An Intuitive Approach to Understanding Infant Death

The sudden, unexpected, and unexplained death of a healthy infant in its first year of life (nominally 2 to12 months) is surely one of the most tragic human experiences a parent can undergo. The shock of loss is commonly accompanied by extreme sorrow, grief, feelings of guilt, and the emergence of unanswerable questions on how such an event could possibly have occurred. Forty years of medical research to find the cause of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) have found neither the cause of the phenomenon nor a means of predicting or preventing it—only a long list of secondary, unlikely, and non-causal “risk factors” which offer no consolation to parents, no answers to their questions, and no substantial and trustworthy guidelines for action.
A novel investigation at the Center for Applied Intuition (CAI) utilized a systematic method of consensual intuitive inquiry to answer these questions. It sought to generate an explanation for the cause of SIDS and suggest how the disorder may best be handled by the parents and associated family members. A dozen “expert intuitives,” whose skills had been verified for acquiring entirely new and correct knowledge in other areas, explained that a very young infant is sufficiently conscious to be able to choose “at will” whether to continue its life or leave it—its own kind of suicide, just as adults may do. As the life force withdraws, the body succumbs to its weakest physical condition, which in the case of SIDS is not medically detectable.
Modern medical science possesses no means for investigating subjective information sources such as intuition, or even for testing whether proposed explanations are right or wrong. It has therefore disregarded non-physical approaches to understanding SIDS. However, corroboration of the intuitive findings is available from psychological sources. They show clearly that perinatal infants possess an active consciousness capable of sensation, memory, and some degree of choice, thereby adding credibility to the intuitive information.
SIDS can be seen as a natural occurrence, not a physical disorder or a medical disease and not a direct result of parental action or inaction. The usual grief, guilt, and confusion of the parents, while certainly understandable, arise from a misconception of the life process itself, which includes the possibility of premature death for infants just as it does for adults. These typical but mistaken responses by parents may be dispelled when they can achieve a fuller understanding and acceptance of the central place of loss and death in human life. The infant has the same choice as its parents to leave life at any time. The parents’ love for their
child is no less genuine by this revised understanding, though it applies more to the infant’s
consciousness, than to its body which can indeed be lost. Herein lies the meaning and the
fundamental lesson parents may learn from losing a child to SIDS or any form of infant
death.