CREATING LIFE,
NEGATING CONCEPTION
...and other secrets of
hormonal self-control

(Please note: this article concerns hormonal, not genetic factors in childbirth. Visualization may have a hormonal effect on a pregnancy but in no way affects a genetically troubled pregnancy. Ideas in this article are experimental and under no circumstances should they replace conventional birth control methods, or normal medical advice. rl).

The Nuts & Bolts of Effective Visualization

The usefulness of the idea of hormonal choice is dependent on women grasping the basics and then proceeding to make hormonal self-control factual in their own experience in whatever terms each perceives it. Those for whom these techniques will prove most successful are those with sensitivity, intelligence, and personality (physical, emotional and mental) control and whose understanding is soundly based on practical, accurate fact. Or, as a gynecologist recently put it, "those who know when they become pregnant".

Menstruation in women is a critical aspect of an unconscious monthly cycle, an interrelated series of chemical and hormonal instructions between brain (hypothalamus), glands (anterior pituitary), ovaries (corpus luteum) and uterus (lining). The hypothalamus, known as the lower or unconscious brain, plays an automatic, active role in menstruation. Under certain conditions (such as visualization or meditation), the mind, through the conscious parts of the brain, can affect the activities of the unconscious brain or hypothalamus and, in turn, the reproductive cycle.

The hypothalamus is sensitive to only one ovarian hormone, estrogen. On receipt of this estrogen message, acting as a gland, this automatic element of the brain sends a chemical message to the pituitary gland lying snugly against it. The pituitary gland then secretes two pituitary hormones--FSH which stimulates an egg to grow within the tiny follicle of the ovary, and LH which causes the follicle to burst, releasing the egg into the fallopian tube. This opened flower-like follicle within the ovary is then called the corpus luteum which in turn produces (much like perfume) the two ovarian hormones: estrogen and progesterone.

Unlike healing practices of the past which tended to ignore the body in favor of mystical (usually ineffective) efforts, hormonal self-control is more realistic. Modern holistic medicine must be inclusive of orthodox medical practices because the more specific and technically accurate your knowledge of the inner workings of your body (or your medical problem), the more effective your visualization. Do not give up normal contraceptive practices because this is strictly experimental and depends upon effective use of the abstract mind. Using these techniques to alleviate symptoms of PMS, however, might be useful practice for other times of need

There is 'no known medical cause' for PMS but generally speaking, it results from excessive hormonal output from the corpus luteum for two weeks prior to the anticipated period, in case of a pregnancy. Generous amounts of estrogen and progesterone, producing a rich uterine lining, result in abnormal cellular water retention which is the body's Herculean effort to wash away excess ovarian hormones. Additionally, low levels of pre-menstrual pain, and temporary irritation resulting from acute hypersensitivity of all physical senses, including heightened empathetic capacity, together result in collective symptoms of PMS.

If one were to decide no to a pregnancy during the eight-week embryonic phase, and, with confidence and clarity, visualize (several times a day, for 20 minutes) not the embryo but the shrinking of the flower-like corpus luteum (ceasing its production of estrogen and progesterone), and the breaking down and sloughing off of the entire lining of the uterus wall (a mixture of cell debris and blood), tracing the expelling process on the abdomen with the fingertips, downward across the uterus while visualizing the inner wall cleaned down to its normally thin layer of cells, this exercise might, possibly, within ten days or so, bring about the overdue period. If not, ample time remains for physical choice prior to quickening at 18 weeks.

Hormonal self-control is not simply mind over matter or positive thinking, because the mind cannot affect the hypothalamus directly. Instead, the will is directed visually in clear, simple images by the mind to conscious centers of the brain, which relays appropriate chemical or hormonal impulses via the unconscious brain to the physical body. Visualization is not necessarily concerned with form and with mental presentations, it is concerned with 'a pictorial and symbolic sensitivity' which interpretively expresses our intuitive understanding. Effectiveness is based on the mental self-control which results from a higher orientation. In the menstrual cycle, failure to effectively exercise free will by dissent, to stop a pregnancy, is an automatic, unconscious hormonal assent. Women may, on all levels of reproductivity, learn to say no, and mean it. Like enlightenment, the potential ability to avoid fertilization, or to negate a pregnancy by starting a period, is available to all women because it is an inherent, innate possibility of the human mind. This becomes increasingly viable as more women contribute to the thoughtform of solution.

As this possibility of hormonal self-control becomes known, women, somewhere, will perfect the means to achieve it. To ask the intelligent questions necessary to discover this reality for themselves, women first need to clear their minds of preconceived limitations. It is no easy matter to free ourselves "from all outer imposed authority and from all tradition and from the imposition of every theological dogma, whether religious or scientific". Here lies the real challenge for ourselves and for our daughters and grand-daughters.

In what he calls this 'Decade of the Brain', Dominick Purpura, MD, Chairman of the National Foundation for Brain Research says "Two achievements of the intellect crown the last decade of the 20th century, Quantum Cosmology, the new science of the Universe, and Neuroscience, the new science of the Brain. The former probes our beginnings, the latter our destiny".

Evidence indicates that reproductive hormones alter brain function permanently during fetal development. A human "organism has the potential to be male or female. If a Y chromosome is present, testes or male gonads form. This development is the critical first step toward becoming a male. If the gonads do not produce male hormones or if for some reason the hormones cannot act on the tissue [of the developing brain], the default form of the organism is female". ("Sex Differences in the Brain" by Doreen Kimura, Scientific American, Sept. 1992).

This example of natural, scientific 'default' may be helpful in understanding the process of hormonal decision. When an effectively conscious mind-brain-hypothalamus no to a pregnancy is not forthcoming, a yes is hormonally assumed, resulting in a default or unwanted pregnancy. Nature offers choices and requires hormonal decision at every step of reproduction.

The six stages of decision are these:

Conception, whether deliberate or not, is a human effect (not necessarily reflecting a personal or a moral decision) based on the ordained nature of physical matter that a fertile heterosexual mating be productive. Governed under the Principle of Conflict, matter, not spirit, makes this decision. Choice based on hormonal self-control involves recognizing and making conscious yes or no choices at every stage of pregnancy. These progressive stages of decision include:

1. Preconception:

2. Conception:

3. Embryonic Phase:

During this sensitive and very significant eight-week stage of embryonic development, right clarification of choice is critical, for all that follows depends upon it. During this embryonic phase, women lose ten to fifteen percent of all pregnancies. On average, this can mean two to three early losses per woman, most of which remain unnoticed. Medical science suggests the hormonal instability of immaturity as a possible cause but hormonal self-control offers an alternative explanation. At the size of about 100 cells, by day five, the embryo has entered the uterine cavity. By the second week it picks its site for implantation and burrows into the recently created lining of the uterine wall. The penetration deepens each week.

Some women suspect or 'know' as soon as they become pregnant, with no apparent sign. Others become aware of a pregnancy by a late period at two weeks, sore breasts at three weeks, or nausea at four weeks from "a fully established exchange of all life-support substances between the woman and her embryo". Others are surprised later.

During the embryonic phase, a significant hormonal decision on the part of the woman takes place whether she knows it or not, for she is faced with the choice or option to go ahead with the pregnancy and have a baby, or not. At this stage most spontaneous abortions occur.

The tiny forming embryo clings to the detachable wall of the uterus, a blood-enriched network lining the uterus which forms each month and is normally loosed or sloughed off as menstruation. Hormonal changes of pregnancy inhibit the usual discard. The embryonic stage is when all menstrual aspirations or extractions are performed, and when most spontaneous abortions occur. It is also when a larger dose of certain birth control pills causes menstruation. Beyond this brief eight-week 'window of opportunity', a medical abortion of a fetus is required if the pregnancy is to be terminated.

Many people sentimentally anthropomorphize the embryo by calling it 'a baby', emotionally attributing baby qualities because it has a human baby shape, projecting imagined feelings, rights, desires, and so on. This impulse to project familiar human characteristics is a natural effort to communicate, much as we do with our animal pets.

The purpose of form is to enable the self to contact worlds otherwise closed to it, to develop full awareness of all parts of the Father's kingdom or the One Mind, to demonstrate, when fully mature the entire range of inclusive relationships available to an enlightened human being. "Through the form, experience is gained, consciousness awakened, faculty is developed and powers are unfolded....One knows oneself in truth to be not the form but the indweller, not the material self but the spiritual, not the differentiated aspects but the One alone, and thus the great process of liberation is carried forward" (The Light of the Soul, Book III, Sutra 35, Alice A. Bailey, p. 321).

4. Fetal Stage BEFORE Quickening:

By the fetal phase (from eight weeks to birth), there is both a strongly beating heart and random (reactive) movement because it is a healthy human form. Early in development, maternal assent (either direct assent, or assent-by-default) might possibly be that powerful invocative factor drawing the attention to the potential relationship between the abstract whole and the as yet unready embryo.

The idea of potential relationship is significant here because early in the fetal stage a direct (self-conscious or individualized) working relationship between spirit and matter has not yet been established. According to the ageless wisdom teachings, by recognizing the potential relationship, the lesser invokes the higher and response is then evoked according to the degree of understanding of the invoking element. Until quickening the fetus is not yet--by definition--a human being.

5. Fetal Stage AFTER Quickening:

As the fetus develops, this thread of potential abstract relationship invokes or 'calls forth' the 'hovering' soul which, at quickening, intelligently individualizes the human form. This event takes place near the fifth month when the fetus is quickened into abrupt brain activity by the now indwelling soul or self-awareness, producing (whether male or female) the 'son of man who is also the Son of God'. The mother then physically feels the fetus kick. Quickening has occurred, and a new Life will soon take its place within the human family.

6. Finally, a Baby, Maybe:

Only after birth is the fetus, medically, called a baby or an infant when hopefully it is welcomed into human society by its loving family.

Unfortunately, this isn't always the case.