Prenatal and Postmortem Consciousness

The descriptions are remarkably similar, but we seem far more interested in one than the other…

Most likely, you’re at least somewhat familiar with the characteristics of near-death experiences: floating out of the body, moving through a tunnel towards a bright light, being greeted by deceased family members and other loving beings, and, eventually (as this is near-death) being sent back to incarnate existence. Not all near-death experiences (NDEs) have all of these events, partially because people are ‘dead’ for varying amounts of time, and there is considerable variation as to the specifics, but you get the idea.

Now, there’s one thing about NDEs that has always struck me as remarkable, in fact as stunning as the NDE itself, and that’s that most people don’t seem to mind being dead. Leave aside for a moment that they are in the presence of a pure loving being, meeting with deceased loved ones, are free from pain, and all the rest of it, but consider — don’t they miss their friends and loved one here on the material plane?

Some do. There are certainly accounts of people being worried about their children, or some important unfinished business. Yet mostly we get an image of calm acceptance. That’s even true in NDEs in which people don’t leave the general vicinity of their body, but have out-of-body experiences where they observe hospital staff, emergency personnel, and nearby relatives, without the more heavenly beings present.

It’s curious, isn’t it? You’d think they’d be freaked out. Imagine yourself hovering above your assumed-to-be dead body, watch doctors going to extreme measures to bring it back to life. Wouldn’t you feel more than the quiet interest that’s usually described?

In fact, for those who do arrive on the higher planes, there’s usually no concern about returning, and many have to be ‘sent’ back, told that it isn’t yet their time. Until they are back in the body they can experience a range of feelings about returning, but joy is not usually one of them. I understand that it’s a sense of freedom and love that surpasses anything here on Earth, but I’m struck by how loose our connections to our loved ones are just minutes after passing into the next world.

On The Other End of the Spectrum…

The ambivalence about incarnate existence during NDEs has an interesting parallel in prenatal experience. This aspect of existence is accessible via a variety of means: spontaneous recall in children, and sometimes in adults, and psychedelic and hypnotic regression in adults. Importantly, many accounts of prenatal existence are verifiable, and can include both experiences within the womb and outside of it. That is, under regression people can describe not only conversations that were taking place, but also sometimes things like the clothes people were wearing or what they were doing (knitting and such). More on this in a forthcoming article.

One notable characteristic of prenatal consciousness is that there’s often a great deal of ambivalence and reticence about being born. It seems that whether entering or leaving incarnate existence (at birth or in an NDE), life here on the material plane is viewed as distasteful and unpleasant. In both cases, we often find reports of being ‘sent’ back into incarnation by a being that is viewed as external — however loving they may be, they are in a sense laying down the law.

In her book Changes of Mind, Jenny Wade offers the following hypothesis: there are two sources of consciousness, one transcendent and one tied to neurobiological development. The transcendent source is very much like what we might call the soul, while the neurobiological source has all of the limitations we associate with consciousness on this plane, including the laborious process of learning how to walk, talk, and otherwise run the biological being from birth onwards.

Before birth, the transcendent consciousness has only temporary and non-binding ties to the neural based consciousness, but then becomes entangled within it — thus begins the long process of emergence, or spiritual awakening.

For Those of Us Between Birth and Death…

If there are similarities between the pre-natal and post-mortem states, we can consider what this implies for those of us here in the ‘between’ of life.

First, I’ll point out a common fallacy about our spiritual development: that we come into this world in a state of pure awareness, and that gets muddied up by our conditioning. The implication is that we need to remove the limiting ideas and experiences thrust upon us by our parents, schooling, the media, and society in general, so that we can return to our original pristine condition. It would be fine if it were true, but it isn’t.

Well, it’s partially true. As part of the process of awakening, we do need to get past all the conditioning that is heaped upon us, but we need to go forward in our spiritual evolution, not backward. As Jenny Wade points out, the transcendent soul that incarnates at birth is certainly a good deal more free before it becomes bound to the physical body and dependent on neurological substrates, but it’s hardly ‘enlightened’.

Like the soul that is sent back to the body during NDEs, the prenatal soul has only a limited viewpoint: note that it regards other beings as ‘other’ rather than perceiving unity. Wade also makes the point that the prenatal soul is a rather passive observer, while the enlightened being is described as both receptive and radiant. The prenatal soul does not have a great deal of agency, the ability to make things happen (even relative to itself).

The Frontiers of the Past

I began this article with the assumption that most of my readers would have at least a basic knowledge of NDEs, and I assume that many have done a lot of inquiry into this area, and that some have actually had NDEs (they are surprisingly common). As accepted as NDEs and postmortem existence are among folks with a spiritual bent, interest in metaphysics, and just plain New Agers, interest in and knowledge of prenatal experience is much more rare.

Yet there is a large and ever-growing database of such information, particularly coming from hypnotic regression and psychedelic experiences. Much of the data is anecdotal, but consciousness researchers are on the task and have built a solid case for conscious experience going back as far as conception. I would think this would be particularly interesting for those of us with a metaphysical/spiritual perspective, because while we may not have had an NDE, we were all born and therefore the experience should be available to each of us.

There are endless volumes written on the experiences of life. As I’ve been covering in my series on death and the survival of consciousness, there is also quite a bit on the postmortem state, although it is hardly a consistent body of knowledge. The prenatal state has received far less attention than either life or death, yet it may very well hold the key to understanding the whole picture.

Here’s a link to my series on Death and the Survival of Consciousness — click on it right after you clap for this article ;)