Science and Reincarnation
How quantum physics allows for past and future lives
My online seminar, Crossing the Threshold: Realms of Consciousness beyond Physical Death starts this Sunday at noon EST / 9 am PST / 6 pm CET (get tickets here. We will investigate, over four weeks, the evidence for reincarnation and the afterlife, supported by the latest science. Below, I explore the wonderful new paradigm of "monistic idealism” as it relates to reincarnation, synthesizing ideas from Amit Goswami, Robert Lanza, Rudolf Steiner, Douglas Hofstadter, Frederic Meyers, among others.
These days, many feel afraid of the future, due to runaway ecological catastrophe, mutating viruses, and other strange things. The best way to overcome this anxiety is to anchor the understanding of our individual lives as part of a much greater continuum of consciousness, extending across multiple dimensions. As Crossing the Threshold seeks to prove, we can now give beliefs common to the world’s mystical and shamanic traditions a solid scientific basis. By stabilizing this new understanding through study and reflection among a community of peers, we can transform our relationship to the world, liberating our energy for great tasks ahead.
Among the most useful of the theorists providing us with new maps or templates to understand this new universe of consciousness is the Indian physicist Amit Goswami. In The Self Aware Universe and Physics of the Soul, Goswami shows how the seemingly paradoxical aspects of the quantum world allow us to construct scientific hypotheses for metaphysical principles, such as the “subtle bodies,” and the mechanism by which an individual soul could maintain a form of coherent identity or distinct essence across successive reincarnations.
Goswami proposes that we resolve the paradoxes of quantum mechanics — nonlocality, action-at-a-distance, quantum uncertainty, and so on — when we recognize that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental basis of reality. Instead of a dualistic split between mind and matter, or subject and object, Goswami puts forth a non-dualistic philosophy known as monistic idealism: “The consciousness of the subject in a subject- object experience is the same consciousness that is the ground of all being. Therefore, consciousness is unitive. There is only one subject-consciousness, and we are that consciousness.”
Neurobiologist Robert Lanza reaches the same conclusion in Biocentrism. Consciousness creates the physical universe for the emergence of self-aware organisms. Space and time are not real things but mental constructs, tools for our perceptions: “Some may imagine that there are two worlds, one “out there” and a separate one being cognized inside the skull. But the “two worlds” model is a myth,” he writes. “Nothing is perceived except the perceptions themselves, and nothing exists outside of consciousness.” This is monistic idealism.
Lanza thinks biocentrism indicates that individual consciousness continues after death, in some form: “If time is an illusion, if reality is created by our own consciousness, can this consciousness ever truly be extinguished?” He notes that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changes form: “The essence of who you are, which is energy, can neither diminish nor “go away”—there simply isn’t any “away” in which to go. We inhabit a closed system.” Lanza’s biocentrism and Goswami’s monistic idealism are the same new paradigm.
Goswami posits a “brain/mind” system where the physical brain functions as a measuring and recording device, following the rules of classical physics, while a “quantum component of the brain-mind . . . is the vehicle for conscious choice and for creativity.” It is the activity of consciousness, determining the “quantum collapse” of a wave-form into a particle, that brings the world into being. “Consciousness is the agency that collapses the wave of a quantum object, which exists in potentia, making it an immanent particle in the world of manifestation,” Goswami writes.
The great 19th Century polymath Frederic Myers, similarly, made a distinction between the subliminal and supraliminal self. The supraliminal self is the region of our conscious awareness and identity, while the subliminal self encompasses a much greater range, including psychic and paranormal capacities and the unconscious. Myers made the analogy of the comparison between the visible light spectrum and the full spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared: The supraliminal self is like the visible spectrum; the subliminal self is the complete range, largely invisible to ordinary perception.
Our subjective awareness arises as a result of a “tangled hierarchy” or what Douglas Hofstadter calls a “strange loop” in the brain. A strange loop or tangled hierarchy is a spiral of self-reference similar to the “liar’s paradox” (the man from Crete who insists, “All Cretans are liars”) or MC Escher’s famous drawing of two hands drawing each other. Our self identity is, ultimately, a kind of illusion, like mirrors reflecting each other, or a fiction, constructed from symbolic and linguistic structures.
For Goswami, such a tangled hierarchy can only occur in a physical brain. Hence, he proposes, while consciousness exists as both transcendent potentia and as the ground of being itself (“the one without a second”), it can only be experienced via a physical brain that creates a self/other or subject/object relationship.
Since quantum collapse can only occur through a physical brain, the ego is “an assumed identity that the free-willing consciousness dons in the interest of having a reference point.” Esoteric disciplines and techniques of meditation teach us to observe our subjectivity, our ego-hood, with its continuous stream of thoughts and worries, from an outside perspective, a witness consciousness. By doing this, we jump out of our individually conditioned viewpoint, the self-referential circuit. We take a transcendent perspective.
The ego—which Goswami calls the “Classical self”—develops habitual patterns of thought and behavior in response to conditioning. Over time, this conditioning creates a probabilistic bias in favor of past patterns of response. “Once a task has been learned, then for any situation involving it, the likelihood that the corresponding memory will trigger a conditioned response approaches 100 percent.” In the same way that classical Newtonian physics is now recognized as a subset of quantum physics, Goswami writes, “Behaviorism is recovered as a special case of the more general quantum picture.”
Our thinking and behavior tends to become predictable, repetitive, over time. Beyond our habitual patterns of reaction, however, we possess the potential for spontaneous insight and unconditioned creativity. We can get beyond our conditioning by making a discontinuous “quantum leap” into the transcendent perspective.
According to physicist F. David Peat, “Synchronicities, epiphanies, peak, and mystical experiences” reveal the mind “operating, for a moment, in its true order . . . reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself.”
Like other quantum objects, thoughts obey the uncertainty principle. Goswami notes, “You can never simultaneously keep track of both the content of a thought and where the thought is going, the direction of thought.” He proposes that “mental substance” — thought — is made of the same intangible elements — quanta — that build up the “macro objects” of the physical world, but “mental substance is always subtle; it does not form gross conglomerates.”
The occult philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1865 - 1925) also conceived of thoughts as possessing a kind of substance. Lacking the terminology of quanta, he expressed the idea in a mystical framework, describing “thoughts as living, independent beings. What we grasp as a thought in the manifest world is like a shadow of a thought being that is active in the land of spirits.”20 The “land of spirits” could be considered the same as the transcendent domain of potentia.
A century before Goswami, Steiner landed on the same name for his philosophy: monistic idealism. His graduate thesis, The Philosophy of Freedom, put forth this philosophical position as a logical alternative to Kantian dualism. Kant made a split between noumena, the real things, and phenomena, our perceptions of them. But Steiner countered that this split was incorrect, as we only know our precepts. The idea of the Noumena is, itself, just another thought. Interestingly, Steiner said the mission of his life on Earth was to bring the knowledge of reincarnation back to Western civilization. He wrote a series of books, Karmic Relationships, where he claimed to follow figures in European civilization through their past lives.
I admit to having an intellectual crush on physicist Amit Goswami.
While researching The Self-Aware Universe, Goswami shifted from a materialist orientation to prioritizing consciousness as the fundamental basis of reality. “I had vainly been seeking a description of consciousness within science; instead, what I and others have to look for is a description of science within consciousness,” he realized. “We must develop a science compatible with consciousness, our primary experience.”
As part of his science within consciousness, Goswami proposes that quantum mechanics gives us a way to investigate reincarnation as a mechanism for individual continuity after death. His theory supports the approach to reincarnation found in
Tibetan Buddhism, elaborated in Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Neither Judeo-Christian ideas of the afterlife nor the secular philosophy of the modern West allow for reincarnation, or the “transmigration of souls.” In fact, he explicitly states his mission, in Physics of the Soul, is to scientifically “prove” that Bardol Thodol is accurate in its depiction of the Bardo realms and the journey of the individual soul/ consciousness beyond death. I don’t think he accomplishes that goal exactly, but he does define a scientific hypothesis for reincarnation and for the kind of afterlife experiences described in that work.
A number of academic researchers have amassed substantial evidence for reincarnation. Ian Stevenson, former professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, spent forty years studying young children who spontaneously recalled past lives, compiling the data in a number of books. In Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, he reviewed over 200 cases in which children recall specific details of their last life associated with physical marks. He documented physiological evidence—birthmarks and birth defects— that seem to carry over from their former existence. In a number of cases, especially ones in which the past life ended in violent death, Stevenson found, and photographed, highly unusual birthmarks on the children that perfectly match the placement of the mortal wounds that ended their remembered past lives.
“Most of the children speak about the previous life with an intensity, even with strong emotion, that surprises the adults around them,” wrote Stevenson, who documented past-life memories among the Tlingit in Alaska, the Druze in Southern Lebanon, across India, and other regions. “Many of them do not at first distinguish past from present, and they may use the present tense in referring to the previous life. They may say, for example, ‘I have a wife and two sons. I live in Agra.’ Although some children make fifty or more different statements, others make only a few but repeat these many times, often tediously.”
The recollection usually commences when the child is very young — between two and four — and ends within the next five years. Stevenson accompanied some of these children to meet the families, corroborating their specific memories. “The birthmarks and birth defects in these cases do not lend themselves easily to explanations other than reincarnation,” he notes. In the cases he has studied, the average period between death and rebirth is fifteen months. While Stevenson is not the only researcher who has probed this area in depth and found extraordinary evidence, his work provides a strong foundation of evidence. But what is it, exactly, that returns from life to life?
Goswami thinks that, after we die, our conditioned and habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action remain connected nonlocally, exactly like other quantum phenomena. These patterns or probability waves form what he calls the “quantum monad.” This quantum monad is the aggregate of probabilistic patterns and habituations formed through an individual life. It is this aggregate, he believes, that returns in future lives.
James Matlock develops a similar theory in Signs of Reincarnation. Reviewing the evidence for past lives and the similar (but not identical) ideas about transmigration held by many cultures around the world, Matlock finds some form of reincarnation to be highly probable if not certain. What Goswami calls the quantum monad, he terms the stream of consciousness: “The stream of consciousness that animates a body during life continues into death, and persists through death, until it becomes associated with (possesses) another body, generally one not yet born.” He calls his theory of reincarnation, the processual soul theory.
Demonstrated quantum effects such as “action at a distance” and “non-local correspondence” prove that quantum objects possess a “memory” — although that memory is not recorded physically, like a photograph or a tape, but only activated when consciousness causes the wave-collapse. Goswami writes:
Objects obey quantum laws — they spread in possibility following the equation discovered by Erwin Schrödinger— but the equation is not codified in the objects. Likewise, appropriate nonlinear equations govern the dynamical response of bodies that have gone through the conditioning of quantum memory, although this memory is not recorded in them. Whereas classical memory is recorded in objects like a tape, quantum memory is truly the analog of what the ancients call Akashic memory, memory written in akasha, emptiness — nowhere.
According to Eastern traditions, it is the accumulation of karma — the word literally means “action” — that induces reincarnation. Goswami’s hypothesis supports this idea.
“Certain incarnate individuals are correlated via quantum nonlocality,” he writes. “They have privileged access to each other’s lives through nonlocal information transfer.” He defines the quantum monad as an intermediate level of individuality between the ego and the transcendent consciousness which he calls the “quantum self,” but was known as Atman or Brahman in ancient Vedanta. The quantum self is what Christ meant when he said, “I and the Father are one.”
The distinct patterns of conditioned thought, feeling, and action that continue from life- to-life are known in mystical traditions as the subtle bodies. The “mental body” represents the individual’s thought pattern, while the “vital body” is made up of the individual’s pattern of action and feeling. A particular quantum monad develops vital and mental memories of past contexts over its successive lives. Beyond these habitual tendencies, worn like grooves in an old record, Goswami posits a body he calls the supramental intellect which contains the “archetypal themes that shape the movements of the physical, mental, and vital” bodies.
Matlock’s “processual soul” is akin to Goswami’s supramental intellect. Matlock believes reincarnation doesn’t require the existence of an intermediary, subtle body (what some esoteric traditions call the astral body). According to his thesis, the stream of consciousness reincarnates directly, utilizing Psi — the ability of mental force to directlyvinfluence the physical world. How this can occur, however, is still quite vague in his work. He also promotes monistic idealism: “There is only one substance and that is consciousness.”
A number of Western thinkers have attempted a synthesis of science and mysticism over the last centuries. Goswami’s idea of the supramental intellect is, in essence, identical to what Carl Jung called the self, Rudolf Steiner called the theme body, and Frederic Myers called the Supraliminal Self. According to Steiner, the theme body does not express itself through thoughts, but “acts through deeds, processes, and events.” It “leads the soul through its life destiny and evokes its capacities, tendencies, and talents.” They reach the same conclusions using different vocabularies.
The subtle bodies defined by different esoteric traditions — chi, prana, the nadis, the chakras, and so on— are not made of any material substance. Yet they have a real existence when understood as quantum phenomena. They are, according to Goswami, “the possibility waves of an undulating infinite medium.” Consciousness determines their manifestation.
For Goswami, consciousness is fundamental. Hence these subtle energy systems — like the seven chakras or the meridians of acupuncture — are no less “real” than our physical organs. They are integral aspects of reality, even if they exist as nonlocal quantum phenomena. He suspects the chakra system creates the “blueprint” for the vital body to map itself onto the physical body, expressed through the healthy functioning of our organs.
For Goswami and Lanza, physical evolution is not a push — a blind, random effort — but a pull. Evolution is the process through which the preexistent, atemporal, transcendent consciousness remembers or, in a sense, recollects itself — self- organizing through increasingly complex levels of light and matter, life and mind.
As long as it exists as transcendent potentia, consciousness cannot experience itself: There is no observer to collapse the probability waves.
Consciousness must split into a subject / object to know itself and reflect on itself. It creates the physical universe — and complex brains that develop tangled hierarchies — for this purpose. Beyond self-knowledge and remembrance, Goswami theorizes there will be another stage: Consciousness will regain its original state of unconditional freedom, but within the physical universe it has designed for this purpose.
Sundays, starting Sept 5, 2021
Noon EST / 9 am PST / 6 pm CET
In this month-long seminar, we explore arguments for and against any kind of afterlife, survey the evidence for the continuity of consciousness and personality after death, and reach a coherent understanding of the new scientific and philosophical paradigm destined to transform our world for the better. Certificates of completion available. Sign up here. All sessions will be archive for later viewing or reviewing.