Memory of Being Born [18]
A young man explains what he remembers of a time
“I” is such an easy word to use. I can’t remember how I first learned it.
When I was born, I knew no words at all. So, please be patient with my words today.
The earliest feeling that I recall arose in the middle of me below the heart and above the stomach. It felt like it did not belong in me. I was doing OK, then this feeling, like a hollowing-out that filled up with terrible upset, lingering and lingering before going away. Twenty-five years later I matched this unnamed memory to a particular childhood event. When I was nine years old and I was playing in a ball game on grassy field, I made a big mistake. I stood in the wrong place where another child, a big bully, ran straight into me. I saw the smirk on his face when he hit me and laid me out painfully on the ground. It wasn’t the hit that I matched to the feeling in the womb; it was deep humiliation at my failure in front of the other boys on the team and the adults who were watching that day. As I lay on the ground, I noticed the sky was colored orange. Today, I think the earlier bad feeling that I had was from my mother when she had a bad experience of her own and she passed that feeling to me inside of her. After I was born, I kind of saw it in her a few times when I saw her red face and tears over something that happened. But it took time to add up these different memories.
Later in the womb, I noticed red-orange colors hovering in my mind. Not the sickness I had felt before, just the color of light seen through her. It felt nice. Reds and oranges.
But one day I started to feel bad with nausea and stomach pains inside me. It got worse, then even worse again. Maybe it eased a little now and then, but it grew and grew until it was thick brown misery and sickness all through, sick to the point it hurt a lot. I had no grasp of what it was or how it could be, or if it would ever go away. Yet, when I think of it today, I think it was the message that I had to leave that place; and then it was the crushing and twisting of me as I was pushed out. It was so terrible, so completely unknown and unexpected. It overwhelmed me. I reached the point when I could not stand it any longer and I gave up. Just gave up. Just set my whole self aside with no hope at all; and of those hours or even days until I was finally delivered, I have no memory now that I can find.
Then it was over. It was calm. Then an explosion all though me of brilliant pins and needles piercing every part of me with a prickling light as I drew my first breath and the air lit me up completely!
The first awareness on that breath was a shocking ecstasy of sparkling light and streaming energy; I could not tell these things apart. If I cried at that moment, as babies will, it was a cry of release. I realized immediately that through all that had happened to me from the beginning—if there ever was a beginning—I was only in the middle of it all. I had never changed. Nothing changed me at all; nothing about me could change. I saw I was the place where this happened and I was none of the things that happened, and whatever happens now could never harm this place. Nothing had really happened for or against me, it just happened all around and inside of me, and I was there with it all. Nothing could ever change this certainty. No experience, no matter the power of it, could ever do me harm.
It is too simple, too obvious, too close to me to put into words. Every word I write about this always means something else, never what I know and what I remember. I can’t write it the way it was.
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Given that he knew no words at all at the time he was born, what did he remember in that moment?
What was the form of that memory?
How did he acquire that memory?
When did he acquire it?
How is this related to universal context?
How can anything so subtle and difficult to explain be so significant?
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