Part Three

The Evidence for the Subtle Bodies

In 1994, I was dreaming one night. I heard something. It was like a voice that was speaking to me. The voice grew louder and louder. Soon it became an admonition. I could clearly hear, “The Tibetan Book of the Dead is correct; it's your job to prove it.” The admonition was so loud it woke me up.

Ah, so, I took the dream quite seriously. But the task proved very difficult. The Tibetan Book of the Dead—guide to the experiences of the consciousness between death and rebirth—was about survival after death. What are said to survive are “subtle” bodies, but what are they?

The Upanishads (Hindu scriptures) and the Kabbalah told me that the subtle body consists of the vital energy body, the mind, and a supramental body of archetypal themes. But if these bodies were nonmaterial, as The Tibetan Book of the Dead implied, nobody knew how they could interact with the gross physical body.

One thing heartened me a lot. By then I had avidly read scientific research that pointed out deficiencies of the materialist approach to science, and I came across the work of John Searle and Roger Penrose proving to us that computers cannot process meaning; there was scope for nonmaterial mind after all. I was also aware of Rupert Sheldrake's work on morpho-genetic fields; it became clear to me that the ancient vital body is nothing but the reservoir of morphogenetic fields.

So it was clear that a nonmaterial mind processes meaning and a nonmaterial vital body whose movements we feel guides the creation of biological form. But how did these bodies interact with matter without that dreaded word, dualism?

One day, I was talking with a graduate student whose boyfriend had died. I was trying to say to her by way of consolation that maybe her boyfriend's subtle body—mind, vital, and all that essence—survived his death. Maybe death was not as final as we currently think under the mesmerism of materialist science. Suddenly a thought came to me—suppose the essence of mind and vital body consists of possibilities, quantum possibilities. Could that not solve the problem of dualism as well as that of survival? I was elated.