Here is the longer quote from the book by Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity (2007), pages 539 – 541.

Excerpt from The Ascent of Humanity

(Humanity feels) … left alone in a dead, pitiless universe, doomed by nature and human nature to struggle pointlessly for survival in a world rendered ever more horrible by our efforts. Although we might try to soldier on, the once bountiful world-womb can no longer sustain the growth of fetal humanity. The effort to squeeze just a few more years out of what remains of the Mother’s resources—natural, social, cultural, and spiritual capital—will only poison the womb still further. …

It is very simple. A fetus grows; the womb is finite. The limits of growth trigger a birth crisis. Unbearable though it is … if the status quo did not become intolerable, there would nothing to impel change—birth into a new state of being. …

Then the enormous pressures on the fetus are revealed to have a purpose, a direction as the cervix opens and a light shines through, promising a new world. The physical distress of the fetus is even greater now than it was in [the womb]. She is subject to titanic pressures that slowly propel her through the birth canal, a life and death struggle occupying the whole of her being. At this point there is no going back to the womb of the familiar, for … the pressures of birth are too great to resist. While physically more difficult [this stage]…is easier to bear, for the light ahead gives hope and direction. For the human species, it represents our growing knowledge that another way of living is possible. We can see a glimpse of it already, the light at the end of the tunnel—the new modes of technology, money, medicine, education, and so forth. …

Collectively, we humans have experienced only the beginnings of the birth pangs that will propel us into the new world we have glimpsed. We are still able to resist, still able to deceive ourselves into thinking that we can expropriate from nature endlessly. …

In the Stage…of birth, the baby is born into a new and unimagined world, where he becomes an anatomically distinct individual. In any kind of birth process, the entity being born cannot imagine what lies beyond the mother’s body. In the case of humanity as well, the new society we are being born into is probably beyond imagining.

Birth is a journey that starts with blissful oneness, proceeds through an increasingly unbearable confinement, climaxes in a heroic struggle, and ends with a return to the one, but at a new level of being. … In the Age of Reunion that will follow the present birthing, we will gaze upon Mother Nature’s face with the adoring eyes of an infant.