Cellular Consciousness at Conception and Beyond: Do We Know What We Know?

In the beginning, two cells come together from two parents to form a unicellular organism known as a zygote. It seems that a third element, call it spirit, soul, being or something else, also arrives at this time. This is the beginning of embodiment. This is the beginning of a new life. From here, a remarkable process unfolds into a complex, multi-cellular body with potential for equally complex consciousness.

Very Early Memories

How can it be that some people claim to remember this very early time in their lives? Children often talk about this time or even earlier, before their conception.

I have been touched by reports, usually from parents, of how their children either appeared to them before they were conceived, or told them about how they chose them as parents.

As I explain  in my recently published book, Spirit into Form: Exploring Embryological Potential and Prenatal Psychology, “Often, the child appears as a toddler. Two or three years after the birth, the parent sees their child exactly as they had appeared to them in their earlier vision. In some cases, they choose to conceive after seeing the vision. In any case, their sense of bonding with the child often begins with this initial vision.”

Three books I have been particularly touched by are,

     Soul Trek: Meeting Our Children on Their Way to Birth by Elizabeth Hallett

    I Remember When I Was In Mummy’s Tummy by Akira Ikegawa

    Children Who Communicate Before They Are Born by Dietrich Bauer, Max Hoffmeister and     Hartmut Georg

For example, Ikegawa recounts a mother’s report of words from her first born, “When my second child was born, he told me, ‘We were watching mommy from the sky together, and I told him, ‘I’ll go first’ and came.’”

What are we to make of these comments from those too young to know that we are not supposed to be able to remember what happened before we were conceived?

A parallel question concerns multiple reports from those who have experienced near-death or actual death experiences. Although their hearts have stopped, their organs are not functioning and they are often declared brain dead, they give accurate accounts of what was said and done in the room around their body or even conversations down the hall in the hospital. How is this possible?

Remembering Without a Brain

In our modern world, there is pervasive belief that we think perceive, remember and understand the world around us via the brain and nervous system. Within this belief system, it makes no sense at all that someone without a functional brain would be able to perceive anything, let alone remember it to tell the tale afterwards.

Like those who have died and been revived, including several outspoken and transformed medical doctors, toddlers frequently talk about their time prior to having a brain or nervous system or a highly functional one. (e.g Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife  by Eben Alexander, and Dying to be me: My journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing by Anita Moorjani).

Certainly, before conception there is no nervous system sensing and recording events. Little ones in the womb with relatively undeveloped brains also clearly have experience. The field of Pre- and Perinatal Psychology has developed due to unexpecting practitioners being surprised by their patients or clients describing prenatal and birth experiences that they shouldn’t have been able to have or remember.

A remarkable pioneer in the field, David Chamberlain, enlightened many of us in 1988 with his first book, Babies Remember Birth (published 10 years later as The Mind of Your Newborn Baby), in which he describes his research with mother-child pairs who described the birth of the child through hypnosis when the child was an adult. The reports matched in most details. When they didn’t Chamberlain found that usually the child had the more accurate memory!

When a baby is born, their brain and nervous system is not fully developed. The belief in the field of psychology has been that they cannot be truly conscious or remember events from the first two or so years before their brain develops enough for them to be able to speak. Yet, toddlers often describe their birth or time in the womb.

Babies too young to speak clearly demonstrate their prenatal and birth experience through their body movement and emotional expression. For anyone open to perceiving this, the stories babies tell before they can speak area very clear.

Little ones also demonstrate their early experience through play. Given a chance, they choose toys representing what happened in their traumatic hospital birth. I have seen toddlers choose dolls or stuffed animals corresponding to the twins they had to leave behind when the twin died or extra embryos were “reduced” during IVF. These children repeatedly enact the pain of leaving their sibling behind until they have been able to resolve this trauma through enactment and accurate, compassionate reflection from parents and/or therapists present.

Throughout life, we tend to re-enact aspects of our preverbal lives, including birth and pre-birth. For example, it’s not unusual for someone born with forceps to feel resistance towards authority, like that of the doctor who decided how they would be born. Those born with assistance, like emergency Caesarean, often have trouble completing things, as if expecting or believing they need to be rescued. People who have lost a twin in the womb may spend their lives searching for that special companion, latching onto someone they “twin” with until they feel disappointed and end the relationship. There are so many examples…

Quantum Consciousness

These kinds of evidence of preverbal awareness and memory challenge modern scientific theories. I am fascinated by research efforts to locate memory in the brain which conclude that it is not in the brain. Instead, memory is now seen as a holographic phenomenon informing our neurophysiology. Memory can be considered to be more of a wave phenomenon than a specific physical activity in a specific part of the brain. Our brains may be more like antennae picking up relevant signals from a larger field around us

For example, physicist Nassim Haramein writes,

“The whole body becomes like a transceiver, an antenna, that’s capturing information from a quantum field of interaction that’s occurring at the atomic level and that’s transmitted through the water molecules into the biological structure at the different scales, but that emerge from the quantum fluctuations of the structure of space- time, itself. So that consciousness is not something inside of you. Consciousness is something that you’re interacting (with) – a field that is inside of you and outside of you and that you’re interacting with.”

Cellular Consciousness

As a Biodynamic Craniosacral therapist, I regularly sense energetic fields and how the physical body responds to them. I also experience this through Continuum, a mindful movement practice founded by Emilie Conrad. In both Biodynamics and Continuum, practitioners often sense a melting of physical structures accompanied by a sense of deepening into more subtle awareness. When structures dissolve, what remains are cells suspended in fluid and energetic fields.

My direct experience of this kind of cellular awareness, as well as my own memories and years of witnessing those of my clients and students, support my understanding of how little ones might be sensing their environment long before their brains develop.

To explain this in simple terms, I think about how our immune system can only function because immune cells recognise and remember what intruding molecules. They remember if a molecule has been problematic and prepare to protect the body from it in case it intrudes again.

This type of cellular consciousness is in our news almost every day these days as vaccines are developed and distributed to address the global challenges of COVID-19.

If immune cells can demonstrate this degree of intelligence, which our health depends on, is it so far-fetched to consider that a community of cells forming an embryo in the womb might also be aware of the field it is growing in? Cell biologist Bruce Lipton eloquently explains how cells interact with their environment, turning genes on and off depending on what is needed as their membranes detect what is around them.

Even a sperm or egg has this kind of awareness. As the Preconception Attraction Complex (PCAC) described by spiritual embryologist Jaap van der Wal demonstrates, these cells are communicating with each other before conception, exchanging messages apparently leading to decisions about which sperm will unite with the egg.

Cells are aware. They carry a kind of consciousness. This may be different from your everyday consciousness, but you began this life as a unicellular organism and your body today is composed of communities of cells whose ability to be aware and communicate enables you to be who you are.

Welcoming Consciousness

I hope you will join me in acknowledging and celebrating the miracle of how we can know what we know, with or without a brain. From this perspective, it becomes essential to treat little ones, from before conception on, with the respect they deserve. Being able to do that may require doing your own work to acknowledge, appreciate and heal your relationship with your own early history.

My we gently and lovingly welcome in those who are coming into body, starting with ourselves!