This article is the second in a series about alchemy. In the first I discussed the career of Sir Isaac Newton, and how his passion for alchemy and its related philosophy influenced and led to his scientific ideas. Here I’m going to try to address the question of how alchemy might be achieved. For the record and to avoid any misunderstanding, I should perhaps say that I am not an alchemist, have never tried it, have no inside knowledge about it, nor am I a member of any secret society. What follows therefore are personal reflections, pure speculation from an outsider’s perspective about how alchemy might be successful.

    According to the modern scientific worldview, the transmutation of one element into another is obviously considered impossible, ridiculous even to contemplate, and belief in it even a sign of madness (e.g. Grant Piper’s article, the inspiration for this series). In order to hypothesise how it might be possible, we therefore have to find an alternative understanding of how the universe works. In very general terms, the scientific worldview is based on the premise that matter precedes mind. All the great religions and esoteric traditions, however, say that mind precedes matter, that the primal state of the universe is a oneness of pure consciousness (i.e. the divine mind), and that everything that exists, whether material or otherwise, has ultimately been thought into existence by this primal Oneness.

    In his book The Secret History of the World¹ Jonathan Black describes in detail the worldview of esoteric secret societies, and his account of this process is as good a starting point as any². He says that at the beginning there was noTHING, that “something must have happened before there was anything” to bring things into existence, and that “this first happening must have been quite different from the sorts of events we regularly account for in terms of the laws of physics”. He suggests that this first happening was a mental event, an impulse from the divine mind. The process continues in this way: “The birth of the universe, the mysterious transition from no-matter to matter has been explained” as “a series of thoughts emanating from the cosmic mind. Pure mind to begin with, these thought-emanations later became a sort of proto-matter, energy that became increasingly dense, then became matter so ethereal that it was finer than gas, without particles of any kind. Eventually the emanations became gas, then liquid and finally…”, “at the lowest level of the hierarchy… these emanations… interweave so tightly that they create the appearance of solid matter”. Therefore, these “emanations from the cosmic mind should be understood… as working downwards in a hierarchy from the higher and more powerful and pervasive principles to the narrower and more particular, each level creating and directing the one below it”.

    I would suggest that this account is consistent with Hinduism, ancient Egyptian religion, Gnosticism, Taoism, Kabbalism (esoteric Judaism), the spiritual tradition of ancient Greece (for example Thales, Pythagoras, Plato), and therefore neo-Platonism (Plotinus etc.). In modern times Theosophy, Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, and other esoteric schools, for example Rosicrucianism, would also concur.

    In case any Christians reading this are thinking that all this has nothing to do with them, I should point out that this process is also described in Genesis chapter 1. There the cosmic mind of God creates light, the fundamental energy which is the basic building block of the universe, and then proceeds to create from it other levels — heavens, higher and lower waters, and eventually dry land (the material universe).

    Even mainstream science has a similar understanding, even though it is a kind of limited caricature of the spiritual worldview. In the beginning there was nothing, an infinitely small and dense singularity which, for unknown reasons, exploded into existence, producing a chaos of subatomic particles, which eventually became the physical universe we know through a process of increasing densification.

    In both the scientific and spiritual worldviews, something akin to alchemy must have gone on at some point, in that one form of existence was transmuted into others; neither side disputes that elements were formed from a more primal level. In the context of alchemy, since lead and gold obviously did not exist at the beginning of the universe, even conventional scientists must concede that they came into existence. They will presumably say that this occurred ‘naturally’, and that blind forces were responsible. The spiritual viewpoint says that it was rather the operation of supernatural intelligence.

    As a non-scientist, my best understanding of what makes one chemical element different from another is the number and arrangement of electrons around the nucleus of each atom. At some prior level of existence therefore, there were electrons existing purely as electrons (along with other particles), not yet transformed into the different elements. There is therefore no reason, at least in theory, why even a conventional scientist could not somehow figure out how this happened, and then reproduce the process. This seems highly unlikely of course, so we have to turn to spiritual alchemy for more insight into how this might be achieved.

    Is alchemy literally possible, purely through physical, quasi-scientific procedures? I’ll leave that an open question for the time being, but assume for the sake of argument that the answer is no. As we have seen, the spiritual, esoteric worldview says that the whole universe is understood in terms of mental events generating physical events. Could that be the explanation for how alchemy might be achieved? Here are some thoughts on the estoteric worldview from Jonathan Black (relevant to, but not referring specifically to alchemy).

• “Matter is therefore moved by human minds perhaps not to the same extent, but in the same kind of way that it is moved by the mind of God” (p34).
• “Our emotional states directly affect matter outside our bodies. In this psychosomatic universe the behaviour of physical objects in space is directly affected by mental states without our having to do anything about it. We can move matter by the way we look at it” (p 35).
• “The belief that the deepest springs of our mental life are also the deepest springs of the physical world, because in the universe of the secret societies all chemistry is psycho-chemistry, and the ways in which the physical content of the universe responds to the human psyche are described by deeper and more powerful laws than the laws of material science” (p 36).

    This all sounds somewhat cryptic, but provides some clues. For alchemy to be successful along these lines, we would have to assume that a human being has hidden, paranormal powers, specifically psychokinesis, the ability of mind consciously to affect matter. This is a controversial topic in parapsychological research, some saying that it is a real ability, while others are unconvinced.

    In Hinduism, as one progresses on the spiritual path, as consciousness rises through the various levels through spiritual practice, it is said that one may acquire siddhis, “material, paranormal, supernatural, or otherwise magical powers, abilities, and attainments”³. The advice given is that no attention should be paid to them, since they are a distraction from the true purpose, which is to reunite with one’s divine essence, a state of pure consciousness. These powers are nevertheless recognised as real.

    Based on everything I’ve said so far, at some point on the spiritual path, as one rises gradually towards a reunion with one’s divine essence, logic suggests that one must reach a point of development analogous to the mind of a creative deity, a level from which one can transmute substances by the power of thought.

    How does this relate to practising alchemists? Do we find them merely indulging in weird, purely physical experiments, or are they engaged in spiritual practices? Michael White, my primary source in the preceding article⁴, quotes Isaac Newton: “Those who search after the Philosophers’ Stone [are] by their own rules obliged to a strict and religious life. That study [is] fruitful of experiments” (p121). This sounds like a Hindu guru talking about siddhis.

    Further observations by White on that theme are:

• “It is clear that what the alchemist was engaged in was an odd combination of modern chemistry with a strong element of mysticism and spirituality which, to the twentieth-century mind, appears irrational. To us it seems odd that the esoteric aspect of the alchemist’s efforts and beliefs were to him the most important” (p 126).
• “The spiritual element of the experiment was in fact the key to the true alchemist’s philosophy” (p 127).
• “It was the practical process that was in fact the allegory and their search was really for the elixir of the philosophers’ stone within them: that, by conducting a seemingly mundane set of tasks, they were following a path to enlightenment — allowing themselves to be transmuted into ‘gold’. This is why the alchemist placed such importance on ‘purity of spirit’ and spent long years in preparation for the task of transmutation before so much as touching a crucible” (p 127).
• “The genuine alchemist was absolutely firm in his belief that the emotional and spiritual state of the individual experimenter was involved intimately with the success or failure of the experiment… placed inordinate importance upon this element of his work” (p 128).
• “The adept had to be pure of soul” (p 129).
• “By becoming spiritually involved with a ‘divine’ process, the alchemist believed he could share in its divinity” (p 133).

    Along similar lines, Gale Christianson, my other source⁵, writes of “the rise of an esoteric or mystical inner alchemy credited by its practitioners with a power even more wonderful than that of physical transmutation. It was believed that the ingestion of the Elixir of Life… would bestow earthly immortality on its discoverer, provided, of course, he had deported himself in a manner ‘pleasing in the sight of God’. Thus for the esoteric alchemist the transmutation of metals, became a mere symbol of the far more profound transformation of sinful man into a creature worthy of Divine grace” (p 206).

    He makes this further observation about the alchemist, strikingly in accord with the spiritual cosmology described above: “Beginning at the outmost layer of a body, he attempted to penetrate to the innermost, invisible, seedlike core. He believed that at this core rested the ‘philosopher’s mercury’, the first matter of all metals and the source of all activity in the universe” (p 227), in other words “the prima materia or first matter from which all substances are formed” (p 231).

    Thus the alchemist, with his spiritually developed consciousness, is attempting to reach back to a very high level of existence, prior to all material manifestation. From there it should be genuinely possible to manipulate the formation and transmutation of matter. In Christianson’s words: “To liberate this special mercury from its fixed form in metals would not only open wide the doors to transmutation and the conquest of disease but would make it humanly possible to understand the very process by which God actively sustains and governs all creation, to identify that supreme interface where matter and spirit meet”.

    So that’s how they do it! It hardly needs saying that this would be an extremely arduous task, not for the faint-hearted.

    In the next article, I’ll discuss some examples of possibly successful alchemy.

Footnotes:

1. Quercus, 2010

2. adapted from his chapter 1, p 29–40

3. Yoga In Practice, David Gordon White and Dominik Wujastyk, Princeton University Press, 2012, p 34

4. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer Fourth Estate, 1998

5. In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times The Free Press, 1984

    This is the latest in a series of articles discussing the work of Ian Stevenson and his research into reincarnation. It follows on from this article in which I described several of his cases where a birthmark appears at the site of a wound, usually fatal, from a previous incarnation. This suggests that the birthmark is a physical memory of some kind of the earlier wound. Here I’m going to repeat the process for birth defects. Stevenson comments that, when considering reincarnation as a possible cause, these are even more important than birthmarks, because “they are much less easily attributed to chance than are birthmarks… (and) in contrast to birthmarks, serious birth defects are comparatively rare”.

    Examples of these include “partial or complete absence of fingers, toes, and larger parts of arms, legs, ears, or other organs”. As with birthmarks, there are other known causes: genetic factors, teratogens, German measles in a pregnant woman, and uterine conditions. Again, as with birthmarks, this nevertheless leaves a large number of cases unexplained. He describes several cases of birth defects unknown to experts, not corresponding to any commonly recognized syndromes or malformations. In the absence of these precedents, the reincarnation factor becomes more likely.

    (I’m going to describe many cases, and go into quite a lot of detail. If at any point you are convinced of the reality of this phenomenon, please feel free to jump ahead to the discussion at the end.)

    I’ll begin with his chapter 19, ‘Birth Defects Involving Two or More Regions of the Body’. These cases provide the most impressive evidence when arguing for reincarnation, if multiple birthmarks and birth defects all correspond to the wounds on the identified dead person.

    1. Ma Htwe Win. Before her mother became pregnant, “she dreamed that a man who appeared to be walking on his knees, or perhaps on amputated stumps of legs, was following her; she tried to avoid him, but he continued to approach her. She did not recognize the man”. “When Ma Htwe Win was born, “her parents immediately observed that she had severe birth defects as well as prominent birthmarks. The birthmarks were on her lower left chest in the region of the heart and on her head. The fifth finger of her left hand was absent. She had constriction rings around the lower parts of her legs above the ankles and another, particularly deep, constriction ring around the middle of her left thigh”. They had no explanation for any of this, until she “said that she had been a man called Nga Than”, and gave details of his murder: stabbed in the chest, fingers cut, and a blow to the head, and legs tied to the back of the thighs, so that the body could be compressed, and therefore disposed of in a well. (It hardly needs pointing out that all these correspond precisely to the birthmarks and defects noted.) Her “statements were correct, so far as they could be verified, for the life and death of a man called U Nga Than”.

    2. Thiang San Kla. Before his birth both his parents had dreams in which the mother’s deceased brother Phoh appeared, saying that he wished to be reborn as their child. Thiang was born with six birth defects and birthmarks. The two most important were an extensive lesion on his head, and a defect of the right big toe — a partially detached portion of the nail, and tissue darkly pigmented. (The other four had faded by the time of the investigation.) Phoh had been killed, having been “hit on the back of the head with a heavy knife”. Before his death, he had injured his right foot in an accident. “His right toe became infected and never healed before he died”.

    Before he was four Thiang began to speak about the life of Phoh. He at once recognised a policeman who had investigated the murder and called him by name. He “also correctly stated to him the names of the persons who had killed Phoh”.

    3. Ariya Noikerd. Before her birth both her mother and her mother’s older sister dreamed that Apirak, a son of the family who had been killed 3 months earlier, was going to return to the family. Ariya was born about a year after his death. She had “a widespread port-wine stain birthmark on the left side of her face and head”, and “an unusual cleft or deep crease in the skin of her lower back, near the midline and just above her right buttock. Apirak had had an exactly similar cleft at the same site”.

    He had been killed in an accident involving a truck. Some mismanagement followed, and when his body was cremated “it had not been washed, and blood remained on the face and head where it had been right after the accident”. Both his parents and maternal aunt “said that the birthmarks… were at exactly the places where blood had been on Apirak’s face when his body was cremated”. Stevenson says that “this is the third case in which informants have attributed birthmarks to blood left on the previous personality’s body when it was cremated”.

    In chapter 17, entitled ‘Birth Defects of the Extremities’, Stevenson gives 7 examples.

    1. Lekh Pal Jatav. He was “born without the fingers (phalanges) of his right hand, which were represented by mere stubs; his left hand was normal”. This is “extremely rare”. He “had spoken only a few words about a previous life”, when a woman from Nagla Tal (a nearby village) came and happened to notice him. “She mentioned that a child of Nagla Tal had had his fingers cut off in an accident”. This was Hukum Singh who “had had his fingers cut off when he inadvertently put them into the blades of a fodder-chopping machine… (He) survived this accident, but he died the following year of some unrelated illness”. Before Lekh Pal travelled to Nagla Tal to meet the other family, “he had spoken to his family about the life of Hukum. He kept repeating the word ‘Tal, Tal’, but at the time this made no sense to his mother. He said Nagla Devi was not his home and he would not stay there. His older sister later remembered that he described to her how, in the previous life, he had put his hand into a fodder-chopping machine. He said that he had a mother and father in ‘Tal’ and also an older sister and a younger brother”. When he was taken to Nagla Tal “he was credited with making a number of recogntions”.

    2. Ma Myint Thein. Before her mother became pregnant with her, her father “dreamed that an acquaintance, U Sein Maung, said that he wished to be reborn in his family”. “When he had this dream, he did not know that U Sein Maung was dead. The next day, however, he learned that assassins armed with swords had killed U Sein Maung the day before”. Two witnesses who had later seen the body “said that the fingers of both of U Sein Maung’s had been chopped off (by a sword) and his head almost severed from his trunk”. Other informants said that he had also been stabbed in the back”. Ma Myint Thein started to refer to her previous life when she was about 5. Years later she “remembered that her first memories of the previous life occurred when, as she was playing with other children, she noticed that her hands were different from theirs. She then began to recall that in a previous life she had been murdered by three or four men with swords”. She “gradually opened up her memories to other members of her family. She said that she had been called Sein Maung. She had a wife, Ma Thein, and two children” and gave other correct particulars.

    She described her death from the previous life, the sword attack, the jewels he had been wearing (which had not been stolen following the attack). She “had a phobia of the site where U Sein Maung had been killed, and when she had to pass it on her way to Pyawbwe, she found herself shivering”.

    3. Ma Khin Mar Htoo. Before she was conceived, her mother “dreamed that a girl called Ma Thien Nwe was going to be reborn as her daughter”. Ma Thien Nwe, nicknamed Kalamagyi, had died in a horrific accident when she was run over by a train. “Her lower right leg was found at a considerable distance behind the rest of her body, which the train had sliced in two, as it ran over her. It seems likely, therefore, that as Kalamagyi fell under the train, she thrust her right leg out under the wheels, and it was cut off before other parts of her body were injured”.

    “Ma Khin Mar Htoo was born with her right leg absent from a few inches below the knee. Two rudimentary toes protruded from the stump of the leg… This condition, hemimelia in medical terms, is a rare malformation”.

    “When Ma Khin Mar Htoo could speak, she expressed many memories of the life and death of Kalamagyi”. (The two families were acquainted, so Stevenson thinks she could not have made any statements which would have served as confirmatory evidence of the reincarnation.)

    4. Ma Win Tar. “At her birth she was found to have severe defects of both hands. The middle and ring fingers of her right hand were present, but only loosely attached to the rest of the hand, and they were webbed together”. These were amputated, following a doctor’s recommendation. Several of her other fingers “were either missing or had constriction rings. There was a prominent ring around her left wrist, and close examination of this showed that it consisted of three separate depressions that might have corresponded to grooves made by a rope wound three times around the arm. (Her mother) said that there had been a similar ropelike mark above her right wrist, but this had since faded. She also said that when Ma Win Tar had been younger, it was possible to discern in this area a pattern within the birthmarks that corresponded to the strands of the rope”. “When she was about 3, she began to refer to a previous life. She said that she had been a Japanese soldier, captured by some Burmese villagers, tied to a tree, and burned alive”. She gave no name, and the account is unverified, although Stevenson thinks it plausible, as there were such cases. She also showed unusual behaviour for her family and culture, but appropriate for the previous life: wanting to dress like a boy, keeping her hair short like a boy, not liking Burmese food, preferring Japanese-style dishes, resisting Burmese Buddhist practices, adopting a Japanese sitting posture, and insisting that she was Japanese. Stevenson picks out this one: “She had a streak of cruelty rare in Burmese children, and she sometimes slapped the faces of her playmates when they annoyed her. (This was a habit that the Japanese soldiers often showed when Burmese villagers irritated them; Burmese people rarely slap faces.)”.

    5. Augustine Nwachi, an Igbo. He was “born with a severe birth defect of his left foot. The outer third of the foot was absent. There were a few nubbins attached to the end of the stump that suggested attempts at toes”. “Mainly on the basis of his birth defect, Augustine was identified as the reincarnation of his paternal grandfather, Dominic. The latter had died from an infection of his left great toe and second toe, which had become gangrenous, and must have culminated in an overwhelming infection that killed him within a few days of his becoming ill”.

    “The Igbos attach importance to the judgment of an oracle concerning the identification of a reincarnated person, and in Augustine’s case an oracle confirmed his father’s opinion that Augustine was the reincarnation of his grandfather”.

    6. Bruce Peck. At this point, Stevenson introduces what, on the face of it, is an even more extraordinary suggestion than those we have been considering so far. He describes the case of Bruce Peck in which “the generating factor… was not even a mark on the previous personality’s body; instead, it seems to have been a thought in his mind”. His paternal grandfather, Richard, “was a renowned fisherman”. He “found the life of a fisherman unendurably severe. Three informants told me independently that they had heard Richard say that if he were reborn he wished not to have a forearm, so that he could not become a fisherman, and he would then be able to work at some less arduous job on land. As he said this, he gestured with his left hand straightened out making a motion like an axe coming down on his right arm and chopping it off below the elbow”.

    He drowned accidentally, at a time when Bruce’s mother was already pregnant. When Bruce was born 7 months later, “the lower half of his right forearm was absent”. He had “no imaged memories of his grandfather’s life or death”, and there had been no dream. “He did have a severe phobia of water. He worked entirely at clerical positions on the shore”.

    7. H. A. Wijeratne. Stevenson thinks that our sense of justice might be offended, in that the victims of crimes seem to be the ones who are afflicted by a birth defect in a subsequent life, not the perpetrators. He is aware, however, of a few cases of malefactors who had an apparently related birth defect in a subsequent life. He describes one example, H. A. Wijeratne, who had “marked birth defects of his right chest and arm. The major muscle of his right upper chest was absent, his right arm was much reduced in size compared with the left one, and the fingers of his right hand were extremely short; some of them were webbed together”. When he began to speak, his mother heard him say “that he had been born with a defective arm because he had murdered his wife in a previous life”. Her husband was not surprised to hear this, because “he had already surmised that Wijeratne was his late younger brother, Ratran Hami, reborn”. He had actually been told by him before he died that he would return as his son. Details of the crime, his trial at which he had “pleaded not guilty, offering an explanation of acting in self-defense”. and execution follow. Wijeratne did not believe his deceased uncle’s false plea, freely acknowledging his guilt, “and believed he was paying a penalty for the murder by being reborn with a malformed right arm”.

    Chapter 18 is entitled ‘Birth Defects of the Head and Neck’. I’ll summarise two of the four cases mentioned.

    1. Semih Tutuşmuş. Two days before his birth, his mother Karanfil “dreamed of a man called Selim Fesli, who had been shot at close range in the head and had died of his wounds a few days later. In the dream the man’s face was covered with blood, and he said that he had been shot in the ear. He also said that he was going to stay with the dreamer. Karanfil had never met Selim Fesli, although she had heard vaguely about his death… Semih was born with a severe birth defect of the right ear. The external ear was represented only by a linear stump. In addition, the right side of his face was underdeveloped”. The details of Selim’s wounding and death are provided, Stevenson obtaining a copy of the postmortem report, which described shotgun wounds to the skull.

    “Semih began to talk about the life of Selim Fesli when he was about 1½ years old. His first words on the subject were the (correct) names of the man who shot Fesli”. He gave more details about the shooting, naming himself as Fesli. “He remembered also, and stated, the names of Selim Fesli’s wife and all six of their children. Among 15 statements that Semih made about the previous life, 11 were correct, 2 incorrect, and 2 unverified”. (Fesli was known to Semih’s father, so this information might have been acquired normally, although there is no obvious reason to think so.)

    Semih had a strong desire to visit Selim Fesli’s family. When he was still less than 4 years old, he found his way alone to Fesli’s village and introduced himself to members of the family, who at some point accepted up to a point that he was the reincarnation. He showed “an attitude of extreme hostility” toward the killer, and threatened to kill him.

    2. Süleyman Çapar. His mother Hekime “dreamed during her pregnancy… that a man on horseback approached her. She asked him why he was coming to her. He replied: “I was killed with a blow from a shovel. I want to stay with you and not with anyone else”. She said that she did not recognise him, and did not give it much thought at the time. “When Süleyman was born the back part of his skull was depressed, and it had a prominent birthmark”. “He gradually told details about a previous life”, how he had been killed, and said that he wanted to go to “the stream”.

    Hekime eventually agreed, and “let him show the way to a village called Ekber, where there was a stream and a mill”. “Süleyman had given the name Mehmet as the one he had had in the previous life”. This enabled the relevant person to be identified. “It is certain — from the medical records that (Stevenson) examined — that Mehmet died after being struck on the back of the head with a flour shovel”.

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    If you’ve managed to read this far, and are not yet convinced by the reality of this phenomenon, then nothing more I add will make any difference. I’ll turn therefore to a discussion of the implications. The obvious ones are the reality of reincarnation, and therefore of the afterlife, since the discarnate body has to go somewhere in between lives.

    One of the most interesting features in these examples is the regular occurrence of dreams announcing the imminent reincarnation. This is conclusive evidence, if any were needed, that dreams are not produced by the brain, but emerge from another level which has access to this knowledge.

    Even more intriguing is the meaning of the appearance of the birthmarks and other defects. It is reasonably easy to believe that a conscious self might have the desire to be reincarnated into a specific family, and this seems to have happened in some of these examples. However, nobody would choose to be born with a serious defect or birthmark. And apart from the one case stated, there is no suggestion that any of these children were being punished through karma for misdemeanours in previous lives. We therefore have to assume that the appearance of these defects is just in the nature of things, without any planning or intention. We are led to the extraordinary conclusion that an injury to a physical body can be stored as a memory in whatever we choose to call the non-material body that exits upon death (astral, etheric, soul). The memory must remain stored at this other level until the next incarnation, and then reappear spontaneously.

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Bibliography: Ian Stevenson, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, Praeger, 1997

    This is a somewhat belated commentary on, and a response to, an article Jules Evans wrote three months ago entitled ‘The Cosmic Right: on right-wing spirituality’, which purported to be an exposé of supposed right-wing tendencies in spiritual thinkers. Even though I think he was well-intentioned, and eventually reached some worthy conclusions, I nevertheless found it muddled and confusing, and contained much that I objected to.

    It is not clear whether his complaints are political, theological, or sociological. One might think that the opposite of right-wing spirituality would be left-wing atheism. If that were the case, then the latter hasn’t exactly got a great record. We need only think of the former USSR and Maoist China: totalitarian authoritarianism, mass murder of citizens, gulags, secret police, censorship, lack of free speech, suppression of religion, and indoctrination programmes. North Korea is also not currently a good model.

    Evans, however, contrasts right-wing spirituality, not with left-wing atheism, rather with a progressive liberalism which is “opposed to traditional religions”. I didn’t understand why some ideas he claims to be right-wing are that, so some explanation or definition would have been helpful. He doesn’t provide one, so I’m left wondering whether right-wingness may be something merely in the eye of the beholder; to those on the Left even some moderate ideas may appear right-wing.

    Here are some of the statements he focusses on. I should say in advance that I personally have no disagreement with the ones I have selected, and I consider myself to be a political centrist:

    1. Evans says that “one finds in much right-wing spirituality a suspicion of modern, secular, materialist, urban, multicultural, mass democracy, and a hankering back to ancient wisdom and more closed, traditional and hierarchical societies”. In similar vein: “Modern liberal democracy is soulless. It is over-rationalistic, and has lost touch with the sublime and the numinous, with the depths and heights of Being… It finds the idea of anything genuinely transcendent deeply threatening and disturbing”.

    I assume that by ‘democracy’ Evans means modern culture in general, rather than a political system. So what is the problem with these statements? We are in an age of increasing secularism, anti-religious attitudes, where so-called Enlightenment — but highly flawed — science overvalues reason, and where materialist, atheist scientists deny the existence of anything transcendent. It is hard to see how such a culture could be described as anything other than soulless. And if we interpret materialism in its other sense as an obsession with becoming rich, and the acquisition of consumer goods, then we still have good reason to be critical. What has any of this got to do with being right-wing?

    2. Along similar lines, Evans says that “one can also find a suspicion of city life — the city is rootless, soulless, disconnected from nature and filled with chaotic ‘mass man’, while the countryside still has soul, myth, ritual and salt-of-the-earth rustic types connected to the soil”.

    If that is a right-wing opinion, which I don’t think it is, then it is shared by a significant number of the city-dwelling population, who, if they can afford such luxury, seek to escape to the countryside after a hard week’s work, in order to reconnect with nature. If they can’t manage that, they long for a walk in the park. I’m a city-dweller myself, and am happy living there, but love nature and going for country walks. I can’t believe that Evans thinks that the city is as connected to nature as the countryside. What has this got anything to do with being right-wing?

    3. Even though this is more true of others he names, Evans associates Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey with “celebration of war, violence and military heroism as a means to virtue, transcendence and ecstatic experience”, saying that “this emphasis on heroism is very appealing to young men, who yearn for a life of military valour…”

    If this is true — no reference is provided — then such men are in need of some spiritual education, since Campbell’s hero’s journey is not about literal warriors, rather the trials and tribulations encountered on the spiritual path, where great courage is needed. There is nothing right-wing or elitist about this, since the spiritual path/hero’s journey is open to all those who wish to undertake it.

    4. “In their search for exotic wisdom, western liberal seekers can end up immersing themselves in cultures like Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism or Amazon shamanism, which they then discover are deeply patriarchal and hetero-normative”.

    From my politically centrist position, I am very interested in all four of these, but I perceive them to be religions rather than cultures. We should always distinguish between religious teachings and the cultures in which they are found. Anyone in a position of power can manipulate teachings to their own advantage, and often do. I would be interested to be informed about any patriarchal or hetero-normative statements in the foundational texts of the religions mentioned.

    5. Evans says that one solution put forward by allegedly right-wing spiritual thinkers is “individual self-realization. If enough people can reconnect with their inner soul, perhaps society can be saved from the mindless mob and soulless mass consumerism”. (He is referencing here, among others, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.)

    What is wrong with self-realization and reconnecting with one’s inner soul? How could they not be the solution to the world’s problems? The quote does, however, contain the unfortunate expression ‘mindless mob’. Evans makes an analogous statement when he says that spiritual thinking can “lead to the belief that some people are realized and awake, while other people are asleep, and are mindless automatons. Some people are spiritually advanced superbeings, other people are degenerate animals”. This is strong language, and it would have been helpful if he had provided a quote from someone who had used those specific words. I would be amazed, and extremely disappointed, if Jung or Campbell had used them. Instead I’m left wondering whether he is putting words into the mouths of others, and thereby exaggerating what they actually said. In any case, anyone who did think that would, by definition, not be a spiritual person in any meaningful sense of the word.

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    Having made all these strong complaints against supposedly right-wing spiritual ideas, Evans then, somewhat strangely, says that he agrees with quite a lot of what is said in this critique of modern society: that “it can be flat, mediocre, lacking in transcendence, that it has lost touch with myths and ancient wisdom, and with the natural world, and this leaves people lonely, disconnected, filled with inner turmoil, and at the mercy of consumer capitalism and Big Tech”.

    He continues: “I believe in the power of wisdom and myth to help people flourish and develop their souls”. He further says that he believes in transcendence, soul, self-realization, wisdom, patriotism, and connection to nature.

    It therefore emerges that the ideas of ‘right-wing’ spirituality might not be so bad after all! What Evans really objects to are not these ideas as such, rather hierarchy, spiritual inequality, and elitism. Thus, spiritual people “believe in higher and lower levels of spiritual attainment”. “If you believe in vertical transcendence, and higher and lower levels of truth, beauty, goodness and spiritual initiation, then you believe some people are higher up the ladder than others. Some people are more realized than others”.

    This is one of the most confusing passages, for elsewhere in the article he says that he also believes in ‘vertical transcendence’, and ‘higher and lower’. He therefore seems to be confessing that he is guilty of the attitude for which he criticises others. In any case, why is this a right-wing opinion? If Evans is denying that this is the case, then is he saying that the Dalai Lama is no more spiritually realised than the average dustman or postman? If so, then let him produce some evidence or an argument to back up his statement. It is clear that some people are more spiritually realised than others, even if that offends Evans’ Woke sensibilities.

    The real issue is how such people behave. Evans thinks that “if you believe that, then you believe in leaders and followers, and you are probably opposed to the egalitarian flattening of society. You believe some have the authority to give instruction, and others should follow those instructions, for their own good”. There may well be some such people out there, but they would be the opposite of spiritual, and would be perverting spiritual teachings, because the enduring values of these teachings are love, compassion, and service to humanity.

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    Evans concludes with a list of spiritual thinkers and his complaints against them, which are unsubstantiated, at least in this article. We have to take his statements on trust, and do our own research if we want to find any evidence for his accusations. It would be helpful, therefore, if he made reliable statements. This doesn’t always seem to be the case, and one sometimes wonders if he even knows what a spiritual thinker is. For example, Julian Huxley is on his list, whom he accuses of supporting eugenics, which he did. Huxley, however, was an avid Darwinian atheist and humanist, denier of the soul, and anything transcendent, about as unspiritual as it is possible to be. Given his unpleasant views, he could be considered a great advert for the ideas of the spiritual people whom Evans rejects as being right wing. (I have discussed Huxley in detail, click here.)

    From my own personal perspective, those I was most concerned to find on the list were Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, where they are described as “conservative reactionaries who thought modern liberal society had lost touch with its mythical roots”. (Jung is my number one intellectual hero, and his ideas have been exceptionally helpful in my own life.) As I mentioned above, earlier in the article Evans had said that their solution to society’s problems “is individual self-realization. If enough people can reconnect with their inner soul, perhaps society can be saved from the mindless mob and soulless mass consumerism”. If those are their worst sins, then I would say “bring it on”. If these are right-wing opinions, which I don’t think they are, then perhaps being right-wing is not such a bad thing after all. As I noted above, Evans himself says that in some ways he shares the spiritual critique of secular society. In that case he would seem to be in agreement with the ‘conservative reactionary’ Carl Jung, who wrote Modern Man in Search of a Soul, and The Undiscovered Self, and who spent his whole life as a psychotherapist seeking to help other people, and as a writer seeking to address precisely the problems that Evans describes here.

    Evans had said earlier in the article: “I think that the Left needs to offer more than rationality, diversity and economic justice. It needs to offer transcendence, soul, self-realization, wisdom, patriotism, connection to nature, (and) the celebration of some traditions”. This is precisely what Jung and Campbell were offering in recent times, along with other figures in his list of alleged right-wing thinkers, for example Abraham Maslow, Ken Wilber, Sri Aurobindo, and Aldous Huxley. It is also what Traditionalism, the Perennial Philosophy, has been offering for thousands of years, although for some reason Evans has taken against it. He says that Traditionalism “argues there is a perennial philosophy at the heart of all religions, which modern society has lost touch with”.

    How is that untrue? And how is that right-wing? This perennial philosophy is the teaching that the essence of every human being is ultimately the same as the divine, as expressed in the Chandogya Upanishad “Tat Twam Asi -Thou art that”, and that every human being is capable of realising reunion with that essence. If that is true, how can it be called elitist or right-wing? Traditionalism would seem to be offering the transcendence and soul that Evans thinks the Left is currently lacking. So is he arguing that the Left needs to catch up with right-wing thinking? Presumably not, given his hostility to the Right, although he is certainly giving that impression here.

    Another of his targets is Theosophy, which he says, “preached a spiritual hierarchy led by an elite of hidden masters, and argued that some races were more spiritually evolved than others”. Discussing that statement in detail would require a separate article. I’ll just note therefore that, if that were true, it would be somewhat strange, given that the Theosophical Society’s first founding principle is “to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed or colour”. Does that sound elitist or hierarchical to anyone?

    Evans also complains that “the struggle for Indian nationalism was championed by many spiritual thinkers like Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo”. He could also have mentioned Gandhi. And what exactly is his problem with that? Who wouldn’t champion such a cause when your homeland is being run by a foreign country, which believes in the superiority of its own culture, and which is plundering your natural resources? They were opposing the kind of elitist, authoritarian dictatorship that Evans claims to dislike so much. (And I’m saying all that as a Briton.)

    His main complaint is indeed against what we would now call dictatorships. Some of those he accuses of advocating this are Plato, W. B. Yeats, Ken Wilber, Sri Aurobindo, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, and D. H. Lawrence. He, on the other hand, is in favour of liberal democracies and “mass democracy”. When put in those terms, who could disagree?

    From his leftish perspective, however, I wonder whether Evans always understands what these people are saying. I suggested above that some people are indeed more spiritually advanced than others. It seems obvious that this is the case, even though in the current climate it might be politically incorrect to think this. Why shouldn’t such people be put in charge of society, provided they are accepted and trusted by the people, and have proved their worth? There could even be regular referendums to confirm the continued approval of the populace. This is a concept something along the lines of a benign dictatorship, one where the people have trust in the leadership because they recognise and appreciate its superior wisdom.

    This reminds me of a line from the I Ching, “to rule truly is to serve”. It’s also worth remembering again that the constant teachings of the great spiritual traditions are love, compassion, and service to humanity. Why wouldn’t we want such figures leading our societies? There is a well-known saying, “all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. That seems often to be the case in the modern world, even in the liberal democracies that Evans is so keen on. There we often end up with ambitious, self-serving, dishonest, incompetent and unethical politicians. In Britain, which I imagine qualifies as a liberal democracy in Evans’ eyes, we still seem to be run on the whole by a privately educated, wealthy, intellectual elite. I, for one, would be happy to give something else a try. Putting truly spiritual people in charge of society might be the exception to the rule that all power corrupts.

    As I noted above, before he gave that final list, having enumerated all his strong complaints against right-wing spirituality, Evans had said that he nevertheless agrees with a lot of what they say in their critique. I’ll repeat that he believes in, and wants to see offered by the Left, transcendence, soul, self-realization, wisdom, patriotism, and connection to nature. He is “hopeful about mass education and ordinary people’s capacity to ‘get’ wisdom teachings”. He also believes that “if you have been lucky enough to get a good education and get access to wisdom, you have a responsibility to try and pass it on, not sneer at those who haven’t had your good fortune”.

    So here are some ideas that I can definitely agree with; they would be an expression of a truly spiritual society. I don’t think, however, that the Left has a monopoly on this way of thinking.

    A few weeks ago I wrote an article on the subject of reincarnation and birthmarks (click here), focussing upon the work of Ian Stevenson, who believes that in some cases a birthmark appears at the site of a wound, usually fatal, from a previous incarnation, which suggests that the earlier wound is the cause of the birthmark. (This in itself was a follow-up to an earlier article which discussed Stevenson’s work in much more detail, specifically children’s memories of past lives.)

    I had two contrasting responses. The first came from a good friend of mine, who dutifully reads all my articles, partly for proof-reading purposes, although she is also (I hope) interested in my thoughts. She is of a somewhat ‘scientific’ and sceptical disposition and, although she disagrees with much of what I write, she very rarely comments. On this occasion, however, the subject matter was obviously too much for her, and she took me to task. Her message was obviously, how on earth can you believe this stuff? The second response (click here) was from someone on Medium.com with the pseudonym HighEnergyEntity. It began “Nice one, Graham”, and he started to follow me. In subsequent correspondence he told me about his “accelerated spiritual awakening”, his teacher Jonathan Sherwood, and his knowledge of his previous incarnations. It seems clear, therefore, that one’s reaction to a controversial topic like this depends upon one’s worldview, and also one’s life experiences.

    I invited my friend to read Stevenson’s book¹, to see whether there was anything in it that could persuade her to change her mind, but she declined. (It would usually be reasonable to criticise someone in an academic debate who rejects a hypothesis without having read the relevant material, but that is not the case here. She merely does me a favour by reading, so no criticism is intended, as she has other priorities.) Instead I’ve decided to write some further articles, to explore Stevenson’s cases in more detail, to offer readers the opportunity to assess how convincing his material is. (At least she will have to read these!) In this article I’ll focus on birthmarks, and in a subsequent one I’ll discuss birth defects which, in some instances, offer even more compelling evidence for reincarnation than birthmarks.

    My friend’s main complaint was “How can you believe this, when there is a much simpler explanation for birthmarks?” Stevenson, however, is completely aware of this issue. He indeed agrees that there are other causes for some birthmarks: genetic factors, certain viral infections, chemicals (such as thalidomide and alcohol), and unspecified others. These factors, however, fail to account for many cases, “less than half of all birth defects” (p2). He also makes the important point that most workers in the scientific and medical community would not even consider reincarnation as a reality, so are hardly likely to consider it a cause of birthmarks: “Modern medicine, with its reductionist and mechanical approach to illness, rarely recognizes a person as anything more than the behavioral expression of his or her body. From this perspective, there is no person other than the body. Thus, if someone is born with a birth defect, physicians nearly always attribute this to chance” (p3).

    Before looking at the reasons that led Stevenson to his radical conclusion, I should point out that he is neither naïve nor gullible, nor someone seeking to make a name and money for himself with a controversial theory. He is rather a normal scientist, inquisitive and open-minded, sceptical and objective, who merely wants to consider on its merits the evidence in front of him. He only begins to consider reincarnation as an explanation when all other hypotheses are ruled out.

    In his earlier book², he had focussed on children’s recollections of past lives. Even though he found many convincing cases, these nevertheless relied upon the memories of both the children and their parents, as well as those of the families of the deceased person in question. As we know, memory can be fallible. Birthmarks and birth defect cases are therefore important because they “provide an objective type of evidence… We have photographs (and occasionally sketches) which show the birthmarks and birth defects. And for many of the cases, we have a medical document, usually a postmortem report, that gives us a written confirmation of the correspondence between the birthmark (or birth defect) and the wound on the deceased person whose life the child, when it can speak, will usually claim to remember… The birthmarks and birth defects in these cases do not lend themselves easily to explanations other than reincarnation”. They provide evidence “that a deceased personality — having survived death — may influence the form of a later-born baby. I am well aware of the seriousness — as well as the importance — of such a claim and can only say that I have been led to it by the evidence of the cases”. Such cases also provide “a better explanation than any other now available about why some persons have birth defects when most persons do not and for why some persons who have a birth defect have theirs in a particular location instead of elsewhere” (p2).

    With all that in mind, let’s have a look at some of his most impressive cases. Chapter 6 is entitled ‘Birthmarks Corresponding to Wounds Verified by Medical Records’. Stevenson considers these “the most important group in the entire collection. The medical records, usually postmortem reports, verify the correspondence between the birthmarks and the wounds with a certitude sometimes approached but never reached by the testimonies of informants drawing on their memories”. He provides details of twelve case histories, which I’ll summarise here with the most significant details. (Please feel free to stop, if at any point you feel convinced by the wealth of the material. There will be more interesting evidence in the next article in the series.)

    1. Metin Köybaşi. “Even before his birth, he had been provisionally identified, on the basis of dreams his parents had had, as the reincarnation of a relative (Haşim Köybaşi), who had been killed some 5 months before… At his birth Metin was found to have a birthmark on the right side of the front of his neck… No informant told me to what wound this birthmark corresponded, and I did not know until I examined the postmortem report on Haşim Köybaşi. This showed that the bullet which killed Haşim had entered his head behind the left ear and almost exited on the right side of the front of the neck. It did not, however, fully penetrate the skin… (and) the pathologist had made a small incision and extracted the bullet. The birthmark therefore corresponded to the pathologist’s postmortem wound”. There was a further mark, an area of increased pigmentation, corresponding to the wound of entry. “Like many other children of these cases Metin showed powerful attitudes of vengefulness toward the man who had shot Haşim. He once tried to take his father’s gun and shoot this person, but was fortunately restrained”.

    2. Tali Sowaid. “He had circular birthmarks of increased pigmentation on each cheek… Soon after Tali began to speak, he started referring to the life of a man… (from a nearby village). He described how he had been having a cup of coffee before leaving for work when a man came up to him and shot him. What Tali was saying corresponded exactly to the murder of a man called Said Abul-Hisn, who lived in (the named) village”. This seems to have been a case of mistaken identity. “The bullet entered one side of Said’s face and exited at the other, traversing the tongue on the way… (He was taken to hospital.) His tongue having swollen, it was necessary to make a hole in his windpipe in order to provide an adequate airway. Somehow, Said fell out of bed, and when this happened, his tracheostomy tube must have become obstructed, and he died. The incident of falling out of bed just before dying figured in Tali’s memories. (The hospital record) showed that the birthmark on Tali’s left cheek… corresponded to the wound of entry, and the larger birthmark on the right cheek corresponded to the wound of exit”. This is one of six similar cases. Tali “identified strongly with Said and asked his family to call him ‘Said’. Tali showed a difficulty in articulating properly. He had special trouble in pronouncing certain ‘s’ sounds, which require elevating the tongue. I interpreted this defect as a possible residue of the damage to Said’s tongue when the bullet passed through it”.

    3. Alan Gamble. “On the basis of a dream and two birthmarks, he was identified as the reincarnation of Walter Wilson, who had died several years before Alan’s birth”. Wilson had accidentally shot himself during a fishing trip. “The shots entered his left hand… and exited at the wrist”. His hand was subsequently amputated, but he died in hospital. “Alan’s two birthmarks were on his left hand and wrist”, and corresponded to Wilson’s wounds.

    4. Sunita Singh. “At birth she was found to have an extremely large birthmark of the port-wine stain type. It extended over her upper right chest and much of her right arm. In addition, she had three birthmarks on the lower part of the right side of her neck and the upper part of her chest”. When a few years old she began to speak about a previous life. “On a social visit to a neighbouring village, she noticed a man and said: ‘He is my son’. She gave the man’s name, Ranvir. One of the women in this village seemed to frighten and even terrify her. After this, Sunita stated details of how in a previous life she had lived in this particular village. She had been murdered there, she said, by her daughter-in-law”. Her name was Ram Dulari, and she had expressed her disapproval of the affairs of her daughter-in-law’, who then, in revenge, hired some men who killed her with a sword.

    “Sunita showed a marked fear of Ram Dulari’s daughter-in-law when she happened to see her” (this was the woman just mentioned), saying “she will kill me again”. “The postmortem report that we obtained showed a satisfactory correspondence between the sword wound on Ram Dulari’s neck and chest and Sunita’s birthmarks. I believe the port-wine stain birthmarks on Sunita’s chest and arm corresponded to the blood left on Ram Dulari’s body when it was cremated”.

    5. Nasruddin Shah. He was “born with several birthmarks, of which the most prominent was a lens-shaped birthmark on his left chest”. He said “that he was called Hardev Baksh Singh and had been killed with a spear during a quarrel over cattle”. This was true of a man by that name: “one of his adversaries drove a spear through his left upper chest, and he died almost immediately. The postmortem report confirmed the close correspondence in location between Nasruddin’s birthmark when he was born and the fatal spear wound”.

    Another interesting feature of this case was that, although born a Muslim, Nasruddin “considered himself a Hindu; moreover, he regarded himself as one of particular distinction (just like Hardev Singh was)… He would not say Islamic prayers or go to the mosque”. Although reincarnation is not an Islamic teaching, his parents became convinced that he was indeed the reincarnation of Singh.

    6. Henry Demmert III. Following his parents’ separation soon after his birth, he was adopted by his grandfather and his second wife Gertrude. Shortly before his birth, she had a dream “that her husband’s deceased son by his first wife was looking for his father and her”. When Henry was born, “he was found to have a birthmark on his upper left chest in the region of the heart”. On the basis of this and the dream, Henry was identified as the reincarnation of an earlier Henry Demmert. The latter had been stabbed in the heart following an all-night drinking party. The birthmark “was slightly narrower toward the inside, so that its shape was roughly that of the profile of a single-edged knife”. Unusually in these cases, Henry said almost nothing about his previous life, only when pointing to his birthmark, that he had “got hurt there”, and that this had happened when he “was big”.

    7. Narong Yensiri. “At his birth, his parents noticed several prominent birthmarks, of which the largest was at the lower part of his chest near the midline. Large parts of the skin of his back were heavily pigmented. When Narong became able to speak, he began to refer to the life of his maternal grandfather… (who) had been murdered under mysterious circumstances two years before Narong’s birth”, apparently by two men who came to visit, and with whom he went off to the forest. Stevenson studied the report of the doctor who was called to the scene, which “showed a good correspondence between wounds on the body and the birthmarks on Narong”.

    8. Necip Ünlütaşkiran. His mother “had a dream before he was born in which a man she did not recognize showed himself to her with bleeding wounds. She did not know how to interpret this dream, but it made some sense when she saw, after Necip’s birth, that he had seven birthmarks”. He was late in speaking about a previous life, but “from the age of 6 he began to say that he had children and asked his mother to take him to them”. “He said that his name was Necip (Budak), and that he had been stabbed; as he described the stabbing, he pointed to various parts of his body to indicate where he had been stabbed”. Several years later, his grandfather’s second wife confirmed the accuracy of his statements. His grandfather then took him to the relevant village, where “he recognized several members of the family of Necip Budak”. The latter had died the day after being stabbed repeatedly in a quarrel.

    Among the impressive statements Necip ( Ünlütaşkiran) made, the most convincing was “his claim that he had once stabbed his (Necip Budak’s) wife in the leg and that she thereafter had a scar on her leg”. This was true, and “taking some ladies into a back room she showed them the scar on her thigh”.

    9. Hanumant Saxena. “Not long before Hanumant’s mother conceived him, she dreamed that a man of the same village called Maha Ram appeared to her. Maha Ram had been shot dead only a few weeks earlier. In the dream, Maha Ram said to her: ‘I am coming to you’. Having said that, he lay down on a cot. The dream ended there”. Hanumant was born with a “large birthmark on the lower part of his chest near the midline. It was irregular in shape and really consisted of several birthmarks close together”. This “corresponded closely in location to the fatal wound on Maha Ram”, who had been shot at close range with a shotgun. “The postmortem report showed that the main charge of pellets had hit Maha Ram in the lower part of the chest in the midline; there was some scattering of wounds from shot around the principal wound. The Indian doctor who examined the postmortem report with (Stevenson) (and who had no knowledge of the location of Hanumant’s birthmark) sketched in the location of wounds on a human figure drawing. This shows almost exact correspondence between the wounds and Hanumant’s birthmark”. (Photos are in the book.)

    “When he was about 3 years old, he started referring to the life of Maha Ram. He said that he was him, and, pointing to his birthmark, he said that he had been shot there”. He made a few other correct statements, and “he recognized some people and places familiar to Maha Ram”.

    10. Sunita Khandelwal. Immediately after her birth “she was noticed to have a large birthmark on the right side of her head”. It was bleeding, “but her family applied talcum powder to it, and the bleeding stopped after 3 days”. At the age of about 2, she began to refer to a previous life in a town called Kota, the most significant detail being that she had fallen down “from a small height’, having been pushed by her cousin when she was 8 years old. “She pointed to the area of the birthmark on her head and said: ‘Look here, I have fallen’ ”. The family had no connections with Kota, but Sunita demanded to be taken there, even though “her family had no substantial clues for finding in Kota the family to which she was referring”. By the time they actually went, she had provided a few more details. They did manage to find one family which fitted the bill, their 8-year-old daughter Sakuntala having died after falling from a balcony. Her mother “found her unconscious with blood running out of one ear”, and she died a few hours later. There remained the question of whether this was the actual family, and Stevenson investigated as best he could whether there were other candidates. However, “after a careful appraisal of all the facts, (he) became convinced that Sakuntala was the correct child and that she alone had had a life and death with details that matched Sunita’s statements”.

    11. Dellâl Beyaz. “At her birth she was found to have a substantial birthmark at the top of her head, and it oozed for some days after her birth”. She “gave the first indications of having memories of a previous life when her mother overheard her talking to herself. She seemed to be calling to someone for help. Gradually she communicated details about the life of a woman who, hanging out clothes to dry on the roof of a house, stepped back, and fell through a hole in the roof”. Her “statements would have gone unverified longer than they did if a man from Odabaşi (the relevant village)… had not happened to hear about them” when in the neighbourhood. Her statements “seemed to fit closely the life and death of a woman called Zehide Köse, who had lived and died in Odabaşi”. “Zehide had been doing just what Dellâl had said” (details given). “She died the following day from injuries to her skull and brain”. Stevenson examined the hospital record which confirmed the cause of death, but made no mention of any damage that might have corresponded to the birthmark. He thinks that “this could easily have been overlooked beneath Zehide’s hair”. He also examined the birthmark, which “resembled the scar of a healed wound”.

    “Dellâl was one of the few Turkish subjects to describe an event that occurred after death in the previous life. She gave a correct description of the location of Zehide’s grave”.

    12. Wilfred Meares. “Before she conceived him, his mother Ruby Meares had had two dreams about a deceased relative, Victor Smart, who, she said, ‘kept coming to me’. Even before that, this same relative, while he was still living, had said that, if he were to reincarnate, he would like to return as Ruby Meares’s child”. Victor had died instantly, following a car accident in which his head hit the pavement, he bit his tongue, and broke his neck. His birthmark was “a hairless area at the back of his head. “When Wilfred could speak, he made a few statements about the life of Victor Smart. He showed friendships and animosities toward members of the family that accorded with those of Victor Smart”.

    The last example is perhaps not as impressive as some of the others, in which many more convincing details are provided. I hope, however, that I have provided enough evidence overall to show that wounds from a previous life as the cause of birthmarks is a hypothesis at least worthy of consideration. I also hope that readers here have more easily been persuaded than my friend mentioned above.

    As I said above, in the next article I’ll turn to Stevenson’s examples of birth defects. There will be further fascinating examples.

Footnotes:

1. Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, Praeger, 1997
2. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. University Press of Virginia, 2nd edition 1974

    In the Christmas issue of The Spectator (a right-leaning British political magazine), Darwinian biologist and arch-atheist Richard Dawkins has been given some space to air his views, and he has produced an article entitled ‘The insidious attacks on scientific truth’¹. He claims to be very passionate about truth, as revealed in an interview in 2009. When asked, “Why does it matter whether or not people believe in God?”, he replied “I really, really think it matters what’s true”². My purpose here is to investigate whether or not he is really interested in truth, to argue that what he considers to be scientific truth is not as true as he thinks it is, and to demonstrate that on occasions he can be somewhat economical with the truth, one might say lying, himself.

    He obviously believes that there is such a thing as scientific truth: “The history of science’s increasing knowledge, especially during the past four centuries, is a spectacular cascade of truths following one on the other… Science can properly claim to be the gold standard of truth”¹. So firstly, let’s have a look at some things he perceives to be scientific truth: evolution, consciousness as an epiphenomenon of the brain, and quantum physics.

    1) Evolution. Dawkins’ strongest conviction, perhaps apart from his certainty that God does not exist, is the truth of Darwinian evolutionary theory. When his book The Greatest Show on Earth was published, a newspaper interview had the headline ‘Evolution is Fact. End of Story’, and the subtitle was ‘If the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope have no problem with evolution, why are our children being brainwashed and our science teachers under attack?’³. It is important to note that, when Dawkins uses the world ‘evolution’, he does not mean it in the simple and obvious sense of ‘change over time’, something that everyone should agree with. He means that life has evolved exclusively through a blind process of natural selection, acting upon random genetic mutations, without any direction or teleology involved. He may believe this to be a scientific truth, but it has never been proved, and is highly debatable. (Like many others, I believe that it is untrue. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope are not necessarily the best judges — they are not trained scientists — and may have been bullied into submission by Dawkins and others like him.) As I just noted, if there is anything that Dawkins is more passionate about than the scientific truth of Darwinism, then it is atheism. As he says, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist”. In the 2009 interview, when asked “what’s the best case that you’ve heard for the existence of God?”, he replied “as far as biology is concerned, the argument is dead — Darwin has solved that one”. It is not hard to see, therefore, that he is so attracted to Darwinism, and blind to its flaws, because of its atheistic implications; these are more important to him than scientific truth.

    2) Consciousness. Dawkins accepts that it “is something unexplained and not yet understood”, and is indeed “mysterious”, yet says that he is “committed to the view that it’s a manifestation of brain activity and therefore, since brains are produced by evolution, subjective consciousness must in some sense have evolved”². The phrase ‘committed to the view’ is strange, suggesting that he knows that it is not scientific truth, merely a logical deduction from his belief in the truth of Darwinism. It has certainly never been proved scientifically, quite the opposite. The failure of science to explain how the brain generates consciousness has been called the Hard Problem, not merely hard but currently insoluble, so much so that some philosophers and scientists are turning in desperation towards versions of panpsychism. Dawkins is “committed” to this view, not because it is scientific truth, but because it is consistent with his atheism; it is merely what he wants to be scientific truth.

    3) Quantum physics. Even though, like most of us, he doesn’t understand the complexities of the theory, he regards this as scientific truth: “Quantum theory is validated by predictions fulfilled to so many decimal places that it’s been compared to predicting the width of North America to within one hairsbreadth”¹. Quantum physics has indeed been described as the most successful physical theory of all time, so no problem there. However, Dawkins conveniently omits to mention that many quantum physicists have stated in no uncertain terms that his belief about consciousness is wrong. Some examples would be Sir Arthur Eddington, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Eugene Wigner, David Bohm, Danah Zohar, and Fred Alan Wolf. Also worthy of mention is systems scientist Ervin Laszlo, co-author of The Immortal Mind: Science and the Continuity of Consciousness⁴. Because of their understanding of quantum physics, they each in their own way state that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain, as Dawkins believes, some of them going so far as to say that it is more primary than matter. The sheer weight of numbers of these influential scientific figures indicates that the viewpoint to which Dawkins is committed is far from being scientific truth. It’s also worth pointing out that the idea that consciousness is more primary than matter is what religions and spiritual traditions have been saying for thousands of years. The scientists just mentioned frequently make statements which echo these traditions. What does that say about Dawkins’ rejection of religion?

    Another quantum line of thinking is that consciousness creates reality. Thus Niels Bohr said: “When we measure something, we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not ‘measuring’ the world, we are creating it”⁵. Another physicist who shares that viewpoint is Amit Goswami, as explained in his book The Self-Aware Universe: how consciousness creates the material world⁶. It is hard to see how a consciousness which evolved through a process of natural selection could be capable of such an achievement.

    I would argue, therefore, as Dawkins does, that quantum physics is ‘true’. Unfortunately for him, it exposes the flaws in his arguments about what is scientific truth, although he either doesn’t know, or chooses to ignore this. (It’s worth mentioning that Amit Goswami also wrote Creative Evolution: a Physicist’s Resolution between Darwinism and Intelligent Design⁷.)

    Now let’s have a look at something Dawkins definitely believes is not scientific truth, parapsychology, i.e. ESP in its various manifestations. I have had some limited personal experience of this, so know that Dawkins is wrong. Of course, anecdotal evidence wouldn’t convince him.

    The biologist Rupert Sheldrake tells the following story⁸. In 2007, Channel 4 television offered Dawkins the opportunity to make a series entitled Enemies of Reason. Sheldrake was invited to participate because of his belief in ESP, and his research on it. Knowing what Dawkins was like, he was reluctant, but was assured that it would be a balanced discussion, so eventually agreed.

    In front of the camera Dawkins said that he would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn’t any evidence for it. He dismissed all research on the subject out of hand. He said that if it really occurred, it would “turn the laws of physics upside down,” and added “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Sheldrake pointed out that many people say they have experienced telepathy, so that it could be considered ordinary: “The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?” Dawkins produced no evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgment; he assumed that people want to believe in the paranormal because of wishful thinking.

    Sheldrake informed Dawkins of the controlled experiments he had been conducting, with results far above the chance level. He had also sent him copies of some of his peer-reviewed papers, so that he could look at the data in advance of filming. Dawkins reply was “I don’t want to discuss evidence… There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about”.

    The camera was then stopped, and the director confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. Sheldrake concluded therefore that the programme he was making was another Dawkins polemic. He quotes him as saying that it was intended to be “a high grade debunking exercise.”

    Sheldrake then challenged them, saying that he had been told that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. The director asked to see the emails from his assistant, which he read “with obvious dismay”, saying that the assurances she had given him were wrong. He was therefore confirming that the programme had no interest in investigating scientific truth, but was intended to be merely a vehicle for Dawkins’ prejudices. (What this says about the ethics of the TV channel is an interesting question.)

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    Now let’s consider how keen Dawkins is on telling the truth himself. In the Spectator article, he criticises Donald Trump for consistently lying, saying: “World-weary cynics sigh that all politicians lie: it goes with the territory. But normal politicians lie as a last resort and try to cover it up. Donald Trump is in a class of his own. For him, lying is not a last resort. It never occurs to him to do anything else”. I’m not going to suggest that Dawkins is as bad as Trump, but there is at least a hint of the pot calling the kettle black. Will he in fact do or say anything to promote his atheistic agenda? Here are some examples:

    1) In a radio interview Dawkins said we “shouldn’t try to indoctrinate children with atheism, in the same way that we shouldn’t indoctrinate them with religion”⁹. In the previous year, however, he had helped to finance the setting up of summer camps for children which had, one might argue, precisely that purpose. Of course he wouldn’t put it in those terms himself — items on the agenda were: the teaching of evolution, lessons in critical thinking, and the debunking of telepathy. As discussed above, however, for Dawkins the teaching of ‘Darwinian evolution’ will be synonymous with atheism. We were told that, around the campfire, the children would be singing John Lennon’s Imagine, which includes the lyrics “Imagine there’s no heaven, and no religion too”.

    The Sunday Times newspaper (June 28th 2009), however, saw through the smokescreen, and ran a headline ‘Dawkins sets up kids’ camp to groom atheists’. The accompanying editorial said: “Richard Dawkins, champion of atheism and scourge of all things religious, has come up with a novel idea to wean our children away from God: summer camps for would-be little non-believers”.

    2) In the same interview Dawkins claimed that “no reputable scientist believes in Intelligent Design”. This is certainly untrue, therefore a lie, unless his definition of ‘reputable’ is merely someone who agrees with him about Darwinism, in which case this statement would become a meaningless tautology.

    Ironically, one of his supposed heroes was a firm believer in Intelligent Design, although he conveniently omits to mention this. I’m thinking of Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection about the same time as Darwin. This one fact persuaded Dawkins to say, in his preface to The Blind Watchmaker, that the mystery of our existence has now been solved: “Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet”¹⁰. Dawkins may be unaware of this, and therefore not lying, merely too ignorant to be credible, but Wallace, in his later book Darwinism, included a section entitled ‘Independent Proof that the Mathematical, Musical, and Artistic Faculties have not been Developed under the Law of Natural Selection’. More significant is the title of his 1914 book The World of Life: a Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose. (If that’s not someone who believes in Intelligent Design, I don’t know who would be.) There he states his view that the purpose (which, for Dawkins, is tantamount to a swear-word) of evolution is “the development of Man, the one crowning product of the whole cosmic process”¹¹. (I’ve described how the true Wallace is ignored by the modern media and science in a little more detail here.)

    Dawkins must surely believe, therefore, that Wallace is not reputable. Given the latter’s views, he should think that he was hopelessly deluded. Yet he says that Wallace solved the mystery of our existence. This is completely misleading and, if not a deliberate lie, then it can only be a case of extreme ignorance.

    In more recent times Michael Behe has become controversial in scientific circles for his firm belief in Intelligent Design, following the publication in 1996 of his book Darwin’s Black Box. He is a Professor of Biochemistry, so I would say that makes him reputable. Dawkins is definitely aware of him, and in another interview¹² dismisses him as a ‘Creationist’, which he isn’t by any reasonable definition of that word. (I could therefore call that a lie, although I think the truth is that Dawkins is too blinkered, and therefore incapable of the subtlety of thought required to distinguish between Creationism, Intelligent Design, and belief in a literal Intelligent Designer.)

    3) In evolutionary literature, there is a lot of debate about the eye, on the grounds that it, and vision in general, seem too complex to have evolved through a process of unguided natural selection. In Dawkins’ own words, “the problem is that in the case of the eye, lots of things have to go on in lots of different parts, in parallel”¹³. This was precisely the reason that Michael Behe rejected natural selection as an explanation, and coined the term irreducibly complex for the eye and some other biological phenomena. Dawkins claimed that there had been a study by two scientists, Dan Nilsson and Suzanne Pelger — a computer simulation about how the eye might have evolved and the length of time required — concluding that these were not really problems after all. However, David Berlinski, frequent critic of Darwinism and Richard Dawkins, tracked down the scientists, and discovered that this computer simulation didn’t exist¹⁴. Tom Bethell comments: “The whole story was fabricated out of thin air by Richard Dawkins. The senior author of the study on which Dawkins based his claim — Dan E. Nilsson — has explicitly rejected the idea that his laboratory has ever produced a computer simulation of the eye’s development”¹⁵.

    If true, it is hard to see how Dawkins thought that he could get away with this, and he may have some excuse or explanation for the claimed deception, but these are the facts according to his critics.

    4) I’ve heard Dawkins state categorically in a radio interview that “Einstein was an atheist”. The presenter was either not knowledgeable enough, or too afraid to challenge him. In another interview, he said something very similar: “Very often, however, when you look at the details of what an alleged religious scientist actually thinks, it turns out to be something like what Einstein thought, which is that there is no God, but that he used the name God as a convenient label, a convenient metaphor for the deep mysteries underlying the universe, for which he had a very proper reverence, as do I. However, he wasn’t a believer in any sort of supernatural God… Most of the so-called religious scientists, if you actually probe what they believe, it turns out to be Einsteinian religion rather than supernatural religion”¹⁶. (Another ludicrous and inaccurate statement by Dawkins on the subject of scientists who say they believe in God, but he thinks don’t really, is: “When you scratch beneath the surface, you find that what they believe in is something like happiness”⁹.)

    On the Einsteinian point, Dawkins’ comment was somewhat strange, given that an obviously knowledgeable listener had called in and actually mentioned John Polkinghorne, Allan Sandage, Charles Townes, and Arthur Schlawlow.

• Polkinghorne is a Cambridge Professor of Physics, and ordained Anglican priest.
• Sandage, considered to be the world’s greatest cosmologist until his death, and a winner of the Crafoord Prize for astronomy (the equivalent to the Nobel Prize), converted to Christianity in 1983. He was also a firm believer in Intelligent Design — another extremely reputable scientist, contrary to Dawkins’ claim above.
• Charles Townes was a Berkeley Professor of Physics, and Nobel Laureate. In 2005 he won the Templeton prize, which is given to someone who “has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works”. He said that it is “arguable that the growth of modern science owes much to the Jewish and Christian religions”.
• Arthur Schlawlow was a Stanford Professor of Physics, and Nobel Laureate. He has been quoted: “It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious… I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life”.

    It is obvious, therefore, that the views of these four are nowhere near close to Einstein’s, contrary to what Dawkins said. (For significant others with quotes see https://blog.magiscenter.com/blog/23-famous-scientists-who-are-not-atheists, which is also the source for some of that material.) So what are we to conclude about Dawkins? Does he really believe what he is saying? In that case we can conclude that he is so misguided that his views are worthless. Or is he simply lying, trusting that he is only talking in these radio interviews to not sufficiently informed listeners?

    Turning now to Einstein himself, let’s have a brief look at what his views on religion and God actually were. They are complicated, so one can easily see why confusion might arise. He is well known for his saying that “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind”¹⁷. This should have caused Dawkins to pause for a second before making his comment that Einstein was an atheist. For the record, he specifically said that he was not an atheist, preferring to call himself an agnostic, or “religious non-believer”.

    It is possible to find quotes from Einstein which lend support to Dawkins’ interpretation, for example: “My views are near those of Spinoza: admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly”. This does not give the full picture, however, for here is a related statement, which suggests a different understanding: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind”¹⁸.

    So, if Dawkins wants to try to persuade us that, despite this, Einstein was nevertheless an atheist, then we can point out that Spinoza offered four proofs of the existence of God. (How convincing they were is not the issue here.) Spinoza’s understanding of divinity may have been unconventional and controversial — he was excommunicated from the Jewish faith because of his “abominable heresies” — but that does not mean that he was an atheist. (His views have frequently been described as pantheistic, or something close to that.)

    To close on Einstein, here’s one more relevant quote. At a charity dinner in 1940 he remarked that there are still people who say there is no God, “but what really makes me angry is that they quote me for support of such views… There are fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics”¹⁹. Given the date, he couldn’t possibly have been thinking of Richard Dawkins, but his comment nevertheless remains in our times highly appropriate.

    5) More lies. In 2011 Dawkins was invited to participate in a debate with the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. He turned down the invitation, explaining his reasons in an article in the Guardian newspaper²⁰. He wrote that Craig was a “deplorable apologist for genocide”, in that he has defended God for commanding the massacre of the Canaanites, as recounted in the book of Deuteronomy. (For the record, I am not disputing Dawkins’ estimation of Craig on this point.) “Would you share a platform with him? I wouldn’t, and I won’t”. “I would rather leave an empty chair than share a platform with him”. This, as it turned out, was a lie, for a reader pointed out that Dawkins had shared a platform with Craig at a debate the previous November. Dawkins then responded that at that time he didn’t know that Craig was a defender of genocide and infanticide. This was another lie, for in April 2008 Dawkins had written an article attacking Craig’s “dumbfoundingly, staggeringly awful” account of the massacre. All this led the magazine Private Eye to comment: “Fans of Professor Richard Dawkins fear he may be losing his grip on reality”²¹.

    Whatever else I may think about Dawkins, I don’t consider him stupid, so we have to account for these strange lapses of memory. There was a strong suspicion at the time that the real reason that Dawkins didn’t want to debate was because he thought he might lose, and be made to look stupid in the process. Even though, in the Guardian article, Dawkins tried to claim that Craig was an insignificant figure not worthy of his time and energy, Craig has been described by others as “the foremost apologist of Christian theism”, and a formidable debater, who is “unafraid to range across ontological theology and moral philosophy and talks with ease about new developments in cosmology, mathematics and physics”²².

    Craig has debated with the other three members of Dawkins’ new-atheist group — the so-called Four Horsemen — Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. Let’s have a look at how well they got on.

    Dawkins has said: “As for religion … nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris”. Yet when Harris debated with Craig, in his opening statement, he declared that Craig is “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists”. After that debate, the atheist website Debunking Christianity reported: “Bill (Craig) has once again showed himself as the best debater of this generation”.

    Christopher Hitchens said: “I can tell you that my brothers and sisters in the unbelieving community take him very seriously. He’s thought of as a very tough guy: very rigorous, very scholarly, very formidable”. After a debate between the two, the website Common Sense Atheism commented: “Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child”.

    Daniel Dennett, apparently, fared a little better and managed to score some points.

    Also worth noting is that, not long after Craig’s exchange with Anthony Flew, a leading atheist philosopher, the latter converted, if not to Christianity, at least to deism.

    So that gives us some idea of how difficult Craig can be. Is it little wonder that Dawkins wouldn’t want to debate with him, given that his own level of argument is so low? He can get away with his lies and misleading statements unchallenged in radio interviews, but it seems he is not so keen to take on highly competent and intellectually rigorous debaters. As Paul Vallely remarked in The Independent newspaper: “Dawkins in the past has been notable for seeking out extreme oddball fundamentalists. He and his followers routinely erect a straw man — defining religion in ways unrecognisable to many mainstream believers — and then knock their caricature to the ground. But Craig is an opponent of a different calibre who focuses ruthlessly on failures of internal logic in his rivals’ arguments”. The debating techniques of Dawkins and those like him “ tend to be catalogues of religion’s historical atrocities, coupled with psychological sideswipes about the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas”²².

    Dawkins said in the Guardian article: “For some years now, Craig has been increasingly importunate in his efforts to cajole, harass or defame me into a debate with him. I have consistently refused”. (This, as revealed above, was a lie, since he had debated with him.) In the light of Craig’s reputation, we can perhaps begin to understand why. Daniel Came, an atheist Oxford Professor of Philosophy, in a subsequent Guardian article, criticised in strong terms both Dawkins and philosopher A. C. Grayling, who had also refused an invitation to debate with Craig, thus: “It is quite obvious that Dawkins is opportunistically using these remarks as a smokescreen to hide the real reasons for his refusal to debate with Craig ”. “Given that there isn’t much in the way of serious argumentation in the New Atheists’ dialectical arsenal, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Dawkins and Grayling aren’t exactly queuing up to enter a public forum with an intellectually rigorous theist like Craig to have their views dissected and the inadequacy of their arguments exposed”²³.

    In conclusion, I’ll repeat the question in my title: is Richard Dawkins a champion of scientific truth, or is he just a compulsive liar? I’ve presented some arguments and evidence here, so I’ll leave readers to make their own judgement. My own estimation is that he is a somewhat shifty character, who will say anything he thinks he can get away with at any given moment, in order to promote his false agenda. He obviously thinks that most people are not monitoring him closely enough to notice his deviousness. He claims to represent scientific truth, yet he is wrong about evolution, about consciousness, and fails to understand adequately the implications of quantum physics. Perhaps not quite so obviously, he is also wrong about God. As Allan Sandage, mentioned above, said: “If there is no God, nothing makes sense. The atheist’s case is based on a deception they wish to play upon themselves…”²⁴. Dawkins might well scratch his head.

Footnotes:

1. magazine issue December 19th 2020: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-insidious-attacks-on-scientific-truth

2. interviewed by Jheni Osman, BBC Knowledge, April 2009

3. The Times, Saturday Review, August 22nd 2009

4. Inner Traditions, 2014

5. quoted by Robert Lanza in The Grand Biometric Design, Benbella Books, 2020, p11

6. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1995

7. Quest Books 2008

8. source for this passage is: https://www.sheldrake.org/reactions/richard-dawkins-comes-to-call

9. BBC Radio 5 Live, August 1st 2010, interviewed by Kate Silverton

10. Penguin, 1988, Pxiii

11. Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1914, Preface, Pvii

12. with Ben Wattenberg, http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript410.html

13. River Out of Eden, Phoenix, 1995, p92

14. I have a reference for this, which I haven’t checked: “A Scientific Scandal” Commentary, April 1st 2003, letters to the editor July 1st 2003.

15. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, Regnery Publishing, 2005, p211

16. interviewed by Simon Mayo, BBC Radio 5 Live, January 12th 2006

17. Essay, Science and Religion, 1954

18. quoted at https://slife.org/religious-and-philosophical-views-of-albert-einstein/

19. quoted in https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/did-albert-einstein-believe-in-god

20. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/20/richard-dawkins-william-lane-craig

21. issue no 1300, October 28th 2011

22. www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/paul-vallely-god-knows-why-dawkins-wont-show-2374659.html

23. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/22/richard-dawkins-refusal-debate-william-lane-craig

24. quoted at https://reasonsforjesus.com/how-science-led-a-world-leading-astronomer-allan-sandage-to-god/

    This is the latest in a series of articles. In an earlier one I offered a spiritual solution to the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. This was based on two almost identical understandings of what it means to be human, one by Raynor C. Johnson, author of impressive books on spiritual themes, and another by the Theosophical Society. Both say that a human being is a hierarchy of several bodies. If required, please consult that article [click here] for the details. In the last article [click here] I considered whether there is any evidence to suggest that this scenario is correct. I focussed on the question of higher bodies in general, and specifically on the etheric body. Here I’ll consider whether this hierarchy of bodies is separated into a lower and a higher level. Evidence which suggests this comes from an understanding of meditation, artistic creativity, and guidance apparently from somewhere beyond the personality.

    How do we understand the purpose of meditation? The conventional viewpoint, as in Buddhism and Hinduism for example, is that the conscious self is seeking to control and silence all thoughts, the chattering mind, in order to access a higher state of consciousness. We might say that the soul is attempting to return to where it naturally belongs, where it feels more at home, in the spiritual realm. Interpreted according to the hierarchy-of-bodies scenario, this chattering mind could well be the lower mental body, which is a barrier to achieving this higher state, since it completely occupies our psychological space, leaving no room for anything else.

    According to the viewpoint of modern science, however, everything to do with consciousness is a by-product, an epiphenomenon, of the brain. The thoughts of our chattering minds must therefore be generated by the brain. Some neuroscientists even go so far as to say that the self, thus consciousness, is an illusion. So they would have to conclude that our conscious selves, which are either created by the brain or are illusions, have the desire to silence thoughts, the contents of the mind. If this is so, the brain has created an entity, possibly illusory, which wants to stop one of the main activities of the brain, the production of thoughts. One part of the brain is therefore in conflict with, and trying to put an end to, another, even though the first one might not really exist. If a war of this kind is really going on inside our heads, surely we would all very soon be driven mad. I therefore suggest that this scientific scenario is ridiculous, and that the spiritual explanation makes better, perhaps perfect, sense.

    Turning now to the question of creativity, Raynor Johnson says of the causal body that it “belongs to a level that inspires all the highest forms. The imagination of the finest artists, sculptors, musicians, and poets has been kindled from this level of consciousness”. This sounds very reasonable, for how else are we to understand such extraordinary creativity? Could it have evolved through a process of natural selection? Arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins once said: “Fundamentally at the gene level elephants are just like gigantic colonies of viruses which are all programming the elephant to make more DNA via the indirect process of making an elephant first. But it doesn’t do justice to the process, because an elephant is such a complicated creature, such a complicated thing, that we focus our attention on the elephant, and we see that it is doing it by another means”¹.

    He is thus suggesting that the fundamental reality of life is DNA seeking to replicate itself, and that the physical elephant is merely a somewhat irrelevant by-product of that process. By implication, therefore, a human being is also merely a by-product of DNA’s attempts to replicate itself. In which case the desire and the skill to create such magnificent works as Beethoven’s 9th symphony, Bach’s fugues, and the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian are also irrelevant by-products of life’s main purpose, that of DNA seeking to replicate itself. If that is DNA’s exclusive preoccupation, why would it show such a strong interest in the arts?

    I suggest that it is hard to take such ideas seriously. Instead let’s consider whether there is evidence for the process of musical creativity according to Raynor Johnson’s perspective. A good example would be what the rock star Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has to say about songwriting:

• “Great songs write themselves. You’re just being led by the nose, or the ears. The skill is not to interfere with it too much. Ignore intelligence, ignore everything; just follow it where it takes you. You really have no say in it, and suddenly there it is… You realize that songs write themselves; you’re just the conveyer”².
• “People say they write songs, but in a way you’re more the medium. I feel like all the songs in the world are just floating around, it’s just a matter of like an antenna, of whatever you pick up. So many uncanny things have happened. A whole song just appears from nowhere in five minutes, the whole structure, and you haven’t worked at all”³.

    Keith Richards has probably never heard of the causal body, but uses language highly suggestive of it. In any event, he is clearly saying that his music and lyrics are written at a different level of being, which his ego-self has merely tuned into. 

    Along these lines, he tells a fascinating story about one of his most famous songs. In the previous article I argued that the etheric body is better able to operate when we are asleep. The same would also seem to be true of the creative, causal body, for Richards says that he wrote Satisfaction during the night while he was asleep (or at least thought he was). He taped it onto a cassette recorder, and had no idea he’d written the song when he woke up: “I wrote Satisfaction in my sleep… it’s only thank God for the little Philips cassette player. The miracle being that I looked at the cassette player that morning and I knew I’d put a brand-new tape in the previous night, and I saw it was the end.” He then rewound the tape and found 30 seconds of the famous riff and the lyrics that would become the song’s title (together with 40 minutes of snoring), even though he had no memory of doing this⁴.

    There are other factors possibly relevant to this story, for it would not be surprising if some alcohol were involved. What is clear, however, is that it was not his conscious self writing the song, which was coming from elsewhere.

    Further evidence for sources of musical creativity beyond the personality is suggested by the practice of improvisation. One especially skillful exponent was Mozart, who had a prodigious ability to compose on the spot:

• “A priest Placidus Scharl recalled that, at the age of 6, “one had only to give him the first subject which came to mind for a fugue or an invention: he would develop it with strange variations and constantly changing passages as long as one wished; he would improvise fugally on a subject for hours, and this fantasia-playing was his greatest passion”.
• The composer André Grétry reported that Mozart’s father had asked him to write a very difficult Sonata movement. “I wrote him an Allegro in E-flat; difficult, but unpretentious; he played it, and everyone, except myself, believed that it was a miracle. The boy had not stopped; but following the modulations, he had substituted a quantity of passages for those which I had written”.
• As a teenager Mozart gave a concert where, according to a witness: “an experienced musician gave him a fugue theme, which he worked out for more than an hour with such science, dexterity, harmony, and proper attention to rhythm, that even the greatest connoisseurs were astounded”⁵.

    It is hard to see how improvisation, at this level of skill and spontaneity, could be the product of the ego-self, let alone the brain, no matter how musical the person. It seems truer to say that the music is playing the performer or, as Keith Richards would say, the writer appears to channel the music.

    I’ll now turn to my third topic, that of apparent knowledge, or guidance to the ego-self from other levels of reality. Many traditions believe this to be the case, so that we encounter terms like the Self (Carl Jung), the Higher Self (Psychosynthesis), the Subliminal Self (Frederic Myers), the soul, and the daemon (Ancient Greece). Examples of such guidance are dreams, divination, powerful intuitions, and so-called Freudian slips.

    1. Dreams are the most obvious and most available source of guidance. Many authors have written on this subject. Perhaps the most important is Carl Jung, who placed dream interpretation at the centre of his therapeutic system. He said “we have forgotten the age-old fact that God speaks chiefly through dreams and visions”⁶. A book I especially like is Arthur Bernard’s God Has No Edges, Dreams Have No Boundaries⁷. His experience is that no matter what you (your ego-consciousness) may think, your “dreams say think again”. 

    Dream interpretation is not just an aspect of Western psychology. It can also fit in with:
 a) Hinduism. See, for example, Realities of the Dreaming Mind by Swami Sivananda Radha⁸, a western woman initiated into the Hindu tradition. She has created a “Dream Yoga”, and talks about the “Guru within”.
 b) Sufism. I once was privileged to attend the daily meetings hosted by the Sufi teacher, Irina Tweedie. Each one began with a session of dream sharing and interpretation.
 c) Ancient tribal traditions. See, for example, Patricia Garfield’s chapter on Native Americans in Creative Dreaming9⁹. She says that all tribes assign special importance to dreams.

    2. Divination. I have given Tarot readings. I am usually assured by the questioner that what I have said has been relevant and meaningful, and yet he or she has chosen the cards when they were face down. Magical and mysterious though this may seem, the hidden self must know which cards are which, and guide the person to choose the appropriate ones. That has been my own experience when being given a reading by others; a certain card suddenly seems to stand out from the others, seemingly asking to be chosen.

    An I Ching coin consultation is broadly similar to a Tarot reading. The interesting difference is that, with the Tarot, the questioner does actually choose the cards, which allows the possibility of some involvement of the hidden self. With the I Ching, however, when the coins are thrown, the person has apparently no control over how they land, so it seems that one would have to ascribe this to ‘chance’. Yet, as Carl Jung assures us, meaningful answers are the rule! (Can one’s own hidden self control how coins land?)

    3. Strong intuitions. Many people feel that they are guided in life by an inner voice. The word actually suggests inner teaching (in-tuition), so that we can reasonably ask, if we are the pupils, who is the teacher? Sometimes this experience can become even more intense, when the ego-consciousness is gripped by what seems to be an overwhelmingly powerful idea, something irresistible. You know that it will not let go until you have performed what it demands, and when you have done this, the outcome is positive.
    An outstanding example of this phenomenon is Rosalind Heywood, writer on parapsychology, who talks about receiving ‘orders’. A powerful example occurred one afternoon when she was told by this inner voice to meet the three o’clock train at Wimbledon station. In order to do this, she had to borrow a neighbour’s car, which shows how important it was to her to obey such instructions. By following this ‘order’ she managed to save the life of her husband, who had suffered a heart attack¹⁰.

    4. Freudian slips. Sigmund Freud’s book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life¹¹ introduced the world to this idea. His most powerful example, so extraordinary that it is almost impossible to believe, tells of a woman who, seeing a man in the street, fails to remember that she had recently married him. He reports that the marriage came “to a most unhappy end”.
    What does the phenomenon of the Freudian slip mean? In general terms, we can say that the ego tends to lie, be prone to self-deception, yet something inside wants the truth to be recognised. There is thus a hidden intelligence which somehow forces the ego to make a mistake in speech or action, revealing what it is trying to conceal. Again I assume that this other consciousness is the Higher or Subliminal Self. Freud’s example seems to be a clear message from this hidden self, which wants the woman to recognise the terrible mistake she has made.                                                 I have an outstanding example of a Freudian slip from my own experience. Some time ago I attended a group-therapy weekend. Some exercises were conducted in pairs, and I was involved in one of these with a man, I would estimate, in his late twenties. During a pause in the exercise, to avoid an embarrassing silence, I engaged him in conversation, and my opening gambit was “How long have you been in therapy?”. His reply was “since I was 11”. This was a strange answer — it seemed a young age to start — so I asked him, “what happened then?” He replied, “I was sent away to boarding school”. I was excited by this; it seemed like an obvious example of a Freudian slip — his deeper self was making him aware how his problems had started, a wonderful gift which would aid him in his therapy. However, when I started trying to suggest this to him, his expression visibly changed, and he went into a state of anxiety and denial, and tried to explain that it meant nothing, was just a “slip of the tongue”. His ego-self clearly wasn’t ready to hear the message.

Footnotes:

1. https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/transcript/dawk-body.html

2. https://www.publicationcoach.com/keith-richards-writing-advice/

3. http://www.timeisonourside.com/songwriting.html

4. https://www.biography.com/news/keith-richards-satisfaction-rolling-stones

5. The source for the three quotes is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart’s_compositional_method

6. Man and His Symbols, Picador, 1978, p92

7. Wheatmark, 2009

8. Shambhala, 1996

9. Fireside, Simon & Schuster, 1995

10. Described by Lawrence LeShan in A New Science of the Paranormal, Quest Books, 2009, p30. Rosalind Heywood and ‘orders’ are also discussed by Colin Wilson in Afterlife, Grafton Books, 1987. Her autobiography is called The Infinite Hive.

11. Penguin, 1991

    This is the latest in a series of articles. In an earlier one I offered a spiritual solution to the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. This was based on two almost identical understandings of what it means to be human, one by Raynor C. Johnson, author of books on spiritual themes, and another by the Theosophical Society. Both say that a human being is a hierarchy of several bodies. If required, please consult  that article (click here) for the details. Here I’ll consider whether there is any evidence to suggest that this scenario is correct. Some of the things I say are speculative, are not therefore being proposed as facts, and are unlikely to convince materialist scientists. That doesn’t matter. My intention is merely to outline the difficulties which arise if one tries to stick to a materialist, ‘scientific’ worldview.

    There are three questions to consider:

• is there any general evidence to suggest that these other bodies exist?
• in the lower level of the personality, in addition to body/feelings/mind, is there an extra etheric or vital body?
• is there a division between higher and lower levels of our being?

    Perhaps the most significant evidence that humans have extra ‘bodies’, is the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences. I personally know three people to whom this has happened, and Jack Preston King, former prolific writer on Medium, has told me that he has also had this experience. The most obvious explanation would seem to be that this is the astral body, the next higher in the hierarchy above the physical, which has temporarily escaped the material plane. It’s worth noting that in New Age literature this phenomenon is sometimes called astral travelling.

    A less dramatic version of this would seem to be the parapsychological phenomenon of remote viewing. Here consciousness has apparently left the body, since it can ‘see’ things in far away places which the physical eyes cannot. The viewer, however, has no sense that he or she has actually left the body; what is ‘seen’ is visualised internally (perhaps by the astral body?). This is not something that can be easily dismissed by sceptical scientists, since the CIA once had a remote viewing programme which achieved useful results. Two of the most successful exponents were Pat Price, and Joseph McMoneagle, who told his story in Memoirs of a Psychic Spy. One of his impressive successes is described by Dean Radin in The Conscious Universe¹.

    Especially significant evidence for the existence of higher bodies are the problems associated with biological morphogenesis. This was discussed by the physicist Paul Davies in The Cosmic Blueprint², where he said: “Among the many scientific puzzles posed by living organisms, perhaps the toughest concerns the origin of form. Put simply, the problem is this. How is a disorganized collection of molecules assembled into a coherent whole that constitutes a living organism, with all the right bits in the right places? The creation of biological forms is known as morphogenesis, and despite decades of study it is a subject still shrouded in mystery”. (He was writing in 1989, and science can sometimes move forward quickly. I would be surprised, however, if significant progress has been made since then on the problems he outlines.)

    He elaborates in the following quotations:

    “The enigma is at its most striking in the seemingly miraculous development of an embryo from a single fertilized cell into a more or less independent living entity of fantastic complexity, in which many cells have become specialized to form parts of nerve, liver, bone, etc. It is a process that is somehow supervised to an astonishing level of detail and accuracy in both space and time. In studying the development of the embryo it is hard to resist the impression that there exists somewhere a blueprint, or plan of assembly, carrying the instructions needed to achieve the finished form. In some as yet poorly understood way, the growth of the organism is tightly constrained to conform to this plan. There is thus a strong element of teleology involved. It seems as if the growing organism is being directed towards its final state by some sort of global supervising agency” (p102).

    If the information is stored in the DNA of the original fertilized egg, this implies that the plan is molecular in nature. “The problem is then to understand how the spatial arrangement of something many centimetres in size can be organized from the molecular level. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of cell differentiation. How do some cells ‘know’ they have to become blood cells, while others must become part of the gut, or backbone? Then there is the problem of spatial positioning. How does a given cell know where it is located in relation to other parts of the organism, so that it can ‘turn into’ the appropriate type of cell for the finished product?

    “Related to these difficulties is the fact that although different parts of the organism develop differently, they all contain the same DNA. If every molecule of DNA possesses the same global plan for the whole organism, how is it that different cells implement different parts of that plan? Is there, perhaps, a ‘metaplan’ to tell each cell which part of the plan to implement. If so, where is the metaplan located? In the DNA? But this is surely to fall into an infinite regress”.

    Davies continues to discuss further difficulties if the blueprint is genetic, then says: “The real challenge is to demonstrate how localized interactions can exercise global control. It is very hard to see how this can ever be explained in mechanistic terms at the molecular level” (p104). If that is true, then we presumably have to look to other higher levels in order to explain this indisputably real phenomenon. In the light of the current discussion, it is not hard to know where to look to find these higher levels. They are exactly those listed by Raynor Johnson and the Theosophical Society.

    Davies goes on to observe that the traditional mechanistic, reductionist approach is based on the particle concept of physics, but that particles as primary objects have been replaced in physics by fields. He notes, however that “so far the field concept has made little impact on biology” (p105). He then suggests a possible solution to the above problems: “A possible escape is to suppose that somehow the global plan is stored in the fields themselves, and that the DNA acts as a receiver rather than a source of genetic information” (p106).

    I would suggest that this is indeed the case, or at least that such an idea, if true, fits neatly with the idea of downward causation as expressed by Raynor Johnson and the Theosophical Society. Are these ‘fields’ a scientific way of describing what spiritual people call etheric or astral bodies, or even the soul? And, like the DNA, is the brain also the receiver of information from these bodies, rather than the programmer that scientists assume?

    More evidence to suggest that we have these other bodies is that, even though all the molecules in our bodies are continually dying and being replaced, to the extent that at some point nothing of our previous physical self remains, our bodies, sense of identity, and memories nevertheless remain intact during this process of regeneration, of which we are completely unaware. It is reasonable to ask how this can be possible, and one suggestion would be that we are maintained in our being by one or more of these higher bodies, or ‘fields’ as Davies might say.

    This problem is addressed by biologist Rupert Sheldrake in his book The Science Delusion³. He quotes Francis Crick: “How then is memory stored in the brain so that its trace is relatively immune to molecular turnover?” Materialist scientists believe that the brain is the source of everything to do with consciousness, and therefore that memories must be stored in the brain as material traces. Where else could they be? However, as Sheldrake points out: “Attempts to locate memory traces have been unsuccessful despite more than a century of research, costing many billions of dollars”.

    He provides details of some specific experiments:

• Some animals “could still remember what they had learned even after large amounts of brain tissue had been removed”, and “learned habits were retained after the associative areas of the brain were destroyed. Habits also survived a series of deep incisions into the cerebral cortex that destroyed cross-connections within it. Moreover, if the cerebral cortex was intact, removal of subcortical structures such as the cerebellum did not destroy the memory either”.
• “Even in invertebrates specific memory traces have proved elusive. In a series of experiments with trained octopuses, learned habits survived when various parts of the brain were removed”.
• “The region of the brain (of young chicks) involved in the learning process was not necessary for the retention of memory”.
• “When a caterpillar is metamorphosed into a moth “in the pupa, almost all the caterpillar tissues are dissolved before the new structures of the adult develop. Most of the nervous system is dissolved as well”. Yet a team of scientists “found that moths could remember what they had learned as caterpillars in spite of all the changes they went through during metamorphosis”.

    Erik Kandel, Nobel Laureate in 2000, said in his acceptance speech that these problems of understanding how memory works “will require more than the bottom-up approach of molecular biology”. This obviously means that they would require a top-down approach, otherwise known as downward causation, which is exactly what is claimed by the hierarchy-of-bodies theory under discussion. Perhaps memories are stored in the higher bodies. Further evidence that this might be the case is that there are numerous examples of children who remember details from their past lives. This obviously could not happen if memories are stored in, and die with, the brain. (I have discussed this phenomenon in earlier articles, click here and here.)

    Turning now specifically to the question of the etheric body, according to both Raynor Johnson’s and the Theosophical Society’s scenarios, this exists at a level close to but above the physical. Johnson says: “During the life of the physical body, this etheric structure never wholly withdraws from it, but tries to maintain the health of the nervous system”. Along similar lines, the TS says that it is “an indispensable factor of the living man”. What evidence is there for the existence of this body?

    We know that our physical bodies are capable of extraordinary feats of self-healing, for example blood clotting, broken bones mending, wounds healing. Materialist biologists would have to say that these abilities have emerged and evolved through a process of natural selection. I have my doubts. The body acts as if it were being directed by some hidden intelligence, a mysterious healer. Perhaps this is actually the case, and the mysterious healer is this etheric body. Interestingly, blood clotting was one of several items that biochemist Michael Behe, in his groundbreaking book Darwin’s Black Box⁴, identified as being impossible to have come about by the gradual process of natural selection. He says that it is “a problem that has resisted the determined efforts of a top-notch scientist for four decades. Blood coagulation is a paradigm of the staggering complexity that underlies even apparently simple bodily processes” (p 97). “No one at Harvard University, no one at the National Institutes of Health, no member of the National Academy of Sciences, no Nobel prize winner — no one at all can give a detailed account of how the cilium, or vision, or blood clotting , or any complex biochemical process might have developed in a Darwinian fashion” (p 187). In this book he coined the term irreducible complexity in relation to this phenomenon, and advocated Intelligent Design as a better explanation. Perhaps the etheric body is part of this intelligent system which maintains the health of the body.

    Further evidence for the existence of the etheric body can be found if we consider sleep. We know that it’s essential for our health, that sleep deprivation has a seriously bad effect upon us. We take it for granted, it’s completely normal, we all do it, and don’t even think about it; we just become tired and fall asleep. You may be surprised to discover, therefore, that scientists do not really understand why we need to sleep. In an article on Medium.com by Markham Heid, Dr. Leila Kheirandish-Gozal, a sleep research and professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, was quoted: “Despite years of scientific research and studies, we still don’t completely understand why we need to sleep”. Dr. Carl Bazil, director of the Division of Epilepsy and Sleep at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, said: “We know sleep is useful, but when you ask why we do it in the first place — why every animal, including insects and worms, go through it — there’s really no answer to that. All we can really say is that it’s important”. In an article in New Scientist magazine, Michelle Carr, a sleep researcher at Swansea University, said: “Despite spending roughly a third of our lives in the land of nod, what exactly sleep is for, and why it is so crucial to our health, largely remains a mystery”.

    Every time I hear a scientist say that something is a mystery, my first reaction is to wonder whether the answer lies in a more spiritual understanding. That may well be the case here. Why do scientists find the need to sleep mysterious? Perhaps because they cannot see beyond the body and the brain, and think that these alone are responsible for the maintenance of health. The scientists can therefore see no reason why the brain cannot do its job just as well when we are awake.

    This does not seem to be the case, however. One might think that brain activity would be reduced when we are unconscious and resting (doesn’t the brain need to rest too?). The opposite is the case, however; brain activity increases while we are asleep. As the first article says, “what experts do know is that sleep is a surprisingly active and fertile time for the brain”. This increased activity may well be the etheric body working on the brain and the body. Since sleep is essential for our well-being, my suggestion is therefore that this etheric body can do its work better when the ego-self is asleep. As the first article states: “While your brain is able to engage in some of these chores while you’re awake, the hours you spend asleep seem to do all this more thoroughly and efficiently”. On this point, it’s also worth noting that, when people have a life-threatening condition, the doctor sometimes puts them into an induced coma. Why? Presumably because they know the body is better able to heal itself while unconscious.

    When contemplating the existence of these etheric and astral bodies, there is a suggestion of the supposedly discredited theory of Vitalism, the belief that there is some kind of animating principle required by the physical body to enable it to live. (Both Johnson’s and the TS’s scenarios use the word ‘vital’.) Perhaps death comes when the etheric and astral bodies are no longer capable of maintaining the physical body in being. Many people present at the bedside of someone dying report their impression that something appears to leave the body. That doesn’t of course mean that it’s true, but it certainly makes a lot of sense.

    To advocate Vitalism is currently a biological ‘heresy’. Everything about a human, so many scientists claim, or would like to believe, can be explained solely by reference to the body and the brain. My observation would be that when you rule out spiritual explanations, you may well end up with mysteries you can’t explain, as in the case of sleep, as the scientists quoted above concede.

    Another such mystery is that of homeopathy. This has been deemed ‘pseudoscience’ by sceptics, and sometimes derided and abused. Several years ago in Britain there were even demonstrations outside chemists selling homeopathic remedies, on the grounds that they did not work, and were therefore fraudulent.

    The problem for materialist science is that one of the claims of homeopathy is that a proposed remedy should be distilled, sometimes up to the point when not one molecule remains of the healing agent. Even though no material trace remains, the claim is nevertheless that it still works.

    I once had the good fortune to be introduced at a party to a practising homeopath. He was convinced that homeopathy worked, but was also a trained ‘scientist’, and therefore had all the expected reservations and doubts. He explained to me how this conflict was tormenting him, and that he was at a loss to know how to resolve it. I would say that he at least had the courage to hold this tension in his mind, unlike more conventional scientists, who avoid such discomfort by rejecting homeopathy, and other alternative medical approaches, without full and proper investigation.

    Is this dismissal of homeopathy just another example of materialism being unable to contemplate a more esoteric, spiritual understanding? The great German dramatist and philosopher Gotthold Lessing wrote of the esoteric healer Paracelsus: “Those who imagine that the medicine of Paracelsus is a system of superstitions that we have fortunately outgrown, will, if they come to know its principles, be surprised to find that it is based upon a superior kind of knowledge that we have not yet attained, but into which we may hope to grow”⁵. Perhaps we also need a superior kind of knowledge to understand homeopathy, and indeed other alternative medical practices like acupuncture. That superior knowledge would, of course, be a more spiritual understanding. If homeopathy indeed works, one possibility is that the healing is taking place at the level of the non-material etheric body. This would be something similar to what I said above about memories being stored in the higher levels. Perhaps the etheric body absorbs some kind of memory of the distilled healing agent.

    That is my best effort at coming up with evidence for the existence of these higher bodies. I’d be interested if any readers have further ideas on this topic. I’ll address my third question about the higher and lower levels of being in the next article.

Footnotes:

1. HarperOne, 1997, p214

2. Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1989

3. Coronet, 2012

4. The Free Press, Simon & Schuster, 1996, my copy 2003

5. quoted at https://www.wrf.org/men-women-medicine/paracelsus-physician-philosopher.php

    This is the latest in a series of articles. In the previous one I offered a spiritual solution to the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness. This was based on two almost identical understandings of what it means to be human, one by the author Raynor C. Johnson, and another by the Theosophical Society. Both say that a human being is a hierarchy of several bodies. If required, please consult the previous article  (click here) for the details.

    In the articles which follow this one I’ll consider whether there is actually any evidence which might lead us to believe that this scenario is correct. Before I start that, it’s worth considering how this hierarchical system works.

    According to the significant religions and spiritual traditions, the multi-levelled universe is ultimately nothing but consciousness in its various manifestations, a philosophy known as idealism. How therefore should we understand the existence of all these different bodies/levels of reality? I think a useful analogy is that of making a sauce with flour. The liquid at the beginning represents the original primal consciousness. This is completely fluid. Then, as flour is added, the mixture becomes progressively thicker. At some point, if enough flour is added, the sauce becomes completely solid, what we call physical reality, the body. However, no matter how much flour is used, and no matter how thick the sauce becomes, there have only ever been two ingredients, the original liquid (consciousness) and the thickening agent (flour).

    This analogy, however, only takes us so far. If we have these distinct levels of reality, represented by the hierarchy of bodies, this suggests that a significant amount of flour has been added each time, in order to create the next denser level. On the other hand, there seems no reason why we could not add just a small amount of flour; that is actually what we might expect as one level becomes more dense in order to create another.

    The question therefore arises whether there are any further intermediate levels. Raynor Johnson does refer to these several times: the mental body which contains “the many lower levels of mind”, the astral body which “is itself composed of many substrata or interpenetrating levels”. He also describes the etheric double as being “interposed between the astral and physical bodies. It is not a functional body or vehicle, but it may best be regarded as a bridge between the physical and astral bodies”. From our vantage point within the physical body, it is hard to contemplate what all this looks like in reality.

    Another possibility might be ghosts. (I’ve never seen one, but I know someone who has.) They would seem to be interdimensional — not actually physical, but somehow dense enough to be visible to humans. This suggests a level between the physical body and the astral. I’ve always assumed that a ghost would be some form of the astral body, but could it be what Johnson calls the etheric double?

    As I said, in the next article or articles, I’ll consider whether there is actually any evidence to suggest that this scenario of hierarchical bodies is correct.

    This article follows on from the Introduction, where I discussed the hard problem of consciousness in relation to Philip Goff’s book Galileo’s Error. During the course of his argument he rejects dualism, the idea that consciousness is of a fundamentally different nature from matter. He seems to think that the concept of an immaterial mind is ‘magical’, i.e. non-scientific, and therefore rejects it on a priori grounds. It’s worth considering whether his arguments for doing so are reasonable. Dualism will therefore be the subject of this article.

    Before getting round to discussing Goff further, there’s an important clarification to be made. Consider the following two statements:

• a neuroscientist says “the self is an illusion”.
• spiritually oriented people, especially Buddhists, say “the self is an illusion”.

    Are we to conclude therefore that Buddhists agree with the neuroscientist? One might assume this, but actually no. Those neuroscientists who believe that the self is an illusion do so because they think that everything related to consciousness is merely a consequence of brain activity. Since these are physical mechanisms, there can therefore be no ghost in the machine. The spiritual person believes, on the contrary, that consciousness and subjective experiences are real and of a different nature to matter, in fact more real than matter, but that they are ultimately of the same nature, because both are manifestations of spirit, albeit at different levels. It is therefore this apparent difference that is considered an illusion, and there is a ghost in the machine. In this article and what follows I shall be arguing for this spiritual understanding of (apparent) dualism. (The philosophical term for this is monistic idealism.)

    With this in mind, let’s consider Goff’s reasons for rejecting dualism:

• neuroscientists, he says, can find no evidence of the influence of an immaterial mind on the body in their experiments, which would be hard to believe if there were such an influence.
• the problem of understanding how the mind and body interact, if they are indeed separate.

    I found the first argument somewhat strange, because I would say that we know for certain that the mind and brain do interact (although I would prefer the term consciousness, rather than mind). Here is a simple example. I hold out my hand in front of me, and say “I’m going to raise my thumb”. I then raise my thumb. That would seem to be a clear demonstration of mind/brain interaction. So, in theory, all we have to do is ask a neuroscientist to discover what was going on in the brain at the moment I announced my intention, and that would be the evidence required for the interaction. If nothing happened in the brain at that moment, then that would be evidence that the mind and brain are indeed separate, therefore evidence for dualism.

    Why does Goff think that this is not evidence of interaction? He discusses the example of bodily movement that I just gave, and here we find a confusing sentence: “Imagine an immaterial mind were impacting on the brain every second of waking life, by initiating physical processes that caused limbs to move in accordance with the wishes of the conscious mind” (p38). This is no longer dualism, because now three separate entities are involved  — the brain, the conscious mind, and an immaterial mind. No wonder he has such problems with dualism, if this is how he conceives the required set-up. No wonder he thinks that neuroscientists can find no evidence for the interactions. All he has done, to avoid the problem of dualism, is to assert that brain and mind are, or must be, a single integrated unit. He is merely stating as a fact the point that he is trying to prove. This is therefore some kind of logical vicious circle, and therefore not a convincing argument against dualism.

    It is what Goff calls the conscious mind, our sense of personal identity, that is the proper subject for the debate about dualism. The real question is whether or not this is immaterial, and distinct from the body. After all, that was the issue for René Descartes, historically the most famous advocate of dualism. By his statement “I think therefore I am”, he means that the existence of his consciousness is the only thing that he can be absolutely sure about. Here, in this quote from his Meditations, he puts the dualist case even more strongly: “I rightly conclude that my essence consists in this alone, that I am a thinking thing… And although perhaps… I have a body with which I am closely conjoined, I have, on the one hand, a clear and distinct idea of myself as a thinking, non-extended thing, and, on the other hand, a distinct idea of my body as an extended, non-thinking thing; it is therefore certain that I am truly distinct from my body, and can exist without it”. So Descartes does believe that his mind is immaterial, but he is clearly talking about his conscious mind, not Goff’s additional ghostly immaterial mind.

    This is how Goff arrived at his position. He believes that Galileo made an error by committing us “to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious”. This ensured that consciousness “will be forever locked out of the arena of scientific understanding” (p21). Since he perceives this to be an error, he considers three possible corrections, the first of which is naturalistic dualism which “denies that the conscious mind is something magical or mysterious, instead taking it to be part of the natural order”, and “wants to expand science in such a way as to include nonphysical minds”. The second is materialism, which requires no further explanation. The third is panpsychism, Goff’s version of which I discussed in the introduction, where I concluded that it is really only a watered down version of scientific materialism. He concedes this when he says that materialism has an element of truth in it, which is accounted for in his panpsychism. In similar vein he says that “to solve the problem (of Galileo’s error), we must somehow find a way of making consciousness, once again, the business of science” (p23).

    So an important question would be, did Galileo actually make the error that Goff claims? Can a true understanding of consciousness be the business of science, in the sense he intends? Or is it actually mysterious? These questions will be addressed in the next article in the series.

    The same observations can be made about Goff’s second problem with dualism — understanding how the mind and body interact, if they are indeed separate. He says that we have zero grasp of this (p28), and that it would be tantamount to a “little miracle”, a divine intervention into the material world (p38). On these grounds also, he rejects dualism. So, what I’ve said in relation to the first objection is again relevant here; he is aiming at the wrong target, and the real question is whether the conscious mind is immaterial, and distinct from the body. (That is an unfashionable viewpoint in modern times, but fashions can change.) Furthermore, we can make an analogy with a computer. People have no problem accepting that the software and hardware of a computer, although of a different nature, are superimposed, and act as one. Why is it so hard therefore to accept that a mind and a brain, of different natures, might also be so closely integrated?

    If we are going to make consciousness the business of science again, we may have to turn to quantum physics. Goff does discuss this in a section entitled ‘Quantum Mechanics to the Rescue?’ He agrees, as so many physicists have said, that it is highly successful as a theory because of the accuracy of its predictions. His discussion of it, however, does not take us very far on the issue being discussed here; as he correctly notes, “nobody really knows what quantum mechanics is telling us about reality” (p40). This is confirmed by the physicist Fred Alan Wolf who says “we only know that there is something other than space-time. But we don’t know what it is!”¹. That does not mean, however, that we cannot speculate, make intelligent guesses. That is what he does as he continues: “… because Beyond-Space-Time is non physical, unmeasurable… But what is beyond space-time is within everything. Can it connect with us and influence us within space-time? Is it pure consciousness?” I would say that his speculations are accurate or, at the very least, are consistent with the spiritual world-view (monistic idealism) I outlined at the beginning of the article. Here we have a clear statement that the immaterial (non-physical) interacts with the ‘material’ (although we have to remember that quantum physicists frequently say that there is no such thing as matter).

    One physicist who has dedicated herself to the task of understanding how quantum ideas help us understand consciousness is Danah Zohar. Her book The Quantum Self ² offers important insights into these questions. Here she outlines the problem: “However much our modern reason might wish to shake off the mind/body or soul/body dichotomy, this deep cultural conditioning holds us in its grip, not least because the physics of the last 300 years supports it. Ever since Descartes brought dualism to its most succinct and forceful expression in the seventeenth century… subsequent philosophers have tried in vain to argue any viable alternative. Ordinary people have had the same problem. Given our everyday essentially Newtonian, notion of what matter is, and hence what bodies must be, there is no clear way to see how they could be anything like minds” (p75).

    We might include Goff in that number of philosophers trying in vain. Even he concedes that “dualism does solve a lot of problems” (p27):

• materialism has so far failed to explain consciousness in terms of the electrochemical processes of the brain.
• it is “a very natural way to think about ourselves”.
• “even some of the most vigorous opponents of dualism concede that in ordinary life they cannot help thinking of their minds as distinct from their bodies”.

    The second and third points echo Zohar. It is reasonable to say, therefore, that we humans have a strong intuition that our nature is dual. As Goff points out, of course that doesn’t mean that it’s true. It’s just that science and philosophy have failed to come up with any credible alternative. Goff says that “it is important to emphasize that what we are considering is a deeply nondualistic form of panpsychism” (p135). He is conceding that other forms are possible, and I would argue that we need a deeper version, beyond Goff’s limited one. As he correctly says, consciousness is a ubiquitous feature of matter, but this is true because matter is actually a form of consciousness, not because consciousness is a fundamental attribute of matter. As noted above, this viewpoint is called idealism, which I submit is therefore a more appropriate term than panpsychism. Goff comes close to saying this: “the simplest hypothesis concerning the intrinsic nature of matter outside of brains is that it is continuous with the intrinsic nature of matter inside of brains (both his italics), in the sense that both inside and outside of brains matter has an intrinsic nature made up of forms of consciousness” (my italics). However, as he continues, he then backtracks: “To deny panpsychism one would need a reason for supposing that matter has two kinds of intrinsic nature rather than one” (p134). Precisely! That is why we need this deeper (dualistic) form of panpsychism — idealism.

    That brings me back to Danah Zohar, who says precisely that: “The quantum world-view transcends the dichotomy between mind and body, or between inner and outer, by showing us that the basic building blocks of mind (bosons) and the basic building blocks of matter (fernions) arise out of a common, quantum substrate (the vacuum) and are engaged in a mutually creative dialogue whose roots can be traced back to the very heart of reality creation” (p219).

    This sounds very much like the quote from Wolf above. Zohar herself considers that she, like Goff, is offering merely a limited version of panpsychism. However, what she calls a full blown version, and therefore rejects, sounds more like animism. This quote shows that, unlike Goff, her panpsychism is dualistic, and is fully in tune with the spiritual (apparent) dualism I described at the start of the article. She is thus asserting that quantum physics is fully in accord with dualistic panpsychism. So perhaps she is fulfilling Goff’s wish that consciousness should once again become the business of science. It nevertheless remains very mysterious!

    In the next article I’ll explore a spiritual understanding of consciousness.

Footnotes:

1. Space-time and Beyond, Bantam, 1983, p56

2. Flamingo, 1991