You will always feel – even though you are crowded every moment of your life – you are missing the other. In the very crowd you are lonely. And in the mother’s womb, in that very loneliness, you were simply alone. There was no question of the other; the other had not even arisen in your mind.

So the child also feels that it is going to be a death, certainly the death of the life that he has known. As far as the life that is going to come, he has no idea of it, no information; nobody ever told him about it. All that he knows is that he is not going to be what he was; perhaps he is not going to be at all. Without the mother’s womb he cannot imagine himself in any way. He is in a shock, perhaps the greatest shock of life.

Even death is not that great a shock, because while the child is coming out of the womb…. Up to then he had even been breathing through the mother, he had not taken even the trouble to breathe on his own – and he is being thrown into an unknown world where he is so helpless. He knows nobody – no address, no letter of introduction. He does not know even who he is and where he is going. The shock is tremendous: naturally he feels he is dying.

That’s why the child clings to the mother’s womb. That is one of the causes why the mother goes through so much pain, and the child goes through so much pain. The child tries to cling to the life that he has lived. That’s the only life that he knows, so you cannot complain against him.

And unconsciously the mother has also lived a totally different life for these nine months. She was a different woman before; now she is no longer the same. Those nine months of motherhood have changed everything in her life.

For nine months she has felt pregnant, full of some life: a great excitement, a preparation, a hope, a dream to be fulfilled. She is coming to fruition, just like a tree when it comes to fruition. There is joy – all over the mother’s being there is a joy; otherwise she was empty, something was missing. She was a tree but without any flowers, without any fruits – what kind of a tree was that?

But these nine months, howsoever troublesome, howsoever painful, were immensely paying. She will never be the same again…and now the child is leaving the womb. It is a very unconscious phenomenon. The mother unconsciously shrinks the womb to hold the child in, not to let it go. Once the child is gone she may be the same way again: meaningless, empty, barren. The mother is not conscious of this, nor is the child; that’s what creates the pain.

The birth has to happen, it is a natural phenomenon. You cannot prevent it, but you can suffer it or you can enjoy it. That is your decision. Enjoyment will be a great experience for the mother; but that needs some consciousness, some awareness, some watchfulness of her own unconscious ways so that she can relax, and the unconscious cannot interfere in the process of relaxation.