So there are differences between year groups, of which the cause lies much deeper than you would expect when looking at the external factors surrounding any one child. You see a collective behaviour emerging that doesn’t seem to match the individualism of the Western world in which your own performance, your own report card and your own diploma are what determine your standing in society. In reality, we see people who are alone and who do not work together, who do not live together.

Their conscious being is being alone. Despite this, there can be an unconscious feeling of togetherness that could be translated to a collective conscious, a fetal conscious. This typically does not translate to a postnatal consciousness of togetherness (after all, it is said that ‘you are born alone and you die alone’).

While nowadays we have more possibilities of experiencing togetherness (such as by watching television and receiving input from around the world) and you would expect that we would have a greater consciousness of togetherness, instead we notice that people in the Western world live an increasingly individualistic lifestyle. Could the cause for this be traced back to the period in the womb? The illogical versus the logical? The reality of the consciousness or the reality of the subconsciousness?

In former New Guinea, when I went to visit the Papuans in what was then called West Irian, I noticed that the children in such a tribe are connected to everyone. How was that possible? To them, it didn’t matter from which breast they suckled or whether or not there was any breast milk. If it gave them peace and quiet, they would even suckle with grandma. And so they would be passed from lap to lap, from breast to breast, without the restriction of the norm of belonging to a single mother.