Part III

Reincarnation 2.0

“The soul is not bound by the formula of mental humanity:
it did not begin with that and will not end with it; it had
a pre-human past, it has a superhuman future.”
- Sri Aurobindo

“Man has never yet applied the methods of modern science to the problem which most profoundly concerns him—whether or not his personality involves any element which can survive bodily death.” Those words are from the founding father of survival research, Frederick Myers, whose groundbreaking book Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was published in 1903. In the intervening century, interest in the subject has waxed and waned, but Myers himself could not have foreseen just how much the field he pioneered has expanded in the last decades. With a tremendous influx of new data and a growing number of scholars subjecting that data to rigorous analysis, there is hope that we may soon have a scientific answer to the question of what happens after death. But even as we consider the growing evidence for reincarnation and survival, we also need to ask another question: How does the way we think about death and rebirth—the philosophical framework through which we interpret the data—need to be updated for a postmodern, post-traditional world? As I spoke with many of the contemporary scholars who are pioneering this field, this question kept arising in my mind. Indeed, as reincarnation becomes more accepted through the work of people such as Ian Stevenson and others, and as we begin to dip our exploratory toes into the nonphysical dimensions of existence, it makes sense that many of the traditional metaphysical systems associated with these concepts may need to be reexamined. Otherwise we may be in danger of defaulting to old assumptions and outdated conclusions about how it all works and what it all means.

Reincarnation is, after all, a premodern notion that came to prominence around the same time as many of the world’s great wisdom traditions. Those traditions developed elaborate metaphysical systems of death and rebirth and detailed maps of the nonphysical realms. But they constructed their philosophies based on an understanding of the world that was significantly less developed than our own. As profound and important as these ancient systems are, they can often be problematic in a modern context. They tend to contain many elements—mythologies, beliefs, and superstitions—that no longer seem relevant given what we have learned about the world during the last two thousand years. For example, premodern traditions knew nothing about evolution. They did not know what science has come to understand—that we live in an unstable, evolving universe full of flux, change, and contingency. That is exactly the opposite of the picture painted by most traditional maps of reality. So it is no wonder that many of the metaphysical systems given to us by our religious traditions do not mesh well with the world revealed by modern science. Ancient belief in a static universe once begat a static metaphysics; contemporary knowledge of a living, evolving universe should give birth to a living, evolving metaphysics.

Ken Wilber is one of the first philosophical voices to recognize this. He points out that the esoteric maps and cosmologies of our religious traditions were based upon “interpretations of living experiences.” And those interpretations were consistent with the philosophical assumptions of the time. These maps, he explains, should not be related to as if they were “fixed, rigid, ontological grids that are true for all eternity.” Indeed, as we examine the data revealed in our own “living experiences” of these same nonphysical realms—as we analyze OBEs, NDEs, interlife memories, and other such experiences—we have to be willing to update our maps for our own time and, even more importantly, keep updating them.

What would this mean? Well, let’s start with a common premodern idea associated with reincarnation—the soul. It is natural, if we believe in reincarnation, to acknowledge the existence of something like a soul—an aspect of the self that is able to survive death, navigate the nonphysical world, and eventually incarnate in a new physical body. Stevenson has called this entity the “psychofore,” and physicist Amit Goswami has taken to referring to it as the “quantum monad.” Wilber himself equates the traditional soul with what he calls the “subtle body.” But regardless of what we call it, the essential point is: How would an updated philosophical context change the way we understand the soul?

In most premodern traditions, the soul is thought of as immortal—a permanent entity created by a higher power designed to interact with physical form. Some traditions talk about “the descent of the soul into matter” or describe the soul as being “sent down to be mixed in with this material world.” That was similar to how many religious traditions used to see human beings—designed in God’s image and placed on earth by a divine hand. Darwin’s revolution helped overturn that entire worldview, and we took our place within a much larger developmental stream of life. With the advent of this perspective, humans were no longer seen to have been fashioned in the workshop of a creator but were instead the latest step in a journey of evolution that has been in process for billions of years. Like all plants and animals, humans were understood to have emerged over time, products of the evolutionary process. But thus far, evolutionary theory has been applied only to the physical dimension, the spiritual dimension of life having been left out of the revolution. As the great French philosopher Henri Bergson noted in the early twentieth century, “The great error of the doctrines on the spirit has been . . . isolating the spiritual life from all the rest, by suspending it in space as high as possible above the earth. . . .”

Indeed, we have not yet extended the evolution revolution to apply to the nonphysical dimensions of existence. But why shouldn’t we? What if souls, for lack of a better word, didn’t just emerge out of creation fully formed but were actually created through the process of evolution in the same way that brains were? That would mean that the soul is not a permanent, ever-existing entity any more than a cell is a permanent, ever-existing entity. It has, instead, evolved over time and will continue to evolve in the future. While many of the people I spoke with talked about the “evolution of the soul,” what they were referring to is individual development from lifetime to lifetime. I began to realize that very few were really looking at the soul as being part of the larger stream of ongoing cosmic evolution. Dr. Bruce Greyson speculated with me about how we might understand the evolution of an entity called a “soul”:

You can look at the evolution of a soul from a physical perspective and try to make hypotheses about why having a soul makes your survival and your reproductive potential higher—what function did souls serve in terms of keeping our bodies alive? Or you can also look at it from a spiritual perspective and say that souls are evolving spiritual entities and that the body developed as a way of helping the soul develop. In that context, the development of the soul is the evolutionary process that’s important and the body is just a tool that the soul uses to further its own development.

Or you can take a more wave/particle view and say that the physical and the spiritual evolve together and you can’t have one evolving without the other; they’re two sides of a coin. Then, when you talk about physical evolution, there’s also a corresponding spiritual evolution that goes along with it. So at what point did primitive molecules organize enough to be called a cell? When can you say that something becomes an animal? That something becomes a human being? I think you can ask the same question about a spiritual entity—at what point does something become a soul?

What if we applied Greyson’s line of reasoning not only to the soul but to the subtle worlds we have been examining? Indeed, the nonphysical dimensions of existence are also easy to leave out of the evolutionary drama of life. Like our traditional notions of the soul, these realms, when they are acknowledged at all, are considered to be permanent, always existing, and outside the stream of evolution that most of us have come to accept as affecting all of physical existence. They are considered to be, to borrow Wilber’s phrase, “fixed, rigid, ontological grids that are true for all eternity.” But what if we didn’t assume that? What if the nonphysical dimensions of life are evolving in the same way that the physical dimensions of life are? What if it is all tied together? Indeed, if there is anything the data from NDEs, OBEs, and children’s interlife memories seem to agree on, it is that the subtle worlds of the interlife are, to some degree, psycho-plastic to our own consciousness. They are deeply affected by our thoughts, motives, and intentions, and we can surmise that they are themselves changing and evolving in accordance with our own psychological, spiritual, and cultural evolution. That would mean that it’s all—physical and nonphysical, material and immaterial, gross and subtle—part of one evolutionary process.

Viewing nonphysical dimensions of existence within an evolutionary context has a rather dramatic result. It means that the actual process of reincarnation is probably not entirely the same as it was two thousand years ago, and two thousand years from now it won’t be the same as it is today. It suggests that its evolution is likely intrinsically tied to our evolution. And that would mean that our own actions and our own consciousness—our own evolution, in other words—will profoundly contribute to the unfolding and development not only of what we call the material world but also of all the realms, dimensions, and processes that are interacting and interconnected with it. Perhaps even the process of reincarnation is destined to evolve in ways that we cannot now foresee.

Many of the great revolutions in human thought have had two important consequences—they have brought greater humility and new perspective to human life. The revolution of Copernicus placed humans outside their privileged place at the center of the universe for the first time in history, forcing a dramatic change in our collective self-perception. And it simultaneously opened up whole new vistas for our attention and exploration. The revolution of Freud showed us that the conscious ego is not necessarily at the center of the self and that there are other unconscious influences, personal and collective, that make up who we are. And it simultaneously opened up territory for inner exploration. The revolution of Darwin placed humanity within the context of a much larger evolutionary scheme, embedding us within the overall matrix of life on earth. And it opened up the doorway for us to take responsibility for our own development and dream as never before of a brighter future. Could the recognition of reincarnation and a new appreciation of the nonphysical dimensions of existence ultimately have the same humbling and expanding effect on human consciousness? Could it be that we will yet again be awed by the recognition of how much more there is to this vast universe than is yet dreamt of in our philosophy, how much more there is to human life and the human self than we could possibly understand by referencing only one brief lifetime? Will we begin to comprehend that we are deeply connected to other processes, forces, and dimensions, seen and unseen, physical and nonphysical, that are acting on us and influencing us at levels of which we are barely conscious? And could that recognition in turn inspire us to take greater responsibility for those forces and to create a future in which we are no longer unconsciously stumbling through the cycle of reincarnation but evolving in such a way that might ultimately transform the very nature of death and rebirth itself?

The trouble with statements about death, as one popular aphorism points out, is that 99.9 percent of them are made by people who are still alive. Death continues to be, at this point in time, one of life’s enduring mysteries. Whatever the miracles of modern science, and whatever glimpses we have been afforded of the world beyond, an objective understanding of what happens after death may always an enticing but ultimately ungraspable goal, a mirage forever receding on the horizon of our culture. But we live in a rapidly changing world, and in so many areas of life, the previously unthinkable is becoming possible. Perhaps one day in the not-too-distant future, we may wake up to find that, miraculously, death itself has become transparent to the ever-expanding field of human knowledge. And like the Tibetans hundreds of years ago, we may find ourselves rewriting the book on what happens at the end of life . . . and at the beginning.