Now, it seems to be at least metaphorically plausible, what Groff is on about, that paradigms sourced in our conception/gestation/birth experiences may form psycho-emotional templates which are either partly or largely replayed in psychogenic and emotional dramas throughout our lives, more specifically in the case of the kinds of experience we might classify as neurotic or pathological. But there is a lot more going on than Groff’s arguments, admittedly now dated, suppose.

For example, (3/4ths of the way through Beyond the Brain) he does not seem to be aware that life itself is, in a number of senses, a birth process. It seems to me that we constantly face challenges that are easily metaphied thus, and we commonly face them in sequences that could probably be compared to those of his basic perinatal matrix (4 phases: normative, compression, ejection crisis, completed birth). In fact, it seems to me that this paradigm could be seen as universal; all experience may be modeled this way. Even the process of creating these sentences. Yet what I hope to emphasize is this: if we decide to call birth a crisis, (which seems at least superficially reasonable) we might meaningfully admit Groff’s (overly bold) supposition that the basic shape and character of our birth experience is prone to color our perceptions and abilities in all future developmental experience… but we should also see that if we are going to adopt this model, the first birth prepares us for a cascade of birth-like experiences throughout life.

In simple terms: we are born, to be born again. Now this is trivially true in the sense of our relationships to crisis, but it is staggeringly meaningful in another, more specific sense: the sense of experiencing something like the entire conception/ejection/birth experience again, while conscious and embodied. This is, perhaps, what the aim of some uncommon spiritual or insight traditions accomplish under other guises. But there is a specific developmental path that leads to a ‘rebirth’ experience of shocking proportions. It remakes the mind, childhood is experienced again, but much more deeply, it does in every way qualify as the conscious and embodied sequelae of the process of embodiment itself, which is birth.

The second birth releases one from filial locks with ones own species (this is, in part, why it should not be mediated by human cultural tenors, masters, or paradigms). In the same way that the first birth introduces one to humanity and culture, the second birth introduces one to a universal array of relationships and the cultures of nature and consciousness. These so vastly exceed both expectation and anything available in human cultures (I specifically here note advanced science, religion, philosophy and technology as being cruelly primitive in comparison to this ambiently available direct experience) that encountering them comprises an actual physical and psycho-emotional crisis at least as provocative, in its own domains, as those of physical birth are.

The second birth is not a dogma or a story. It’s a fact of our human potential that our cultures have too long denied or co-opted. But it has nothing to do with them. It belongs to you. The gifts it brings cannot be assembled or acquired in any other fashion, and without them, frankly, the first birth seems to be incredibly overwrought and misfounded.