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Eternal Lives, Eternal Deaths
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Chapter 1
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Chapter One
In Search of a New Paradigm
‘The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious,’ Einstein famously wrote. ‘It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and science.’ At some level, we have all been touched by this sentiment: On one or the other forlorn night, we might have looked up to the starry sky and allowed our minds to be overwhelmed by awe. Perhaps our hearts felt crushed by the feeling of being so infinitely small as if we were left and forgotten on this tiny planet: a place too grand for our legs to walk, yet nothing but a single dot amidst inaccessible galaxies and inconceivable mysteries. This feeling of wonder brings up the eternal questions: Where are we from? Who are we? Where are we going?
Some of us may feel that these questions can never be fully answered. Others turn to religion or science – but religion, as we have inherited it, requires blind faith in its teachings, while science, as we have it today, requires reduction to the measurable. However, there are some of us who are born with an innate awareness that there was an existence before birth, as there will be an existence after death. We have cases of people who were born aware of other dimensions and events that occurred before they incarnated into this life. These people possess a conscious and mature spiritual awareness, sometimes from the moment of birth. For them, it is self-evident that their lives are part of an ongoing cycle of births and deaths, a reality which is empirically accessible in their present existence, needing no further proof or validation.
My own first memory of this life is about lying in the crib as a baby, watching in the nightly darkness a gigantic wheel turning towards me. On it, I saw countless moving pictures, like a thousand screens displaying scenes from different times and places. It felt like data processing, as if my mind were a computer working through all the previous information before rebooting. I wasn’t just a baby lying in bed: I was consciousness watching countless previous existences simultaneously – like the ‘begetter of millions of years’ in the Egyptian Book of the Dead – before starting this new life as a female born in communist Hungary during the Cold War.
Early experiments with people under hypnosis revealed memories of them having full consciousness at the time of their birth. We also have thoroughly documented cases of children who remember past lives. These experiences suggest that we belong to a great eternity. Yet, we have been taught ‘rationally’ that we cannot be more than our bodies and our lives are confined to the time span between cradle and grave. Our current science regards our consciousness and our ability to partake in the universe with awareness of our existence as nothing more than a curious by-product, a mere epiphenomenon of the brain.
My own first memory of this life is about lying in the crib as a baby, watching in the nightly darkness a gigantic wheel turning towards me. On it, I saw countless moving pictures, like a thousand screens displaying scenes from different times and places. It felt like data processing, as if my mind were a computer working through all the previous information before rebooting. I wasn’t just a baby lying in bed: I was consciousness watching countless previous existences simultaneously – like the ‘begetter of millions of years’ in the Egyptian Book of the Dead – before starting this new life as a female born in communist Hungary during the Cold War.
Early experiments with people under hypnosis revealed memories of them having full consciousness at the time of their birth. We also have thoroughly documented cases of children who remember past lives. These experiences suggest that we belong to a great eternity. Yet, we have been taught ‘rationally’ that we cannot be more than our bodies and our lives are confined to the time span between cradle and grave. Our current science regards our consciousness and our ability to partake in the universe with awareness of our existence as nothing more than a curious by-product, a mere epiphenomenon of the brain.
Our Current Paradigm: Reductionist Materialism
This attitude is part of a larger paradigm currently predominant in our society: reductionist materialism. It operates under the assumption that the world consists of matter, primarily of matter, and nothing but matter – in the sense that there is an objective and measurable reality out there, of which everything is part. This assumption has been highly successful for all endeavours to understand, shape, and manipulate the physical world, resulting in technological advancements such as cars and computers, instant worldwide communication, satellites, and life-saving surgical procedures. However, this success has been seductive; as a society, we have come to trust materialist science so much that we mistake its basic assumption – namely, that matter is the fundamental basis of reality – for a scientific fact. A useful assumption has been turned into a dogma, becoming a socially held belief, quasi a new religion, and the creation myth of our culture.
It might sound strange to qualify materialism as a creation myth – but it has indeed become one. In social anthropology, creation myth is a technical term for any set of narratives within a culture to explain the origin of the world and our place in it. Contrary to the common use of the term myth as a false or fanciful story, a creation myth may contain truth or elements of truth, especially for the culture it belongs to. Having some sort of creation myth is considered a ‘cultural universal,’ something inherent in every society. The narrative can be primitive or sophisticated, explicit or implicit, religious or scientific, false or true, but no culture has ever done without one. The strength of the myth determines the strength of the culture and the psychological health of the individuals who belong to it. For example, an aboriginal child, who heard stories of the ancient Dreamtime, will grow up knowing that dreams and thoughts have creative power. A person, who grew up in the East, having heard the story of Prince Siddhartha transforming into a Buddha, will know that enlightenment can be achieved in this precious human life. Psychologically speaking, these myths are empowering.
How about the myth which underlies the society we live in?
Our universal story that explains the origin of the universe and our place in it might not often be told as a literary narrative, yet it is deeply woven into our lives: into every school curriculum we pass through, every scientific programme we watch, every textbook we study, every doctor’s diagnosis we receive, every business and political decision we make or deal with. Scientific materialism has become our ruling explanation for the universe and everything in it. As such, it has a profound impact on our psyche, continually delivering its message, day in, day out, to ourselves and our children. If we explicitly told the fable we were taught to believe our whole life, it would sound something like this:
It might sound strange to qualify materialism as a creation myth – but it has indeed become one. In social anthropology, creation myth is a technical term for any set of narratives within a culture to explain the origin of the world and our place in it. Contrary to the common use of the term myth as a false or fanciful story, a creation myth may contain truth or elements of truth, especially for the culture it belongs to. Having some sort of creation myth is considered a ‘cultural universal,’ something inherent in every society. The narrative can be primitive or sophisticated, explicit or implicit, religious or scientific, false or true, but no culture has ever done without one. The strength of the myth determines the strength of the culture and the psychological health of the individuals who belong to it. For example, an aboriginal child, who heard stories of the ancient Dreamtime, will grow up knowing that dreams and thoughts have creative power. A person, who grew up in the East, having heard the story of Prince Siddhartha transforming into a Buddha, will know that enlightenment can be achieved in this precious human life. Psychologically speaking, these myths are empowering.
How about the myth which underlies the society we live in?
Our universal story that explains the origin of the universe and our place in it might not often be told as a literary narrative, yet it is deeply woven into our lives: into every school curriculum we pass through, every scientific programme we watch, every textbook we study, every doctor’s diagnosis we receive, every business and political decision we make or deal with. Scientific materialism has become our ruling explanation for the universe and everything in it. As such, it has a profound impact on our psyche, continually delivering its message, day in, day out, to ourselves and our children. If we explicitly told the fable we were taught to believe our whole life, it would sound something like this:
13.5 billion years ago the Universe was a small, singular entity devoid of consciousness and thought, but of infinite density and heat. This caused it to expand rapidly. There was no will or intention behind any of it. However, the action was enormous and freed up a lot of energy which converted into subatomic particles, like electrons, protons, and neutrons. In the beginning, the heat was too immense for atomic particles to stabilize, but as the temperature sank, the simplest element, hydrogen, appeared. It became the first among increasingly more complex atoms and molecules emerging as building blocks of matter. For make no mistake about it: everything was matter, nothing but matter.
Nonetheless, in those parts of space where density was greater than average, something happened. Gravity began to pull the particles together and thus galaxies were formed, stars, suns, and planets, like our own, the Earth.
First, the Earth was nothing but cooled microscopic dust, which then collided and stuck together, forming a planet of toxic gases, and extreme volcanism. Water brought here by comets and asteroids condensed into clouds and allowed oceans to take shape. There was no idea behind any of this, and no concept, but there was plenty of methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), water (H2O), and hydrogen (H2) plus lots of lightning. It has been experimentally showni that from such conditions organic substances can derive, especially amino acids, that are the building blocks of protein, and ultimately, of life.
Life appeared roughly 3.8 billion years ago. Make no mistake about it, life is nothing but matter formed into objects that are self-sustaining, can signal in and out of their environment, even regulate it (homeostasis), have a sufficient organisation of one or more cells (the basic units of life), and are able to energetically sustain themselves (metabolism). These organisms grow, respond to stimuli, adapt to changes, and reproduce but have no presence or essence beyond their physical form. Their lives are short and fragile, ultimately ending in death, which is the complete annihilation of their existence. Consciousness is nothing but a mere by-product of the brain in higher evolved life-forms: an epiphenomenon with no further relevance, and is, therefore, better omitted from any serious scientific study.
Life evolves, but there is no meaning or intelligence behind it. In the nucleus of every cell, there is a double helix molecule, the DNA that carries all the heritable characteristics. Sometimes, through random mutations, the chromosomes within the DNA change and produce a specimen with a trait different from the ones before. If that change gives the specimen a better chance of survival and reproduction, it will transmit the new characteristics to the new generation that will therefore deal better with the pressures of the environment.
As a result of evolution human beings emerged, producing even more epiphenomena, like feeling, reasoning, conscious experience, self-awareness, artistic expression, and introspection. These are personally interesting but scientifically irrelevant phenomena of life. Death will bring them to an end and life will continue evolving based on random mutations and survival mechanisms.
Meanwhile, the universe is still expanding. It would do so infinitely, but the temperature is dropping and is continuously getting closer and closer to absolute zero. Eventually, our soulless world will congeal into a state of empty and eternal freeze.
Nonetheless, in those parts of space where density was greater than average, something happened. Gravity began to pull the particles together and thus galaxies were formed, stars, suns, and planets, like our own, the Earth.
First, the Earth was nothing but cooled microscopic dust, which then collided and stuck together, forming a planet of toxic gases, and extreme volcanism. Water brought here by comets and asteroids condensed into clouds and allowed oceans to take shape. There was no idea behind any of this, and no concept, but there was plenty of methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), water (H2O), and hydrogen (H2) plus lots of lightning. It has been experimentally showni that from such conditions organic substances can derive, especially amino acids, that are the building blocks of protein, and ultimately, of life.
Life appeared roughly 3.8 billion years ago. Make no mistake about it, life is nothing but matter formed into objects that are self-sustaining, can signal in and out of their environment, even regulate it (homeostasis), have a sufficient organisation of one or more cells (the basic units of life), and are able to energetically sustain themselves (metabolism). These organisms grow, respond to stimuli, adapt to changes, and reproduce but have no presence or essence beyond their physical form. Their lives are short and fragile, ultimately ending in death, which is the complete annihilation of their existence. Consciousness is nothing but a mere by-product of the brain in higher evolved life-forms: an epiphenomenon with no further relevance, and is, therefore, better omitted from any serious scientific study.
Life evolves, but there is no meaning or intelligence behind it. In the nucleus of every cell, there is a double helix molecule, the DNA that carries all the heritable characteristics. Sometimes, through random mutations, the chromosomes within the DNA change and produce a specimen with a trait different from the ones before. If that change gives the specimen a better chance of survival and reproduction, it will transmit the new characteristics to the new generation that will therefore deal better with the pressures of the environment.
As a result of evolution human beings emerged, producing even more epiphenomena, like feeling, reasoning, conscious experience, self-awareness, artistic expression, and introspection. These are personally interesting but scientifically irrelevant phenomena of life. Death will bring them to an end and life will continue evolving based on random mutations and survival mechanisms.
Meanwhile, the universe is still expanding. It would do so infinitely, but the temperature is dropping and is continuously getting closer and closer to absolute zero. Eventually, our soulless world will congeal into a state of empty and eternal freeze.
Psychologically, our current creation myth is disempowering. It leads us to interpret our existence as random and the universe as lacking in value and meaning. As Charles Eisenstein explains, this worldview causes individuals to see themselves as separate ‘among other separate individuals’ in a universe that is separate from all of us as well. Accordingly, a person is but a ‘Cartesian mote of consciousness looking out through the eyes of a flesh robot, programmed by its genes to maximize productive self-interest. […] There is no purpose, only cause. The universe is at bottom blind and dead.’ The implicit message that currently circulates among ourselves and our children gives us the impression that the best we can hope for is enjoying momentary wealth, success, and pleasures, while we await final annihilation.
While the materialist approach has propelled us to unprecedented technological heights, its imposition as a universal and self-evident worldview has brought great psychological distress upon us. We are experiencing high levels of depression, psychopharmaceutical and other drug abuse, as well as an unfortunate disrespect of old age. Such is the pervading fear of death that it has become a social taboo. We follow self-destructive ways when treating our bodies as well as the planet.
Despite our technological advances, we cannot solve any of our inner challenges, some of which are the world’s greatest. In a survey created by the World Economic Forum, millennials have named as the top 5 greatest problems in the world: religious conflicts, poverty, inequality, environmental destruction, and war. None of these are material in nature: Even poverty goes back to psycho-social causes. None of them can be solved through further technological advancement, as they are caused by erratic, idiopathic, and out-of-control human behaviour that our materialist science fails to understand and address properly.
The materialist paradigm, as much as it succeeds in advancing technology, equally fails to understand consciousness and the inner, psychological terrain. A paradigm that regards consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon of the brain cannot value, explain, or add significantly to the understanding of its nature. The question arises: Is there an alternative?
While the materialist approach has propelled us to unprecedented technological heights, its imposition as a universal and self-evident worldview has brought great psychological distress upon us. We are experiencing high levels of depression, psychopharmaceutical and other drug abuse, as well as an unfortunate disrespect of old age. Such is the pervading fear of death that it has become a social taboo. We follow self-destructive ways when treating our bodies as well as the planet.
Despite our technological advances, we cannot solve any of our inner challenges, some of which are the world’s greatest. In a survey created by the World Economic Forum, millennials have named as the top 5 greatest problems in the world: religious conflicts, poverty, inequality, environmental destruction, and war. None of these are material in nature: Even poverty goes back to psycho-social causes. None of them can be solved through further technological advancement, as they are caused by erratic, idiopathic, and out-of-control human behaviour that our materialist science fails to understand and address properly.
The materialist paradigm, as much as it succeeds in advancing technology, equally fails to understand consciousness and the inner, psychological terrain. A paradigm that regards consciousness as a mere epiphenomenon of the brain cannot value, explain, or add significantly to the understanding of its nature. The question arises: Is there an alternative?
The Paradigm War of our Time
At the University of Vienna, where I studied and later worked as a research fellow, Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was considered ‘the Bible’ when it came to the philosophy of science. In this seminal work, Kuhn broke with the age-old belief that the progression of science would occur in a linear, unbiased fashion through the accumulation of objective data. At any time in history, he observed, there was a leading contemporary paradigm, a framework for knowledge and knowledge accumulation.
Every paradigm is based on certain fundamental assumptions that serve as a starting point for inquiry (like the existence of zero and one in mathematics, or the existence of matter in all natural sciences). Assumptions, by their nature, cannot be proven and are therefore chosen for their usefulness. (For instance, the medieval paradigm – according to which knowledge is to be gained through the revelation of God – was not useful to advance technology. Hence, the new, materialist paradigm had to be adopted.)
As long as a given paradigm produces satisfying new results, it is maintained and the course of ‘normal science’ remains unchallenged. Problems arise when too many anomalies show up that cannot be explained within the existing paradigm. If that happens, a few revolutionary scientists begin to study these anomalies, while adherents of the official science tend to vehemently protect the status quo for various financial, socio-political, and personal reasons, such as not wanting to lose their reputation, rank, and credibility.
The conflict between official and revolutionary science can produce a crisis strong enough to be called a paradigm war. Heralds of the new paradigm are frequently marginalized and even persecuted. These days, while they may not be burned at the stake, contemporary methods of silencing dissent can be equally effective. Radical, new thinkers are often excluded from academic positions and funding, their pioneering approaches may be labelled as pseudoscience, and the peer review process may function as de facto censorship.
An example of a paradigm battle was brought by Robert Schoch, the geologist who concluded that the Great Sphinx of Giza must be much older than previously assumed. He based his conclusion on the water erosion marks on the Sphinx, as they indicate extensive rainfall typical of the area only prior to Dynastic Egypt. Fellow geologists found his arguments convincing enough to engage in debate. Egyptologists, however, who had built their entire professional lives on the traditional chronology, behaved in a hostile manner towards him. When Dr Schoch showed up at one of their conferences, he recalls an elderly, well-established Egyptologist approaching him and saying: ‘I do not understand geology and I cannot refute your evidence but I know that you are wrong. Now there are lots of rocks other than at Giza and in Egypt; I suggest you go and study the rocks somewhere else.’ii Note the language: The point here is not whether Schoch was right with his water erosion hypothesis or not. His idea was rejected on emotional grounds without any attempt to falsify it through empirical, experimental, or logical evidence, as one would expect from scientists.
This is the human, subjective side of scientific progress that Kuhn so brilliantly illuminated. Paradigm shifts, much like tectonic plate movements, are dangerous. They can cause landslides and tsunamis capable of upending entire professions and economies. Consider, for instance, the pharmaceutical industry: currently, it is a ‘key asset to the economy.’ How might a paradigm shift, steering away from bio-chemical technologies toward alternative, mind-over-matter and/or preventive approaches, impact the profits of ‘Big Pharma’? As long as illness remains more lucrative than health maintenance, low-cost initiatives (such as visualisation techniques for cancer treatment) will remain repressed, rejected, and unexplored. A paradigm shift would require doctors to assume an advisory, preventive role with the responsibility of maintaining health rather than fixing illness. This is certainly not unthinkable: In Ancient China, doctors were holistic health advisors who consulted their clients on a long-term basis about a wide range of lifestyle choices (nutrition, exercise etc.). They were paid for as long as the client remained healthy. Redefining the role of doctors in this way is certainly possible but it would likely take a new generation of practitioners to gain widespread acceptance.
Scientists and practitioners will not leave the established paradigm until a credible and profitable alternative becomes available. Most will simply prefer to retire within the old system. As Max Planck said more than half a century ago: ‘[a] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’
Ironically, at the University of Vienna, where Thomas Kuhn’s work was so highly revered in theory, I found very little tolerance for thinking outside the established paradigm. At that time, I could only feel what I understood later: We are, indeed, at the beginning of a new paradigm war, comparable in scale to the Copernican Revolution, reshaping humanity’s understanding of its place in the cosmos. Let us now delve deeper into understanding how it is happening.
Every paradigm is based on certain fundamental assumptions that serve as a starting point for inquiry (like the existence of zero and one in mathematics, or the existence of matter in all natural sciences). Assumptions, by their nature, cannot be proven and are therefore chosen for their usefulness. (For instance, the medieval paradigm – according to which knowledge is to be gained through the revelation of God – was not useful to advance technology. Hence, the new, materialist paradigm had to be adopted.)
As long as a given paradigm produces satisfying new results, it is maintained and the course of ‘normal science’ remains unchallenged. Problems arise when too many anomalies show up that cannot be explained within the existing paradigm. If that happens, a few revolutionary scientists begin to study these anomalies, while adherents of the official science tend to vehemently protect the status quo for various financial, socio-political, and personal reasons, such as not wanting to lose their reputation, rank, and credibility.
The conflict between official and revolutionary science can produce a crisis strong enough to be called a paradigm war. Heralds of the new paradigm are frequently marginalized and even persecuted. These days, while they may not be burned at the stake, contemporary methods of silencing dissent can be equally effective. Radical, new thinkers are often excluded from academic positions and funding, their pioneering approaches may be labelled as pseudoscience, and the peer review process may function as de facto censorship.
An example of a paradigm battle was brought by Robert Schoch, the geologist who concluded that the Great Sphinx of Giza must be much older than previously assumed. He based his conclusion on the water erosion marks on the Sphinx, as they indicate extensive rainfall typical of the area only prior to Dynastic Egypt. Fellow geologists found his arguments convincing enough to engage in debate. Egyptologists, however, who had built their entire professional lives on the traditional chronology, behaved in a hostile manner towards him. When Dr Schoch showed up at one of their conferences, he recalls an elderly, well-established Egyptologist approaching him and saying: ‘I do not understand geology and I cannot refute your evidence but I know that you are wrong. Now there are lots of rocks other than at Giza and in Egypt; I suggest you go and study the rocks somewhere else.’ii Note the language: The point here is not whether Schoch was right with his water erosion hypothesis or not. His idea was rejected on emotional grounds without any attempt to falsify it through empirical, experimental, or logical evidence, as one would expect from scientists.
This is the human, subjective side of scientific progress that Kuhn so brilliantly illuminated. Paradigm shifts, much like tectonic plate movements, are dangerous. They can cause landslides and tsunamis capable of upending entire professions and economies. Consider, for instance, the pharmaceutical industry: currently, it is a ‘key asset to the economy.’ How might a paradigm shift, steering away from bio-chemical technologies toward alternative, mind-over-matter and/or preventive approaches, impact the profits of ‘Big Pharma’? As long as illness remains more lucrative than health maintenance, low-cost initiatives (such as visualisation techniques for cancer treatment) will remain repressed, rejected, and unexplored. A paradigm shift would require doctors to assume an advisory, preventive role with the responsibility of maintaining health rather than fixing illness. This is certainly not unthinkable: In Ancient China, doctors were holistic health advisors who consulted their clients on a long-term basis about a wide range of lifestyle choices (nutrition, exercise etc.). They were paid for as long as the client remained healthy. Redefining the role of doctors in this way is certainly possible but it would likely take a new generation of practitioners to gain widespread acceptance.
Scientists and practitioners will not leave the established paradigm until a credible and profitable alternative becomes available. Most will simply prefer to retire within the old system. As Max Planck said more than half a century ago: ‘[a] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’
Ironically, at the University of Vienna, where Thomas Kuhn’s work was so highly revered in theory, I found very little tolerance for thinking outside the established paradigm. At that time, I could only feel what I understood later: We are, indeed, at the beginning of a new paradigm war, comparable in scale to the Copernican Revolution, reshaping humanity’s understanding of its place in the cosmos. Let us now delve deeper into understanding how it is happening.
The Great Anomaly: Consciousness
Currently, all over the world, a growing number of anomalies – like guerrillas of a paradigm war – are emerging. One by one, they come forth from the hidden depths of the human psyche, appearing from situations in which consciousness seems to function independently of the body. These peaceful warriors march in from near-death and out-of-body experiences, sometimes from children who remember past lives to challenge the stronghold of the leading paradigm. The officers and guards of materialism are still trying to laugh them off, claiming they are not real, just hallucinations that would pop into nothing but impossibility as soon the weapon of logic is taken aim at them.
And it is true: If consciousness is seen as a derivative of matter (product of the brain) it could never exist without or outside of the brain. Any experience that suggests otherwise is therefore seen as a phantom insurgent, an illusion that does not belong in the realm of accepted reality. This dismissal is a logical resolution. Still, the legion of anomalies continues to rise… Is this possible? Can something be illogical yet true at the same time?
Yes – and this is in the very nature of a paradigm shift: When a new assumption (or set of assumptions) is chosen, a proposition which constituted a logical impossibility in the old paradigm becomes a logical possibility within the new. We can recall, for example, the Copernican claim of the Earth revolving around the Sun. At that time, the ruling paradigm was the medieval, religious worldview that assumed the Earth to be down here, the Sun in the Heavens up there. With that assumption, the idea that there would be planetary movements with the Earth revolving around the Sun, constituted a logical impossibility. (How could something down here revolve around something up there?!) Only when this assumption was given up and changed, could the movement of heavenly bodies be studied meaningfully. (Meanwhile, revolutionary scientists, such as Galileo Galilei were burned at the stake for proclaiming the heliocentric world-view.)
In a similar way, claims that consciousness can survive without the body, constitute a logical impossibility within the materialist paradigm. (If we assume that matter (the brain) produces consciousness, consciousness can not possibly emerge or exist without the brain!)
If we, however, turn the assumption around, and view consciousness as primary to matter and matter as derivative of consciousness, we have the foundation of a whole new science: a new, consciousness based (mind-)science.
The concept is neither new, nor simply a philosophical or esoteric idea. In the scientific context, it has first been brought forth in the mid-20th century by prominent, Nobel-laureate physicists and physiologists. ‘Consciousness,’ wrote Erwin Schrödinger, ‘cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental.’ Another of the famous Nobel-laureates in physics, Max Planck (after whom the most prominent association of German research institutions is named, whose very name hence stands quasi-synonymously for science) put it in similar terms: ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative of consciousness.’ George Wald, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, states that ‘the stuff of which physical reality is composed of is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe.’
What these Nobel-laureate scientists bring forth, is a new assumption – not a fact. (They have expressed this worldview in personal interviews, not as a result of their scientific work.) This is very important to keep in mind: assumptions, by definition, cannot be proven and must never be mistaken for scientific facts. Currently, scientists often take it for granted that mental processes are derivative of physical processes, forgetting that this has never been proven. It is not a fact, but an assumption. ‘The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact’ – wrote the Dalai Lama, another Nobel-laureate and Buddhist scholar, in debate with Western scientists about the nature and study of consciousness.
The point is that both notions – whether mind is derivative of matter or matter derivative of mind (consciousness) – constitute assumptions. It is not a question of proving one or the other but of choosing the assumption wisely – based on the criterion of usefulness as brought forth by Thomas Kuhn.
We have seen that the materialist assumption has been useful for studying physical phenomena. Now, we shall explore how useful the assumption of a consciousness (mind)-based universe could be for studying the anomalies our current paradigm cannot account for, especially the phenomena of near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and remembrances of previous lives.
And it is true: If consciousness is seen as a derivative of matter (product of the brain) it could never exist without or outside of the brain. Any experience that suggests otherwise is therefore seen as a phantom insurgent, an illusion that does not belong in the realm of accepted reality. This dismissal is a logical resolution. Still, the legion of anomalies continues to rise… Is this possible? Can something be illogical yet true at the same time?
Yes – and this is in the very nature of a paradigm shift: When a new assumption (or set of assumptions) is chosen, a proposition which constituted a logical impossibility in the old paradigm becomes a logical possibility within the new. We can recall, for example, the Copernican claim of the Earth revolving around the Sun. At that time, the ruling paradigm was the medieval, religious worldview that assumed the Earth to be down here, the Sun in the Heavens up there. With that assumption, the idea that there would be planetary movements with the Earth revolving around the Sun, constituted a logical impossibility. (How could something down here revolve around something up there?!) Only when this assumption was given up and changed, could the movement of heavenly bodies be studied meaningfully. (Meanwhile, revolutionary scientists, such as Galileo Galilei were burned at the stake for proclaiming the heliocentric world-view.)
In a similar way, claims that consciousness can survive without the body, constitute a logical impossibility within the materialist paradigm. (If we assume that matter (the brain) produces consciousness, consciousness can not possibly emerge or exist without the brain!)
If we, however, turn the assumption around, and view consciousness as primary to matter and matter as derivative of consciousness, we have the foundation of a whole new science: a new, consciousness based (mind-)science.
The concept is neither new, nor simply a philosophical or esoteric idea. In the scientific context, it has first been brought forth in the mid-20th century by prominent, Nobel-laureate physicists and physiologists. ‘Consciousness,’ wrote Erwin Schrödinger, ‘cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental.’ Another of the famous Nobel-laureates in physics, Max Planck (after whom the most prominent association of German research institutions is named, whose very name hence stands quasi-synonymously for science) put it in similar terms: ‘I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative of consciousness.’ George Wald, who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, states that ‘the stuff of which physical reality is composed of is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe.’
What these Nobel-laureate scientists bring forth, is a new assumption – not a fact. (They have expressed this worldview in personal interviews, not as a result of their scientific work.) This is very important to keep in mind: assumptions, by definition, cannot be proven and must never be mistaken for scientific facts. Currently, scientists often take it for granted that mental processes are derivative of physical processes, forgetting that this has never been proven. It is not a fact, but an assumption. ‘The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact’ – wrote the Dalai Lama, another Nobel-laureate and Buddhist scholar, in debate with Western scientists about the nature and study of consciousness.
The point is that both notions – whether mind is derivative of matter or matter derivative of mind (consciousness) – constitute assumptions. It is not a question of proving one or the other but of choosing the assumption wisely – based on the criterion of usefulness as brought forth by Thomas Kuhn.
We have seen that the materialist assumption has been useful for studying physical phenomena. Now, we shall explore how useful the assumption of a consciousness (mind)-based universe could be for studying the anomalies our current paradigm cannot account for, especially the phenomena of near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and remembrances of previous lives.
Near-Death Experiences (Temporary Death Experiences)
Dean McCleland from South Africa was in the middle of a family meeting, where they discussed details of a funeral for his girlfriend’s mother, who recently passed away, when all of a sudden, he collapsed and fell to the floor. Family members, while trying to help him up, noticed that his body functions, such as breathing and heart-beat, completely stopped. At one point, someone placed a blue dish-towel filled with ice behind his neck, which seemed to have brought him back. He was rushed into the emergency room. On the next day, still in hospital, his body went into shock and was shaking for two hours non-stop. However, when everything was over, the doctors examined his body and found nothing wrong with him medically.
This was the story how it occurred from the outside. This is how Dean experienced it:
Dean McCleland : Personal Near-Death Experience
While my family was frantically trying to revive me, I was being taken away at enormous speed, through blue little lightning balls, almost like static electricity. The next minute, I found myself looking through a huge window into what I thought was heaven. A figure, who had a robe on, turned to me and smiled. The most amazing sense of peace and contentment just flooded into my heart. I do believe it was Jesus himself. It was beautiful. I just wanted to stay there. It was just a case of relishing all of this: the most amazing thing ever (I don’t even want to call it emotion) that just flooded into my spirit. It was a real struggle, when I felt that something was drawing me back into the body because the place was so amazing that I just wanted to stay there at all costs. But soon I started to return through that network of static electricity of blue lightning bulbs, and took a breath again. First, at the emergency room, I didn’t even know whether I was dead or alive. I couldn’t speak, but I saw my family around and they weren’t mourning, so I figured I must still be alive.
When Dean talked about his experience to me, he said, it was a life-changing event. It felt like a ‘divine appointment’ through which the concept of eternity became reality for him. As a result, he lost all fear of death, as he became convinced that death was not the end of our conscious existence.
This significant and life-changing quality of the event is shared worldwide by those who have experienced a state of clinical death (cessation of all body functions, including those of the brain) while their consciousness remained active.
The widely-used term for this phenomenon is near-death experience (NDE) coined by Raymond Moody, who became the father of modern near-death research after a curious incident that occurred to him while teaching Plato’s Republic in college...
In class, they related Plato’s account of the soldier Ur who woke up on his own funeral pyre and told his comrades about his out-of-body journey while he was ‘dead.’ Afterwards, one of the students came into Dr Moody’s office and confessed that he himself had experienced something similar. The young man had suffered a serious car accident, during which the doctors said he had died a clinical death. Yet, during the whole time he remained aware. His consciousness left the body and he could see the crash scene from above. Then, he travelled through a tunnel of light, at the end of which he encountered a being who helped him review his entire life. ‘What happened has changed my life forever,’ the student said, ‘I know there’s a life after death, and I know that love is very important. But I want to know if there are more people like me who’ve had this experience.’
This encounter piqued Dr Moody’s curiosity to see whether there were more contemporary cases.
Thanks to modern resuscitation techniques, he could find 150 people who were brought back from that ‘undiscovered country’ of death. He asked them to share their experiences, just as early geographic explorers would recount the exotic lands and animals they encountered. Detecting congruency was the key. If a single explorer came with a lone report about a huge, grey animal the size of a coach, with a nose long and strong enough to uproot a tree with, listeners might have thought that he had too much rum on board. But when dozens, later hundreds of people came back with similar stories, the consistency of their accounts eventually convinced people that elephants really existed.
Similarly, Moody’s research, first published in his seminal book Life After Life concludes that near-death cases show remarkable congruence. If we moulded them all together, we can get a comprehensive idea how dying happens from the point of view of those who have experienced it:
In the moment of death, your consciousness leaves the dead body. You may see the scene of your death below, especially if it was an accident or if medical personell tried to revive you – but there probably won’t be much time to linger on: Your consciousness begins to travel away from the scene, perhaps by being pulled through a dark tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, light awaits, infused with an ineffable sense of peace and unconditional love. Here, you may meet old relatives, spiritual teachers, guides, or a divinity.
In a moment of startling power, your entire life is displayed in an all-round psychic panorama. During this life review, the usual restrictions of time and space are lifted: You’re able to see every detail and event of your life, feeling the consequences of your actions, not only from your own point of view but from everyone else’s involved. This life review is reminiscent of teachings about the soul’s assessment found in various religions (from weighing one’s heart against a feather in ancient Egypt to the idea of a final judgement in Christianity) but lacks any condemnatory connotation. The life review is more educational or exploratory in its nature. Through it, one of the deepest spiritual truths of our existence reveals itself... that on the most profound level, consciousness is a singularity: We are not separate from each other, but fundamentally interconnected. Our actions directly affect others and ultimately affect back on ourselves.
Unity feels so good that you don’t want to leave this eternal home. Hence, it rather comes as a shock when a higher intelligence tells you that it is not your time to stay here: You have not fulfilled your mission yet and must go back into your life. Even though you are not being told what this mission was, you return with a renewed sense of purpose and a changed set of values. Somewhere deep, you now know that your life has a greater meaning. If money, status, and possessions were important to you previously, they now have lost their charm. You are now holding an ineffable, yet deep sense that life holds meaning and mystery, which is intrinsically linked to the evolution of consciousness, through which we learn how to love.
We could be wondering how many cases of similar experiences it would need for the academic establishment to take near-death experiences seriously. Are the hundred and fifty cases collected by Dr Moody enough? Or would it take hundreds or thousands more? The current number of near-death cases is running by the millions: According to a Gallup study conducted in 1992, there were 13 million adult near-death experiences in the US alone. A study, conducted by Knoblauch found that 4% of the population in Germany (over 3 million people) has had a near-death experience.
Indeed, the sheer amount of anomalous data arising from these cases compelled mainstream scientists to react. They proposed various explanations within the old paradigm, some based on physiology, others on psychology.
Physiological theories attempt to explain NDEs through the release of various hormones and chemicals or through severe malfunction of the brain. Depending on the theory, the malfunction may result from the cessation of blood supply to the brain, elevated carbon dioxide levels in the blood, oxygen deprivation of the brain, or more specifically, a surge of electrical activity before the brain runs out of oxygen. They all have in common that NDEs – often the most important life event to those who experienced them – are dismissed as mere mistakes of the cerebral system. The obvious paradox inherent in these theories – how the brain can malfunction while it is not functioning at all, or how hormones can be released in a body that is not even alive at the time – some try to resolve by suggesting that NDEs may not occur during the actual time of clinical death, rather during the trauma of shutting down or recovering.
This is a reasonable argument, as time distortion during various altered states of consciousness is a widely known and documented phenomenon. (It is famously known to occur during hypnosis or in the dream state, where one might dream an entire story in the time-frame of just a few seconds in clock time.) However, near-death research has found at least three related phenomena, each of which would prove these theories wrong.
The first of these phenomena is a so-called shared-death experience (or SDE). In a typical shared-death experience, a loved one is in the room with the person who is dying, for example a daughter is with her mother at her hospital bed. At the moment of the mother’s death, the daughter (who is healthy and very much alive) also leaves her body and starts experiencing typical near-death phenomena, such as the journey through the tunnel. She might even meet with non-physical beings, but is ultimately told to return, as it was ‘not her time yet.’ The mother dies, but the daughter returns to narrate the experience. She had an experience like an NDE but her brain wasn’t shutting down, was not deprived of oxygen, the CO2 level in her blood didn't change etc.
Secondly, we have now suggestive evidence that near-death experiencers can sometimes hear and later report events and conversations which occurred exactly while their bodies were in total shut-down. Cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who studied near-death experiences of cardiac patients, describes the famous case of Pamela Reynolds, a patient who had all the blood drained from her head as part of a surgical procedure. (Certain surgeries require the stopping of blood circulation to the brain, thus clinical death is intentionally induced. Under the right circumstances, that can be tolerated by the patient for up to 30 minutes without permanent damage to the brain.) Pamela could later recall the entire conversation her doctors made while she was in that state. Neurosurgeon Spetzler commented that he found it inconceivable how she could have perceived this but at the same time, accepted that something occurred which was impossible to explain within the current paradigm: ‘I have seen so many things that I can’t explain’ he wrote ‘that I don’t want to be so arrogant as to be able to say that there’s no way it can happen.’
Thirdly, we even have reported cases in which blind people, while having an NDE, perceived information that can only be picked up by the visual sense. Kenneth Ring, author of Mindsight, found that 80% of his blind subjects (31 in total) claimed to be able to see during their NDE. Some could provide specific details that could be verified. In one of his cases, for example, a blind woman named Sarah, had a near-death experience during a medical crisis. She left her body and found herself able to see. Later, she could describe specific details about the corridor her consciousness hovered along, like patterns on the floor tiles, the appearance of various medical devices, as well as a distinctive uniform a nurse was wearing and physical characteristics of other staff members. Despite being blind, Sarah’s descriptions were accurate and precise, which provided further compelling evidence that NDEs do not occur solely ‘in the brain.’
According to modern philosophy of science, ‘a single counterexample is enough to falsify a theory’ (Karl Popper). Yet, none of our counterexamples to the materialist theory of consciousness have yet been used to falsify it. Instead, suggestive evidence has been labelled as ‘anecdotal’ and revolutionary scientists have been called ‘pseudoscientists,’ regardless of their academic credentials. Additionally, psychological theories have been brought forth to explain NDEs within the constraints of materialism. These psychological theories suggest that NDEs would be dissociative defence mechanisms against the death trauma, for example through depersonalization due to extreme emotional stress or the creation of false memories. These explanations are based on interpretation rather than facts, however; aside from lacking empiric evidence, there is something even more seriously troubling about them.
Near-death experiences are frequently valued and described by those who had them as deeply meaningful, life-changing spiritual events. Multiple long-term studies have verified this transformative quality of NDEs. Arising from the transpersonal aspects of the experience, near-death survivors often gain a heightened sense of self-worth. Typically, they become more risk taking and less dependent on other people’s opinion, as well as deal better with stress. They develop a great curiosity about life and the nature of reality. At the same time, to experience death literally in one’s own skin, constitutes what Stan Grof calls a spiritual emergency. It puts the experiencers into a crisis situation, in the original, ancient Greek sense of the word ‘krisis’ (κρίσις) which may refer to a point where decision-making is required or a medical situation when a patient’s condition can turn for the better or the worse. Just as NDEs can unfold their beneficial effects, if things go well, in lack of support, they can propel the experiencer into states of anxiety, depression, or other mental distress. A glimpse into multidimensional reality can make it difficult afterwards to reintegrate into normal society. (It is not uncommon, for instance, that near-death experiences would lead to divorce, when suddenly the world-views of the partners become incompatible.)
A lady from Tucson, Arizona, we shall call her Lilly, had a near-death experience when she was nearly killed by a stampede of horses. She told me about the impossibly hard time she had at the hospital talking about the spiritual side of the experience, which for her was very significant. One night, the doctor came to her bed, repeatedly tapped her on the shoulders and threatened with transferring her to the psychiatric ward for good, if she did not stop talking about her experience. Instead of giving her the spiritual support she needed, he made her worse. A lot of suffering is caused by doctors and psychologists who dismiss NDEs as a kind of delusion, hallucination, or malfunction: Instead of contributing to their understanding, they deepen the crisis.
Imagine the architect whose bridges collapse every time he aims to build them. Imagine the engineer whose airplanes crash every time he tries to launch them. Imagine the scientist who proposes the theory that causes these structural failures in the first place. As a society, we’d like to think, we would no longer employ them – yet, we still have psychologists and psychiatrists firmly in place, applying the materialist paradigm to millions of near-death cases where it is proving to be harmful or useless.
The materialist paradigm, which only offers to explain NDEs in terms of hallucinations and malfunctions of the brain cannot deliver comprehensive and useful theories about the nature of death and dying. It cannot offer help to those who could use psychological help and spiritual advice after a close encounter with death, hence in terms of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it fails to fulfil the criterion of usefulness and calls for a change in our assumptions.
Near-death experiences are frequently valued and described by those who had them as deeply meaningful, life-changing spiritual events. Multiple long-term studies have verified this transformative quality of NDEs. Arising from the transpersonal aspects of the experience, near-death survivors often gain a heightened sense of self-worth. Typically, they become more risk taking and less dependent on other people’s opinion, as well as deal better with stress. They develop a great curiosity about life and the nature of reality. At the same time, to experience death literally in one’s own skin, constitutes what Stan Grof calls a spiritual emergency. It puts the experiencers into a crisis situation, in the original, ancient Greek sense of the word ‘krisis’ (κρίσις) which may refer to a point where decision-making is required or a medical situation when a patient’s condition can turn for the better or the worse. Just as NDEs can unfold their beneficial effects, if things go well, in lack of support, they can propel the experiencer into states of anxiety, depression, or other mental distress. A glimpse into multidimensional reality can make it difficult afterwards to reintegrate into normal society. (It is not uncommon, for instance, that near-death experiences would lead to divorce, when suddenly the world-views of the partners become incompatible.)
A lady from Tucson, Arizona, we shall call her Lilly, had a near-death experience when she was nearly killed by a stampede of horses. She told me about the impossibly hard time she had at the hospital talking about the spiritual side of the experience, which for her was very significant. One night, the doctor came to her bed, repeatedly tapped her on the shoulders and threatened with transferring her to the psychiatric ward for good, if she did not stop talking about her experience. Instead of giving her the spiritual support she needed, he made her worse. A lot of suffering is caused by doctors and psychologists who dismiss NDEs as a kind of delusion, hallucination, or malfunction: Instead of contributing to their understanding, they deepen the crisis.
Imagine the architect whose bridges collapse every time he aims to build them. Imagine the engineer whose airplanes crash every time he tries to launch them. Imagine the scientist who proposes the theory that causes these structural failures in the first place. As a society, we’d like to think, we would no longer employ them – yet, we still have psychologists and psychiatrists firmly in place, applying the materialist paradigm to millions of near-death cases where it is proving to be harmful or useless.
The materialist paradigm, which only offers to explain NDEs in terms of hallucinations and malfunctions of the brain cannot deliver comprehensive and useful theories about the nature of death and dying. It cannot offer help to those who could use psychological help and spiritual advice after a close encounter with death, hence in terms of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it fails to fulfil the criterion of usefulness and calls for a change in our assumptions.
Multi-Dimensional Experiences:
After-Death Communications and Out-Of-Body Experiences
Dealing with near-death experiences (NDEs) highlights one of the major challenges of the new paradigm: It calls for the inclusion of subjective experiences. This is particularly provocative because the current, materialist paradigm – historically – had to fight the medieval, religious-dogmatic world-view by demanding objectivity. This was an absolutely necessary battle that enabled science to study physical phenomena and became a success story, rendering objectivity nearly synonymous with the scientific method.
However, consciousness is not objective. It cannot be measured, reproduced, or mathematically assessed. It can be felt, put into music, art, and poetry… but this is not the reason we need to bring it into the scope of science. Most importantly, consciousness and all its related subjective phenomena are real in a sense that they can be the cause for very real effects. A nightmare is a subjective experience, but the mental disturbance and tiredness it brings, may cause a very real car crash the next morning. Hitler’s rhetoric may have had but a subjective resonance, yet his dark mass-hypnosis affected our world worse than any objectively measurable tsunami or earthquake. Ignoring subjective phenomena can thus be highly dangerous, hence there is an urgent need for a systematic, new science that allows for consciousness to be taken into account.
This challenge only deepens when we move beyond near-death experiences to other cases in which the mind appears to function beyond the brain. Sometimes survivors have communication with deceased loved ones – subjective experiences that hold deep personal meaning, other times individuals can leave their bodies without any medical emergency.
The following case comes from Ethan, a long-term practitioner of lucid dreaming who used his skills to generate after-death communication with his deceased father.
Ethan: Personal After Death Communication
During his dying moments, I had promised my father that I would lucid dream to visit him in my dreams. Sadly, he could not communicate with me due to the pain and seriousness of his illness. But I believe he heard me, since his hurried breathing momentarily changed. Several weeks later, after his funeral, I was reunited with him in a spontaneous lucid dream:
During the dream, first, lying on a road, I then feel myself being propelled upwards, by some unseen force, into a beautiful sunlit blue sky. I fly along for a while, enjoying the scenery and then I see a circular bungalow house. I pass straight through the roof and ceiling, into a large circular room full of people. To my amazement, I recognise the people in the room as my relatives; some who have passed and some who are still alive. Everyone seems to be queuing up to greet and welcome someone seated in a wheelchair in the middle of the room. To my utter astonishment and delight, I see the person sitting in the wheelchair is my dead father. The only way I can contain my excitement, and not lose my lucidity, is by repeatedly flying up towards the ceiling and back down to the ground again and then flying around the room a few times, as I am kindly told by one of my relatives that I will have to wait my turn, since I had just arrived. When it is my time to greet my father, I am overjoyed with emotion to be reunited with him again and to see that my deathbed promise to him has been fulfilled. We embrace and start to talk. I try to keep my emotions from boiling over, so I do not lose lucidity. We discuss many things and he says he is proud of what I have achieved with my dreaming ability and being conscious during this reunion. I excitedly reply that I can contact him again through a medium, but he seems to not like this sort of contact and prefers that I do not.
Note: I didn't get to say goodbye as I lost my awareness, since I couldn't control my emotions any longer and woke up. Up until this lucid dream, I had an open mind about the belief in life after death. I could accept metaphysical debates and theories, but deep down I had a small fear of death and exploring outside of lucid dreams into OBEs [out-of-body experiences] etc. This lucid dream experience completely banished my fear. No longer do I just believe in life after death, I now know there is life after death. This experience was unlike any other times when I did come across thought-forms of my father in dreams but knew instantly that it was not him, only a projection of my subconscious. This time I experienced a high level of vividness and recall, and knew instinctively – not only through his mannerisms, his movements, the types of words he was using, but also through his projection of love and joy that I had affectionately experienced many times growing up as his son – that it was really my father. It was a very emotional experience that cannot be replicated in a dream or any hallucinatory type of way.
Experiences like this are currently among the most endangered, like threatened wildlife species hunted and deprived of their natural habitats – so within the materialist paradigm evoking the dead is ridiculed and dismissed as wishful thinking. Banished from the modern world are all the age-old customs of maintaining numinous ties with the ancestors. With them, we lost our connections with death and dying, our relationships with old age, the wisdom that comes through the transitory nature of life, and the organic unfolding of history from generation to generation. What if – instead of relegating conversations with the dead to taboo – we endeavoured to study this phenomenon scientifically and provide assistance to those seeking contact with the beyond?
Someone has already gotten it started. Less known than his research into near-death experiences, Raymond Moody has also explored ways of establishing communications with the departed.i Being a classical philologist, as well as a medical doctor, he was aware of the psychomanteia (also called necromanteia or ‘oracles of the dead’) in Ancient Greece. In those antique times, grieving people who yearned for contact with their deceased loved ones would visit these remote places, usually hidden away in subterranean caves deep within the mountains. Aspirants were required to undertake an arduous journey, then stay underground for a prolonged period of time before being granted access to the holy lake – where the departed would eventually appear on its surface.
In his study, Moody attempted to reproduce all those factors – in a modern setting – that were likely to cause this effect. He speculated that isolation and sensory deprivation were responsible for producing a dissociation from every-day life. The shiny surface of the lake – similar to mirrors and crystals used in various scrying instruments throughout later centuries – could cause a shifting of the usual modalities of perception. To combine and recreate these various psychologically effective elements in a modern setting, Dr Moody set up his own Theatre of the Mind. He purchased an old mill for the location, where nothing would remind the visitor of our contemporary times. He took clients, who wanted to meet a dead relative, for long walks through the woods (dissociation from everyday life), engaged them in conversation about the deceased and looked with them at their photographs and memorabilia (focusing attention). At the mill, he set up a dark room with a mirror placed in it. Astonishingly, clients not only saw their dead loved ones appearing in that mirror but oftentimes also stepping out of it. Here is what one participant recalls:
I was so happy to see him that I began to cry. Through the tears I could still see him in the mirror. Then he seemed to get closer and he must have come out of the mirror because the next thing I knew he was holding me and hugging me.
Dr Moody noted that these visionary reunions were being experienced as ‘real events, not fantasies or dreams. So far almost all of the subjects asserted that their encounters were completely real and that they had actually been in the living presence of loved ones lost to death.’
Recognizing the reality of such experiences demands a significant shift in thinking and a truly open-minded attitude. It requires abandoning the assumption of an objective, measurable reality that exists independently of the observer. To genuinely include subjective experiences into academic study, we have to assume that reality is fundamentally mind-based. This idea, supported by ancient philosophies, such as Platonism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, which propose that the material world is but a shadow or illusion (Maya) manifested by the Mind, becomes personal reality for those who have any spiritually transformative experience in which they perceived themselves (or someone else) independent of the body.
I would not be writing these lines, if it weren’t for an experience in my mid-twenties that so profoundly shook the very foundations of what I thought was possible that it prompted me to give up a fledgling legal career and devote myself to consciousness research instead.
My Personal Out-of-Body Experience
The room remained unchanged, only I was somewhere else. From a different vantage, rather than looking out of my eyes, I could see my body from above, as it was sleeping next to my partner on the bed below. I had read about out-of-body experiences and always imagined them as strange and spooky occurrences. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the power of a real experience like this. Immediately, it became the single most important life event I ever had. There was nothing spooky about it; rather, it was magnificent – like the first glimpse of a greater truth waiting to be discovered.
There was someone else there with me: a guide I couldn’t see or hear, but whose thoughts reached me in an intuitive-telepathic way. I was informed this is how death will feel and I was having this experience so that I could later relate to those seeking to understand death and other realms of reality. I became very interested and wanted to explore more, but I was ‘pushed back’ into my body. There was nothing I could do about it.
In my first out-of-body experience (OBE), I felt like the character Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) from ‘The Matrix’ – suddenly freed from the limited virtual reality he was plugged into all his life. An OBE is the eye-opening, mind-blowing, first-hand experience of reality being multidimensional. An anonymous online commentator bluntly called it the ‘greatest mindfuck in history,’ as it shifts perception from our every-day world to a vast reality that is hard to imagine for a modern human raised in Cartesian thinking. This pivotal event can trigger various reactions from neurotic fear to developing a Messiah complex. However, in fortunate cases, where the person is capable of understanding, sharing, and integrating the experience, it becomes the gateway into a greater life.
For that to happen, the person needs a large enough framework of reference that includes higher dimensions and an extended set of universal laws. Without such a framework, chaos, contradictions, and various psychological disorders may arise. Being referred to the Western psychiatric system with a history of perceiving one’s body from an external point of view and communicating with non-physical entities can result in a diagnosis of schizophrenia instead of illumination. Only if the individual is fortunate to find an effective multidimensional (external or internal) guidance system, can these experiences lead to spiritual enrichment rather than jeopardizing one’s mental health.
Traditionally, human societies had expert mediators between the dimensions, we usually refer to as shamans or (in the pre-Christian context) priests or priestesses. Anthropologist Erica Bourguignon showed that over 90% of all human societies ‘have one or more institutionalized forms of altered states of consciousness.’ This statistic underscores the near-universality of practices involving altered states of consciousness, including out-of-body experiences and after-death communications, illustrating that these are not merely individual experiences but part of the human cultural fabric all around the world.
Other researchers indicated that these multidimensional experiences may reach back to the dawn of time. Lewis-Williams, who studied cave art in South Africa – possibly as old as 10 millennia – came to the conclusion that these paintings depict entoptic phenomena: images usually seen when a person enters altered states of consciousness. This would mean that rock art was not merely decorative but deeply related to shamanic practices. Therianthropic images – that show human-animal hybrids – also found on cave walls support this theory: In shamanic traditions it is common to shape-shift into the form of a power animal. Others, like Terence McKenna, go so far as to say that altered states of consciousness – in particular, psychedelic experiences – are responsible for the development of cultural achievements such as language, art, and religion, hence kickstarted our civilisation.
While I doubt that psychedelics (like the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms) were necessary to achieve altered states of consciousness, I quite agree that altered states (in whatever way they were achieved, through plants, fasting, sensory deprivation or overload, dream training, meditation, dancing, drumming, or an overall magical lifestyle) played an important role in human history. In the oldest known book, the Epic of Gilgamesh – dating back to the 22nd century BC, with an editorial history of nearly a thousand years – the protagonist, the King of Uruk, has a series of precognitive dreams (a natural type of trance state) foreshadowing his future quest for immortality.
From Siberia to Tibet, from Nepal to Lapland, from North to South America we have traditions that report flights out of the body, where the action radius of a person’s consciousness extends further than the physical body. Fairy tales and legends from all around the world are based on shamanic patterns: heroes travelling to various underworlds and upper worlds, encountering non-physical and other supernatural beings, sometimes flying, other times shape-shifting, transcending time and space, visiting the dead or even attempting to bring them back. Sometimes, I wander back in thoughts to those ancient times, when the fire had just been stolen from the gods and the first stories were being told around the campfire. I like to think that these first stories were accounts from shamans, those metaphysically talented members of the tribe who could enter into altered states of consciousness and travel outside of the body to find the portal of death or bring back lost soul parts for those who suffered illness.
In anthropological literature, it has been widely documented that the natural inclination to fall into trance states (including seizures) was seen as a calling to become a shaman.v A similar sign is the often cited initiation crisis or ‘shamanic illness.’ Usually starting at adolescence, the affected person experiences a series of severe psychological experiences, such as having vivid, often terrifying visions, out-of-body experiences, dismemberment, and encounters with the spiritual world. The crises can involve severe, even life-threatening symptoms, until the candidate is willing to fully break down the old self and transform into a shaman, empowered and dedicated to serve the community. This can happen, if they are lucky enough to belong to the 90% of all the world’s cultures that have an institutionalised form of supporting altered states of consciousness. If they live in our Western world, they might instead get drugged, institutionalised, electroshocked, and marginalised instead, for within our materialist paradigm there is not much knowledge or willingness to support a spiritual crisis.
In his book, Spiritual Emergency, Stanislav Grof describes these states encountered by those who go through a shamanic crisis as holotropic states, for they open up the human consciousness to greater, spiritual dimensions. As Joseph Campbell remarked somewhere these states are the same ‘waters’ both the shaman and the schizophrenic get thrown into; while the shaman, however, learns how to swim in them, the psychotic sufferer drowns. It is our responsibility as a society, to employ some lifeguards and swimming instructors, so that those whose normal functioning is disrupted by extraordinary experiences can use these for personal growth, healing, and a deeper understanding of their own spiritual path.
For these anomalies are pointing us towards a direction that is new to us, yet ancient in the world, taking us to heights from where we can see that our lives are not separate, but part of a much larger reality. Finally, nothing shows this greater truth more poignantly, than accounts of children, who remember that they have lived before – to these cases we shall now direct our attention, as a last group of consciousness-related anomalies.
However, consciousness is not objective. It cannot be measured, reproduced, or mathematically assessed. It can be felt, put into music, art, and poetry… but this is not the reason we need to bring it into the scope of science. Most importantly, consciousness and all its related subjective phenomena are real in a sense that they can be the cause for very real effects. A nightmare is a subjective experience, but the mental disturbance and tiredness it brings, may cause a very real car crash the next morning. Hitler’s rhetoric may have had but a subjective resonance, yet his dark mass-hypnosis affected our world worse than any objectively measurable tsunami or earthquake. Ignoring subjective phenomena can thus be highly dangerous, hence there is an urgent need for a systematic, new science that allows for consciousness to be taken into account.
This challenge only deepens when we move beyond near-death experiences to other cases in which the mind appears to function beyond the brain. Sometimes survivors have communication with deceased loved ones – subjective experiences that hold deep personal meaning, other times individuals can leave their bodies without any medical emergency.
The following case comes from Ethan, a long-term practitioner of lucid dreaming who used his skills to generate after-death communication with his deceased father.
Ethan: Personal After Death Communication
During his dying moments, I had promised my father that I would lucid dream to visit him in my dreams. Sadly, he could not communicate with me due to the pain and seriousness of his illness. But I believe he heard me, since his hurried breathing momentarily changed. Several weeks later, after his funeral, I was reunited with him in a spontaneous lucid dream:
During the dream, first, lying on a road, I then feel myself being propelled upwards, by some unseen force, into a beautiful sunlit blue sky. I fly along for a while, enjoying the scenery and then I see a circular bungalow house. I pass straight through the roof and ceiling, into a large circular room full of people. To my amazement, I recognise the people in the room as my relatives; some who have passed and some who are still alive. Everyone seems to be queuing up to greet and welcome someone seated in a wheelchair in the middle of the room. To my utter astonishment and delight, I see the person sitting in the wheelchair is my dead father. The only way I can contain my excitement, and not lose my lucidity, is by repeatedly flying up towards the ceiling and back down to the ground again and then flying around the room a few times, as I am kindly told by one of my relatives that I will have to wait my turn, since I had just arrived. When it is my time to greet my father, I am overjoyed with emotion to be reunited with him again and to see that my deathbed promise to him has been fulfilled. We embrace and start to talk. I try to keep my emotions from boiling over, so I do not lose lucidity. We discuss many things and he says he is proud of what I have achieved with my dreaming ability and being conscious during this reunion. I excitedly reply that I can contact him again through a medium, but he seems to not like this sort of contact and prefers that I do not.
Note: I didn't get to say goodbye as I lost my awareness, since I couldn't control my emotions any longer and woke up. Up until this lucid dream, I had an open mind about the belief in life after death. I could accept metaphysical debates and theories, but deep down I had a small fear of death and exploring outside of lucid dreams into OBEs [out-of-body experiences] etc. This lucid dream experience completely banished my fear. No longer do I just believe in life after death, I now know there is life after death. This experience was unlike any other times when I did come across thought-forms of my father in dreams but knew instantly that it was not him, only a projection of my subconscious. This time I experienced a high level of vividness and recall, and knew instinctively – not only through his mannerisms, his movements, the types of words he was using, but also through his projection of love and joy that I had affectionately experienced many times growing up as his son – that it was really my father. It was a very emotional experience that cannot be replicated in a dream or any hallucinatory type of way.
Experiences like this are currently among the most endangered, like threatened wildlife species hunted and deprived of their natural habitats – so within the materialist paradigm evoking the dead is ridiculed and dismissed as wishful thinking. Banished from the modern world are all the age-old customs of maintaining numinous ties with the ancestors. With them, we lost our connections with death and dying, our relationships with old age, the wisdom that comes through the transitory nature of life, and the organic unfolding of history from generation to generation. What if – instead of relegating conversations with the dead to taboo – we endeavoured to study this phenomenon scientifically and provide assistance to those seeking contact with the beyond?
Someone has already gotten it started. Less known than his research into near-death experiences, Raymond Moody has also explored ways of establishing communications with the departed.i Being a classical philologist, as well as a medical doctor, he was aware of the psychomanteia (also called necromanteia or ‘oracles of the dead’) in Ancient Greece. In those antique times, grieving people who yearned for contact with their deceased loved ones would visit these remote places, usually hidden away in subterranean caves deep within the mountains. Aspirants were required to undertake an arduous journey, then stay underground for a prolonged period of time before being granted access to the holy lake – where the departed would eventually appear on its surface.
In his study, Moody attempted to reproduce all those factors – in a modern setting – that were likely to cause this effect. He speculated that isolation and sensory deprivation were responsible for producing a dissociation from every-day life. The shiny surface of the lake – similar to mirrors and crystals used in various scrying instruments throughout later centuries – could cause a shifting of the usual modalities of perception. To combine and recreate these various psychologically effective elements in a modern setting, Dr Moody set up his own Theatre of the Mind. He purchased an old mill for the location, where nothing would remind the visitor of our contemporary times. He took clients, who wanted to meet a dead relative, for long walks through the woods (dissociation from everyday life), engaged them in conversation about the deceased and looked with them at their photographs and memorabilia (focusing attention). At the mill, he set up a dark room with a mirror placed in it. Astonishingly, clients not only saw their dead loved ones appearing in that mirror but oftentimes also stepping out of it. Here is what one participant recalls:
I was so happy to see him that I began to cry. Through the tears I could still see him in the mirror. Then he seemed to get closer and he must have come out of the mirror because the next thing I knew he was holding me and hugging me.
Dr Moody noted that these visionary reunions were being experienced as ‘real events, not fantasies or dreams. So far almost all of the subjects asserted that their encounters were completely real and that they had actually been in the living presence of loved ones lost to death.’
Recognizing the reality of such experiences demands a significant shift in thinking and a truly open-minded attitude. It requires abandoning the assumption of an objective, measurable reality that exists independently of the observer. To genuinely include subjective experiences into academic study, we have to assume that reality is fundamentally mind-based. This idea, supported by ancient philosophies, such as Platonism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, which propose that the material world is but a shadow or illusion (Maya) manifested by the Mind, becomes personal reality for those who have any spiritually transformative experience in which they perceived themselves (or someone else) independent of the body.
I would not be writing these lines, if it weren’t for an experience in my mid-twenties that so profoundly shook the very foundations of what I thought was possible that it prompted me to give up a fledgling legal career and devote myself to consciousness research instead.
My Personal Out-of-Body Experience
The room remained unchanged, only I was somewhere else. From a different vantage, rather than looking out of my eyes, I could see my body from above, as it was sleeping next to my partner on the bed below. I had read about out-of-body experiences and always imagined them as strange and spooky occurrences. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the power of a real experience like this. Immediately, it became the single most important life event I ever had. There was nothing spooky about it; rather, it was magnificent – like the first glimpse of a greater truth waiting to be discovered.
There was someone else there with me: a guide I couldn’t see or hear, but whose thoughts reached me in an intuitive-telepathic way. I was informed this is how death will feel and I was having this experience so that I could later relate to those seeking to understand death and other realms of reality. I became very interested and wanted to explore more, but I was ‘pushed back’ into my body. There was nothing I could do about it.
In my first out-of-body experience (OBE), I felt like the character Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) from ‘The Matrix’ – suddenly freed from the limited virtual reality he was plugged into all his life. An OBE is the eye-opening, mind-blowing, first-hand experience of reality being multidimensional. An anonymous online commentator bluntly called it the ‘greatest mindfuck in history,’ as it shifts perception from our every-day world to a vast reality that is hard to imagine for a modern human raised in Cartesian thinking. This pivotal event can trigger various reactions from neurotic fear to developing a Messiah complex. However, in fortunate cases, where the person is capable of understanding, sharing, and integrating the experience, it becomes the gateway into a greater life.
For that to happen, the person needs a large enough framework of reference that includes higher dimensions and an extended set of universal laws. Without such a framework, chaos, contradictions, and various psychological disorders may arise. Being referred to the Western psychiatric system with a history of perceiving one’s body from an external point of view and communicating with non-physical entities can result in a diagnosis of schizophrenia instead of illumination. Only if the individual is fortunate to find an effective multidimensional (external or internal) guidance system, can these experiences lead to spiritual enrichment rather than jeopardizing one’s mental health.
Traditionally, human societies had expert mediators between the dimensions, we usually refer to as shamans or (in the pre-Christian context) priests or priestesses. Anthropologist Erica Bourguignon showed that over 90% of all human societies ‘have one or more institutionalized forms of altered states of consciousness.’ This statistic underscores the near-universality of practices involving altered states of consciousness, including out-of-body experiences and after-death communications, illustrating that these are not merely individual experiences but part of the human cultural fabric all around the world.
Other researchers indicated that these multidimensional experiences may reach back to the dawn of time. Lewis-Williams, who studied cave art in South Africa – possibly as old as 10 millennia – came to the conclusion that these paintings depict entoptic phenomena: images usually seen when a person enters altered states of consciousness. This would mean that rock art was not merely decorative but deeply related to shamanic practices. Therianthropic images – that show human-animal hybrids – also found on cave walls support this theory: In shamanic traditions it is common to shape-shift into the form of a power animal. Others, like Terence McKenna, go so far as to say that altered states of consciousness – in particular, psychedelic experiences – are responsible for the development of cultural achievements such as language, art, and religion, hence kickstarted our civilisation.
While I doubt that psychedelics (like the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms) were necessary to achieve altered states of consciousness, I quite agree that altered states (in whatever way they were achieved, through plants, fasting, sensory deprivation or overload, dream training, meditation, dancing, drumming, or an overall magical lifestyle) played an important role in human history. In the oldest known book, the Epic of Gilgamesh – dating back to the 22nd century BC, with an editorial history of nearly a thousand years – the protagonist, the King of Uruk, has a series of precognitive dreams (a natural type of trance state) foreshadowing his future quest for immortality.
From Siberia to Tibet, from Nepal to Lapland, from North to South America we have traditions that report flights out of the body, where the action radius of a person’s consciousness extends further than the physical body. Fairy tales and legends from all around the world are based on shamanic patterns: heroes travelling to various underworlds and upper worlds, encountering non-physical and other supernatural beings, sometimes flying, other times shape-shifting, transcending time and space, visiting the dead or even attempting to bring them back. Sometimes, I wander back in thoughts to those ancient times, when the fire had just been stolen from the gods and the first stories were being told around the campfire. I like to think that these first stories were accounts from shamans, those metaphysically talented members of the tribe who could enter into altered states of consciousness and travel outside of the body to find the portal of death or bring back lost soul parts for those who suffered illness.
In anthropological literature, it has been widely documented that the natural inclination to fall into trance states (including seizures) was seen as a calling to become a shaman.v A similar sign is the often cited initiation crisis or ‘shamanic illness.’ Usually starting at adolescence, the affected person experiences a series of severe psychological experiences, such as having vivid, often terrifying visions, out-of-body experiences, dismemberment, and encounters with the spiritual world. The crises can involve severe, even life-threatening symptoms, until the candidate is willing to fully break down the old self and transform into a shaman, empowered and dedicated to serve the community. This can happen, if they are lucky enough to belong to the 90% of all the world’s cultures that have an institutionalised form of supporting altered states of consciousness. If they live in our Western world, they might instead get drugged, institutionalised, electroshocked, and marginalised instead, for within our materialist paradigm there is not much knowledge or willingness to support a spiritual crisis.
In his book, Spiritual Emergency, Stanislav Grof describes these states encountered by those who go through a shamanic crisis as holotropic states, for they open up the human consciousness to greater, spiritual dimensions. As Joseph Campbell remarked somewhere these states are the same ‘waters’ both the shaman and the schizophrenic get thrown into; while the shaman, however, learns how to swim in them, the psychotic sufferer drowns. It is our responsibility as a society, to employ some lifeguards and swimming instructors, so that those whose normal functioning is disrupted by extraordinary experiences can use these for personal growth, healing, and a deeper understanding of their own spiritual path.
For these anomalies are pointing us towards a direction that is new to us, yet ancient in the world, taking us to heights from where we can see that our lives are not separate, but part of a much larger reality. Finally, nothing shows this greater truth more poignantly, than accounts of children, who remember that they have lived before – to these cases we shall now direct our attention, as a last group of consciousness-related anomalies.
Children Remembering Past Lives
This body of research emerged in the 1960s when Ian Stevenson, later his successor Jim Tucker, from the University of Virginia, as well as Erlendur Haraldsson, from the University of Iceland and others began studying children who, without any external prompt, provided their parents with descriptions of apparent previous lives.
The facts these children volunteered were often astonishing in their precision, including names, exact locations, professions of family members and friends, and other verifiable information. Stevenson, who first studied these cases, established rigorous standards by only following up on what he called strong cases – those that had all details independently recorded prior to investigation. He regarded a case as solved when independent investigators verified the facts, finding them precise, personal (not in the public domain), and valid beyond reasonable doubt (e.g. the possibility of deception could not be substantiated). Cases were deemed even stronger when the children exhibited certain skills they could not have acquired in their current life but seemed to have inherited from the past.
Reading through the materials, we are inevitably left with the feeling that something profound has been discovered. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages contain suggestive evidence for what was previously only a belief in reincarnation. The children who were studied not only recalled detailed facts about past lives but often exhibited special knowledge, behavioural traits typical for those past lives, or even birthmarks corresponding to mortal wounds from a previous existence. (Additionally, they typically do not know anything about events that occurred after the former personality’s death – indicating that these are cases of ‘genuine reincarnation,’ and not mere telepathy or the like.)
Below, we shall look at a bouquet of example cases collected from the endless pages of research conducted by Stevenson and other revolutionary scientists. Although their work is published, it remains – outside the spiritual community – largely unknown. If taken seriously, these cases serve as evidence that life encompasses a much greater spectrum than the individual lifespan between cradle and grave.
Children Recalling Facts from a Previous Life
Imagine a toddler who comes to you and says that she has lived before… as an incense maker who died in a car crash…. and she specifies that Ambiga and Geta Pichaer were the types of incense they made… that her mother’s name was Simona… and the school she attended was called Rahula… but she only went there up to 5th grade. Imagine a research professor would come along and do the detective work to find that, apart from some minor discrepancies, all these details were true. Such was the case of Purmina Ekanayake, a school girl from Sri Lanka, whose case was studied by Erlendur Haraldsson. Hers was one of many cases in which small children recalled exact facts about past lives, such as names of previous personalities, family relations, professions, names of schools, monasteries, and other institutions, even brand names or vehicle types.
In addition to academically researched cases, we also have personal memoirs of spontaneous childhood recalls of past lives from different parts of the world. An author from Transylvania remembered that as a little girl, she had recollections of a past life as her own brother, who died as a toddler before she was born. She used to surprise her parents by describing their previous family home, the rooms, the furniture, and even the dress her mother was wearing as she hugged her dying son goodbye – all details the family verified.
Special Knowledge and Skills
Imagine the toddler Purmina, who came to you stating she had been an incense maker in a previous life, did not only remember the names of the brands but also knew about the professional production process of the incense – even though her current family had no information of that sort. Plato, in his Theory of Reminiscence, proclaimed that ‘knowledge easily acquired is that which the enduring self had in an earlier life, so that it flows back easily.’vi Now, 25 centuries later, we seem to have some empirical evidence supporting his statement. We have cases of ‘the manifestation of skills acquired by the past-life person but not acquired by the present-day subject in this life.’ In another case, Swarnlata, a three-year-old girl from India frequently performed dances and songs which – as far as her closely guarding parents knew – she had no opportunity to learn anywhere in her current environment. In a famous American case, documented by Jim Tucker, the toddler James Leininger, was bothered by frequent nightmares about dying in an airplane crash as a soldier in World War II. He surprised his parents with his special knowledge about military planes. His assertions were confirmed not only by historians but by fellow WWII soldiers who were still alive. In fact, the veteran group of the troop James said he belonged to in his past life was so impressed by the insider knowledge of the child that they acknowledged him as one of them, even though none of the old veterans held prior beliefs in reincarnation.
Behavioural Traits
Children who remember past lives may also carry some of the behavioural traits stemming from the past into their present existence. In three cases from Sri Lanka, boys who remembered being Buddhist monks in previous lives exhibited practices typical of monks: They visited temples, recited prayers, and did not eat meat. Furthermore, they displayed a type of calmness, serenity, and detachment rarely found in children of their age. In India, children who remember past lives as members of a higher caste sometimes demand better food or better clothes. Bishen Chand scolded his lower-class parents for their poverty and, in general, acted exactly like the spoiled rich man he claimed to have been in a past life.
It is also interesting how children respond to possible past-life triggers. To cite a macabre example, Ismail Altinkilic clapped with joy when his murderer from a previous life – after lengthy legal proceedings – was judicially hanged.
Birthmarks
An interesting body of evidence has been found in cases of children who have birthmarks or bodily abnormalities that correspond to injuries, even mortal wounds apparently sustained in a previous life. Stevenson published a two-part monograph of 2,000 pages containing these cases, followed by a condensed version entitled Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. It features about 90 verified cases in which correspondence was found between birthmarks on the child and similar marks (distinguishing features such as wounds, injuries, or other stigmata) present on the body of the previous personality. Examples include a girl, born with markedly deformed fingers who remembered being a man whose fingers were cut off, and a boy, born with stubs for fingers on his right hand who remembered the life of a boy in another village who lost the fingers of his right hand in an accident with a fodder-chopping machine.
Xenoglossy
Finally, there is an element of the reincarnation type of cases sometimes cited in literature: xenoglossy, the use of a language the individual normally has no command of. We shall mention it for the sake of completeness, although it is the most controversial of all features, with very few and unverified examples. Almeder describes the case of a lady whose recurring life-long dreams and nightmares pointed towards a Cathar past life in medieval France, which was ended by the inquisition. Her notes contained verses of songs that turned out to be in medieval French and in langue d’oc (the language used in Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries). Lydia Johnson, a 37-year old American housewife, is noted to have given Swedish answers to Swedish questions when conversing about a past life as ‘Jensen Jacoby’ – a case of so-called responsive xenoglossy (when the subject is able to respond in a foreign language that otherwise they have no command of) Although this sounds like an intriguing feature, none of the cases of alleged xenoglossy could be verified or comprehensively studied by linguists. Therefore, their evidential value can, at this stage, not be asserted.
However, I may add that I did find it interesting when Thomas, in one of my sessions, recalled a Nazi past life and uttered one sentence in German: Sie ist meine Mutter und ich bin ihr Sohn. Thomas, a native English-speaker in this life, said these few German words completely without the trace of a foreign accent.
The Personality of Children Remembering Past Lives
Critics of the reincarnation-type cases suggested that high suggestibility and social isolation were causes for children reporting past lives. In response, Erlendur Haraldsson, who was a professor of psychology, decided to subject this hypothesis to proper psychological tests. As a result, he found that children who remembered past lives were found to be significantly more intelligent compared to the control group, had higher levels of cognitive functioning, performed better on the vocabulary test, and had much higher grades in school. Their teachers rated them significantly higher on adaptive functioning and reported that they tend to learn more, behave better in school and work harder than others. In short, children with past life memories turned out to be more mature.
This detail about the higher intelligence and overall greater maturity of children who remember past lives leads us – not to a conclusion – but to an important presupposition. Beginning with the Platonic idea that skills and traits are perfected life after life, thinking through the esoteric schools’ requirement of recalling past lives as a necessary step of spiritual development, and considering Moody’s respondents who returned to life in order to fulfil a specific mission, we arrive at the notion that consciousness is not static, but seems to be undergoing an evolution.
This notion is quite different from – even diametrically opposed to – the current cosmology inherent in mainstream science. Our cultural myth, as we have seen, presents life as a random occurrence: Biological evolution is driven by accidental mutations that happen without our intention or any kind of conscious will. Would we live our lives differently, if we were told that life wasn’t just a random occurrence but part of a larger process governed by consciousness? How would we behave if we knew that the individual choices we make had not only implications for our present life but reverberate their consequences into future lives to come? Would we hold profit-making as our highest value regardless of the long-term harm our business does to the world? Would we waste money on momentary pleasures? Would we still rage wars? Or would we live our lives completely differently: in harmony with nature, like indigenous people and focusing on internal techniques to foster our conscious evolution, like Buddhists or yogic practitioners?
Stanislav Grof once said that the main problem of our era was that we were using ‘superior technologies [...] in the service of primitive emotions and instinctual impulses.’ This imbalance causes conflict to rage not only in domestic and social contexts, or between nations and belligerent groups that fight with high-tech weapons – but also within ourselves. To find harmony, happiness, and meaning in our lives, we need internal technologies that are just as effective as our external technologies currently are.
For that, we need a science of internal experiences, a science of the mind – which will require a new paradigm with new assumptions and new research methods.
How could a new science like that be established?
The facts these children volunteered were often astonishing in their precision, including names, exact locations, professions of family members and friends, and other verifiable information. Stevenson, who first studied these cases, established rigorous standards by only following up on what he called strong cases – those that had all details independently recorded prior to investigation. He regarded a case as solved when independent investigators verified the facts, finding them precise, personal (not in the public domain), and valid beyond reasonable doubt (e.g. the possibility of deception could not be substantiated). Cases were deemed even stronger when the children exhibited certain skills they could not have acquired in their current life but seemed to have inherited from the past.
Reading through the materials, we are inevitably left with the feeling that something profound has been discovered. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages contain suggestive evidence for what was previously only a belief in reincarnation. The children who were studied not only recalled detailed facts about past lives but often exhibited special knowledge, behavioural traits typical for those past lives, or even birthmarks corresponding to mortal wounds from a previous existence. (Additionally, they typically do not know anything about events that occurred after the former personality’s death – indicating that these are cases of ‘genuine reincarnation,’ and not mere telepathy or the like.)
Below, we shall look at a bouquet of example cases collected from the endless pages of research conducted by Stevenson and other revolutionary scientists. Although their work is published, it remains – outside the spiritual community – largely unknown. If taken seriously, these cases serve as evidence that life encompasses a much greater spectrum than the individual lifespan between cradle and grave.
Children Recalling Facts from a Previous Life
Imagine a toddler who comes to you and says that she has lived before… as an incense maker who died in a car crash…. and she specifies that Ambiga and Geta Pichaer were the types of incense they made… that her mother’s name was Simona… and the school she attended was called Rahula… but she only went there up to 5th grade. Imagine a research professor would come along and do the detective work to find that, apart from some minor discrepancies, all these details were true. Such was the case of Purmina Ekanayake, a school girl from Sri Lanka, whose case was studied by Erlendur Haraldsson. Hers was one of many cases in which small children recalled exact facts about past lives, such as names of previous personalities, family relations, professions, names of schools, monasteries, and other institutions, even brand names or vehicle types.
In addition to academically researched cases, we also have personal memoirs of spontaneous childhood recalls of past lives from different parts of the world. An author from Transylvania remembered that as a little girl, she had recollections of a past life as her own brother, who died as a toddler before she was born. She used to surprise her parents by describing their previous family home, the rooms, the furniture, and even the dress her mother was wearing as she hugged her dying son goodbye – all details the family verified.
Special Knowledge and Skills
Imagine the toddler Purmina, who came to you stating she had been an incense maker in a previous life, did not only remember the names of the brands but also knew about the professional production process of the incense – even though her current family had no information of that sort. Plato, in his Theory of Reminiscence, proclaimed that ‘knowledge easily acquired is that which the enduring self had in an earlier life, so that it flows back easily.’vi Now, 25 centuries later, we seem to have some empirical evidence supporting his statement. We have cases of ‘the manifestation of skills acquired by the past-life person but not acquired by the present-day subject in this life.’ In another case, Swarnlata, a three-year-old girl from India frequently performed dances and songs which – as far as her closely guarding parents knew – she had no opportunity to learn anywhere in her current environment. In a famous American case, documented by Jim Tucker, the toddler James Leininger, was bothered by frequent nightmares about dying in an airplane crash as a soldier in World War II. He surprised his parents with his special knowledge about military planes. His assertions were confirmed not only by historians but by fellow WWII soldiers who were still alive. In fact, the veteran group of the troop James said he belonged to in his past life was so impressed by the insider knowledge of the child that they acknowledged him as one of them, even though none of the old veterans held prior beliefs in reincarnation.
Behavioural Traits
Children who remember past lives may also carry some of the behavioural traits stemming from the past into their present existence. In three cases from Sri Lanka, boys who remembered being Buddhist monks in previous lives exhibited practices typical of monks: They visited temples, recited prayers, and did not eat meat. Furthermore, they displayed a type of calmness, serenity, and detachment rarely found in children of their age. In India, children who remember past lives as members of a higher caste sometimes demand better food or better clothes. Bishen Chand scolded his lower-class parents for their poverty and, in general, acted exactly like the spoiled rich man he claimed to have been in a past life.
It is also interesting how children respond to possible past-life triggers. To cite a macabre example, Ismail Altinkilic clapped with joy when his murderer from a previous life – after lengthy legal proceedings – was judicially hanged.
Birthmarks
An interesting body of evidence has been found in cases of children who have birthmarks or bodily abnormalities that correspond to injuries, even mortal wounds apparently sustained in a previous life. Stevenson published a two-part monograph of 2,000 pages containing these cases, followed by a condensed version entitled Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. It features about 90 verified cases in which correspondence was found between birthmarks on the child and similar marks (distinguishing features such as wounds, injuries, or other stigmata) present on the body of the previous personality. Examples include a girl, born with markedly deformed fingers who remembered being a man whose fingers were cut off, and a boy, born with stubs for fingers on his right hand who remembered the life of a boy in another village who lost the fingers of his right hand in an accident with a fodder-chopping machine.
Xenoglossy
Finally, there is an element of the reincarnation type of cases sometimes cited in literature: xenoglossy, the use of a language the individual normally has no command of. We shall mention it for the sake of completeness, although it is the most controversial of all features, with very few and unverified examples. Almeder describes the case of a lady whose recurring life-long dreams and nightmares pointed towards a Cathar past life in medieval France, which was ended by the inquisition. Her notes contained verses of songs that turned out to be in medieval French and in langue d’oc (the language used in Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries). Lydia Johnson, a 37-year old American housewife, is noted to have given Swedish answers to Swedish questions when conversing about a past life as ‘Jensen Jacoby’ – a case of so-called responsive xenoglossy (when the subject is able to respond in a foreign language that otherwise they have no command of) Although this sounds like an intriguing feature, none of the cases of alleged xenoglossy could be verified or comprehensively studied by linguists. Therefore, their evidential value can, at this stage, not be asserted.
However, I may add that I did find it interesting when Thomas, in one of my sessions, recalled a Nazi past life and uttered one sentence in German: Sie ist meine Mutter und ich bin ihr Sohn. Thomas, a native English-speaker in this life, said these few German words completely without the trace of a foreign accent.
The Personality of Children Remembering Past Lives
Critics of the reincarnation-type cases suggested that high suggestibility and social isolation were causes for children reporting past lives. In response, Erlendur Haraldsson, who was a professor of psychology, decided to subject this hypothesis to proper psychological tests. As a result, he found that children who remembered past lives were found to be significantly more intelligent compared to the control group, had higher levels of cognitive functioning, performed better on the vocabulary test, and had much higher grades in school. Their teachers rated them significantly higher on adaptive functioning and reported that they tend to learn more, behave better in school and work harder than others. In short, children with past life memories turned out to be more mature.
This detail about the higher intelligence and overall greater maturity of children who remember past lives leads us – not to a conclusion – but to an important presupposition. Beginning with the Platonic idea that skills and traits are perfected life after life, thinking through the esoteric schools’ requirement of recalling past lives as a necessary step of spiritual development, and considering Moody’s respondents who returned to life in order to fulfil a specific mission, we arrive at the notion that consciousness is not static, but seems to be undergoing an evolution.
This notion is quite different from – even diametrically opposed to – the current cosmology inherent in mainstream science. Our cultural myth, as we have seen, presents life as a random occurrence: Biological evolution is driven by accidental mutations that happen without our intention or any kind of conscious will. Would we live our lives differently, if we were told that life wasn’t just a random occurrence but part of a larger process governed by consciousness? How would we behave if we knew that the individual choices we make had not only implications for our present life but reverberate their consequences into future lives to come? Would we hold profit-making as our highest value regardless of the long-term harm our business does to the world? Would we waste money on momentary pleasures? Would we still rage wars? Or would we live our lives completely differently: in harmony with nature, like indigenous people and focusing on internal techniques to foster our conscious evolution, like Buddhists or yogic practitioners?
Stanislav Grof once said that the main problem of our era was that we were using ‘superior technologies [...] in the service of primitive emotions and instinctual impulses.’ This imbalance causes conflict to rage not only in domestic and social contexts, or between nations and belligerent groups that fight with high-tech weapons – but also within ourselves. To find harmony, happiness, and meaning in our lives, we need internal technologies that are just as effective as our external technologies currently are.
For that, we need a science of internal experiences, a science of the mind – which will require a new paradigm with new assumptions and new research methods.
How could a new science like that be established?