Reflections on Reincarnation

Do patterns of thinking, feeling, and willing form "quantum aggregates" that stay connected after we die?

Since childhood, I’ve wondered about the following: According to the reductive materialist worldview, we are born accidentally into a universe entirely produced by cause and effect processes. Minus the initial inexplicable happenstance of the Big Bang (“Give me one miracle and I’ll give you the rest” quipped Terence McKenna), the universe crystallized as gasses cooled into stars and planets. Gravitational force swirled solar systems together. Billions of years passed. 

Through some unknown, ostensibly random biogeochemical process, life evolved from insensate minerals and sprouted on at least one spherical ball of rock spiraling around a modest-sized star. Cause and effect through natural selection produced ever-greater complexity. Meteors smashed into the Earth at particular junctures. This swerved evolution away from giant reptiles toward smaller and more nimble primates. These apes developed the ability to use tools, to think and self-reflect, eventually leading to homo sapiens, industrialization, modern civilization, nuclear bombs, post-deconstruction, transhumanism, us. 

After all of those billions of years in the past, with billions of years left to go — before the universe contracts back into a pinprick of nothingness — this little knot or nuclei of self-awareness, my consciousness, randomly popped up at this particular juncture. Here I am, until death sends me back into an eternity of non-existence, of never-having-been-ness, according to reductive materialism. 

While everything I observe outside of me, in the apparently external world, expresses measurable cause-and-effect processes, my individual self-awareness — what makes me “me” rather than “you.” or anyone else— is, according to materialist beliefs, utterly accidental and without any possibility of explanation. But isn’t this interior, invisible dimension of mysterious subjectivity an essential aspect of the whole? 

According to materialism, there can be no reason that one separated blip of self-consciousness is born into a rich person’s body with great advantages in education and opportunity, while another blip of awareness appears in the body of a poor subsistence farmer on the edge of starvation. Although everything in the world is the result of biogeochemical and gravitational forces, the interiority of our subjective identity is purely contingent, inherently inexplicable, not even worthy of discussion. 

In Physics of the Soul, physicist Amit Goswami proposes a theory, given quantum nonlocality and other recent discoveries, for how reincarnation can fit within a scientific paradigm. While we are alive, our thinking, feeling, and action form quantum aggregates that, via nonlocality, don’t dissolve when we die. Goswami writes:

Nonlocality implies transcendence. It follows that all quantum waves of possibility reside in a domain that transcends space and time; we will call it the domain of transcendent potentia…

And don't think that possibility is less real than actuality; it may be the other way around. What is potential may be more real than what is manifest because potentia exists in a timeless domain whereas any actuality is merely ephemeral: it exists in time. This is the way Easterners think, how mystics all over the world think, and how physicists who heed the message of quantum physics think.

These patterns remain linked and, like waves, continue their trajectory. These patterns of thought, feeling, and action create a kind of karmic vehicle for what spiritual traditions call the “soul,” which automatically returns to physical embodiment to continue its journey, seeking completion and resolution. 

The more I have reflected on Goswami’s ideas (which I explored in Quetzalcoatl Returns back in 2006), the more I find them sensible.