"Balsamic" Cosmology

The several foregoing discussions of “models” or “cosmologies” now need some rounding out, a certain amount of benign critique, and it seems to me that a good approach to that might be by analogy to a traditional food product. The contrast I’d like to suggest is that between the processes that take place in the vineyards of France, as old as time almost, and the activities that take place in modern laboratories.

When French vintners make really first class balsamic vinegar, they start with freshly pressed-out grape juice from carefully selected varieties. This they cook until only a third of the original volume is left over, known as “must.” Then begins a process of fermentation; more volume is lost, known as the angels’ share; the liquid grows thicker and sweeter and more concentrated. And after that begins a long period of aging. The product, which is neither, properly speaking, wine nor vinegar, is an expensive delight used to flavor salads, dips, and sauces. The best such products have lived in the darkness of barrels for up to twenty-five years.

Real cosmologies—and not called that, but functioning as cosmologies do, only better—are like balsamic vinegar. They are a concentration and essence of long periods of human experience. They come into being by means of poetic inspiration of just a few individuals and then live on as essences that change the very taste of reality. In their native form they are mythologies. And by the time that they are incorporated into holy books—where, invariably, they are mixed in with all sorts of other matters, not least history, law, custom, and moral guidance for the community—they are already very old. They arise—meaning that they’re captured in poetic forms—in the early stages of cultures. As these mature, the myths are gradually transformed into systems of belief. Where poets once had visions, now philosophers are scribbling. Later yet come modern times, such as the current phase in Western culture, when the philosophies, based on the myths, are in turn translated into cosmologies proper. This last stage resembles the analysis of a minute sample of balsamic vinegar (forget the salad) in a modern laboratory to see what it contains. And what it contains will turn out to be nothing at all like the vinegar itself, the must from which it was fermented, the juice that had been cooked, and never mind the grapes, the vines, the vineyards from which it all came. In this process, inevitably, value is lost. But in the final stages, in situations where the human mind has been uprooted from its collective experience, where time is no longer perceived in the same way—all those long years in the barrel—all that’s accessible to public thought is the chemical composition. And, not surprisingly, it’s the same-old carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on.

I say this in benign critique of the things that I have written on “models” up to this point. They serve as a kind of intellectual orientation, but they are not matters of experience. Something is lost in the process, and, one suspects, the most vital element. There is no taste left. The angels’ share has boiled away. The life in the grape is no more. Which is a way of saying—not that it needs to be said—that reality cannot be captured in models. But making models is one way in which we can trace residues of something higher still left in the culture.

Having said this much, I will go one more step in the direction of concentration and try to sum up the essence that traditional cosmological models leave us. It is that life appears to be “out of place” here—for whatever reason: by expulsion, invasion, or capture. That it is different from that which now surrounds us. That it descended from on high—however that is viewed: by creation, by voluntary seeking of experience, or by cosmic misfortune. Finally, that the purpose of life is some kind of return. With that I think we can now wander on in our patrol of the Borderzone.

Trapped: Another Model

Suppose that a community of souls becomes entangled—caught up, trapped—in the quite alien order of matter. We’ve looked at something similar, namely a community that voluntarily enters (I used the word “invades”) the alien realm; I labeled that a “weird” model. What I’d like to look at here is a variant, one in which the entanglement is involuntary.

If this is familiar ground for you, you’ll only notice subtle differences. I based the weird model on Hindu conceptions. In that tradition the soul descends voluntarily but, descending, is so shrouded in ignorance that it becomes a captive on the Wheel of Karma. Escape is only possible by bursting through that veil of darkness by a supreme act of self-denial. The focus in Hinduism is on the ignorance and the escape. The voluntary character of the descent doesn’t get much ink. The involuntary model of entanglement or capture is based on another tradition, Gnosticism. That mode of thought views the soul as innocent; the emphasis is therefore on the capture and on the agency responsible for it (not us); escape is not by self-denial but by realization, insight, knowledge: gnosis.

But let me put Gnosticism on the back burner for now. Its doctrines were forbidden and persecuted in the West; consequently they never acquired the clarity and high philosophical development that Christian and Hindu doctrines manifest. Merely to outline Gnosticism in its endless variants would be confusing. Those who wish to go there, however, might well start with Hans Jonas’ superb work, The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, 1958, available here. Let me, instead, put the model in terminology readily accessible to a Westerner using a naturalistic style of framing—meaning that I will neither invoke nor exclude any higher beings in the process.

To see this process we must imagine a cosmic order quite similar to the one we experience down here on earth, namely one in which vast realms coexist under discernible—but not easily discernible—laws. A strong element of randomness is present, at least from our perspective. Beneath that randomness a deeper order may in fact represent absolute necessity, but as we see, weird things can happen; the lightning might just strike the cat, and why it did we’ll never know. Assume, further, that an order of soul, such as I’ve outlined it before, exists within this cosmic whole; it has its own laws and powers, including consciousness and will; it is different in kind from the other phenomena, be they subtle or dense; the soul-order may very well exist in a more subtle kind of material order—suitable to its natural unfolding. It is perfectly consistent, in this model, to hold that God exists in some mysterious way behind all that we are able to discern, indeed that what we see is the creation, and, further, that it may well still be under way. But this God is very obviously the Deus absconditus, not the intervening deity of the Old Testament.

Next assume that in the course of the cosmos cosmosing, as it were, on the model of Spinoza’s “nature naturing,” the cosmos doing what the cosmos does, energetic phenomena well above the pay-grade of the souls happily living their lives in what, to us here, would be a kind of heaven, a disaster would take place. It would be a disaster only from the point of view of the soul-community affected, not in any absolute sense. By way of an example, let’s suppose that a new sub-universe forms in a big bang, and in the process a region of the soul-order is swept away in the consequent enormous explosion and becomes hopelessly disrupted, confused, and its subtle matter wildly mixed in with matter of quite another density. The souls caught in this vast melee would, of course, continue to exist. They are immortal. But they would be greatly disoriented, confused, and their habitation a hopelessly shambles without the accustomed rhyme and reason.

There you have it: an involuntary model of entanglement.

Let me next compare this model to the other two in order to discover if it has any merit. In this model a vast yawning distance opens between God and the soul. In the creation model God personally forms the body and breathes in the living soul; the narrative is that of creator and creature, of command and of obedience. The interaction is continuous. The absence of God is due to the soul’s own disobedience. In the Hindu model the soul is itself a separated tiny instance of God, hence an identity relation continues. And, of course, the separation is voluntary and, with the right effort, can be healed. The Gnostic model, by contrast, produces a very high verisimilitude to actual human experience—which was at least materially a whole lot more miserable even for the middle classes when Gnosticism flourished; it flourished for a couple of centuries before and after the transition between BC and AD. The Gnostics found this world intolerable; they wanted somebody to blame. God could not be blamed. Like all other human communities, the Gnostic were also keen defenders of God against charges of collusion with evil. They chose a secondary agency, much higher than man but lower than God—and they held that this demiurge created the world we see, full of its mayhem and absence of meaning, is a botched job; a hapless imitation of the creator. In the Gnostic doctrine, the demiurge deliberately keeps us asleep so that we’ll stick around. Breaking through our ignorance means liberation.

I will close this presentation by outlining another possible explanation which the modern mind might find more plausible. It isn’t pantheism nor yet lineal creationism. Assume that creation is continuous and God is behind it—but apart. God is not evolving, but the world is. God isn’t finished yet; another chapter is being written. And this evolution, consequently, takes place in resonance with God’s intentions. The aim of existence, in other words, isn’t placid equilibrium but infinite development. We had no choice in being here, but we do have a choice. We can participate or we can decline. If we decline, we’ll find our equilibrium in due time. If we volunteer to take part in the creation, the future may hold many more wonders. Pop psychology might call that “tough love.”

Reincarnation: Western Perspectives

Modern cases of reincarnation studied by westerners mostly involve children who remember a previous life in detail. They remember the names of previous family members. In many such cases, the child reports dying of violence or early in life in some traumatic fashion—while giving birth, for instance. The previous (remembered) family may live in the same or in a distant town. The child usually insists. It says that it does not belong here, in its current family. Some children carry birthmarks at those sites where they were injured in their supposed previous life.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, then at the University of Virginia documented such reports in Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University of Virginia Press, 1974) and in Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (Praeger Publishers, 1997). He maintained a database of some 3,000 reported cases; of these 200 were “suggestive” of reincarnation in his opinion. Stevenson was an original, erudite, and courageous figure. He was trained in medicine, worked in biochemistry, and, with a partner, made a discovery about oxidation in kidneys. He later took another degree and qualified as a Freudian psychoanalyst; but dissatisfied with Freudian approaches, he eventually began investigating paranormal phenomena. In the process he became the leading scientific investigator of reincarnation. I ought to put “scientific” in quotes because he was treated as an outlaw by many would-be spokesmen for science, described (because he had to be) as objective, careful, and disciplined—but he was said to entertain an “unacceptable hypothesis.” Here is a classical case of the clash between the search for truth on the one hand and of an orthodoxy on the other.

Stevenson labeled only those cases as suggestive of reincarnation where no other explanation of the data seemed as plausible. Even so he studiously avoided making any claims. Hence he used the word “suggestive” rather than some stronger term like “evidentiary.”

All such cases rely on memories—of children. The memories are vivid, including, for instance, the location where some money was buried or what the names of the reincarnated person’s children were. The child recognizes previous locations, the layout of residences and neighborhoods it had never visited before, and people who were its claimed relatives in the previous life. The child greets these people by name, sometimes by nickname known only in narrow family circles. In all of these cases, the will not to believe causes doubters to reach for concepts like telepathy to argue for an alternative means whereby information may have reached the child.

The cases are much more persuasive than the “super-psi” explanation, outlined here, used to explain them away. Indeed the raw data become almost banal, and the birthmarks, where present, suggest that the minds appearing now in new bodies actually participated in their formation along lines that remind one of stigmata, but here caused by unpleasant memories.

Stevenson’s cases come from all over the world, but many more from cultures where reincarnation is accepted. In cultures where the doctrine is taboo, children are shushed when they first begin to talk about such things. They are certainly not believed. No doubt they sense their parents’ anxiety and disapproval. In any case, these memories tend to fade away as the children grow older, no matter which culture they inhabit.

Now for some older western views of reincarnation. The concept has been around from very early on and seems to have been widespread. It was and is held by Hindus and by followers of the Jewish Kabbalah today. The Kabbalah calls the process gil-gul. One of the greatest if also admittedly one of the more controversial of the Church Fathers, Origen (185-254), taught the preexistence of the soul. Origen had an, ah, original view of the scriptures too, declining to follow the “letter” of the scripture strictly where he judged it unfit to be the word of God. He wrote: “Every soul comes into this world strengthened by the victories and weakened by the defeats of its previous life.” One source is here, on p. 42.

Platonist ideas influenced Origen, but he seems to have held his belief in “preexistence” as a matter of logical necessity based on an argument I personally find silly. Origen thought that souls coexist with God and thus have no beginning. Origen argued that God could not be omnipotent without subjects. No one is master without servants. Souls therefore had to coexist with God. Origen’s father died as a martyr; Origen himself was tortured for his faith. He was a teacher of great renown and wrote many books—a shining light, in other words, much admired by numerous people who were later canonized. He was not.

Belief in some Christian version of reincarnation seems to have been held by various groups for at least 300 some odd years in the West—dated from around the time when Christianity formed. With the coming of the Emperor Constantine (reigned 306-337), the Church gained power and began consolidating its ideological rule. The process took the form of various councils, the first of which Constantine organized himself. Bishops gathered at various places and hammered out the shape of orthodoxy. Until then all kinds of sects coexisted uneasily, snarling at each other in their tracts. All this had to be organized. Competing groups now morphed into heresies. At the Second Council of Constantinople, held in 553, “preexistence” was finally rooted out. Souls had to be created within time and only went round once. The council published some 13 anathemas in the summer of that year. One dealt with the “fabulous pre-existence of souls” and condemned those who asserted the “monstrous restoration which follows from it.” If the belief had not been common, it wouldn’t have required quite so firm a sanction. This event, in the sixth century, was not really a philosophical but a political resolution of an article of faith. It is well to hold that in mind. The organization of churches, while deeply intertwined with ideas and their meanings, is an expression of social force aimed at regulating society, not at clarifying thought.

Forgetting

Let me use the analogy of a person who descends into a very deep cave on an elaborate spelunking expedition. He carries a radio. His team of supporters is above ground monitoring his progress below; they’re leaning into computer screens. Now the explorer has reached such a depth that the interfering rock formations cause him to lose communications. The radio sputters, here and there he can make out a phrase, but not enough to carry on a meaningful conversation.

Let me apply the analogy. The cave and the rock that forms it represent the material order. The surface represents the order of the soul. The explorer is one soul descending into the density of matter. The radio is his mind communicating rather well with his base camp at first, but then interference all but cuts off his contact. His descent is what Wordsworth means by our birth; the failure of the radio is our “forgetting” of a previous existence. The analogy isn’t perfect. It merely illustrates that “interference” may explain our forgetting. A situation like the one described might be elaborated to explain plausibly the Hindu concept of reincarnation, structurally an emanationist concept. To make this case we need just a few elements.

These are (1) some evidence that souls have really preexisted before; (2) an understanding of memory as a field phenomenon, and (3) a conceptualization of orders based on some kind of density.

Evidence for Preexistence. In eastern culture people accept reincarnation as a traditional belief; it’s been around a long time, not least in the West, if we go far enough back. The first westerner to give it scientific study was the Canadian, Ian Stevenson, a professor at the University of Virginia. The late Stevenson’s studies of people who claimed to remember an earlier life represents an opus of evidence not as extensive but as persuasive as the corpus of NDE reports. It represents empirical proof, as best as we can get it, for preexistence. Others have continued such studies after Stevenson.

Memory. No one questions the role of the brain in memory, but the subject of where memories reside is more controversial. The orthodox answer is that tissue holds memories, but proof of that is speculative. New theories therefore keep springing up. The Austrian, Karl Pribram, has been the latest theorizer, suggesting a holographic storage of memory across tissues. This suggestion has not firm proof either. The British biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, is the chief proponent of a theory that memories reside in what he calls morphic fields, thus fields analogous to the electro-dynamic kind, but not detectable by our instruments. He offers some intriguing empirical support for this suggestion (see The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & the Habits of Nature (Park Street Press, 1995). This alternative fits a metaphysical perspective better—without in any way denying the role of the brain.

Concerning memory, especially in this context, it’s worthwhile reminding ourselves that in daily awareness we don’t actually remember our entire life in full detail. What we have is a very compressed précis of our past. But if we want to remember something, we have potent powers to evoke those things by effort. The day-to-day functioning of our memory is in response to stimuli. Those things not “evoked” by something lie dormant. We have enormous stores of memory that we never visit—and when we do, we tend to be amazed. I’d completely forgotten that, we say—but evidently we have not. We need to keep this in mind in reflecting on the subject in this context.

Orders of Density. There is ample philosophical as well as experiential evidence for a subtle reality—that which I keep calling the “soul-order.” Its most obvious proof is human consciousness. I include life itself as an element of proof—although that’s more controversial. Tradition supports the concept. People believe in other words, and NDE reports appear to back up those beliefs. If such orders exist, however, science cannot prove them by definition. If those world are more subtle, our physical instruments can no more detect them than they can detect consciousness.

With these elements in mind, let me suggest the following model for explaining why we can’t remember previous lives. I assume, for starters, that when a soul is born (unites with matter), it enters a realm of greater density. The soul-order is subtle, in other words. The “noise” of this environment, to change the metaphor, overwhelms the channel by means of which we gather knowledge (memory is knowledge). What we hear across this channel reaches us almost too faintly to decode: intuitions, intimations. When our souls form new memories, our brain mediates their storage. But when the brain retrieves memories in response to stimuli, it always fetches the most recent deposits to this store, especially as we age. In rare cases only, the brain may actually bring back memories created in times predating our current life, but these would have less context. After we die, presumably, we shall recover our older memories, but only after appropriate stimuli, those arising in the soul-order, actually evoke them. What I’m suggesting as a reasonable assumption is that we never really lose contact with our continuous memories, but our ability to evoke them from within this dark spelunking cave becomes much weaker.

How then can some people remember earlier existences while the great majority do not? While I’m into idle speculation, why not tackle that one too. The remembering of some is no idle claim of this or that small thing remembered. On the contrary. Stevenson’s work indicates that the recovery of memories is quite complete and quite detailed. One explanation might be that, in childhood, many of us do remember previous lives but too fragmentarily. We’re unable to link up enough of them to reproduce a sense of forgotten self-awareness. The shock of entry into this world may have been greater for most than some. Other explanations might be that the tuning powers of the brain are better is some than others, that the environmental stimuli are sharper for some, and finally that some have been gone but a short time. Concerning the last point, the point is that the memories remembered would be more current. In most of the cases Stevenson reports, the life remembered had been lived but a few miles away and ended just a few years earlier. For most other people, possibly, the last stretch of existence may not have been physical but “subtle,” thus in a quite different order, the soul-order. Physical stimuli here may not evoke memories of that one, except perhaps for feelings. The two orders may be very different in character. Remembering lives may therefore be rare because the conditions necessary to evoke earlier memories may also be rare.

What I’ve managed here, perhaps, is to show that some element of plausibility attaches to the reincarnation scheme and, therefore, indirectly, to the proposition that another realm might be invading matter or—what may be a rougher row to hoe—may have been caught here involuntarily.

Ex Nihilo

The three cases I laid out yesterday may not be sufficient adequately to explain the full range of reality. Those cases involved A. the soul’s eternal existence, B. its creation at birth, and C. its emergence from matter. Our context was memory. Based on the fact that the vast majority of us do not remember existing before, the second case, B, appeared most logical.

That “model,” however, entangles us with the concept of God creating souls ex nihilo at the moment when ova are fertilized by semen. That idea ultimately rests on the assumption that the creation of every human being requires God’s personal intervention precisely as described in Genesis: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (2:7). I’m happy for those for whom this verse is answer enough. But I’m moved to understand reality at another level. Much as the Greeks—who launched the civilization that stands in a parental role to ours—disliked the notion of creation ex nihilo so do I. From a purely logical stance, if God created the universe, it did not come from nothing; God was present. Ex nihilo creation, as I see it, is an interpretation of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Understood poetically, this is a wondrous statement. To parse it apart strikes me as courting disaster. You have to get into a quagmire of interpretations from which you’ll never get past the word “beginning.” No human has satisfactorily explained time. And precognitive dreams, for one—the existence of which I cannot doubt—make me doubly sure that exegesis of this verse in hard conceptual terms is going nowhere.

This leads me to evoke another poetical image of creation originating, as best I can determine, with the Gnostics and the Neo-Platonists, but present also in Hindu beliefs. It is the notion that our reality is the emanation of the Godhead, thus a kind of overflow of an infinite plentitude. This is equivalent to the concept of a continuing, ongoing, and, indeed, eternal creation. In this idea the created world does not spring from nothing. On the contrary, it is God—but with a difference. The idea is also discernible in the Jewish Kabalistic image of sparks from a broken divine vessel falling into the void—our own mission being to raise the sparks again: the old theme of descent and ascent.

What makes this poetic image—its model recognizably being solar radiation, but no one claims that it originated that way—unappealing to the West is that it is perhaps too naturalistic. In the Judaic conception—which is at the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the emphasis is on an active God in active and personal relationship with his creation. It is a model assertively based on moral behavior. Its very premise rests on command, its disobedience, the consequences of it, and the resolution of that error.

What underlies the emanation concept is quite another emphasis. It is that creation is a diminished, weakened, or dispersed aspect of divine plentitude. The agencies that we observe did not arise from nothing but are separated instances of God; their limitations are due to the separation. This model is equally impossible to render into hard concepts because as the ex nihilo concepts defies explanation by involving time, so this one, through the concept of separation, involves space, and neither one yields to human understanding—as Kant well understood. In what way, precisely, can a spark be separated from God who is everywhere? If we could make sense of that, we might equally well make sense of “in the beginning.” The moral element is also present here but embedded, from the outset, in the individual agent who, being a particle of divinity, carries consciousness and therefore the essence of morality, of free choice.

These problems of space, time, and responsibility have plagued philosophers throughout time. The Gnostics shifted responsibility to an intermediate semi-divine meaning, Sophia, one of the higher emanations of God—but not Sophia personally but to one of her agents, the demi-urge. No human thought can get around the problem that if God is all God must be ultimately responsible—not least for freedom and therefore evil. Swedenborg tried to deal with this using the concept of “permission” in rather tortured ways. In the Hindu conception, a part of divinity develops a yearning for limitation, for experiencing it. This conflicts with the notion of God as all knowing. We cannot escape the problem—and I will certainly not solve it. The issue I’m trying to address—and strictly for myself—is that of ex nihilo creation versus another conception of how reality might be explained.

The ex nihilo model is consistent with our experience of memory. The other model must rely on forgetting. That is where I will go next. I’m not the first to think that it is a good way to go. I will end with a bit of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” by way of introducing what is to follow:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

The Soul-Memory Nexus

If we classify philosophical conceptions of what the soul may be, we find three categories in use. I want to look at each as it relates to memory. At the end I’ll try to make clear why choosing memory as a magnifying glass makes sense. Let’s start a listing of the categories. The soul is—

A. Immortal and Uncreated. We find this conceptualization in Plato and also in Hindu thought. In both traditions, reincarnation (metempsychosis in the Greek version) is presumed to take place. If the soul is conceived as immaterial and uncreated, our inability to remember any past existence before the current incarnation becomes a problem. To reconcile the supposed status of the soul with its very limited memory calls for an explanation. A contradiction looms without one.

B. Created but Immortal. This formulation underlies Western Christian, and particularly Catholic, thought. Here the fact that we don’t remember preexistence is a virtue. Why should we if we did not exist? The evidence that memory may operate after the body is left behind (see postings on NDEs) is confirmatory. Once created, immortal—and, in the out-of-body state, still functioning.

C. Material and Perishable. The naturalistic view has no concept of an independent soul. That which we call soul is the material functioning of brain processes, a kind of input-output device. Memory is stored in tissue. Our experience of memory, tied entirely to this life, is consistent with the naturalistic view.

The problem identified in A is somewhat mitigated by the fact that some people remember previous lives. I will discuss that subject in more detail in future postings. The problem remains, however, because most people don’t have such memories. Nor do we have evidence from NDE reports that, on departure from the body, old memory streams become active and, Aha!, we now remember lives in earlier incarnations.

What is an amelioration of the problem in A becomes a problem in B. Reports of previous lives are not by any measure universal, however; thus the B position may still be correct, but it seems to require some modification. We might assume, for instance, that created souls might conceivably stay on in this dimension after one life and manage somehow to occupy new bodies. Why would they do so? It may be that they failed to achieve their purpose here. A surprisingly large proportion of those reporting previous lives lost the life that they remember in youth through violence or accidents. This option (“stay-and-go-around-again”) may even have divine sanction. In this formulation, which I’ve never encountered as a doctrine anywhere, reincarnation may be recognized as an exception, but not, as in Hinduism, as the universal rule.

Evidence of earlier lives is consistent with a conception of the soul as an independent agent, not with the naturalistic view. This last mode of thought needs to explain the evidence as something other than it is understood to be. There may be memories, but they’re not of another life, for instance. The super-psi theory is a favorite mode of explanation. For that, please see the posting under that heading.

Significance of Memory. Memory is central to our experience of duration. Any concept of life after death requires that we should remember what came before. Exactly the same rule applies to previous lives. If we don’t remember them, they might as well not have been. Another way to put this is that a third party may know with certainty that Jane Doe, now in heaven, is the same Jane Doe who lived in the twentieth century in Amherst, say. But Jane Doe herself will not know that if she doesn’t remember her days in Amherst. Ontological continuity is not the same as conscious continuity. The latter requires memory. Yet another way to put this is that if memory is discontinuous—if it ceases on death or fades away entirely after death; if it is wiped away upon birth and is not recoverable later—then the materialistic theories are functionally identical to spiritual experience. You die; with death you’re gone. A temporally delimited memory is equivalent to materialism. Applied to the concept of agency, the essence of which is consciousness, endurance in an agency requires endurance of memory. If we cannot discover where the memories of a previous existence are stored, why they are inaccessible, and how they might be recovered, the logical position is B: we were created at or around birth. I’m obviously not done with this subject.

Motivation

I’ve noted long ago—when I first began pondering such matters—that thinking about the origin of life inevitably leads to speculation about cosmological origins. You find yourself going in that direction every time because, I think, the logic in the question posed, and in the facts under examination, force you to take that path. You realize that life is a transcending phenomenon—and at least one of its exemplars is an agent—ourselves. And since we did not make ourselves, seeking a transcendental origin for a transcending phenomenon leads to very basic cosmological questions.

The motivation for the search itself is the love of wisdom, the root meaning of philosophy. If you feel it you’ll certainly also know it. The activity is of its essence contemplative and justified by itself. The genuine lover strives to attain the beloved and has no other motive. The suitor of the princess who doesn’t actually care for the princess but cares only to impress the king—he is a sham. I emphasize this point for a reason.

My discussions of cosmologies—or religious faith systems, for that matter—take place in a philosophical context and are thus part of my search for truth. The last thing I have in mind is to persuade anyone of anything. I’m simply living a part of my life in contemplation. I’ve benefitted a great deal from others’ thought, hence I share mine too. My understanding of agency is that it’s sovereign. Thus every human being is free to make up his or her mind. As the German song has it: Die Gedanken sind frei.* It seems obvious to me that compelled faith—or faith based on ignorance—cannot be real. Thus it seems to me that sincere philosophical discussion will strengthen genuine faith and only weaken unexamined forms of it—which is a service.

The problem I’m addressing has two aspects, one low, one high. Let’s take the high one first. Many faith systems base themselves on revelation, a phenomenon that can be viewed philosophically but cannot be reached by philosophy. By this I mean that philosophy can neither prove nor disprove that God speaks directly to humanity. I have my own understanding of revelation, but that is what it is, an understanding. I believe it to be true, but I cannot prove it. In my view revelation reaches all of humanity in multiple forms; several orthodoxies would deny this. In matters of faith, individual sovereignties may indeed clash. And such clashes cannot be resolved at the level of faith. But they can be discussed philosophically in a generous spirit. And that’s the spirit I try to cultivate in myself.

The low aspect is that faith systems can and often do manifest a tribal character; the best people in these systems always deplore this. Some people, however, out of ignorance, mostly, treat their beliefs as ideologies and view any discussion of them, if outside the “inside” consensus, as an attack. Similarly, they treat those in agreement with their formulations as part of the tribe. But the discussion may not be an attack at all; it may be an appreciation; and the person sympathetic to the faith system may not be a true believer.

This long comment, at this place, seems appropriate. I noted that yesterday’s posting, with its prominent use of the word “Hindu” in the title, caused several partisan websites to broadcast my posting to constituencies. And in each of the two sites (Blogger and WordPress) with the identical content, readership surged to all-time highs. Alas. Time to say the above. High time. In the future I expect to draw fire (or praise) from those who dogmatically deny (or affirm) reincarnation, those who view Gnosticism as a heresy (or truth), and yet others who quarrel with (or adhere to) Catholicism or Islam. Du calm, as my daughter in France might say. This is just philosophy. It follows the Beloved wherever She may wander.
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*Thoughts are free.

The Hindu Model

In the last several postings, I’ve been looking for ways of understanding life as a phenomenon. I proposed that life is best explained as a phenomenon different in kind from matter, that it suggests the existence of a separate “order” of reality where it might be located, and then developed a “weird” theory under which a soul-civilization is pictured as “invading” matter from a soul-dimension.

Today I’d like to examine the Weird Model in light of the traditional Hindu viewpoint on the nature of life and the soul—and to draw out some of the problems and ideas that such a comparison suggests.

To understand soul-civilization, perhaps it might help us to see our own human civilization in functional terms. Our civilization represents a flow of individuals. We might picture its members as in three categories: the unborn, the living, and the departed. In our reality all of the action is centered on the living. We have no idea whether or not the unborn already exist or “come into being,” literally, at some point between conception and birth. The two traditions of the West resolve this phenomenon, this “flow,” in different ways. In the materialistic version, life is simply a function of matter. The unborn don’t exist except as genetic potential in the living. The living are carriers of genes. The departed don’t exist any more except as matter in transformation. The religious concept is that souls do, indeed, “come into being,” created by God at the time of conception or birth; the living are destined to live in another dimension; after death the immortal soul is bound for that realm. At the “end of time” the souls will be once more reunited with their bodies—the doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

The Hindu conception is quite different. In that model the unborn may be the departed; society, therefore, comes to be seen as a circulation of souls. The departed become the unborn; they see incarnation and become the living; they die and depart and thus become the unborn once again. Ultimate escape from this “wheel of karma” takes the form of departure for Nirvana. “Replenishment” of the supply of souls, as it were, takes place as aspects of the Godhead split off and descend into the lower karmic realms. This model is coherent, self-contained, and well-motivated; I use that term in the way computer people do to mean well-justified. The souls go round and round until they split off and rejoin divinity; new souls rain down, of their own volition. The separation of “sparks” of the divine refulgence from the divine plentitude is motivated by a desire, deep within the Godhead itself, for limited experience. When such limitation turns out, ultimately, to be sorrow—at least as experienced by the spark—its descending motion becomes an upward striving, an ascent toward the Whole again.

It is worth noting here that the Weird Model, at least as pictured thus far, appears to be quite different. But is it? It presents the picture of orders of reality arranged in layers, as it were. The soul-layer is above the material. It exists and holds life of our own kind; it proceeds in equilibrium. One element of it, however, that which is most proximate to the material layer beneath, partially interpenetrates the material and produces what might be called a hybrid form of life. By hybrid I mean a “soul-body” composite, animated matter. That kind of life is unstable; it persist only because the departing souls are either replaced from “above” in the hybrid dimension or return to the hybrid layer once again by taking up bodies after a period of discarnate existence. The two models, thus, while differently conceived, are functionally similar. Both depend on circulation for the simple reason that the hybrid form of life is severely limited: bodies wear out. Both also depend on what seems to be a voluntary fascination with the lower region—with matter for souls in the Weird Model, with limitation in the Hindu model.

The Western Religious conception abandons the idea of circulation but retains one element of the other two models. In this conception, humans are created for life in Paradise. We might picture that as the soul-dimension of the Weird Model and as a kind of heaven beneath the perfection of Nirvana. Buddhism eventually formulated the concept of just such a world, something less perfect than Nirvana but heavenly in its aspects. This was the Pure Land, a perfect world; Pure Land Buddhism is also the most popular form of Buddhism. Buddhism, of course, is one of the Hindu traditions. In the Western view, humanity was destined for life in Paradise; God placed the first humans there, evidently intending Paradise to be their home. But Adam and Eve just couldn’t leave things well enough alone. They had to meddle. And with that comes—not an invasion of the lower realm but, instead, an expulsion into the lower realm. Thereafter, getting back to Paradise becomes Job One.

As this brief survey shows, the great traditions—all except materialism, which just throws up its hands—are intimately linked. They suggests that these models have at least the merit of arising spontaneously as we force our attention to contemplate what reality might actually mean.

Strange Evidence: The Stigmatics

Sometimes I find it difficult even to approach certain kinds of evidence. I’m thinking here of phenomena that humanity tends to walk around. The entire subject of the miraculous belongs into this category. When treated at a high level of abstraction, it is easier to handle: modernists can readily dismiss it, traditionalists can accept it without fear of being strangely eyed by modern colleagues. The more detail we add, the more difficult the evidence becomes. A particularly unusual and delicate subject is that of people who have the stigmata, thus wounds on hands, feet, and in the chest in imitation of the crucifixion of Jesus. Stigmatics arise in small but persistent numbers, and have done so since the thirteenth century, as assumed by the Catholic Encyclopedia based on a study, but I’ve been aware of only two such cases in my own time. One was the Capuchin priest Padre Pio (1887-1968); another was a Bavarian peasant woman, Therese Neumann (1898-1962). Padre Pio has been made a saint; Therese Neumann is being considered for that status by Vatican at present.

The turbulence of World War II moved our family from Hungary to Germany, landing us in the town of Tirschenreuth in Bavaria right as the war was ending. I was nine. Therese Neumann was then 47 and lived about 11 miles or so away in Konnersreuth just north of us. We heard about her fairly soon, as we settled down. By the time she died we were in America. I never saw her myself; this is not a personal account; I note this proximity by way of emphasizing that such phenomena are here with us, right here and now, not something in the dark past of another age. In the case of both of these people—and I do hope that Neumann will be made a saint—we have ample modern evidence (photographs, etc.) for their extraordinary lives and miraculous deeds. It is always thus with stigmatics: the physical manifestations are, you might almost say, minor compared to other very strange things they knew and did. Healings and knowledge of selective events in the future were reported about both.

My focus on this subject in the present context—the context being the possible interaction between soul and matter, the subject of the last several postings—is to suggest that there is striking evidence for it in these cases provided that the cause of the stigmata is assigned to the individuals who have them rather than to miraculous interventions by a higher order.

Now, to be sure, in one sense—and precisely the sense that I present in the last two postings—namely that life itself is the product of another spiritual order “invading” or “trespassing upon” the physical, then, indeed, stigmata are caused by a higher order. The saints who have them, under that assumption, are from another order. In that case stigmata are simply unique expressions of a power manifesting with more force in this dimension than it usually does. These individuals are able to concentrate another kind of energy, that which originates in the realm of soul, more effectively than the rest of us. Their intense devotion to a particular belief, their identification with Jesus and Jesus’ suffering on the cross, combined with their greater spiritual energies, produce mirroring effects. The stigmata are one expression of this concentrated spiritual power; their ability to heal others, to have visions of future events, to appear in two places simultaneous (reported of Padre Pio) are other expressions of the same intensified ability. This seems to be a reasonable explanation for these strange phenomena, but that is not what “miraculous intervention” normally means. By “miraculous” people usually mean that other agencies, not the saints themselves, are reaching across the border and temporarily lifting the laws of nature.

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It is clearly not possible to reconcile these two different interpretation unless we attempt to see the phenomenon from a more sophisticated perspective perhaps. Let me, for starters, examine the subject of agency. The saints themselves neither think nor feel that they are causing their own experiences. Many of these experiences, not least the stigmata, are painful. The agents experience them passively. But in this regard they resemble genuine artists. Artists don’t claim that they produce their own inspiration. They don’t claim that their poetry, melodies, or visions are made. They are found, discovered. They arrive. They strike—like lightning. They also experience the inspiration of the Muse in a passive way. Ask the real artist: he or she will tell you. It’s a gift. I just write it down. Later I marvel… The artist frets because giving the inspiration its mundane expression is where the trouble begins; that’s where failure is possible. But to receive and then to transform such energy, which comes from another order, the instrument itself, it seems to me, must originate there as well. Thus the two cases are joined.

Thus we have here a two-fold situation: there is an agency capable of receiving—and an inflow that the agent then directs. Let’s call this inflow by the mundane name of “energy.” Energy is perhaps a very suitable concept because its expression may take all kinds of forms—and the forms it takes are modulated by the receiving instrument, in this case the personality. If the energy results in stigmata, it may well be because the receiving mind is fixed in certain rigid ways on a certain delimited pattern, a certain mind-set. The same energy, reaching another person of a more flexible and developed mentality, may produce quite another outcome.

Here Brigitte reminded me of my favorite saint, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). To put it in a single word, she was a genius. I enjoyed some proximity to her as well; in my Army days I used to drive through her town many times, being stationed to the south of her in Bad Kreuznach. This “great seeress and prophetess, called the Sibyl of the Rhine,” (as the Catholic Encyclopedia properly calls her, here) was also an abbess, a poet, a scientist, composer, author, visionary, and public figure of her time. In Hildegard of Bingen, a highly developed instrument, the energy that flowed expressed itself in a higher sphere than the merely physical. But the interaction between two orders is more concretely or obviously exemplified by the sufferings of the stigmatics.
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A good introduction to Therese Neumann is provided by the eponymous book written by Albert Vogl, Tan Books and Publishers, Inc., 1987, and available here.

Weird Squared

Let me now attempt to sketch how, say, a crocodile, might be explained by the weird theory that an order of intelligence, an order of souls, may have invaded the order of matter. Crocodiles are a neat and also difficult example because they appear (to us) as vicious and ugly creatures that prey on innocent zebras and wildebeests. I think you know where I am going.

Serious problems arise when we contemplate this theory in any kind of detail—indeed the same problems arise no matter how we picture the agency behind living, embodied entities. One is that intelligence seems to be required for the arrangement of matter into effectively functioning and self-reproducing chemical machines. The only alternative explanation we have, if not intelligence, is the operation of sheer chance in a cosmic space where movement is possible. But the complexity of life is so great that the odds against this explanation are impossibly high, the time demanded impossibly long. Quite an extensive literature is available critiquing the theory of evolution based on chance. In popular parlance, this is the problem of a hundred monkeys, pounding a hundred typewriters, accidentally producing the collected works of Shakespeare.

Instead of belaboring an explanation based on probability, let’s assume that intelligence must be at work. The dictionary defines it as a power to apprehend facts and their relationships. If you unpack that definition, you ultimately get consciousness. But what we actually see in nature is end-seeking entities that seem to operate without consciousness, at least as we understand that word. How can these observations be reconciled?

I would propose that seeing things at the right scale might turn out to be helpful. I offer an analogy. Would you say that the City of Detroit is intelligent? Obviously by Detroit I don’t mean any official representative of it—not its mayor or its city council. I mean the city itself. The City of Detroit itself is most definitely real. But it is not, actually, in the category of things usually thought to be possessing or lacking intelligence. Next question. Could the City of Detroit have come into being without intelligence? It is literally made of objects all of which clearly testify to the presence of intelligent agents. I think you also suspect where I am going here.

Now to extend this. I claim to be an intelligent agent, but my effective reach diminishes a great deal away from my immediate surroundings. I’m served by highly developed modern transport and communications systems, but I can only form the vaguest comprehensive consciousness of anything as big as Detroit. If asked what Detroit needs or what may be wrong with it, I’m capable of speculation, but individually I cannot do much about it. And if we enlarge the scope, my already nonexistent powers diminish at each step: Michigan, the United States, the Western civilization… I’m less than a molecule at these scales.

Now I turn to an order of intelligence interfering with, or invading, the order of matter. Suppose that this process began at a very small scale—say at the atomic or subatomic level. Why there? Well, it may have begun there because a very subtle power, the power of immaterial intelligence, may only be strong enough actually to influence matter at its lower manifestations, down there where minute quanta of energy are moving. Let us say that souls, intelligences, encountered matter down there in the tiny, examined it, differentiated this from that, drew inferences, understood this, understood that—and, again at the very small scale, began a process of experimentation. Let’s further assume that they found this environment difficult to work in—too much flux, huge, coarse, violent energies, etc. And let us assume that an entire community of such beings, attempting to get a foothold, messing with matter as best they could, fascinated by it—or, alternatively, unable to escape it—at last succeeded in delimiting the disturbance of the material flux by building a spherical container inside of which the flux is low. Here, inside the proto-cell, they next began to optimize this interesting world. The first problem, of course, would be to continue to maintain the wall that keeps things relatively peaceful inside. If we image the scale in the right way, the agencies would be small compared to the proto-cell. And in the same way in which I barely understand Detroit so they, also, barely understood the cell but, collectively they maintained it for their own purposes.

But how do you get from here to crocodiles? It’s not a very great jump. It strikes us as outrageous to imagine an intelligent order creating a biosphere that is hierarchically organized so that the higher feed on the lower—so that crocodiles waste innocent wildebeests so that the green, ugly, scaly things can laze in the sun satiated. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” It’s entirely possible that an intelligent order, limited in its ability to perceive, can produce vast structures that live destructively on others, the others also created by other groupings of the same intelligence. The inhabitants may not be aware of what they’re doing. The crocodile, of course, is a later creature, but its machinery, thus its brain, is still quite limited. The information that flows from it to the inhabitants is not very useful.

Another analogy. When our military in the righteous pursuit of that sacred duty, national security, vast distances away, in brightly shining aircraft (don’t they resemble a little the white teeth of the crocodile?) rain death and destruction on villages in the border zones of Afghanistan and Pakistan, hunting some Al Qaida operative, and producing regrettable collateral damage in the process, is the beast that does this, the United States of America, really conscious? Is any collective really conscious? Are there, perhaps, awakening souls inside the crocodile who mildly mourn the wildebeest?

Life: Some "Weird" Speculation

Seriously entertaining really weird ideas has the merit, minimally, of stimulating the mind. The notion that life may be an intrusion into matter from some other order is such an idea. The initial reaction is: “Ridiculous.” We have a powerful pair of feelings: One is that life is precious and must be preserved at all cost; the other is that life can be lost.

That life itself is necessarily linked to living bodies is powerfully reinforced by observing death—and the consequent disappearance of people we know. This is the overwhelming evidence. Where is grandma? Common sense urges us to acknowledge the facts. Anyone attempting to build another case bears a huge burden of proof. The countering indicators are subjective, meaning that unless we have the experience ourselves, we must credit reports. The very strength with which we cling to bodily life supports the skeptical opinion that any belief in surviving death is wishful thinking—laudable, perhaps, engendered in us by evolution itself to make us fight better and longer, but ultimately an illusion.

Having now made the case for the conventional view, we might be safe enough to consider something weird. Suppose reality is much more rationally organized than we think it is. Suppose that at least two orders exist, an order of matter and an order of souls, and that analogous laws govern each. Let’s assume that conservation laws exist in both realms; here it is the conservation of matter, mass, and energy; there it is the conservation, let us say, of life, consciousness, and individual identity. Each of these orders has its appropriate meaning and justification. What these are is knowable, but not necessarily by us. They’re knowable by something that stands above them. This something would ultimately be God, but quite possibly higher intelligences than ours may also be present in a hierarchy of beings and worlds.

Someone might object here and say that such a formulation isn’t very weird. An ordered hierarchy of being can be found in the Aristotelian/Thomistic, in the Neoplatonic, and in other traditions as well. Granted. Let me then introduce a weird element now.

Let’s suppose that one order of reality intrudes into another. This may be possible because in some sense the orders may “touch” … or because a higher order can perceive a lower but not the other way around … or because either one can influence the other in certain ways. In the last case the lower may limit the higher and the higher may enhance the lower. If souls inhabit a realm of relative freedom—whereas matter is governed by relative necessity—it may be possible that souls are either tempted to explore a lower world or may become entangled in it.

Tempted to explore: Let us suppose here that the material world is perceived and while its character is very strange indeed, curiosity draws souls to enter into it even though dangers are sensed. Here the contact is assumed to be entirely voluntary.

Become entangled in: This situation may come about because the arrangement of the different orders produces “border zones” as it were. The lawful behavior of each order may produce what might be labeled naturalistic situations where, from a conscious perspective, “accidents” can happen. Thus, for instances, random events may take place under the influence of the material order or the material order may be temporarily deformed by contact with a conscious order in which collective will may bend the laws of matter. The entanglement may be involuntary. Or it may take place because of carelessness—the absence of attention, the disregard of warning, neglectful behavior.

We need three assumptions to make this weird speculation plausible. The first is that two orders, although different in kind, must nevertheless be able to influence each other. Thus they must have something in common. The second is that one of the orders must be free in some way but limited in others. The third might be put as a constitutional arrangement of the orders such that they are sufficient to themselves and protected each by its own legal framework and internal arrangement.

Let’s put it more concretely. Soul must be able to influence matter, but in so doing it must yield something of itself to matter in order to achieve this influence. Therefore, to govern matter, the soul must accept limitations that it does not otherwise have. When matter is influenced by soul, it is animated. When the soul relinquishes its hold on matter, it can no longer influence it. Matter then returns to its normal state of being—as does the soul.

Let me elaborate on this. What we know about our current reality is (1) that we have free will but (2) its execution always involves mechanical structures—brain-action, muscular-action, and chemical processes. We also know that in a sense we are the prisoners of bodies. We don’t feel like prisoners—unless, of course, we’re experiencing severe pain. But we are prisoners if we assume another world out there which we cannot reach while we’re embodied. In other words, we cannot leave our bodies at will. (There are exceptions to this generalization, but those exceptions are not part of the general consensus.) We can, of course, kill ourselves and thus escape; but we can’t have any certainty about the consequence of such an act. For all we know we might just disappear. While in bodies we cannot see out except through eyes—and what we see is the material realm. If we existed in some other space before, being in bodies now we’ve definitely moved into another order. We’ve become monads relative to our origin, in Leibnitz’s sense of that word: monads have no windows. We can then reasonably assume that life on earth—assuming that another real world-of-the-soul exists—is a mechanically-rendered mirror of that other one, with all the necessary compromises to make a semblance of that other world work reasonably well in the material dimension. To give one example—keeping in mind Swedenborg’s observations of how people move and associate in heaven and in hell—here on earth we cannot move at will and rapidly to join communities of affinity. If we move at all, it requires that we move our bodies. Those have to live somewhere. Joining communities is difficult. We do the next best thing. We associate as we are able. Here we’re obliged to deal with a rigid arrangement of space. Evidently not in heaven—if Swedenborg saw true.

Turned around, we know from the NDE reports that disembodied souls cannot affect matter. They cannot do so because they’re deprived of the necessary vehicle to express themselves in the physical dimension—the one in which the doctors and nurses who attend to their bodies and the relatives who anxiously await the outcome are “imprisoned.” Cut off from our brains, we can neither talk nor gesture.

All this sounds reasonable enough—and not very weird. The weirdness enters if we seriously contemplate that being in bodies is either a choice we made, along with millions if not trillions of others or a cosmic event in which we are involuntary participants. This strange model of reality, however, makes better sense of the known facts than the conventional view.

The modern view is that life is simply a property of matter. Consciousness is an illusion in that, in actuality, we are completely determined by past events and the lawful behavior of matter. Our freedom is also illusory. With death we disappear. Nothing in our life has any stable meaning. Nor does the universe make any sense. To demand that it make sense is part of our illusory mentality. This is an unvarnished but accurate presentation of modern materialism.

Now I would ask the following. Which model would you label weird? The one I label weird or the modern one?

To this people with more traditional views might respond by saying that they don’t believe that atheistic, positivistic, naturalistic nonsense either. They too assert that the cosmos has a meaningful arrangement. Fine. But traditional religious visions are, alas, also weird! Thus I would suggest that a concept like The Fall is entirely consistent with the model I present above—if we assume that souls don’t belong into the order of matter but may have entered it (no doubt advised to avoid it) by voluntary acts. If those acts plunged a vast community of souls into a pit of sorts, one might legitimately talk about original sin. The functional equivalents are there, if, to be sure, in a more secular garb.

We might want to elaborate this model further to see how it might actually work at the level of detail.

Life's Origin: First Steps

When it comes to the origin of life, we seem able only to come up with two theoretical structures, possibly a third if we combine the other two. One is that life emerges from matter spontaneously by chance. The other is that God creates the living by a special act. The combination, favored in Catholicism, for example, is to picture God creating the cosmos in such a way that life is already present in it; thus at the appointed time, life will emerge from matter. Here the absolute sway of chance is mitigated if not entirely removed; it is replaced at the crucial point by an intention hidden in the very structure of physical reality.

The third solution is both elegant and subtle. It leaves science to follow its naturalistic methodology wherever it might lead without the embarrassments that the intrusive correction of Galileo occasioned for the Church. At the same time it preserves the ultimate ground of creation as an act of God.

When I look at this solution in more detail, however, it has a troubling aspect. If life is hidden somewhere inside of matter, its emergence is a change in degree rather than in kind, and I’m persuaded that life is different in kind. My reason is that life displays teleology, thus it displays purpose. The most obvious evidence of this is reproduction. It is the continuation of a very complex arrangement of matter, what might be called an extremely complex form, by an intricate step-wise method, a whole long chain of intricate processes. We do not encounter anything resembling it in inorganic nature. We do encounter various examples of simple structural changes in response to stimuli, thus the formation of crystalline forms, e.g., snowflakes, but we don’t find anything at that level in which a necessary chain of formations takes place and must take place for the end result to emerge.

Purpose is, strictly speaking, associated only with agency. I grant you that this is an intuitive finding. It takes a special effort to deny that agency is present in living entities. It is observable. To explain it away mechanistically is always possible when the entity manifests in physical form. The physical expression of agency will take place using mechanical means. But to assign agency, purpose, strictly to mechanism requires that we willfully ignore that which we really see and feel. It is literally impossible to deny that we feel purpose. It's presumptuous on our part to deny the same feeling to dogs, to plants, indeed even to cells. What we observe is a difference in awareness, not a difference in end-seeking tendency. This is the same-old, same-old battle between two ways of perceiving. I don’t want to waste time on it. But the point I’m after here is that the third solution, given above, namely that life is embedded in the cosmic whole from the start, that it permeates matter so that, in the ripeness of time, it may emerge, that solution doesn’t please me. Even when offered by Catholic thinkers, it still reminds me of panpsychism.

There is a version of this mode of thought that I find much less troubling. It is that two (or at least two) orders of reality are present in the cosmos. David Bohm, the physicist, formulated this conception as the presence in the Whole of a conditioned and an unconditioned order. You can find this idea in Bohm’s Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 1996. Another way to put this is that an order of agencies or souls exists and so does an order of matter. There may be many other mansions in the Lord’s house as well, but here I’m pondering two. This sort of concept can be imagined as two orders that coexist and possibly also interpenetrate—and under certain circumstances the unconditioned order may, in fact, act upon the conditioned order where circumstances permit such interactions. Both, however, exist independently. As for their origin, my view is simply that if agency exists at all, its origin must be God. The unconditioned order, of course, has both consciousness and freedom; that freedom is clearly delimited, as we see from our circumstances. It isn’t, in us, omnipotence. But it has freedom as the order of matter does not.

The difference I see in this position, call it 3A for convenience, is that it keeps separate what are, in my view, two orders, separate in kind, not one rising from the other. I can thus imagine a community of spirits becoming entangled in matter, seduced by it, as it were, and, over long periods of time, building a strange intermediate world of incarnation just because it’s possible. In my science-fiction role I’ve named this chemical civilization. Thus all of life is a construct by spiritual agencies, working on their own. They don’t originate life—because they are life. But they cause it to manifest in matter, where it does not properly belong. This notion first arose in me when studying biology as a grown man with three children. It has long intrigued me because it fits in many ways that which I see displayed in biology. What it requires is that we also imagine the possibility of many grades of consciousness—upward and down. We find no difficulty imagining higher beings—we even have names form them: angels, whole choirs of them. We find it difficult to imagine spirits operating in vast choirs of their own at levels way lower than ours.

This conceptualization demands a cosmology different from the Aristotelian/Thomistic which builds its hierarchy from unformed matter to absolute act. Thus I’m challenging a tradition vastly more grown-up than I am. But I find that hierarchy difficult in spots. Since it goes on into orders of spirit, ever higher, it does not seem to have a proper justification for matter—unless it is to make sense of man. But what if man is just trespassing on matter? What if original sin has another meaning yet? What if matter has a different explanation?

Obviously there is more to say here, but these posts shouldn’t get too long.

Views on "Life"

If a self continues to exist after the body fails, what do we call the surviving state? Is it “life”? Common usage seems to think so. We speak of life everlasting, life in the hereafter, and survival of death. But we seem to have two things in mind. We also have a down-home definition; it involves breathing, warmth, movement, and the ability to pick up signals. When the body stirs and we cry out, “Oh, thank God! He’s still alive,” we’re not talking about souls. We’re talking about bodies. Can definitions help us sort out this seeming dualism in our own conceptions?

Merriam-Webster produces a number of key words; they have one thing in common; they’re intangible in character. Life is a quality, per Webster; it is a principle or force; and it is a capacity. The definition using that last word comes closest to identifying life with bodies: “an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction.” If we try to determine what the word capacity itself means, we get “facility or power to produce, perform, or deploy.” And if we seek out the definition of a principle, the most suitable definition the dictionary gives is “an underlying faculty or endowment.” A faculty is a capacity; an endowment is a form of energy or, ahem, capacity.

Life thus seems to be force; power has the same meaning; capacity carries the sense of potential awaiting actualization. Next question: What originates this force? Humanity provides two answers.

One is that life manifests as matter and is therefore one aspect of the material world. Its force is different only in degree and application from (say) the force exerted by the sun in holding planets in their orbits or of the earth in throwing magma up into the air.

The other answer is dualistic. The life-force isn’t physical but something transcending the material order. It is spirit. This view develops into various alternative formulations: one spirit manifests in countless entities; many individual spirits exist and have always done so; their “descent” into matter is what we call life; one God made and continues to create many individual entities; they are endowed with spiritual powers but these ultimately come from and are maintained in force by one agency, God.

But, it seems, bodies get their energy from food and oxygen; life-force is a burning process; no invisible spirit need be invoked in producing that, surely. The dualist answers: Yes, true. The life-force is not the ordinary energy of bodies; bodies are material in composition and must be moved by energies appropriate to them. But the life-force is the constituting and maintaining force; it causes bodies to cohere in highly organized wholes. This may be understood if we think of the soul as giving life to bodies and the soul’s departure as depriving bodies of life. We normally think of this relationship in reverse. Souls exist because bodies do. When bodies die the soul disappears (materialism) or the soul becomes homeless, so-to-speak (transcendentalism).

The soul as a “constituting/maintaining” agency corresponds to the dictionary definition of life as a principle—in the sense defined above. It is the enabling overlord. An analogy. Let’s take a very small woman (to emphasize her relative physical weakness); she decides to build a mansion on a distant, hilly, rocky stretch of land. She has the means to do this, the money and the will. Money is a good analogy; it is an invisible force in that confidence alone gives those dirty dollar bills or that printed check its real value. Machines do the heavy work of land-clearing and digging out the basement; the heavy work of lifting stone and timber; other, able, brawny men do the rest. All of these “tools” operate off a plan drawn up by the architect, but the tiny lady approved images of the structure and of the layout within it. At last, roads having been built to the place, everything connected, she walks into her house. She lacked the capacity to accomplish most of the actual labor involved, yet here she is, the real owner. No, I couldn’t tell you how my liver really works…

It is of course legitimate enough to label this as a fanciful metaphor with no necessary relationship to actuality. But the metaphor gains plausibility when we contemplate the evidence provided by near-death experiences. They suggest that, indeed, we go somewhere; they suggests that, without some kind of material machinery, we are unable to affect matter. They suggest further that, on the other side, in another order, something more naturally accessible to us—without the very coarse space-suit that we are obliged to wear in this dimension—actually exists. Alas, we don’t have equivalent accounts of people recounting their births. If we did, we could be even more certain.

"Other-Worldly" NDEs

Most but not all people who have near-death experiences either “travel” or “find themselves” in another world. Even those who only report an out-of-body experience in ordinary space and don’t enter the new dimension may be aware of it; they may see the world or, at least, an entrance to it. Here is a sample from a report from C.G. Jung’s Synchronicity (Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 92), about a woman who never “entered” the other world:

All this time [thus while observing the doctor and the nurse after a difficult delivery] she knew that behind her was a glorious, park-like landscape shining in the brightest colors, and in particular an emerald green meadow with short grass, which sloped gently upwards beyond a wrought-iron gate leading into the park. It was spring, and little gay flowers such as she had never seen before were scattered about in the grass. The whole demesne [domain] sparkled in the sunlight, and all the colors were of an indescribable splendor. The sloping meadow was flanked on both sides by dark green trees. It gave her the impression of a clearing in the forest, never yet trodden by the foot of man. “I knew that this was the entrance to another world, and that if I turned round to gaze at the picture directly, I should feel tempted to go in at the gate, and thus step out of life.” She did not actually see this landscape, as her back was turned to it, but she knew it was there. She felt there was nothing to stop her from entering in through the gate. She only knew that she would turn back to her body and would not die.

To this I would add by way of observation that some people report ability to see in all directions, thus all around the circle of which they form the center—even when their attention is focused in one direction only—forward, whatever that means in this context.

Those who “travel” report passing through what many call a tunnel at the end of which appears the proverbial light; the light signals the destination; when it is reached it unfolds as a scene often quite similar to the one described above. Here people become visible and receive Mary (our stand-in) as she arrives. Among them often, but not always, is someone often described as a “luminous being” from whom benevolence radiates. Mary finds it easy to communicate with those who thus receive her; if she is average, she will report that the communication is something other than what we call speech in ordinary life—but that it functions in the same way; it is a kind of thought-exchange.

The experiences reported are varied, but a process of decision soon becomes the center of focus. Should the self continue into this new reality or should it, instead, return to ordinary life? The choice is sometimes made by the self. The self, if left to choose, decides to return; if it doesn’t we obviously wouldn’t hear about the experience at all. Interestingly enough, the lady who is the subject of C.G. Jung’s report also ends on a decision—but the decision is already made. In contrast to such situations, sometimes the luminous figure or another figure of authority (a relative) tells the self that its time to go hasn’t arrived yet. Mary must go back. In many cases the person resists this judgment and wishes to stay—but cannot. The NDE rapidly ends after the decision is made or communicated. Mary next reports awakening at the hospital, at the scene of the mishap, or in some other setting linked to the event of trauma that triggered the NDE.

Today I want to focus narrowly at two aspects of this second phase, those I’ve highlighted already: (1) the self sees another world and there is able to communicate with entities whereas, in the worldly phase, it is not; and (2) the chief content of this phase is a decision which evidently has two possible outcomes.

The world that Mary sees is evidently a border area of another region. All reporters think that they are in another world. The images in which this is expressed vary but have the essential meaning, as Raymond Moody puts it in his book, of a “border or limit.” The scene will include a fence, a door, a body of water, a mist—or a gate, as in the case that Jung relates. The qualitative difference between our dimension and that one is signaled by emphasizing its beauty, its strangeness (“flowers … she had never seen before”), unusual architecture, and intensity of light or color. The presence of departed relatives, whom Mary recognizes, suggests that they have certainly not disappeared forever, for here they are; the ability to communicate with them suggests that, in her present disembodied form, Mary is better adapted to that world than the one she left behind.

The vision of that world is limited. And the chief reason for that seems to be precisely that the person reporting the experience did not penetrate deeply into that world but remained, throughout, in the, well, border zone. Why there? We discover the reason for that in the “content” of this encounter. Its aim is to decide which way Mary should proceed. A decision must be reached. And, evidently—at least in many cases—the decision could go either way. Return is the outcome--otherwise we'd know nothing about it.

I will leave commentary on this phase for another posting and conclude here simply by saying that in the aggregate, these accounts are coherent. They appear to depict a natural process of transition; it begins when the body seems to fail. The self is already “competent” to continue in that world; it can certainly communicate with the dead, if not the living; it meets a sample of the “population” that is at home “over there.” In NDE cases, self-evidently (because the people later are revived) the bodily functions are only temporarily damaged; therefore a choice remains.

Traditions on the Soul

As briefly sketched in the last post, we have at minimum indicators that souls can persist without a bodily substrate; the same reports also indicate that while the disembodied self is able to perceive the world through some analog of sight and hearing, it seems unable to affect the material dimension that it can see and hear. Today I want to glance briefly at humanity’s traditions concerning the soul—and how those views resonate with near-death reports.

The picture out there is the usual wondrous confusion. Within Christianity, for instance, we have conflicting view. The Apostle’s Creed specifically singles out “the resurrection of the body” just before it concludes with the final article of belief in “life everlasting.” Within Catholicism—but not exclusively in Catholicism—the focus is on the soul, not on the body-soul composite. Here we encounter the concept of purgatory, for example. At the same time the Church also asserts the resurrection of the body as a dogmatic article of faith. Souls are immortal and hence cannot be said to return to life—therefore resurrection of the body. What we encounter here is a mixing of scriptural and philosophical conceptions not satisfactorily sorted—in my opinion, anyway. The sorting, in effect, is accomplished by dividing time into two great sections; the first is the reality in which we now find ourselves; the second is another one that, curiously, begins “at the end of time,” thus at the beginning of another dispensation.

The popular Greek and the Hindu views of soul present an interesting contrast. The Greeks conceived of embodied life as the proper and, as it were, the full expression of the self. Souls survive the death of bodies but, thereafter, live as ghosts or shades; they lack something they ought to have; hence they continue to exist but in a diminished form. This view is nicely put by Homer in the Odyssey. Ulysses visits Hades and there encounters the great hero, Achilles. In conversation with the hero, Ulysses lauds him as a great prince among the dead.

“Say not a word,” [Achilles] answered, “in death’s favour; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.” Odyssey 11.488.

In the Hindu conceptualization the soul is something permanent and eternal, indeed uncreated, a particle of divinity. Thus it pre-exists any and all of its incarnations. But its incarnations are, in effect, a form of inferior existence that selves suffer rather than enjoy; the suffering comes from ignorance. Ultimate bliss comes from successful detachment from the material realm, thus from bodies. If any karmic weight clings to the soul on its departure, it will be drawn into yet another undesirable incarnation. Where the ancient Greeks deplored the shades, the Hindus still grieve over the living.

In the Christian tradition, incidentally, Origen (185-254) also held that souls pre-existed their appearance in bodies. Not surprisingly he also denied the body’s resurrection. His views were later anathamized by the Fifth Ecumenical Council (545).

Plato’s view of soul is functionally similar to the Hindus’—but with none of the pessimistic coloration that darkens Indian cosmology. The soul is immaterial and therefore immortal (“incorruptible” in the sense that it’s indivisible); it continues after death. Aristotle—whose enormous powers of rationality, I think, caused him to lean in the direction of materialism—conceived of the genuinely real, or actual, as formed matter. Thus people are substances composed of bodies and souls, but the soul is the form of the body and the body is the matter of the soul—and if you separate these two, you don’t have anything real. This is known as the doctrine of matter-form or substance dualism. Only substances are real. Unformed matter or immaterial soul have no ontological status. They’re merely potentials—reminiscent of ghosts or shades. Aristotle, therefore, did not believe that souls survive the passing of the bodies. He did, however, indicate a vague sort of belief in the permanence of intellect. But it's best, in this context, not to confuse “intellect” with “person.”

Ancient materialists—the only two I’m able to name are Democritus (c.460-370 BC) and Lucretius (c.99-55 BC)—both held the doctrine that souls were formed of very subtle atoms. These, much like the coarser atoms that make up the body, disperse into the flux of the world on death. Hence souls do not “survive,” meaning that the clusters of fine atoms do not continue to cohere.

* * *

In looking at these traditions in light of what we can discern of souls in the early stage (I call it the “worldly” phase) of near-death experiences, what seems evident is that the Aristotelian matter-form doctrine may not be right; the “form” seems to survive—if indeed the soul is the body’s form or constituting agency.

The conventional Greek view of “ghost” or “shade” seems mildly confirmed in that the disembodied self is incapable to acting on the world—isn’t heard when Mary or John attempt to speak to doctors, nurses, or their relatives. Experiencers report frustration when they can’t communicate. But that the “life in Hades” is indeed wretched is denied in the later phase of this experience, what I’ve called the “other-worldly” phase of NDEs—as we shall see.

The early phase certainly doesn’t contradict the Hindu view of things; the soul is still there even though the body is in its last stages of cohesion; it might go on and be reborn again. Contrarian indications are present in that, upon departure from the body, no person undergoing such an experience appears to regain memories of previous lives—while still fully possessing memories of this one. But nothing here suggests that later on such memories might not return.

That form of the Christian view which emphasizes the importance of the soul is certainly confirmed. As for the unique importance of one particular body, such that its resurrection becomes important, on that subject the near-death experience is largely silent.

The "Worldly" Phase of NDEs

From within an ideational culture (see last post) the testimony of those with near-death experiences is not at all astonishing but, on the contrary, supports the general belief that we are going somewhere after life’s travails. Let’s examine the experience now without the interfering business of having continuously to make the case for an independent soul. The first aspect of NDEs I find worth noting is that these states usually have two phases, each with interesting implications. One is a “this-worldly” and the second an “other-worldly” aspect. I want to look at the first phase today.

The subject, let’s call her Mary, first experiences her own awareness outside of her body. She sees the hospital bed, the operating room, or the scene of an accident—the situation, in other words, where something decides that she is now on her own. Her perceptions are sharp and clear. Not only does she see, she also hears, and her mind is working quite normally. Mary may very well, if she is average, later relate that her thinking was sharper than ever in ordinary life. What she hears is the noises in the environment and the talk of the doctors, nurses, or attending relatives.

This consciousness of the ordinary world becomes an important aspect of the evidentiary character of NDEs. What she sees and hears can be pinned down in time and then examined in light of the medical observations recorded at the same time. If Mary was comatose at the moment of a particular observation—when the doctor, for example, called for electric shock to restart the heart—if Mary’s brain was no longer functioning at the moment—and if, of course, all the while her eyes were shut—how then could she see, hear, understand, and also form very accurate memories? One logical explanation of such data is that consciousness can operate without our sensory apparatus and the information gained (however it is gained) can be understood and also remembered outside of a bodily frame of reference.

Some subjects also report that they made attempts to communicate with doctors, nurses, or family members in attendance—usually to assure them that all was well. Mary, after all, was still there and feeling no pain. Notably, these attempts invariably fail. Others present at the scene are keenly aware of Mary’s presence as a body in distress; but they are entirely unconscious of Mary as a communicating self. She is neither seen nor heard—although she sees and hears.

Let’s give this a clear conceptual formulation. Those in bodies can see and manipulate the physical dimension but cannot perceive anything beyond it. Those outside of bodies can perceive the physical dimension but cannot act on it without a body. The physical, therefore, is accessible in a limited way from a spiritual order (to give it a name), an order where Mary now temporarily finds herself. The very character of her current situation—comatose, etc.—seems to enable her to perceive the physical in a new way but also prevents her from acting upon it. She is communicating, or trying to do so, but she cannot induce her brain to move her vocal chords in order to set up air vibrations that doctors and nurses can pick up with ears and then decode. They, in turn, encased in bodies and tuned in to sensory inputs entirely, cannot perceive Mary and understand her communication in what appears to be a much more subtle medium. It may be, indeed, that they do hear her at some level; that, at least, seems sensible to me. But it must be that the sensory “noise” is so greatly distracting that the more subtle message, from Mary, does not register sufficiently to reach the agent at the center of that bodily structure. It would seem that the subtle message should be more easily heard: it is closer to the true nature of the agent doing the understanding. This, however, is not what happens—and that fact, alone, may be an interesting indicator either of the “problem” or of the “purpose” of embodiment: separation from something higher.

What the NDE appears to show is that the soul is independent of the body. It throws off the body when it appears to be beyond repair. Outside the body the self appears to be in a different environment but one which seems to permeate the physical without directly influencing it. In the body, however, the self appears to be captured. Other paranormal evidence—and instances from the lives of saints and highly accomplished seers and such—would seem to indicate that this state of “capture” is by no means absolute, that it can be mitigated. But I’ll get to that some other time, God willing and the crick don’t rise. Here I will finish with the notation that all manner of interesting philosophical questions and metaphysical speculations arise from the mere observation Mary and her brothers, sisters report from near-encounters with death. Are we meant to be in bodies? Does an Aristotelian-Thomistic hierarchical arrangement of reality make sense? Are we here voluntarily? Is the sojourn in bodies a kind of training? Much to ponder.

Is Evidence Subject to Debate?

That would depend, it seems to be, on who is engaging in the debate. The line of thought that I began pursuing in the last posting strongly suggests that thought takes place within environments. Indeed, until we’ve produced or selected a broad framework in which to think, we are engaged in something else: we are attempting to find an orientation, we’re clearing land, surveying, and otherwise preparing the ground for thought. This conclusion is almost self-evident. We don’t start thinking suddenly. We’re raised in cultural settings; we learn to think while using mental tooling formed and perfected over many generations by others. We in turn make our contribution and pass on.

In one sense there are as many cultures as individuals. Families have cultures, small communities ditto, and so on up the line to very large collectives. At the same time cultures can be divided into two fundamental kinds: those spiritually and those materially oriented. The Russian sociologist, Pitirim Sorokin, renders these as ideational (spiritual) and as sensate (materialistic). He also thinks that in periods of transition, the Renaissance being an example, the two forms mix. I will content myself with the two basic forms because I somewhat doubt that a real mixing is possible.

The ultimate problem for thought—or for the evaluation of evidence—is that these two position are incompatible. I’m tempted to pile on the adjectives: radically, totally, absolutely, and so on. But a naked “incompatible” will do. Here different a priori premises define all that follows; one cannot reconcile this difference at later stages of the argument. The ideational position begins with the acceptance, a priori, of an immaterial reality; its evidence is the sheer fact that we are, know it, and therefore we are conscious. Consciousness cannot be logically reduced to matter; therefore the soul is immaterial. The sensate position denies precisely this basic starting premise of the other side; it asserts the priority of inorganic matter. In effect it never reaches consciousness because it views it as a negligible by-product of brain functioning (mind is an epiphenomenon).

These two sides can’t debate. What are usually labeled debates are efforts to attract a following. To rally a following is, in essence, a form of politics, certainly not philosophy. Or metaphysics. Or theology. There are countless examples of such debates not least, on one side, the rash of books promoting atheism and, on the other, the intelligent design (ID) argument contra Darwin. Such squabbles may have a secondary benefit in helping people orient themselves—thus choosing a framework of thought in which to abide. The best way to identify this sort of ideological activity is to look at the tooling being used. If the argument makes use of physics, biology, or some other natural science to argue—whether it is for or against spirituality—you can be certain that the argument is ideological. So far as I’m concerned, basing a spiritual interpretation on quantum mechanics is still materialism. And so is an argument based on very spiritual-sounding entities like memes, complexity theory, or the Collective Unconscious.

What is interesting is the popular manifestation of this mixed-up situation. The sharp difference in fundamental premises is obscured. The ideational position appears to be grounded on God or, in a more philosophical contexts, where God is assigned to theology, on Being. God’s existence is held to be a matter of debate because in a mixed culture such as ours the best evidence is thought to be something physical out there. There is no physical out there that is evidence for God. Thus a population that is vaguely spiritual in orientation—because, it seems, it comes as a natural endowment—nevertheless gives standing to another ideology. The nihilistic conclusions of the sensate viewpoint, to be sure, are not loudly proclaimed; where they are touted at all, it is as emblems of superior status.

From a point of view like my own—let us say someone who likes to do his own thinking—the real grounding of the ideational position has the strongest possible evidence: it is our internal experience of the self. God becomes a necessary inference if we take this evidence seriously, if we assume, in other words, that we have meaning and that our personally felt meaning has a real foundation, isn’t merely an illusion, has ontological reality. To be sure, we operate at all times as if this were true—ignoring troubled, suicidal states. If it is—especially in light of our personal impermanence on this plane—then it requires a grounding in a transcending Meaning, call it what we may.

Now to the question posed in the title. Debates take place within a framework—else they don’t deserve the name. All sides must share the same grounding premises. Concepts, similarly, must hold their definitions and not undergo strange morphings along the way. If the evidence for anything, let us say for NDEs, takes place within a framework, why not debate it? Something of value may emerge. Across frameworks, however, discussions lose all relevance.

NDEs as Evidence

No sooner had I finished the last posting than I had second thoughts. These arose because the experience of life somewhat contradicts formal distinctions such as those that I presented, thus between philosophy and metaphysics. Thought and knowledge live in the real world, as it were, and in personal experience, we’re interested in how things feel. We live our knowledge and only occasionally reflect back upon it in formal ways. An illustration of what I have in mind is the near death experience (NDE) and the literature, pro and con, that has developed around it.

The NDE is a genuinely modern phenomenon, but its modern character is not, when you reflect upon it, all that surprising. The medical arts are ultimately responsible that we have such reports in sufficient numbers to form the basis of investigation and debunking. Most of those who are today resuscitated almost routinely from severe injuries or illnesses would have died before 1900. In the twentieth century medicine had advanced enough so that Raymond Moody could assemble and publish a sampling of NDEs in his book Life After Life (1950).

The essence of an NDE is that a patient, in what is a critical condition, experiences an out-of-body experience. He or she observes the body lying on the operating table—or, say, at the site of an automotive accident. Afterwards the patient may have the experience of entering another world and meeting relatives and luminous beings. All those who render such reports recover from the trauma—else we wouldn’t have the stories. This is the essence of the NDE.

In Moody’s wake came a series of other medical people who carried on investigations of this sort. Some medical practitioners have also engaged in the systematic debunking of the NDE—not that it happened but suggesting that what NDErs had reported had nothing to do with out-of-body trips much less trips to heaven or hell. No. It could all be explained by physiological events in the brain.

Three ways of looking at this kind of evidence will give me an occasion to look at real life approaches to the evidence. One is my own, one is that of the debunkers, and one is by a hypothetical observer suspended in that vague space that modern life creates: impressed by science but reflexively traditional.

I well remember my own reaction to Moody’s book when I first read it years ago. It was, “Well, there you are!” I didn’t see Moody’s cases as evidence so much as confirmation of something I already knew. I knew it because I’d thought about life after death for many years already. I felt comfortable with the hypothesis because we accept metaphysical postulates if they are formulated comprehensively, if aspects of them don’t violate our broader structures of understanding, and if they add meaning to reality. My quarrels with certain metaphysical structures are not caused by their lack “positive” proof; when I quarrel with them, it is because they carry tenets that don’t seem to me supportable in my own tentative cosmology. Thus, in effect, I treat certain metaphysical theses as matters of fact—although less sharply resolved than matters, say, of chemistry or of consciousness or of will. I don’t draw very sharp lines in day-to-day life.

The debunking responses to Moody (and they swiftly followed Life After Life) illustrate another mindset. It rests on another metaphysical postulate, namely that nothing can be real unless it is materially detectable. For people who hold this position, there can be no evidence ever that might point in a transcendental direction. Books like Moody’s therefore, presented as such evidence—by an author who bears the letters M.D. behind his name, letters that the publishers, of course, never fail to put on the cover for everyone to see—represents a challenge to a world-view. It must be dealt with. But this hurry to defend the meaningless universe has a peculiar character too. It can, at best, convince those who haven’t done their homework.

I read the debunking articles myself, of course, but for me to do so is to engage in anthropology. The same people who wish to explain away the NDE also deny that consciousness or free will exist. Now I haven’t had an NDE and hence have no direct experience, but when it comes to consciousness and will, I happen to own the evidence personally. Thus I’ve learned to discount any debunking argument. Views like that have no standing in my court, as it were.

The third position is that of people who, for whatever reasons, have not delved into these matters directly, personally, and to any depths at all. They reflect the culture, and the culture, brother, he/she is mixed, like that pronoun. The culture rests upon a traditional view. That view rests on religious doctrines. The scientific overlay, particularly science as ideology, dominant in the academy, reflected back in the media, contradicts the tradition. For this person who has studied neither deposit with any energy, Moody’s had the peculiar effect of showing that, finally, science has found evidence for the hereafter. Raymond Moody, M.D. Alas, Moody’s evidence has no more scientific standing that the Gaia hypothesis. But for the person reacting in this way, words like tradition and science have a quite different meaning. They are like brand-names. They carry authority with a certain amount of experiential backing. Mom’s advice is sound. And the way they dealt with that ear infection at the hospital—wow! Science. And just look at that I-Pod of mine.