During our pre-natal experience in the womb, we all, in common, live a sort of corporately interdependent oneness with our mother. We develop a vague sort of memory here marking the most primitive backdrop against which all the rest of life is measured. The mirror neurons and senses are experiencing even before the mind can create and catalogue in picture or language.
Later that background proceeds into a sensory recognition of corporate familial and environmental unities as a good thing. In some way, though inadequate to fully reach it, these unities provide a substitute sense of this primordial oneness. Out from within this experiential background, our interdependency outside the womb for the first couple of years develops finally into a sense of full blown recognition of self-distinction from other beings and things. This occurs by the time we are about two to three years old.
In this final stage, we not only notice the differences between self and others, but between one thing and another, especially where the contrasts are ever so significant. There seems to be an innate drive or propensity by which we spend the rest of our lives desiring to return to the protective, nurturing, comfort and security of the original experience of pre-natal oneness. In the development of all our rites of passage and other social associations we are recreating higher and higher unions. This is shared by all in this most common human experience. It is biologically programmed to occur from the very beginning of human conception, and on the other hand by continuously facing and struggling with our personal, social, and environmental differentiations (I and other, us and them, man and environment, pain and pleasure, good and evil, and so on).
Based on the reality of this common three tier subconscious experiential ground, i.e., the prenatal symbiosis, this unity amidst the whole or many, and the eventual and final discernment of differentiation of self, many important common aspects of culture become figure. This three tier experiential ground plays out in the life of the individual, as well as our collective motivations, for the rest of our lives (ever seeking greater and greater unions). Obeying our parents to gain affections, becoming an adult, the mating game, discrimination, group dependency, faith communities, vocational guilds, and other such rite of Passage rituals help substitute the very vague and unconscious desire to return to that womb experience. The attention paid to good verses bad, helpful verses harmful, and so on, which is deeply imbedded in the universality and purpose of religion, its subsequent various forms, rites, and the natural division of things into sacred and profane, are based on this experience. Experientially they are very reasonable options. They do not however fulfill in an actual sense. The momentary achievement of a nirvana like state or the experience of genuine relationship with God are much closer and achievements like these in our experience are always the highest form of oneness we can attain to outside the womb. I find this a most sound basis and explanation for the universality of these phenomena outside of simply admitting that there is a Creator or creators.
Going through this common experiential reality of the sense of primordial oneness at this critical foundational level in our ego’s development, and then our developing sense of autonomy/relation, I believe is one of the inner witness’s that God planned in every human being. It provides us all with a sense of God’s higher reality, as well as a drive to know God, and a drive to have God’s protection and favor, and causes us to desire ever greater communions including the ultimate union or relationship with the God(s)/forces. Whatever system it is called (religious inclination of any and all civilizations), all these are designed and developed as means of achieving that highest of unions within our unique societies. This goes for all people and their institutions respectively, which all mimic to one degree or another, or provide substitution for the original almost transcendent sense of oneness and security we had in the womb which can only be satisfied in the spiritual.
Many religious and societal rituals and rites of passage express this need! Hugging, sexual union, baptisms, circumcisions, inaugurations, officiations, marriage, graduations, consecrations, etc., are all attempts to connect us into a higher and higher unions on levels greater than self.
Sorry, I get deep I know but this may speak to Tubby if he reads it slowly and considers it in relation to this idea of the possibility of deep past memory...
brother Paul