harassment, at the same time as her environment is managed to be as benign as possible.

Natural birth is a skill for the mother and her helpers, and as in any skill, instruction cannot substitute for practice. A vision of the goal, however, is also needed.

It is strange that something natural has to be learned, but as we have seen, the circumstances are special. Birth involves a delicate balance of physical, psychological and psychical forces, and the assistant's task is to learn how to stand by, understanding without upsetting, guiding without intruding and standing guard against the unexpected. The mother must learn how to assert her fundamental self, submitting only to the demands of her own nature.

The reservoir of these skills, to be part of a successful program, is to reside in its practitioners. Only then, can it adapt to circumstances and have the flexibility to succeed. The printed word cannot substitute for a skilled instructor, though a course needs many books. On the other hand, an adequately developed broad theory is essential, so that a favorable social climate can exist enabling the practice to be sustained and developed. For many must be taught.

In ancient times, when fire was precious, giving and receiving flame was a social ritual. One lamp was lit from another; but this 'lighting of the lamp' was also an analogy for the transmission of knowledge. They well understood that certain aspects of knowledge could be passed on, like the flame, only from one to another.

This is still the case today. One does not learn to ride a bicycle or to swim from a book. The book does not sense the presence of a little problem that can stall an aspirant for months, or respond to what you require to know, meeting the need in a few well-chosen words. Books are essential but not the essence.

This latter is to be found in practice. Only in the context of practical courses, and life itself, can the knowledge become alive, part of the living culture, passed from generation to generation, and who will acquire this skill in the end but the mothers themselves?

### Helpers

The course revolves around the expectant mother, or those who may later become mothers. Similarly, specific courses can be arranged for those who will be with the mother at the birth, and mothers in turn may teach the method, but for our purposes here, the principle subject is just 'the mother'.

Next to the mother are her helpers. Like the mother, they have a practice and discipline to learn. They function in a helping and coaching role. One of the helpers acts as coach. For the sake of clarity in exposition, and this alone, we will assume a male coach; so the mother is a 'her' and the coach a 'him'. Situational direction is secured by having the other helpers defer to the guidance of the coach, who in turn defers to a supervisor. Coaching is a task, not a position, so it may be rotated at discretion.

The third person required is a supervisor, or natural birth practitioner, taking overall responsibility. Her professional qualifications will include an understanding of the theory, along with psychological or spiritual competence as proven by results. Like captaining a ship or piloting a plane, taking overall responsibility for a birth is a test, best judged on results, so requiring a right of final decision. Everyone should understand this, and if the supervisor feels that she will not have complete control, as guardian of the mother's wish and her own responsibility, she should not accept the brief, for it is to be as 'absolute' as the natural birth itself.

### Program Outline

In its broad aspects a program will consist of:

1. Relaxation after Jacobson

2. Stressed Relaxation

3. Exercises

With background information upon:

a. Lifestyle as suited to pregnancy, labor and birth.

b. Mother-baby bonding, breast-feeding and the mother-infant relationship.

c. The role of the mother as the first teacher of the child to age seven.

The mother is initially required to bring along a helper, someone or several, chosen by herself, to go through the training program with her. The helper (individual or group) then attends on every occasion to take part in the training, and will finally be with her at the birth.

The supervisor, seeing the mother first, will advise her that her (the mother's) will is to be supreme at the birth, and that she (the supervisor) is to be the mother's agent in this. It is for the mother to choose who her helper(s) will be and no one will be allowed to attend at the birth who has not attended the training sessions.

To infringe this rule is to jeopardize the project – not something one wants to discover in retrospect – and the reason is that, whether one or twenty attend, a group mind is involved, and an unprepared or uninvited guest may well act as a strong cultural childbirth signal. This applies to strangers and close intimates of the mother alike and the mother should never be tested by last minute requests. The only exception a supervisor could consider would be a request originating with the mother herself.

Naturally, such a rule will be determined by the overall situation, but for those interested, the question is carefully considered in ancient Buddhist texts. These describe the close attention a mother's family is to give to choosing who may, and who may not attend a birth. The ground for this concern is stated to be that the psychical influence of each person present will influence and affect the spirit and so destiny of the newborn child. The question is therefore considered and determined with the greatest care. Times have changed, but it would be difficult to fault this ancient teaching.

The mother chooses who can be there, and her natural birth adviser sees to it that they will have been adequately trained in the technique. The problem can be expressed in this way; that in no species but the human does a medical team stand by to assist the laboring female, and in no species but the human do cultural influences disrupt birth.

[My practice was to see each mother from about the second month for an hour once a week throughout the pregnancy. This was in addition to the routine monthly attendance for antenatal clinical assessment. The medical and antenatal training routines were kept separate.

As a result I got to know my patients much better, for the medical attendances up to month seven had amounted to only one visit per month and consisted only of a clinical examination occupying on average about ten minutes. Besides which, a mother in such a clinical setting is not disposed to be very communicative. She will usually just ask a question or two about some minor health problem.

The mothers would attend with their helpers and go through their training routine coached by the helper. By having several attend at the same time we formed bigger groups, so with two or three groups working in the same or adjacent rooms. This allowed for the sharing of experience and the assignment of a helper when someone was absent. Mothers never missed an appointment and helpers only rarely, due to clashing hours or work assignments etc., a fact which told me that the course itself was 'on target'. I would supervise, check for progress and introduce a further step to each mother's schedule week by week. The sessions were then practiced at home daily. Re-included from p 362 original book by editor]

All living things reproduce. Nature therefore makes complete provision for its need and then regards any intrusive attention focused upon the laboring female as an intended aggression or predation. This is the basis of cultural childbirth, in that an unconditioned response mechanism is built in to temporarily stop the labor process, and in the earliest stage, even annul it if such attention is experienced. The birth is thus booby-trapped, and bystanders trigger the response through inappropriate interest, curiosity sympathy and desire to help.

Those whose presence is tempered by familiarity and disinterest – the mother's immediate associates and family – do not trigger this reflex. In ancient times, it would have been the members of the mother's extended family, a tribal group sharing a common social inheritance. But even in this feral state the mother is known to retire, seeking quietude away from her fellows in the birth itself. In modern times, the mother must be free to choose those with whom she shares a psychological affinity, while those who need to be present for professional reasons should be trained in the technique of non-obtrusive presence.

The mother must be free in her choice of birth alternatives without pressure, subtle or overt. Medical antagonism to midwifery must be set aside, and the spirit of the mother's free choice must be fully implemented throughout the antenatal period and in the birth itself.

### Sessions

The mother can begin her sessions from about the second month of pregnancy on. She and her helpers may attend once a week under the supervision of her natural birth practitioner, continuing the practice with her helper(s), each morning at home. The supervisor will check for progress and add further steps to the drill each week.

Each session duplicates the one before, except in having another step added at its end. The final session after six months or more of training, although vastly different, still has the earlier ones telescoped within it. The sessions therefore always began and progress in the same way.

Repetition leads to increasing competence, while the session structure, like a play, gradually becomes more complicated, until the mother is surrounded by a barrage of instructions and interferences, to some of which, as in 'psychological warfare', she has to respond, all the time remaining self-centered in her own determination, deeply relaxed and doing her 'own thing'.

Her 'own thing' includes a sequence of exercises and the practice of positions appropriate to various birth experiences. These she does, governed in timing by her own breathing, while remaining impervious to whatever her helper(s) may do to throw her off balance.

Anyone, of course, can be thrown off balance if the attack is remorseless. We do not seek this. The coach's task therefore, is to increase the vigor and subtlety of the attack so gradually that her composure is always a step ahead. Conversely, if her composure is too far ahead, the rules are adjusted to make it harder. This is easy to do, and the result is that an element of challenge is always present.

The course begins with relaxation, and then goes on to differential relaxation, which means keeping the whole body relaxed, except for the muscle groups involved in carrying out some particular function. The training program has gone off the rails, the moment attention to the initial and background relaxation ceases to be effective.

The story is told of a golfing pro, who had been practicing a single stroke that had been giving him trouble for months on end. He finally perfected it, when he realized that he had been in the habit of holding a particular muscle in his back tense for a moment too long. The training we pursue is similar, except that we aim at a state of mind, not of bodily action directed to an external task.

In the program, the birth is visualized as the final session in which the mother will do her supreme 'thing', responding only to her inner nature, while her chosen helper(s), their harassment suddenly stilled, stand by, intervening only by that touch, look or action which love might command.

### Timing

The sessions are practiced each morning immediately upon awakening. No other activity, such as reading or breakfast is to come before the session, other than a quick tepid sponge, or wake-up splash and rub down.

In the evening a simple meditation, so sitting on a pillow on the floor, eyes straight ahead or slightly raised, standard lotus or half lotus position, for at least half an hour is practiced before retiring. This brings the day of practice suitably to a close and ensures a peaceful sleep, so a good start for the next day.

The morning sessions are the most vital, and so that this may be understood upon more than just a "that's the way it is" basis, the theory governing this is now given.

### The Theory of the Morning Session

The morning session is effective because it corresponds to our original awakening into infancy. Our mind is a twenty-four hour mechanism, moving forwards upon an unconscious subconscious and conscious basis. Sleep is its 'winding up', and in its daily progress it recapitulates our life sequence in unconscious review.

Our mind is thus accumulated in daily increments, and in this repeating cycle, the moment of natural awakening in the morning corresponds to the moment in our life cycle when babyhood ends and infancy begins.

The mind therefore steps forth as an infant every morning. Our moment of awakening is its remembrance or rehearsal of our first moments in consciousness. Have you ever woken wondering, "where, what, who am I?" Welcome to your infant self, to your mind with a clean slate, ready to work faithfully in any direction.

Just before awakening is a moment of dreaming, visible in the electroencephalogram trace as a characteristic pattern. It corresponds to the period before infancy, so to babyhood, and it may last anywhere from a few seconds to minutes. This 'moment of dreaming' is the hypnagogic fringe of sleep dating from babyhood, marking the development of the subconscious, but the whole sleep period before that, a whole factory of activity, what is that doing?

In sleep, the previous day's experience is readied for the permanent mental record. Our mind is thus reset, prepared afresh for the new day's work. Our goal in training is mental autonomy, a state whose quality is to be pure; the sessions are therefore timed to begin upon awakening. This is the best option. It does not mean that we have to review our life experience upon awakening. The sleep work does that for us, fitting the previous day's experience into the mind's architecture. Our mind upon awakening is ordered; ready to work in any desired direction, much as the infant mind stands ready at life's beginning.

The events of the previous evening are available to our memory in the morning, but only through the exercise of directed thought. We have to choose or be reminded to recall them into memory, whereas the previous evening they were immediately present, as witness the feelings of elation or depression they may have then occasioned. Training, to be effective, should therefore begin first thing in the morning upon natural awakening – in keeping with meditation exercises as practiced around the world.

Sessions in the late evening do not function in the same way, but practiced as simple meditation they prepare the mind for sound sleep and a beneficial start the next day. Sessions during the day are perfectly good for practice, but the morning sessions, rotating with those of the evening constitute the substance of the program.
26. The First Session

Initial sessions should be as brief as required to introduce the subject, anything from a few minutes to half an hour for the first. As time goes on their duration will be extended, up to two hours towards the conclusion of the course. It is a matter for judgment. There is no need to explain anything at the beginning, except that she is to lie down and relax, keeping her eyes open and refraining from response to any stimulus from within or without. Any questions can be met by observing that the best way to learn is to do.

Relaxation is the initial goal, so making it as easy as possible, she will begin lying down with head and knees supported by small pillows. When she appears to be ready, the coach says, "Start!"

The fully supported back lying position

The coach maintains silent and after a few minutes, calls, "Stop," or "That's it," earlier if she speaks or moves, ending the session.

Besides the regular movement of breathing and natural blinking (which keeps the corneal epithelium of the eyes moist), the coach allows nothing else. Movement of the body, including the eyes, as in looking at something, clearing the throat or swallowing, speaking or smiling, irregular breathing coughing sneezing are all session stoppers.

[Should any such occur the coach pushes the stop watch, states what happened (you cleared your throat, spoke, smiled, moved or whatever), and declares the session ended. Re-included from p 366 original book by editor]

Immediately the session ends, discussion is permitted, but again, as at the beginning, it should be brief and to the point of repeating the process, this time for a little longer. The goal is to establish the idea of the formal session and the idea of gradualness. When the body stops (relaxation), the mind jumps ahead (emotion and thought). Response reaction and bodily motion normally consume mental tension. Upon stopping such reaction, the energy channels into response, and if this is forbidden it makes its way, into concealed muscular tension. The drill is to lead the mother, facing it directly, to become aware of it.

Stopping the session and restarting upon the slightest interruption of her relaxation, quickly leads her to understand that she is to avoid response. Once she is able to relax for up to 30 minutes without this occurring, the first element of stress can be introduced. It might take the following form:

The coach begins a session and after a few moments says (quietly, but unexpectedly in view of his previous silence), "Ok, are you ready?"

The mother makes no response.

Then, more forcibly he adds,

"Did you hear me?"

"Yes!"

"Flunk. You said, 'yes'!"

As before, the mother may then raise any point for discussion, with this codicil, that if it concerns a technical point, the coach, if possible, should answer by referring to a textual entry (such as this), rather than give ad lib opinion or instruction. This is because, whether right or wrong, a degree of stability attaches to written text. It is a neutral authority, which can be examined, affirmed or refuted. This will help to avoid any imputation of teacher/ pupil or instructor/ student rank, which is appropriate to ordinary education, which is not part of our goal. We wish to establish neither an inverted or paradoxical rank (where the leader pretends to be led), or an actual rank, which is incompatible with the outcome we intend. A firm role, in adherence to a disciplined procedure, is on the other hand, correct.

The coach, as responsible for the session, controls it, and should be martinet in retaining this role. The viewpoint here is that, through the absolute, things turn into their opposite, and the coach's absolute control is to turn, eventually, into the mother's absolute self-control. This is the goal of the course.

The session places the mother in a situation where she is robbed of all autonomy. It is a situational prison. However, she is a voluntary prisoner, herself the jailer, and her task is to find her autonomy within that framework. It is latent within herself, and she is to find it, for it is never totally lost as long as life endures.

The coach's intention is to show, within a framework of agreed signals, that every suggestion remark statement and command, order question protest request plea advice etc., is superficial and is to be ignored. The coach is in command, but has one goal to realize, namely to expose the nullity of command. The lesson being taught is non-response and disobedience. The 'prison' will prove to have no substance, to be just a set of agreed words, which in the end are quietly folded and put away.

The training goal for the mother is autonomy. This is something not easily possessed. One cannot command that another assume it, for if they did so on such a basis, it would be trance, a false, not true autonomy. It cannot be grasped or bestowed, but flees every approach, arising only when unsought. Everything has its secret origin, and develops in the bosom of its opposite. This is where we seek it.

### A Comment upon Position

The fully supported back lying position, which allows the anti-gravity muscles to rest, is used in the initial sessions to allow the mother to concentrate upon deep relaxation. It is neither a comfortable position for relaxation in the later months of pregnancy, when the baby will have achieved some size, nor is it a recommended position for labor. We use it in our program in the early weeks only. Relaxation is then continued, but using other more labor-suitable positions. The following quotation indicates why we do not use the back-lying (recumbent) position in our drills, other than initially.

Sally Inch, quoting G. J. Engelmann, whose book, 'Labor Among Primitive Peoples', was published in St Louis, in 1882. Engelmann wrote:

"A vast and important fund of knowledge may be derived from a study of the various positions occupied by women of different peoples in their labors... The recumbent position is rarely assumed among those people who live naturally... and have escaped the influence of civilization and modern obstetrics... According to their build, to the shape of their pelvis, they stand, squat, kneel or lie on their belly; so also they vary their position in various stages of labor according to the position of the child's head in the pelvis... I deem it a great mistake that we should follow custom or fashion so completely, to the exclusion of reason and instinct, in a mechanical act which so nearly concerns our animal nature... instinct will guide the woman more correctly than the varying customs of the times." Quoted in 'Birthrights', by Sally Inch, Hutchinson Publishing Group, 1982, p. 48.

Engelmann was writing well over a hundred years ago, yet he already refers to those who have 'escaped the influence of civilization and modern obstetrics'. He was not reacting to today's nearly 30% Cesarean section rate, just observing that the primitives had not forgotten how to give birth. He could see that we were beginning to make it difficult for mothers even then, though he does refer to birth as 'a mechanical act'.

Certainly, birth is a mechanical act, but it is also physical, that is, its mechanism belongs to life, and above the physical it is _psychical_ , so a spiritual completion. Nor is it an act performed by the mother alone, but a cooperative process between the mother who is giving birth and the baby who is being born. Both are active participants in the dance of birth.
27. The Mother's Experience

It is important to notice that the mother is doing something, albeit negative, during session time. She is indifferently _not responding_ to her inner thoughts on the one hand, and to external signals on the other. She practices remaining aloof to the tumult of inner and outer worlds alike. She is exercising a form of will, and this exercise is the central thread of the training.

The initial fully supported position allows her to flop out, that is, to relax her whole body indifferently. She is instructed to mentally scan her body for any tension, and finding it, let it go. Positively, she will cease from talking, responding moving or smiling etc. Negatively, her task is to commit herself wholly to comprehensive relaxation.

Should her sense appreciation alter, she should focus her attention upon it, recognize and 'own' whatever manifests, and otherwise ignore it. Whether it is a tingle pain or discomfort, itchy nose or other phenomenon, she is to give it her full mental attention, but not respond to it in any other way. She is not, on its account, to initiate or allow any muscular tension or movement. It will fade from existence, and in that experience, some headway is made. Her only active task is to mentally locate and release any pockets of muscular tension.

If some sensory phenomenon does not fade away, if it persists or gets worse, that is only early days. It will fade eventually if faced in the way described, and on subsequent occasions fade more quickly. The point is to identify it as something to be faced and to increasingly come to grips with the patterns of one's inner mental expression.

Other than making it shorter, it would be difficult to lighten the conditions of the initial session. It is like training for a marathon by a slow run of twenty paces on the first day.

### Ending the Session

On ending the session, the mother will take a moment to rouse from her relaxed state. In later sessions, when she will have reached a deeper stage of relaxation, this arousal time will be longer. Having formally closed the session the helper takes over the momentum of 'non doing', in that they assume the state of self-disciplined inactivity which the mother has been practicing, until she becomes active herself. It is her moment, corresponding to that which immediately follows a birth.

No one moves or speaks at session's end before the mother herself does so. Watch with eagle eyes by all means, but do not interfere with nature's process. In a natural birth, all being well, one does not rush in and possess the baby ahead of the mother!

### Second and Subsequent Weeks

After a week, the mother and her coach will have become familiar with the process and its tendencies, so we introduce something new. Our tasks are to train in deep relaxation, and to unlock any inherent tension.

Relaxation here does not refer to simple rest, but a state of complete quietude. Electromyography shows that voluntary muscles retain a basic resting tension even when subjects believe they are fully at rest. This will be discussed later, but the point is that trained subjects can relax this away, and that it disappears in deep sleep. We do not want the sleep, but we want our subjects to be able to relax so thoroughly that this background tension disappears.

Unlocking any inherent tension means disengaging from our usual state of conditioned mental activity. Social conditioning embroils us in a web of stereotyped responses. We can free ourselves from this by going on holiday or retreating into solitude, but it is not our environment or other persons that make us vulnerable, but the conditioning encapsulated in our own mind. Autonomy requires that we conquer the internal enemy, the conditioning embedded within. It is not necessary, besides which, it only affords a temporary respite!

Of the two training goals (relaxation and unlocking), relaxation comes first. It is the foundation. However, a session control structure, aimed at the conditioning, will allow us to pursue the relaxation within a framework which make gains on the other front possible at the same time. In session, the mother loses her self-control for a moment. She involuntarily smiles, moves or speaks. This ends the session. [The coach clicks the stopwatch, states why and immediately recommences. Re-included from p 370 original book by editor].A discussion ensues and a new session begins.

### Deconditioning

As time passes the mother becomes able to relax quite deeply quite quickly. When she has attained this level, after perhaps a week or two, a new twist is added. Instead of waiting for a break (smile, movement etc.) to occur, the coach endeavors to precipitate it by passing a remark, casual or innocent at first, such as asking, "Well, how's it going." If the mother responds, she immediately earns a flunk and the session is ended. After a brief discussion, another session is then commenced. An important discipline now follows. As soon as the mother is again relaxed to a similar state, the coach repeats his exact verbal challenge once again.

He must endeavor to reproduce it faithfully without any variation he is aware of. If the mother responds, again, she is flunked and the session is ended. A third time the process is repeated, and repeatedly it goes on, always without deviation, until, out of sheer boredom or otherwise, there is no response.

The next time the challenge is more pointed, but on a gradient, for the coach is forever trying to avoid a loss, to get his mother through as far as possible without breaking down. With success it might get to the stage where she remains composed and unresponsive until he suddenly says, "You look like a rabbit." On some such occasion, the mother may burst out laughing. In the renewed session, he will repeat the exact words, and again the repetition occurs until the same state of non-response is reached. It may occur that the challenge denatures (it no longer elicits a response), only to recoup its provocative power after an interval. It should therefore be tested a few more times.

The Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, showed that a conditioned response, repeatedly triggered without reinforcement, wanes and vanishes. Furthermore, diminution continues even after no visible effect is obtained. This 'few more times', some would say, perseveration, is important, because it carries the extinction below the surface of awareness. The reflex is then less likely to recur, even though it cannot be permanently eliminated by this means.

Having a session structure, and knowing the rules, we can proceed with the relaxation training. Jacobson was concerned to obtain the deepest possible relaxation under the most favorable conditions. We can begin in this manner, but we then proceed to alter the conditions in a calculated way. The mother first learns relaxation. That is the original goal. It takes priority and keeps it. If deep relaxation is not obtained, everything else is for nothing. It is easy to remain apparently calm, not responding to a challenge while one is inwardly tense. The question is, can one do so, while profoundly relaxed, without one's relaxation being affected? The first goal therefore is to learn _technically_ , what it means to be deeply relaxed, and to be able to achieve this state.

The secondly step is to learn to maintain this relaxation in the face of harassment. For instance an arm, leg or head, raised slightly by the coach, is suddenly allowed to drop. It should fall as if it did not belong to her. She may be touched, tapped jostled or otherwise disturbed, but always within known limits. For the coach, a 'success' – breaking the mother's composure – is a loss. The harassment will gradually increase. The mother is to take it like a pool struck by a perfect diver – without a splash.

The third step is to learn to maintain a differential deep relaxation, so that while some muscle groups are active, as in performing exercises, the muscles not being immediately used remain totally relaxed.

It may be difficult in early sessions to obtain the right degree of challenge, not too little and not too much. This is a matter of experience and here a word of advice from the supervisor can be invaluable. The coach is as much in need of training as the mother. A correct application will result if the theory behind the practice is understood and the training goal is kept steadily in mind.

### The Two-State Goal

Two states, relaxation and supreme alertness, are sought together. Later, activity will be added to make it a trio. Ordinarily, if we relax, we tend to doze off, but here the goal is to remain vigilant, watchful and open-eyed, as if on a dark night we listened with all senses alert for the least approach of danger. Now notice a point of major importance.

This 'crossed state' of alertness and relaxation is the key to spiritual awareness. It is approached on a gradient like any other learning curve. It can be compared to sailing a boat 'close to the wind', meaning that a fraction too far and the sails, catching the wind on the wrong side, tip the boat over. This is the hypnotist's trick, which plunges his subject into trance and mental subjugation. We are running reverse hypnosis, undoing the subject's hypnotic susceptibility, and for us this is to be avoided.

Once we establish the coincidence of relaxation and vigilance, we have the 'tension' of the whole approach. The motor system is to be quiet, and the attention or receptive intelligence supremely alert. What happens then depends upon the circumstances. If we were actually waiting in the dark, expecting danger, and we heard a twig snap, our attention would peak and we would be ready for fight or flight.

In a different situation, but psychologically similar, a hypnotist intones, "You are sleepy, your eyelids are heavy, you cannot keep your eyes open..."; If the maneuver is successful... 'Wham'! The boat overturns.

In still another circumstance, the coach in natural birth training, is silent, or suddenly states, "Be aware of something you can (hear, see, feel, etc.)." This is alerting, but not alarming. The boat remains upright, on course, sailing...

In natural birth training, we do not steer a course dangerously close to the wind, and we certainly do not tip the boat over. If it can hardly keep upright of its own accord, we set about improving its balance. Command statements, which introvert the attention, such as, "You feel sleepy," are hypnotic. "Notice how you feel," which calls for no reply, alerts. "How do you feel?" also alerts, but introverts as well. We could give a name to such questioning statements. We could say they curdle. So, if the mother begins to reply, that is, succumbs to its implied sympathy and status assumption, the session is cut off immediately.

She thus learns to treat such statements as harassment. Once she has been proofed against falling into the sympathy trap, we may say in later training, "You poor thing, you have been through so much, you really need a rest..." With a trained mother, we can ladle on the hypnotic stuff with a dipper, and its only effect will be to complete the immunization against control by others.

How do we know that between the 'Start' and 'End' of the very first session that the mother is not in a trance? The answer is we do not, and it does not matter. We do not test it, and no suggestive content is entered. There are indicators one can observe, and it would be possible to set up a short course to teach these along with the skills of coaching. The course is a program for bringing hypnotic susceptibility to the surface and deleting it. Autonomy and trance are opposite poles. Each is built by deleting the other.
28. Coaching

What skill does a coach require? Love and intention will go a long way. As coach you have said, "Start." The mother is relaxing and someone knocks on the door. Or the phone rings. What do you do?

It is only a training session. Nevertheless, the rule is to handle the situation as if it were the birth itself. How would you manage such an unexpected interruption? Would you desert your post, giving your attention instead to some chance caller wishing to sell insurance, leaving the mother on her own, or would you let them in and argue the matter in front of the mother in labor? More likely, you would stubbornly refuse to answer the door. Your duty as coach takes top priority, so you should plan to avoid any unnecessary interruption, and if they do occur, resolve them as best you can. Your management skill, diplomacy and resolve are under test. You should be firm, not allowing anything short of the house being on fire disturb the session. If you show such resolution, when it is only a training session, the mother will have faith in you when it comes to the birth. Your action on every occasion, even the first, is therefore important as contributing to the result.

The coach's task is to conduct the mother through a relaxation technique, and when its idea is established, challenge the mother, probing for suppressed sensitivities, and helping her to rise above them by rewarding when the challenge is ignored and punishing when it is not. The reward is an approving acknowledgement, while punishment takes the form of a flunk, stopping the session.

A brief mid-morning and mid-afternoon relaxation period of a few minutes should be observed in addition to the morning and evening practice. Its purpose is to show that, if mental poise is lost on some occasion it can be quickly regained. It is aimed at the unguarded moment so it needs an independent signal for its practice, such as a watch or clock set signal.

When it sounds, which is not during session, the mother momentarily stops what she is doing, arresting her activity sufficiently to assess her background mental state and reassert her composure. As in a drill, but without altering her posture, she ['freezes', relaxes away any unnecessary tension, Re-included from p 362 original book by editor], composes her mind and then resumes her activity. Eventually she will not need a signal but will accustom herself to rebalancing her mental state whenever this is needed. As we all know, it is valuable to be able to remain self-possessed, calm and collected during a crisis.

### Comment on the Drills

Coach and helpers must not be afraid to upset the mother during a drill. Upsetting – and the mother taking no notice – is what it is all about. The helpers have to learn how to upset, how to _raise the tension_ in order to learn _what raises the tension_. If you cannot create an effect at will, neither can you refrain from creating it unintentionally upon some occasion, such as in the actual labor where it is not wanted.

Laughter indicates that tension has been tapped and released, but in the process, it has also been accommodated; assigned to an external cause. That is why we flunk the laugh. In one way, it is good; we have struck psychological pay dirt, but we want it contained, pending insight. The laughter means that the tension has not won, but we want to go beyond this simple evasion.

On another occasion, a mother may not laugh, but express herself later in some comment such as, "I felt like a cornered animal," or, "like a rag-doll," or in any one of an infinite number of possible statements, which show that she has not yet learned to see the emotion behind the expression. She is identifying with her sense of affront to the extent of ascribing it to some external circumstance, holding the cause to be apart from herself, when the needed insight is that it is fear, anger, shame or whatever, welling up inside herself – the insight which, attained, puts her in control of the situation, and of herself.

Laughter accommodates tension, while justification defends it, shielding it from insight. In justification, we excuse ourselves. In criticism, we go on the warpath, blaming another. Refraining from comment complaint and criticism, we afford insight the opportunity of observing the mechanism of conditioning at work within ourselves. Tension recoils upon a mother in labor, turning what would otherwise be a natural into a cultural childbirth. The drills not only proof the mother against the expression of tension; they also provide her with a blueprint of the attitude and disposition that labor will expect of her when, in its superior power, it takes over. They give into her hands the knowledge and means of flowing with it, rather than fighting it.

The helpers also have to learn. You say to a helper, "Taunt the mother. Make her laugh or cry," and they, the helpers, are struck dumb. They are otherwise gripped by a contagious inner fear. Should this occur in labor the mother would respond to it and her labor would stop. Those who do not know what to do or say in the presence of a laboring woman should do and say nothing. This is better than spoiling the performance like someone who coughs and shifts their chair in the middle of an orchestral presentation.

Silence, however, though preferable to thoughtless chatter, is not itself the answer we seek. No formula can replace understanding. Like physical germs, some behavior is deadly, some required. The drills show the helpers, which is which, testing their attitudes and moods. Their task is to upset scandalize mock or humor the mother. In doing so they will experience a degree of abreaction, learn what it feels like to release their own tensions and thoughts. They too need to acquire a sense of detachment, to be able to stand apart from their own mood, and this is the attitude sought.

The drill provides a rule-governed learning situation, which brings behavioral interaction under the spotlight of attention. When the labor arrives the whole apparatus of the drill is set aside, but those who have been involved now know what is, and what is not permissible in the presence of a laboring woman. They will be there, but as a virtually invisible presence. This greatly reduces the risk of inadvertently upsetting the mother and introducing a cultural factor into the labor.

### Drugs

For those committed to a natural childbirth program, drugs present no problem. For the world at large, their consumption constitutes a major conflict-ridden problem. Our goal is natural childbirth. In practice we observe that drugs – meaning psychotropes – and natural childbirth, do not mix. In theory, we go further. We observe that birth in nature is a supreme function. Seeing it, beyond and free of the cultural affliction – and such is our goal – we see that it has physical and psychical sides, which are required to unfold in a perfect harmony. Drugs and interference throw this into imbalance.

Our theory demands that drugs not be used in the birth, for this implies cultural childbirth and operative delivery. Nor should they be used during antenatal training. The reasoning here – and practice will not be far behind – is that nature requires autonomy in the birth, a state of abandonment, which is equally a self-collection and self-possession: and training is a preparation to reach this state. If drugs of any sort are taken, there is no beginning, no realization of the requirement and no grasp of the subject. The simple rule is that a mother in training will not take any psychotrope at all.

The question arises, what is a psychotrope? In medicine, the word 'drug' has a very wide connotation. For us, it is more specific. By psychotrope, we mean a mind or psyche-affecting substance in whatever form, solid liquid or gaseous, typically present as a carefully titrated dose of powerful poison. Caffeine, for instance, taken in tea coffee chocolate and cocoa is an alkaloid poison. Nicotine is used to fumigate glasshouses. It can be lethal for anyone entering such premises before it has been dispersed.

The matter is easy for us. Abstinence from drug taking is required of an expectant mother taking the course. She has an appointment with her original nature, which is neither poisoned, nor has any need to be. Her training is in preparation for this appointment and she goes forward to meet it. Caffeine nicotine alcohol and all psychotropic drugs of whatever kind, social medicinal or illegal, must be avoided. Stopping them is not to be seen as dealing with a habit or addiction, but as overcoming a faulty education.

Corticosteroids are included because they have a subtle psychotropic influence, distinct from their medicinal use. Abstinence from drugs does not ensure a natural birth. It is simply the prerequisite for the training program. The mother embarking on such a program, and indeed anyone choosing to adopt a drug free way of life, is advised to be quietly reticent about it, firm in their own resolve but non-assuming and non-proselytizing in the case of others. This not only makes it easy for themselves, but shows an awareness that spiritual autonomy calls for a free decision, each to oneself.

### Psychoanalysis not Helpful

Provision is made in session for constant checking upon the mother's state of awareness in three ascending areas: sense emotion and thought. She is invited, reminded and urged to be aware of what she is sensing feeling and thinking. However, she alone need be aware of the content. She is not asked to deliver it up for analysis, comment or discussion. To do so is unnecessary. Nature has the means to deal with such content.

Different objectives call for different approaches. In order to shape a program, and fit individuals into it, we may have to take an interest in their thoughts beliefs understanding environment and living conditions, medical history etc. this covers anything that might bear upon the success or failure of the course, but our immediate interest is not in psychoanalysis.

Those coming onto the program are not equal. Some mothers will be experienced in meditation, others in psychoanalysis, and others in neither. Meditation, in itself, is generally conducive to natural childbirth. This is not so with psychoanalysis. Beyond this, the existence of conditioning, which needs to be overcome, is virtually universal.

Compared to hypnosis, psychoanalysis is a step forward, but only a step. The analyst is forever there, inhibiting the attainment of autonomy. The subject thinks, "My therapist will provide the clue." The dependence involved, is as rational as thinking that, by eating someone's food we can make them fat.

The analyst is meant to keep out of such entanglement but gets in the way. A question of control exists. Success depends upon the subject simultaneously gaining insight and breaking free of the web of analytical thought. However, this involves a conflict of interest between the analyst and his patient, one of whom is paying, the other being paid. A mutual dependency results, which cannot be resolved within the process.

The fact is that birth, breathing and spiritual understanding cannot be managed for us by another.

In nature, birth calls upon no external assistance whatsoever. For this reason, we aim to eliminate external control on the one hand, and psychological dependence on the other. The pregnancy and coming birth imposes a time limit, whereas psychoanalysis can go on for years. The natural birth attendant has a function in the end – to know the mother, the circumstances and the self, and to hold the cultural influence at bay sufficiently for the birth to proceed free from well-intentioned but disastrous interference.

Birth is as natural to life as breathing. The helpers form a defensive shield around the mother to protect her from the aggression latent in everyday relationships. The salesman who puts a foot in the door exhibits this overtly, but it is also latent in the unbidden concern, inclination and desire to help. The mother needs a psychologically free space, away from the importunity of those who would tell her how to breathe and how to push. Real experience, in the spiritual dimensions of birth, comes with a mother's actual experience in giving birth by natural means, whilst properly conducted antenatal training courses draw upon collective experience and the collation of results. In addition, at least one of the team, who may be the supervisor, should be medically skilled, able to monitor the birth in both its natural and medical dimensions.

This arrangement, which is highly possible, does not exist in civilized industrial countries at present, but once understood it can be created by any such society that is prepared to call upon its reservoir of older experienced mothers.

### Self and other Determinism

To be completely other-determined is to be in trance. Short of this, it is possible to be largely conditioned, and responding to circumstances rather than living for oneself. The true self is buried under a heap. Becoming self-determined does not mean having one's own way. That can be the most shallow behavior, completely other-determined. It is rather to uncover, and so discover one's true self.

Conversely, the self-determined person is just as much 'other determined', able to join in the community effort, seeing the other person or group's side.

The mother who can align herself with nature's intent, even if she progresses only part of the way, has every opportunity of being picked up by the 'wave' of natural birth, and carried the full way. She will become a mother in the full sense of the term in an age when spiritual enlightenment is far out of reach for most. Other-determined people are bereft of freedom, tossed about on the storm waves of chance, perhaps arriving at success, but just as likely to be shipwrecked on the rocks of frustration and despair.
29. Stressed Relaxation

The program consists of three sections:

1. Relaxation after Jacobson

2. Stressed Relaxation

3. Exercises

In 1929, Edmund Jacobson published his book, 'Progressive Relaxation' detailing his method and findings in deep relaxation. The experimental investigation of the previous century linking electricity and magnetism, along with the emerging availability of recording devices had enabled him to begin relating mental and muscular states in a clinical setting.

He applied his technique across the whole range of psychosomatic and behavioral disorders, concentrating upon what he called neuromuscular hypertension, by which he meant all degrees of restless behavior and rigid posture. 'Neuromuscular' itself simply means the functional interface between nerve and muscle fibers, or it may mean the nervous and muscular systems taken together. Jacobson took the completely quiet state of neuromuscular rest – which he could sense on his recording devices – as his basis. Oppositely, he noted the exaggerated states of restlessness and muscular rigidity in neurotic and psychopathic subjects. But more significantly, he noted a similar background of excessive electrical tension in the muscles of almost all subjects when at rest, even though they were supposed to be in good health.

In relation to labor he says,

"In obstetrics, hypertensive symptoms are familiar in pregnancy, labor and the puerperium [the weeks following birth]. Following a complicated pregnancy or difficult first childbirth, many women give an extensive medical history in which hypertensive symptoms from the nervous system may be difficult to differentiate from symptoms due to other organs." E.J. p. 26

This is the only reference to childbirth in his 500-page book. Nevertheless, it is his method and scientific approach that counts, and Read introduced these into his work, producing good results by actual test.

Since Jacobson's pioneering studies, electronic monitoring of bodily states has greatly expanded, facilitated by the development of relatively inexpensive, yet very sensitive equipment. A sensor is placed upon the skin over a muscle to indicate the presence of activity to a subject otherwise unaware of it.

Instrumentation is not required in natural childbirth training, but it can help our understanding of underlying mechanisms and processes. Our own consciousness is the finest instrument, but we can lack the insight needed to use it to advantage. Technology is part of the modern problem, but it is also part of the answer. It has helped to get us into trouble; it can help us get out of it. The challenge is to use it intelligently. If the validity of natural childbirth methods is challenged, if it is ascribed to trance or illusion, the electromyograph can offer clinical evidence of effectiveness.

A sensor placed on the skin can 'hear' electrical noise in the underlying muscle, even when we think it is fully relaxed. Then, once we realize that we can influence this residual tension, cause it to sway imperceptibly, we are encouraged by this knowledge to practice influencing it more decisively in the process of deep relaxation. The instrument reveals that we possess sensitivity within ourselves, with which we have lost touch in becoming civilized. It is still there, latent and accessible.

People living close to nature do not lose this intuitive awareness, but neither do they have the knowledge that goes with its loss and rediscovery. Although our training does not call for it, it has played a part in the development of our knowledge, and it helps us to understand what we are doing. It is especially useful for the beginner, and it is there for those who wish to use it.

In the picture revealed by electrophysiology, we can distinguish three states:

(1) A trained subject in deep relaxation.

(2) The same remaining relaxed, but _imagining_ doing some activity.

(3) Actually doing that activity.

If the activity in (3), is say, turning a butter churn, and we are actually doing just that, the muscles involved are electrically active. High voltages are recorded in them as they come rhythmically into play.

Oppositely, in (1), relaxing, there is little or no electrical activity in the muscles. But in (2), with the subject _imagining_ that activity, the _same_ electrical pattern manifests in the electromyograph trace as appears in (3), only 'sotto voce' – at very low voltage.

This means that the imagination acts as the whole body acts, but it takes only first trigger pressure. It does not precipitate the muscular response, the action, itself. We do not imagine 'in our head', but the imagination uses the whole body as a sounding board. The results can be read therefore in two places. One is visible to an observer, the 'sotto voce' voltages in the equipment; the other is the imagination or thought of the experiencing subject.

The subject is an _instrument_. What to the subject, as a mental action, is a thought is to the electromyograph a low-key neuromuscular activity, an ordered sequence of electrical impulses in the muscles, which do not reach however, the threshold of motor response. Deep relaxation is based on the ability to detect and extinguish this low-key activity, extinguishing as well the imagery or determinate thought. Instead of struggling with one's imagination, one observes and lets it be, reaching beyond it to the underlying neuromuscular tension, which is fueling the resultant imagination.

Determinate thought, is thought with a determinate content, so about cabbages and kings. If it is eliminated, if there are no clouds in the sky of thought, there is still the sky. There is a world, and there is awareness, but there is no disturbance. The word 'thought' lends itself to a range of conditions, just as 'climate' lends itself to a variety of weathers, but in general, there is a thoughtful state, which is to be desired, and a form of conditioned response we can well do without.

Instruments can help us by pointing to psychological sensitivity that we have otherwise lost in becoming civilized. Or rather, they can help us to discover that our mind, in itself, is the most sensitive of such instruments, but we have lost the ability to read it directly. Pitted against these sensitive instruments, we discover that our mind too, is sensitive, and furthermore, it has resources of its own.

Deep, or trained relaxation means relaxation that proceeds to the elimination of conditioned (involuntary, determinate) thought. This it is aim of the natural childbirth training program. All a cross-country runner does, is run. It does not follow that anyone who can run is a cross-country runner. There is a qualitative difference between the two, a special fitness, not necessarily externally visible, which distinguishes the trained from the untrained runner.

The first step in our program is that the expectant mother, through training, should be able to reach a state of simple but deep relaxation. The second is to maintain it in the face of psychological pressure, or we could say, in 'rough conditions'; and the third is to maintain it while performing specific tasks, at first of a minor nature, but later including the full setting-up exercises of a prescribed course.

### Jacobson in review

Jacobson's strength is the simplicity of his approach, which is essentially clinical electrophysiology. In the broader perspective, although he claimed it as new – and as a modern development in science it is – it has been practiced under another name since civilization began. It is, in brief, meditation, now rediscovered in a new medium, that of science. Its development has been on its way since the 1920s.

Immediately we assess it in this light, a significant point comes to the fore. In his approach, Jacobson makes no effort to ward off sleep. He is content if his deep relaxation turns into sleep. "The plan," he said (E.J., p.29), "was to test whether excitement which has stubbornly persisted will tend under conditions favorable to progressive relaxation to give way to sleep..."

He correctly observes from his studies that in many ways deep relaxation resembles sleep without being sleep. In this, consciousness is preserved in a qualitatively unique state of mental quietude, but it did not occur to him that this could be sought as a therapeutic goal _as distinct from sleep_. Thus, having instructed his subject, he says, "If he now lies quietly with eyes closed, and seems to be set to relax, he may be left alone," and, "...if persistent it becomes the most restful form of natural sleep."

Our advice is different. We seek to marry relaxation and alertness. The goal is to be supremely relaxed, whilst vigilant watchful and open-eyed.

As a final point Jacobson says, "Patients accustomed to hypnosis may tend to go into a trance-like state when they lie down. This renders them poor and difficult subjects for the present method and makes it well to abandon the attempt to develop relaxation" (ibid p.306). In other words, he would abandon just those subjects we would regard as our proper starting point, insofar as our objective is to undo trance susceptibility.

### Non hypnotic and non analytical

Like Jacobson, we must become experts in detecting and understanding innate muscular tension, as against its relaxation, and we must know how to communicate this accurately to our mothers, developing a professional regard for our subject so that they really learn. In the first two months, deep relaxation is covered systematically. The details cannot concern us here, because equipment and demonstration is involved, but we must cover muscular relaxation and all forms of sensory awareness with care, with emphasis upon the eyes and vision. The teaching must be meticulous. It is not good enough to just 'go through the motions' of following some course – for that only leads to failure.

When the tide is out rocks and wrecks show. In deep relaxation the tide of reticular nervous energy drops low. As it approaches the sleep point, the subject's psychological shoals rocks and wrecks come into view. Now comes a remarkable phenomenon. With correct guidance, the mental state readjusts itself. We do not have to be psychoanalysts. The human brain, should we say the mind, is itself the master analyst. It creates no images except those it needs. We can engage in analysis, but it implies a special interest or sensed need to intervene and so control in some way.

There are times when we may need to do this. Guidance must include insight, and very often, practical advice, and for this we need facts figures, thoughts and ideas, visions and dreams. However, our main task is processing for autonomy, and this does not call for analysis. We need but to create the right conditions. The subject's mind will do the rest.

But how can we ward off any trance tendency, for to go back to our analogy – as the tide drops, might not the ship of consciousness strike a shoal or rock and be endangered? The answer is simple. We use a non-hypnotic approach. We run hypnosis in reverse. Certainly, we drop the level of inner tension in the nervous system (relaxation does this), but then we do everything wrong from a hypnotist's point of view. Hypnosis wants to sink the ship of mind. We want to ensure that it stays the right way up!

Sessions are conducted in the morning. The mother can freshen up with a splash of cold water and a towel rub down, but we do not expect that degree of difficulty. We ask the mother to keep her eyes open. The fact that a person can be in trance with their eyes wide open and exhibiting all the signs of ordinary consciousness need not concern us. We are concerned, not with where she (initially) is, but where she is going. We have but to adopt a non-hypnotic approach, and conduct the session in such a way that any such tendency will lift.

### Drills

Towards the beginning of the mother's introduction to stressed relaxation, variations are introduced. The key words are, "This is a drill." With that announcement, she is to respond faithfully to verbal cues and commands. It might go like this:

Coach: "This is a drill. Tell me something you can see."

Mother: "A vase of flowers."

Coach: "OK. Tell me something else you can see."

Mother: "I can see a curtain."

The coach obtains several such answers and then switches to something heard.

Coach: "Listen, and tell me something you can hear."

Mother: "I can hear a train in the distance."

Coach: "Excellent."

If the intention is to induce trance, this is the 'wrong' thing to do. It alerts and focuses, rather than fixes and tires the attention. It walks away from, not towards trance. At the same time, it is differential attention. The mother must remain otherwise motionless and relaxed, for this state drives the process. Should she move or cough, otherwise than in response to the cue, she will earn the usual flunk, explanation of error, and beginning of a new session.

"Drill," along with "start" and "end," are agreed key words. "This is a drill," means that the mother is to obey, and it remains in force until "end of drill" is announced. We can ask her to look around and identify things sounds colors etc., and instruct that she "be aware" of any thoughts or emotions she may be able to detect in herself, which does not mean that she must tell us what they are, unless we so stipulate. In this way we can guide her to the state of mind, awareness and consciousness we intend her to adopt.

Give her sufficient time for each step. For instance if you ask her to be aware of any emotions she may experience, pause long enough for her to do this before asking something else. The intention is to cultivate a state of alert relaxation. Later she will learn to name objects colors sounds etc., without making any head or eye movements, i.e., while remaining otherwise fully relaxed.

We, for our part, remain in complete conversational contact, acknowledging every response as appropriate. Finally, she is asked to concentrate her mind upon her breathing, to make this her attention 'parking spot'. We may ask her to count her breaths to herself, and then inquire what number she has reached as a check upon her state of concentration.
30. Differential Relaxation

**Immobility** and **alert attention** constitute the moments of a psychological state, anterior or deep to sleep and waking conscious attention. Its physiological basis comes fully into play during labor. It is also the state that, in the mature foetus and newborn child sustains the higher consciousness that will build upon it.

We cultivate or construct it artificially in our sessions, as a situational framework that we can then drive in either direction, towards trance or autonomy. We want the latter of course. Language of the type: "You feel sleepy. You feel like closing your eyes. Close your eyes! You are very tired, you hear only my voice," will induce hypnotic trance in susceptible subjects. Conversely, "Now a short drill; tell me something you can see. (response). Good! Now tell me something else you can see, etc.", by alerting the subject's attention, has an opposite influence. It maintains psychological extroversion.

Relaxation is immobilization, and immobility traps the psyche, because it eliminates the habitual movements that otherwise vent and reduce accumulating tension. It is one of two similar, but mutually opposed extremes, the other being total engagement, as for example in cross-country running, but there are legion other activities in this category as well. The psyche, we could say our thoughts, have nowhere to go if we are engaged in deep relaxation, and those who train in cross-country running become aware that the total physical commitment is accompanied naturally by a profound mental quietude, which in itself is therapeutic.

The primal state, that is the ground of consciousness deep, so prior in nature to sleep and conscious awareness alike is not somnolence but an unfailing ground of awareness coincident with life. The subject is not to sleep in session and it is the guide or helper's task to see that this does not occur. Now, compare this with another situation, that of driving a car. The voluntary element in the latter case is cancelled insofar as we cannot cease driving, while to fall asleep is fraught with danger. This more proximally corresponds to the mother's required state in the drill.

She is a voluntary participant, and the training is to introduce her, before labor begins, to her best option in coping with it and its demands. She is to relax completely, keeping her eyes open, while she is monitored, and the monitor(s) represents (to her) the world of possibility she is likely to encounter. The goal for her is autonomy. The opposite of this, which she is to avoid, is external control, for birth in nature works supremely within its own parameters, to its own ends.

Submission to such control is the enemy of a natural birth. The mother is to neither obey nor fight it, but to ignore it altogether, annul and cancel in the process her own (internalized) conditioning. Now the relaxation is negative, but annulling both her activity and conditioning alike, it brings her conditioning into view, importantly for the observer (her guide or helper), and more importantly for herself. When motion stops, emotion, so the expression of mind springs to the fore. This gives her a front on which to work.

The trance experienced in hypnosis works through conditioning. It does not confront it. The task is to eliminate this conditioning, or at least blunt its power to control, for its expression in labor is cultural childbirth. Nature's primal state and hypnotrance are the same thing, except that the former is life's naked expression, as found in the newborn and the mother alike, while the latter is the expression of submission or folding in the face of overwhelming control by others, and the power of death as experienced in injury and disease.

We do not use a trance-inducing approach as a sessional challenge until we are sure that the mother can and will reject it, and is capable of doing so effectively. When she does so, her action in doing so moves her away from trance, as well as reducing her trance susceptibility. This is the path to spiritual autonomy.

The coach, guide or helper cannot confront or reduce the mother's innate conditioning. Only life's impact, drugs toxins injuries and illnesses can implant trance susceptibility, and only the life force within the mother can overcome it. We can no more prevail against it, than wind and wave can change the state of equilibrium and balance in a ship, or an earthquake the design of the buildings it shakes, but we can know the conditions and forces that do fashion these states.

Now, Jacobson, in his _Progressive Relaxation_ , sets out the clinical and experimental facts that apply to mind and muscular states in activity and rest. It is essential to understand the states at this level, but it is also necessary to go beyond them to that of therapeutic application. We find this in the works of Dick-Read, and once again we have to go beyond Read, both in his technique and outlook. In his technique he continues to nurse along his initial error of pushing education, where this implies a degree of assumed authority and control.

The error here emerges in the blame he attaches to the media of mass information and his naive advocacy of some form of censorship. It reflects too, in the concessions he makes to his colleagues in relation to drug administration, for example pethidine, which enabled them to 'examine and fail' his work, as well as his struggle to comprehend the biblical references and the larger issue of matriarchy v. patriarchy. Clinically he did not introduce stressed relaxation, the stage we now reach.

We must therefore follow his teachings, for these establish the subject, but warned by their fate (suppression), correct where necessary and go beyond. Man must take the lead in establishing woman's hegemony, for it involves recognition, not self-recognition, but recognition by another, and of one sex by the other. Man must recognize woman, not as a sexual partner and plaything, for this is secondary and degrading, but as a mother, noting that the mother, through imprinting, informs every human mind.

Beyond this inner presence, woman's central role manifests in motherhood, a role which has nothing whatsoever to do with dominance, and everything to do with example, the ground and foundation upon which mind and humanity stand. Only when this is correctly understood and motherhood recaptures its citadel, childbirth, will cultural childbirth be overcome, and a new age, free at last of the curse, be initiated.

### The Role of Attitude and Shame

The theory governing the application of deep relaxation to antenatal training can be expressed quite simply. Any inappropriate muscular tension in a mother in labor indicates an unfavorable psychological state. The mental tension behind it will trigger off an unconditioned reflex to stop the birth. Just as we cannot sleep if we are mentally tense or 'over tired', so natural birth escapes those who come to labor harboring tension.

Read said:

"A word about the forehead. The wrinkled brow must, of course, be avoided. Relaxation of the face as a whole is extremely important, and I am quite sure that any woman who is capable of relaxing her facial muscles will go through labor with ease." 2nd Ed. p. 161

He added:

"A few women have definitely refused to allow their faces to become relaxed in my presence; they have been self-conscious and have promised to try when alone in their room. If a woman is wearing false teeth, I suggest that it would be wiser for her to remove them rather than try to relax her face with them in; this is because many dentures are not absolutely safe without some support from the facial muscles; one does not want to see them half in and half out when the muscles of the cheeks and jaw are relaxed."

A furrowed brow, grimace or scowl is intended to warn someone or something to stay away. But in labor it turns against the mother herself. If she can inwardly relax, stilling or withdrawing the mental force which powers the frown (where 'frown' means any response to the external world which she judges inimical) she is free of its consequences, and she can keep herself on track and the birth progressing.

In his discussion Read describes shame without naming it, and we can see that he could not do so without recognizing its central role in the cultural devastation of birth, a role that goes beyond his benign acceptance of the male/ female inequality that disfigures modern Westernized society.

Now, in our sessions a mother may have her own associates, family and friends about her, a factor not found in Read's antenatal classes, which hinged upon education and group exercises. They soon learn the psychological value of what they say and do. Some gambits will disturb, or even devastate the mother's composure, while others will not affect her at all. When something effective is discovered it is pursued, but within the rules of repetition earlier discussed under the heading of deconditioning. The coach's skill is measured by his success in achieving this, always with relaxation in view.

The team tries to break the mother's composure, but only in order to find and repair the weak spot. To be carried away in the search function and be too successful, in danger of breaking her composure altogether, is to lose. The coaching must always be on the side of finding and reducing the otherwise hidden emotional charge, utilizing a judicial balance of challenge and leniency. Initially the team will find it easy, but as time goes on the mother will become increasingly impervious to challenge, until nothing can be found to throw her off-balance.

Situations vary infinitely; nevertheless a program schedule should be drawn up for each participant covered the months available. Instruments, such as electromyographs, can be instructive, and helpful in creating a progress record, but it is the supervisor's responsibility to ensure that the goal of increasing self-possession balance calmness and composure is actually attained. Each mother's psyche must be initially assessed and a judgment made on the best program for her. This will test a supervisor's competence, and this will grow with increasing experience. Her goal is to build a group mind, wherein those present will know how to behave in the spiritual presence of the labor.

In one sense there is nothing to it, with emphasis on the 'nothing'. Without assistance or training a young mother, with little knowledge and even less understanding can experience a natural birth. This is the 'nothing' side of things. Conversely, without knowledge, any bystander can throw a monkey wrench into its process, stopping the labor and precipitating a crisis, for we are dealing with a mental state as fragile as sleep.

### Differential Relaxation

By this time the mother will have reached the stage of being able to profoundly relax her whole body and hold it so in the presence of commotion. She now adds to this, the ability to move, or alternatively tense specific areas, such as individual fingers, the right hand, wrist, elbow and so on. The drill moves on, covering the entire body, so that she can differentially tense and release the various muscle groups region by region. The purpose is to draw her attention to bodily parts systematically, along with the idea of differential relaxation, and clarify what relaxing and letting go, or 'going negative' means.

The eyes are important in this respect. The drills are to teach how to avoid giving attention. With the eyes open and totally relaxed they will naturally be centered and so stare straight ahead, even if her relaxed head is moved from side to side. It is 'staring without seeing', to be able to be aware of everything without allowing one's attention to be caught by anything, or caught by motion or detail. The opposite of this is to focus the vision on something close, or infinitely far away as in gazing at a star.

Subjectively the mother is to be aware of her thoughts and feelings, treating the internal world of her thought in the same way that the training directs her to treat her external environment. If presence and chatter are to be considered so is absence and silence.

The coach may chatter away or be subject to long silence, in view or retired from sight. He can mention that something terrible has happened, and then everyone can, with calculated carelessness leave the room. The possibilities for variation are endless. The only thing that does not change is the intention to maintain a steady training gradient in achieving the desired result, the mother's sense of composure and autonomy.

Her helpers may engage in conversation that disregards the mother's presence. This will be staged to seem careless, but is not so, for nothing in the program is careless except by design. Alternatively, the coach may officiously decide to read to her from a book, and this can be a way of imparting information. Personal comments can be made, of a provocative nature. The mother is subjected to taunts praise and blame, always with the view in mind of determining what influence, if any, these may have upon her. The aim is to discover and hammer out of existence any weaknesses in her state of composure.

As the months pass, and the mother shows herself capable of withstanding almost anything anyone can throw at her without responding, reference to the maternity situation and labor may be made. This will seek to explore any hidden myths fears and imaginings in the minds of the mother and helpers. Far from protecting her from scare stories, she can be mocked that she is going to be sectioned, that training is a waste of time, that it will fail and she will fail, that she never make it. The labor will stop and she will require section after all. Her attendants need not be afraid that anything they say or do in session will adversely affect the coming labor, for when that arrives it just turns off the spigot of conditioned memory. Heaven help them though, if they commit the least faux pas in her presence during the labor itself.

The supervisor will be conscious of the fact that she is dealing, not with the labor, for that needs no tuition, but with the cultural attitude that otherwise disrupts it. The helpers may be initially reticent and shy, unable to comment, challenge or provoke. They have to learn as well as the mother. The unwanted cultural attitudes are there but bottled up. Unprepared people are too dangerous. They should not be present at a birth. The mother just does not know how to 'behave' in labor. Animals, beyond predators and opportunists have no concerned audience, and no problem.

The control rehearsal investigates, educates and reveals. It lets everyone who will be there see and understand the frame of mind in a mother conducive to a natural birth, and the sort of behavior in those around her, which either promotes or prevents such a frame of mind from being reached. It is far better that it be discovered in a training session than in the labor itself.

Relaxation is the backbone of the training, but we cannot assume that life is going to provide the mother with ideal conditions. So we introduce stress to steel her against the possible intrusion of unexpected intense social pressures, especially of the kind arising from our culture of regimentation and imposed medical regulation. Only a professional obstetrician or midwife working in the system can guess what sort of challenge may suddenly emerge in the twists and turns of real life. In this respect the supervisor's role is vital.

In case the thought may arise that the helpers could be dismissed, for they may sound more trouble than they are worth, we should review their role.

In this modern age someone has to be present at the birth, otherwise the benefits of modern scientific knowledge are forfeit. However, so-called benefits, thoughtlessly intruded and imposed, cancel the possibility of natural birth. The conflict that here arises is the ground of the extensive literature that has arisen on the subject. The mother needs her familiars as a magnet needs its keeper. They, in turn, need training in order to take part in a quite complicated situation, learning what they may do and what they may not.

They must become, in effect, students of a science of mind and understand their role as links in the circle of social recognition of the mother and baby. Read emphasized that a mother in labor needs peace and quiet above all else, but short of training program, emulating and dramatizing the conflict that surrounds labor beforehand, this has proved virtually impossible to provide. In result, Read's initiative collapsed upon his death.

The option now provided is for the mother to attain the peace and quiet she needs, not in the environment, but in her own mind. She must learn to remain calm and collected in the middle of the utmost turmoil and harassment. She is still vulnerable however, if left alone and unassisted. By working on three fronts, the mother, her helpers, and the overall social environment we can achieve the required objective.

### The Electromyograph

The electromyograph or EMG gives us a direct read on muscle tension, or rate of firing within muscles. Compare, but do not confuse it with ECG, the electrocardiogram or heart tracing, or EEG the electroencephalogram or brain tracing.

Quite early one may notice that a mother may relax well for a few minutes or even for half an hour. The relaxation is satisfyingly deep. Then someone says something. It can be an inconsequential remark, and suddenly her relaxation is lost.

She may give no outward sign of this, but the effect is there, in triggered mental tension, altering her state of mind and composure. Sooner or later it will manifest in her behavior, but an EMG, appropriately attached, will sound, buzzing away or signalling in some other way, until the sensitivity controls are readjusted. The tension, once provoked, is resistant, so that try as she might, the mother can no longer regain her former relaxed state for some time.

Tension comes in two forms; one as a sine wave, up and down, the other as a plateau. The latter means that the mother has been upset by something and is unable as yet to unravel the cause in her own mind. With practice, as in the training, she will learn how to do this.

The mother learns to search, not for the unwelcome thought or emotion, but for the location of the muscular tension which expresses it. To learn how to detect this and relax it away is to learn how to overcome the associated mental response.

The coach can assist by running an 'unscramble' session: "Be aware of" your (body parts, arm leg back face eyes etc.) Be aware of your vision (what you can see); of your hearing (what you can hear); of emotion (how you feel); of thoughts, and, finally of your breathing. This may quickly lead to reinstatement of the desired degree of relaxation, and the training in deep relaxation can proceed.

The mother will learn, and be taught to distinguish between sensations arising from some bodily experience such as external pressure, intrinsic pain and so on, and actual muscle tension. For instance, the eyes are relaxed when looking at something very far away. To look at something close we have to focus the eyes, and the resultant tension involved in this focusing can be detected. When we look at something close by, the muscles controlling the eyes, and those in the iris itself, contract, and with practice this can be detected for exactly what it is, muscle tension. The mother will therefore learn to relax her eyes completely, which means, looking straight ahead without the focus of seeing. The same applies to the muscles of expression and so on. When deep physical relaxation is attained, psychological tension loses its place of purchase. This was indeed Jacobson's principal finding.

The EMG can teach all concerned about relaxation quickly. It throws light upon the aim and intention of the training program; however it belongs to the realm of technology we wish to set aside and it becomes disadvantageous the moment it takes attention away from the mother and her helpers, onto itself. The body, after all, as demonstrated in meditation, is the finest instrument. No other is needed.

### Controlling the Environment

Whatever else we are doing we are creating a controlled local environment for the birth. Who may, and who may not attend the labor has been discussed, along with the reasons why. We recall that it is the mother's choice. It stems from her original authority upon which her autonomy rests, vested in her by nature, which tolerates no infringement in a natural birth. But what theory dictates, and discussion has agreed must always be confirmed in practice.

In the training, or _as_ training, we set no store upon education. None whatsoever. Then, because 'second hand' education is deleted, the actual training can only consist of acting out, or learning by doing. This would have delighted B. F. Skinner, the behavioral psychologist, and is, I believe, a principle in Gestalt psychology. Education is to training as a frame is to the picture. In this, too, we seek perfection and set great store upon it, but at the same time we recognize that true education can rest only upon insight. It is necessary here to focus upon the question of education and exclude it as a modern imposition, incompatible with our program intention and goals. Learning by doing takes its place, and in the clear vision that then obtains, becomes the sole content of the autonomy-seeking seeking program.

In the light of this, every training program should incorporate contingency plans conforming to its circumstances. For instance, if it is conceived that an uninvited person or intruder may have to be kept out or removed, then measures should be taken to guard against this in advance, but the contingency should also be included in the training program routinely. The same applies if the supervisor feels that she needs control over those already present. At a nod, glance or gesture in training the person indicated would leave the room; assume guard duty on the door or whatever is required.

This is not because people are going to be ordered out at the birth, or uninvited guests intrude, but just to 'Gestalt' the sense of environment control. The mother will not then be thrown into cultural birth should such a disturbance occur. The example is invoked to illustrate how an appropriate contingency plan is to be implemented on two levels. Everyone would practice ordering out, and being ordered out, there being only two fixtures, the mother and the supervisor or person who represents her autonomy.

It might be argued that this sense of authority, control and regimentation are the sorts of thing we want to avoid. We seek a loving caring environment, where those present feel they belong. Surely to 'order out' or practice doing so will create an atmosphere of tension contrary to this? On the other hand, no one has a God-given right to intrude upon a birth. It is a practical question, depending entirely upon circumstances.

In society a bear, tiger or other predator is unlikely to show up, and in an enlightened society there will be no burglars or intruders. There is a saying, 'if you want peace prepare for war', but if the possibility of war did not exist there would be no sense in such preparation. There is another saying, 'trust in God but keep your powder dry.' The exercise itself creates no tension. To the contrary, any contingency or situation that could create tension is grist for the stressing mill.

Our planning is determined by the measures we discover to be necessary to make a natural birth possible. In the nature of the case, the mother herself, her wishes and need is the sole source of authority. We are but her agents. Anything against that disposition, infringes upon circumstances that govern natural childbirth as such.

Still, circumstances make the case. Whoever is supervising must have full responsibility, which includes being able to throw away the book if necessary. Midwifery has to be a living art, and there is no appeal in the end but to results. One who has understood, and thrown away the book is not quite in the same position as one who has never read it at all.

### Stress with Physical Interference

During relaxation training a mother learns to let her hand or arm flop back onto the pillow when it is lifted and dropped by the coach. Such actions can be repeated unexpectedly during the process of stressing.

Parts of the body may be touched unexpectedly, especially if the mother appears to have her eyes shut. A hand, foot, arm or leg may be lifted, or the mother's head moved, she being fully relaxed and remaining so [the body part should be 'floppy' without tension. Re-included from p 393 original book by editor]. The coach may lay the tips of the fingers on the abdomen in duplication of the process of palpating for the baby's position.

The theory in this is simply that the mother may well be subjected to such experiences during her labor. In training we must keep contingency in mind, that regardless of planning the mother may be delivered at home when she planned for a hospital, or in a hospital when she planned for home. Life is nothing, if it is not original!

As a note on coaching, _every such action is to be rewarded or punished_. The reward is a compliment; "Good," very good, fine or excellent, etc. Punishment is punching the stopwatch and announcing a flunk; "The hand did not drop freely," or, "The movement was resisted," etc. Because the mother is not responding, the coach must take both sides of the conversation upon himself. It is a coaching failure not to routinely reward or punish every action of response or no response.

### Obeying and Disobeying Orders

So far the mother has done nothing but learn to relax and maintain her relaxation through a program of exercises designed to instil a disregard for intrusive bystander speech and behavior. Now she is to enter a factor of her own doing, responding or not responding to external circumstances and control.

The coach by now has achieved something, namely a mother in training who not only knows how to relax, but can remain relaxed through considerable turmoil. If an earthquake shook the building, she would hopefully remain calm. A new drill is now explained.

All that has been practiced up to this point is to remain valid, but in addition the coach will now give orders, and instructions for carrying, or not carrying them out.

Coach: "This is a drill. I am going to give you orders, which you are to obey. You are to respond to the orders."

The statement, "This is a drill," annuls the requirement that she is to 'take no notice and not to respond'.

Coach: "Close your right hand."

Mother: (closes right hand).

Coach: "OK"

Coach: "Close your left hand."

Mother: (closes left hand).

Coach: "Good"

Coach: "Take a big breath."

Mother: (takes a big breath).

Coach: "Thank you. End of drill."

The drill, more extensive than that indicated above, is repeated until it becomes routine. Then it is repeated with the initial instruction changed:

Coach: "This is a drill. I am going to give you orders which you are to disregard. You are not to respond."

"Close your right hand."

Mother: (does not respond).

Coach: (after an expectant pause).

"Good! You did not respond to that order."

Coach: "Close your left hand."

Mother: (does not respond) ... etc.

The sequence is repeated a third time, but now with the instruction to _change the order_ , that is, to do something different. So instead of closing her hand the mother may move her foot or shrug her shoulders etc.

The instructions are once more altered. The orders are given and the mother is to decide whether to obey, change the order or disregard it altogether. She is to retain her general state of background relaxation regardless, and the coach is to acknowledge her action or non/action affirmatively, informing her of the choice she has made. She is to make up her mind whether to carry out, change or ignore each order, and for the sake of the drill she is to vary her responses in a more or less random manner.

Coach: "Drill. Tighten your right hand."

Mother: (does nothing).

Coach: (after a pause) "Good. You disregarded that order."

The coach may get it wrong, in which case the mother may, should she wish, respond.

Mother: "No. I changed it. I moved my left foot."

Coach: "OK."

Now the chaff begins. The coach, who can vary the instructions to suit the occasion, begins to give orders with increasing intention of imposing his will over the mother. Initially, they can be quietly presented, but then, by degrees, become more and more imperative, given in a peremptory manner, with cajolery threats reasons pleadings and promises.

Having given an order, and finding it not carried out, the coach can repeat it, plead, persist, and grow angry or indignant whatever. But in each case, when he conceives that she has made her point and is not going to relent he must acknowledge, saying, "Good! You disregarded (or changed) that order," whatever. A flunk is still a flunk if it has been deemed to occur, for instance, if the mother were to smile, laugh or move unexpectedly or in a wrong sequence.

The intention is to affirm that the mother in labor is in supreme command of what she does and how she does it. Her whim is her will, and her authority is by no means to be set aside. In the training, the only authority she acknowledges is the session structure, and this only consists of some formal pointers established as the rules of the game. If that were set aside, or should a mother find herself for some reason without a helper in training, meditation would be her best resource.

This, incidentally, and changing the subject, is usually conducted in the sitting posture, in which case gravity is the only external authority she has to deal with. Maintaining the posture, which is one of differential relaxation, any beginning lapse of attention is signalled by the onset of gravity-induced movement. The goal is to completely relax the body but not to go to sleep or otherwise relinquish the state of alert attention.

We can tell a mother that in labor that she is to be "her own person," that the labor is a complicated natural process, and that only she, through her body knows what is going on and what is needed. Therefore she is to ignore advice that she knows is wrong for her and insist upon having her own way. But during labor, not only her body but her mind is undergoing transformation, and such advice, even were it learned by heart, counts for nothing. She must actually _practice_ "having her own way," which is what the drills are all about.

She is not, therefore, learning disobedience – unless her upbringing has included a surfeit of disciplinary obedience that needs to be corrected – but self-reliance as the natural basis of intelligent responsibility and cooperation. The drill leads the mother to see that she may disregard or change any order that is contrary to her wish, or knowledge of what is right. This may turn her into a 'difficult patient' in the eyes of those who are not aware that birth is life's sacrament, [who think they have some God-given prerogative, but she will do the right thing more often than not, whereas the completely compliant person will become the victim of administrative blundering and cultural consequences. Re-included from p 396 original book by editor]. The alternative is a difficult birth with the mother needing an operation.

It is not a course in disobedience. Autonomy is the goal. The question of obedience/ disobedience just comes in along the way. But at this superficial level a case can be made for it as follows: in family and social life disobedience is nowhere taught, whereas discipline in obedience is uniformly drilled. We live therefore in an off-center one-sided culture with antagonism and disobedience breaking out spontaneously on all sides in unpremeditated ways. It takes the form of suppressed necessity. It can also be said that only those who know how to disobey know how to obey. For the mother in antenatal training it is a question of learning the attitude of body and mind conducive to a natural birth.

31. Physical Fitness

Physical fitness alone is not the key to a natural birth. An athletic woman may have a very good birth, but then again she may not, and finish up having to have an operation, while another with a condition such as rheumatic heart failure causing breathlessness on moderate exertion may have her baby easily. For birth is gentle in nature, but in cultural or non-gentle birth, the opposition is in the self, and the athlete's strength is also against her. However, recognizing that physical fitness is not the answer, it is still an important factor. It is necessary to distinguish between fitness in general and fitness to give birth.

Because of her lifestyle the average woman in modern society is not fit to give birth. This can be corrected by appropriate exercises, which are not those needed to win the javelin throw, but can help in the preparation for labor. For instance women living in primitive conditions, away from such things as chairs and tables squat when tending the fire, preparing food, weeding or planting etc. The squat is also an appropriate position for labor.

The full squat.

Something else adverse in our modern culture, besides tables and chairs, is our means of transport. Animals lumber around on all fours. The human frame is adapted for that position – chest and abdomen slung beneath a horizontal spine. And labor and birth are happy with that position. But our ancestors first became arboreal and then stood up on two legs. The lower part of the abdominal cavity, in conjunction with the spine (so the pelvis), then adapted over long time, by curving backwards in order to regain its original more supportive horizontal position. So in the human, though we stand straight, the rear tends to stick out and the abdomen to be balanced forward, a posture accentuated in the carrying woman.

Then someone invented the car, so we sit reclining in a bucket seat working the steering wheel and foot pedals. The head, hands and feet are alone exercised, while the activity and posture is the worst possible for the baby's positioning in the womb as the mother approaches term. It is as bad in terms of positioning, and therefore presentation, early rupture of the membranes etc., as it is bad for the mother to try to labor and give birth lying on her back on a narrow table with her feet in the air. It is so wrong that it should not need to be pointed out; however, women can do something for themselves. They can practice the squatting position, if just to get the feel of it, while they read a book, eat lunch or perform any number of tasks for which they would otherwise sit down. This can be quite a valuable preparatory exercise.

Read mentions that women who live and work out of doors, the peasant woman, the fisher-girl farm-hand etc., bear their children more easily than those who live sedentary lives, but that those trained in ballet and gymnastics tend to have a bad time unless they are specially retrained.

Antenatal exercises have been practiced for thousands of years. They have stood the test of time and are superbly developed in themselves. Yet they may be wrongly taught. As calisthenics, they can be performed to music, but in this case, though correctly selected and beautiful to watch on stage or film, like javelin throwing, they are useless for childbirth, so long as the problem of control and autonomy is neither understood nor addressed.

Exercise is intrinsically helpful because giving birth is an exercise. It interests us to the degree it rehearses natural birth, which we know, is not an externally controlled thing. If the exercise is done to music, a metronome or an instructor's call its control is external.

Birth unfolds from within. In the process of labor and birth the mind undergoes a special involution. It is nature's moment wherein the mother returns to her primal self. It marches forward without reference to any conditioned learning pattern. Those who look for an external control and find it are immediately led astray. Nature's purpose and their ebbing external-looking consciousness are in headlong conflict. The internal signal then is to stop the birth, and nothing is left but for needle and knife to take over.

How can we manage it differently? Turn off the music or throw away the metronome. The mother is to be her own metronome; the exercises practiced in time with, or 'attuned to' her own natural inclination and breathing. The mother can breathe in time with the exercises, or exercise in time with her breathing. So long as they are linked they are under her control, part of her systematic nature.

So first she is given the exercises and shown how to do them, one or two initially, with more added week by week. Each is linked to the next in daisy-chain fashion, so that she herself can decide how many times she wished to repeat each before moving on to the next.

If there were say, twenty different exercises, and she has gone through each, and wished to continue for a time she moves from number '20' to '01', and may therefore stop where and when she wishes. It is a continuous chain. One exercise is made to flow into the next without pause. The sequence will also include practice of the various positions encountered as possibly useful in birth. She practices all, and in birth is free to choose her position for herself, needing no-one else' s suggestion, though a trained midwife, who is also herself a mother, can give valuable advice. Rules, we should always remember, do not override common sense.

As the mother gets to know the exercises she takes them over completely. Because they are to be tied to her breathing the initial exercises are breathing exercises, which makes it easy to establish the desired breathing-to-exercise link, which will then continue right through.

### Meditation

When meditating, our heart continues to beat. We continue to breathe, and if we are sitting up the muscles maintaining our posture continue to act. Eyes open, we 'see without looking', without interest in what is before us. Our total active commitment is negative; we exercise our will to _refrain_ from positive acts beyond those mentioned.

We require nothing special or any person before us, but if we sit in front of another who is also meditating a particular circumstance arises. An external surveillance is added to the internal. We are conscious of being watched, and our resolve to self-discipline is thereby consciously reinforced.

The mother on course meditates, with only this difference, that our program is targeted at one only special goal, her scheduled participation in a forthcoming labor and birth. To look into another's eyes without wavering is special in our psychological vocabulary, for this baby-to-mother eye-to-eye contact is a built-in reflex mechanism, that begins at birth, ignites the baby's intelligence and has a genetic, therefore unconscious component.

It is not surprising therefore, that meditation, assisted by a partner, supervisor or group leader sitting in front and also meditating is practiced around the world and has been for ages. The other's eyes become a point of focus in a mental non-intrusive surveillance.

Looking another in the eye also plays a notable role in a wide range of interpersonal interactions, including those of love hate fear admiration and anger, as well as in the ordinary process of simple communication, when we glance to see if the other is listening. Face to face meditation contains the element of teaching by example. One is not told what to think, for the idea is to experience the influence of introspection, for the conscious mind to assess its own working. It is a natural self- grooming for the mind.

Visual attention begins when the baby stares into its mother's eyes shortly after a natural childbirth. It is a biologically programmed reflex in the bonding sequence, which secures the preponderance of a visually orientated mental focus. The 'ego-focus', so intellect, is established through the person of the mother. She is the baby's first ' _one_ '. Through her, the baby's mind is brought into focus, becoming a determinate intelligence or intellect as such. When we talk about single-mindedness, a faithful nature and clarity of vision we are talking about this establishment of mind that occurs in the mother baby relationship.

In this, the baby gains its first experience of what will become an external orientation vis-a-vis the world. Breathing also begins at birth, and this is an internal self-controlled process, within a determinate voluntary expression. We can hold our breath for just so long. Breathing, therefore initiates the independence of mind at birth, and it is also the last stronghold of the mind in retreat, when it survives the loss of consciousness and remains after all determinate thought is gone. When it departs, so does life. We still breathe when we are in deep sleep, and when we are pathologically unconscious, due to injury, concussion etc. In labor and birth, as in meditation, breathing is the mind's station of final resort.

The mantra, as a short repetitive phrase or verse, sung aloud or quietly verbalized is widely used to focus the mind in meditation. It falls into step with the breathing, thus helping to guide the mind in the same direction. The mantra becomes subliminal and eventually phases out, leaving the consciousness self-centered in step with its respiratory focus.

The mantra, given or acquiring form becomes prayer. Focused meditation is more intense, but it requires another's presence. Unlike the breathing, the mantra, centered in consciousness, ceases when this lapses, as in sleep.

In a natural birth the mother breathes as she thinks fit. She need give no special thought to it. She is not instructed to puff or pant this way or that, or finish up inhaling anaesthetic gases as suggested by Read's Editors. She will neither welcome nor deign to notice any chorus of external ordering. I do not use the word chorus here unadvisedly. Anyone who has witnessed a birth where the attendants, like the spectators at a football match feel constrained to work as hard as the players will know what I mean. Mothers who have practiced the various breathing exercises and possibly useful positions before the birth are well able to choose for themselves that which suits them in every circumstance.
32. The Baby's Position in Labor

Birth is best when the baby's position is 'vertex' (head down), and 'occiput anterior' (it faces backwards). Vertex means the crown, or top of the head, and the occiput is the back part of its head. So in this, 'best of all positions', when the mother is standing up the baby is upside down and facing towards the mother's back, or 'contrary' in every way.

If the baby is vertex, which is good, but facing the same way as the mother (not straight forward but angled to one side), the labor tends to be slow and accompanied by backache.

In the last four to eight weeks, when the baby is big enough for its position to be readily felt, the mother can place her hands on her abdomen to determine whether its back is more to her right or left. She will feel the long smooth curve of its back or a gaggle of hands, knees and feet.

Ability to palpate the baby's position is influenced by its stage of development, the thickness or thinness of the mother's abdominal wall and the state of her womb or uterus. The womb usually contracts and thickens when she moves around, as in climbing onto a couch using her bodily muscles. The baby can then hardly be palpated at all, so it is best to be in a warm room fully relaxed. If the mother relaxes the womb will usually do the same, though it is not under conscious control. It does 'its own thing'.

### The philosophy of 'who knows?'

There are two philosophies of 'who knows'. To a degree they oppose and exclude each other, but each has a place in the world, and ultimately they complement and assist each other. But individually they make sense according to the mother's station, so she must decide what is right for her.

Doctors sell their skill, knowledge and time. The further choice is between 'the doctor knows', and 'the doctor should know'. This is an honest working attitude. It makes for efficiency, and in the long run it is partisan, competitive and cost effective for patients.

Expectant mothers, midwives and birth helpers will likely choose, 'the mother knows' and, 'the mother should know'. Especially if it is a question of the baby's position. Given the conflict of opinions and interests the best of all worlds lies in the concatenation and unity through consultation.

The baby can change its position, and its position is intimately associated with the mother's position, so there is no reason why the mother should not be the expert on how the baby is lying and why. Today doctors can determine the baby's position easily and accurately by ultrasound, and otherwise by listening for its heartbeat, determining where this is best heard. Given these means doctors in hospital practice are tending to relinquish their clinical diagnostic skills. Despite protests to the contrary they are no longer trained, nor do they devote their time to acquiring skill in determining the baby's position by palpation. It is exactly the same as losing their skill in delivering breech, as their training is no longer weighed in that direction, but is quickly deflected to performing Cesarean sections.

This is something not easily rectified, but the result of a shift in emphasis and specialization, which is taking place throughout the whole educational, technological and professional system worldwide. We will pursue the theme that 'the mother can know.'

Lying flat on her back, legs straight out, the mother raises her knees, using her hands to draw her heels in close. Then keeping her shoulders on the floor raises her bottom until her body forms a straight line from knees to shoulders.

With her hands she can feel (check) that her abdominal muscles remain loose. She then reverses the movement, again relaxing and 'rolling' her back onto the floor.

This exercise can be practiced in the early months of pregnancy, but in the later weeks it has certain implications. It allows the baby to fall towards the mother's chest and diaphragm, so if in the later weeks the baby's head has become engaged in the pelvis, a sign which is known as 'lightening', and the mother puts her fingers down just above the pubic bone, she may feel the baby's head dislodge from the pelvis.

She does not necessarily want this, for that is where the baby's head should be, especially if, at the same time it is occiput anterior. But just moving slightly into that position with the help of pillows she may feel the baby's head disengage just slightly, enough to enable ballottement (feel it tap from side to side between the finger tips). She gains by knowing where the baby's head is for sure, and also learns how the baby's position is responsive to gravity and relaxation.

Achieved on a tilting table, the position is called 'Trendelenburg'. Again, it is not an exercise to be practiced in the later weeks if the baby's head is down, for that is fine. It is where it should be. But if the baby is breech, which is not so good, the Trendelenburg position can be practiced as an exercise one or more times a day for several minutes, or assisted by a suitable apparatus that will favor its turning. This is especially true, in that the baby is more likely to turn into the vertex position as time goes on, and it may facilitating that possibility.

Part of the reason for this is that the baby's big end tends to occupy the roomier pole of the womb, which is up, and the baby's big end is the head at about thirty weeks, but the bottom at term. So approximately 23% of babies weighing 1000g are breech. At 1500g it is 12%, and at 3000g (term), only 3%.

In a breech birth the baby's cord is liable to prolapse, and anyway the after-coming head compresses it, with the danger of suffocation is there is any delay. This calls for an episiotomy and a skillful delivery. The combination of a breech and a cultural birth, especially if complicated by the administration of drugs, is deadly. For this reason Cesarean section has been increasingly advocated for breech presentations. However, if a natural birth can be achieved, and skillful medical care is available, the outcome and statistics can be quite different.

Fortunately only 4 to 5 percent of human deliveries are breech. With the dolphin it is the other way around. That baby is born tail first. If it is vertex, it is likely to drown. The danger and percentages are reversed in the two mammals, which makes one realize that nature arranges things to suit the species. Further, birth is a cooperative procedure. The mother dances her dance, and the baby dances its dance, and we can surmise that nature achieves her purpose partly through mechanical possibility, partly through manoeuvre and intention.

So the baby works for a favorable position, and the mother, by understanding these things, and deciding that she can, and should be able to 'diagnose' which way the baby is presenting, can at least help it to flow with nature's intent, and to turn if it she must.

Position and intuitive knowledge can help in this respect; just as the knee-chest or genupectoral position (kneel on all fours then drop head and chest onto the floor keeping the bottom high) can help a 'posterior' lie to become anterior. If the mother kneels, allowing her abdomen to relax, it becomes like a sling and the arch of the baby's back will adapt to this, especially if, 'bottom high', it is helped to disengage a little from the pelvis. If she habitually sits on chairs and never squats, or spends hours in a bucket-like driving seat knowing nothing about what is going on in relation to the coming labor and birth, abrogating all responsibility in favor of periodic 'check-ups', then she is likely to need all the help she has contracted for.

It is the job of midwifes and doctors, exercising a medical supervisory role, to know which way a baby is going to present, but it is also within the mother's competence and interest to know how her baby is lying from day to day. She has much more access to it, can feel it externally as well as internally, know its mood and motion and draw upon all the facilities and knowledge available by modern means. She should turn her access to information into knowledge, and be the expert concerning the baby's position. The more she knows, and knows what she wants, the better it is for her, her baby, and the world to be.

### Birth as a Non-Event

A natural childbirth is a non-event, as unremarkable as the arising of a new day. So make all preparations beforehand. Check everyone and everything out in advance. Inform people and discuss arrangements. Obtain specialist opinions. Have whatever necessary examinations done, and then when the labor begins let the non-event occur. If the birth is natural you will have nothing to do but observe as an invisible bystander.

For years the mother will attend to the household chores while children grow up and husbands pursue their calling. She is the avatar, the spiritual teacher in the home. Because she attends to her tasks others are free to attend theirs. The least we can do is ensure that she is free on the day of her labor, to birth in peace, that it does not have to be a journey through busy streets, or a party for light chatter and anxious inquiry where a thinly veiled male influence dominates, breaking out finally in the conviviality of drinks. Let it be her day of peace and quiet without intrusion or disruption.
33. The Exercises

The first three or four weeks are devoted to the practice of deep relaxation. A knowledge of session structure, together with an idea of the type of state intended – to be relaxed and alert at the same time – is thereby gained. Once the program is satisfactorily under way, physical exercises can be added, beginning with just one or two and adding one or two week by week. The aim is to attain physical fitness in those joint and muscle systems called into play in birth, together with knowledge of birth positions and a sense of self-control. This chapter gives some exercises by way of example. Others can be taken from one of the many suitable works on calisthenics available.

The program is conducted against a background of correct knowledge to the end point of achieving a natural birth. This will automatically lead to the establishment of breast-feeding and a bonded mother-infant relationship. A preliminary discussion of priorities will enable the mother to budget her time so that her program will not be disturbed by social engagements or unexpected interruptions. A carpeted floor, or rugs and pillows are all that is required as venue.

Relaxation is simply a state of muscular rest. If all its fibers are resting the whole muscle is loose rather than contracted or tense. We are accustomed to the fact that a muscle can contract with various tensions. So all degrees of tension are possible, from none to slight to very strong. But the muscle fibers or cells that do the actual work are governed by an all or nothing rule. There are millions of these fibers in a large muscle and the graded response mentioned is obtained by having more or less of them active at a given moment.

If a nerve impulse arrives, a wave of electrical depolarization runs down the muscle fiber, which then contracts. Then, having 'done its job', it slowly recovers. This depolarization wave can be detected in a sensor, telling us just how quiet or active a muscle really is.

The other significant point about muscle activity is its intermittency or rhythm. So in the heart we have systole/ diastole. In the breathing we have inspiration/ expiration, and in the process of birth contractions followed by rest, and as mentioned, the individual muscle cells know nothing but this alternation between complete work followed by complete rest (the muscle as a whole can contract differentially, but its individual cells either contract fully or not at all). Note that the muscle fibers of the uterus are special, they contract gradually, step by step, but thicken in doing so and do not relax at all.

Mind and body are altogether related in this reciprocal way. In our exercises we will designate the moment of rest or relaxation by the term 'flop'. It means, 'relax completely' in the way practiced in the relaxation drills. Coming after the activity it means not to just stop or rest, but to 'flop out' completely, resigning muscular tension everywhere. We will see this too, in the labor, where the periods of relaxation between the womb contractions are not just 'time off' but are part of nature's master plan for the birth.

### The Exercise List

### Exercise 1: DEEP BREATHING LYING DOWN

Lie flat on your back comfortably relaxed. Breathe out completely until finally the stomach muscles contract firmly. Hold it for a moment and then take a slow complete breath in which finishes with full expansion of the chest.

Back lying

Repeat this deep full breath out and in three or four times and then flop. Flop means 'relax completely' in the way you have been practicing in the relaxation drills. Let everything go. Consciously relax tension wherever you may detect it anywhere in the body. Breathe how you wish but do not bother to rearrange your bodily position in any way once you have flopped. Maintain this flop until you feel ready to do the next exercise.

### Exercise 2: BREATHING WITH CHEST AND ABDOMEN

The position is as for Exercise No. 1. The coach sits beside the mother so that he can easily detect movements of the abdomen and chest and asks that breathing should be with the abdomen only. The abdomen only should move and the chest not at all in quiet breathing. When the coach is satisfied that this is done (it does not have to be perfect first time!), he acknowledges and asks that breathing be with the chest only. Again he acknowledges, and the mother 'flops' into breathing which is quiet, even and natural.

These exercises, and others of the kind which may be added are put first to give them maximum exposure because they help to focus attention on the breathing.

### Exercise 3: PELVIS ROCKING LYING FLAT ON THE BACK

Lying flat on the floor raise the knees up. Keeping the shoulders and bottom on the floor arch the small of the back up. The coach can test the movement by putting his hand between the back and the mat.

Lying Flat

Arching Back Up

The arched back is held for a few moments then flexed. This will press the coach's hand into the mat if he still has it there. The extension and flexion of the lower spine is repeated several times, then flop.

What is being accomplished? Exercise leads to fitness. No one needs to be told that. But for the mother a special learning process is taking place. Muscle groups vital to the birth process are being exercised in rotation so that the mother gains a _mental picture_ of their action, and a control of activity in their regard. The 'exercise' then 'flop' isolates the activity in this respect. The joints, with their capsular and ligamentous structures are being encouraged to reach the potential inherent in their original structure. Exercise and relaxation, muscle and joint, body and mind are all considered and required to be developed _together_.

Lifting The Hand

Letting It Drop

No comment is required. The picture tells the story. Lifting and dropping is a challenge, test and reminder to stay relaxed.

### Exercise 4: DROPPING THE KNEES TO RIGHT AND LEFT

Lying flat on the back with arms outstretched, raise the knees up keeping the feet on the mat and drop the knees over to the left, and then to the right. It is assumed that the mother will do each new exercise cautiously at first making sure that she can manage it comfortably without strain or hurt.

Knees Up

Knees To Left

The knees are alternately dropped to touch the mat on one side, raised, and then to the other. Repeat several times, always at the mother's discretion. This exercise again exercises the muscles and tendons of the spinal column.

### Exercise 5: RISING WITHOUT STRAIN

This begins with the mother lying on her back. She raises both knees and drops them to one side, then using the top arm presses it to the floor gently pushing herself up at the shoulders.

Raise The Knees

Roll To The Side

Push Up With The Top Arm

The action is now assisted with the other arm, raising the body to full arm's extension and rising to all fours. Then onto the feet, one before the other, pushing with the forearms on the knee to rise to a standing position.

Rise Onto All Fours

Push Up With The Hands On The Knees

This exercise teaches use of the real lifting muscles of the body and makes the action of rising easy without calling unduly upon the delicate spinal mechanism. Nature herself prepares for birth by loosening up the joint structures of the pelvis and spine, and in these exercises we are no more than falling in with her plan.

The coach may initially suggest, show and demonstrate the exercises, but as soon as they have been learned by the mother they fall entirely under her own decision and control. One exercise is made to follow naturally on another, with duration and pace being decided by the mother who must remain centrally conscious of her breathing, using it as her 'metronome' governing every step of the way. The series is repeated every time in exactly the same way, which she is free to modify as she may desire, but which otherwise becomes a ritual as mindless as labor and birth itself.

### Exercise 6: PELVIS ROCKING STANDING UP

Standing, drop the shoulders forwards, head dropped, stomach out in a general 'slouch' posture. The stomach is allowed to sag and the bottom to stick out.

Slouch Standing

Then straighten up with head up, shoulders back and stomach in:

Corrected Standing Posture

The action is to tilt the pelvis up in front then revert to the slouch position, letting it tilt forwards again. This creates a pelvis rocking motion similar to that produced in Exercise 3, only whilst standing. End this exercise in the 'correct' posture (shoulders back, bottom in) and maintaining it take a few steps forwards.

Correct Posture in Walking

This is designed to strengthen the muscles which aid in the maintenance of the erect posture rather than allowing the strain – more important in later pregnancy – to be taken by the fixed ligamentous and support systems.

### Exercise 7: FLEXING THE SPINE

On hands and knees arch the back upwards as far as possible with head dropped between straight arms. Then drop the back reversing the spinal bow keeping the arms straight and throwing the head up and back.

Arching Back Upwards

Reversing The Spinal Bow

Once again arch the back, hold the position for a moment and then repeat, doing the exercise slowly and deliberately a few times. End by dropping into a 'flop' position with arms beside the head on the floor and knees spread apart to allow the abdomen to rest between.

Flop

The exercise helps to mobilize the spine. It is instructive to notice and compare the average woman's performance when doing this exercise early in the course and again towards the end – a difference which will usually speak for itself.

### Exercise 8: PELVIS TWISTING

Lie flat on your back. Raise the left knee keeping the left foot on the mat and the hands outstretched. Twist the right hip towards the left knee, raising the bottom slightly off the floor on the right.

Twist Right Hip Up

Then let the hip relax, raise it again and so on. Having done this a few times, always timed by the breathing, drop the left knee and raise the right, repeating the whole process on the other side. To illustrate the exercise put your hand on your hip and feel the most forward prominence of the bone. Imagine a string from this point to the opposite knee cap. The exercise is to slacken off this imaginary string as much as possible. There is little movement in the exercise but it mobilizes an important spinal action.

### Exercise 9: STRETCHING THIGHS SITTING TAILOR FASHION

Sit on the floor with the heels together and the knees apart. Hold onto your ankles with your hands and gently pull the heels as far as you can towards the crutch pushing the knees down towards the floor with your elbows.

Pull Heels In, Push Knees Down

Sit in this position for a few minutes and then cross the legs and sit in a comfortable tailor fashion as the 'flop' position for this exercise.

Sitting 'Tailor' Fashion

The tailor position, like the half lotus and full lotus can be adopted on many occasions when one would otherwise sit in a chair. In the full lotus one sits cross-legged with the soles of the feet turned upwards, each cradled in its opposite crook of the thigh. The half lotus is similar except that one foot is allowed to rest upon the other ankle rather than being pulled right up into the thigh.

The lotus position has been used in the East through millennia for meditation. It occasions no cramping or pressure upon nerves or arteries even after long periods of time though many people brought up in a chair and table world find it tight on the joints and difficult to adopt. Whether you find it comfortable or not adopting it in all the exercises will help to flex the thigh joints and related muscles.

### Exercise 10: SITTING POSTURE EXERCISE

This exercise is to help ease the pressure of the womb on the chest in the last month of pregnancy, though you do not have to wait until then to commence it! Sit on a chair. Breathe out, then flex the back and raise the clasped hands above the head, breathing in and pushing the chest out and pressing the arms backwards.

Sit On Chair, Breathe Out

Breathe In, Raising The Clasped Hands

Hold the position a short while, thus lifting the rib cage off the womb, then return to the original 'flop sitting' position. Repeat a few times.

By exercising these muscles and indicating how to relieve any chest/womb pressures this exercise helps to make the later weeks of pregnancy more comfortable.

### Exercise 11: RECLINING POSTURE EXERCISE

Lie on your back without pillows. Raise the clasped hands above the head. Keeping the shoulders and bottom on the floor arch the back upwards (extend the spine) an inch or two. Then, from the stretching position bring the arms down and return to the flopped resting position. Remember to concentrate upon the 'flop' just as much as on the exercise. This exercise has the same goal as the preceding.

### Positions

The above exercises and others can be done as described, the mother after a preliminary guidance herself determining the whole procedure alternating activity with rest and being conscious of her breathing as 'time keeper' throughout. She is thus autonomous in this as in the birth. The various positions now to be described can be demonstrated and practiced initially and then practiced by taking one each time from the list and incorporating it as an 'exercise'.

### Exercise 1: SQUATTING POSITION LYING BACK

The mother lies on her back well supported by pillows under her head and shoulders. Then she raises her knees and grasps them with her hands, pulling them to either side of the abdomen.

Back-Lying Squat

Turning this position into a breathing exercise, take a big breath and hold it as if in readiness to contract the abdominal muscles and push down. Do not however do this. Hold it as long as possible. When you want more air let the breath go and breath in quickly again. You drop your breath and catch it on the bounce so to speak, but it is to be a balanced, not forced action. No time is wasted, but take sufficient time for the action to be comfortable. In the breath going out the natural force of the expulsion is enough. Allow a barely perceptible pause at the end of the expiration before drawing the next breath in.

Endeavor to ensure that the facial, neck, leg etc. muscles not actually being used in the action remain relaxed whilst the breath is held.

Drop the breath and catch a new breath a second time, hold it, then flop (let the whole body go loose everywhere).

Draw the knees up once more. Take a deep breath and hold it as before. Now let it go as before, but this time, instead of catching another breath as a 'bounce-back' - take short breaths in and out through the mouth in a shallow pant. Keep the abdominal muscles loose during this action and the body generally relaxed. Diminuendo this panting breathing until it is the lightest possible flutter; then flop.

On another occasion repeat exactly the same exercises, only in an upright squatting position, and then alternate the positions so that both receive practice.

These are the sorts of breathing and pushing exercises commonly taught and used in labor. Become used to them and know what is involved, not with a view to using them in labor but to knowing that they are there if required. If you are inwardly centered in labor that will be just right. Entrust yourself completely to the spirit of birth inherent within your nature. It alone knows best and needs no help from you or anyone else. Its dwelling is deeper than the marrow of your bones. Give it a chance and it will show you that it can manage very well!

The almost imperceptible breathing of the 'flop' (or deep relaxation), dwelling in its own inner necessity not troubled by thoughts or considerations is for the first stage of labor and the time between contractions. The 'take a big breath and hold it' may find a place in the second stage of labor. The diminuendo or panting breathing may find a place in the late second stage when, the baby being on its way needs no further help, no more pressure from above at all.

This counsel to 'leave it to nature' is null and void if your attendants begin giving you advice, you cannot stop them, and you begin following their instructions. But since they also will have been in on the training one trusts that this is not going to happen. There never will come a stage when you 'don't know what to do'. This training is for your instruction. Put your deep relaxation into place. Center your mind within yourself. It is never the mother but only the attendants – not being trained _except to worry_ – who become confused and do not know what to do. Which is why the midwife of old used the send them out to chop wood and boil water – anything to keep them out of the way.

### Exercise 2: THE BACK LYING POSITION

This we have already seen in commencing the relaxation drills. We chose to begin with it there because it puts the anti-gravity muscles – those which automatically keep us upright when standing – to rest. It is shown on page 365 (see caption "The fully supported back lying position").

Back lying becomes the back delivery position just by raising the knees and holding them with the hands.

Back Lying Delivery Position

Because this position is not comfortable to hold for long the mother will tend to raise her knees during each contraction and let them down again as it converts into its relaxation stage. The coach and perhaps another helper can assist by placing a hand each upon the mother's knees, supporting the weight. Do this as a drill so that in the labor the mother knows this support is available and will indicate if it is wanted. Once again the reminder that no one will make suggestions to the mother in actual labor unless inspired by Artemis herself.

The strength of womb contraction is noticeably diminished when the mother lies upon her back, and the weight of the baby is not helping, which makes the labor more difficult. This is the reason a mother in labor in the back lying position left to herself so characteristically digs her heels into the bed and pushes herself up the wall as if trying to escape. But before the attendants grab her and pull her back – this compulsion for everything to look neat – they should reflect that all she is trying to do is to adopt a more suitable position.

Back Lying Pushed Into Semi-squat

The mother should not have to climb up the bed's headboard but should be given as many firm pillows as she wants, or deliver on the floor or a low firm base where she can convert her position into a squat.

In natural birth she will choose her own delivery position. If she has practiced the different positions beforehand she will know what she wants when the time comes.

The worst advice I ever read in a book declared: "The mother should enquire as to the favourite position for childbirth at the local obstetric hospital and practice that position whichever it is." Which could well be lying on her back with her feet up in stirrups. Not the recipe for a natural birth!

Squatting is the most favoured labor and birth position for the reasons already stated; it is efficient insofar as the body's natural processes are concerned, and the weight of the baby is helping its own birth. However, whilst squatting is natural to women in societies where one sits on the floor to eat, it may not come so easily to modern woman who needs to consider practice ans supports, like resting the hands upon a window sill. And there are, of course, birthing stools from ancient days, now undergoing something of a revival.

Other positions which may be mentioned in passing and would deserve consideration in a more detailed account are side-lying with the upper leg bent slightly at the knee and supported by an attendant. This is a common 'access position' for medical attendants, short of the full back-lying and legs-in-stirrups position required for operation.

For a mother required to sit long hours at a desk or other work place in the months before the birth the back should be suitably supported and the legs raised on pillows, or even a specially built platform, so that the ankles can be crossed and the knees fall outwards.

Relaxed Sitting

If varicose veins are a notable problem a mother may lie down with her legs resting up a wall:

Legs Raised Upon Wall

And for 'backache labor' several supportive positions are possible, two of which are pictured below:

Backup Labor Positions

### Pelvic Floor Exercises

These are important exercises, carefully described by Grantly Dick Read and warranting careful attention, though outwardly there is nothing to see. The pelvic diaphragm is the basket-like layer of muscles which closes off the bony pelvis below. It is concave downwards, opposite to the chest diaphragm which is concave upwards.

Channels penetrate this muscle layer and the muscles form a sphincter for these; being the rectum behind, the urethra in front, and the vagina giving egress to the baby. When there is pressure from above for something to pass the sphincters relax to allow this to occur. The opposite action is for them to tighten, closing the channels and holding everything in place. Weakness in these muscles and inability to pull them back into place predisposes to piles or haemorrhoids, a condition which may make its appearance in late pregnancy or at the birth.

The exercise which the mother can first learn in the bath or on the toilet is to touch the rectum with the finger tip. Push the rectum down or extrude it as in moving the bowels, then draw it in and with your finger tip notice how it rises.

Once the feeling of the movement is gained one need no longer palpate to understand what is meant by the action. The idea can be quickly grasped that this pelvic diaphragm can be exercised, and how it responds.

Pulling the pelvic diaphragm up, then pushing it down can be done ten, twenty or thirty times per day. Doing so not only exercises the muscles but awakens a knowledge of their action in consciousness. It does not require deep thought to see how important this can be in the birth.

The sphincters of the anus and vagina should be exercised together, then separately a few times. Mothers have stated that the sensation of contracting the vaginal sphincter can be learned by stopping the flow of urine in midstream. The components of contraction and relaxation can be sorted out. As in all practice this exercise improves with repetition so do not allow it's apparently trifling nature or seeming unimportance to put you off. Anything which helps to keep the delicate structures of the perineum intact at the birth is worthwhile, and it is exactly your consciousness which will do this for you.

### A Graduation Ceremony

The trained mother is a unique product whose only test is the birth ahead. Her helpers have learned what _not_ to do at the birth, for they now know what unsettles her. When they are present, they will not initiate any unconsciously disturbing comment or behavior. They have learned what is and what is not acceptable, just as the mother has learned how to conduct herself favorably to nature.

When, after several months of training, and with her time close by a mother reaches the stage when her own helpers can rarely disturb her relaxed equanimity, everyone can be invited to gather around to see if anyone, or all together can break her resolution. Gratifyingly we had the experience that the challenge would heighten her resistance and all present would become aware of just how effective the state of reserved indifference can be.

The mother continues with the daily practice after her graduation, but she is now considered to be ready for the birth. She is invited to indicate, before each session, how she would like it to be modified or run, and to undertake the training of others who may present for training.

After a 'textbook' natural delivery, Dick-Read wrote as follows:

"It was a perfect example of natural childbirth, entirely free, she assures me, from any discomfort; her relaxation was exemplary, her amnesia deep, and her reception of her son, holding his arms as he emerged from her _uninjured_ birth canal, was a joy for anyone to witness. I turned to the matron who was present, and said 'Why, oh why, were not ten thousand obstetricians here?' " 4th Ed. p. 325

Like Read I have seen these perfect births. I know they can be achieved. At the same time I realize that the subject is mined with difficulties, and that its deep anchor is fixed in the spiritual malaise that afflicts our human race. I have seen Read's initiative collapse and his work invalidated, carrying away the basis of my own endeavors with it at the time.

I would like to think that the subject could be established and that the majority of mothers could be assured of a natural birth, something which is technically possible even though currently out of reach for social and economic reasons. For want of knowledge and realization, something abnormal is taken as standard. We have reached the stage wherein renewal of the human race, metaphorically and literally, is dependent upon natural birth taking its rightful place as the paradigm type against which all other types of birth can be understood and judged. I have endeavored to paint the wider picture showing the distant cause of cultural birth, and how an understanding of its fundamental nature could lead to a rational program. It is my conviction that the knowledge for a breakthrough already exists. We need but the will to put it together, for the means will fall into place when the time is ripe. However, the world moves so slowly that it may take centuries for that which is already possible to occur.

A new science and understanding will come into being, at first in a halting and hesitant way, but with an increasing power and crescendo to develop and grow. The foundations of the old world are vanishing. It is living on borrowed time, barely able to sustain the rapidly developing change overtaking it on all sides. It is prophetic that just as a description of the origin of cultural childbirth is found in the earliest of our historical writings, so it will play a role in the completion of our knowledge, where 'completion' means, not an end to forever newly emerging experience, but the end of our inhumanity, when the Fall of Man will be atoned in the Rise of Woman. Natural childbirth is on this pathway. To all who embark upon this journey I say, good luck and "bon voyage."
34. The Primal State

Sleep and awake can be taken as two opposed complementary states, sleep coming second, and the more basic or foundational state, and awake third and later and higher. This implies a first or primal state, and this has its manifestation or time in babyhood and the mother's state in labor and birth. In terms of function, the mind's corresponding expressions are unconscious, subconscious and conscious. All three participate in consciousness. The third takes the leading role in the conscious state of mind; the second in subconscious activity, the domain of intellect thought and emotion, and the first in labor and birth. The trance of hypnosis is a paradoxical state of consciousness. The first state also 'surfaces' or assumes authority in the near death syndrome, which will not concern us here, beyond noting that it is orientated upon death, whereas the state in labor is orientated upon life.

Three basic or operational physiological states exist. Two, as in being alternately asleep and awake are universally known. The problem is that the first, as primal, is not. It is recognized only in terms of a grab bag of pathological states, including hypnosis, encountered in the domain of mental illness, whose genre remains unrecognized. Its physiological or normal expression, which would give the clue, occurs only in the newborn baby, and in its mother in the 'moment of forgetfulness' that peaks in the final moments of a natural birth.

The signal difference between the mother's state in labor, and the state that manifests in hypnotrance, is that the former is universal and physiological; the latter is conditional and pathological. As a _signal_ or polar difference (like that between equatorial poles), the two are opposed in their very similarity.

The next point to note is that although the first or primal state is as effective and strong as any trance (it leaves nothing to be desired in this respect), it is also as sensitive as sleep and there is no hypnotist present. The mother responds to the whole of her environment in its totality and every determinate element, not as in a trance, but in conformity with nature's elemental presence. As in hypnosis, another point of similarity, she retains the balance of her understanding consciousness, and so the initiative of her intelligent autonomy, but as _secondary_ , no longer the commanding influence. So we see her as 'awake', but not as engaged in light repartee or some secondary pastime.

Because it is not focused upon a hypnotist, but every significant development in her environment (its 'genius' is her own receding mind), her state is spiritual. But focus as such is increasingly there, and will finally pre-empt that mind and direct it upon her newborn baby. In this sense it is uniquely inverted in comparison to the trance of hypnosis, for it is she who becomes the _genius_ of the newborn child. It is totally and wholly normal and physiological, and is therefore primal and spiritual. Hypnosis is its reflection and _shadow_ , and can no more create it than a canvas can paint an artist.

It is important to note, that because the mind is pre-empted, or the state is spiritual, the mother's attendants are immediately implicated in the mother's consciousness, and so behavior. In this sense we can think of it as a waking dream, or as described above, it is ' _as if_ ' the mother were hypnotized by her environment. She is not so, because this is the state that creates and supports every sense of every environment. The hypnotic trance is an inadequate descriptor for this state of spiritual awareness. In this way, the natural mother is society's universal prophet, guardian font and guarantor of its spiritual nature.

In labor the process of birth calls upon her whole attention. No other task comes before it, but all is subordinated to that contingency. That is how nature sees it, and She has her way. If her conditions are met the birth is natural. This is expressed in Read's fundamental point, given to him by 'the woman in Whitechapel'; "It didn't hurt. It wasn't meant to, was it, doctor?" (4th Ed. p. 18).

If the expression that belongs to birth is obtunded and frustrated the mother is plunged into a cultural labor. She experiences pain, or as the Prayer Book has it, "The snares of death compassed me round and the pains of hell gat hold upon me" (4th Ed. p. 104).

Because the process of birth calls upon her whole attention, because it is an _absolute_ and not ordinary call, in fact a change of state, a recession of the mother's everyday conditioned and conditional consciousness, it is as if her ego were suddenly expanded to include her whole environment. She is now one with it. Her 'thought' is now her environment, so her attendants, so their thoughts, portrayed in their every expression and action, become her thoughts, and this is the primal mentality which then becomes focused upon the newborn baby.

### The State of Mind in Labor

What is, is. Nature exists for description, but nature does not exist for description. The sense depends upon what we mean, as the following intends to show.

Nature exists for description. If 'She', Nature, did not, there would be nothing to describe. But 'She' does not exist _for_ description. "What is, _is_!" It does not wait on description. Nature just 'is'. It exists forever in its own way, subsisting and abiding through all determination, unperturbed in all perturbation.

'Is' is the present singular tense of the verb 'to be'. The spoken language contains nuance and inflection and is monitored by the speaker who can observe whether its recipient understands or not. The written language, helped out by punctuation, tends to be more precise, but requires the reader to track with the meaning. But whether spoken or written, the meaning has no guaranteed right of passage. Understanding is the work of the 'understandee'. It also is part of nature and independent in its own way.

Describing mind as having subconscious and unconscious depths, we assume consciousness as our point of departure. The latter is a state of intelligent awareness, accepted as an unstated starting point in ordinary discussion. The unconscious is then the depth that sustains this consciousness. We may think of consciousness as the sea, as seen from a ship, and the unconscious as its quiet depth. However, _for_ consciousness, that depth is the body itself. But just as the sea is neither 'just the surface' or 'just the depth', but both together, so the mind is neither just the conscious nor just the unconscious, but both in irreducible unity.

We need a term to designate the difference, as well as the unity of the conscious and unconscious, and 'subconscious' serves this purpose. The three terms, 'conscious', 'subconscious' and 'unconscious' are parts of a descriptive map we have drawn to facilitate our discussion of mind as such.

A woman in labor is usually considered to be awake, or conscious in the ordinary sense. It is then possible, in clinical observation, to point out certain characteristic modifications of this conscious (labor) state, but true science demands that the whole be fitted within the wider framework of a _science_ of mind, capable of lending itself to a full description adequate to all experience.

The states 'asleep' and 'awake' alternate in psychical balance. Between them transitional states can be recognized. This pattern, characteristic of our daily, or twenty-four hour cycle, repeats the pattern of our life cycle. For instance, babyhood is transitional between life in the womb and our later intelligent consciousness. The state in babyhood reaches a destined completion; we could say spiritual maturity, at which point it 'tips over' into that of infancy, a different form of psychical organization. This tipping is then preserved in the succession of awakening and then going to sleep again.

Spirituality implies a destined totality and self-completion, so the actualization of a latent potential. In babyhood there is no distinction between ego and world. Or these exist as moments in a unity. This will later open, as a bud into flower, when, in reflective life all differences will have emerged; ego and world, time and space, thing and motion, genus and kind, called by the Greeks, 'the Many'.

This reflective state of ordinary life, where to 'reflect' is to see (be aware) and to think, is not however, the end of life's spiritual journey. It too is an in-between, a temporary stage in life's greater cycle. Revelation, which may break in suddenly upon the reflective state, is a surmounting of a contradiction, otherwise extant in our conditioned understanding. It reasserts the unity of babyhood, but on a higher plane. The process of revelation, as distinct from the state, be it the most simple steps of understanding, a sudden insight, intuition or prophetic vision, is itself a mental 'in-between' or transitional state.

The mental state characteristic of labor and birth, which we can describe as 'primal' to distinguish it from all reflective or mirror states, can be seen as a dedicated revelation. Its 'look-alike' in the world of reflective mind is the trance of hypnosis. The primal state of labor is however universal. All women in the course of a natural birth experience it, and it is dedicated to the renewal of spiritual life in the race, a purpose which receives its focus in and through the baby.

The consciousness of babyhood, the primal state in labor and revelation in religious practice belong to the one foundational category, where, in cyclical process, mind attains to its destiny, its realization in an ever-higher consciousness, until it shall be uniform within our species and on earth.

Our mind in sleep, touching home base, unmade and made, is renewed for a day. In labor it equally returns, but in a more profound way, renewing the spiritual life cycle for the race, whose 'days' are generations. It prepares the mother-infant relation for the launching of a new mind.

The primal state expressed in the state of consciousness as it exists in the newborn baby, and the later expression, appearing as revelation, whether to the individual experiencing it or to an observer, like harmonious notes on the musical scale, are 'in step'. The first is an unknowing, the third a knowing unity. The primal state, as manifest in the natural mother, is then the bridge between the baby's state of mind, and that belonging to developed civilization. As such it is the bridge between one generation and the next, the stem that is, of _human_ society as such.

For this reason, religious text survives through the generations, for it expresses the original truth and being of mind, historically experienced and beyond, meaning before recorded history ever began. Religion and myth dwell in this original truth.

As variously described and observed/ reported, the onset of labor is accompanied by an initial buoyancy of mood. This translates into a plastic compliance, which finally becomes absolute. How are we to understand this? It can be interpreted as follows:

In labor the woman's conditional or reflective ego is to yield, recede and dissolve, 'made ready' to receive the newcomer, and reset in the latter's relation. This state in labor is similar, but not identical to sleep, just as it is similar to our ordinary consciousness, but not identical to this state either. It marks the onset of trance, but a physiological, a spiritual 'trance', normal in itself, and the basis of all normality in mind whatsoever.

Trance, if we examine the word in its usual meaning, as used in its relation to hypnosis, is from middle English, ' _transe_ ', passage, especially from life to death, deadly suspense or 'fear', derived from the Latin, _transire_ , to go across, pass over. It involves regression, a backwards movement of the mind in time. According to its deep anchor in the mind, as expressed in love and fear, two types of hypnotic trance induction are known, called respectively mother and father induction, the former soft and gentle, the second harsh and overpowering.

The state of mind in labor also falls to one or another of opposite sides, but in terms of direction the reverse of that encountered in hypnotrance. It is forward looking, and it is anchored in nature in the anticipation of the birth. In clinical terms, it is physiological, not pathological.

In labor there is no focus upon a hypnotist. The focus is self-forming in the birth itself (the 'moment of forgetfulness'), and its object is then upon the newborn baby. This is its natural beginning end and completion.

Liability to trance in hypnosis is variable. Some people are susceptible, some are not, just as some people are prone to accidents, and others are not. Hidden in this fact is the further comprehension that trance susceptibility is subject to change. The primal state of labor is universal, and uniformly deep in natural labor. The states are similar in their opposition, so that the one, in contrariety, can tell us about, or indicate the nature and function of the other.

35. Hypnotism Revisited

The trance of hypnotism, as a regression, can be physiological or pathological. To understand it, we need to understand the mind that enters into the state of trance. This means that we must understand its formation and function, so imprinting and its subsequent expression in the function of the mind's conscious on subconscious on unconscious mechanism.

Trance susceptibility is the key. It operates upon the basis of a physiological state, which is held in readiness in every normal person for a possible life-threatening situation. Then, through certain life experiences, which involve the coincidence of metabolic and sensory conditions, such as poisoning anaesthesia toxin anoxia etc., and intense stimulation (which can be erotic or injurious), the physiological condition mentioned is actuated, meaning invoked mobilized and called into action (in other words re-membered). So primed, the sensory component alone will then call the trance into play. At this point we meet the hypnotist.

To review this; first there is an underlying physiology present in everyone. Second, there is a sensitizing experience in _conscious_ life, and thirdly there is the hypnotic induction, which calls the sequence into play.

As mentioned shortly above, the sensitizing experience, upon which the later trance depends, involves two factors, a metabolic breakdown leading to diminution and loss of consciousness, and on top of this, intense stimulation, which, working in the opposite direction, restores it.

For the sensitizing experience to be effective, the brain's function must be so embarrassed by the action of toxin, drug or anoxia that consciousness is lost. This is a metabolic-level breakdown resulting in a temporary cessation of the brain's conscious function. The intense stimulation elevates and so restores consciousness, and the two situations, loss and restoration, compound. If the subject recovers from that parlous state, an implant then exists, which, if activated, appears in the form that we later recognize as hypnotic trance.

In one sense, with recovery, a gap remains in the conscious sequence or basic memory. In another, there is a memory, whose content is the now submerged intense stimulation, which peaked, but within that gap, within that loss of consciousness. Like a mountain in a valley it does not break surface, and this is the implant, which, summoned by the hypnotist, appears as the trance state.

In support of this we can adduce two facts. The first is that, on average one in ten is hypnotically susceptible, exhibiting somnambulism, and one in ten is partially so, with diminishing degrees of susceptibility thereon. The second, discovered in the 1920's, is that hypnotic susceptibility can be created in individuals. The details of this can be found under 'Pain Drug Hypnosis' in the Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry. Theory and experiment then combine to support the mechanism.

Such implants, produced in the coincidence of metabolic breakdown and stimulation, can occur in many life situations, accidental operational and experimental. For instance, pleurisy complicating pneumonia, if severe, can lead to a metabolic loss of consciousness and the required stimulation (pain). An anaesthetic administered for an operation can meet the conditions. Accidental drowning or suffocation, drug ingestion followed by a beating, and so on, the possible causes are legion.

In life, a traumatic loss of consciousness that is not sleep-induced signals to the body an oncoming death. This switches on the physiological trance, and the subsequent stimulation creates the 'island of consciousness' or implant.

We are particularly susceptible, because being human we have a highly developed brain taking up to a third of the body's blood supply. In any general derangement of bodily function, that of the brain is likely to be the first to suffer. So we become hypnotically susceptible. Oppositely, the religious practice of mediation can resolve this problem; in other words, hypnotic susceptibility can also be undone.

Not all unconsciousness progresses to death, so it is easy to see that _recovery from all forms of injury must rank highly in survival history_. Developed mechanisms for coping are therefore well established. They are genetically written into our constitution, blueprints for our survival, forming the basis of our consciousness and response. We have our sense of space and time in this way, and our ability to respond in every reflex manner as well as by trance, sleep and so on.

A more detailed analysis of hypnosis in clinical presentation is not our concern here. Suffice to say that it is a subject replete with fantasy and misinformation calling for correction. This will come about once a science of mind is established. This is now possible, and in its development it will bring about a transformation in science as a whole, bringing it to its final required state of rationality and responsibility.

36. The Philosophy of Love

Mind begins with love, not in the sense of attraction, but a psychical _identity_ that overreaches physical separation. This is its foundation, but to clarify it we must define love broadly. There is the love that arises de novo between a baby and its mother. Then in adult life there is the love that arises between a man and a woman. And thirdly there is a love of life that can focus in innumerable ways upon objects, pastimes and pursuits. But in all, love in itself is an emotion and a relation.

In nature's order the love that arises in the mother-infant relation comes first. It gives rise to mind. The story of that development is dealt with elsewhere. Adult love, whether sexual or sublimated, is higher, but by the same token it is not primal and original. So, in a three-step sequence, love in the mother-infant relation comes first. Love in the sexual relationship between a man and a woman comes second, and the love of life, of the world with its pastimes comes third.

The emotion of love, built around attraction, has relation and direction. The direction is towards, just as love's opposite, fear, impels retreat, while if the approach is repelled it turns to hate. Conversely, fear prevented, turns into anger (approach to attack and destroy). Emotion, then, is all about motion, not its action, but its mental intention, which becomes the internal structure of thought.

But this is only how we _see_ love. _In itself_ it is identification. Two people come together and fall in love. The meeting, we can say, was predestined or inherent in the nature of the species etc., so that an original identity antecedes the meeting. Love is a relationship yet its essence is identity, and this identity is resident initially, not in the brain, but the organism's DNA.

Seeing love according to our usual ideas, as desire and attraction, we may suppose that a baby does not love its mother. It is _loved_ , and it just accepts this. But if we see love in itself as a relation, we see that a relation necessarily involves two sides or terminals. There _has to be reciprocity_ or there is nothing. The mother gives love and the baby takes it; but if free giving is 'love' so is free taking, but as the accepting side of love we call it faith. Both are sides of the one love, and love consists in the identity of these two opposites; one receiving, one giving; one expressive, one mute. It is correct to see love as the encompassing whole, for out of this 'sidedness' the new intelligent mind arises.

From the original or founding love, through to that maturity in understanding we call intelligence and wisdom, there is a connecting pathway. If all subsequent social and intelligent life is developed from a primal love, upon what does love itself stand? The answer calls for an understanding of the origin of mind in love, so that we may in turn perceive the origin of love itself in the physiology of our living being. We may pose the question, how does an identity first break into the child's primal 'self'? The self is in inverted commas because it cannot be a 'self' until it has cognized another.

How is the psychical process founded? The baby in the womb, and the mother, are metabolically one, and in the last months of pregnancy the baby's brain is active. It attunes to the mother's heartbeat, bowel sounds, voice and bodily movements. But at birth, when imprinting begins, how is the first pattern received and known as a pattern?

The imprint 'takes', as mindlessly as light falling upon a photographic plate. The baby is originally united with its mother through its origin and metabolism. Before, and after its birth, its nourishment is through the mother. But it has also to make contact at a higher level, to discover the form of an identity within the totality of its sensory intake. This will be the beginning of its psychical mind proper, in particular of its subconscious which will mediate between its body, or genetically expressed memory, and its experience in intelligent life. How, exactly, does this beginning arise?

The answer – which may initially sound strange – is that the mother loves the baby, and the baby loves the baby. This _identity_ is the foundation of our higher or psychical mind.

The difficulty is; how can the baby be said to love itself? The answer rests upon a special viewpoint already canvassed above, that the depth of love is simply metabolism, and love is the dawning consciousness of this. Further, to _take_ is equally a side of love, when love is construed in its more familiar sense as a relationship. But can one love _oneself_ in this higher sense?

The answer is yes. A biblical quotation may help us to see this. "You must love your fellow as yourself," Leviticus 19:18, and "You must love your neighbor as yourself," Matthew 22:39.

Normally we read this as, 'we must identify with our neighbor's welfare'; overlooking the point that self-love is assumed as the basis. It is the bottom plank in our understanding of all the forms of love that arise on the ground of our life and knowledge. And this 'bottom plank' is simply 'oneself', one's being insofar as one is a metabolism.

The Bible, used here not as an authority but for an example, is not teaching us that self-love is the foundation of love in general, that love arises in our _metabolism_ , yet this is the interpretation that our modern understanding demands. However, religion does teach that unless we love our self, we cannot truly love another being.

Self-love has a pejorative side, but equally the deeper meaning, that it identifies with our mental spiritual and bodily self-preservation. Love is thus the first _expression_ of our consciousness, just as consciousness is the _coherence_ of our living existence. It underlies our self-respect and the coincidental integrity of body and mind. As we love our self in this way, so does the baby, simply in the integrity of its living being.

Biologically, faith, which expresses our conscious being, our identity with things we _understand_ , is the zero of love, which is its maturity, and the foundation of mind and knowing.

Because originally, the baby has no determinate mind, it is perfectly identified with its physiological being. This is its nature, its perfection and ability to take, and so partake in the absolute mother-infant relation of love. It is pure self-love. For it to be also loved is then the pure original perception, in the recognition and genesis of mind.

The self-love in the baby (innate faith), which receives the love of the mother in the original psychical conception immediately upon birth, is not love as we ordinarily know it, but its infinite foundation. It also becomes one of the moments in the ego-self; in the psychically developing love, which inspires mind as such. When this ego-self, or love as we do ordinarily know it, arises, the self-love remains as its sounding-board so to speak, in identity with its body, which we now say is _conscious_.

On the one hand, we have chemistry in the process of becoming a physiology, 'love' which is pure selfishness, needing another; and its opposite moment, pure selflessness (faith), which needs another in order to mature, to become love in relation to another. On the other hand we have the persistence of this original self-love, as we have called it, not as love at all, but as the being of our consciousness, so knowing and knowledge within which a world in creation arises, within which our intelligent mind then develops.
37. The Genesis Of Mind

In nine months, a single cell generated in the womb by the union of strangers, becomes a formed baby. Our body, and the system of its organs, is created in the unfolding of a genetic message encoding the history of our origin going back before the dawn of our species. Then comes birth, and again strangers meet – a baby and its mother.

A psychical conception, in the genesis of individual mind, then takes place. Mother and baby are opposites, not like male and female within a generation, but spanning from one generation to the next. The mother is mature; the baby is newborn. The mother is caring; the baby is cared for. The mother has reached adulthood in the experience of life; the baby, nurtured in the darkness of the womb, has yet to learn.

The mother nurses the baby and the baby imprints capturing the mother's psyche as a side in its building mind. In this way the mother's external existence becomes an internal impression, the seed crystal or 'genius' of the new intelligence to be.

For the baby, the in-arms period which follows, is one wherein an intense cerebral intake, an immense imprinting of sensory pattern, not meaningful in itself but finding its meaning through the mother's mediation, becomes the internalized foundation of mind, whose external expression is a world in consciousness.

Mind originates on two sides, genetic inheritance and sense. The 'genetic inheritance' is our body, and 'sense' is the totality of our experience in consciousness.

Another way of expressing this is that the mind consists of a liaison between our ancestral and current experience, with the body playing the role of medium, and our babyhood experience is the (intergenerational) 'join'.

Genetic inheritance is a two-sided thing, because we all have two parents. Sense is also a 'two-sided thing' as the following explains:

The baby imprints, what to us is light coming in the window, traffic noises, birds singing and so on, but all this, to it, is simply a background medley of unordered sense. But contained in this 'unordered medley' is a unity the baby can understand, namely the infinite love of the essential mother. For the baby this is constancy within inconstancy, giving 'sense' a two-sided character. The mother is initially lost in the total sensory intake, because the baby has no criterion, no primal seed crystal of knowledge to initiate the resolution of the whole. Its mind, wherein it will know, has yet to be formed.

Genetically, the baby is an original being endowed at conception with a unique chromosome pattern. As such it constitutes a genetic memory summing the result of eons of ancestral experience. Then, in a time-determined sequence, imprinting supplies a wealth of patterned sense data to the brain, by means of its inherited specialized genetically given sense organs, eye, ear etc. The problem is then to join the sides seamlessly, so that the given racial intelligence can flourish within successively new life environments.

Already we can see, or we have mentioned that the mother herself is the baby's seed crystal of its intelligence to be, the single intrinsic psychical identity that will cause the whole 'mass' of sensory data to crystallize out in intelligent cognizance.

This is the 'uncarved block' of Taoism. In the mother the baby finds the coherent experience it needs, the required image, the guiding genius of the whole. This is not given at once, but it compounds (is consistent) over hours, weeks and months. It begins as a preordained natural identity, whose process is the formative synthesis of faith and love in the creation of the intelligent consciousness.

In its primal self, the baby as a physical being is an absolute identity. As a living being it imprints, as indifferent to the content of that imprint as a camera to the scene it encompasses. It does not 'know' what it imprints, until and except as the mother emerges within this totality as another self.

For the baby, initially, there is _only_ one 'self', which is equally _not_ a 'self', because there is no 'other'. An 'other' cannot break into this infinite self, which is equally not a self, just as our scholars, at one time, could not break into the secret of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. But a _self_ , namely the mother's love, which totally identifies with the baby, can break in, and it does so, in the genesis of a new mind.

The primal self then has 'another' against it, and just as egg and sperm, as preformed predestined sides, met and coalesced, so now two psychical sides come together, creating a primal ego. But this, unlike the primal self, is troubled, for it is in imbalance. It has something 'against' it, and that 'trouble' will push the mind ever forward into time as the germ of its ego nature. In symbolic terms, our mortal self, swimming in the sea of time is born.

In its absolute nature, the primal self excludes duality. It is one, as in the 'one' of God, the unity or consciousness of the living being. So when the inclusive identity, the primal _ego_ , arises, the primal self is both drawn and not drawn into the ego nature. It remains equally beyond it, and in being so is just as much divided. In the primal ego there is now the identity of the primal self with 'the mother', or the 'genius' of that ego-mind, and this in turn excludes the 'not mother', the mass of contingent background sense detail.

There are thus _two_ identities; the primal self-identified indifferently with all, as unconsciously as a photographic plate with its impression, but then specifically, by preordained matching, with the mother, and then _through the mother_ with the sensed all.

Its identity with imprinting, original and irreducible is one. Its identity with the mother, which then separates off a 'not-mother' (the sense of a contingent background), is another; and in this 'one and another' the original primal self is well and truly split, even while reserving and preserving its infinite and irreducible unity as its deepest base.

In this way the original irreducible identity is fructified. Through the mother a psychical conception takes place, which is the first act of knowing in a mind foundation, which will mature steadily towards a final imprinting maturation and true awakening.

There is another side to mention, studied in the field of observational science. Computer analysis of video records show that the baby is pre-programmed in nature to identify a face by its eyes. Taken immediately upon birth, the baby, presented with an array of pictures, will, without previous experience, preferentially focus upon a shape with two eyes resembling a face. In addition to this, it imprints to the mother's voice, which it has already encountered in womb life, and to her touch, smell and taste.

### Faith and Habit

Babies accept their mothers blindly and unconditionally. They have no mind initially to understand things as we understand them. They cannot for instance, distinguish between a human and an animal. The brain and sensory system in a baby is given ahead of time, with its mind still to be fabricated.

Nature calls upon the baby to learn, and to learn fast. It does this. Without wasting a moment it imprints all in sight across the whole range of its sense organs. It does not stop to ponder choose and reflect, but takes everything on board just as it is. How, then, does it make sense of individual things in this conglomerate whole?

The answer is that it does not. No detail will be intelligible to it until, at a later stage, its mother's love, acting as its 'genius', will have shaped the total content into the _form_ of its mind.

This blind acceptance of whatever comes along becomes the imprinted core of mind in the foundation of our intelligence. Technically, this is a weakness, but it is inevitable in the circumstance. It works with precision in wild nature, where only the mother will ever nurture her baby, but it is prone to all sorts of accidents in a caring society.

If we transpose our knowledge of this sequence into later life and ask, "to what does it correspond in our mature awareness," the answer is faith. The baby does not have 'faith' in its mother. It is just following a physiologically established natural pathway, but when matured into a psychological or adult consciousness, the relation discussed is the basis of what we call habit and faith. It becomes one side of our confidence in life, our poise and self-esteem. It becomes the _nerve_ center of our life and the certainty of our understanding, in much the same way that a source code establishes order within the subsequent usage of a computer; but at bottom it is blind.

Taken on its blind side, the same relation is the deep source of habit. It is faith in terms of our inner sense of certainty. Its blindness is acceptable, because it belongs to a private primal inner realm. In habit, this blindness is expressed in action.

Faith is commended in religion as lending discernment to what, as more superficial intelligence, is as ready for evil as it is for good, but through faith, and the instrumentality of religious teaching, this blind intelligence is elevated to conscious wisdom.

The baby's love for its mother, taking this original form of faith, is blind. Transposed into mature life, if the accent falls on the love, it is faith; if it falls on the blindness, it is habit. It is usual to take a superficial view of habit, looking upon it as an oddity, and on this basis we talk about 'good' and 'bad' habits, but really, habit is the unintelligent basis of all intelligence, just as faith, in its deepest origin, is merely a prejudice supporting our particular interests and values.

Referred to its unconscious/ subconscious basis, or, same thing, the baby/ infant model, faith is the inner, and habit the outer nature of that which supports the entirely of our belief and behavior. Because our thinking behavior is based upon habit, there is no _thinking_ in habit as such, and it is this that we notice when we see it manifest as a 'bad' habit. Otherwise we do not notice that it is integral with our thought. We take it for granted, without much noticing, as we do the ground under our feet.

In the same way, although love underpins our intelligence, there is no intelligence _in_ love. It is unconditional, based upon a physiological implant. Its depth is simply metabolism, or as some say, 'chemistry'. It questions not, for it has no means to do so, and just as science can find only probability laws at the basis of its particle behavior, our mind at base has nothing within it but ordered chance and contradiction. In this, mind and physics tell the same story.

### The Focus of Attention

Originally the baby has no mind as such, but only a focus of attention, and this is the mind's precursor. Imprinting proceeds, only through this focus, which in the first place is the mother. A sleeping baby is not imprinting; neither is a crying baby, which is withholding its attention. Its original attention arises in its physiological recognition of its mother, and every subsequent influence upon it is channelled through this pathway, which is thus the stem of intelligence and conditioning alike.

It follows that an injurious experience, caused by the mother, is more than physically challenging, for it is accepted as mothering behavior, and if it goes beyond that dimension it must be blocked out altogether. This is the origin of repression in later life; the so-called repression of the unconscious, when in fact and reality only the unconscious is manifest in consciousness. The earth, the sky and the heavens (thought) reflect back to us, our 'unconscious'. Drug consumption performs exactly this role, blocking out or controlling (obtunding) the mind by altering its various expressions. Addiction, in the last analysis, is therefore not the cause, but the result of a psychical deficiency. It is assuming alarming proportions in today's civilization, only because its cause is doing the same. 'Man', in medicine, is endeavoring to take over woman's mothering role entirely. The association, and the consequence, currently unfolding, is direct.
38. Gating

Gating expresses my theory of mind, at least in terms of a possible mechanism. It proposes a cooperative mutual interaction of opposed nervous systems, each primary in its area; one derived from an inherent genetic blueprint, the other, essential specific and reflex in nature, created by environmental influence, the two together interacting to create the single process of behavior in the intelligent living organism.

There are two major systems in the brain. The first, deep, is called the reticular system. It consists of a fine tracery of nerve cells constructed in the form of a network. This begins in the brain stem, where its impulse, taking the form of activating and inhibiting waves of neural energy (it has these two sides), radiates outwards, pervading the entire brain. This rhythmic energy governs first the heartbeat and breathing, and then spreads throughout the cortex, triggering or gating the impulse energy whose origin and target is the extant environment of our circumstantial life.

This network system is the time-based central foundation of all brain activity. Around it the reflex component develops as an enclosing shell, a massive, spatially orientated system, transferring nervous energy from dedicated sensory terminals to equally focused muscle effectors. The inner reticular system draws upon evolutionary experience. As inherited knowledge in bodily form, it is central in all logical and mathematical function. The body itself is 'pure' genetic memory, and the nervous system, fashioned around its reticular core, is its highest expression.

The further point is that the reticular system is a closed network. Its nervous energy, in the form of an energy pulse or wave, is essential for our conscious experience, and at the same time, the 'pulse', which alone makes the rest of the nervous system work.

It is the ghost in the machine, the driver in the bodily vehicle. The entire reflex system depends upon this reticular input to work at all.

This dependency is central to our independence and activity. Just as a car does not start and wander the town on its own, neither does the reflex system do anything, barring inducing sleep, without an enabling input from the reticular system. The two systems constitute the fabric of our brain and consciousness, which the reflex system controls through the command value of its negativity. Our behavior, everything we think and do, rests in the complementary opposition, summation and interaction of the two sides. A reticular input must be present as an essential gating component at every functional cellular junction throughout the nervous system. An input from each source must be present to reach threshold, enabling the effective passage across every such junction. This I adduce as the basis of my theory of mind.

The individual mind is not an island to itself. Just as everything in the determinate world, from stars to atoms, unravels, upon analysis, into opposing cooperating sides, matter and energy being the ultimate division here, so the mind itself in an interaction, in the first place between the mother and the baby.

Our sense of unity, corresponding to this, as expressed in the generalization, 'God', founds, or is the fabric of our consciousness. In expression everything then requires an input from two otherwise independent sides. This independence, however, is conditional, each being dependent on the other. On this basis, an infinite complexity of sides and arrangements arises to accommodate every detail of existence and experience we can imagine.

The deeper mind controls by withdrawing its influence. On the other hand it can accomplish nothing on its own. It is the powerful, but otherwise unspecified control from beyond the grave, that of past ancestral life over the living and present. Mencius was right when he said that what we can do is governed by what we do not do. By withholding we can stop any nervous activity from going ahead, but this negative influence, by itself is blind. It can do nothing effective.

Also, this degree of control, the 'power to withhold', has to be learned. As an ability it is the sum total of all experience. The two sides, weaving specificity and knowing, response and control together, then determine the world of mind and doing together at every step.

In gating, the reticular system's control extends over all nervous system activity. It can facilitate or inhibit; but unless it contributes, no action at a particular junction can take place. We can no more accomplish anything against its 'wish' than we can accomplish any task during deep sleep. At best we can learn what we can do, and in this respect, meditation is the key. In it we learn to withhold, to stand back mentally and reserve our position, letting that occur which can and must.

At the same time the reticular system is the recipient of an energy input from all parts of the body, but because of its network nature any such input cannot retain its specific character. Compare: we can throw a stone, spoon, bottle or sewing machine into a well. In each case the water level will rise by an amount determined by the object. Its manner of rising is alike in every case, yet if we knew the amount we could identify the object.

In this way the systems, quite different in their manner of responding, join, match, and exchange the import of their respective influences. Their relation in functional interaction then comprises the basis of all brain and nervous system activity in general.

Common objects can be cross-indexed by name color purpose weight size specific gravity price and so on ad infinitum. In each instance the mind is exercised in a specific way, and if we understand these ways fully, inversely we must also understand the mind itself. In determining the nature of objects, sensibly and logically present to us, we determine the nature of the mind, for world and mind are identical in their very difference.

Philosophy, as the analysis of knowledge, or 'thinking about thinking', intends to bring us to an understanding of the world and our self. It is not too difficult to see that the nervous system, must, in its function, be a circular organization. We can, in this respect, conceive that its reflex side encloses the reticular, but is itself enclosed, or contained by the reticular. Being composed of billions of cells, each with long processes, this confronts us with no difficulty in its possible accomplishment. The one system then exists for, facilitates and enables the other.

A major consequence of this approach is that it affords thought, as such, an independent status, taking it out of the realm of merely conditioned response. Neither the inherited instinctive impulse, nor the acquired conditioned response holds undisputed power, but in a complementary circular arrangement, the totality is alone effective.

The process of this competence leads to the result, that mind per se, holding our every thought and action in thrall to our wider interests and original purpose, and creating our personal identity and the integrity of our ego on the way, governs our activity from birth to death. The mind, as the interaction of opposing but corresponding sides, provides the course, the terrain upon which our independent judgment holds sway.
39. Physics, physiology and psychology

(This chapter elaborates upon the original Definitions and a section in the Introduction.)

Physics deals with the mass and motion of things in relation. It includes heat light and sound, electricity and magnetism, atomic and subatomic phenomena. It arises as a _material_ science from mathematics, which constitutes its _mental_ foundation.

When we speak of physical things, we are generally referring to known formed objects such as ships waves and water, and living things insofar as they are material. Conglomerate Physiology and psychology study the mechanism wherein living things exhibit corporate behavior that goes back to a memory-based _mind_.

Just as matter comes in amorphous and crystal form, and the crystal is more systematically ordered, so life is more ordered again than the crystal. It is in fact a living crystal in that it exhibits the same principle of ordered structure, but standing on a conglomerate rather than single skein molecular base. Again, this 'conglomerate principle' is mind, or we recognize it as such, generated in the mother-infant relation. This involves an _overt_ physiological relation, whose unstructured form is mind (the general term), and whose organized form is _psychological_ , wherein arises our sense of the psyche, the human mind or soul. This, socially ordered, is religion.

Looking at the origin of this latter, pre-human behavior, still animal in expression, is conscious, but not _self_ -conscious. Self-conscious mind, mind standing we might say, on its own feet, appears when, in the course of evolution, consciousness completes or matures, through introspection and insight into the stage of self-consciousness. It is aware of a world which it itself creates, whose colors and shapes it figures and fathoms. In maturity this created world, reflecting within itself exhibits the hallmark of its creator, consciousness, and this folded into objective existence is at once God and the intrinsic consciousness of the human being.

To restate this in different words, in reflecting upon itself inwardly, it detects itself as projecting the world of which it is conscious. From this vantage point it observes the world confronting it as its own (external) reflection, and in doing so becomes aware of itself as an independently existing spiritual entity or being. Insight is into self and world; each now seen in the new light, which is that of humanity.

With this establishment of its own individuality – in the triple domain of person society and world -; and grasping the latter in its spiritual as well as material sense, evolution enters upon its final mature or human stage. It breaks in suddenly upon the otherwise slow but inexorably progressive march of evolution, as in reaching and crossing a threshold; a sequence which then necessarily repeats in the life cycle of every individual, being available therein for study. This is _physiology_ as the ground for the _psychology_ that then arises, given suitable environmental circumstances and conditions. Again in general, the roots of physiology go down to the species DNA. Psychology's roots go down to the brain or central nervous system, and only secondarily, through physiology, to the DNA.

Concentrating now on physiology and psychology, their ground is matter and motion, which elevated into the biological realm become body and mind. Viewing them in terms of life alone, matter, now seen in the form of a body, brings physiology into focus, being the body's manner of working through the organism at three levels; organs (lungs legs etc.), cells (nerve muscle etc.), atoms and molecules in the synthesis of living beings.

In another viewpoint, physiology appears as the inborn intelligence of our physical nature. Tissues develop and grow in the course of a repeating life cycle. The study of this cycle of development and existence belongs to physiology. After a wound, the tissues heal. This is physiology at work. It is the motor of our being and guardian of our health; life's process in the course of living.

Psychology (from psyche, mind or soul) has its base in physiology, in the way that the brain's organization has its base in the sexually produced original encoded order of DNA. We can see here that physiology goes back to the formative process initiated by conception, while psychology, in a corresponding manner, goes back to the _mental conception_ (between mother and baby) initiated by birth.

To take religion back to birth is to take it back to physiology, for birth in the mother and baby is a complex physiological interaction, perfected in the long course of evolution. It takes it back at the same time to psychology, for birth, again, as an integration of sides, is foundation of every individual mind. Finally, these sides, in their physiology and psychology, define our human kind. The crisis in today's world indicates the need for this deeper integral vision, which identifies the centrality of birth and the consequent mother-infant relation, not as negating the existing social political and economic world, but taking it a step forward to a necessarily higher stage, whose urgency now confronts us.

As humans we are _psychical_. We _think_. We are physical in that we have a bodily form; and material in that we can be considered as so much gravitating matter. A stone, on the other hand, is confined to the material. Insofar as it has a particular shape, regular as in the case of a cut diamond, or random in the form of a rock, that which is merely **material** , reaches up to the physical, but only borders upon it. In terms of psychical being it is passive and external.

Cleaving between the material and physical, allows the absolute philosophy, the nether foundation of true science, to take mind in a more commanding sense than is usually the case. When talking about the mind, the physical body is usually excluded, but that philosophy _includes_ it. Scientifically, because a hereditary process shapes the body, it exists as an expression of racial _experience_ , and as such belongs to life and mind. When we talk about the mind therefore, we will be speaking of something _objective_ , having physical and psychical sides, the latter indicating its living form, whilst its material embodiment is passive. Unconscious subconscious and conscious processes, thus obtain a scientific footing, and on this basis we can build a determinate theory and science of mind. It then eventuates that _only in this context_ can birth, in all its significance and process be adequately understood.

Conventional science, and in particular physics, as the study of the _material_ world, falls into place as a subdivision within a greater Science of Mind, to which all knowledge, physical physiological and psychological belongs. In particular, this constitutes the substance of the Hegelian philosophy.
Appendix

### The Classification of Pain

The classification of pain is technical. Nevertheless, it is imperative to establish it on a scientific footing in order to resolve the question of cultural childbirth. Because the classification of birth in a medical relation has come to turn upon theoretical questions involving the nature of pain, it is essential to examine it carefully, and we do so here in continuation of the start made in chapter 13.

### Physical Pain

For the sake of classification we will divide pain into physical and _psychical_. Physical pain will then subdivide into objective and subjective. The cause of 'physical pain, objective' may then be inside or outside the body.

'Physical pain, subjective', is often referred to, as functional pain and will be discussed under this heading. The subject is therefore as follows:

1/. Physical pain can be objective or subjective in origin.

1a. Objective means that its cause can be apparent to another person.

1b. Subjective means arising in the consciousness of the subject. It is not, as such, assessable by another.

Comment: If physical pain is objective in origin, its cause is still to be determined as operating from outside or inside the body. For instance a blow operates from outside, but the pain from a bruise or inflammation operates from inside. Physical pain is said to be subjective in origin when, as arising within consciousness, its cause is within the nervous system, and so cannot be pointed out or demonstrated to another.

The possibilities of origin in terms of locality are thus three and can be identified as follows:

i/. A cause operating from outside the body

ii/. A cause operating from inside the body

iii/. A cause operating from within consciousness, described as 'the inside of the inside'.

The thinking here is that mind is the true 'inside' of the body, but we also have the conception of a physical inside and outside. For instance food eaten is said to be inside the body, especially when it passes into the bloodstream. We are dealing here with the physical integrity of the body, whereas its mental integrity (mind, psyche or consciousness) is something beyond that again. We can indicate this difference by speaking of consciousness as the 'inside of the inside'. We will then know exactly what we mean by the different terms. A few examples are now listed by way of illustration. The choice of the designations, S1, S2 and T, explained below, will then make the ground plan of the classification clear.

### Physical Pain: Objective

(S1) From a cause outside the body, such as a blow pressure burn, etc.

(S2) From a cause inside the body, such as pain from a broken bone, inflammation ischemia, etc.

Inflammation can take the form of a boil or toothache. Ischemia is a localized anemia due to mechanical obstruction of the blood supply. It can be very painful. The fact that ischemia can also be subjective in origin is discussed below.

### Physical Pain: Subjective

(T) From a fault in the pattern of nervous control, as in colic, ischemia, migraine.

Comment: colic occurs in hollow organs like the gut where movement occurs as waves of muscular contraction and relaxation. With a fault in the pattern of nervous control, instead of working together, such waves can run into each other, resulting in painful pulling, stretching and tension. Ischemia, or pain arising through an inadequate blood supply can be mechanical in origin, as mentioned, but it can also be caused by faulty nervous control, as when the muscular sheath in an arterial wall clamps down when it should be open. For example, angina or heart pain can be caused by anger. In this case, emotional distress causes the intra-arterial musculature to contract. The pain can be severe and life threatening. Many more examples could be given; those chosen have merely been selected by way of illustrative example to help define the categories.

In the 'pain, physical, subjective' category, physical pain can occur arising from nervous malfunction. This is called functional and will be discussed below.

### The choice of Letters

The choice of the letters used above can now be explained and will reveal the classification plan:

The S in S1 and S2, stands for Space.

'T' stands for Time.

When we grasp this significance our classification becomes absolute, for that which is primarily from the mind will be time related. That, whose reference is to 'the world', will be space related. This 'space' and 'time' division will then be seen to be the fundamental basis in all the distinctions and subdivisions noted.

In practice, space and time work together. They are inseparable. But the order in which they come into the picture is fundamental in the logical classification.

In functional pain there is no objective _thing_ , such as a bit of grit in the eye, or a clot in an artery. If a small artery shuts down like a clenched fist due to contraction of the muscle fibers in its walls it will cause ischemia just as surely as a clot. The organ served is throttled by the body's own control mechanism. To understand that fault we would have to understand what was going on in the consciousness of the subject. It is a fault in the nervous pattern of control, so one of Timing. So 'T' for time is the appropriate designation in the plan of classification.

Compare this with a car that breaks down due to distributor failure. It has not hit a tree or developed a cracked cylinder head. The fault is 'merely' in the electrical timing. The breakdown however, is just as complete.

### Psychical Pain

Pain is dictionary defined as 'bodily or mental suffering.' For our classification purposes, we will take it that mental suffering, or _psychical pain_ , is that feeling or mental state occasioned by a circumstance such as bereavement. Circumstantially it can arise in endless ways, not to be corralled by an example, but bereavement as an example leaves us in no doubt as to what 'psychical' refers to in our system of classification.

The pain of concern to a clinician is that which arises from an injurious or pathological condition affecting the integrity of bodily tissue. It is localized and apt to be described as 'real physical pain'. But this terminology is dubious, for it implies that besides 'real' physical pain, there is another type of physical pain, located entirely in the imagination. It is judgmental, because an objective determination of pain is impossible; besides which the reality of mental pain is freely admitted.

When comparing the types of pain we may consider the structure of mind. Choosing our words, if we say that it has conscious subconscious and unconscious _depths_ , we can add that the consciousness has three levels or _stacks_. Physical pain may then be seen as coming from the bottom of the stack, whereas _psychical_ pain comes from the top.

To understand this we need to see that the emotions arise in a sublimation of the pain/pleasure level. Thought arises in a sublimation of the emotional level. Thought is thus a complex of positive and negative nervous energy, and it is not surprising that, tipping one way or the other, we may come to regard thoughts as painful or pleasurable, for they are modifications within a single basic process. Our consciousness may be centered in any of the three levels, or in a higher level again, which sublimates all three lower levels, within which the particularity of conditioned thought exists.

Psychical pain is not felt in the same way as a wound, toothache or migraine. For a start, it is not localized. We do not experience an emotion or thought in our hand or foot. Its level is that of thought, so it affects the whole body by influencing our behavior. If it is severe we feel depressed. We may become suicidal. It can hardly be confused with physical pain, though both have the same antecedent and reality, insofar as they both belong to the side of biological loss, and so retreat. But whereas physical pain is sensed in the body, and is related to the foundation of consciousness, _psychical_ pain is sensed in the mind, and is related to the foundation of our spiritual understanding. We should feel it, endure and then smile, for it is the hormone of mental growth. It is intrinsic to our human nature. Without it, where would we be?

### Functional Pain

Within the classification discussed so far, the only possibility of confusion that could arise is that between psychical and functional pain. But now that we have dealt with the reality of mental suffering, or psychical pain, hopefully this will not occur.

As explained, functional pain is physical. Its cause is invisible, but a sufficiently sensitive examination could detect its mechanism. So for example, in functional ischemic pain, the mental cause remains unseen, but the spasm of the artery can be detected. It is something objectively determinable. Again, in an attack of asthma, the functional cause, belonging to the domain of thought, bears no physical marker, but the resultant bronchiolar spasm is patently visible.

In mental suffering, or _psychical_ pain, the anguish can plot our destruction, but only through the whole of our behavior.

We must not confuse pain and its cause. Physical pain is private to the person who has it. Inflammation can be patently visible, but the pain of a toothache does not parade before external eyes. The term 'real' implies an insupportable value judgment. Functional pain, however, imports a further problem, in that it is disowned. No one can detect any cause, neither the observer nor the person who has it.

This is firstly because the cause is in the mind, so it is not visible to outside observers; secondly, because _, being 'invisible' to the host is part of its pathology_.

If we do not note this distinction, confusion can arise, in that functional pain is 'self-caused'. It is 'all in the mind', but not, for that reason, consciously so. Such statements (that pain is 'self-caused' or 'in the mind') is therefore confusing to subjects, for it does not fit their reality.

An imaginary pain does not hurt. Furthermore, the mentioned invisibility of the cause to the sufferer, rules 'self-cause' out of the question. If it were 'visible', or known within consciousness, there would be no disorder. For insight, in this case, is curative. No more is required to unravel the knot of the functional disorder. But it has to be a true insight, a palpable experience of the cause in the actual thought process, not just an explanation-based comprehension of the mechanism. This true insight founds faith healing and psychotherapy alike.

### Titles by the same author

The Science of Mental Arithmetic, 1981

Space Age Arithmetic, 1981

The Theory of Mental Arithmetic, 1983

Circle Arithmetic, A Short Introduction, 1988

Clock n'Calendar, 1989

CircleMath One (CM1), 1988, revised 1992

CircleMath Two (CM2), 1988, revised 1992

Math and Mind, 1995

Math War, 1997

Journals

New Zealand Medical Journal, April 1960, pp. 206-210, A Theory of the Dual Nature of Nervous Energy, S. W. Taylor

New Zealand Medical Journal, September 1960, pp. 432-436, Hypnosis and Hallucination, S. W. Taylor

New Zealand Mathematics Magazine, Dec. 1983, Vol. 20, No 4, The 'Zeta' Maths, S. W. Taylor, pp. 146-147

### Contact

Robert Michael Taylor

mailto: Circlemaths123@gmail.com

Visit our website: www. **c** irclemath **s**.com

