To The Best Of Our Knowledge; In The Beginning...

From PRI, Public Radio International, it's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Jim Fleming. What happened in the beginning? In the beginning there were two realms. Moosebell was in the south, and it was full of fire and blinding light. Fire in your head. Never mind. The space of the universe was in the shape of a hands -ad. None of them knew the great love that created the world. She had 12. The goddess who is responsible for reading mankind is told to you. He is out there. And you travel all over the world. And you make all the nights. In the beginning there was no room in the south. And the world was full of fire and blinding light. The great of the birds, and just as the wind got it. The great of the birds, and just as the wind got it. The wind was in the south. Two rivers, and five streams, and four rivers, and five rivers, and five streams, and five rivers. The great of birds, and just as the wind got it. Creation

Stories, a way of explaining how we got here. On this planet, in this universe, with this life, we're talking about beginnings today from the Big Bang to biblical creation stories to baby birthing. So let's begin with some of the oldest creation stories we have. poet Stephen Mitchell has retranslated a lot of them. Stephen, when people want to ask the primal question, where are we, what's it all about? They almost always turn to religion, and I guess specifically to religious texts. So I want to talk to you about what these stories tell us about our beginnings. How did we get here? And maybe the most famous of all of them is Genesis. Your translation of the Genesis story has, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was chaos, and there was darkness over the abyss, and the spirit of God hovered above the waters, and God said, let there be light. That's a pretty powerful beginning, isn't it? That's a wonderful

story. It's a very simple story, the language could barely be simpler, and it's a story of a methodical exuberance, one thing after another, beginning with light, created, and one joy after another. It's a kind of, you could say, portrait of the artist as God. It culminates in a marvelous description of what can be called the Sabbath mind, where God contemplates everything He has made, and sees that it is all very good. That's the part that reads, on the seventh day, God saw that His work was completed, and He blessed the seventh day, and made it holy, because on it He rested from all the works of creation. That part of the story is incredibly rich, because it's really a wonderful description of what the human mind can come to when it realizes itself. There's a balance and a depth that it comes to, where it sees everything

in life, everything in the universe as very good, and that is what spiritual paths like Buddhism and Taoism call realization, a kind of ultimate, unshakable happiness. But what's curious to me, and listening to you talk about that, is that we shifted away from where do we come from and why, where we came from, God made us. But it doesn't say why, unless the why is that God wanted to do something good and did and took pleasure in it. No, it doesn't say why, isn't that fascinating? It's just that primal creative impulse. You can imagine God in all His worldless, silent eternity, suddenly having a wonderful idea and immediately proceeding to play that out, let there be light. I mean, it's so simple and rich in its imagination.

We don't think of why at all. Well, we've been talking pretty much about the Bible at this point. And there are other sources of stories about the origins. What about the East? I know you have translated both the Tao Dajing and the Bhagavad Gita. Are there beginning myths in those, or is it simply a different way of looking at why we're here? It's a very different way. There are mythical, you could say, thought forms that split in and out of the Bhagavad Gita, but it's really a kind of myth that explodes myth. The figure of God there is called Krishna. And Krishna is a character in the story that opens the Bhagavad Gita. But very soon it becomes quite apparent that the poet is looking at God and the most vast way, a way that's astonishing for someone who's grown up just in the Judeo -Christian world. Or there are

passages in it that are sort of mind -blowing where God says things like, I am death and the deathless. I am all that is and is not. And where he says he contains the entire universe. It's a portrait of God as everything, as the beginning and the end. And what is beyond the beginning and the end, as the place of the universe, as the essence of the universe, is something and beyond thing that contains everything imaginable. This is a difficult thing for a Western reader to come into, isn't it? We like our stories of creation. We like our stories of beginnings in middles and ends. And what you're saying is that the Bhagavad Gita, which is at the heart of Hinduism, doesn't believe in beginnings or creators. That's true. There's something beyond creation, beyond the figure of a being creating other beings. That is seen as a relatively small way of

worshiping God. Interestingly enough, the way that the Bhagavad Gita enters the consciousness of the 20th century, in my opinion, is at Alamagordo in 1945, at the explosion of the first Atomic bomb, when Robert Oppenheimer saw that in awe and horror, he thought of the verse from the Gita, which talks about God as brighter than a thousand sons. He also thought of another verse from the Gita, which is, I am death. Krishna talks about himself as God, as including all evil, all death, as well as all good and all beauty. That's very hard for the ordinary human mind to get around. We haven't talked at all about the Tautiching, which is yet another way of looking at the world. And this one, I think, doesn't deal so much with beginnings, but it does deal with the universality

of being. The Tautiching is probably, at least in my opinion, the most profound of all the spiritual scriptures that we have. Like the Gita, it self -destructs at the very beginning. It says that anything that you can say about ultimate reality is false. It's a lie, because you're using language to describe what can't be described. And along the way, it will say things like, when you go before the beginning and go after the end, then you can begin to glimpse reality. There's a lovely little verse in your translation of it that goes something like, look, and it can't be seen. Listen, and it can't be heard. Approach it, and there's no beginning. Follow it, and there's no end. You can't know it, but you can be it. I love verses like that in the Tautiching, because even if somebody is coming at it cold, and without

understanding what in the world the Tautiching is talking about, still there's a kind of resonance that, for many readers, sound somehow genuine. They can't understand it. They don't really know what it's talking about, but there's something there that draws them on. We've talked about all sorts of questionings of the beginnings that have been done in different cultures and different religions. Is there a common answer? I wouldn't say a common answer, but what is common is the very natural creative impulse to question. Questions like why or where, where do we come from, things like that, lead to all sorts of fascinating and maybe valuable stories of creation, stories of beginning. But the question behind the question is what's truly valuable. It doesn't have words. It's a kind of impetus, and if we take it deep enough, we can get to the

bedrock of human experience. And that, too, just like the question doesn't have words. Stephen Mitchell's translations of spiritual and religious poetry include the Tautiching, the Book of Job, the Bhagavad Gita, Genesis, and many more. I am the wind on the sea. I am the stormy wave. I am the sound of the ocean. I am the bull with seven horns. I am the hawk on the cliff face. I am the sun's tear. I am the beautiful flower. I am the boar on the rampage. I am the salmon in the pool. I am the lake on the plain.

I am the defiant word. I am the spear charging to battle. I am the God who put fire in your head, who made the trails through stone mountains, who knows the age of the moon, who knows where the setting sun rests, who took the cattle from the house of the war crow, who pleases the war crow's cattle. What bull, what god created the mountain skyline, the cutting word, the cold word? In the beginning, there was only water, and the water animals that lived in it. Then a woman fell from a torn place in the sky. She was a

divine woman, full of power. Two loons flying over the water saw her falling. They flew under her, close together, making a pillow for her to sit on. The loons held her up and cried for help. They could be heard for a long way as they called for other animals to come. The snapping turtle came to help. The loons put the woman on the turtle's back, then the turtle called all the other animals to help. The animals decided the woman needed earth to live on. The turtle said, dive down in the water and bring up some earth. So they did that, those animals. A beaver went down, a muskrat went down. Each time, turtle looked inside their mouths when they came up, but there was no earth to be found. Toad went under the water. He stayed too

long and he nearly died. But when turtle looked inside Toad's mouth, he found a little earth. The woman took it and put it all around on turtle shell. That was the start of the earth. Dry land grew until it formed a country, then another country, and all the earth. To this day, turtle holds up the earth. That's a story from the Huron people of the St. Lawrence Valley. We also heard a poem from one of the earliest recorded Celtic myths, American song. You'll find these and more creation stories on our website at www .ttbook .org and still to come. The Big Bang, Theories of Reincarnation and a visit with America's most famous midwife. I'm Jim Fleming. It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International. Where

did people come from? Where did people come from? Where did people come from? If somebody's dream, I don't know. I don't know. That's a good question. I'd say nowhere or everywhere. Where did people come from? Interesting question. Where did people come from? India, which my dad came from, actually. And Milwaukee, Chicago, Ohio. Indiana, Wisconsin, Korea. Well, we evolved from these little one -celled amoebas. And each generation, which might be 10 ,000, 12 ,000 years, they kept getting more and more cells and pretty soon. Here we are, Wala. From the heart and

the creative side of God's brain, and it's all. Where did people come from? A regular process of birth and death? People came and lived through a male and female getting together and having a baby. I don't know if we'll ever know or have the capacity to ever know, but wherever they came from, it's good knowing that we're here. Some big primordial soup. Where do we come from? Well, how about if we start even earlier? Where did the universe come from? Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has been asking that one for years. He teaches at the City University of New York and hosts a nationally syndicated radio show about science. His latest book is called Parallel Worlds. Kaku told Steve Paulson about the new theory that our universe may be a kind of echo from the Big Bang of

another universe. It's called the multiverse theory. Think of soap bubbles. We live on the surface of an expanding soap bubble. And if you jiggle a soap bubble, sometimes it vibrates and splits in half, and then you have two soap bubbles. So when soap bubbles bud off another or sprouts off another, and this is called eternal inflation. And so, of course, we can't prove all these theories yet, but the experimental data is coming in in the direction of inflation, which does support the idea of a multiverse. That is, an ocean of bubbles. Each bubble then fissioning off and creating more bubbles. And so we have Genesis taking place in an eternal nirvana. So theoretically, each black hole out there and scientists have identified black holes. Hundreds. Each one might be creating a new Big Bang. That's right. Now, the inflation theory is actually independent of the black hole idea, but it's intriguing that if inflation takes place all the time, perhaps it could take place in the form of black holes, in which case the matter being

sucked into the black hole actually seeds the next universe being blown out the other end. And of course, we can't see the other end. There's a wormhole or a tube that connects our universe with a baby universe. And it does mean that perhaps our universe butted off perhaps another universe. Our universe looks very much like a black hole, by the way. A black hole, from a physicist's point of view, is nothing but a bubble. A closed bubble. You cannot leave the bubble. And of course, that's what a black hole is, something you can't leave. And our universe is the same thing. You cannot leave our universe. And so our universe may actually be a black hole. Now, when you talk about these other universes, you're saying they exist in some other dimension that at least at the moment given our technology that we have and we have no possible way of connecting to them. I mean, each universe, presumably, unless it's a baby universe, has thousands or millions of galaxies and goes on for eons. I mean, every one of these universes is like this. Well, that was the old thinking. The new thinking is that we can actually detect these universes and millions

of your taxpayers' dollars now are going to physics experiments to detect the presence of these other bubble universes. For example, there's something called dark matter out there. We now realize that dark matter is about 10 times more plentiful than ordinary matter. Except dark matter is invisible. It has weight, but it's invisible. Now, gravity goes between these soap bubbles. We're stuck on one bubble. But gravity freely goes between soap bubbles. So if there's a nearby soap bubble, then perhaps we're seeing the gravity of their galaxies. The shadow matter, the galaxies have their own gravity that hops across to our universe. And so there's a theory that says that dark matter, which we have verified with the Hubble Space Telescope. In fact, we even have gorgeous maps of dark matter now, this invisible matter that envelops the universe. But that may be shadow matter, gravity that has hopped across a parallel universe to ours. And dark matter is one of the great mysteries in astronomy, right? Now, I mean, it from what I have heard, I mean, it makes up most of the matter of the universe, but no one has

any idea what it is. That's right. There are two theories as a dark matter. Both of them coming from something called string theory, which is what I do for a living. I'm one of the pioneers in string theory. One is that dark matter is shadow matter, just like the invisible man, gravity from one of the universe. The other theory is that dark matter could be made out of particles, super particles that is higher octaves of the super string. Now, we believe that we can't yet prove that all matter we see around us are nothing but musical notes. Musical notes on tiny, tiny little vibrating strings. So the laws of physics are the laws of harmony. And when these strings bump into each other, they create chemistry. So chemistry would be the melodies played out on these strings. The universe would be a symphony of strings. And the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about in his memoirs, the mind of God would be cosmic music resonating, not through ordinary space, but through hyperspace, perhaps 11 dimensional hyperspace. And so the other theory

is that dark matter is nothing but the next octave, the next octave of these vibrating strings. So both interpretations of dark matter require the introduction of multiple universes. Okay. I don't have a clue what any of that means, but I will look like it's right again. No, no, no. I mean, you've, I think that's for someone, if my scientific knowledge, I think that's about as good as it's going to get. But can you actually, do you think we'll ever get to the point where you can actually prove or disprove the existence of other universes? Some people smirk and say, well, who are you to talk about the mind of God? Einstein couldn't do it. So how do you test a theory of the multiverse? Well, in 2011, six years from now, NASA will be launching into outer space the most ambitious satellite of all time is called Lisa. Laser interferometry space antenna. It is three satellites connected by laser beams. Each laser beam

is three million miles across, making a triangle in outer space. Now, gravity waves from the instant of creation are still circulating around the universe. These vibrations will hit Lisa, jiggle the laser beams, and we should be able to pick up the characteristic frequency of vibration from the instant of creation still circulating around the universe. Now, string theory, inflation, they all give predictions as to what the vibrations should look like. And so this could nail it to the wall. This could lead to a whole series of Nobel Prizes once Lisa goes into orbit. And for the first time in history, would give us direct evidence and prove or disprove many of these pre -bigbang theories that are now being proposed. So we're no longer talking about science fiction. We're no longer talking about speculation. Some people don't have to snicker anymore that you cannot test string theory because it's a theory of universes. How do you create a

universe in a laboratory after all? We don't have to. Our own universe is a laboratory. It's a laboratory that will be probed by Lisa beginning 2011. Michio Kaku is the co -founder of string field theory. His latest book is called Parallel Worlds, a journey through creation, higher dimensions, and the future of the cosmos. Steve Paulson spoke with him. The blueprint consistent with the known laws of physics as to how to escape our dying universe. You would have to have huge laser beams, and banks of laser beams, and atomist measure. The device would be several star systems long. That is, it would be approximately 10 light years across. And this, of course, is not for us. We can barely leave the Earth with our space probes, let alone go to the nearest star. This machine would have to be at least 10 light years across, in order

to focus enough temperature, heat, light at a single point in which to open a hole in space. Now, the bad news is that preliminary calculations you can do with Einstein's equations show that the hole is very small. And if so, then a dying civilization may have to resort to the ultimate. And that is, shoot a robot. Shoot a molecular -sized robot, a nanobot, through the wormhole, which will then land on a planet and build copies of itself, trillions of copies of this molecular robot, which will then build a DNA factory. The DNA factory will then clone its masters who will die in the old universe. And the whole civilization could be recreated in the new universe. Now, believe it or not, no matter how preposterous this may sound, this is consistent with all the known laws of physics and biology. That a dying civilization may be able to recreate itself by sending its

DNA across a wormhole to a parallel universe and start all over again. The space of the universe was in the shape of a hand's egg. Within the egg was a great mass called no -thing. Inside no -thing was something not yet born. It was not yet developed and it was called Panku. In no time, Panku burst from the egg. He was the first being. He was the great creator. Panku was the size of a giant. He grew 10 feet a day and lived for 18 ,000 years. Here grew all over Panku.

Horns curved up out of his head and the tusks jutted from his jaw. In one hand, he held a chisel and with it, he carved out the world. He chiseled out earth rivers. He scooped out the valleys. He placed the stars in the moon in the night sky and the sun into the day. Only when Panku died was the world at last complete. The dome of the sky was made from Panku's skull. The soil was formed from his body. Rocks were made from his bones, rivers and the seas from his blood. All of plant life came from Panku's hair. Thunder and the lightning are the sound of his voice. The wind and the clouds are his breath. Rain was made from sweat. And from the fleas that lived in here cover him, came all of humankind. The form of Panku

vanished in the making of the world. After he was gone, there was room then for pain. And that is how suffering came to human beings. In the beginning there were two realms. Muspel was in the south and it was full of fire and blinding light. Niflaim, the home of fog, ice and snow lay in the north. Between the two realms was a vast stretch of empty space. The place called Yawning Gap. Warmer drifted from Muspel and mixed with the cold from Niflaim. This breath of summer and winter met in a thaw above the middle realm of Yawning Gap. The drips and drops started life growing. And life took the form of a great giant. His name was Emmer.

And from the beginning he was evil. Emmer was a frost giant. He laid out to sleep and sweated through the night. A woman and a man grew from his armpit. A son came forth from his leg. From Emmer came the first family of ice -crusted frost giants. Melting ice from the middle realm of Yawning Gap formed into a giant cow. Emmer drank the rivers of milk from the cow. The cow lived off the ice itself. She licked and licked blocks of it. A man's head appeared from one block. For three days and nights the cow fed on the ice block. And finally a whole man was born from it. Music Creation stories from Virginia Hamilton's collection in the beginning.

You know for some people the question isn't where did we come from. It's, have we been here before? For the past 40 years doctors at the University of Virginia have conducted research into young children's reports of memories of previous lives. They've investigated several thousand cases in which children as young as two or three say they remember previous families. Things they did when they were adults. Even the way they died. Is this proof positive of reincarnation? Jim Tucker is a child psychiatrist and the current director of the children's memories project. He told Anne Strange Shamps the sheer number of cases is hard to explain any other way. We get children telling reports of memories of previous lives from all over the country. And in fact all over the world. It's easiest to find the cases in Asia but we're collecting dozens of them now in the United States. Some of them involve children talking about a deceased family member that they say they remember being. And they know there's talking about complete strangers in other locations. One of the American

ones was a little boy where when he was 18 months old, his dad was changing his diaper one day and the boy looks up at his dad and says, when I was your age, I used to change your diapers. And the father found this quite odd. He and his wife were not religious, certainly didn't believe in reincarnation. But then the boy started talking more and more about having been his grandfather and gave a number of details. And his mom in particular became quite interested. So she started asking him some questions. What sort of things did he say? One thing he would just say that he was his grandfather. But then he would talk about things like she asked him one time if he had any brothers or sisters. And he said, yeah, how he had a sister who died and how she had been turned into a fish. And it turned out that the grandfather's sister 60 years before had been murdered and her body had been dumped in the bay, which was needless to say quite traumatic to the grandfather. And would this boy have known anything otherwise about

his grandfather? Did he grow up with stories about his grandfather? Does parents talk a lot about his grandfather? Well, they certainly didn't talk about the sister being murdered. In fact, they had only recently found out about it themselves. But yeah, certainly, you know, people do talk about grandparents at times. But they felt that he had information that he could not have known from anywhere. And in addition, when his grandmother died, his father went out to her home and collected some of the belongings and came back with pictures. And before that, they did not have any pictures of the father's family up in the home. So the boy's mom had them spread out on the coffee table one night looking at him and he came over and started saying, no, that's me. That's me pointing to the grandfather. So she showed him a picture of an elementary school class picture and asked him to pick out his grandfather and he ran his finger along the different pictures and then stuffed at the one of the grandfather and said, that's me. Is this pretty typical of the stories you've been collecting? It

is. It's typical in a lot of ways, except again, this involves what we call a same family case. Then we also get cases where kids are describing being total strangers. And in those cases, they often really express a lot of longing to return to the previous family and to see them. For instance, is there one of those that comes to mind? There's a little girl in India who talked a lot about a previous life in a town where she named the city, which is a large city in India. She named the city and even the subsection of the city where she said she had lived. She gave the name of both her son and her grandson from that life, gave a lot of other details about that life. And eventually her father had a friend who was from there and sent him to try to track this down and found that in fact there was somebody there, a woman who had died who matched the description perfectly. Yeah, this just sounds so bizarre. I can't imagine

you've got some stranger with a child shows up at your door and says, excuse me, my child thinks he used to be your wife or something. Is that how it happens? It is how it happens, although usually if there's advance warning, they don't just show up at the family and say, hey, this child used to be your wife. But these cases happen, or at least they're easiest to find in Asia where they're in cultures with a belief in reincarnation. So it's not as completely bizarre as it might be if it happened to a family here. How many of these stories have you collected? We've collected over 2 ,500. That's a lot of cases. And again, it's from all over the world. Since we set up our website, we've been hearing from more and more American families and we've heard from over 100 of those in the last few years. And most of these families are ones that had no belief in reincarnation at all before their child started saying these things. So what do you make of this? I mean, are you now

based on having heard so many of these stories? Are you a believer in reincarnation? Well, first of all, we certainly keep an open attitude to this work. It's one that we're doing with a scientific attitude, not with sort of a religious kind of attitude. I think if you look at the strongest cases as a group, then the best explanation for them is that at times, at least, memories and emotions can sometimes carry over from one life to the next. What do the children themselves say about this? I mean, do the children say I was reincarnated? I had a past life. I chose you. I mean, how do the children explain these memories? Most of them do not come out with, like, enlightened words of wisdom. It's just for them, part of their experience of life is that they have these memories. Do they

persist throughout their whole lives? No. The memories usually stop by the age of six or seven, which is also the age where children lose memories of their early childhood anyway, and along with that, there are exceptions, but they usually lose the memories that they're reporting from previous lives. Out of more personal level, I wanted to ask... I mean, you've collected these, you've lived with these stories for a long time, you've thought about them a long time. What do they make you think about where we come from? Well, I think these stories, along with other areas of science, suggest that consciousness may well be more than just a byproduct of functioning brain. The consciousness is a separate entity in the universe, and it's something that may be able to continue after the physical body dies. Jim Tucker is a child psychiatrist, and

director of the University of Virginia's project on children's memories of previous lives. His most recent book on the subject is called Life Before Life. He spoke with Andstrane Champs. Andstrane Champs. Nana Baluku, the great mother, created the world. She had twins, Mao and Lisa. Mao was the moon who had the power over the night and lived in the west. Lisa was the sun who made his home in the east. They were mother and father of all other gods, and there were 14 of these gods who were seven pairs of twins. One day, Mao and Lisa called all of her children to come around them. When they all came, Mao and Lisa gave each pair of twins a good place to rule. The first twins were told to rule Earth. The second pair of twins were told to stay in the sky. You will rule over thunder and lightning, said Mao and Lisa. The third pair, who were

iron, were the strength of their parents. You will clear the forests and prepare the land, Mao and Lisa said, and you will give humans their tools and weapons. The next twins were to live in the sea. Children rule all waters and all fishes, Mao and Lisa commanded. Other twins would rule over the birds and beasts of the bush country. More twins were to take care of the space between the earth and sky, and you will also make the length of time that humans shall live, said Mao and Lisa. Then Mao said, come visit me. You will tell me everything that goes on in the world. He was out there, traveling all over and making things. Old man, he had been south and was on his way north. He created the birds and animals as he went. He made prairies always traveling north

and mountains. Old man decided one day that he would make a mother and her child. He farmed them out of clay. He molded the clay into the shape of humans, and he spoke to them. You will be people, he said. He covered up the clay shapes and went away. Next morning, old man went to the place, taking the covering off the shapes. They seemed to have changed just a little. The morning after that, the shapes had changed some more. And the next day, they were different still. On the fourth morning, old man went over and looked at the shapes that were images of people now. Rise up, walk, old man told them. And they rose up and started walking. They, the woman and child and their maker, walked to the river. That's a story from the Blackfoot tribe of North America. We also

heard one from the phone people from the Republic of Benin. When we come back, a visit with America's most famous midwife, and Jim Fleming, it's to the best of our knowledge from PRI Public Radio International. What do I know what the birth of a universe sounds like? Seems incredible, but because the vibrations of the Big Bang are still out there in space, cosmologists now think they know what the Big Bang sounded like. After warning you, it's more like a big hiss. But hey, it's not every day. You get to hear the sound of a million years compressed into ten seconds. Here goes.

Okay, so the heartbeat's our addition. Because for all our talk about universal origins, that's where life really begins, isn't it? With the sound of a heartbeat, a first cry, a first breath. Birth is such a miracle. And no one knows that better than Ina Mae Gaskin. She is the woman widely credited with having created the modern midwifery movement. A grandmotherly ex hippie, who lives on the legendary Tennessee commune called the farm, Gaskin has delivered hundreds, well, actually thousands of babies, all naturally. There are an estimated 10 ,000 midwives in America today, but when Ina Mae Gaskin began her practice, they were almost none. She told Anne Strange, it was her own experience of having a baby that convinced

her something had to change. It was the first time when I found that I had to be skeptical of what a doctor was telling me. And when I told the doctor one week before I actually went into labor, oh, by the way, I don't want any medication. He said, oh, no, no, no, we're going to have a forceps delivery. Now, I had a master's degree in English, and that means you've read a lot of English novels and the forceps stories in those novels are not pretty. So what happened? Well, what happened was that I thought that my major strategy was, I'll be really quiet, and then they won't make me do it. And I was wrong about that. They did leave me alone for a long time, and then they came in and they had masks on, and they did what they wanted to do with me. And I didn't have any fight in me. I hadn't realized that I would have had to, you know, freak out and slug somebody to avoid that. So I did have the forceps delivery,

and I had the long separation with my baby, and that's what really made me know that there was something wrong here. Tell me about the first birth that showed you there could be another way. There's a story I've read that the first time you helped birth a baby, it was in the back of a school bus. That's right. This was, I guess, back in the 1960s, and you and your husband were hippies basically traveling around in this kind of commune, and one of the women went into labor and gave birth on the bus. That's right, and it was the best birth, I think, that I could possibly have seen. I'll never stop being grateful for my good fortune, and that everything was perfect. And she gave birth in an hour and a half, seemingly without pain, she needed to look at me, and we both needed to relax together, and I saw how it ought to be. It was perfect that baby was born, the placenta came, all of the things that people get so frightened of didn't happen. What about pain?

Why not think about what if something goes wrong? What if this happens? What if that happens? As soon as you entertain a thought like that, your heart rate will quicken, your breathing will quicken, and get more shallow. That causes pain. On the other hand, if you are with somebody who knows how to relax and is just giving you a facial expression, or, you know, those eyes that say you're doing great, this is wonderful. And what I was thinking, I was looking at her, is why didn't anybody ever tell me how gorgeous women can be giving birth? Of course, we didn't have video in those days to show you, and I'd never seen a photograph, I'd never seen a drawing, I'd never seen anything about anything giving birth. And so it was really quite something to see this woman looking so ravishingly beautiful. The first book you wrote about your experiences as an early midwife was called Spiritual Midwifery, and it became kind of the Bible of the early midwifery movement, and it's

still, you know, as a book that many women buy and read it still in print after all these years. I was thinking it's funny because you would think that giving birth would be one of the most spiritual experiences you can have, and yet we so often just talk about it as a physical experience. What did you mean when you called it a spiritual experience? Well, just what you said, your thought that it's a physical experience, only almost a mechanical experience. In fact, that's often, if you look at the language in medical textbooks, that's the way doctors in training are taught, a kind of woman is a machine. She's anything but a machine. And I was floored by the energy that I felt in that room, and it reminded me of a story that another woman had told me. Her second baby was born in her country home, and she had a labor and delivery nurse, friend of hers, who she talked into sitting with her, thinking that this woman would be

aware if she were in trouble and they wouldn't go into the hospital. Well, there was no trouble, and the baby was duly born, and they were sitting on the bed admiring the baby, and they looked up at the window, and the neighbor's cows had walked about a hundred yards up the road, and we're now looking in the window. Now, that's what told me birth was spiritual. I just thought, what drew those cows there, and did they start a religion? What if that's the case every time, and that we just don't notice? Don't you think there's also something culturally about how we approach pain? I mean, we tend to approach pain, and think we just want to get rid of it. Just take a cover. Don't experience it, and my own? We don't take it as a teacher, perhaps. For instance, in the Netherlands, I interviewed a lot of women there, where still, close to 40 % of women give birth at home, and those women that go into hospital kind of rarely want

an epidural. Why? Because they know it's possible for there to be a euphoria. There is a euphoria, even those who experience pain may feel that during a contraction. There's an excitement and a wish to be aware, the same in Japan, where I talked to many, many women, and they said, oh no, no, we're afraid of earthquakes, we're afraid of typhoons, but birth, that's normal. Earlier, you referred to the experience of birth as being potentially empowering for women, really affecting how they feel about their bodies and themselves. Can you talk about that a bit more? Sure. I would refer to, well, I think one of the most powerful stories, is one that's told in my book that came out in 2003, Anima's Guide to Childbirth. And this particular woman, she's a good -sized woman, and she tended to grow really huge babies. Normal -sized baby for her was around 10 pounds, because her babies were big and this was seen on ultrasound. She had two caissarins, and she

was so let down by the surgeries, and of course, she found post -surgery quite painful. Well, we accepted her into care, and she did manage to give birth vaguely on this third baby. And she was at home then watching the Winter Olympics, the Luz and the downhill skiing and all that, and she said, that's not too impressive. Try having a 10 -and -a -half pound baby after Tuesday's series, and then we'll talk. She was, she found such strength, and she said, I felt like I could lift a car afterward. She said, I was on top of the world. I wouldn't have traded that for anything. So, I think that that's what happens when women who get to know a community of women who all find that you can learn how to give birth. As a group of women together, in our group, we had a woman

who had a baby, and she, this was her first baby, and she didn't even know she was in labor. Whereas her husband thought he was dying. He had horrible cramps. Probably all the time that her uterus was at work. Well, that's a nice arrangement if you can work it out. I know, and you know, anthropologists tell of this, you know, phenomenon called Kuvaid, but this woman actually experienced it. She massaged her husband, and he thought he was, you know, dying of appendicitis or something. So, she massages him, relieves his pain, she starts to feel like she's a great healer. She fixes some supper, they eat some supper, and then she starts to feel a little, not so good herself, kind of a little bit crampy or gassy. She thinks maybe she has a flu, goes in and sits on the toilet, and then the next minute she's yelling at her husband, come on in here, and help me, everything's coming out. I think she was afraid that all of her internal organs were coming out, but in fact it was just one baby who fortunately was caught by his father before he had the water. So, she

was among us, and taught us, you know, just by her presence that this was possible. That changes your idea because when you don't hear these stories, and we never see this on television, why? Because those births that happen that fast, it's impossible to record them. Birth is so miraculous, and nobody can imagine that, you know, woman's body can open without injury the amount it needs to to let a baby's, a big old baby, you know, a 10 or a 10 and a half pounder. Or even a 11 pound, or even a 12 pound baby, and the woman can open that much. It's miraculous, and even if you've seen it a thousand times, you still go, that's unbelievable. And it does it, but it only does it when fear is out the room. Einame Gaskin is the author of Spiritual Midwifery and of Einame's Guide to Childbirth. She spoke with an stranger. She speaks. Oh, who's gonna rock here?

Oh, who's gonna rock here? Oh, who's gonna rock here? Oh, who's gonna rock the baby? I will, I'll do my part, I will, with all of my heart. It's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Jim Fleming. You can buy a copy of this program by calling the radio store at 1 -800 -747 -7444. Ask for, in the beginning, program number 1120 -A. To the best of our knowledge, the recipient of the 2005 Peabody Award, is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio by Steve Paulson and Strange Shamps, Veronica Rickert, Doug Gordon, Marythus Finnegan, and Charles Monroe Kane. Our intern is John Peterson. Our technical director is Carillo One.