There is an old myth that in our mother’s womb we know the universe but forget it at birth. I recently became reacquainted with this motif while rereading Martin Buber. It made me think about our wayward path in personal development. Do we lose something of our prenatal innocence—that undifferentiated awareness of and dependency on an all-encompassing nurturer? At birth we enter into an alphabet soup world of limitless diversity where we struggle to put together the pieces that define and delineate the boundaries of our existence. In the process of explaining this complexity, we not only map the world into our consciousness, but also create ourselves, that is, the person perceiving this world and living in it. But what happens to that prenatal awareness in the process?

It does not seem likely that any of us would want to return to a primal state. But we do recognize a naive innocence there at the beginning: we see it in babies as they reach for their mother’s breast. Our search for physical security begins there. That initial “reach” is only the first of lifelong efforts to gain control of our future and eventually to define our history. But these efforts can never be fully realized. For our powers are limited, and nature has its own course outside of our control. We are too soon separated from our mothers’ bosom. However tempted we might be to envy that infantile innocence, its comfort quickly vanishes when confronted with our personal mortality. But what about that primal awareness: can it and should it be somehow regained?

At birth we enter a physical world and begin the process of discovering our place in it as a person. I believe we carry with us from our prenatal existence a longing that not only propels us into our time and space but motivates us to transcend them. That longing can only be innate in our primal state, but it gradually manifests itself in the course of our lives as we ponder the meaning of our existence, seek a lasting legacy, or wonder about life after death. We never stop reaching; else we succumb to a meaningless life and equally vacuous death. What in our lives can overcome the inevitable tremor mortis and promise something beyond the moveable here and evanescent now?

Science can tell us nothing about life after death. It does, however, remind us that the basic elements of the universe make up our physical body, that we freely exchange molecules with our environment, that we absorb air and nutrients from earth’s abundance to fuel our life processes, that our intellectual life is born of and fostered by the delineation of objects we encounter in nature, and that we exist and are nurtured by the most improbable galactic circumstances that locate our planet in exactly the right place and time within the duration of our solar system. Science clearly shows our dependence on nature—its physical laws and its processes. And, further, the wisest amongst us have told us through all of human history that we walk the face of this planet as individual manifestations of a transcendent reality. Our religious myths speak of rebirth, resurrection, and salvation. Is it possible that we can either have immortality and/or experience its promise in the course of a normal lifespan? But if the universe has so conspired to bring us into existence and support our life processes, how is it that we are left abandoned in the end, destined to be recycled into the dust of mother earth?

A baby does not know of its death. An adult cannot know otherwise. I think the death we fear is the loss of the person we have created in the course of our lives. That person is not immortal, but the universe is. Our salvation depends upon our identification with the hidden nurturing force that has been with us from our gestation. A baby in the womb does not know its mother until sometime after birth. But it does have a generalized awareness of that which nurtures it. As adults, it behooves us to do the same. The difference, of course, is that we approach this awareness from a very different starting point. Our life’s experience and personal decisions have mapped both the world we live in and our own self-image. These are defining and therefore limiting concepts. It is only when we can see ourselves from outside ourselves that we begin to understand what modern science and the wisdom of the ages have revealed. We exist in a womb of life throughout every phase of our existence, not just in its prenatal phase. In the very realization of this fact, we become liberated of our finite existence and begin to see our personal life as part of an interplay the universe has engaged with itself. My personal role is part of a musical score that transcends my lone note. When I truly recognize my part, I can find the wisdom that brings harmony to my life. I realize that I am of the universe and must act in concert with it. The Bible says that we were created in the image of God. I believe that image is our identification with the universe which extends further than we can see and far longer than human imagination can fathom. In other words, in those moments when we reach for and touch that identification, we experience our immortality.

Every human being is born of woman. In the mother’s womb, a baby experiences a primal awareness before it even knows itself. In life, that same human defines his/her self, but can easily lose his/her place in the universe. Herein is the ultimate mystery of human life. Becoming a person is just the first step toward maturity. The penultimate is an awakening to the Transcendent within the womb of life.