THE BIRTH OF CONSCIOUSNESS
It is useless to try to determine _what is consciousness_ or _what is
knowledge_. Who cares anyhow, since we know without definitions. But
what we fail to know, yet what we must know, is the nature of the
pristine consciousness which lies integral and progressive within every
functioning organism. The brain is the seat of the ideal consciousness.
And ideal consciousness is only the dead end of consciousness, the spun
silk. The vast bulk of consciousness is non-cerebral. It is the sap of
our life, of all life.
We are forced to attribute to a star-fish, or to a nettle, its own
peculiar and integral consciousness. This throws us at once out of the
ideal castle of the brain into the flux of sap-consciousness. But let us
not jump too far in one bound. Let us refrain from taking a sheer leap
down the abyss of consciousness, down to the invertebrates and the
protococci. Let us cautiously scramble down the human declivities. Or
rather let us try to start somewhere near the foot of the calvary of
human consciousness. Let us consider the child in the womb. Is the fœtus
conscious? It must be, since it carries on an independent and
progressive self-development. This consciousness obviously cannot be
ideal, cannot be cerebral, since it precedes any vestige of cerebration.
And yet it is an integral, individual consciousness, having its own
single purpose and progression. Where can it be centered, how can it
operate, before even nerves are formed? For it does steadily and
persistently operate, even spinning the nerves and brain as a web for
its own motion, like some subtle spider.
What is the spinning spider of the first human consciousness—or rather,
where is the center at which this consciousness lies and spins? Since
there must be a center of consciousness in the tiny fœtus, it must have
been there from the very beginning. There it must have been, in the
first fused nucleus of the ovule. And if we could but watch this prime
nucleus, we should no doubt realize that throughout all the long and
incalculable history of the individual it still remains central and
prime, the source and clue of the living unconscious, the origin. As in
the first moment of conception, so to the end of life in the individual,
the first nucleus remains the creative-productive center, the quick,
both of consciousness and of organic development.
And where in the developed fœtus shall we look for this
creative-productive quick? Shall we expect it in the brain or in the
heart? Surely our own subjective wisdom tells us, what science can
verify, that it lies beneath the navel of the folded fœtus. Surely that
prime center, which is the very first nucleus of the fertilized ovule,
lies situated beneath the navel of all womb-born creatures. There, from
the beginning, it lay in its mysterious relation to the outer, active
universe. There it lay, perfectly associated with the parent body. There
it acted on its own peculiar independence, drawing the whole stream of
creative blood upon itself, and, spinning within the parental
blood-stream, slowly creating or bodying forth its own incarnate
amplification. All the time between the quick of life in the fœtus and
the great outer universe there exists a perfect correspondence, upon
which correspondence the astrologers based their science in the days
before mental consciousness had arrogated all knowledge unto itself.
The fœtus is not _personally_ conscious. But then what is personality if
not ideal in its origin? The fœtus is, however, radically, individually
conscious. From the active quick, the nuclear center, it remains single
and integral in its activity. At this center it distinguishes itself
utterly from the surrounding universe, whereby both are modified. From
this center the whole individual arises, and upon this center the whole
universe, by implication, impinges. For the fixed and stable universe of
law and matter, even the whole cosmos, would wear out and disintegrate
if it did not rest and find renewal in the quick center of creative life
in individual creatures.
And since this center has absolute location in the first fertilized
nucleus, it must have location still in the developed fœtus, and in the
mature man. And where is this location in the unborn infant? Beneath the
burning influx of the navel. Where is it in the adult man? Still beneath
the navel. As primal affective center it lies within the solar plexus of
the nervous system.
We do not pretend to use technical language. But surely our meaning is
plain even to correct scientists, when we assert that in all mammals the
center of primal, constructive consciousness and activity lies in the
middle front of the abdomen, beneath the navel, in the great nerve
center called the solar plexus. How do we know? We feel it, as we feel
hunger or love or hate. Once we _know_ what we are, science can proceed
to analyze our knowledge, demonstrate its truth or its untruth.
We all of us know what it is to handle a newborn, or at least a quite
young infant. We know what it is to lay the hand on the round little
abdomen, the round, pulpy little head. We know where is life, where is
pulp. We have seen blind puppies, blind kittens crawling. They give
strange little cries. Whence these cries? Are they mental exclamations?
As in a ventriloquist, they come from the stomach. There lies the
wakeful center. There speaks the first consciousness, the audible
unconscious, in the squeak of these infantile things, which is so
curiously and indescribably moving, reacting direct upon the great
abdominal center, the preconscious mind in man.
There at the navel, the first rupture has taken place, the first break
in continuity. There is the scar of dehiscence, scar at once of our pain
and splendor of individuality. Here is the mark of our isolation in the
universe, stigma and seal of our free, perfect singleness. Hence the
lotus of the navel. Hence the mystic contemplation of the navel. It is
the upper mind losing itself in the lower first-mind, that which is last
in consciousness reverting to that which is first.
A mother will realize better than a philosopher. She knows the rupture
which has finally separated her child into its own single, free
existence. She knows the strange, sensitive rose of the navel: how it
quivers conscious; all its pain, its want for the old connection; all
its joy and chuckling exultation in sheer organic singleness and
individual liberty.
The powerful, active psychic center in a new child is the great solar
plexus of the sympathetic system. From this center the child is drawn to
the mother again, crying, to heal the new wound, to re-establish the old
oneness. This center directs the little mouth which, blind and
anticipatory, seeks the breast. How could it find the breast, blind and
mindless little mouth? But it needs no eyes nor mind. From the great
first-mind of the abdomen it moves direct, with an anterior knowledge
almost like magnetic propulsion, as if the little mouth were drawn or
propelled to the maternal breast by vital magnetism, whose center of
directive control lies in the solar plexus.
In a measure, this taking of the breast re-instates the old connection
with the parent body. It is a strange sinking back to the old unison,
the old organic continuum—a recovery of the pre-natal state. But at the
same time it is a deep, avid gratification in drinking in the sustenance
of a new individuality. It is a deep gratification in the exertion of a
new, voluntary power. The child acts now separately from its own
individual center and exerts still a control over the adjacent universe,
the parent body.
So the warm life-stream passes again from the parent into the aching
abdomen of the severed child. Life cannot progress without these
ruptures, severances, cataclysms; pain is a living reality, not merely a
deathly. Why haven’t we the courage for life-pains? If we could depart
from our old tenets of the mind, if we could fathom our own
_unconscious_ sapience, we should find we have courage and to spare. We
are too mentally domesticated.
The great magnetic or dynamic center of first-consciousness acts
powerfully at the solar plexus. Here the child knows beyond all
knowledge. It does not see with the eyes, it cannot perceive, much less
conceive. Nothing can it apprehend; the eyes are a strange plasmic,
nascent darkness. Yet from the belly it knows, with a directness of
knowledge that frightens us and may even seem abhorrent. The mother,
also, from the bowels knows her child—as she can never, never know it
from the head. There is no thought nor speech, only direct, ventral
gurglings and cooings. From the passional nerve-center of the solar
plexus in the mother passes direct, unspeakable effluence and
intercommunication, sheer effluent contact with the palpitating
nerve-center in the belly of the child. Knowledge, unspeakable knowledge
interchanged, which must be diluted by eternities of materialization
before they can come to expression.
It is like a lovely, suave, fluid, _creative_ electricity that flows in
a circuit between the great nerve-centers in mother and child. The
electricity of the universe is a sundering force. But this lovely
polarized vitalism is creative. It passes in a circuit between the two
poles of the passional unconscious in the two now separated beings. It
establishes in each that first primal consciousness which is the sacred,
all-containing head-stream of all our consciousness.
But this is not all. The flux between mother and child is not all sweet
unison. There is as well the continually widening gap. A wonderful rich
communion, and at the same time a continually increasing cleavage. If
only we could realize that all through life these are the two
synchronizing activities of love, of creativity. For the end, the goal,
is the perfecting of each single individuality, unique in itself—which
cannot take place without a perfected harmony between the beloved, a
harmony which depends on the at-last-clarified singleness of each being,
a singleness equilibrized, polarized in one by the counter-posing
singleness of the other.
So the child. In its wonderful unison with the mother it is at the same
time extricating itself into single, separate, independent existence.
The one process, of unison, cannot go on without the other process, of
purified severance. At first the child cleaves back to the old source.
It clings and adheres. The sympathetic center of unification, or at
least unison, alone seems awake. The child wails with the strange
desolation of severance, wails for the old connection. With joy and
peace it returns to the breast, almost as to the womb.
But not quite. Even in sucking it discovers its new identity and
_power_. Its own new, separate _power_. It draws itself back suddenly;
it waits. It has heard something? No. But another center has flashed
awake. The child stiffens itself and holds back. What is it, wind?
Stomach-ache? Not at all. Listen to some of the screams. The ears can
hear deeper than eyes can see. The first scream of the ego. The scream
of asserted isolation. The scream of revolt from connection, the revolt
from union. There is a violent anti-maternal motion, anti-everything.
There is a refractory, bad-tempered negation of everything, a hurricane
of temper. What then? After such tremendous unison as the womb implies,
no wonder there are storms of rage and separation. The child is
screaming itself rid of the old womb, kicking itself in a blind paroxysm
into freedom, into separate, negative independence.
So be it, there must be paroxysms, since there must be independence.
Then the mother gets angry too. It affects her, though perhaps not as
badly as it affects outsiders. Nothing acts more direct on the great
primal nerve-centers than the screaming of an infant, this blind
screaming negation of connections. It is the friction of irritation
itself. Everybody is implicated, just as they would be if the air were
surcharged with electricity. The mother is perhaps less affected because
she understands primarily, or because she is polarized directly with the
child. Yet she, too, must be angry, in her measure, inevitably.
It is a blind, almost mechanistic effort on the part of the new organism
to extricate itself from cohesion with the circumambient universe. It
applies direct to the mother. But it affects everybody. The great
centers of response vibrate with a maddening, sometimes unbearable
friction. What centers? Not the great sympathetic plexus this time, but
its corresponding voluntary ganglion. The great ganglion of the spinal
system, the lumbar ganglion, negatively polarizes the solar plexus in
the primal psychic activity of a human individual. When a child screams
with temper, it sends out from the lumbar ganglion violent waves of
frictional repudiation, extraordinary. The little back has an amazing
power once it stiffens itself. In the lumbar ganglion the unconscious
now vibrates tremendously in the activity of sundering, separation.
Mother and child, polarized, are primarily affected. Often the mother is
so _sure_ of her possession of the child that she is almost unmoved. But
the child continues, till the frictional response is roused in the
mother, her anger rises, there is a flash, an outburst like lightning.
And then the storm subsides. The pure act of sundering is effected. Each
being is clarified further into its own single, individual self, further
perfected, separated.
Hence a duality, now, in primal consciousness in the infant. The warm
rosy abdomen, tender with chuckling unison, and the little back
strengthening itself. The child kicks away, into independence. It
stiffens its spine in the strength of its own private and separate,
inviolable existence. It will admit now of no trespass. It is awake now
in a new pride, a new self-assertion. The sense of antagonistic freedom
is aroused. Clumsy old adhesions must be ruthlessly fused. And so, from
the lumbar ganglion the fiery-tempered infant asserts its new, blind
will.
And as the child fights the mother fights. Sometimes she fights to keep
her refractory child, and sometimes she fights to kick him off, as a
mare kicks off her too-babyish foal. It is the great _voluntary_ center
of the unconscious flashing into action. Flashing from the deep lumbar
ganglion in the mother to the newly-awakened, corresponding center in
the child goes the swift negative current, setting each of them asunder
in clean individuality. So long as the force meets its polarized
response all is well. When a force flashes and has no response, there is
devastation. How weary in the back is the nursing mother whose great
center of repudiation is suppressed or weak; how a child droops if only
the sympathetic unison is established.
So, the polarity of the dynamic consciousness, from the very start of
life! Direct flowing and flashing of two consciousness-streams, active
in the bringing forth of an individual being. The sweet commingling, the
sharp clash of opposition. And no possibility of creative development
without this polarity, this dual circuit of direct, spontaneous, honest
interchange. No hope of life apart from this. The primal unconscious
pulsing in its circuits between two beings: love and wrath, cleaving and
repulsion, inglutination and excrementation. What is the good of
inventing “ideal” behavior? How order the path of the unconscious? For
let us now realize that we cannot, even with the best intentions,
proceed to order the path of our own unconscious without vitally
deranging the life-flow of those connected with us. If you disturb the
current at one pole, it must be disturbed at the other. Here is a new
moral aspect to life.