prenatal experiences and subtle interaction:

[please read the section, "psychic" and "supernatural" stuff: what/how/how-not, before this section]

[cw: discusses abortion, miscarriage, and prenatal trauma]

[I’m indebted to a few collaborators for initial salience that a bunch of this was even a thing, and more.]

It’s maybe less controversial that, if one eventually encounters pretty much everything, including very early life stuff, that one will eventually come across things like surgeries under general anesthesia and traumatic medical or ritual events like circumcision (depending on decade born, where in the world, and parental culture.)

As a side note, it seems like people, the bodymind, actually is/are unconscious while under general anesthesia—there’s not some ultimately recoverable, intensely painful memory, or maybe even any sense of pain. It does seem like there’s maybe the faintest, diffuse shadow of pain and/or some mild "blurring" around the edges of the system, as it were. But this seems to be straightforward to clean up in meditation and doesn’t seem to heavily bottleneck people, as far as I can tell. It might be different for different people.

Anyway, regarding "everything," one might note that these are things that can happen preverbally and in the seeming "amnesia period" of early life events. So, one point, here, is that people do, in some relatively typically, fairly discretely sense, sometimes, have recoverable early life and preverbal memories. And these, quickly or eventually, are indeed recovered, re-experienced, and re-interpreted, etc., in meditation.

Such "particularly discrete" memories can have a strange, displaced, spatiotemporally odd, perspectivally odd, sensorily odd flavor/sense/character, as one might expect! (And, sometimes, they’re shockingly warm, intimate, etc., e.g. remembering being breastfed as a neonate.) The particularly vivid ones maybe tend to be fragmented and few. Mostly, this content might be subtle, "diffused," barely perceived undulation.

Now, more controversially, these preverbal memories extend back not just to early, postnatal experiences, but all the way back to prenatally, to one’s time in the uterus/womb, and even to the very first moments of consciousness. (It seems, as soon as the brain starts firing, and maybe even before, the memory system is doing its thing, and its fully contiguous out to adult experience. Thinking about how one might "design" learning and memory, maybe this is very elegant or hard-to-vary, evolutionarily speaking, and it’d be difficult to design some kinds of learning agents any other way.)

There’s a particular character to prenatal memories, maybe a few particular sub-feels, depending on how far along the nervous system and sensory system are, in development.

These feels and memories can eventually be raised, felt, experienced as a (relatively non-jarring) "flashback," re-experienced as such in meditation. And, one can realize that, for most people, the "prenatal feel of everything" tends to actually be a distantly felt but pervasive backdrop of one’s adult experience! So, something about the quasi-timeless, quasi-all-pervadingness of prenatal experiences lets such experiences maybe particularly persist and coexist with/in/as adult experience. And, one’s personal "prenatal feel" can contribute signifcantly to one’s "cosmology." (One eventually explores all this in meditation; it eventually just comes up, when it’s safe, a dialogue between different ages, "realities," etc. and there is eventual manifoldly endorsed harmonization, integration, etc.)

During the prenatal period is when we work out our first takes on individuality, self versus other, "personhood" (in some very rudimentary sense), agency, inside/outside/boundary/containment. Usually our first passes on these things will be quite "confused" in various ways, and those confusions can have downstream ramifications for sensemaking through our entire lives. Also, when things happen too intensely, too fast, too painfully, etc., we can paper over our old versions of early conceptualization and start working off of entirely new takes. This can put twists in the system with further, twisty, downstream effects. (All of this is eventually untangled in long-term meditation.)

Now, of course, prenatally, there is the mother—hormones, voice, body movements, heartbeat, and more. It seems many fetuses are aware of the mother and possibly conceptually/experientially undifferentiated with the mother. The mother, being partially separate, contributes both to successful differentiation, individuation, and conceptions of self versus other (and more), while also being a source of confusion about these things (and more).

***

Sort of continuing to take things in order of more and more intense and controversial, recall in a previous section about me/not-me confusions, how "mind stuff" from other people can be "in you," with highly counterintuitive (and controversial, and seemingly even impossible or confabulatory) fidelity, bandwidth, degree, amount, etc. This happens, too, between mother and child. And, surely, much of this is healthy and possibly even essential to development. (Just like postnatal babies need touch and attention, one wonders what counterfactual children of the future would be like, if grown in artificial wombs, meters or miles away from a parent, however humane and liberating that might be along lots of dimensions.)

Sometimes, aspects of the mother/fetus interaction can be problematic, in such example cases as the mother not wanting to be pregnant, not wanting the child to exist, not wanting the child to think or move, mistaking control for love, and so on. Those are sort of "easily imaginable, ‘just so’ story, cliches," easy to back-extrapolate and confabulate, say, in therapy. But, there seem to be consistent reports from meditators and other mind explorers that such effects/influences/memories are real and downstream effectual for the adult mind. There is a huge range of possible effects, beyond what one might guess—the mother’s conceptual confusions about self and other can affect a child, and so on. A child/adult might have a feel/anticipation/belief that they shouldn’t exist or that they’re bad, which can ultimately be traced all the way to the womb.

Assuming everyone is affected prenatally by their mother (and father, siblings, and more, by the way), it’s currently hard to tease out how often "bad" things happen, and to what degree. There might be selection bias (and, sometimes, confirmation bias and demand effects) amongst meditators. That is, someone who had particularly problematic prenatal experiences might be more likely to become a meditator. So, particularly problematic prenatal experiences might not be very common. I myself don’t have enough data, yet, about this.

In any case, it’s worth noting that the interaction between mother and fetus will be complex. A baby might only sort of interpret the most salient themes, but, even if, say, a mother is experiencing fear and disgust, she might well also simultaneously be experiencing love and care. So, even if there’s problematic regard, there could often be lots and lots of good things going on, too.

Further, fetuses, babies, people, everyone makes mistakes! Even if a mother is wholeheartedly loving (which would be superhuman!), a baby could still misinterpret something as too much attention, intensity, control, something. The baby just might be particularly sensitive or might have an unfortunate misinterpretation of something.

So, I’ll just note that this stuff is hard, life is hard, this stuff is subtle and barely talked about, and everyone’s doing their best, lots of good stuff happens, and sometimes bad stuff happens, too. And, all things being equal, all the bad stuff is retroactively correctable, in principle, with meditation and other approaches. To borrow an old saying, it’s never too late [for a meditator] to have a good childhood (and prenatal experience), as it were.

***

Ok, so there’s one more thing to mention, in this section, and that is miscarriages, abortions, and older siblings.

It seems to be the case that prior fetuses leave a "pattern," as it were, "in" the mother, that are conceptually/spatiotemporally/experientially localized to the womb. And, this pattern is durable/stable/lasting and can "picked up" and (mis)interpreted by subsequent fetuses.

Leading to the above, I (and other collaborators, who first made this phenomenon salient to me) have encountered multiple, first-hand reports of people, while in the womb, [proto-]fearing that they would have the same fate as a miscarried or aborted fetus, or, say, believing, confusedly, that they were an aborted fetus (and so were a sort of living dead zombie person), and so on.

My dataset is currently small, so I don’t know how many people who’ve come across such things, in meditation, have then verified them with their mother or through records. (I’m not saying that is or isn’t a good idea!) It’s partially confounded by how normal and common miscarriages are and how they sometimes go undetected.

(Interestingly, everyone so far in my dataset was firstborn, so I don’t know what it’s like to encounter prior patterns/traces of one’s older siblings as a fetus.)

***

This has been a difficult section to first-pass draft, because it could come off as mom-blame-y as well as sort of fatalistic, regarding far-reaching, possible harms in the distant past that we had no control over. And then there’s how unbelievable some of this stuff is, if one hasn’t experienced some aspect of it, firsthand. And, finally, there’s even the political/ideological and moral elements, regarding prenatal experiences and downstream effects.

(Regarding "proof" of all of this, beyond meditation, some mothers will be like "of course," as well as shamans, bodyworkers, healers, etc.)

Anyway, this section has focused sort of on the "bad/traumatic cases" because that’s what can tend to bottleneck and then saliently come up in meditation.

But, between mother and child (and father and other siblings and family members, both prenatally and postnatally), we also learn about love, compassion, warmth, safety, and much more.

Resources permitting, a mother, as a skilled meditator, might perhaps(???) work through remaining, prior womb patterns before conceiving another child. This could, of course, be outrageously stringent and costly. (And there might even be good reasons for not doing this that aren’t yet well understood. As always: meta protocol, etc.)

And, but, so, in any case, in principle, resources permitting, as I mentioned a bit above, minds are "lossless" in a way that allows for sort of "clean healing", clean reinterpretation, clean re-understanding from any badness, trauma, misinterpretation, etc., all the way back to the first moments of consciousness. So, whatever experiences someone has prenatally, this is sort of all accounted for in the "10,000 hour" estimate of how long-ish it takes for a hardcore meditator to sort of asymptote. All of this section is accounted in that time estimate. All of this comes up naturally and is handleable, if it does. And having skimmed this section, hopefully it’ll all go fractionally more smoothly.