[1] Ian Stevenson, M.D., Cases of the Reincarnation Type - Vols. I-IV, University Press Of Virginia (1975)

[2] See, for example, Bhikku Nanamoli (trans.), The Path of Purification (Vishddhimagga), Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 1975, p. 451.

[3] Note that I am here using what philosopher Christian de Quincey calls the “psychological” meaning of consciousness in which its opposite is held to be the unconscious. This is contrasted with the “philosophical” meaning of the term, in which consciousness is opposed to non-consciousness, as in the idea that “dead“ matter is non-conscious.

[4] Remember that the kind of memory enjoyed by high-grade occasions is essentially mediated by the metrical space of the physical world, but by the type of space appropriate emotion and thought.

[5] The ideas in this section were developed in conjunction with Victor Goulet and Josephina Burgos.

[6] The notion of habit can be adequately expressed in the language of transpersonal process metaphysics. A habit is built up in a personality where (1) one or more occasions makes a (usually complex) decision with a subjective form of intense determination; and (2) some adequate number of subsequent occasions in that personality accepts and reaffirms that decision. In this way, the causal power of that decision becomes stronger for subsequent members of the society.

[7] I am here assuming here that the various values are differentially prioritized, which implies only one dimension of valuation, more or less. The actual relationships among the values constituting a value character is probably much more complex.

[8] In what follows, I will sometimes refer to this as the “basic character” or the “value character.”

[9] My attention was drawn to this theory by Dr. Sean Kelly and Frank Poletti. Dr. Kelly developed a unique and interesting version of this theory in: “Integral Time and the Varieties of Post-Mortem Survival,” Integral Review, Vol. 1, No. 4, June 2008, http://integral-review.org/back_issues/backissue6/index.htm

[10] Poonam Sharma, B.A. and Jim B. Tucker, Ph.D, “Cases of the Reincarnation Type with Memories form the Intermission between Lives,” Journal of Near-Death Studies, 23(2), Winder 2004, p. 102.

[11] Ibid., p. 107.

[12] Ibid. p. 107

[13] Ibid, p. 107-108.

[14] Ibid., p. 198

[15] Ibid., p. 103

[16] John Poynton, Making Sense of Psi and Mysticism: Whiteman’s Multi-Level Ontology, unpublished.

[17]Paul Pearsall, Ph.D., Gary E. R. Schwartz, Ph.D., and Linda G. S. Russek, Ph. D., Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients That Parallel the Personalities of their Donors, in Journal of Near-Death Studies, Vo.. 20, No. 3, Spring 2002.

[18] Ibid., p. 194-195.

[19] Ibid., p. 199.

[20]See, for example, Arthur E. Powell, The Causal Body, The Theosophical Publishing House Ltd., 1978; and Alice A. Bailey, A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, New York: Lucis Publishing Co., 1977.

[21] Sri Aurobindo, The Psychic Being - Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Wisconsin: Lotus Lights Publications, 1989.

[22] This is similar to what Teilhard de Chardin suggests: that more complex entities can experience greater “radial communication,” whereas simpler entities are confined to more “tangential communication.”

[23] One of Whitehead’s last published essays in entitled Immortality (Alfred North Whitehead, Immortality, in Paul Arthur Shilpp, The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Illinois: Open Court Press, 1991, p. 682.) Whitehead speaks of “the immortal aspect of personality.” I offer this idea as a possible key to the interpretation of that fascinating, but notoriously obscure, essay.

[24] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed. New York: The Free Press, 1985, pp. 342-351.

[25] Note that that for entities with no abstraction in objectification among them, spatial distance is undefined. Remember that in transpersonal process metaphysics, spatial distance is a function of abstraction in objectification. Without abstraction, there is no distance and, hence, no space. I am assuming that the soul also objectifies all finite occasions without abstraction, thus the distance between the soul and finite entity in any finite universe is also undefined. Souls define a unique perspective that cannot be grasped in any scheme of indication

[26] Sri Aurobindo, in many of his writings, suggests that the entire evolutionary process can be understood in terms of the soul’s efforts to construct entities grounded in the physical world and capable of expressing the soul’s fullness in that world. The higher the grade of the presiding personality of a being living in the waking world, the more open it is to the soul’s expression.

[27] Powell, A. E. The Astral Body, Wheaton, Il. :Quest, 1972.

[28] Sri Aurobindo, The Problem of Rebirth, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1994.

CHAPTER 0 - INTRODUCTION

I would like to begin by saying a few things about the origin and purpose of this book. These chapters began as a series of lectures organized and sponsored by the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, founded by independent scholar Michael Murphy, author of The Future of the Body.[1]

Mike likes to convene groups of passionate and competent scholars to discuss issues and themes that are not being addressed anywhere in academia. One of these conferences—begun in 1998—focuses on the topic of reincarnation and life after death.

The core of this conference consists of a group of scientists from the University of Virginia who have been studying the question of survival of consciousness after death and the evidence for reincarnation since 1968. Their research continues a long scientific tradition going back to William James and Frederic Myers in the nineteenth century. Since that time, a large amount of hard scientific evidence has been documented that strongly suggests we do not die with the death of our bodies, and the evidence also makes a very powerful case for reincarnation.

To say that what happens to us after our bodies die is an important issue is, to put it mildly, an understatement.  In fact, I would claim that this is one of  the most important issue we can talk about—whether as scientists, philosophers, or lay people. Who among us has not at some time wondered, “What happens to my personality when I die?” or  “What happens to the people we love when they die and cease to function in our waking life?  Where do they go?  Where do we go?  What happens?”

Indeed, questions such as these, and the answers we provide, are immensely important to the structure of our civilization. It is clear to me that whatever we believe about what happens to our sense of self or personhood at the end of our days strongly affects our outlook on life. It determines our sense of ethics and profoundly affects our values. For example, if we believe that at death everything about us is extinguished, and we ask: “What is life for?” we are likely to conclude that it is nothing but an opportunity to gratify our emotional, intellectual, and physical needs during the short span we are alive. That kind of attitude toward life and ethics encourages the tide of consumerism that dominates and afflicts modern civilization.

If, on the other hand, we do survive the death of our bodies, and, further, if we are involved in a sequence of reincarnations that is somehow a part of the evolution of the universe, then our whole attitude toward ourselves and toward life has to change. The question of our destiny, the meaning of our existence, and all of our attitudes towards ethics would dramatically change.

Let me give some examples. Suppose, as a society, we were to confirm the fact that people’s personalities survive bodily death, and suppose we were to find a way to regularly communicate with people who have died

· What would that do to our property laws? Could dead people still own property? Who has the rights to dispose of the estate?

· What would that do to our secrecy laws?  Could people be expected to keep state or financial secrets after they died?  And what if we discovered that the deceased could  eavesdrop on our conversations?  What would that do to our sense of privacy?

· What would this do to our large religious institutions with their conflicting ideas about the afterlife?

From these few examples, you can get a sense of how widespread the consequences would be if we came to know that the personality survives bodily death, and if we found a way to be in reliable contact with the deceased. Make no mistake: This is a profound issue.  Nevertheless, it is not being formally considered, as far as we know, in any serious academic institution in the United States—or, indeed, in any country of the world! It seems to us that our Esalen group is the only formal group in academia working to understand the “long trajectory” of human destiny, the profound nature of the human life cycle—in other words, to fathom the full facts of life and death.

Our team of scientists and other scholars began research nearly a decade ago with a commitment to evaluating, organizing, and documenting robust scientific evidence that supports the hypotheses of life after death and reincarnation. We published the results in a thoroughly researched and documented book Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21^{st Century.[2] We regard this as a landmark demonstration that the human personality is more than the body, and a powerful argument that the human personality survives bodily death.}

^{Having assembled a formidable body of evidence, our next task is to ask: “If survival and reincarnation are actual facts, how can we make sense of this?  This question is important for two reasons.}

^{First, in the absence of a theory of some kind, it is very difficult to accept the facts.  It is often the case that people will reject data that don’t fit into the categories through which they customarily interpret the world.  It is a source of frustration and bemusement among parapsychologists that many prominent scientists reject the data of parapsychology out of hand because they believe, on the basis of their usual way of understanding things, that those data are simply “impossible.”  Indeed, the picture of reality in the background of much scientific research is so mechanistic and reductionist that it is almost impossible, in that context, to understand the existence of consciousness itself, let alone survival, by the personality, of the death of its body.}

^{Nonetheless, the data is there to be explained.  As Galileo is reported to have said after is conviction by the Inquisition, “And yet, it moves.”  The reference to Galileo is relevant because the problem that we face in academia today is quite similar to that faced by Galileo in his day.  Many of the Learned Doctors at Galileo’s university felt no need to look through Galileo’s telescope – after all the idea of planets having moons was simply too preposterous to be entertained.  It was not facts that finally awakened the world to the power of scientific reasoning – it was rather the articulation, by Newton, of general scheme of ideas which organized and made intelligible the scattered findings of science up to that point.}

^{So we need a theory to help make the data with which we are amassing more coherent in part because such a theory will help to make the data more intelligible and, thus, more acceptable to the scientific community.  But we also need a theory because, when a good theory is found, it opens up the possibility of a deeper and more comprehensive investigation of the data.}

^{A good example of the power of theory in stimulating deeper research is the development of the Mendeleev’s Table of the Elements.  A first consequence of this theory was the recognition of elements that had not yet been discovered, and then their subsequent discovery.  A later consequence of this theory was the recognition of the possibility of elements that had never before existed, and the subsequent creation of those elements in the laboratory.  And these are only two of the developments in chemistry that were inspired by this theory.}

^{If the study of the long-trajectory of human existence is to open up to scientific investigation, if it is ever to become a topic upon which many investigators can focus their attention, it will only be when the data currently available concerning survival and reincarnation, along with the associated data of parapsychological investigation, is first coordinated into a general picture of reality.}

^{Whatever theory that we develop to coordinate the data which we are about to present, that theory, to be credible at all, will also have to be coordinated with the scientific understanding of reality which our civilization has pieced together over the last 400 years of sustained social effort.}

^{In this book, I will outline a way in which such a coordinations may be achieved.}

^{Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, work on the areas covered in this book has been rare.  The ideas offered in this book sketch out a new way of approaching the understanding of the actual world.  While these ideas have a lineage - they are drawn from the works of Alfred North Whitehead, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Ernst Cassirer and many other thinkers - nonetheless they will be unfamiliar to many of my readers.  Also, those of my readers who know some of these authors well will find their ideas used in unfamiliar ways.  There is no way to open up new territory like this without new ideas and new language.}

^{Finally, though this book was very much inspired by my work at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, this book is my own, and is not reflective of any consensus of our working group.}

^{[1] Murphy, Michael, The Future of the Body, New York:Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992.}

^{[2] Kelly, Edward F., and Kelly, Emily Williams. Irreducible Mind.  New York:  Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007.}

]]> http://ericweiss.com/522/feed http://ericweiss.com/518 http://ericweiss.com/518#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:02:31 +0000 http://ericweiss.com/518

CHAPTER 0 - INTRODUCTION

I would like to begin by saying a few things about the origin and purpose of this book. These chapters began as a series of lectures organized and sponsored by the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, founded by independent scholar Michael Murphy, author of The Future of the Body.[1]

Mike likes to convene groups of passionate and competent scholars to discuss issues and themes that are not being addressed anywhere in academia. One of these conferences—begun in 1998—focuses on the topic of reincarnation and life after death.

The core of this conference consists of a group of scientists from the University of Virginia who have been studying the question of survival of consciousness after death and the evidence for reincarnation since 1968. Their research continues a long scientific tradition going back to William James and Frederic Myers in the nineteenth century. Since that time, a large amount of hard scientific evidence has been documented that strongly suggests we do not die with the death of our bodies, and the evidence also makes a very powerful case for reincarnation.

To say that what happens to us after our bodies die is an important issue is, to put it mildly, an understatement.  In fact, I would claim that this is one of  the most important issue we can talk about—whether as scientists, philosophers, or lay people. Who among us has not at some time wondered, “What happens to my personality when I die?” or  “What happens to the people we love when they die and cease to function in our waking life?  Where do they go?  Where do we go?  What happens?”

Indeed, questions such as these, and the answers we provide, are immensely important to the structure of our civilization. It is clear to me that whatever we believe about what happens to our sense of self or personhood at the end of our days strongly affects our outlook on life. It determines our sense of ethics and profoundly affects our values. For example, if we believe that at death everything about us is extinguished, and we ask: “What is life for?” we are likely to conclude that it is nothing but an opportunity to gratify our emotional, intellectual, and physical needs during the short span we are alive. That kind of attitude toward life and ethics encourages the tide of consumerism that dominates and afflicts modern civilization.

If, on the other hand, we do survive the death of our bodies, and, further, if we are involved in a sequence of reincarnations that is somehow a part of the evolution of the universe, then our whole attitude toward ourselves and toward life has to change. The question of our destiny, the meaning of our existence, and all of our attitudes towards ethics would dramatically change.

Let me give some examples. Suppose, as a society, we were to confirm the fact that people’s personalities survive bodily death, and suppose we were to find a way to regularly communicate with people who have died

· What would that do to our property laws? Could dead people still own property? Who has the rights to dispose of the estate?

· What would that do to our secrecy laws?  Could people be expected to keep state or financial secrets after they died?  And what if we discovered that the deceased could  eavesdrop on our conversations?  What would that do to our sense of privacy?

· What would this do to our large religious institutions with their conflicting ideas about the afterlife?

From these few examples, you can get a sense of how widespread the consequences would be if we came to know that the personality survives bodily death, and if we found a way to be in reliable contact with the deceased. Make no mistake: This is a profound issue.  Nevertheless, it is not being formally considered, as far as we know, in any serious academic institution in the United States—or, indeed, in any country of the world! It seems to us that our Esalen group is the only formal group in academia working to understand the “long trajectory” of human destiny, the profound nature of the human life cycle—in other words, to fathom the full facts of life and death.

Our team of scientists and other scholars began research nearly a decade ago with a commitment to evaluating, organizing, and documenting robust scientific evidence that supports the hypotheses of life after death and reincarnation. We published the results in a thoroughly researched and documented book Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21^{st Century.[2] We regard this as a landmark demonstration that the human personality is more than the body, and a powerful argument that the human personality survives bodily death.}

^{Having assembled a formidable body of evidence, our next task is to ask: “If survival and reincarnation are actual facts, how can we make sense of this?  This question is important for two reasons.}

^{First, in the absence of a theory of some kind, it is very difficult to accept the facts.  It is often the case that people will reject data that don’t fit into the categories through which they customarily interpret the world.  It is a source of frustration and bemusement among parapsychologists that many prominent scientists reject the data of parapsychology out of hand because they believe, on the basis of their usual way of understanding things, that those data are simply “impossible.”  Indeed, the picture of reality in the background of much scientific research is so mechanistic and reductionist that it is almost impossible, in that context, to understand the existence of consciousness itself, let alone survival, by the personality, of the death of its body.}

^{Nonetheless, the data is there to be explained.  As Galileo is reported to have said after is conviction by the Inquisition, “And yet, it moves.”  The reference to Galileo is relevant because the problem that we face in academia today is quite similar to that faced by Galileo in his day.  Many of the Learned Doctors at Galileo’s university felt no need to look through Galileo’s telescope – after all the idea of planets having moons was simply too preposterous to be entertained.  It was not facts that finally awakened the world to the power of scientific reasoning – it was rather the articulation, by Newton, of general scheme of ideas which organized and made intelligible the scattered findings of science up to that point.}

^{So we need a theory to help make the data with which we are amassing more coherent in part because such a theory will help to make the data more intelligible and, thus, more acceptable to the scientific community.  But we also need a theory because, when a good theory is found, it opens up the possibility of a deeper and more comprehensive investigation of the data.}

^{A good example of the power of theory in stimulating deeper research is the development of the Mendeleev’s Table of the Elements.  A first consequence of this theory was the recognition of elements that had not yet been discovered, and then their subsequent discovery.  A later consequence of this theory was the recognition of the possibility of elements that had never before existed, and the subsequent creation of those elements in the laboratory.  And these are only two of the developments in chemistry that were inspired by this theory.}

^{If the study of the long-trajectory of human existence is to open up to scientific investigation, if it is ever to become a topic upon which many investigators can focus their attention, it will only be when the data currently available concerning survival and reincarnation, along with the associated data of parapsychological investigation, is first coordinated into a general picture of reality.}

^{Whatever theory that we develop to coordinate the data which we are about to present, that theory, to be credible at all, will also have to be coordinated with the scientific understanding of reality which our civilization has pieced together over the last 400 years of sustained social effort.}

^{In this book, I will outline a way in which such a coordinations may be achieved.}

^{Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, work on the areas covered in this book has been rare.  The ideas offered in this book sketch out a new way of approaching the understanding of the actual world.  While these ideas have a lineage - they are drawn from the works of Alfred North Whitehead, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Ernst Cassirer and many other thinkers - nonetheless they will be unfamiliar to many of my readers.  Also, those of my readers who know some of these authors well will find their ideas used in unfamiliar ways.  There is no way to open up new territory like this without new ideas and new language.}

^{Finally, though this book was very much inspired by my work at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, this book is my own, and is not reflective of any consensus of our working group.}

¹

^{[1] Murphy, Michael, The Future of the Body, New York:Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992.}

^{[2] Kelly, Edward F., and Kelly, Emily Williams. Irreducible Mind.  New York:  Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007.}

]]> http://ericweiss.com/518/feed http://ericweiss.com/contact-eric http://ericweiss.com/contact-eric#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:52:49 +0000 http://ericweiss.com/?p=487

I would like to begin by saying a few things about the origin and purpose of this book. These chapters began as a series of lectures organized and sponsored by the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, founded by independent scholar Michael Murphy, author of The Future of the Body.[1]

Mike likes to convene groups of passionate and competent scholars to discuss issues and themes that are not being addressed anywhere in academia. One of these conferences—begun in 1998—focuses on the topic of reincarnation and life after death.

The core of this conference consists of a group of scientists from the University of Virginia who have been studying the question of survival of consciousness after death and the evidence for reincarnation since 1968. Their research continues a long scientific tradition going back to William James and Frederic Myers in the nineteenth century. Since that time, a large amount of hard scientific evidence has been documented that strongly suggests we do not die with the death of our bodies, and the evidence also makes a very powerful case for reincarnation.

To say that what happens to us after our bodies die is an important issue is, to put it mildly, an understatement. In fact, I would claim that this is one of the most important issue we can talk about—whether as scientists, philosophers, or lay people. Who among us has not at some time wondered, “What happens to my personality when I die?” or “What happens to the people we love when they die and cease to function in our waking life? Where do they go? Where do we go? What happens?”

Indeed, questions such as these, and the answers we provide, are immensely important to the structure of our civilization. It is clear to me that whatever we believe about what happens to our sense of self or personhood at the end of our days strongly affects our outlook on life. It determines our sense of ethics and profoundly affects our values. For example, if we believe that at death everything about us is extinguished, and we ask: “What is life for?” we are likely to conclude that it is nothing but an opportunity to gratify our emotional, intellectual, and physical needs during the short span we are alive. That kind of attitude toward life and ethics encourages the tide of consumerism that dominates and afflicts modern civilization.

If, on the other hand, we do survive the death of our bodies, and, further, if we are involved in a sequence of reincarnations that is somehow a part of the evolution of the universe, then our whole attitude toward ourselves and toward life has to change. The question of our destiny, the meaning of our existence, and all of our attitudes towards ethics would dramatically change.

Let me give some examples. Suppose, as a society, we were to confirm the fact that people’s personalities survive bodily death, and suppose we were to find a way to regularly communicate with people who have died

· What would that do to our property laws? Could dead people still own property? Who has the rights to dispose of the estate?

· What would that do to our secrecy laws? Could people be expected to keep state or financial secrets after they died? And what if we discovered that the deceased could eavesdrop on our conversations? What would that do to our sense of privacy?

· What would this do to our large religious institutions with their conflicting ideas about the afterlife?

From these few examples, you can get a sense of how widespread the consequences would be if we came to know that the personality survives bodily death, and if we found a way to be in reliable contact with the deceased. Make no mistake: This is a profound issue. Nevertheless, it is not being formally considered, as far as we know, in any serious academic institution in the United States—or, indeed, in any country of the world! It seems to us that our Esalen group is the only formal group in academia working to understand the “long trajectory” of human destiny, the profound nature of the human life cycle—in other words, to fathom the full facts of life and death.

Our team of scientists and other scholars began research nearly a decade ago with a commitment to evaluating, organizing, and documenting robust scientific evidence that supports the hypotheses of life after death and reincarnation. We published the results in a thoroughly researched and documented book Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21^{st Century.[2] We regard this as a landmark demonstration that the human personality is more than the body, and a powerful argument that the human personality survives bodily death.}

^{Having assembled a formidable body of evidence, our next task is to ask: “If survival and reincarnation are actual facts, how can we make sense of this? This question is important for two reasons.}

^{First, in the absence of a theory of some kind, it is very difficult to accept the facts. It is often the case that people will reject data that don’t fit into the categories through which they customarily interpret the world. It is a source of frustration and bemusement among parapsychologists that many prominent scientists reject the data of parapsychology out of hand because they believe, on the basis of their usual way of understanding things, that those data are simply “impossible.” Indeed, the picture of reality in the background of much scientific research is so mechanistic and reductionist that it is almost impossible, in that context, to understand the existence of consciousness itself, let alone survival, by the personality, of the death of its body.}

^{Nonetheless, the data is there to be explained. As Galileo is reported to have said after is conviction by the Inquisition, “And yet, it moves.” The reference to Galileo is relevant because the problem that we face in academia today is quite similar to that faced by Galileo in his day. Many of the Learned Doctors at Galileo’s university felt no need to look through Galileo’s telescope – after all the idea of planets having moons was simply too preposterous to be entertained. It was not facts that finally awakened the world to the power of scientific reasoning – it was rather the articulation, by Newton, of general scheme of ideas which organized and made intelligible the scattered findings of science up to that point.}

^{So we need a theory to help make the data with which we are amassing more coherent in part because such a theory will help to make the data more intelligible and, thus, more acceptable to the scientific community. But we also need a theory because, when a good theory is found, it opens up the possibility of a deeper and more comprehensive investigation of the data.}

^{A good example of the power of theory in stimulating deeper research is the development of the Mendeleev’s Table of the Elements. A first consequence of this theory was the recognition of elements that had not yet been discovered, and then their subsequent discovery. A later consequence of this theory was the recognition of the possibility of elements that had never before existed, and the subsequent creation of those elements in the laboratory. And these are only two of the developments in chemistry that were inspired by this theory.}

^{If the study of the long-trajectory of human existence is to open up to scientific investigation, if it is ever to become a topic upon which many investigators can focus their attention, it will only be when the data currently available concerning survival and reincarnation, along with the associated data of parapsychological investigation, is first coordinated into a general picture of reality.}

^{Whatever theory that we develop to coordinate the data which we are about to present, that theory, to be credible at all, will also have to be coordinated with the scientific understanding of reality which our civilization has pieced together over the last 400 years of sustained social effort.}

^{In this book, I will outline a way in which such a coordinations may be achieved.}

^{Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, work on the areas covered in this book has been rare. The ideas offered in this book sketch out a new way of approaching the understanding of the actual world. While these ideas have a lineage - they are drawn from the works of Alfred North Whitehead, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Ernst Cassirer and many other thinkers - nonetheless they will be unfamiliar to many of my readers. Also, those of my readers who know some of these authors well will find their ideas used in unfamiliar ways. There is no way to open up new territory like this without new ideas and new language.}

^{Finally, though this book was very much inspired by my work at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research, this book is my own, and is not reflective of any consensus of our working group.}

^{[1] Murphy, Michael, The Future of the Body, New York:Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992.}

^{[2] Kelly, Edward F., and Kelly, Emily Williams. Irreducible Mind. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007.}

This book focuses on two ideas. First, that the personality formed during life does, in fact, survive the death of the body; and, second, the idea that we do incarnate more than once.

I will explore these two challenging and provocative ideas in four steps:

· First, in this introductory chapter, I will start with a series of definitions that specify just what I mean by “survival of bodily death” (I will often refer to this phenomenon as “personality survival”). In turn, this will require a preliminary definition of what I mean by “transphysical worlds”—a key concept in this work, as we will see. I will also offer a preliminary definition of reincarnation, and then end this chapter with a set of five propositions that capture the essence of this book.

· Second, in the next chapter, I will present a summary of the scientific evidence that points toward the truth of these five fundamental propositions.

· Third, in the several chapters that follow, I will discuss what the world must be like if these propositions are true. I will do this by outlining a metaphysical system capable of supporting the truths of modern and postmodern science and the truths of parapsychology that support our fundamental propositions.

· Finally, I will discuss an expanded vision of the human life-cycle, and what this implies for the long trajectory of human evolution.

Let us start, then, with some fundamental definitions.

The Physical Body

By “body,” I mean the living body  as it experienced in waking life. I am assuming that the living body contains inorganic entities such as atoms and molecules, and that these atoms and molecules are organized (in a manner to be explored) into cells, tissues and organs.

This definition of “physical body” is unremarkable, but I do want to emphasize that I am most emphatically not making the assumption that the human body can be reduced to inorganic entities and their dynamic interactions. In other words, I am not suggesting that the body is already “dead” or insentient, even when it seems alive. In working to understand survival and reincarnation, the question of what makes the physical body a living body is one to which we will have to pay considerable attention. When I refer to survival, by the personality, of bodily death, I will always mean the “physical body” in this sense. Later, I will broaden the definition of “body” to include transphysical bodies, as well.

Personality

I want to propose that we define personality in terms of five different characteristics. As you review these, I invite you to check them against your own experience.

Being an individual among other individuals

It is certainly possible to refer to entities that transcend or pervade the entirety of the actual world. Such beings may be referred to as Divine and may, perhaps, be reasonably called “gods,” but such beings are not what I have in mind when referring to a “personality.” A personality, as I am defining it here is, first of all, finite. It is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. It is not a god.

A personality is an individual and, as such, it is a finite being. It is not co-extensive with its environment, and it exists in the presence of others. To be finite is to be an individual existing in interaction with other individuals of some type. Further, individuals in causal interaction with one another must share some coherent context in which that interaction takes place. I will express this by saying that a personality is always contextualized by a world of some type.

Various arguments can be advanced in favor of this idea, but I am going to introduce it here as a definition. I am using myself as a paradigm of what I mean by personality. After all, one my deep motivations for developing the ideas in this book is to discover the destiny of my own personality after the death of my physical body. As a personality, I am a finite being. I find myself in a world full of other beings—beings like myself who keep me company, and many other beings constituting the complex context of my existence. All of these beings exercise causal effects on one another, and all share a common system of spatial and temporal relations. These entities constitute the world in which I live, move, and have my being.

Throughout this work, when I use the term “world,” it does not refer to a planet in a solar system, but rather to a system of individuals causally interacting in a common space and time, and serving as a context for the life of personalities.

If I am going to survive the death of my body in a way that is truly interesting to me, I want to survive it as a finite being in a world I can explore. I am, therefore, assuming that personality is a finite being playing out its existence in a coherent world of others.

Consciousness

The word “consciousness” has been used in so many different ways that each author is now obliged to define it for him- or herself.

In this work, I propose that we define consciousness as “that factor of experience by virtue of which there is feeling and choice.”

Feeling

When I say that consciousness is the factor of existence that brings feeling, I am using the word a sense that includes all types of sensation. Later on, I will contrast feeling with the idea of efficient cause that our educated commonsense imports from classical physics. When we think of a cause (especially when we are being scientific about it), we mean an event that directly precipitates another event in its immediate future. For example, if I throw a ball through a window, the window will most likely break. The movement of the ball causes the breaking of the window. When we think of cause in this way, we assume that both the rock and the window are entirely insentient and completely unaware of what is happening to them. If I were to suggest that the window “felt” the rock shattering it, I would most probably be accused of naïve anthropomorphism. On the other hand suppose the rock hit me instead. In that case I would most certainly feel the impact.

Later on, I will discuss the possibility that there may, in fact, be some feeling involved in an actual encounter between a ball and a window. But for now, let’s use this classical view to establish an important contrast. Why is it that we think the window feels nothing as it is shattered, while I feel pain when I am hit by the rock? I propose that I feel, rather than being merely affected, because I am a conscious being. To put this more simply, there can be no feeling without consciousness, and no personality without feeling.

A personality is necessarily conscious and, as such, a personality feels its environing world.

Free choice

I want to propose that consciousness is not only the factor of experience by virtue of which there is feeling, it is also the primary factor of experience by virtue of which there is choice (value or aim, a factor which is discussed below, is also needed).

Classical science, which was entirely deterministic, made no room in its cosmology for choice. Scientific reductionists of the classical era thought of choice as a miraculous gift from God, or as a mere illusion. Quantum mechanics has, however, pushed science beyond the narrow and excessively abstract position of earlier centuries. Our predictions about the outcome of events can only be probabilistic. We can never, in principle, generate perfectly accurate predictions of anything. Beyond blind computation, something else is involved in actuality. We might just label this “blind chance,” but quantum physics goes still further.

Quantum theory recognizes that the consciousness of the “observer” not only enables us to observe the outcome of experiments, but is also a causal factor in the outcome of experiments. The consciousness of the observer makes decisions among otherwise merely probable outcomes, and thus causes them to actualize. This factor of existence—consciousness—has real effects in the physical world, but its decisions are not determined by anything in the physical world at all.[1] Consciousness is that which feels and makes choices.

This interpretation of quantum theory is also consistent with various trends of Vedic thought. For example, in the yogic psychology of the Bhagavad Gita, purusha, the pole of pure consciousness around which individual experience is constellated, is also the ultimate origin of all free decisions.[2]

Finally, my waking consciousness is strongly flavored by my sense that I, the conscious being that I am, make the decisions that cause my behaviors in the world. My decisions are not mere echoes of randomness. They are conscious choices, made with awareness of possible outcomes. They are also made in the context of valuation—I decide which outcome to choose based on my sense of the values that my decision will achieve.

While consciousness is the factor of existence that makes those choices that we call free, it can do so only under the influence of value and purpose. In fact, the difference between randomness and choice is just the presence of values that give the choice meaning. As we will see later, this process of valuation is also a crucial factor in our definition of personality.

I define “personality,: then, as a locus of choice. As personalities, we make our decisions among the different options that open before us in the creative advance.  Personality, among its other characteristics, is an ongoing sequence of conscious acts of decision.

Causal Power

The free decisions made by a personality exercise causal influence on the world inhabited by that personality. For example, it is I, the personality, that decides which way to turn at a crossroads. Also, it is I, the personality, that chooses which words to speak and write. In this book, I will take the position that all communication involves causal interaction. This is obvious in the case of any form of communication mediated by direct sensory experience in waking life. I will argue that it is true, also, of various forms of empathy (the direct communication of feeling states) and telepathy (the direct communication of thoughts).

Technically: To know any finite fact is to be causally affected by the circumstances constituting that fact. To be a personality is to be a conscious, feeling entity that has causal effects in its environment.

Memory

Without my memories., I would not be a personality. Because we have memory, we discover time as as a dimension that extends continuously into the causal past. The extension of that dimension into an anticipated future underlies the range of possibilities I can embrace. While I recognize, of course, that my future may have an end in time, nonetheless—except when death seems very close—I not only remember having extension in time past, I also anticipate that I will continue to extend my existence into the future. Just as I assume that my past memories can be arranged in a linear sequence, so I assume, too, that my future experiences will continue to be sequential, so that I will have one and only one experience at any moment of future time. Also, induction is the projection of memories of causal sequences into anticipations of future causal sequences. Spatial extension (as we will see in Chapter 9) cannot be understood apart from possibilities of movement; the recognition of movement involves the recognition of a difference between the past and the present, and thus it, too, involves memory. Without memory there is no experience of time, no experience of space, no experience of causality, no experience of a coherent world.

I remember the being that I was a moment ago, the being that I was on my last birthday, and so on. Although my memories are generally patchy and rather jumbled, I operate on the assumption that I could, given sufficient powers of discrimination and attention, order all of my waking memories (at least) into a linear sequence.

A personality then, is a sequence of conscious experiences that stretches off, in memory, into the indistinct reaches of the past; is always experiencing one moment as a present in which there are decisions to be made; and always anticipates its ongoing existence in a similar sequence of future moments.

I want to emphasize here that memory not “merely subjective”—it is a causal factor in the actual world. For example, suppose I am walking along a street in a particular direction, and suddenly I remember that I have an appointment with someone who lives off to the right. and so I make a right turn at the next corner. My memory was a causal factor in the world, causing me to turn my body in a new direction. In this case, my behavior is influenced by a clear conscious memory. Memory also operates unconsciously. My memories of past decisions and their consequences constantly impact the decisions that I am making in the present moment even when they do not become thematic in my current moment of experience. This causal continuity of personality, carrying the effects of past decisions into the present moment, is part of what is meant by the term “karma” in Buddhism and other Vedic traditions.

As we will see, the notion of the survival of bodily death involves a continuation of this sequence of memory and causation after the death of the physical body.

Continuity of purpose

While some scientists imagine that the physical body is a system driven entirely by efficient causes, it is impossible to think adequately of the personality in these terms alone. Personality, as we live it, is always characterized by the operation of purpose.

Purpose, as I am using it here, is a very general term. It encompasses instinctive self-preservation; the desire for satisfaction, pleasure and joy; and the intention to achieve a consciously chosen goal. Every moment in the life of a personality enacts some purpose. In the realm of personality, nothing happens without a “reason why.”

Every purpose expresses a value of some kind. I want to survive because I value my life. I want this job rather that than one because I value my free time. I will give to others because my moral values dictate that action.

Earlier, I defined consciousness as that factor in existence that makes free decisions. Clearly, one of the differences between a random event and a choice is the presence of consciousness, but consciousness, though necessary, is not in itself sufficient. A conscious choice made in the absence of any sort of criterion would still be random. Besides value, another key factor that distinguishes between randomness and choice is purpose (or aim). When I make a choice, I am consciously choosing among a number of meaningful alternatives. And what gives the alternatives meaning is the value each option has for me. Every moment in the life of a personality is making decisions regarding the future in light of the values those decisions may realize.

However, personality is characterized by more than the mere presence of purpose. It is also characterized, in an essential way, by various types of continuity of purpose. All personalities pursue the value of continued existence for themselves, and they do so on a ongoing basis. As personalities become more developed, they also begin to hold specific purposes over time. Other animals, which are also covered by this definition of personality, display very elaborate continuities of purpose. They demonstrate “instinctive” purpose when, for example, birds migrate over thousands of miles. But they also demonstrate the ability to hold a purpose through a complex series of operations designed to achieve a goal, as we see regularly in the domesticated animals with which we are most often familiar.

Human personalities are differentiated from the personalities of other animals by factors such as the ability to speak and think in grammatical languages,[3] and this allows us to consider significant ranges of the future when we make our decisions. Human personalities can hold conscious purposes for a significantly greater length of time—indeed, even spanning generations.

However, while personalities may vary in their capacity for holding and sustaining purpose, some kind of purpose motivates every moment in the life of a personality.

Continuity of identity

Beyond the five characteristics already developed, we need to consider one other factor at this point. As a personality, I tend to assume there is an “I” that was earlier, is now, and will be later. In all three phases of time, this “I” seems, in some important sense, to be the same “I”. The nature of this “I,” however, is a hotly contested issue.

Many schools thought that take this “I” to be illusory. For example, materialistic reductionism, which denies the existence of personality altogether. Process philosophy (the intellectual context for the ideas in this book),  has decisively rejected materialistic reductionism for what I take to be very good reasons. Without going into the issue deeply, I would suggest two serious difficulties confront the philosophy of materialistic reductionism. First, those advocating this position seem to be involved in a performative contradiction: In denying the existence of personality, they deny their own existence and the existence of their students and readers, thereby condemning their work to utter irrelevance. Second, they seem to be led to this conclusion by a classic instance of what Alfred North Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness” —i.e., they try to describe all of reality in terms of abstractions that are relevant to only the part of reality explored in physics. Along with many others, I have argued this point extensively.[4]

While acknowledging the existence of personality, Buddhists are well known for their denial of any permanent “I” binding it into an identity. But their rejection of the ongoing identity of personality is softened in two important ways. First, while Buddhists quite rightly point out that there is no single element of experience that remains constant in the flow of experiences making up the personality, they do recognize the existence of a pattern of organization that does remains constant as long as the personality is functioning. This constant organizational pattern is spelled out in the twelve links of interdependent origination.[5] In this way, the personality has at least the unity of an ongoing system.[6] In addition to this unity, Buddhists also have a doctrine of karma, which provides for the causes generated in one lifetime to affect a subsequent reincarnation of that same personality. This allows the unity of the system to survive a change of bodies.

Other schools of thought (usually with its own definition of “soul”) posit a permanent identity in the form of a soul. Arguments for the existence of the soul, while they can be quite compelling, are not, generally, rooted in empirical observations.

When we come to discuss reincarnation, near the end of this book, complex issues surrounding the idea of soul will emerge, and will be explored more deeply at that time.

Meanwhile, for our current purposes, we will adopt something similar to the Buddhist position—that the unity of the personality is guaranteed by its unity as a system, and by its significant (though hardly complete) continuity of memory and purpose.

Transphysical Worlds

If the personality is to survive bodily death while still remaining a personality in the sense just defined, it must continue to exist after death in some world other than the ”regular world” of our everyday, waking experience (the precise nature of this world will be explored more fully in Chapter 7). Therefore, a central idea of this book is the notion of “transphysical worlds.” The doctrine of the transphysical worlds can be summarized as follows:

• The physical world is part of a larger system of interlocking worlds.

• These other worlds are not physical (hence, “transphysical”), and they operate according to laws different from those that govern the physical world. They are, nonetheless, objectively real.

• Processes taking place in those other worlds directly impact what takes place in the physical world—whether or not human beings are aware of them.

• Human beings can consciously experience those other worlds, and can operate in those other worlds in ways that significantly affect the unfolding of events here in the physical world.[7]

The idea that the personalities of the deceased inhabit the same world in which we live our daily lives flies in the face of the evidence. If we are surrounded by disincarnate personalities during our waking lives, then it is remarkable that they have such minor causal effects. Also, as we will see, the descriptions of the afterlife received from deceased personalities by mediums generally describe a world quite different from the one we share in our waking lives.

Because the definition of survival I am using in this book requires the existence of transphysical worlds (other than physical worlds) one of the prime tasks of this book is to make these words intelligible.

Reincarnation

While many people profess a belief in multiple incarnations, we will see in Chapter 11 that “reincarnation” has a variety of meanings. In the strongest sense of the term, we can understand it as a situation in which the personality survives the death of its body, and then, without losing continuity, embodies itself in another personality. In the weakest sense, we can understand it to mean that every individual is a reincarnation of all past individuals. Reincarnation may, as in some Buddhist teachings, involve no continuity of identity, or, as in soul-theories of reincarnation, it may involve a strong sense of enduring identity between successive lives. We will leave the term “reincarnation” somewhat vague, until we tackle these issues in Chapter 11.

Summary

In this chapter, I have defined what I mean by “physical body, ” “personality,” “transphysical worlds,” and “reincarnation.”  The definition of “body” is unremarkable, though we have left for later consideration an analysis of the difference between a living body and a dead one.

The definition of “personality” is descriptive of what we mean by that term in everyday life—a personality is an individual sharing a world with other individuals. It is conscious, which is to say (at least) that it feels its surrounding world and makes free decisions thatr have effects in that world. It is endowed with some significant measure of continuity in terms of memory and purpose.

The definitions of “transphysical worlds” and of “reincarnation” given in this chapter are necessarily preliminary, and will be expanded in following chapters.

Five fundamental propositions

Our exploration of survival and reincarnation will be organized around the following five propositions:

I. The personality exercises causal agency in its actual world;

II. Transphysical worlds are part of our actual world

• This proposition is part of my definition of personality, but is sufficiently questioned by scientific thought that it needs to be established separately.

III. The personality can function in transphysical worlds, independently from the physical body, even during the life of that body.

• While this is not implicit in the definition of personality, establishing this will make the survival, by the personality, of bodily death much more plausible.

IV.The personality survives the death of its physical body, and it does so in transphysical worlds.

·People may think of personality survival in a number of different ways. For example:

oMaterialists might think of survival in terms of the survival of the matter that makes up the body. The thought of that matter, returning to the general of store of matter making up the world and participating in many generations of future life may give materialists some feeling of continuity after death, but this is in no sense a continuity of individual identity after death, and that is what I mean by personality survival in this book.

oSome more spiritually oriented philosophies may imagine survival in terms of the individual personality, as a drop, dissolving into the ocean of Divine Unity. There, its essence lives on, even though its individuality is no more. Again, in this approach, there is no continuity of personal identity.

oAlfred North Whitehead seemed to have imagine survival in terms of ones own experience living eternally, in the perfect memory of God. Here, there is some sense of a preservation of personal identity, but it is preserved as a very special and complete memory, and not as an ongoing personality.

Each of these ideas of personality survival is built around some important truth, and deserves respect in its own right. However, in this book, when I say that the personality survives the death of its physical body, I have in mind a very strong definition of survival—one in which the very personality I have formed in the course of my lifetime wakes up, after the death of the physical body, to find itself in a different world, while retaining consciousness, causal efficacy (including, under some circumstances at least, the possibility of communicating with beings who are still alive), and at least as much continuity of memory and purpose as I share with myself in earlier phases of my life.

V. Reincarnation is part of the human life-cycle.

· Reincarnation and personality survival are, logically speaking, two entirely different phenomena. Personality survival, as we have seen, involves the continuation after death of the personality, formed during bodily life. This survival is not the same thing as immortality, since the personality that survives may, and indeed, probably does, die after a time in its own world. There may be personality survival without reincarnation.[8] On the other hand, certain Buddhist accounts of reincarnation[9] suggest reincarnation without personality survival.

In general, we are born without accessible memory of previous lives, and the personalities we exist as now have been formed by the experiences and decisions made during this current lifetime. Many traditions suggest that the personality formed in this life, whether or not it survives the death of its body, does eventually die, and then there is a new lifetime—somehow connected to the old one, and yet enjoying an entirely new personality that forms in the future.

Later, when I discuss reincarnation, I will examine more fully the nature of the continuity between personalities that is implied in reincarnation.

In the next chapter, I will examine the evidence supporting these propositions.

1

[1] This quantum consciousness is part of what is intended in the title, Irreducible Mind (Kelly, Edward F., and Kelly, Emily Williams. Irreducible Mind. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007.) —the first book to come out of the Survival Research conference at the Esalen Center for Theory and Research (http://www.esalenctr.org/).

[2] Sri Aurobindo Essays on the Gita, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry, 1983. See Chapter 8 in particular.

[3] Other animals seem to use and understand words—both their own calls and human words. If other animals did not have this capacity, it would be difficult to imagine how human language could ever have evolved at all. But it seems that other animals rarely make sentences, and never paragraphs. We could speculate that human language is differentiated from the language of other animals by virtue of its grammar—a structure that permits much more interesting concatenations of words and, thus, of ideas.

[4] Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World, New York: The Free Press, 1967. ; de Quincey, Christian, Radical Nature, Invisible Cities Press, 2002. Weiss, Eric, The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds, Proquest, 2003.

[5] Bhikku Nanamoli (trans.), The Path of Purification (Vishddhimagga), Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 1975, p. 696.

[6] Joanna Macy, Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural System, State University of New York Press, 1991.

[7] Weiss, Op. Cit., p. 5.

[8] While the evidence documented by Ian Stevenson (see next chapter) can be said to prove that the personality sometimes does survive bodily death and then reincarnate in a new body, it does not prove that this is the general case.

[9] Bhikku Nanamoli (trans.), Op. Cit., p. 451.

In the last chapter, I proposed five propositions that form the essential content of this book. They are:

I. The personality exercises causal agency

II. The transphysical worlds are part of the actual world

III. The personality can function independently of its body, even during the life of the body.

IV. The personality survives the death of its physical body, and has its ongoing existence in transphysical worlds.

V. Reincarnation is part of the human life-cycle.

In this chapter, I will review the evidence that supports these propositions.

While some of this evidence has been produced in scientific laboratories under strict experimental controls, much of the evidence relevant to personality survival and reincarnation (only summarized here) consists of carefully researched case studies. For example, evidence for near death experiences can be produced in conversation only with those who claim to have had the experience. This forces us to rely on the perspicacity and truthfulness of the participants and the witnesses whose stories constitute the core of anecdotal accounts. Can we take such evidence seriously?

In considering this issue, I want to begin by acknowledging that the experimental method has brought to science a degree of objectivity, accuracy and replicability unmatched by any other means of establishing evidence. And I want to point out that methods of experimental science, while perfectly suited to the investigation of inorganic and, to a lesser extent, to the investigation of biological systems in nature, fails us entirely when we are dealing with the richness, diversity, and complexity of our ongoing personalities. In the study of personality, we cannot achieve anything like scientific objectivity, and we simply do not have the power to replicate any single moment in the life of a personality. My concern in this book is with the “long trajectory” of human life; with the survival, by the personality, of bodily death, and by the destiny of personality in the cycle of reincarnation. We simply cannot expect to investigate this issue by means of scientific experiments with numerical results.[1]

This brings us back to the issue of anecdotal evidence that I will summarize in this chapter. Anecdotal evidence are the only data we can share with each other regarding the nature and prospects of the personality as it is lived.

Scientists often dismiss such evidence with a catchphrase: “The plural of anecdote is not evidence.” This sounds clever but it sweeps under the rug the key function of anecdotes —something found even in the strictest of scientific research. By and large, unless we actually do the experiments, the only way we can know the results of scientific experiments is by anecdotal reports —for instance, in journals or at conferences. These anecdotes, like all reports, are liable to distortion, particularly when the emotional (and funding) stakes are high. In order to minimize the danger, the scientific community insists on independent verification. Once that is achieved, everyone but the original experimenter and the scientists who replicated the events is now left with more anecdotes. It is then assumed that multiple anecdotes about the same experiment are more evidential than just one. The entire edifice of worldwide scientific cooperation is based on simple, (and, usually, well warranted) faith in anecdotes about experiments.

So, rather than taking seriously the dismissive quip, scientists would do well (1) to realize that when it comes down to it most of what they know about science is inevitably anecdotal; and (2) to keep in mind a much more pertinent dictum: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

In this book, therefore, I do accept as evidential the reports of instances of unusual human capacities when witnessed and investigated by researchers with reputations for high intelligence, high competence, and high integrity. And here, too, the more instances of an anecdote I hear, the more credibility I give it. For example, if I hear about a single case of a near-death experience, I am might dismiss it as an aberrant dream-like wish-fulfillment produced by a stressed brain. But when various distinct anecdotes begin to show remarkable similarities, when they begin to appear more and more frequently in my readings and conversations and, finally, when I can, myself, speak to people and hear their own personal anecdotes about a near-death experience, then the anecdotes become evidential.

The various types of evidence presented here have met the tests outlined in the last paragraph. These are reports of instances of unusual human capabilities that are regularly reported in ancient spiritual texts, that are regularly reported by primal peoples, that have been witnessed by multiple reliable witnesses, on many separate occasions, and that (in a number of cases) I have personally verified by speaking with people who have had similar experiences. Some of these capacities I have verified first hand, and all of them are extensions of powers of personality we already exercise in the course of daily life.

One important application of the metaphysical system I develop in this book is to take these disparate data, and organize them into a coherent cosmology that exhibits our actual world as one in which:

· human beings do, in fact, enjoy a life cycle that comprises much more than just bodily life, and

· in which 400 years of scientific work would be expected to produce just the sorts of results that they have.

Before we begin to address that larger concern, and before we consider the evidence for each of the five propositions, let us pause to consider the historical evidence for survival and reincarnation in general.

Historical Evidence for Survival and Reincarnation

First, every civilization in history, and in prehistory, of which we have knowledge, believed in some form of afterlife and reincarnation. Of course, many civilizations, particularly those of primal peoples, held an understanding of individual identity very different from that which we hold today.[2] Nonetheless, they all experienced the boundary between life and death as fluid, believed in some kind of contact with deceased persons, and most assumed a kind of recycling of personalities through family and tribe.

Many cultures recognized that honoring and dealing with their ancestors was a priority. They built special shrines and rewarded members of their communities who could communicate with the dead. It would be arrogant for us today to assume that these people were unenlightened or primitive. They were genetically identical to us and were at least as smart as we are. Throughout history, they experienced communication with ancestors as not only possible, but also as effective and valuable.

Furthermore, no pre-modern society made the strict distinction between “inner” and “outer” in quite the same way we do. The idea that reality might somehow exist “out there,” beyond experience, never occurred to them. Earlier civilizations assumed, rather reasonably, that they experienced reality as it actually is. The contents of dreams and apparitions were just as real for them as the contents of sensory perception—just in a different way. All pre-modern historical civilizations also understood the physical world to be accompanied by worlds of divine and demonic beings of various sorts, and understood human beings as possessing bodies that could function in those worlds. These beliefs have been exhaustively documented in J. J. Poortman’s Vehicles of Consciousness.[3] These transphysical worlds appear in my fundamental propositions (Proposition II) and are necessary for the existence of personality survival as defined in this book. I will offer arguments for the existence of these worlds independent of the historical evidence, but it is nice to have the support of my ancestors.

Only modern industrial civilization—rooted in a metaphysics of reductionist materialism and, therefore, imagines that personality is a product of dead matter or brute energy—has conceived the idea that the physical world is the whole of reality, and has held the idea that personality terminates with the death of its body.

Modern materialistic reductionism not only makes survival and reincarnation seem impossible, it also makes consciousness per se seem impossible. As an idea, materialistic reductionism has outlived its utility. The theoretical framework that I will be introducing here not only allows us to preserve all of the findings of modern science but also makes room for the wisdom of our magical, mythical, and classical ancestors.

Because the new metaphysical framework I am about to outline is so counterintuitive—from the perspective of the old, but still dominant, paradigm of materialism—I will now prepare the ground for what is to come by reviewing and expanding on the five fundamental propositions that form the core of my thesis.

Evidence that Personality Has Causal Agency (Proposition I)

Common Sense

Before we move on to more exotic forms of evidence, let’s look at the evidence for this proposition that surrounds us daily. While scientific reductionism tries to tell us that our personalities are merely epiphenomenal and have no actual effects in the causally closed domain of the physical world, our entire lives are based on quite a contrary belief. While we are willing to accept reflexes, instincts, habits and various sorts of unconscious motives as determinants of our actions, nonetheless, in general, we know that it is we ourselves, as personalities, that make all of the major and many of the minor decisions of our lives. I decide how I will dress, where I will go, what I will say and so forth.

It is impossible to read a news story, a history or a biography that does not make innumerable references to choices made by personalities. It is also impossible to imagine any of the everyday feats of engineering we witness— construction of buildings and ships, for example—without recognizing the conscious purposes and decisions that lie behind their realization. Indeed, our entire legal system, which assigns responsibility to people for the decisions that they make, would be unintelligible if we did not credit personalities with causal effects in the actual world.

Only when our attention is directed by the very abstract ideas of modern science can we imagine personality to be void of causal efficacy. Indeed, the very real and significant act of judgment that condemns the personality to a non-causal status is itself a causal act performed by a personality. To put it simply, any personality that judges the personality to be epiphenomenal, and that strives to convince other personalities of this point of view, is engaged in a blatant performative contradiction.

We all live and act on the assumption that our personalities are causal agencies in the actual world.

Beyond the essential evidence from our own everyday experiences, however, other evidence suggests that the causal power of the personality is much greater than it appears in the normal course of our lives.

Unusual Causal Impacts of Personality on its own Body

A great deal of evidence suggesting that the mind has unusual causal influence on the body is presented in chapter three of Irreducible Mind.[4] Emily Kelly, the author of that chapter, drawing from published research as well as from her own investigations, documents the following:

• Cases in which purely psychological factors trigger symptoms of full-blown diseases (such as mass hysteria in closely associated groups).[5]

• Studies correlating chronic negative emotions (such as depression or helplessness) and physiological illness.[6]

• Cases where people died suddenly, usually from cardiac arrest, after receiving a sudden emotional shock or (more rarely) sudden unusual joy.[7]

• Cases of “voodoo” death in which a person who has been cursed or otherwise led to believe “by another, usually authoritarian, person . . . that he or she is going to die at a particular time does in fact die [at that time].”[8] Some of these occur entirely outside religious or “magical” contexts, as in the case of a man who had a bad asthma attack “after his mother had cursed him for going against her wishes, saying ‘something dire will happen to you’ as a result.”[9] He had several more attacks over the next several months, always after encounters with his mother. Finally he was found semi-comatose an hour after a conversation with his mother in which she repeated her warning, and he died twenty minutes later.[10]

• Many cases in which people “postpone their death until after some meaningful occasion, such as the arrival of a loved one or a significant day.” [11]

• Cases documenting the power of placebo effects—even a case in which patients given a placebo surgery did better than those who received the real thing.[12]

• Cases of sudden whitening of the hair or skin.[13]

• Cases of false pregnancy, in which the signs are so convincing that even doctors are often fooled.[14]

• Stigmata, and related phenomena in which people see another person get injured, and develop corresponding wounds on their own bodies; or in which people reliving traumatic experiences reproduce the wounds from the original incident ; and cases in which people can make geometrical blisters, or even writing, appear on their skin merely by willing or imagining it.[15]

• Cases in which different personalities all belonging to one person with Dissociative Identity Disorder require different prescriptions for their eyeglasses, and have different allergies.[16]

In all of these cases, the personality seems quite clearly to be exercising unusual influence on the body with its own, independent, causal power. But we can go one step further, and also document cases in which the personality has a direct causal effect on the bodies of other individuals.

Causal Impact of Personality on Other Bodies

Here is a sampling of the evidence that suggests causal impact of personalities on other bodies without the mediation of its own body.

· First, in daily life, considerable evidence exists for “empathy,” or direct communication of feeling states between personalities, unmediated by physical causes. Many of us have the experience of “feeling vibes,” which happens, for example, if we walk in on a room where people are fighting, and feel the anger thickening the air. While these experiences can, usually, be “explained away” by references to elaborate processing of subtle sensory cues, in fact many of us take this sort of empathy as a regular phenomenon, and make extensive use of it in daily life. In the metaphysical system I will present and explore here, it is very natural to think of this sort of empathy as a direct causal connection among personalities. Daily life and parapsychological research also provide evidence for various forms of “telepathy,” or direct sharing of thoughts among individuals.[17] Sigmund Freud, though generally a materialist, was nonetheless convinced of the reality of telepathy by his exploration of dreams.[18]

· Numerous cases have also been documented in which one person takes on the symptoms of another—for example, “couvade,” in which a man takes on many of the symptoms of his pregnant wife.[19]

· More striking are cases of “maternal impression” in which a fetus manifests characteristics that can be attributed only to the experiences of the mother while the fetus is developing. One case documents a woman who was, during her pregnancy, shocked and impressed by seeing someone on the street with a birthmark covering half of her face. Her child was born with a similar birthmark.[20]

· Other cases include a woman who could “reproduce on her skin [by entirely subjective means] target pictures or writing. Not only could she “somehow translate an image presented to her normally into corresponding marks on her skin” (but in some instances “the target information often had not been conveyed to her in any normal sensory way” (p. 225)—in other words, it was communicated via some kind of extra-sensory modality, such as telepathy.[21]

· Many cases have been documented in which a hypnotist could put a subject into a trance without being in any way physically present to the subject.[22]

· Finally, evidence from a number of cases attest to the healing power of distant prayer.[23]

These cases show not only that the personality of one person can exercise causal influence on his or her own body, but also that a personality can exercise, without physical mediation, causal influence on the bodies of others. In addition, as we will see when discussing the Ian Stevenson evidence below, cases exist in which it appears that a recently deceased personality produced marks on the body of a subsequent incarnation.

Influence of Personality on Inorganic Systems

In considering the causal power of the personality, we must also look at the considerable evidence demonstrating that personalities can influence the behaviors of inorganic systems. These studies usually involve the ability of individuals to influence the outcome of random events through the simple act of intending to do so.

Robust results, obtained in rigorous experiments, have been documented in Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne’s Margins of Reality[24] and Dean Radin’s The Conscious Universe.[25] For years, scientists have experimented with digital random number generators (RNGs) where people will, wish, or intend for more ones or zeros to show up with a frequency greater than chance. Because these machines operate via quantum effects, and are shielded from any physical influence by humans, the results should turn out to be statistically random. Nevertheless, when human subjects are tested to see if they can influence the behavior of the RNGs using only their minds, the results reveal patterns significantly greater than chance. The experimental system is electronic, operating close to the speed of light , and so scientists have been able to perform millions of trials. Meta-analysis reveals statistically significant results demonstrating some kind of psychokinetic (PK) effect.

Besides these cases in which personalities influenced the results of random number generators, cases of so-called “macro PK” have been documented—in which skilled subjects, ostensibly using only the power of their minds, have levitated tables, bent spoons, and made clocks run backwards.[26]

These are just a small selection of the kinds of data documented in Irreducible Mind and other sources. When we review this body of evidence as a whole—including the accumulated weight of scientific data, historical and cross-cultural persistence, contemporary personal reports, and other anecdotal sources—it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some aspect of who we are can both function independently of the body and survive bodily death.

Summary

Considering (1) the fact that we all live with the assumption that our personalities exercise causal power over our own bodies; (2) that the entire moral and legal foundation of our civilization rests on the assumption that the personality generally controls and is, therefore, responsible for, the behaviors of its body; (3) that we have strong evidence for the power of the personality to create sickness and health, to postpone death, and even to produce voluntary stigmata; (4) the evidence for direct causal influence by one personality on another; and (5) the extensive evidence for the direct, unmediated influence by the personality on inorganic systems (such as random number generators)— we have more than ample reason to believe my second proposition: that the personality has the power within itself to create effects in the actual world.

Furthermore, the data of parapsychology—such as PK, clairvoyance and remote viewing—demonstrate that the human mind is capable of interacting with the physical world directly, without the medium of the body. Whatever we are, we not only have the capacity to operate a body but also have the capacity to have causal effects in the world around us not mediated through our bodies.

Bottom line: Whatever a human personality is, it appears to have the ability to affect the waking world in meaningful and significant ways directly, without working through the body. We do not know yet where the outer limits of this ability lie.

Given the impressive weight of all the parapsychological data, plus our own commonplace direct experiences of influencing our bodies through choices generated in our minds, the worldview of modern science is seriously called into question. I present this work with a clear understanding that the standard metaphysics of materialism—the view that nothing ultimately exists but physical matter or energy—is not only incomplete but also inadequate. We need a much more comprehensive set of metaphysical assumptions if we are to account for indisputable realities such as consciousness itself, our thinking, feeling personalities, as well as explain “anomalous” data that indicate the human personality has the capacity to survive physical death, and even to reincarnate through multiple lives.

Evidence for Existence of Transphysical Worlds (Proposition II)

In the chapters that follow, I aim to establish the plausibility of the existence of the  transphysical worlds. Such worlds are alien to the sensibilities of modern, scientifically informed common sense. Consequently, it is difficult to find works that discuss the existence of these worlds  Nevertheless, I take it that the evidence in support of propositions III and IV below also counts as evidence for the existence of the  transphysical worlds. Furthermore, much that is difficult to understand about our waking lives can also be illuminated by the doctrine of the  transphysical worlds.

Evidence for Independent Functioning of Personality (Proposition III)

The idea that the personality can survive the death of its body will be much more plausible if it can be shows that the personality can function independently from its body while the body is alive. Evidence for this idea falls under several different headings.

Dreams

In modern times, we have come to think of dreams as entirely private shows put on for us by our brains when they are unoccupied with the processing of external sensory data. This idea, however, is not without its difficulties.

If it is, indeed, possible for our brains to generate what appear to be entire worlds for us to explore, and to populate those worlds with various objects and the expressions of other seemingly human and non-human personalities, then how can we know whether or not our waking worlds are merely unusually coherent dreams? And if we can’t tell the difference between waking and dreaming, then how can we know whether or not other people are merely figments of our brains? In other words, the idea that dreams are entirely private productions raises a serious problem of solipsism—it makes it plausible to imagine that we are the only actual personalities in existence, and that everyone else is merely a projection of our own brains.

Other difficulties exist with the idea that dreams are entirely private (I have explored this elsewhere).[27] For now, I simply invite you to consider not the differences, but the similarities between waking life and dreaming life. In both, we are dealing with process and the flow of time (of course, time may behave very differently in dreams than it does in waking life; nevertheless, events in dreams can be sorted, more or less, into before and after). In both cases, we are dealing with some form of space in which various objects are arrayed. In both, we are a subject at the center of a situation involving multiple objects, and with various sorts of causal relations among ourselves and those objects.

Even though dreams are often confused and confusing, and difficult to remember, I would like you to at least consider that dreams are glimpses into transphysical worlds. To the extent that we are willing to accept this, we can interpret our ordinary dreams as evidence for the independent functioning of the personality in  transphysical worlds.

Near-Death Experiences

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are “generally understood to be the unusual, often vivid and realistic, and sometimes profoundly life-changing experiences occurring to people who have been either physiologically close to death, as in cardiac arrest or other life-threatening conditions, or psychologically close to death, as in accidents or illnesses in which they feared they would die.” [28] These experiences often include the sense of floating outside the body and of seeing events transpiring around the body while it is unconscious (sometimes in ways that can be clearly verified afterwards). They also frequently include the feeling of moving through a tunnel with a bright light at the end. People experiencing NDEs regularly report clarity of perception and thought greater than that enjoyed during normal waking life, and even though “according to conventional psycho-physiological theory, such activity should be diminishing or even not possible.”[29] Many people who have experienced NDEs come away from the experience with the conviction that they have functioned independent of their physical bodies, and that they will do so after they die. These experiences are relatively common, being experienced by 10-20 per cent of patients who are close to death.[30]

After a thorough analysis of the data, and of the various explanations that have been proposed, the authors of Irreducible Mind conclude: “We should not rule out categorically that NDEs are essentially what many of those who experience them think they are—namely, evidence that they have temporarily separated from their body and, moreover, may survive the permanent separation that occurs at death.”[31]

Out of Body Experiences

NDEs are closely associated with out-of-body experiences (OBEs). In fact, many NDEs are reported to begin with OBEs, and then move into more elaborate scenarios. “In an OBE, a person experiences his or her consciousness as having separated from the body, but also as continuing to function normally.”[32] It is estimated that as many as 10 per cent of the general population has had these experiences.[33]

A large literature exists on the subject of OBEs, most prominent are the extensive personal records of OBEs compiled by Monroe, Bruce and Vijera.[34] Reports include veridical perceptions of events that could not have been sensed by the body, communication with other individuals who are, at the time of the contact, asleep and in a dream-like condition, and communication with deceased individuals.

Some OBEs include “reciprocal apparitions” in which one person deliberately tries to “project” his or her personality or is having a spontaneous OBE, or is having a dream in which he or she seems to go to a distant location, while a person at that location, unaware of the first person’s experience, sees an apparition of that person One famous case from 1863 involves a  Mrs. Wilmot, whose husband was onboard a ship on a storm-tossed Atlantic crossing. She “had an experience, while she was awake during the middle of the night, in which she seemed to go to her husband’s stateroom on the ship, where she saw him asleep in the lower berth and another man in the upper berth looking at her. She hesitated, kissed her husband, and left. The next morning Mr. Wilmot’s roommate asked him, apparently somewhat indignantly, about the woman who had come into their room during the night.”[35] A number of more recent cases of the same type have been reported.[36]

Lucid Dreams

Lucid dreams are closely related to OBEs and NDEs.. I have had lucid dreams several times, and thinking about this experience brought my attention to the fact that there is a kind of taking-for-granted that pervades my dream experiences. I may have a very strange dream in which I am doing strange things in strange places, but while I am dreaming, it always seems perfectly normal. It’s as if I’ve always been there, in that dream space, and the dream experience is entirely undisturbed by memories of waking life. In lucid dreams, that taking-for-granted is interrupted. Suddenly, it is “I,”—my waking self, the person that I am in my everyday, waking life—who is there in the dream. I remember having been awake, I appreciate the uncanny strangeness of the dream space, and anticipate waking up. The waking “I” brings with it to dream space whatever lucidity and clarity of purpose it can muster in waking life. Lucid dreams can merge into OBEs, and vice versa. An extensive literature on lucid dreams also exists.[37]

Summary

Out-of-body experiences and lucid dreams are felt, by those who have them, to be clear instances of the functioning of the personality independent of the body. People who have these experiences are often convinced they will survive bodily death. Near-death experiences are related to lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences in that lucid dreams and near-death experiences not infrequently lead to out of body experiences. Near-death experiences are particularly evidential in that they happen under conditions of intense medical monitoring, and it can be shown that while they are happening, the electrical activity of the brain is entirely flat-lined. Thus they seem to be clear instances of personality functioning in the absence of the normal bodily support.  Given that dreams can turn into lucid dreams, which are essentially identical to out of body experiences, we may also choose to take our ordinary dreams as further evidence of our ability to function independently of the physical body. This evidence will, of course, be most convincing to those who have had the relevant experiences, but these experiences are fairly wide-spread. The evidence so far presented supports the idea that, at a very minimum, ten to twenty percent of the population has experienced these phenomena first hand. Given the suspicion in which these experiences are held, it is probable that these experiences are even more widespread than the currently available evidence suggests. My own informal research in my own classes (which are composed, of course, of people who are open to and curious about these matters and which, therefore, say nothing about the general population) suggests that as many as 60-70 per cent of my students have had or are regularly having these experiences. This summarizes the evidence for Proposition III.

Evidence for Personality Survival After Death in  Transphysical Worlds (Proposition IV)

Evidence from Ian Stevenson

Ian Stevenson’s evidence, which I will present shortly when I discuss reincarnation (Proposition V), is also relevant to the issue of personality survival. Stevenson’s evidence is extensive and careful documentation of “Cases of the Reincarnation Type (CORT)”— cases of young children with vivid and demonstrably accurate recollections of previous lives —usually of lives that were recent in time and close in space to the life they are now living. I introduce this evidence here because twenty percent (20%) of his cases include reports of what the personality was doing during its sojourn out of the body. This evidence includes:

Evidence from mediums

The most glamorous evidence we have for personality survival comes from mediums. Mediumship, also known as “channeling,” involves special individuals who claim to be able to communicate directly with various sorts of disembodied entities —spirits, demons, and disincarnate people—and to relay messages from those entities to the living. Awareness of mediumship has grown so broad and mainstream that some more commercially minded mediums now practice their art on television. I will not attempt to review the vast literature on this subject, other than to note that the descriptions of the afterlife communicated by mediums often seem to be corroborated by the descriptions of afterlife conditions given by individuals who report on these matters in terms of their OBEs.

Reports of Extra-bodily Activities of Personality

Some of the most important evidence for survival has been already outlined when I discussed the evidence for Proposition III—i.e., that the personality can function independently of its body. Some evidence, particularly among reports of out-of-body experiences, supports the idea that personality may travel about in the space of our waking lives.[38] The vast majority of these reports, however, attest to the existence of strange and wondrous worlds that transcend the physical world in their variety of form and function, and in the freedom and profound adequacy of self expression that the personality can find in them.[39]

Once we take our own experiences of these worlds (as, at least, in dreams), and the stories of these worlds that we hear from others, as evidence for the ability of the personality to function independently of its body, then it makes sense for us to take the contents of these stories as evidential as well.

Without going into a detailed analysis of the many stories to be found in the literature, I want to propose that the type of world these stories imply has been extensively explored in popular fiction.

Here are a few examples of this exploration, distinguished from many others only because of their vividness in my own memory:

· The environments explored by Dr. Strange, a long-time character in comics of that name published by Marvel Comics

· Movies such as Roger Rabbit and What Dreams May Come with Robin Williams.[40]

· The environment inhabited by the Worm-Hole-Aliens who serve as religious prophets in the television series Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

· Neuromancer[41] and the cyberpunk tradition to which it belongs, all imagine cyberspace very much as the astral world is depicted in the Theosophical literature[42]

These are all descriptions, under the safety of science fiction, of the types of  transphysical worlds that people enter when they are functioning in a mentally conscious way, and with some continuity of memory, outside their physical bodies. These fictional explorations are far from the sort of aesthetically, ethically and intellectually coherent cosmology that we need for deeper investigation of these issues, but it is evidence that awareness of these experiences and a willingness to entertain them—even if only “in fiction”—is growing.

The need to weld these early imaginings into a new cosmology is not being heard in the halls of mainstream academia. Indeed, the very issue of  transphysical worlds has been anathema to mainstream academics during the last four hundred years.[43] However, as we have already seen, we have no need to start from scratch in such an undertaking. A multi-world cosmology of some sort was held by all cultures with the notable exception of the modern industrial West. Particularly relevant to the model developed in this book, a multi-world cosmology was developed by the Vedic tradition in India and Tibet, and has been tested and refined by many generations of yogis.

This Vedic cosmology also has been expressed, with increasing clarity and vigor, by a number of prominent—if extra-academic—writers over the past 150 years. A sampling of these authors include Emmanuel Swedenborg,[44] Madam Blavatsky,[45] Annie Bessant[46], C. W. Leadbetter[47] and other, more recent Theosophists such as Alice Bailey[48], Rudolph Steiner[49] and Sri Aurbondo[50].

These various authors all agree on a cosmology that supports both the existence of the physical world and a variety of transphysical worlds. All of them agree that personality survives the death of its physical body and enjoys further experiences after that death in  transphysical worlds. And each of them provides a coherent interpretation for the various stories that are told by modern explorers concerning the adventures of the personality while out of its body.

All of this together amounts to what we might term a “circumstantial” case for personality survival. There is no particular phenomenon that we can isolate and replicate that somehow proves the existence of personality survival. In fact, it is difficult to imagine what such a phenomenon might be. But what we do have is:

· Evidence supporting the proposition that the personality can function independently of its body in dreams, lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, even  when the electrical activity of the brain is flat-lined.

· Evidence that the personality has causal effects in the physical world—by deciding on the behaviors of its physical body, by directly impacting the feelings and thoughts of other without the mediation of the physical body, and (for example in remote viewing and psychokinesis) of having a causal impact on the behaviors of inorganic systems.

· Stories from Ian Stevenson’s CORT data, which gain strength from their association with the well verified cases of reincarnation that it accompanies.

· All the stories gathered from the extensive literature on dreams, lucid dreams, out- of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and the activities of mediums.

· The corroboration of these stories by people of the historical past who were no less intelligent than we are.

· The ordering of these stories into a general multi-world cosmology that is so widespread and pervasive that Aldous Huxley and others called it “The Perennial Philosophy.”

As this book progresses, I hope to strengthen this evidence still further by showing how it not only is compatible with modern science but can actually help to explain certain phenomena with which post-modern science is struggling.

The Stevenson Data

Probably the most conclusive body of evidence for survival and reincarnation is the research done by Dr. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist from the University of Virginia. During years of fieldwork in India, Sri Lanka, Africa and Europe he discovered and documented multiple cases of very young children who had vivid and detailed memories of previous lives.[51] At three or four years of age, they said things such as “I really don’t belong here, I belong in another house” or “My sister is named _____ and my brother is named _____. My cat is named ______. But in that lifetime I was killed in _______way.”[52] When Stevenson interviewed these children he found that almost all of them claimed to have lived a previous life in the recent past and in geographical proximity to the location of their current life. Typically, they reported detailed stories about prior family lives, often in other villages they had never visited in this life, and, when checked out, the details of their stories were confirmed. In many cases, the people involved had died at a young age, and usually suffered a violent death. Frequently, Dr. Stevenson found birthmarks on the children’s bodies corresponding to the wounds that had killed the person in a previous life (the circumstances of the deaths were confirmed by local records).

For example, one person had been shot through the throat with a shotgun, and the bullet had gone right through and out the back. In this life, the ostensibly reincarnated man has a matching birthmark on his neck. Even more curious, when Stevenson and his team looked closely at the subject’s skull they found he had birthmarks where the exit wounds would have been as well.

Over the years, since the early 1960s, Stevenson investigated and meticulously documented thousands of such cases. Quite often, he arrived at the site of the previous-life incident before news of the case of a reincarnated child could have traveled from town to town. Nevertheless, the location and other reported details about the circumstances of the death (often including names) were confirmed. Stevenson’s research, documented scientifically, was published in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and in four volumes of Cases of the Reincarnation Type.[53] To an objective, unbiased reader, Stevenson’s work, based on robust data, constitutes powerful evidence for reincarnation.  In fact, I consider this evidence to be scientific confirmation that at least some people, under certain circumstances, die and are reborn in another body. This is momentous, indeed, and has not received anything like the attention it deserves.

I regard Stevenson’s data as substantial proof that at least one type of reincarnation—the type that occurs when a personality leaves a physical body that has died and then, after some interval, reincarnates directly in a new body—is regularly taking place.

Evidence for other modes of reincarnation

It is important to note, however, that this type of reincarnation does not seem, on the surface at least, to be the general rule. Very few young children speak about their previous lives. The vast literature on the subject, nevertheless, suggests that reincarnation is a universal phenomenon.

Accounts drawn from Sri Aurobindo and other Theosophically inspired sources suggest that a more frequent type of reincarnation involves first the survival of the personality for some unspecified, but finite, duration in  transphysical worlds, then a death of the personality, and then some period of time which is characterized as a “soul” existence.

I will return to this subject and explore it in more depth in Chapter 11. The point I want to make now is that reincarnation of this type does not involve the ongoing existence of the personality per se. Rather, it suggests a model in which each personality is unique and mortal, but that each personality is some sense an expression of a soul, and that it is the soul, not the personality that reincarnates.

Buddhists, who reject the existence of the soul but still maintain a doctrine of reincarnation have suggested at least one model in which there is no survival of bodily death in the sense that we are discussing here, but there is still a form of reincarnation that establishes a causal (karmic) connection between two successive personalities.[54] The evidence for these other types of reincarnation are, it seems to me, less robust.

Arguments made for reincarnation on philosophical grounds go back as far as Plato. Sri Aurobindo makes a particularly sophisticated an argument of this type in his book The Problem of Rebirth.[55] Anecdotal evidence for rebirth comes from “past-life memories,” supported somewhat by data obtained by psychics in “past-life readings.”

Past-life memories are, at least in some circles, far from uncommon, but many of them are difficult to credit. Some of them seem almost mechanical as, for example, when someone with healing talent discovers a past life as a great healer; and some of them seem entirely too flattering, as when an otherwise unremarkable person remembers himself as having been Napoleon and Genghis Khan. But past-life memories are sometimes quite surprising, and can have a profound impact on the person having them. I have had some personal vivid experiences that I am tempted to interpret as past-life memories. These consisted of sudden, and very vivid, first-person recollections of scenes from other times and other places, as lived through other bodies with different personalities from mine. These memories were far from flattering, though they were related to psychological issues I was working with at the time the memories occurred. I an undecided as to the evidential value of such experiences.

In this book, I will take Stevenson’s evidence for at least one type of reincarnation as valid, and I will give the benefit of doubt to the scant evidence for other types of reincarnation. I will explore ways in which the metaphysical ideas in this book can support the existence of reincarnation in ways that might suggest other ways of gathering evidence on this important issue.

Summary

This, then, is a survey of the evidence that supports my five propositions. At this point, I will turn attention to more theoretical issues and begin the task of developing a metaphysical and cosmological framework within which we can understand these propositions, and their relation to the truths of modern and post-modern science.

1

[1] I have developed these ideas in more depth in Weiss, Eric, The Doctrine of the Subtle Worlds, Proquest, 2003., chapter 1

[2] For a fuller development of this point see, for example: Jean Gebser The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985, and Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thought. Yale University Press, 1972.

[3] J.J. Poortman, Vehicles of Consciousness, Volumes 1-4. The Theosophical Society of the Netherlands, 1954.

[4] Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, Bruce Greyson. Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2006.

[5] Ibid., p. 123.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 124-125.

[8] Ibid., p. 125

[9] Ibid., p. 126

[10] Ibid., p. 126.

[11] Ibid., p. 129.

[12] Ibid, p. 143.

[13] Ibid., p. 148.

[14] Ibid, p. 149-152.

[15] Ibid., p. 156-159.

[16] Ibid., p. 167-174.

[17] Rene Warcollier, Mind to Mind, Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2001.

[18] Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870-1901,Oxford University Press, 2002

[19] Kelly et. Al., Op., Cit., p. 219-221.

[20] Ibid., p. 221-224.

[21] Ibid., p. 225.

[22] Ibid., p. 226-227.

[23] Ibid., p. 227-230.

[24] Jahn, Robert and Brenda Dunne. Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1987.

[25] Radin, Dean. The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997.

[26] see Kelly and Kelly, Irreducible Mind, Op. Cit., pp. 199-218.

[27] Weiss, Ibid.

[28] Kelly et. al, Op. cit., p. 369.

[29] Ibid., p. 386.

[30] Ibid., p. 371

[31] Ibid., p. 391.

[32] Ibid., p. 394.

[33] Ibid., p. 396

[34] Robert Monroe. Far Journeys, New York: Doubleday, 1985: Robert Bruce, Astral Dynamics. Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads, 1999: Waldo Viera,. Projections of the Consciousness. Rio de Janero: International Institute of Projectiology, 1995.

[35] Kelly and Kelly, Op. cit., p. 396.

[36] Ibid.

[37] For example, see Stephen Laberge, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Ballantine Books, 1991.

[38] Some authors, however, suggest that even in out-of body-experiences that appear to be in space and time of waking life, there are always details out of place – which suggests that such experiences happen in those portions of the  transphysical worlds that most closely approximate that of our daily lives.

[39] What is probably the most exquisitely evocative description of these worlds in all of English literature is to be found in Book II of Part I of Savitri, (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, 3^rd ed., Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1970.

[40] Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Director: Robert Zemeckis, Disney Home Video, 2003. What Dreams May Come, Director: Vincent Ward, Polygram Filmed Entertainment, 2003.

[41] William Gibson, Neuromancer, Ace Hardcover; 20th edition 2004.

[42] A. E. Powell has admirably summarized the Theosophical cannon in Powell, A. E. The Astral Body, Wheaton, Il. :Quest, 1972.

________. The Causal Body and the Ego. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1978.

________. The Etheric Body. Wheaton, Il :Quest, 1972.

________. The Mental Body. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1975.

________. The Solar System. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1930; reprint Mokelumne Hill, CA: Health Research, 1985.

[43] Poortman, Op. Cit.

[44] Emanuel Swedenborg, The Universal Human and Soul-Body Interaction, Paulist Press, 1984.

[45] H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Quest Books, 1993.

[46] Annie Besant, Ancient Wisdom: An Outline of Theosophical Teachings, Kessinger Publishing, LLC

[47] C. W. Leadbetter, Inner Life, Society of Metaphysicians Ltd; Facsim.of 1910 Ed edition 1999.

[48] Alice A. Bailey, A Treatise on Cosmic Fire, Lucis Publishing Co., New York, 1977.

[49] Rudolph Stiener, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, Anthroposophic Press.

[50] Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, 2d American ed., Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1990.

[51] Ian Stevenson. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. University Press of Virginia, 1966. Ian Stevenson. Cases of the Reincarnation Type, Volume I, II, III, & IV, University Press Of Virginia, 1975.

[52] Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation (revised edition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001).

[53] Ibid.

[54] Bhikku Nanamoli (trans.), The Path of Purification (Vishddhimagga), Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 1975, p. 451.

[55] Sri Aurobindo, The Problem of Rebirth, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press.

I began this exploration into the nature of personality—and the question of its survival beyond death by offering definitions for ““personality” and “body.” And I also articulated five fundamental propositions that the new metaphysical framework developed in this book is meant to support:

I. The personality exercises causal agency in its actual world;

II. Trans-physical worlds are part of the actual world;

III. Personality can function separately from its body, even while the body is alive;

IV. The personality survives the death of its physical body, and has its ongoing existence in transphysical worlds;

V. Reincarnation is part of the human life-cycle.

Then, in the previous chapter, I reviewed some of the evidence that supports these propositions.

However, even if the evidence is persuasive, for many people something much more compelling is required before either the propositions or the supporting evidence will be accepted. This is understandable. From the perspective of modern science, and even from the perspective of everyday commonsense, the kind of reality suggested by the propositions and revealed by the evidence amounts to a major break with widely accepted assumptions and beliefs about the nature of reality.

Because I will be criticizing beliefs that are often thought of as “scientific,” I need to say a few words about what I mean by the word “science” as I will use it in this chapter.  I am aware of at least three different broad uses of the word that people use in different contexts.

· Science can be defined by referring to its Latin root scientia which means “knowledge.” In this sense, “science” just means “knowing” in general.

· Science can be defined in a more limited way by as “rational knowledge.”  In this sense of the term, any knowledge about the actual world that can be reduced to a set of coherent propositions is considered science.

· Science can be defined still more narrowly by specifying that it is knowledge gained by a special method - the “scientific method” - which proceeds by means of hypothesis and testing.

· Finally, science is sometimes restricted only to those knowledge activities that are like physics, and that analyze phenomena thought mathematical modeling.

In general, it is assumed that science is “empirical” in the sense that it restricts its data to that which can be gathered through the bodily senses.

When I use the word science, I will be referring to a particular knowledge tradition that has existed in the West since the time of Plato and Aristotle.  I will divide science into three phases:

· “Natural history science,” or “Classification science” that began with the Greeks and is still strong today in sciences such as biology.

· “Modern science” which began around the time of the Renaissance, crystallized with Newton, and was dominant up until the beginning of the 20^th Century.

· “Post-modern science,” which includes Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Chaos Theory, Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics and the the theory of self-organization.

I will also make a distinction between science in general, and something that I will call “reductionistic” or “materialistic” science.  In general, science is ontologically neutral.  It either classifies entities, or it analyzes functional relations among entities, but it minimizes its assumptions as to what those entities really “are.”  On the other hand, there is a certain scientific culture, still based in modern science (as opposed to post-modern science), which takes the ontological position that only physical matter - dead, instentient stuff with nothing but mathematical properties - is the ultimate reality.  I will have considerable reason to criticize this sort of reductionistic science, but I want to be very clear that in doing so I am not criticizing science in general.

I am quite sure that most are aware that our everyday, scientically conditioned commonsense, as well as the fundamental assumptions at the foundations of materialist science are inadequate, to say the least, when we are dealing with phenomena that involve mind, consciousness, or any form of subjective experience. Consequently, if we are to expand science to include not only the objective physical world but also the domain of subjective experience then we will have to move science well beyond the bounds of strict materialism.

As things stand today, scientific materialism provides no way to illuminate the mystery of consciousness. As a result, the worldview handed to us by modern science tells us that we (conscious, living beings) are accidental products of automatic forces destined for inevitable universal decay (entropy). It is a bleak and absurd vision, offering no meaning or purpose to life.

We are, as Thomas Berry[1] and Brian Swimme[2] have said, in need of a new story. The metaphysical system that I will present in this book provides the foundation for a new story of the universe—for a world where consciousness, mind, soul, and spirit are just as real and obvious as the matter and energy that currently occupy the restricted gaze of materialistic science. In short, I am offering a new way of thinking about consciousness, matter, life and death, evolution, and the human role in the evolutionary process. In particular, I am proposing a new vision of our actual world that not only allows us to accept the truth of my five propositions, but also accounts for the kinds of results that scientists actually get in their experiments.

As is immediately evident from my opening propositions, and as will become clearer as we proceed, I am identifying a major gap between the world of modern reductionistic science and the new approach outlined in this book. But it is a gap that can be bridged. Our essential tool for building this bridge is metaphysics—in particular, the rigorous ontology and cosmology developed by the great twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

As Whitehead did, we’ll begin our metaphysical quest by “taking it down to Earth,” - by grounding it in our own familiar experience. While some of the key concepts and terminology may be unfamiliar initially, and therefore may require some extra care and attention, my aim is to use the tool of metaphysics to help make philosophical and scientific abstractions more concrete, by connecting them to our familiar experience of the world.

We’ll start by looking at different forms of explanation that we use to make sense of our lives and of the world around us. For example, we use ethical explanations to account for why we take one course of action, rather than some other, as we attempt to balance self-interest with the interests of others and the good of the whole. We also use aesthetic explanations to justify choices based on perceived values that determine or influence actions intended to create beautiful objects and environments. In addition to modes of explanation focused on the “good” and the “beautiful,” we also seek to explain what we understand to be “true.” Scientific explanations are of this type. Modern and post-modern science is a body of knowledge based on an experimental method and designed to tentatively confirm or decisively refute assumptions, hypotheses, or theories about some aspect of physical reality. Specifically, modern and post-modern science seek to demonstrate how some particular phenomenon fits into a general scheme of efficient causes that unite the waking world into a single mathematical system.

Each of these forms of explanation takes certain basic ideas as given and then it uses those ideas in its explanatory work. Ethical explanations hinge on motives, on ideals, on knowledge available at the time of the moral act being explained and so forth. Artistic explanations hinge on sensitive descriptions of sensory patterns and felt relationships, for example between parts of a composition and the whole, and so forth. Scientific explanations hinge on observing and classifiying the sensory characteristics of the entities found in the natural world, or on reliably measuring qualitative variations in those characteristics and producing mathematical statements of the relations among the results of those measurements. All scientific work assembles its explanatory ideas into logical structures.  Classification science tends to use Aristotelian logic, while mathematical science requires some form of propositional logic.[3] To explain something within a particular explanatory discipline, then, is to account for its in terms of the ideas appropriate to that discipline.

Metaphysics is yet another form of explanation. It is generally similar to science in a number of ways:

• It is rooted in logic.

• It attempts to describe the actual world in its totality.

• It proceeds by means of hypothesis and testing.

• It seeks to bind the entirety of its domain into single system of logical relations—in other words, it seeks for explanations with terms that hold their meanings in different contexts, and where contradictions among terms and statements are avoided.

Metaphysics is unlike science, however, in the object of its study. Science restricts its domain to actualities disclosed through the bodily senses. It attempts to bind these actualities into a unified system in two ways: first, in the “natural history” phase, science aims to order the natural entities that it observes with the bodily senses into a hierarchy of logical categories. Then, in the more modern experimental phase, science aims to represent those entities by measurements, and to reduce those measurements to the unity of a single, all-embracing mathematical theory (a “Grand Unified Theory”).

By contrast, metaphysics takes for its domain the entirety of experience—not just experiences mediated by the bodily senses. It includes not only the domain of physical events but also the domain of consciousness and all its operations—such as free association of thoughts, rational thinking, emotional and poetic musing, aesthetic and cognitive judgements, and so forth.

Metaphysics also differs from science (and other modes of knowledge such as ethics and aesthetics) in an additional fundamental and important way. Whereas, for example, science takes as its foundation a set of (often unquestioned) metaphysical assumptions, metaphysics begins by questioning its own assumptions as well as the assumptions of other disciplines such as science, ethics, and aesthetics. The attention that metaphysics brings to the issue of fundamental assumptions sets it apart from other knowledge disciplines. Other disciplines tend to start with a set of ideas that seem self-evident, and then to use those ideas to form explanations.  Metaphysics, by contrast, looks at explanatory ideas themselves, and to critique them in terms of their coherence and their usefullness.

The methods of metaphysics are also quite different from those of other modes of knowing. It does not restrict itself either to hierarchical categorization or to mathematical analysis. Rather, metaphysics encompasses all of the different ways in which the field of experience can be coherently unifiedm - in terms of story, in terms of aesthetic composition, in terms of various sorts of logic - and attempts to appreciate the values and the limits of each of the disciplines that it examines.

The method of metaphysics begins with the study of explanatory disciplines per se. Metaphysics takes on this task in order to identify and clarify key ideas that are used within  a particular discipline—including the discipline of metaphysics itself.  In doing so, it aims to see how far the ideas and connections used within any one discipline can be generalized and coherently applied to other disciplines and, ideally, to the whole range of experience.

Each individual discipline provides a set of conceptual tools applicable within its own domain. Examining those conceptual tools, metaphysics searches for ideas that can be generalized and shown to be adequate over the entirety of experience. For example,  from quantum mechanics we get the idea that actuality is composed of discrete, causally interacting events. We know that this idea is applicable to the analysis of the sub-atomic realm. The metaphysical system we will be exploring here attempts to generalize this idea to cover all of actuality—from the exotic realm of the sub-atomic all the way to the unfolding experience of human beings—which, as we will see, can also be understood as a system of causally interconnected discrete events.

As a kind of preview or foreshadowing of what is to come, you can consider this book as essentially an exercise in metaphysics that generalizes the revolutionary insights of quantum mechanics to the entire spectrum of experience—including consciousness itself and, in particular, human personality. However, I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting we can turn to quantum physics to explain consciousness or personality. Rather, I am saying that we can use the tools of metaphysics to show a fundamental coherence between certain ideas in quantum physics and a more comprehensive cosmology inspired by the metaphysics of Whitehead.

Testing Metaphysics

Having assembled a set of applicable ideas,[4] metaphysics then proceeds to a kind of phenomenological testing. That is, a metaphysician will see whether or not a description of experience based on these ideas actually serves to illuminate experience in interesting and useful ways. Does this description actually correspond to experience? Does this description enable us to understand our experience in new and useful ways?

Metaphysics, as we will understand it, does not start with dogmatic axioms as, for example, mathematics does. Rather, it starts with what Whitehead calls “tentative formulations of the ultimate generalities” [5] of experience which it then tests against experience itself. But then, like mathematics, it proceeds to make deductions from those tentative generalizations to see how successful they are in illuminating our experience. Some metaphysical generalizations pass this test, and others do not. When the deductions from the generalizations are unsuccessful, then the metaphysician, like the scientist, goes “back to the drawing board,” and examines his/her assumptions to see where they were wrong and how they can be revised.

Finally, metaphysical activity is a search for ideas and forms of connection among ideas that can be generalized over the totality of experience so as to exhibit it in its orderly wholeness, and to find a place within that whole for all of the truths revealed by the various the specific disciplines..

Newton’s astounding success in explaining the motions of moving bodies lulled our dominant academic institutions into the belief that modern science had uncovered the truth about the the nature of the actual world, and that it had no need whatsoever for the discipline of philosophy in general, and for the discipline of metaphysics in particular. However, as science developed, its very successes forced it into a series of metaphysical revolutions. Since Thomas Kuhn, we now think of these metaphysical revolutions as “paradigm shifts.”[6] A paradigm shift is, among other things, a change in the basic explanatory concepts of a science. It is a testament to the vitality and integrity of the scientific tradition that it has embraced these paradigm shifts. Unfortunately, because scientists think of themselves as dealing merely with facts and measurements, and not with the total activity of explaining the actual world, its paradigm shifts have led us, at the current time, into a terrible philosophical muddle, and have left quantum physicists and other advanced scientists out of harmony with the general ideas of scientifically informed commonsense.

In other words: Science-inspired commonsense (the general worldview of educated laypeople and most practicing scientists) is out of step with the great twentieth-century revolutions in the physics of relativity and quantum mechanics. Contemporary “scientific commonsense” is anachronistic—still stuck in the seventeenth-century mechanics of Isaac Newton or the eighteenth-century electromagnetism of Clerk Maxwell.

My objective, then, is to outline a framework of ideas that will allow us to make sense of postmodern science and of the five propositions at the core of this book. It is my hope that this general metaphysical system will allow us to be comfortable in holding both the well-proven facts of science and the facts that point towards a more complex and interesting life-cycle for human personalities —the prime concern of this book.

I am sure that some of my readers will question the need for such a radical move, and would prefer to find some way to extend current modes of scientific explanation to accommodate the anomalous data we are considering. However,  I will show why a major shift in our mode of thought is indeed required, and why metaphysical ideas assumed by pre-quantum science cannot be stretched to account for the data of parapsychology, personality survival, or reincarnation.

A Brief History of Scientific Ideas

In order to appreciate why we need this shift, let’s briefly review how the metaphysical ideas of modern science developed.[7] We can pick up the story of the development of these ideas with Copernicus and Kepler in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Both of these men were members of kind of Platonic underground, a long line of scholars who had kkept alive certain of Plato’s ideas in the face of the dominant Aristotelian tenor of the times. One of the Platonic ideas that inspired the work of both Copernicus and Kepler was the belief that mathematics is the key to understanding nature. In particular, both were attempting to justify Plato’s conjecture that the mysterious movements of the planets against the fixed stars must be governed by some elegant mathematical function. The fact that they could simplify their calculations of planetary movements by placing the Sun in the center of the system of planets was enough to convince them of the truth of the heliocentric view.

The successes of Copernicus and Kepler later influenced Galileo, who expanded their work by mathematically analyzing the movements not only of celestial objects, but also of objects here on Earth.

If we view the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo from the cosmological perspective current at that time, we can clearly see the absurdity of the heliocentric theory. Nothing, after all, is more obvious than the stillness of the Earth and the movements of the Sun, the Moon and the other planets around it. Also, as anyone who has ridden a horse would clearly realize, moving through space at high velocity is a dramatic and risky business. If the Earth were actually moving, we’d all be thrown off. Furthermore, if the Earth were not at the center of the created world, all objects on the surface of the Earth would naturally fall towards the real center. Logic, backed up by observation, was clear: If the Sun really were at the center of things, then everything would fall off the Earth and tumble into its burning furnace. With the benefit of hindsight it might not be so obvious, but in fact the medieval scholars who rejected Copernicus’ heliocentric view did so with reasons that were entirely valid at the time. Of course, in time, science found ways to neutralize those objections within its own framework.

The core lesson we learn from paradigm shifts is that obviousness is no guarantee of truth. Perceptions can be deceiving and beliefs can be profoundly mistaken. For example, in Galileo’s time, accepting the heliocentric theory was just about as difficult as accepting my five central propositions and the new metaphysics that they imply might be today. But greater comprehensiveness, coherence, and adequacy of a worldview sooner or later trumps more limited ideas and beliefs.

Despite the evidence of daily observation, scientists found a way to overturn the obviousness of Earth-centered cosmology.  The began by developing a theory of gravitation in terms of which each body attracts all other bodies to itself.  They could then show that the Earth moves around the Sun, and that falling objects released in proximity to the Earth would still hit the Earth, and that the Earth could move at high velocities without people and things spinning off into space. By demonstrating how it could seem as if the Sun goes around the Earth even when the Earth is “really” going around the Sun, the new science began to win converts and initiated a new industrial civilization.

We are in a similar position today. The world must be very different from what we were taught to believe based on the ideas of scientific materialism. The data of parapsychology, evidence in support of survival of consciousness beyond death and reincarnation—not to mention the simple fact of consciousness itself—compel a latter-day paradigm shift comparable to the Copernican revolution.  The dimensions of this metaphysical shift are suggested by the five propositions I have offered as a way to begin making sense of all the data. Make no mistake: Neither hese propositions, nor the supporting data, can be accommodated within the dominant worldview of modern reductionistic science. We need a new metaphysics, a new world system, that not only shows why science gets the results it does, but also explains these results in the context of a universe where the revolutionary five propositions are true.

The importance of Galileo’s breakthrough, and its significance for our times, can hardly be overstated. Nearly two millennia earlier, Plato had believed that the incorruptible, sacred heavens moved in a perfect mathematical order. Earth, the realm of mere appearance, could not be intelligible in terms of the perfection of number. Yet that is precisely what Galileo believed he had demonstrated: Earth is guided, or ruled, by an intricate perfection of mathematical order. Over time, it came to seem as if God had ordered all things by number, and that the ability of humans to discern mathematical order in nature was a unique communion between “man”[8] and the Divine Creative Intelligence. From the beginning, there was a shadow side to this inspiration: If reality is ultimately intelligible through mathematics, then we gain an extraordinary ability to turn facts about the present into precise and accurate predictions about the future. All of modern technology with all of its consequences for good and for ill, is a testament to the power of that realization.

When Galileo and others began to articulate a new metaphysical cosmology, their foundational premise was that mathematics is the language of creation, and that mathematical analysis reveals nature’s most intimate secrets. In one form or another, the question echoing through the new science was: “What must nature be like, given that she is ultimately mathematical in nature?” For a century or so following Galileo, scientists debated the relationship between numbers and reality—for example, whether matter is anything other than extension itself, whether there are individual atoms, and whether or not atoms have extension or mass. Finally, late in the seventeenth century, Newton stunned the scientific world by producing a masterful mathematical description of the laws of motion that accounted, in great detail, for everything from the movements of planets in the heavens to the falling of leaves. The Copernican-Galilean cosmology had vindicated the power of numbers to a range of application and degree of  precision Plato could hardly have imagined. Henceforth, following Newton, the mathematical analysis of nature was secured. Nature was now understood to be a collection of changeless, miniscule, massy particles occupying, at any given instant, a volume of Euclidean space and influencing each other through mathematically described gravitational forces that fall off in intensity as a function of distance. If reality were truly as Newton’s equations suggested, then mathematical analysis would be the Holy Grail that unlocks the deepest secrets of Nature, giving humanity access to, and mastery over her latent powers.

If reality truly is as the Newtonians believed, then mathematical physicists are the ultimate oracles—using numbers to predict Natures’ every move. Coupling religion with science, the corollary naturally follows: If all of reality is mere movement of insentient mechanical matter, and humans alone possess the gift of intellect, then God has surely given ”man” dominion over the Earth. With our “divine intellect” and the ability to discern mathematical patterns, we have direct insight into the mind of God, guaranteeing our right to do exactly as we please with the material world. This is the shadow side of science and technology.

On the other hand, if we agree with the scientists that nature is nothing more than a very complex mechanical device, then how are we to account for our own personalities—for consciousness? Should we grant ourselves the status of divine spirits who miraculously inhabit high-tech biological machines? Or, taking the other view, should we relegate ourselves to the status of epiphenomena, observing nature but having no real effect on it? More extremely, should we regard ourselves as entirely delusory, being confused about the unreality of our own, merely seeming existence?

These disturbing ontological questions follow,  unavoidably,  if we take Newton’s cosmology as ultimate truth. And, as mentioned earlier, we also need to deal with a decisive epistemological conundrum lurking in the heart of materialistic science itself. Science is based on experiments which depend on sensory observations—and these, in turn, require conscious experience.  However, there is no way to derive conscious sensation, let alone of the interpretive activity that necessarily accompanies it, from the mere hurrying about of insentient atoms. These problems are well known, and have been an outstanding scandal in Western thought for many generations.

The problem, when viewed from a metaphysical perspective, is not difficult to understand. It is a simple confusion of a conceptual model with the actual world. Let me explain.

Newton succeeded in creating an abstract model that is exceptionally useful for studying the motions of macrocosmic entities of all sorts—from peanuts to planets. If we represent space as a Cartesian grid, and each entity as a point (or a set of points) in that grid, and if we represent gravitational interaction as a vector-field[9] on that grid, then we can use calculus to compute how those points will move over time under the influence of gravity. Remarkably enough, the movements of the points on the grid will more or less approximate the movements of actual entities in space over time. That is brilliant modeling.

But, given the complexity of the actual world, there is always some margin of error in applying the calculations back to the actual world. Actuality is more complex than any model can capture—the model is an abstraction from the fully concrete actual world. Ignoring the difference between the actual world and the model, scientists assumed that the model depicted the real world, while our perceptions of the world, where they differed from the model, were illusory. This move, confusing a model for the actual world, was called by Whitehead the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”[10]

Since the time of Newton and Descartes, this fallacy has more or less gone unchecked because it seemed to confirm the scientific idea that mathematical form alone determines the processes of nature. But, under critical philosophical analysis, the difficulties quickly become evident.

• First of all, the Cartesian-Newtonian view requires the separation of perceptions into those that reveal primary qualities and secondary qualities. Smell, taste, hearing and the perception of color were all held to be secondary because they did not reveal qualities that could be quantified; whereas touch and the visual perception of form were held to be primary because they figured prominently in measurement, and revealed qualities that could be quantified. Of course, touch and the visual perception of form are, as soon became apparent, also subjective and open to interpretation and error. And thus the epistemological morass of modernity came into being.

• A second consequence of mistaking the model for actuality was the notion that the physical world is a causally closed domain. After all, if the model discloses the actual world behind appearances, and if the model is complete, then no factors other than those represented by the model can affect the macroscopic movements of actual entities.  Furthermore, because the mathematics of the model is entirely deterministic, there is no room left in the real world for freedom, value and genuine choice. Thus, the physical world is causally closed. Add to this the fact that Newton’s model could not represent consciousness or personality at all, then the very fact of conscious experience becomes a “hard problem,”[11] indeed. The task of trying to derive consciousness from a model designed only to analyze fully determinate macrocosmic motions of inanimate objects is quite impossible.

The point here is that classical science, which is based on ideas that are responsive to a very narrow interest (the interest in measuring and predicting macrocosmic movements), is entirely too narrow in its scope to be applied to consciousness and personality, and thus hopeless when it comes to the issues of parapsychology, personality survival and reincarnation.

Now science—unlike scientifically shaped common sense—has not remained wedded to the simple Newtonian model. In fact, science has gone through several “paradigm shifts,” or metaphysical changes, in which its basic ideas have been modified. In particular:

· Science has come to accept the actual existence of “fields,” and has supplemented gravitational fields with electromagnetic fields, and strong and weak nuclear fields.

· With the Theory of Relativity, science was able to embrace a fusion of space with time, a fusion of energy with matter, and, finally, a fusion of energy with time-space itself.

· Through the use of computers, which permit the deep exploration of recursive functions, science has developed “Chaos Theory” that illuminates the tendency of natural systems to self-organize into stable, macroscopic structures; and it has developed the theory of fractal geometry, which illuminates Nature’s habit of reproducing similar structures at various scales of organization.

· Through Prigogine’s “non-equilibrium thermodynamics,” science has succeeded in showing how living organisms can function without violating the second law of thermodynamics, thus bringing the phenomena of life more into harmony with the principles of physics.

· Finally, at the frontier of classical science, Maturana and Varela[12] have proposed a theory of self-organizing systems that suggests that life is nothing but a particular organization of otherwise insentient matter, bringing life even more solidly into the purview of a modified classical physics.

These developments in scientific metaphysics have given us a deeper understanding of the behaviors of the physical world. They have also allowed us to include within the purview of science some of the patterns expressed by living matter. But, for our purposes, they remain excessively narrow and abstract. While chaos theory, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and self-organization can model certain external behaviors of living system, they cannot say anything about consciousness and personality, and so cannot help us in our attempt to understand our five fundamental propositions.

Quantum mechanics (QM), however, the most recent and most far-reaching metaphysical revolution to develop within the scientific tradition, has finally developed a scientific model sufficiently rich to make room, at least, for consciousness and personality. Quantum theory revises our conception of the physical world in at least three fundamental ways:

· First, it gives up the idea of substantial atoms—of finite entities that endure unchanging through time—and replaces it with the idea of causally interacting events each of which takes place over a finite interval of time. Also, these events are not fully determined in advance. There is a certain irreducible uncertainty involved in predicting how they will behave. Further, this uncertainty can be, and often is, interpreted so as to suggest the existence of objective probabilities as part of the real world.

· Second, in at least some of its interpretations, QM implies the existence of consciousness (an “observer”) that is causal (a source of the decisions among alternatives that “collapse the wave function”) and not determined in any way by anything in the physical world. Thus QM not only makes room for the existence of consciousness, it also breaks the causal closure of the physical by making consciousness a significant factor that actually determines how events play out in the physical world.[13]

· Third, QM thoroughly rehabilitates those qualities that classical science had tended to dismiss as “secondary.” In QM, any quality that has a determinable probability of being detected by an emerging event can be represented in the model,[14] and thus is held to be fully actual.

With quantum mechanics, science has, at last, advanced to a set of metaphysical ideas that at least open it to the presence of consciousness and personality, and so bring it within range of helping to explain our five propositions. But quantum mechanics is still primarily a theory concerning the behavior of inorganic events, and it is not yet a full metaphysical system, capable of dealing with the full phenomenology the personality, and with the ideas with which we are concerned.

The Current State of Metaphysics

As I noted earlier, Newton’s staggering success in predicting the motions of macrocosmic bodies so impressed the educated West that metaphysics as a discipline began to fall on hard times. The German philosopher Hegel was the last of the famous metaphysicians, and his synthesis fell apart—partly because it could not keep up with advances in science, partly because it painted eighteenth-century Prussian society as the ultimate achievement of cosmic evolution, and partly because the shock of two World Wars resulted in a great cynicism towards any form of systematic thought.

During the first half of the twentieth-century, metaphysics was an academic backwater. During the second half, it became practically nonexistent. Nonetheless, the need for a comprehensive understanding of the actual world continued to be felt, particularly after relativity theory and quantum mechanics swept the rug out from under the classical sciences that inform so much of modern commonsense. Certain scientists[15] tried to fill the gap, but their ignorance of the larger philosophical tradition kept their work focused on narrow issues. Nonetheless, a few philosophers continued to work in this area, among them Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer, and Sri Aurobindo. These writers are truly remarkable for the depth of their insights, and perhaps equally remarkable for the lack of attention that their ideas have received. I believe, for example, that Alfred North Whitehead entirely solved the mind-body problem back in the 1930s, and yet that issue is still debated as if he had never published his masterpiece Process and Reality. The ideas of these three philosophers form the central inspiration for the system I will shortly outline.

The fact is that our civilization is in desperate need of a comprehensive metaphysical framework that can integrate spiritual inspirations, moral and aesthetic aspirations, parapsychological investigations, exploration of the “long trajectory” of human existence, our ongoing investigations of the physical and biological sciences, and our technological manipulations of the world. We need some way of understanding how it is that all of these diverse explorations take place in the context of a single, unified world.

That is the task of the new metaphysical framework presented in this book—drawing heavily on the process metaphysics of Whitehead, and the metaphysical and cosmological ideas of Sri Aurobindo. I call it “Transphysical Process Metaphysics.”

[1] Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, Bell Tower, New York, 1999.

[2] Brian Swimme, The Universe Story, Harper One, 1994.

[3] Aristotelian logic is a logic of classification, and is generally associated with substance ontologies.  Modern propositional logic is a logic of functions.  It desribes relations among entities in a very general way.  Modern propositional logic is much more general than Aristotelian logic.  In fact, Aristotelian logic is a subset of propositional logic which analyzes the particular functions involved in assigning characteristics to entities and classes, and assigning entities to classes.  Mathematics can be derived from propositional logic, but it cannot be derived from Aristotelian logic.  For a deeper consideration of these issues see:  Ernst Cassirer, ˆSubstance and Fuinction and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity,” Dover Publications, Inc., 1953. Pp. 3-26.

[4] For a discussion of the assemblage of applicable ideas see Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought, New York, The Free Press, 1968, Chapter 1.

[5] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed.  New York, The Free Press, 1985.

[6] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

[7] For an excellent treatment of this hisotry, going back to Aristotle, see Leclerc, Ivor. The Nature of Physical Existence. London, George Allen and Unwin, 1972. For an excellent and highly readable history, going back to Copernicus and Kepler, see A. E. Burtt, The Metaphyhsical Foundations of Modern Science, Dover Publications, 2003.

[8] I use the masculine pronoun here deliberately as it is characteristic of the mode of thought I am describing. To see only number in nature is miss the Mother entirely, and to fall into dismal patriarchy.

[9] To turn a grid into a vector-field, we place a little conceptual arrow to each point, representing the forces operating at that point that will tend to cause an object at that point in one moment to move in a particular direction and at a particular velocity at the next moment.

[10] To fully understand the meaning of the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness, we must keep in mind that Whitehead uses the word concrete to refer to the opposite of the abstract. That which is concrete is that which is fully actual. The concrete is infinitely complex. Scientific and Philosophical abstractions are simplified models of the concrete. To confuse a simplified abstraction with the concrete actuality from which it has been abstracted is to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

[11] David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3):200-19, 1995.

[12] Humberto R. Maturana, and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis And Cognition: the Realization of the Living. Boston, D. Reidel Publishing Co, 1980.

[13] See, for example, Henry Stapp, Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics, Second Edition, Springer, 2009: Henry Stapp, The Mindful Universe, Springer 2007: Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, Fordham University Press, 2004.

[14] It will be represented in “Hilbert space” as a dimension.

[15] For example Schroedinger, Von Neumann, Heisenberg and Neils Bohr.