Part Two

THE BURDEN OF PROOF

 

UNTIL THIS CENTURY the burden of proof in spiritual matters lay with disbelievers. Religion had such a powerful hold upon the human imagination that for whole cultures—the ancient Egyptians and medieval Christians come to mind—the material world was much less real than the world of the gods or God. Most modern people can barely fathom this worldview, because we are as immersed in materialism as they were in idealism—the belief that nature begins in subtle realms of spirit. In idealism the earth is a lower world while heaven is higher. Thus everything about earthly life—its physicality, appetites, sexual drive, disease, suffering, and old age—is further from God or spirit than heaven.

Science did not overturn this view by disproving it. Idealism was simply outmoded by a new worldview—materialism—that was more practical. Materialism brought about technology, with its attendant comforts, and it explained many phenomena that religion preferred to regard as a mystery known only to God. Like any worldview, the old one overstepped its bounds when it claimed, for example, that diseases were acts of God to punish sinners. Once germs were discovered, this explanation seemed pointless and ultimately irrational. But by the same token, the new worldview would overstep its bounds, as it has today, when science claims that without physical proof we can abolish all notions of God, angels, ghosts, spirit, the soul, and the afterlife itself. Just as religion had no competency in physics and chemistry, science has no competency in spiritual issues.

The burden of proof has shifted, and now it is the believer who must prove that God and the soul are real. For many people, the triumph of materialism is so complete that even showing why we should care about God and the soul is a tough challenge.

If skepticism carries the day in some circles, in popular culture the burden still lies with proving that the afterlife doesn’t exist. Consistently polls show that 90% of people believe in heaven, and almost that many believe they are going there. Belief in hell suffers a sharp decline to 75% and only 68% believe in the devil. This leaves most people in a quandary, dividing their allegiance between faith when it comes to spirituality and science when it comes to the material world. No less than Sir Isaac Newton was a devout Christian who wrestled his whole life with the schism he saw between science and metaphysics.

There is another way, however. In this book I’ve tried to present a view of the afterlife based on consciousness, and issues about consciousness can be settled, at least partially, through science. The evidence we’re looking for isn’t photographs of supernatural phenomena (these already exist in abundance but only lead to more skepticism). The most helpful evidence would be in support of the major claims that underlie Vedanta, which is consistent on its own terms. The primary claim, of course, is that reality is created from consciousness. We will have our proof if we can answer the following questions:

Is Akasha real?

Does the mind extend beyond the brain?

Is the universe aware?

Does consciousness have a basis outside time and space?

Can our beliefs shape reality?

These are fundamental questions that science has touched upon, even though few researchers had the afterlife in mind when they made their findings. It’s fair to say that physics never set out to prove that the universe is self-aware. But so many mysteries remain unsolved if the universe isn’t self-aware that cutting-edge theories are starting to include that once unthinkable idea.

Looking at unsolved mysteries is our best hope, in fact, because only those things that science hasn’t explained offer room for radically new thinking. At present, neurology doesn’t know how memory works, or how brain cells turn raw data into complex thought, or where identity is located. If we knew these things, there might be no need to speculate about “extended mind,” the notion that thinking can occur outside the brain. Fortunately or not, we find ourselves with a rich store of enigmas that provide room for the Vedic rishis and their deep understanding of consciousness. On the frontier of many mysteries lies the answer to one mystery.