A new-born baby is not a tabula rasa, not a clean sheet upon which the world can write its story. We have all lived and died a million times before . . . well, a lot anyway. By the time a baby pops into the world, it’s got history.
We used to think that when an egg is fertilised, it’s the first sperm to get there that wins the prize – but it isn’t! She chooses one. Then, at the actual moment of conception, there is a period of seven seconds during which nothing happens at all. A cell normally does about a million things a second but during that seven seconds nothing happens except that the cell wall becomes impermeable. Then there’s a kind of a ‘whoosh’ and it all starts up again.
The cell pulses and divides, pulses and divides and pretty soon you’ve got a tiny circle called the embryonic plate within which the cells drift round the periphery and up the centre. Pretty soon that centre thickens and we get a central ridge called the notochord along which the cells still drift. That chord is the origin of our backbones.
The process of cell division and migration continues rapidly and, in about six weeks, we have a recognisable little being. (Not necessarily easily recognisable as a human being, but certainly a being. The thing about that six week period, the really fascinating thing, is that during all that time there in no genetic input whatsoever. DNA doesn’t kick in until that time is up. Each cell is exactly the same as all the others, they’re all stem cells.
So how do they know? How do those cells decide which part of the emergent body they’re going to be? Nobody actually knows, but people like me believe that the information is magically, energetically carried in the fluids of the embryo and its calls, as sunlight is carried in sea water.
As we come in, during that whoosh after seven seconds, we come in with all our history and with all our intentions for this brand new life embedded in the subtleties of the body, specifically in its fluid energetics.
But then there are nine dangerous months in the womb. After that there are the perils of babyhood and on and on . . . More and more undigested life experience get layered over the top of that original intention till it becomes almost hidden under the weight. But it’s still there, if you know where and how to look.
Sensitive hands coupled with a very still mind can even now feel that original surge as the cells migrated along the notochord, can still palpate the original energetic flow along the spine. The original intention is still there, waiting to be heard.