At birth, the baby can easily recognize their mother’s voice, her native language, and music that they have heard in the last ten weeks of pregnancy. Sounds are quieter and lower in pitch inside the uterus. The mother’s heartbeat, bloodflow and digestive system all create sounds for the foetus’s developing ears to hear.(1)

According to integral theory, the first stage of human consciousness - “archaic consciousness” - is mainly operative during the time when we are foetuses in our mother’s womb, and the first years after we are born. In this period, infants are said to be ‘preverbal’, ‘precognitive’, ‘presymbolic’, entirely dependent on others and dominated by basic physical and emotional needs. Compared with later stages of development, this is undoubtedly true.

Contemporary infant and intrauterine research, however, has painted a more nuanced, interpersonal picture in which babies exert more agency and complexity than we previously thought. Foetuses, as the above quote explains, not only sense their inner and outer worlds, but are capable of discerning and remembering specific, complex cues, such as the tone and language of their mother’s voice, and developing strong emotional preferences around this sensory information that activate powerful regulation of their basic biology. They send basic, specific communications, too. Yes, these responses are largely unconscious, but our consciousness ultimately begins here at this unconscious/dawning of consciousness level, just as Jacob dreams of “a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven” (Genesis 28:12), or, as Blake pictures it below, rising above his sleeping body.

William Blake, *Jacob’s Ladder or Jacob’s Dream* (1799-1806)

In the first chapters of Integral Christianity, Paul Smith omits the stage of “archaic consciousness” from his discussion of various types of “church”. Perhaps because of Smith’s Protestant and Baptist background, he defines church in terms of beliefs that an adult consents to and adopts. I think this is a significant oversight, and underplays the deeply emotional, primitive, and indeed maternal reality of ‘church’ for all of us.

Perhaps this also reflects a pernicious and deeply unconscious obsession, throughout Western theology, with ‘salvation’ as something that has to be earned, or at least gained through adult conversion and consent. This often produces a similar sort of primitive terror and estrangement in the adult believer that an infant experiences if they suffer significant abandonment, physical or emotional, momentary or extended, by their birth parents.

Quaker Christians, for the most part, begin from a different place. Instead of the unbaptized infant (or unconverted adult) full of sin and in danger of hell, or at least in danger of purgatory until they are baptized and safely received into the arms of ‘mother church’ (or accept the Lordship of Jesus Christ), Quakers begin with the ‘Cosmic Christ’ and the Christ-centred account of creation that is found at the start of John’s Gospel:

All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. (John 1: 3-5).

Writing from “The Porch” in Cambridge, England, in 1908, Caroline Stephen draws out the consequences of such a foundational belief (ok, beliefs are critical after all):

It means, in the first place, that I share the belief of the religious society to which I belong to (the Society of Friends) that there is given to every human being a measure, or germ, of something of an illuminating nature - something of which the early Friends often spoke of as “a seed of life” - a measure of that “light, life, and spirit of Christ” which they recognised as the gift of God to all men [sic]. They dwelt as much on the universality as on the inwardness of the grace of Christ - the power of God unto salvation. They believed that this seed of life, if yielded to, obeyed, and followed, would lead everyone to salvation, with or without the outward knowledge of the Gospel of Christ. (2)

In this way, Quakers, as good Protestants, were able to affirm that salvation comes through God and Christ alone. By pointing to a cosmic, inward, universal Christ, however, they also affirmed that all human beings are children of a truly loving, non-abandoning, ever-present God, avoiding some of the horrible snarls of Reformed anthropology, soteriology, psychology, and ‘church’.

Nevertheless, for most of their history, Quakers imagined this universal creative divinity - and Christ - in dominantly masculine terms. Throughout the rest of Light Arising, from which the above quote is taken, Stephen speaks of God as “He” (never “She”), as the “the Father” (never “Mother”) of “his” (never “her”) “children”. While this doesn’t make much Christian theological sense (God as the Ground of Being is beyond all names and forms, including gender identity), it is also, arguably, not our first experience of the Great Parent:

The preborn baby prefers her mother’s voice over her father’s voice. Although a two-day-old baby pays attention to her father’s voice and can distinguish his voice from another male’s voice, she shows no preference for her father’s voice. This suggests that the foetus does not get a lot of experience with his father’s voice compared to his mother’s voice. Surprisingly, even as late as four months old, some babies still show no preference for their father’s voice. (3)

We begin life ‘mixed up’ with our mother’s body, and for good or ill, it shows.

But is it possible to experience Christ in maternal or non-masculine terms?

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often have I wanted to gather you up, like a hen gathers her chicks beneath her wings. And yet, you were not willing! (Matthew 23: 37).

The most obvious sense of Christ as ‘mother church’ - in the sense of ‘archaic consciousness’, in the sense of our original cosmic parent and womb - is once again the opening words of John’s Gospel; read, that is, not as masculine Greek ‘Logos’, but in Jewish terms as divine feminine Wisdom:

When God set the heavens in place - I was there. When God fixed the sea’s horizon - I was there. When God made firm the sky and set the fountains that feed the sea; When God bound the ocean with shore, and the sand with sea - I was there. (Proverbs 8: 27-29).

I was God’s confident and architect, a source of endless delight, playing before him without ceasing, rejoicing in creation, delighting in humankind. (Proverbs 8: 29-31).

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. (John 1: 1-3).

You will forgive the length of the next quote, but it is an unsurpassed biblical meditation on the divine feminine spirit that ‘pervades and penetrates all things’, that is the spark of our potential, healing, integration, and growth:

There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy,
unique, manifold, subtle,
mobile, clear, unpolluted,
distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen,
irresistible, beneficent, humane,
steadfast, sure, free from anxiety,
all-powerful, overseeing all,
and penetrating through all spirits
that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle.
For wisdom is more mobile than any motion;
because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.

For she is a breath of the power of God,
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.
For she is a reflection of eternal light,
a spotless mirror of the working of God,
and an image of his goodness.

Although she is but one, she can do all things,
and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;
in every generation she passes into holy souls
and makes them friends of God, and prophets;
for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.

She is more beautiful than the sun,
and excels every constellation of the stars.
Compared with the light she is found to be superior,
for it is succeeded by the night,
but against wisdom evil does not prevail. (Wisdom 7:22-30).

Icon of Sophia, Wisdom of God (the central figure is a depiction of Christ as Sophia)

Richard Rohr writes:

Although Jesus was clearly of the masculine gender, the Christ is beyond gender, and so it should be expected that the Big Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full Divine Incarnation and to give God a more feminine character - as the Bible often does.(4)

Creation, for Rohr, is the ‘first Incarnation’, where the Spirit of God becomes the body of the world. He continues:

Whenever I go to Europe, I am always struck by how many churches bear the name of Mary, Jesus’s mother. I think I encountered a “Notre Dame of something” church in every French city I ever visited, and sometimes even two or three in one small town. Some of these churches are big and ornate, most are very old, and they usually inspire respect and devotion, even among nonbelievers. Yet even as a Catholic I sometimes wonder, Who were these Christian people who appear to have honoured Mary much more than Jesus?

Rohr then offers us his own, mature conclusion:

In the mythic imagination, I think Mary intuitively symbolizes the first Incarnation - or Mother Earth, if you will allow me. (I am not saying Mary is the first incarnation, only that she became the natural archetype and symbol for it, particularly in art, which is perhaps why the Madonna is still the most painted subject in Western art). I believe Mary is the first major feminine archetype for the Christ Mystery. This archetype had already shown herself as Sophia or Holy Wisdom…The first incarnation (creation) is symbolized by Sophia-Incarnate, a beautiful, feminine, multicoloured, graceful Mary. She is invariably offering us Jesus, God incarnated into vulnerability and nakedness.

Kelly Latimore, Mary Breastfeeding Baby Jesus (icon)

Archaic or primal consciousness manifests in Christianity as what I’m rather clumsily calling the primal stage of ‘mother church’. It might be better named as the seed of life and light dwelling within the womb of God, against which no evil can prevail. George Fox simply called it the inward light, or that of God in everyone. Although it can be thoroughly dishonoured, blasphemed against and crucified (in various ways), it can never be destroyed insofar as God, the Eternal Spirit, can never be destroyed - though God can be, it seems, endlessly abused.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Like other stages, if we experience significant challenges and difficulties in completing this stage in a ‘good enough’ way, it can have important implications for what comes after. Perhaps this is even more so when we are dealing with the first stage or original ground level of consciousness.

For Catholic contemplative, Father Thomas Keating, the first ‘Guideline for Christian Life, Growth, and Transformation’ is:

The fundamental goodness of human nature, like the mystery of the Trinity, Grace, and Incarnation, is an essential element of Christian faith. This basic core of goodness is capable of unlimited development; indeed, of becoming transformed into Christ and deified. (5)

Such life, growth, and transformation, of course, do not all happen in the stage of archaic or primal consciousness. We need to complete and grow past this stage, in as much as we are able or called to (reserving the very significant possibility that not all of us are called to leave this stage, and that a good many of us may ‘return’ to this stage, although in a different way, in life crises or in our dying).

I am suggesting that completing or at least consolidating stage one of the journey of consciousness, from a Christian perspective, includes experiencing good enough trust and faith in the basic core of our goodness, of our ontological status as ‘children of the light’, and of trusting and experiencing God (and/or Reality) as a good-enough, loving mother (or parent, or supportive positive force).

If we are prevented or unsupported from doing so when young, and ‘completing’ this stage can never be an individual-only project or achievement, we will consciously or unconsciously find ways return to this level and wound (in some manner, though largely centred in another stage of consciousness), and heal, hopefully, and integrate its gifts. But how often is this exploration, healing, and integration stymied by ‘church’? How often have subsequent levels of ‘church’ actively severed us from our natural/divine root, making the ground more treacherous as we journey on?

Psychologically speaking, it is extremely hard, and perhaps impossible, to trust the idea and promise of a loving divine parent when our first (and perhaps subsequent) experience of human beings - ‘the other’ - has been exceptionally negligent, abusive, or lacking. Yet the seed never dies. The ‘central radiance’ is never permanently extinguished, even if outwardly it seems the case.

After brain surgery for a benign tumour, several years ago, my health and consciousness completely fell apart. I was in unceasing physical pain, severely anxious, severely depressed, and had regressed to a terrifying, primitive place. Eventually, medication and good psychiatric care glued me back together again, enough that I began to sleep, feel less terrified, and ‘cohere’ once more. As I came together, the world did too. I was much better, but only 30% of the way there.

The other 70% of my recovery was a combination of many things, some quite physical and ‘primal’ (such as a healing diet), and including meditation, or contemplative prayer, or waiting and basking in the light. I remember meditating one Easter in a house we were staying at in the country. Suddenly I was aware that there was light, once again, inside me. Real physical light, shining in the darkness within, as well as a lightening of my spirit and mood. I don’t believe that the contemplative prayer created the light, but it sure as hell started blowing the coals of it further alive.

Finally, in my life these days, and in a more earthy, pragmatic sense, I believe I am enjoying the goodness of my primal level of consciousness, and affirming my membership in the great, invisible ‘mother church’, whenever I fall asleep in meditation or contemplative prayer, or others doze off in Meeting for Worship around me, and we wake up softly without guilt or shame, simply feeling refreshed.

References

(1) “Hearing in the womb”, Charlotte Tozier Institute: https://lozierinstitute.org/dive-deeper/hearing-in-the-womb/.

(2) Caroline Stephen, Light Arising: Thoughts on the Central Radiance (1908), p.2

(3) “Hearing in the womb”, as above.

(4) This, and the following quotes from Rohr, from Richard Rohr, The Univeral Christ (2019), pp.122-123.

(5) Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart (1986/2006), p.158.

‘Mother church’: archaic or primal consciousness

Stages and churches, cautiously