Chapter 15
Reincarnation: Some of the Best Evidence for the Soul and God
I have heard that the Dalai Lama was once asked if there was any scientific research that would ever prompt him to give up his Buddhist beliefs about spirituality. To this the Dalai Lama is supposed to have replied that if scientists could ever prove that reincarnation never happens, he might change his mind.
What is reincarnation? And what makes it such a definitive gauge of spirituality?
Reincarnation is the idea that there is some essence of ourselves that survives death and is reborn in another body. In popular parlance, this essence is called the soul; however, the meaning of the word “soul” is somewhat extended from its use in chapter 13. In the context of reincarnation, soul denotes the entire “subtle body” consisting of the vital, mental, and supramental components. Reincarnation can be readily understood within the model of our expanded selves that we have been exploring in this book. (For details, see Goswami, 2001.)
Who am I? I have a physical body. Additionally, I have a subtle individual vital body defined by my vital habit patterns—the specific ways in which I engage this body. In chapter 11, I showed the yang and yin dominance of the vital body in connection with traditional Chinese medicine. The relative amounts of yang and yin is one way to define my vital individuality. I also have an individual mental body defined by my mental habit pattern. As part of my vital and mental bodies, I also have a repertoire of discovered archetypal contexts of feelings and meanings. And if I live these vital-mental representations of the archetypes, I even have physical representations of them.
You can see that while the physical body is structural, our individual vital and mental bodies are functional. The conglomerate of individualized vital and mental bodies, along with the universal supramental body, is called “soul” in the reincarnational context. To avoid ambiguity, I call it the quantum monad (Goswami, 2001).
Because the quantum monad is functional, it is not memory recorded in structure, but a quantum memory that Easterners call Akashic memory. (The Sanskrit word akasha means nonlocal—beyond time and space.) It is memory akin to the laws of physics: it affects us and it guides our behavior from a transcendent domain. The difference between the physical laws and Akashic nonlocal quantum memory is that the former are universal and the latter tends to be personal.
But the quantum memory does not have to be personal for only one lifetime. If many physical human bodies in many different times and places express the same developing quantum monad, the same quantum memory, they are called reincarnations of one unique quantum monad (figure 15-1). Empirically, it is found that these incarnations or past lives of ours are nonlocally correlated to one another and, under special circumstances, we are able to glean the local memories from each. In fact, the data on such past life recall—akin to mental telepathy across time and space—provide definitive proof of downward causation by nonlocal consciousness (Stevenson, 1973, 1977, 1983).
You now can understand the Dalai Lama's comment on reincarnation. The reason for its supreme importance is that reincarnation data proves all the three essential aspects—downward causation, subtle bodies, and supramental godliness—of religions and spiritual traditions in one fell swoop. Reincarnation is impossible if matter is the ground of being; moreover, the data directly prove that our subtle bodies are recycled, confirming their existence. Why reincarnate? Only through many incarnations can we gradually acquire supramental godliness (learned repertoires of supramental archetypes); that is practically impossible to do in one life.
FIGURE 15-1. Model of reincarnation. The quantum monad and the nonlocal window provide the thread that connects our various incarnations over space and time.
Reincarnational data have a gross aspect and a subtler one. The gross aspect consists of all the reincarnational memories that people recall, not only children (Stevenson, 1973, 1977, 1983) but also adults under hypnosis with a past-life regression therapist (Wambach, 1978). Another technique that seems to elicit reincarnational memory recall is holotropic breathing, developed by the psychiatrist Stan Grof (1998). The explanation for this vast amount of data is quantum nonlocality, and it readily accommodates our reincarnational model of recycling quantum monads. (For details, see Goswami, 2001.)
The subtler aspect of reincarnational data are the phenomena of geniuses and psychological disorders such as phobias that cannot be explained as merely due to the suppressed trauma of this life. There are also a few other phenomena. (See below.) Let's first discuss why people of genius and those with phobias are such compelling proof for the idea of reincarnation.
THE PHENOMENON OF GENIUS
The materialists’ explanation of genius and talent in general is genetic. The assumption is that people have “talent genes.” It all started with the work of a 19th-century scientist named Francis Galton (1869) called Hereditary Genius. Galton claimed, “I propose to show that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world.” Galton even provided an impressive list of the genealogy of talented people; for example, 40 percent of the 56 poets that he studied had “eminently gifted relations.”
Galton did his work before anybody knew how heredity worked. When genes were discovered, initially there was great excitement over Galton's work, which eventually died down when more data were amassed and with them more understanding of genes. Unfortunately, the fact is that nobody, then or since, has found any talent or creativity genes. Also, we now know that genes do not usually express themselves in any one-to-one correspondence with the macroscopic traits of a person. This is especially true of personality traits, to which at least the environmental conditioning of the current life contributes in a major way. Moreover, the glaring fact that a genius's children are rarely at genius level rules out the genetic inheritance of creativity or genius.
The question can be asked, “Are there any personality traits that contribute to the creativity of a genius?” Certainly, traits like self-discipline and divergent thinking (ability to think about a problem in different ways) contribute to the creativity of a genius, but they are no guarantee. The researcher Donald MacKinnon (1962) did a survey of architects in 1962 in which he found that a noncreative group of people shared 39 out of 40 personality traits with the creative group.
If not personality traits, what then? The case histories of geniuses show that what contributes the most is a strong sense of purposiveness and a psychological drive to explore meaning, especially those archetypal contexts of meaning. It is this drive that Easterners call sattva— the mental propensity for fundamental creativity. The psychologist Carl Jung (1971) identified it in people of modern times as an unconscious psychological drive that pulls up archetypal images from the collective unconscious.
Down-to-earth creatives are inventors, who use their minds for situational creativity that Easterners call rajas. And let's not forget that the vast majority of people engage neither in rajas nor in sattva, but engage their minds simply with conditioning responses—a tendency that Easterners call tamas. If geniuses possess an uncanny amount of sattva, so dominant that neither conditioning nor common situational creativity can obstruct it, where does such sattva come from? I believe that the predominance of sattva in geniuses can be understood only within a reincarnational framework (Goswami, 1999). One must work out the tendencies of tamas and rajas and cultivate a lot of godly archetypal qualities before sattva dominates the personality. In other words, a genius is an old soul.
Stevenson, the dominant researcher of reincarnational memory, believes on the basis of his data that there is a relationship between genius and reincarnation. Why was Mozart able to play piano so well at the age of three? Why was the Indian mathematician Ramanujan able to add infinite mathematical series at a young age? Genes cannot be a satisfactory answer, from what we have learned about traits. Environmental conditioning? How much special conditioning can you instill in a three-year-old? Ramanujan did not even have any formal training in mathematics until age 10. In addition, consider the odds that, while others of their age were engaged in all kinds of tamas and rajas activities, these children are taken by such acts of sattva as music and mathematics. Stevenson offers many cases in which past-life learned propensity is the only answer to the question of the origins of genius.
PHOBIAS
Phobias, in psychoanalytic terms, consist of avoidance conditioning from childhood traumatic experiences. But Stevenson found many cases where there were phobias but no childhood traumas. Therefore, Stevenson (1974, 1987) attributed those cases of phobias to the reincarnational category. Many more cases have now been reported by past-life regression therapists (Woolger, 1988). What makes the latter work persuasive is that past-life regression therapy is effective in curing the phobias acquired from past lives.
OTHER RELATED PHENOMENA
I will now mention some other cases of inheritance of past-life character. I started this chapter quoting the Dalai Lama. The religious post of Dalai Lama is neither inherited, as in monarchies, nor elected, as in democracies. How do the Tibetans choose their current Dalai Lama? They believe that lamas and rinpoches (rinpoche is a Tibetan Buddhist honorific title) are special spiritually complete personalities (quantum monads) that reincarnate in their culture in an ongoing way. Tibetans depend on reincarnational memory recall and even more on reincarnational character traits such as sattva dominance, ability to read and recite scriptures, and so on to find the current incarnates of lamas and rinpoches. In fact, the current Dalai Lama was found on the basis of such tests.
The cases of the reincarnational transmigration of vital body propensities are very convincing. I will tell you about an impressive case from Stevenson's large repertoire. The subject in this case was an East Indian man who remembered that in a past life he was a British army officer who served in World War I and was killed by a bullet through his throat. Stevenson was able to verify many details of this man's past life story by visiting the Scottish town of his previous life—details that the subject had no way of knowing in his current life. What makes this case interesting is that this man had a pair of birthmarks on his throat that exactly resembled the bullet wound of his previous incarnation.
An explanation can be given as follows: The bullet that killed this man's physical body was an acute trauma to his correlated vital energies at the throat, especially the vital energy correlated with the skin there. When his physical body died, the vital body trauma translated as a propensity that gave rise to the birthmarks when he was reincarnated in a new physical body.
Xenoglossy, a paranormal phenomenon in which children (and sometimes adults) are able to speak a language not learned in the current life, without any accent (or with the accent of the past), also falls in the category of transmigration of vital body propensity. Our capacity for speaking a foreign language with the correct accent is severely impaired in adulthood because the pronunciation of the vowel sounds demands certain flexibility in using the lips, tongue, and so forth that can be developed only in childhood. If an adult speaks a foreign language with proper accent that she has not learned in childhood of the present life, it can mean only one thing: she inherited the appropriate morphogenetic field from a previous incarnation.
A spectacular example of xenoglossy and also of channeling (see below) is found in the case of “Lydia Johnson,” a 37-year-old housewife in Philadelphia studied by reincarnation researchers Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams (1984). Lydia was initially the subject of her husband's experiments with hypnosis. But soon, with the help of another hypnotist, she began to channel an entity named Jensen Jacoby, a man who lived in a tiny village of Sweden in the 17th century. She pronounced the name as “Yensen Yahkobi” and spoke Swedish freely while channeling him. Most tellingly, she would take on his character and recognize only 17th-century Swedish objects and also forget how to use modern tools, such as a pair of pliers.
EVIDENCE OF THE EXISTENCE OF OUR SUBTLE BODIES FROM SURVIVAL DATA
Quantum monads do not necessarily take rebirth immediately. The evidence of their existence between incarnations is called survival data, for obvious reasons. These data also provide us direct proof of the existence of our subtle bodies, and in fact, of the quantum monad.
Channeling is the phenomenon in which a person receives communication from a discarnate being. Popular pictures notwithstanding, one can make a theory of channeling using the idea of quantum monad in a straightforward fashion. Realize that, although a quantum monad (soul) cannot collapse quantum possibilities in any ongoing manner when it lacks a physical body, it certainly could do this if it could temporarily borrow a living physical body under mutual (nonlocal) agreement. This is what happens in channeling. A channeler, through mutual nonlocal intentions, becomes correlated with a discarnate quantum monad. Henceforth, for mutually agreed-upon periods, the quantum monad can use the channeler's body to have a physical presence. The proof of this model would be verifying that the character of channelers undergoes drastic change during the periods of channeling.
The phenomenon of channeling has a long, checkered history, but it has finally become scientifically investigable. The idea is to compare specific and measurable neurophysiological performances of the channelers in their normal state and in their channeling state. I will mention three such investigations.
Parapsychologists Gilda Moura and Norman Don (1996) did a comparison of brain wave data of channelers in both states. There is a famous channeled entity called Dr. Fritz that several channelers in Brazil independently have been able to channel. While channeling Dr. Fritz, the channelers perform amazing feats of surgery with fairly primitive instruments. What can be better proof, when the channelers have no previous training in surgery, than this feat? Moura and Don provided even more convincing proof. They measured the brain waves of the channelers in many of their normal states of waking consciousness. Usually the channelers showed beta waves with frequencies ranging around 20 to 30 Hz and never exceeding 40 Hz. But while they were performing surgery, their brain waves suddenly jumped in frequency beyond 40 Hz; this showed extreme concentration that they were not even capable of normally. The data proves beyond a doubt that the channelers were using an unusual borrowed propensity, but from where? The only explanation that makes sense is that they were channeling the discarnate quantum monad of a surgeon who had acquired the characteristic of intense concentration.
The channeler JZ Knight was similarly studied, using eight different psychophysiological indicators. The investigators found a marked difference in the observed range for all the indicators between her channeling mode and her normal mode (Wickramsekhara et al., 1997).
More recently, a channeler in Brazil named Joäo Teixeira de Faria, called John of God, has become quite famous for his many documented cases of healing through the energies of love that he channels (Cumming and Leffler, 2006). Joäo was never trained as a medical doctor, let alone as a surgeon; yet, when he channels, he performs skillful surgeries demonstrating a remarkable shift in character. Even his manners, stance, and speech change during the channeling episodes.
I will tell you about one of these remarkable surgeries. The medium Joäo had a stroke that paralyzed one side of his body. Amazingly, however, during this period, whenever Joäo channeled an entity and became John of God, the paralysis disappeared. What about this change of psychophysiological indicators? Even more amazingly, Joäo was able to channel one of the entities of love energy to operate on and heal himself. (He continues in good health.) For further details, read Cumming and Leffler, 2006.
ANGELS AND SPIRIT GUIDES
There are a lot of anecdotal reports of people being guided in their personal lives by angels or what are called spirit guides. The famous poets William Wordsworth and Rabindranath Tagore talked about their muses or spirit guides. Is this just the metaphorical expression of exuberant creative experiences, or should such statements be taken literally?
I think that we should take them literally, since the present theory of quantum monads permits it. The idea is that a quantum monad goes through many incarnated lives, learning from experiences in every incarnation until it has become individuated, liberated from the birth-death-rebirth cycle. What then? The quantum monad has no further need to reincarnate as a mental being, but it could be nonlocally available for channeling to whoever can correlate with it.
KARMA AND DHARMA
The complete theory of reincarnation must also contend with reincarnational content memory and certain cause-effect entanglements that may happen between two disparate incarnations. Reincarnational memory is easy to understand; we assume that there is a nonlocal window that is always open between reincarnations. Ordinarily we are not aware of it, but at the moment of death, when ego attachment is extremely tenuous, a person may be open enough to this nonlocal window to have a panoramic view of himself or herself through various lifetimes. Similarly, at the moment of birth, since the ego attachment has not formed yet, the opening of the nonlocal window may allow a panoramic experience of incarnations to be stored in the memory of the newborn.
There are data in support of this theory. In near-death experiences, many people explicitly describe their panoramic vision of this life and sometimes even their past lives. Similarly, while no one remembers offhand the memories of early childhood, especially the moment of birth, such memories have been elicited through special techniques and are found to be consistent with a past-life panoramic vision. For example, Grof uses the holotropic breathing technique for regression to birth or even pre-birth. Many of his subjects recall reincarnational data. I have already mentioned past-life regression therapists. They, too, find it suitable to regress their subjects to very early childhood to extract past-life memories.
How does a cause-effect entanglement take place between two people that continues beyond this incarnation to the next? If two people are correlated through quantum nonlocality and one of them collapses and experiences an event, it becomes a certainty that the correlated partner will experience the collapse, except that the exact time does not have to be specified. It can happen any time in the future, even if the future happens in the next incarnation. So is the nature of quantum nonlocality.
In this way, a cause in this life can nonlocally propagate to the next life to precipitate a nonlocal effect. Theosophists use the Sanskrit word karma to denote such nonlocal cause-effect connections between incarnations.
But, of course, there are these mental and vital propensities that are also effects that we carry from one life to another life. I have called these propensities karma in my earlier work (Goswami, 2001), although the Sanskrit word samskaras is also used for this particular transmigration.
There is a third connotation that can be given to the word karma. This is the repertoire of supramental contexts that we learn to live, those we carry with us from one birth to another. That is what the Theosophists call our higher mind. This is also something that propagates from one life to another and therefore can be called karma.
So defined in this way, karma denotes everything that transmigrates from one life to subsequent lives. We then can bring accumulated karma through many lives into the current one. Then, of course, there is the future karma, the karma we collect in our current life.
However, the Eastern literature on reincarnation contains one more concept related to karma—ambient karma (prarabdha in Sanskrit), karma that we bring to bear in this life. Prarabdha is the portion of the past karma that is responsible for the present body. The idea is that we don't bring all of our accumulated karmic propensities into the current life we are living—only a select number of them.
Surprise of surprises, this idea has been verified by empirical data through the research of a past-life therapist named David Cliness. He has studied many subjects who have recalled various past lives. Curiously, he found that people don't bring all their previously learned contexts and propensities from their past lives to the present one. It is as if one plays poker with them and chooses five out of the deck of the available 52.
We can theorize. Why do we bring a specific choice of ambient karma? Is it because we want to concentrate on a particular learning agenda for this life? This learning agenda is denoted by another Sanskrit word, dharma (spelled with a lower-case d to distinguish from Dharma with a capital D, which denotes the Whole, Tao).
This idea of a learning agenda for life may remind you of the wonderful film Groundhog Day, in which the hero reincarnates (sort of) from one life to another with a single learning agenda, which is a biggie—love.
One more thing I can say about dharma. When we fulfill the learning agenda that we bring to the current life, life becomes full of bliss. And if we find bliss in our lives, we can conclude that we must be following our dharma. The mythologist Joseph Campbell used to say, “Follow your bliss.” He knew.
REINCARNATION AND ETHICS
I earlier introduced the idea of ethics, idealistic ethics. But why should we follow ethics, idealistic or not, if we are behaviorally conditioned beings? In today's social environment, following ethical guidelines often means a personal sacrifice. And ethics are not like physical laws; there is no punishment if you don't follow them. If you don't adhere to the law of gravity and try to fly, you will fail and fall, a reminder that the law is compulsory. Do we similarly fall when we violate an ethical law?
When reincarnation is taken into account in our science, we can see that ethical laws are as compulsory as physical ones. Through our unethical actions, we set up a nonlocal karmic causes that will propagate its karmic effect, its revenge, in a future life. There is no free lunch as far as karma is concerned.