Chapter 13
Soul Evidence
In a bygone era, many scientists were deeply religious and they talked about God quite openly. Einstein was one of them. He was famous for saying things like, “I want to know the mind of that One (meaning God)” or “I can't believe that God would play dice with the universe.” The reason for this God talk is misunderstood today. Some scientists think that it is just a casual manner of speaking that was common in those days. Others flatly declare that scientists of that ilk had not yet shed their superstition. But the actual reason for belief in God for Einstein and other scientists like him goes deeper.
It is a fact that science, especially physics and chemistry, is based on laws. But how did these laws originate? And often these laws are expressed in the language of mathematics. What is the origin of mathematics?
If everything arises from the motion of matter, then the laws of physics and the language of mathematics must follow from the random lawless motion of the elementary particles. To the credit of materialists, some attempts at rectification have been made. Unfortunately, no one has succeeded in deducing any physical laws from the random movement of elementary particles. Nor has there been any breakthrough in understanding the origin of mathematics beginning with randomly moving matter.
So the scientists of Einstein's ilk who were reverent about God were no fools. Being good philosophical thinkers, they figured out that the laws of physics and their mathematical language offer definitive proof for God. To be sure, these scientists also believed in Newtonian determinism. Accordingly, they genuinely believed that God created the laws of the universe (along with the language of mathematics), set the universe in motion, and then let the laws dictate the course. This is the reason that Einstein said, “The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science.”
To these scientists, God was a benign caretaker of the world, a parent who refrained from interfering. To be sure, Einstein never understood the entire message of quantum physics, although he contributed crucially important ideas to it. His comment, “I cannot believe that God plays dice with the universe,” came later from his utter frustration with the majority of scientists following the so-called statistical interpretation of quantum physics. Physicists hypnotized themselves, calling the waves of quantum objects “probability waves” and not what they really are, “waves of possibility.” Thinking of quantum objects as waves of possibility sooner or later will raise the question in your mind, “Whose possibility?” Instead, physicists ignored the observer effect and remained satisfied with calculating probabilities and using their statistical calculations for practical applications of quantum physics to systems of large numbers and events.
I strongly suspect that if Einstein knew that quantum physics would enable us to rediscover God and that the quantum God is not benign, he would be very happy indeed.
THE REALM OF THE ARCHETYPES: THE SUPRAMENTAL CONTEXTS OF INTUITIVE EXPERIENCES
Where do physical laws originate? Some philosophers think physical laws are mind-made descriptions of the behavior of physical objects.
Often this is summarized by the question, “Can Newton's law of gravity make even a leaf fall from a tree?” The physicist John Wheeler, in a discussion with two other physicists, approached the question in this way:
Imagine that we take the carpet up in this room, and lay down on the floor a big sheet of paper and rule it off in one-foot squares. Then I get down and write in one square my best set of equations for the universe, and you get down and write yours, and we get the people we respect the most to write down their equations, till we have all the squares filled. We've worked our way to the door of the room. We have our magic wand and give the command to those equations to put on wings and fly. Not one of them will fly. Yet there is some magic in this universe of ours, so that with the birds and the flowers and the trees and the sky it flies. What compelling feature about the equations that are behind the universe is there that makes them put on wings and fly? (Quoted in Peat, 1987).
The point is that the equations we mentally compose to represent the laws don't fly, but what about the “real” laws behind them, the laws for which the equations are the mental representations, the laws that we intuit and mentally represent as best as we can with our equations? They must fly; they must be potent. Our equations evolve with time; the representations get better and better. But the real laws toward which our mental representations evolve are eternal.
It is a fact that the law of gravity is not a program encoded within a piece of rock that guides the rock's attraction toward the earth. Nor is the falling movement of the rock the result of a program written into its body. There must be an archetype (to use Plato's term) behind the law of gravity that manifests a causal force of attraction between the rock and the earth. And similarly there must be another archetype behind the falling movement of the rock under the earth's gravity. These archetypes must constitute the most esoteric compartment of the possibilities of becoming for consciousness or Godhead—the supramental compartment.
Where does mathematics originate? Mathematics is a meaning given to symbols that represent things, usually physical. So mathematics must come from the mind. And then there are the laws of mathematics. The famous incompleteness theorem proved by Kurt Gödel—a sufficiently elaborate mathematical system is either incomplete or inconsistent—is an example. (This theorem is also notable for its use of tangled hierarchies of logic.) These laws of mathematics must also have an archetypal origin (meta-mathematics).
In biology, there are biological functions—waste elimination, reproduction, maintenance, to name a few—that represent purposive ideals toward which the vital blueprints of these functions evolve. As these evolving blueprints find representation in the physical, biological form evolves purposively toward more complexity.
We can see that there should be archetypes in the supramental that guide the purposive movement of the vital blueprint. Should we be able to make mental mathematical representations of these laws? We should. Some progress may already have been made in this regard (Thom, 1975). This is an area where new research is needed.
There are also archetypes that represent the mental movement of meaning—love, beauty, justice, etc.—that Plato was one of the first to elucidate. These archetypes guide the movement of mental meaning toward a purpose. Can we ever find mathematical representation of the laws of movement of mental meaning? Mathematics itself consists of symbols of which mind gives meaning. To discover mathematical representation of the archetypes for the movement of meaning itself will be a mind-boggling endeavor, but it must be possible.
One thing we already know. The archetypes of physical forces and their vital and mental interaction, the archetypes behind all laws of movement in general, must guide only the movement of possibilities of consciousness. In other words, all movement—physical, vital, mental—is quantum movement. Only consciousness can make a movement manifest through the action of downward causation of conscious choice.
The evidence of the quantum movement of the physical suggests what to search for in the vital and mental movement, as experimental proof that those movements are also quantum. The signatures of the quantum vital and mental realms consist of discontinuity and nonlocality, for which there is ample evidence.
Notice that, in the ultimate reckoning, even the supramental archetypes are quantum possibilities for consciousness to choose from. As mentioned earlier, the experience of such choice is what we call intuitions and creative insights.
Are there “super archetypes” behind the movement of archetypes? We do not know, and we cannot know at the present mental stage of our being.
What is the experimental “proof” of this archetypal, supramental dimension of consciousness? We have already discussed one: the existence and theorizing and experimental verification of the laws of physics. One signature of the supramental is that the elements of this dimension are universal. The universality of the biological laws of behavior of morphogenetic fields would be another proof. But since all earthly life originated from that one first living cell, the geographical universality of biological forms does not prove the universality of the morphogenetic fields. So we could verify this if extraterrestrial life is ever found. Fortunately, our minds did not arise from a common origin, so the universality of the mental archetypes is experimental proof for the universality of some of our dream symbology (of the “big dreams,” to use Jung's terminology: Jung, 1971).
CREATIVITY
Creativity is the discovery of new meaning of value (Amabile, 1990). New meaning can be discovered in a new context—this is fundamental creativity. New meaning can be invented in an old known context or a combination of old contexts—this is situational creativity. Picasso's discovery of cubist art is fundamental creativity; the invention of the fast Internet processor, Google, is a great example of situational creativity.
Where do contexts of profound meaning arise? They are derived from the supramental domain, the archetypes. So the many instances of fundamental creativity in science, arts, music, architecture, mathematics, etc. give us the most definitive evidence of the supramental domain of archetypes.
There are also many reported instances of “inner” creativity or spiritual enlightenment in which the context shift of meaning pertains to one's own self. The creative leap in these cases is the discovery of the true nature of the self, the quantum self, or what Jung would call the Self archetype.
Since creativity presents major evidence of both the supramental domain of reality and a quantum signature of the divine, I will present further details in chapter 17.
QUANTUM HEALING
In chapter 12 I mentioned mind-body disease—how faulty meaning processing in emotional situations produces stress, which can lead to disease. How do we heal such disease? We can, of course, deal with the physical level first. But there is plenty of evidence showing that if the faulty meaning processing persists, the disease relapses. Thus we have the idea of mind-body healing—correcting the faulty meaning processing of the mind to heal the diseased body.
But how do we correct faulty processing of meaning? By finding a new context of thinking, right? There is a similarity with inner creativity here. In inner creativity, we find that our inner belief systems or contexts of thinking cannot be changed in a continuous fashion by reading or through discussions with a teacher. Similarly, one has to take a quantum leap to the supramental level of being in order to change the context of meaning. The shift in context for the processing of meaning must arrive discontinuously in order to be effective; in other words, a direct influence of the supramental is essential. And nowhere is the discontinuous nature of a mental contextual shift more spectacular than in spontaneous healing without medical intervention.
Indeed, there exists a large repertoire of cases of spontaneous healing (O'Regan, 1987, 1997), practically instantaneous healing without medical intervention. Many of these cases have involved the overnight disappearance of cancerous tumors.
The physician Deepak Chopra (1990) was the first to suggest the term quantum healing to refer to these cases of spontaneous healing. Quantum healing, according to Chopra, is taking a quantum leap to heal oneself. We can clarify this further by saying that the quantum leap is from the ordinary thinking mind of conditioned contexts to the supramental domain to discover a new context for processing meaning.
An example (Weil, 1983) will make this clear. A woman had Hodgkin's disease but refused radiation treatment or chemotherapy since she was pregnant. Her physician suggested an LSD trip, which she took while being guided by her doctor, in order to deeply communicate with the fetus in her womb. When the physician asked her if she had the right to cut off the new life, she felt a communication from it. At that moment she also experienced a sudden insight—that she had the choice to live or die. This change in the context of her thinking took some time to manifest in her life, but she was healed. Her unborn child survived, too.
This patient's insight obviously was about her deep self—the suppressed archetype of the quantum self. In this way, quantum healing provides us with direct evidence of the supramental archetypes.
And behind the quantum self, who is the real healer, the chooser of the healing intention? It is quantum consciousness, of course, God. So quantum healing is also direct evidence for God's downward causation. This will be further elaborated in chapter 19.
A physician (allopathic, of course) went to heaven and found a big line at the pearly gates. Being an American doctor, he was not used to waiting in line, so he went straight to St. Peter, the gatekeeper in charge of admission to heaven. Upon hearing his complaint, St. Peter shook his head. “Sorry, Doc. In heaven, even doctors have to wait in line to get in.” But just then, one fellow in a white physician's robe with a stethoscope hanging from his neck went running through the gate, paying no heed to the line.
“Ha,” said our doctor. “That doctor went in without waiting in line! How do you explain that?”
“Oh,” chuckled St. Peter. “That's God. He is returning from a quantum healing episode.”
DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY OR HEIGHT PSYCHOLOGY? IS THE SUPRAMENTAL “DOWN” OR “UP” FROM US?
Much definitive evidence for the supramental archetypes comes from the data on inner creativity, the transformational journey of people. This is a field of study of two recent branches of psychology: depth psychology and height psychology, also called transpersonal psychology. Actually, transpersonal psychology incorporates the wisdom of ancient esoteric traditions such as Indian yoga psychology (Krishnamurthy, 2008).
But psychologists are torn between Freud and Jung's conceptualization of the unconscious, which is the basis of depth psychology, and the concept of the “superconscious,” which is the basis of yoga and transpersonal psychology.
As we have seen in the vision of depth psychology, the archetypes of our creative transformational journey rest in the depth of our collective unconscious. We have to delve deep to discover these archetypes, let the unconscious processing take place, and allow what comes up to be integrated. Then we shall arrive in the promised land.
Yoga and transpersonal psychologists view this a little differently. They, too, see the conditioned behavior of the human being as the play of the ego, the domain of behavioral psychology. But they claim that human behavior does not have to stop there, with the development of the conditioned ego. The development can continue beyond the ego, using similar developmental processes but now exploring further dimensions of human potential. There are the ordinary states of our conscious ego, no doubt; we live there most of the time. But we also have momentary experiences of nonordinary, “higher” states of consciousness (intuition). We can cultivate these higher states of consciousness through various conscious techniques such as meditation, one reason that this psychology is also called “height” psychology. Eventually we end up in superconscious states of Samadhi (the Sanskrit term for peak experiences of primary awareness, in which the consciousness of the subject tends to becomes one with the object experienced) that have transformative effects. Reaching these superconscious states opens the doorway to spiritual enlightenment that leads to transformation.
In this vision, human development is seen as a ladder that we climb: from the preconscious states of a child, to the conditioned states of the conscious ego, to the superconscious states of the enlightened sage. This is height psychology, which has the further advantage of using a terminology and conceptual framework from esoteric spiritual traditions (as in yoga psychology).
So what is the difference? And is one path better than the other? Controversies and much confusion exist because both tracks hitherto have lacked dynamical foundation. In chapter 6, I outlined the quantum conceptual foundation of depth psychology. Is there a similar foundation for transpersonal psychology using quantum science within consciousness?
CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATION OF TRANSPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
The conceptual problem is to explain the ladder of proposed human development: from pre-ego to ego and then beyond ego (transpersonal self), with any other, intermediate homeostatic stages.
The philosopher Ken Wilber (Visser, 2003) begins the explanation with the “great chain of being” of esoteric traditions—body, mind, soul, and spirit. He looks at developmental stages as a progressive climbing of the ladder defined by the great chain. At the first, pre-ego level, the being is entirely physical. Then it goes through the next stage, incorporating the development of the mental ego. But the development does not stop there. It naturally continues to transpersonal stages through the development of the soul level of being. It ends at the highest stage, where it becomes identical with the spirit. At each stage, the being is called a holon, meaning whole unto itself and part of some other greater whole. Each holon stage integrates the previous stage and also has something entirely new to offer.
You can see in the great chain of being the five bodies of consciousness if you include the vital energy body: physical body, vital body, mind, soul or supramental body, and spirit (the ground of being). Let us consider the ladder in quantum terms. At each stage, consciousness identifies with what is available for manifestation, for collapse. So at the physical-vital stage, the identity encompasses the physical and vital body; this is the pre-ego (pre-mental) stage (however, see below). Then, representing the mind in the brain begins with cognitive development, greatly facilitated by a language-processing capacity, ending with consciousness identifying with a mental ego. At the next stage, the soul-level learning is explored and consciousness identifies with the transpersonal stages of development, of which Wilber has quite a few. These stages are characterized by “peak” experiences of superconscious states and transformation.
You can call each stage of identity of consciousness a holon if you wish, but there are subtleties, as we'll see later.
This conceptualization looks very different from depth psychology until you recognize the obvious: at the pre-ego level, the mental states belong to the (collective) unconscious, and in the ego stage, the soul states belong to the unconscious. So at each stage, we can consider that we are exploring the unconscious (making it conscious), dipping into its depth instead of climbing the ladder.
The difference of emphasis between these two tracks of the psychology of development becomes obvious when we consider the process in which development actually takes place. As the psychologist Jean Piaget (1977) discovered in child development, the next stage always consists of a creative quantum leap, a discontinuous collapse of new contexts of living, be it of the vital, the mental, or the supramental soul. However, creativity also involves a process consisting of preparation, unconscious processing, sudden insight (quantum leap), and manifestation (Wallas, 1926). The depth psychologists emphasize the unconscious processing, not dwelling on the rest of the (inner) creative process. The transpersonalists emphasize the conscious part of the creative process, preparation and insight, not mentioning the unconscious processing. However, the end goals of both schools—individuation and enlightenment (that implies transformation)—are quite similar.
But of course, all of the stages of creativity are important. In its own way, the difference in emphasis between the two schools has been productive. Whereas transpersonal psychology has helped to legitimize the ancient wisdom paths to God-consciousness, depth psychology has helped chart a relatively new path for the modern human. Both have value in the pursuit of human potential fulfillment. Likewise, both have therapeutic value for helping people in need.
Science is monolithic in the gross material domain, but we should not make the mistake of declaring it a general rule and expect that there should be one science for the subtle. Elsewhere (Goswami, 2004), I have argued in favor of many approaches to subtle-body medicine. Here we should welcome, following cultural anthropologists, different psychologies for investigating subtler aspects of consciousness. Is God deep down or higher up from us? It does not matter what path we follow or how we picture our path.
There are some important controversies, however, that have remained unresolved so far in how the two schools approach human development. We will return to these questions and give a quantum resolution later in the chapter.
We must also note in passing that the materialist model of psychology stops at psychosocial conditioning of the machine that thinks of himself or herself as a conscious ego, because of some apparent emergent epiphenomena, such as consciousness (subjective experiences), free will, etc. There is only mechanical cognitive development in this model; development is then a matter of quantity of knowledge or information, such as the programming of a computer with time. There is no room for human creativity in this model, nor is there any scope for discovering the soul level of values and wisdom. In other words, materialists deny inner creativity. Avowed materialists, such as the philosopher Daniel Dennett, are supposed to be born and live as zombies, collecting information, and then are supposed to die as zombies. And they do live their avowed life as zombies to a surprising extent, as far as an outsider can see. Such is the sad fate of materialists, ironically created by choosing to say “no” to subtler experiences of consciousness.
Is the idea of transpersonal stages of being, or individuation, or what we popularly call enlightenment (which implies transformation), or whatever you may call it, empirically valid? If it is, then this is another one of the impossible problems of the materialist view of the world.
DO WE EVER TRANSFORM?
This is the million-dollar question. Neurophysiologists have their molecules of happiness, endorphins, but even they know that a limited endorphin supply cannot provide the key to lock up all the sites of unhappiness. The spiritual concept of transformation is of a 100-percent-happy person: always equanimous, creative as needed, unconditionally loving to everyone, joy bubbling over, and so peaceful that if you sit near that person for a while, all your restlessness simmers down and you become peaceful. Can a human being be like that? Impossible, say the materialists. Very possible, say the traditionalists; it has happened quite a few times in human history. The founders of the world's great religions are supposed to have been such people. And there still are such people, traditionalists insist.
There are believers, of course; religious fundamentalists still far exceed materialist fundamentalists in number. But if you are a reasonable person and if you look at the spiritual scene without prejudice, doubts may enter your mind.
First, it is easy to find only talkers, teachers who can inspire. Inspiration is important, of course, but you wonder. Does the teacher live the way she inspires us to live? Even in California, the New Age mecca, such skepticism led to the popularity of the dictum, “Walk your talk.”
Second, there are those persistent scandals. Sooner or later, scandals seem to engulf all public teachers of spirituality. There are scandals about the misuse of sex, power, money—all the things that cause ordinary people trouble. But aren't we talking about enlightened people? They are supposed to be different, no? The defenders raise their own slogan, “Birds do it, bees do it, and gurus do it, too.” Perhaps we should not be na00CF;ve enough to believe that enlightened transformation is useful in ridding us of our instincts!
The need for a middle ground should be obvious. But it is still disaster, an impossible problem for materialist science. Can one be 80 percent transformed, or even 60 percent? Does that count? Yes, it does count. Society needs people who are mostly happy, creative, and inspiring, mostly peaceful and wise, and mostly optimistic and loving. These people are mostly environmentally independent, have a sense of humor, do not take themselves seriously, and so accept their imperfection. When a society has an abundance of such people, that society thrives. The opposite happens when there is a dearth of such people.
Here is the good news. The psychologist Abraham Maslow (1968), the founder of the transpersonal psychology movement in America, collected conclusive data indicating that people can be divided into three mental health categories: normal, pathological, and positive. About 5 percent of all people have positive mental health, compared with about 30 percent for pathological cases and 65 percent who are normal.
The people of positive mental health that Maslow studied also had frequent peak experiences—another name for the quantum leap to the supramental. A wonderful confirmation of Maslow's data on people who take quantum leaps has come from the data on near-death experiences. Cardiac surgery can sometimes restore “clinically dead” people to life. Some of these people describe astounding “peak” experiences while in near-death coma. The psychologist Kenneth Ring (1984) did an exhaustive study of these people and found that many of them are (partially) transformed and live a life of positive mental health.
Yes, there is a God, because maybe as many as 5 percent of the people on earth have positive mental health; they are optimistic, loving, environmentally independent, creative, humorous, etc., most of the time. These people, in the language of the new science, live in God-consciousness at least sporadically.
So the idea of samadhi—creative insights of primary awareness, followed by transformation or individuation—is valid, except that the idea of 100 percent transformation has to be considered more cautiously.
THE PRE/TRANS FALLACY
I would like to offer a resolution of the much-touted pre/trans fallacy that is a prime example of the confusion within the developing new paradigm of psychology. The transpersonalist Ken Wilber does not seem to agree with the depth psychologist Carl Jung's ideas of human development. According to Jung, the early child lives as one with the archetypal (quantum) Self; as a child of the divine. With ego development, the Self is repressed. And then post-ego development recovers the repressed Self and restores it to the foreground. For Wilber, the self of the early child is limited to only a physical body identity. And although in Wilber's scheme a person at any stage of development can have experiences of the self in another stage as transcendental experiences, in actuality this access is quite limited. Wilber's concept of the holon says that for a child the experience of a later holon stage, like the soul or supramental with rich archetypal content, is almost impossible. This is because the child has no way to manifest such an experience or process such an experience. That experience requires an ego.
Here's how Wilber (2001) expresses his idea:
The essence of the pre/trans fallacy is itself fairly simple: since both prerational states and transrational states are, in their own ways, nonrational, they appear similar or even identical to the untutored eye. And once pre and trans are confused, then one of two fallacies occurs.
In the first, all higher and transrational states are reduced to lower and prerational states. Genuine mystical or contemplative experiences, for example, are seen as a regression or throwback to infantile states…. In these reductionistic accounts, rationality is the great and final omega point of individual and collective development, the high-water mark of all evolution. No deeper or wider or higher context is thought to exist. Thus, life is to be lived either rationally or neurotically…. Since no higher context is thought to be real, or to actually exist, then whenever any genuinely transrational occasion occurs, it is immediately explained as a regression to prerational structures…. The superconscious is reduced to the subconscious, the transpersonal is collapsed to the prepersonal, the emergence of the higher is reinterpreted as an irruption from the lower….
On the other hand, if one is sympathetic with higher or mystical states, but one still confuses pre and trans, then one will elevate all prerational states to some sort of transrational glory….
In the elevationist position, the transpersonal and transrational mystical union is seen as the ultimate omega point, and since egoic-rationality does indeed tend to deny this higher state, then egoic-rationality is pictured as the low point of human possibilities, as a debasement, as the cause of sin and separation and alienation.
Freud was a reductionist, Jung an elevationist—the two sides of the pre/trans fallacy. And the point is that they are both half right and half wrong. A good deal of neurosis is indeed a fixation/regression to prerational states, states that are not to be glorified. On the other hand, mystical states do indeed exist, beyond (not beneath) rationality, and those states are not to be reduced.
So the pre/trans fallacy. The soul level can be developed only after the ego development. The development of the soul level is not a regression to the childhood.
Thinking the quantum way will let you see through the problem to the other side. Freudians are wrong, no doubt, but there is no need to make Jungians wrong. At each stage, there is a conditioned identity of consciousness and a creative identity—the quantum self, Holy Spirit-consciousness. Sure, Wilber is correct: initially the baby's identity is primarily with the physical/vital body. But the baby's mental unconscious processing is done without conditioning, without any ego; it always processes it in God-consciousness. When conscious choice takes place, the result is an immediacy of experience that we call the quantum self or Holy Spirit experience. This is why it is not incorrect to say that the early child lives much of his time in God-consciousness, not with conscious wakefulness, but unconsciously. It is quite right that Hindus regard children as God until they reach age five.
But Jungians get confused and caught up in their own language, too. As ego develops, the quantum self is harder to reach because quantum leaps are more difficult to take. The quantum self does not disappear; there is no regression. Nor does the ego push it away. It is simply the nature of conditioning that creativity is more difficult when we have lots of memories. And yet, as Wilber says, memories should not be looked upon as detrimental to later development. A child has easy access to quantum self experiences, but is unable to make mental representations of these experiences. Precisely because our adult egos have this vast range of sophisticated material, we can manifest and make representations of creative insights that require such sophistication. Otherwise, we would be rediscovering the wheel over and over.
ALTRUISTIC BEHAVIOR
Altruistic behavior undoubtedly exists. Many people in all cultures often give a helping hand to others in need without demanding anything in return. Where does altruistic unselfish behavior originate? The conceptual schema that tries to incorporate altruistic behavior into our usual norm is called ethics.
Of course spiritual traditions make ethics more complicated than just the conceptual context for the study of altruistic behavior. In most spiritual traditions, for example, ethics is about discriminating between good and evil. We humans have a discriminative function called conscience; we suffer pangs of conscience if we fail to choose good. Thus we have the simple statement of spiritual ethics, “Be good, do good” (to yourself and others), from the Hindu Swami Sivananda. Another statement, this one by the Rabbi Hillel, expresses the same concept:
If I am not for myself; who am I?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And still another statement, this one from Christianity: “Do unto others as you want others to do unto you.”
It is this discriminative conscience that enables us to do good. Where does conscience originate? It is the bidding of the supramental or soul level of being. In this way, our altruistic behavior proves the existence and reality of the supramental domain.
Ethics is important for spiritual traditions, because being good is a godly quality; it is a virtue. If you acquire it, it takes you closer to God. If you shun it or do evil, that behavior takes you away from God.
Religions like popular Christianity put it more bluntly: if you are virtuous, you go to heaven when you die, and if you are sinful, you go to hell after death. (For a crude but hilarious depiction of the latter, see the movie Ghost.)
It is this latter depiction that does not appeal to some modern people. But what if the religions are right? Is ethics compulsory? Suppose ethics is a science and is compulsory like scientific laws—what then?
The philosopher Immanuel Kant sided with religion and believed that ethics is the categorical imperative, which he expressed succinctly in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” It is an inner moral law for each of us and is compulsory. The imperative arises because we have a moral sense of duty or duties that we can figure out by reasoning. And oh, yes, for Kant, the inner moral law came from an immortal soul, another name for the supramental. So for Kant, altruistic behavior was imperative and it proved the soul or supramental level of our being.
But obviously ethical law, or inner moral law if it is that, cannot be compulsory in the same cause-and-effect sense of science. If you try to violate the law of gravity by trying to fly, you fail: you cause an effect now. If you cheat ethics and get away with it, where is the failure? What is the effect that you cause? None is apparent unless you take hell seriously—and that's later, not now!
Well, you suffer from the pangs of conscience, you may think. But is conscience real for everyone? In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's classic novel The Brothers Karamazov, the two brothers Ivan and Alexei are obsessively torn between right and wrong, good and evil. But the novel was published in 1880; that was another era. Can you imagine people of our time similarly perturbed by the ideas of good and evil, right and wrong?
But altruism is real, empirically proven behavior, and not compulsory for everyone. A substantial number of people help out others unselfishly, so altruistic behavior must be proving something. But what?
Biologists have tried to answer this question with the idea of the selfish gene (Dawkins, 1976). According to this thinking, we are gene machines, the way our genes propagate and perpetuate themselves. Consistent with that purpose, our genes ensure that we behave altruistically toward those people with whom we share some of our genes. For example, we will tend to be altruistic to our own children or parents, but proportionately less so toward cousins, and much less altruistic to the cousins' children.
This idea is interesting, but easily disputed by the vast amount of data (anecdotal, to be sure) of saintly people giving unselfish help to completely unrelated people without expecting anything in return. Mother Teresa is only one glaring recent example.
So, again, what does altruism really prove?
ETHICS IN THE CONTEXT OF SCIENCE WITHIN CONSCIOUSNESS
With the idea of nonlocal consciousness, ethics is easily validated and altruism is easily explained. If you and I are not separate, if we both belong to the same nonlocal consciousness at a deeper level, then certainly I may feel an urge to give you a helping hand when you are in need and vice versa. We are just helping ourselves! Altruistic behavior, indeed any ethical behavior, comes from the urging of our nonlocal self-archetype or rather its mental representation (call it conscience). It proves the supramental level of being, the soul.
We must note, however, that there is a predominantly vital component to our conscience; it is a “heart” thing. People who are more sensitive to vital energy, people with open hearts, suffer more from pangs of conscience than people who are less sensitive to vital energy, people with primarily thinking minds.
Early conditioning further complicates any discussion of conscience. For example, religious fundamentalists often have a strong sense of ethics and morality, but it is mostly made up of conditioned beliefs. When there is subtle complexity in making an ethical choice for right action, such as extending help to people beyond one's own “clan,” the conditioned conscience may not be able to resolve the ethical dilemma. One may need to take a quantum leap to the supramental to get a clear insight about ethical action. But if the conditioning is substantial, such quantum leaps are unlikely to happen.
And of course, altruism is not compulsory. If we are not feeling energy-sensitive, if the situation is not black and white, a conditioned conscience most likely will not hear the intuitions of the self-archetype for ethical action.
As you can see, the new science gives us the proper context for understanding all the facets of altruistic behavior, and it proves the existence of our supramental level of being, the soul.