When I told my wife that I was thinking about whether a scientific theory of the meaning of death and of ideas such as reincarnation can be built, she was nonenthusiastic. A conversation ensued, nevertheless, and slowly she warmed up.
“Haven't you had enough of theorizing for now?” she teased. She was referring to the fact that I had recently published a book on the nature of reality.
“Not when it's so much fun!” I laughed. “And after all, I'd be in stimulating company. Alan Watts (1962) speculated about the meaning of reincarnation. He said that we choose the scenarios of our lives before we come Earthside. And Carl Sagan (1973) used to say that CETI would fulfill the meaning of life—that's Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, you know.”
My wife shook her head in amusement. “You're picking some far-out examples of questions of meaning. Is that a portent of what's coming?”
“That's what makes it fun. Anyhow, here's my idea. Fred Alan Wolf (1984) says that creativity is nonlocal in time. What is a creative idea today is commonplace tomorrow. Doesn't this mean that we borrow ideas from the future in a creative experience?
“Nonlocality, you remember, is one of those quantum phenomena that play a central role in our new paradigm of reality. It means communication or influence without exchanging signals through space-time—in other words, it is an out-of-this-world connection.”
“Right,” my better half interrupted. “I don't find that idea particularly startling.”
“But now, brace yourself,” I went on, pausing significantly (I never lose a chance to impress her). “Suppose we can borrow also from the past. What would that be?”
“Learning from history. We humans have been trying to do that ever since we could reflect on our experience, although we seem to be slow learners as far as the big lessons like war are concerned.”
Her answer was predictable (which pleased me). I said with not a little fanfare, “No, that's not what I mean. Suppose there are patterns of being from which the themes of becoming are borrowed. When we borrow an unfamiliar theme, we say it is creative, but of course the unfamiliar today is familiar tomorrow, so nothing is unfamiliar from a timeless perspective.”
I added, now rushing a little, “You see, the themes themselves reside in the nonlocal domain, right? Where there is no time and where the past, present, and future coexist. So, just as we can borrow a theme (it would probably be more appropriate to say that a theme borrows us) ahead of its time in creativity, why shouldn't we be able to borrow themes from the past that are also in the nonlocal domain? The concept of karma—”
“Aha!” exclaimed my wife. “The scientist finally acknowledges the limits of his science and returns to the esoteric cosmology for the meaning of death. Classic! Who needs physics for that? And watch it! Many people know more about esoteric theories of karma and reincarnation than you,” she said with not a little scorn.
“Hold it, you're bringing in a classical, competitive framework. Hear me out,” I said. “Science likes symmetry, especially time symmetry. If time is nonlinear in the nonlocal domain and things can come to us without signals from the future, then they can also come to us nonlocally from the past.”
“I can't find fault with your logic, speculative though it is,” she bantered, backing off. “So how does this benefit us?”
Pleased with her attentiveness and the use of “us,” I went on. “Let me give you an example I once heard about. A woman had a pain in her neck for which doctors could find no physical cause, and psychiatrists had also given her a clean bill of mental health. Then a past-life therapist hypnotically regressed her to her previous lives. So she was tripping down the memory lane of the centuries when, all of a sudden, she felt a choking pain in her neck and experienced the end of a lifetime in which she died on the gallows. After she came back from the hypnotic trance, the pain in her neck was gone, and it never came back.”
My woman was laughing. “What a difference two decades make! Are you forgetting your own experience with past-life regression?”
She was referring to an incident in the mid-1970s that I shared with her. I had left the field of nuclear physics and was groping for a new interest in another area of physics when a self-avowed past-life regression therapist approached me. I was persuaded to do a regression with this person and one of the episodes I recalled was about some great, juicy, sexy escapades from my allegedly twelfth-century past. Unfortunately, I also had the distinct feeling that I was unconsciously concocting the entire scene, that it was a fantasy. This colored my view of the rest of my experience which made psychological sense, so it was useful.
“That was twenty-five years ago,” I said. “The data of regression therapy is much better now. Also we have a new worldview and a new science to explore it.”
“I know, I know,” said my wife, continuing to smile.
“And also, don't forget, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is correct—”
“And it's your job to prove it,” my wife finished the sentence, still chuckling. “I'm sorry,” she laughed, “but I have this image of you as the lone scientist galloping to the rescue of reincarnation, and I'm your faithful sidekick riding scout at your side.”
I grinned. “It's a funny image, all right. But if we remember that reincarnation is an attempt to explain real experiences that people have, we at least have to respect the intent. I have a friend, let's call him Paul, a very intelligent, hardheaded, high-powered professor with all the credentials—a Ph.D., directorship of an institute, and all that. He always shared my opinion that reincarnation is absurd. But then he had a series of “past-life” experiences in which a couple of Buddhist monks, one from the eleventh century and one from the thirteenth, urged him to develop his spiritual life. What's a poor academic to make of such an experience? There are just too many people throughout history who have reported such experiences to discount them all as deluded, and many of them—like my friend—have been respected, feet-on-the-ground types. It's a puzzle that keeps pestering me off and on.
“And then I intuited: what if we cast off some of the peripheral beliefs in souls and the like and recast reincarnational experiences in terms of nonlocal themes from the past that we are sharing today with somebody in the past—like Aspect's photons, only across time? What then?” I was referring to the French physicist Alain Aspect's classic experiment in which he demonstrated that correlated grains of light called photons indeed influence one another across space without exchanging signals.
“What then, indeed?” my sweetheart replied. “I'll play devil's advocate for science. What's your evidence?”
“As a theorist, I don't prove things empirically myself, but I can cite evidence collected by others. Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia Medical Center is a serious and respected researcher of reincarnation. Actually, he has some very intriguing data about children who remember their past lives that is very resistant to any explanation other than reincarnation. Then there is data on near-death experiences that also suggest quantum nonlocality.”
“I suppose so, but frankly, I'm having a little trouble with this.”
“Well, I'm just intuiting, but it makes sense that if creativity is remembering an idea from the nonlocal theme park before its time, then there can also be karma, or causes that haunt us from the past via the same nonlocal theme-sharing.”
“Amit, it seems to me that you're digging your own grave. You've worked so hard to refute determinism, and now you seem to be saying that past karma determines our lives. That's worse than hidden-variables determinism. It's not only old wine in a new bottle, but it's rotten wine.”
My wife was referring to scientific attempts to explain away quantum nonlocality by postulating that hidden (unknown) variables are “really” responsible for quantum weirdness. The existence of such variables, which would save materialist beliefs, have been ruled out by Aspect's and others' experiments.
“But you're forgetting, sweetheart, I am not necessarily buying the popular interpretation of karma. The stuff of the nonlocal theme park is like H. G. Wells's invisible man. It has no manifest form until we give it form by living it. It's the experiencer who puts clothes on the invisible man.”
“So why don't you put some clothes on your friend's experiences as Buddhist monks?”
“OK,” I said with relish. “Let's go shopping at the nonlocal theme park clothing store. Say there were two Zen aspirants in the past whose unfinished business in their spiritual work was a theme in the nonlocal theme park; their business was unfinished because they didn't bring about a satisfactory manifestation of the theme.”
“Well,” my loved one sighed in mock admiration, “you have a fantastic imagination.”
Bowing my appreciation, I continued. “Now suppose those guys were having a nonlocally correlated precognitive experience with my friend. Those guys of the past nonlocally influenced Paul's spiritual destiny. When consciousness was collapsing possibilities of the correlated event in those guys of long ago, the experience of my friend in the future was also locked in, except it would be in limbo for a few centuries.”
“I don't understand,” said my wife, frowning.
“Remember Aspect's experiment?” I asked. When she nodded her affirmative, I continued. “If two photons are correlated and the wave function of one is collapsed, the other's wave function is also collapsed; its possibility becomes a certainty, irrespective of when an experimenter actually observes the second photon's state. See?”
“Okay, I see it now. So when your friend had his experience, he was spontaneously experiencing predestined events.”
“Exactly. Of course, my friend's case is unusual. What I think is more common is for dying people nonlocally to share their life story as it flashes by their mind's sky with their subsequent incarnations as they are being born. This is more likely because death and birth are special egoless times. Conscious intentions that produce nonlocal correlations between people are strong then. The psychiatrist Stan Grof has found much evidence for the recall of such reincarnational memories by using techniques that he calls holotropic breathing. How is your strangeness level, Mrs. devil's advocate? Have I crossed your strangeness threshold yet?”
“No, I'm getting into the spirit of the thing. I haven't enjoyed such a tall tale since I sat at my grandfather's knee.”
I grinned. “Well, in that case, let me tell you something else. I said earlier that these other guys from Paul's past were influencing Paul's life. But we really can't tell that it was not Paul who initiated the whole mutual influencing.”
Now my wife seemed intrigued. I went on. “A philosopher named Brier concocted an interesting story: Suppose somebody conspires to kill a friend of yours by planting a time bomb in his desk drawer while he is at lunch. You happen to walk into your friend's office after the bomber leaves to borrow a pencil; you open the drawer and see the bomb set to go off in one hour, but suddenly you are called away for an emergency. Of course, you intend to call your friend at lunch to warn him about the bomb, and to call the bomb squad. Unfortunately, absorbed in your own predicament, you forget to call until much later. Now, of course, you hope that your friend did not return to his office after lunch and is still alive; but chances are that he did, and he died. Can you do anything?
“If you know about quantum nonlocality and backward causation, then yes! You cry out in your mind the needed warning to your friend and hope that he picked it up—'heard' your warning—in time to save himself from the bomb. But he could pick it up only creatively or precognitively, for which there is a small but finite chance. It's far more likely, of course, that your warning came too late, and your friend was blown to smithereens. So, although it is far more likely that those Zen aspirants of the past centuries initiated the whole series of experiences that Paul had, we cannot rule out that Paul may have been the one who called out to the past, to his past lives.”
“Are you saying that the future can change the past? Tell me, my impetuous frontiersman, aren't you making a shambles of Einstein's relativity? Have you no respect?”
“Of course, I have. Einstein is practically the physicist's archetype of God. You probably don't know this, but Einstein had very similar ideas about existence as I am proposing.”
“Really? You never cease to amaze me,” said the woman I love. I could not tell if she was faking her admiration or not.
“Really. Einstein had an interesting perspective on death. He maintained that past, present, and future all exist, at some level, simultaneously, although time-traveling to the past is forbidden for people of one time frame to another. When his dear friend Michelangelo Besso died, Einstein consoled Besso's wife saying exactly that, ‘For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.’ Perhaps Einstein intuited that people do live on in their respective time frames; I am only giving more scientific savvy to that intuition. People do live on, but in different incarnations that are correlated possibilities across time frames. Comprende?”
“I am trying, I am trying,” said my darling wife, with a distinct frown of concentration.
“But remember, my skeptical darling, all past and future correlated incidents in experience are acausal coincidences. The meaning—remember? this is about the meaning of death—is in the mind of the experiencer, the particular individual consciousness that tunes in something from the nonlocal theme park, in that person's specific melodrama. And that person is free to disregard any nonlocal experience, to write it off as a hallucination—or to take it seriously as an opportunity for growth. Children, whose minds are relatively open, do; adults don't often. It doesn't mean any violation for the causal world, where relativity reigns.”
“What a suave purveyor of answers you are!”
“No, love, I just have given up being afraid to ask a question, any question. Coming back to meaning. I hope you have begun to see a kind of tangled hierarchy between past, present, and future events. It's not a simple hierarchy where past effects present and present effects future; instead, each effects the other to form an interwoven network of events. Each nonlocal sharing perhaps reinforces the probability of further sharing, and so forth.”
Putting her hand to her forehead, my wife suddenly went into a dramatic mock-swoon. “My limit is approaching. My head is spinning. . . .”
“See, ambiguity will do that to you,” I persisted, laughingly catching her. “So instead of determinism, what we actually have is quite creative and full of novelty, an opportunity for new order to come from creative chaos. We have such freedom to choose the clothes we put on the invisible man! Glory hallelujah! As far as consciousness is concerned, the universe is constantly creative.”
“Is creativity then the epitome of dying?”
“Yes. Within the wheel of karma, outer creativity, our arts and sciences, is the best thing. And when the creativity is inner-directed, inner creativity, we may even escape the wheel of karma. If we die consciously, at the moment of death we may be able to recognize the illusory nature of all experience; even the themes, creativity included, are illusions created by consciousness for play. That recognition is what people call liberation. There is no more identifying with the themes after that; there is no more rebirth.”
“I agree with all that; it is your scientific theory that I have difficulty with. Does anybody else support this crazy theory?”
“Well, Seth has said similar things about our past, present, and future influencing one another.”
“Who is Seth?”
“A disembodied being, supposedly from another plane, who spoke through the late medium and writer Jane Roberts.”11
“A disembodied soul!” my sweetheart gasped. “Amit, if this gets out, your scientific colleagues will disembowel you. They'll crucify you for having too much fun!”
“Think nonlocally, woman. Well, you may be right about the reaction of my colleagues. Fortunately, my hard science colleagues don't read popular books, especially one on reincarnation.”
“What I want to know is, is it your karma to write all this, or is it a creative choice? What is manifesting right now, nonlocal themes from the future or the past?”
“Why not both? Past, present, and future tangling, mixing, making up the quivering consciousness,” I breathed in a suitably husky voice as I leaned toward her, “that wants to change the subject to amour.”
“You've got to be kidding,” my woman snorted. “I have a headache. That's your karmuppance.”
11For a taste of the Roberts-Seth relationship, read Roberts 1975.