“We are brought up on schoolbooks that deride and dismiss this notion as superstition. The principle remains sound even if the terminology is quaint”¹.

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    When I was at school, I do remember being taught how foolish ancient people were for believing that everything that exists is composed of four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. After all, the evidence of our own eyes says otherwise, and modern science, so it is said, has proved the point conclusively; there are actually 92 naturally occurring elements.

    Even though some researchers recognise that the ancients were actually a lot more knowledgeable than Enlightenment scientists like Steven Pinker think they were, this attitude persists in modern times. For example biochemist Michael Behe says: “the ancients were still lost when it came to the composition of living things. They believed that all matter was made up of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water”².

    Yet perhaps it is we moderns who are foolish, incapable of understanding subtle, symbolic ideas, what the ancients really intended. I work from the assumption that the terms earth, air, fire, and water represent cosmic principles, rather than what we understand by them on the material plane. As Lucie Lamy says of the Sphinx: it “can be viewed as a symbol of the four principles — earth, water, fire and air — which are frequently and quite incorrectly called ‘elements’ ”³.

    Let’s try to understand what the ancients really meant. In Taoism the Supreme Ultimate Principle, the T’ai-chi T’u, separates into two — the Yang principle, associated with maleness, and the Yin, associated with femaleness. It would be reasonable to assume that, following a further subdivision, there would now be four principles, namely the ‘elements’ we are considering. And two of these principles are indeed considered masculine, thus the separation of the yang principle (into air and fire), and two are considered feminine, the separation of the yin (into water and earth).

    These four principles can therefore be considered the basic spiritual building-blocks of the universe. Some writers, referring to ancient sources, who have understood this are:

• John Anthony West, who says: this system was “a precise and sophisticated means of describing the inherent nature of matter… (The ancients) used these four commonplace phenomena to describe the functional roles of the four terms necessary to matter — or, rather, to the principle of substantiality”⁴.
• George Trevelyan, who calls them, following Rudolf Steiner, etheric formative forces (see footnote 5 for a long explanatory quote).
• Manly P. Hall, who seems to have a deep understanding of this process (see footnote 6).
• The ‘mystical’ psychologist Carl Jung, who talks about “a primitive consciousness which is constantly liable to break up into individual affective processes — to fall apart, as it were, in four directions. As the four elements represent the whole physical world, their falling apart means dissolution into the constituents of the world…”⁷.

    I hope that the above is enough to convince you that the idea of the four elements (principles) is alive and well, even in modern times. Some expressions of this idea can be found:

• in the Tarot cards, the four suits of which are intended to represent the totality of all aspects of life: swords/air, cups/water, wands/fire, and pentacles/earth
• in the astrological Zodiac, where the twelve houses are divided into four groups, each relating to one of the four elements⁸
• more recently in Carl Jung’s four functions. He believed that human personality has four aspects: sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition⁹. The correspondence between these and the four elements is fairly obvious: sensation/earth, thinking/air, feeling/water, and intuition/fire. There is also a close correspondence between these four functions and the four suits of the Tarot.

    And, for those not afraid to entertain paranormal ideas, esotericists believe that there are various elemental beings, existing in a different level of reality: gnomes (earth spirits), undines (water spirits), sylphs (air spirits), and salamanders (fire spirits)¹⁰. These entities, so it is said, can be seen or sensed by clairvoyants, but not by humans in their everyday state of consciousness.

    So, despite what our teachers try to tell us, the idea of the four elements has survived since ancient times into the present. Let’s not forget the Ancient Wisdom.

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    Click here for an update to this article.

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Footnotes:

1. John Anthony West and Jan Gerhard Toonder, The Case for Astrology, Macdonald & Co Ltd., 1970, p33

2. Darwin’s Black Box, The Free Press, Simon & Schuster, 2003, p7

3. Egyptian Mysteries, Pxvii

4. Serpent in the Sky, Quest Books, 1993, p37

5. “The old belief in the four elements of Earth, Water, Air and Fire takes on new meaning when related to the etheric formative forces as investigated by Steiner. Air and Fire are seen to correspond with the warmth ether and the light ether, both centrifugal in their nature. They are the field of action for the levity polarity. Further condensation moves over into the realm of gravity, first into the watery element known as the ‘chemical ether’ and finally into solid matter or Earth, known as ‘life ether’. Here we have the bridge through which creative archetypal Ideas may become operative in form in the material plane”. (Lecture, ‘Gateway to the Infinite’, in The Spirit of Science, David Lorimer [ed.], Floris Books, 1998, p304)

6. “According to the ancient doctrines, the tangible universe is composed of four principal elements… These four essences are the basis of all things cognizable by human material body centers of consciousness… (The ether) passes through itself in four streams the powers of the creative Logos. From its essences are extracted the four creative principles which at the present time are the basis of the human fourfold vehicle: (1) physical or dense, (2) etheric or watery, (3) astral or fiery, (4) mental or airy… These four elements are the basis of, as well as the life behind, the four physical material elements — earth, fire, air, and water. The power from the unseen causal worlds works through the four material elements in order to express itself in bodies, cells, and molecular combinations”⁶. (Unseen Forces, Philosophical Research Society Press, 1936, available in the Kessinger Legacy Reprints series, p4–6)

7. Mysterium Coniunctionis, Princeton University Press, 1977, p459–60

8. Air (Gemini, Libra, Aquarius), Fire (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius), Earth (Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn), Water (Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces).

9. see Psychological Types, Princeton University Press, 1971, chapter 10

10. Rudolf Steiner refers to them in “Right and Wrong Use of Esoteric Knowledge”, lecture delivered at Dornach, 18, 19 and 25 November 1917. Esotericist Manly P. Hall, who himself believes in these elementals, describes Paracelsus as “the Swiss Hermes, and the greatest physician of modern times”, and says that he “has given us the most complete analysis of these strange creatures who live, move, and have their being unseen and unrealized by mortal man. Though we daily see their works, we have never learned to know the workers who, day and night, function through Nature’s finer forces” (as footnote 6, p3).

    In September 2019, New Scientist magazine excelled itself in its ongoing promotion of scientific materialism. On its front cover¹ it announced two headline articles: ‘The True Nature of Consciousness, We’re Finally Cracking the Greatest Mystery of You’, and ‘Richard Dawkins: How we can outgrow God and religion’. If the first were true, that would be a significant achievement, given that explaining consciousness has been described as the ‘hard problem’, because no one can understand how something supposedly material, the brain, can generate something non-material, mental. If a problem seems insoluble, however, perhaps the wrong question is being asked. What if the brain does not generate consciousness? What if consciousness generates the brain? This is what spiritual traditions have always maintained, and some modern philosophers and scientists concur².

    The editorial accompanying the main article³ hasn’t got that message, however, since its subtitle was: Despite decades of effort, we have been unable to understand how our brains create consciousness. The author of the article, Michael Graziano, also hasn’t got the message, since he asks: “How does the brain, a physical object, generate a non-physical essence?”

    The article’s title makes the grandiose claim: ‘True nature of consciousness: Solving the biggest mystery of your mind’, and the subtitle was, ‘Far from being a mystical “ghost in the machine”, consciousness evolved as a practical mental tool…’. This is presented as a statement of fact, but is actually an unfounded assertion, without evidence, merely an assumption based upon a preconception of materialism and the truth of Darwinian evolutionary theory. It is much closer to the truth that consciousness is indeed a ghost in the machine. (This is therefore another example of the superfluous and pointless use of the word ‘evolved’ — see my recent blogpost.)

    The Richard Dawkins article⁴ is an interview with him, following publication of a new book Outgrowing God: A beginner’s guide. Much of the interview covers material familiar to anyone acquainted with his thought, so I’ll just focus on one point. The interviewer says that the book picks factual holes in the Bible and points out logical inconsistencies and absurdities. During his reply Dawkins says that many believers are “actually quite shocked to learn how little support there is for any Bible stories. Many people in America are not aware that, for example, virtually nothing in the Old Testament has any evidential support at all”, and therefore that the evidence for anything in the Bible is extremely flimsy. He mentions Adam and Eve, Noah, and goes on to say that “there’s no evidence that there was a Jewish captivity in Egypt, for example, which is shocking to some people”.

    This is hardly an argument against the existence of God. At best, it could be seen as an argument against the Jewish God. But what about the God of the Hindus, the Sufis, the Gnostics, the Native Americans, and so on? Supposed inaccuracies in the Bible say nothing whatsoever about the existence of God or otherwise, and should not be used as an argument for atheism.

    Dealing with his specific point, Dawkins seems to be making the same error for which he criticises believers, namely that the content of the Bible is meant to be taken literally. The figure of Noah is a difficult question, so remote in time that it would be hard to come to any definite conclusion about historicity. It’s worth noting, however, that many cultures all over the world have a global flood story, including a Noah-like figure, albeit with different names. The story of Adam and Eve is clearly allegorical, and not meant to be taken literally, even though some Christians do so. (This will be the subject of a future article, so I won’t deal with it now.)

    Let’s look closer at the question of the captivity in Egypt. Dawkins is presumably referring to the absence of any mention of it in the Egyptian records, and the lack of archaeological evidence. Is the story meant to be taken literally, however? According to the Jewish Kabbalist Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi: “The history of the Exodus (is) an analogue of an individual’s escape from the physical bondage of the body, represented by Egypt, and his soul’s struggle with psychological slavery in the desert as he strives to reach the Promised Land of the Spirit. (In the accounts)… are revealed the inner stages of initiation, trial and rebellion that led up to the realization that the secret of Existence is that it is a mirror in which man reflects the Image of the Divine so that God may behold God”⁵.

    So a Jew, albeit one from an esoteric tradition, clearly recognises that the Exodus is not a story that is intended to be taken literally, for those who have ears to hear, but is actually the story of humanity’s spiritual search to reunite with the Divine. This is the same story that is told in all branches of the Perennial Philosophy: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, Gnosticism, esoteric Christianity, and so on. As an aside, I understand that the phrase ‘in slavery in Egypt’ was actually used by the Egyptians themselves to describe the human situation of being a soul trapped in matter.

    So, how is the suggestion that there is no evidence for a literal exodus a reason to reject religion or God? On the contrary this story reinforces what is believed to be the spiritual truth of all ages, the Ancient Wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy. Perhaps it is time for Richard Dawkins to outgrow atheism.

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Footnotes:

1. issue 3248, September 21st 2019

2. see, for example, Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe: how consciousness creates the material world, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1995

3. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332480-000-true-nature-of-consciousness-solving-the-biggest-mystery-of-your-mind/

4. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24332480-100-richard-dawkins-how-we-can-outgrow-god-and-religion/

5. Kabbalah and Exodus, Gateway Books, 1988, Preface

    Recently I’ve published articles describing three extraordinary experiences from the altered-state sessions of Stanislav Grof (whether LSD or intensive breathing). One involved life after death, another healing via access to knowledge not available to the everyday consciousness of the person concerned, and the third an apparent exorcism¹. More recently I’ve written two articles on reincarnation². What follows is an anecdote which brings the two themes together, healing through reliving a past life trauma³.

    The person in question was an Australian psychologist and minister, who was tortured by chronic pain in his shoulder. X-rays revealed nothing, and there was no medical explanation. Injections provided temporary relief for a few hours, but nothing had helped in the long term.

    In his altered-state session he went through a long period of screaming and shaking, then eventually became relaxed and blissful. In the feedback session which followed, he said that he had relived three levels of trauma. The first was an incident which occurred when he was seven years old, playing on a sandy beach. A tunnel had collapsed and buried him; he almost died. In the session he was still in pain, and then relived an experience of being stuck in the birth canal, his shoulder trapped behind the pubic bone of his mother. He stayed there for a while, choking.

    As explained in the previous article on reincarnation, once people have relived their birth, they seem to have access to material from past lives. This man then moved on to the third level of trauma, and experienced himself in a uniform, on a horse in a battle in Cromwell’s England. A lancet went through his shoulder, and he fell off his horse. He was then trampled on by other horses, and he experienced himself as dying, his consciousness detaching itself from his body. He then saw his trampled body from above.

    Following this altered-state session, that was the end of the pain in his shoulder, which never came back. This suggests that fully reliving a traumatic incident, even from a past life, provides the necessary catharsis to enable healing.

    Does such an anecdote prove reincarnation? Probably not, but it is at least strongly suggestive, the word used by Ian Stevenson in my last article.

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Footnotes:

1. Here are links to these articles: Is There Life After Death? – an Interesting Anecdote. Consciousness and the Brain – an Interesting Anecdote, and Another Interesting Anecdote.

2. Here are the links: Reincarnation and Christianity, and Reincarnation – Memories of Past Lives

3. Grof tells this story on a series of audiocassettes, The Transpersonal Vision, Sounds True (Publishers), tape 3.

    This article is the latest in a series on the theme that the results of psychedelic drug therapy strongly challenge the dominant materialist paradigm of modern science. There were two previous articles, and for relevant background information about Stanislav Grof please refer to either of them¹.

    Grof describes the following anecdote² as the most extreme case in all his many sessions of altered-state therapy. A woman was referred to him as a candidate for LSD therapy, because 11 months of conventional treatments had achieved nothing. The woman was suicidal, had a criminal record — guns had already been involved. Her first three psychedelic sessions brought forth violence, sexual abuse, and a difficult birth, but there were no major breakthroughs. In the third session, however, about 20 minutes in, the woman’s face took on a “mask of evil”, becoming constricted. Then a deep male voice started to speak through her, introducing himself as the Devil. He told Grof that the woman was his, and started to threaten and blackmail him, telling all the things that would happen to him and his programme if he tried to take the woman from him. The entity referred to things the patient couldn’t have known (therefore, we assume, it was not some bizarre aspect of her own personality). Grof says that he had never seen anything this extreme. The woman’s hand had become “spastic, like a claw”. Grof was in a state of “metaphysical fear”. He decided to meditate on light and focused on this for a long time. After about two hours the woman’s face and hand suddenly relaxed. Her regular voice returned and she was in wonderful shape.

    In the feedback session which followed Grof decided against telling her what had happened. When she returned the following morning, she was radiant, and showed no sign of depression. Two weeks later she was released back into the community. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that Grof single-handedly achieved an exorcism through LSD therapy. Now, can any materialist neuroscientist explain to me how this woman’s brain managed to create this incident?

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Footnotes:

1. See: Is There Life After Death? – an Interesting Anecdote, or Consciousness and the Brain – an Interesting Anecdote

2. Grof tells this story on tape 3 of a series of audiocassettes The Transpersonal Vision, Sounds True (Publishers). Colin Wilson retells the story, having met Grof and heard the story from him, in Alien Dawn, Virgin Publishing, 1998, p3–4. He gives more details, and the woman is given the name Flora.

    This article follows on from a previous one with a similar theme, that the results of psychedelic drug therapy strongly challenge the dominant materialist paradigm of modern science. In the following anecdote, what is challenged is that consciousness is produced by the brain.

    I am basing this series on the work of Stanislav Grof. I’ll therefore repeat some background information from before. He began as a psychiatrist in Marxist (therefore atheistic) Czechoslovakia, where he became involved in an experimental programme, using LSD for therapeutic purposes. Because this often induced spiritual experiences, he felt compelled not to reveal his results to the authorities there, and worked secretly. He later moved to the USA, where he continued this research, until LSD was made illegal. He then devised a system of intensive breathing to obtain the same results without using the drug. His patients explore their own personal unconscious, often go on to relive their birth, experience ego-death and rebirth, have past life memories, encounter archetypal beings (gods and goddesses), and much more besides.

    To understand what LSD does, we need to turn upside down the conventional scientific understanding of consciousness. The normal assumption is that consciousness is a by-product of the brain. Spiritual traditions believe rather that the brain limits consciousness, acts as a kind of reducing valve. This theory is called the Transmission Model, following the great American psychologist William James. (I have discussed this in an earlier article, Consciousness and the Brain – the Transmission Model.) It seems that LSD somehow deactivates or bypasses the reducing valve, thus enabling consciousness to free itself from its everyday limitations.

    Now for the new anecdote¹. The patient was a woman with chronic depression; she couldn’t bring herself to do anything. She had two powerful sessions, including re-experiencing her birth. The next day she came back to the group for a further session, highly charged. She again went back to her birth, and began shaking. She was told to go with this. At some point the sounds she made had a different quality, as if words. She was told to let these words come through. To the onlookers it seemed to be clearly a language, an incantation of some kind, although no one understood what she was saying. She was sitting up, making broad movements with her arms, as if in adoration of something. It was some kind of chant, a repetitive sequence. Then she lay back in ecstasy.

    In the room there was a Jewish psychoanalyst from Argentina. He approached the facilitators, and said that this was incredible, that the woman was singing in perfect Sephardic, an esoteric medieval language mixing Jewish and Spanish. He was a Jewish intellectual who had studied it. The woman had been singing: “I am suffering and I will always suffer. I am crying and I will always cry. I am praying and I will always pray”.

    In the feedback session which followed, it emerged that she didn’t know modern Spanish, and didn’t even know what Sephardic was. These sessions, however, completely resolved her chronic depression.

    What are we to make of this? I suggest that, assuming the account is correct, this is evidence that the brain does not produce consciousness. In the woman’s ordinary life, she had no knowledge of Spanish or Sephardic, so how did her altered-state consciousness have access to it? A possibility is that this was some kind of past-life experience, although that is not mentioned in the account.

    A further extraordinary coincidence/synchronicity, which reveals the great mystery of how the world works, is the fact that in the room was an expert in this obscure esoteric language who was able to explain what was happening. What were the odds against that?

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Footnote:

1. Grof tells this story on tape 3 of a series of audiocassettes The Transpersonal Vision, Sounds True (Publishers).

    This blogpost follows on from the article Reincarnation and Christianity.

    One frequent objection to belief in reincarnation is that there is no recollection of previous lives. One can immediately counter this by asking, is there any reason why we should remember? For example, Professor William Knight says: “Forgetfulness of the past may be one of the conditions of an entrance upon a new stage of existence. The body which is the organ of sense-perception may be quite as much a hindrance as a help to remembrance”¹. He seems here to be adopting what is known as the Transmission Model, following the American psychologist William James, in which the brain is seen as a limiting organ. (I have discussed this in a previous article Consciousness and the Brain.) The neo-Platonist teacher Plotinus expressed this idea more dramatically: “Body is the true river of Lethe (oblivion); for souls plunged into it forget all”².

    Believers in reincarnation sometimes offer an even more dramatic explanation, namely that the painful trauma of birth erases, at least temporarily, the memories of past lives, and that if one relives one’s birth, one has access to memories from previous incarnations. I remember reading this somewhere in the works of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. (He is seen as a cult figure, often the object of contempt and derision, but I’ve found many of his writings impressive and insightful.) Confirmation of this idea can be found in the work of LSD therapist and Transpersonal Psychologist Stanislav Grof, whose patients, having relived their births, frequently go on to relive incidents from past lives relevant to their current problems. Further confirmation was given to me when the only person I’ve ever met who said she had relived her birth in therapy, even though she wasn’t previously familiar with this idea, revealed that past-life memories had indeed started to float up afterwards, and that she had made “extensive notes”.

    If all the above is true, it is hard to see why anyone would remember their past life. Even though such cases may be relatively rare, however, there are some children who do seem to remember details from their past lives and, insofar as this is possible, their stories have been verified by investigators.

    The best known researcher in this field is Ian Stevenson, who began work in the 1960s, then published Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation³. He describes “an almost conventional pattern. The case usually starts when a small child of two to four years of age begins talking to his parents or siblings of a life he led in another time and place. The child usually feels a considerable pull back toward the events of that life and he frequently importunes his parents to let him return to the community where he claims that he formerly lived. If the child makes enough particular statements about the previous life, the parents (usually reluctantly) begin inquiries about their accuracy. Often, indeed usually, such attempts at verification do not occur until several years after the child has begun to speak of the previous life. If some verification results, members of the two families visit each other and ask the child whether he recognises places, objects, and people of his supposed previous existence. On such occasions the case usually attracts much attention in the communities involved and accounts reach the newspapers”⁴.

    Stevenson further says: “The child claims (or his behaviour suggests) a continuity of his personality with that of another person who has died. …in a few cases the identification with the previous personality becomes so strong that the child rejects the name given him by his present parents and tries to force them to use the previous name. But in most cases, the subject experiences the previous self as continuous with his present personality, not as substituting for it”⁵.

    He openly admits that his cases are not definite proof of reincarnation, as in his title merely suggestive. He nevertheless states that some of the cases furnish “considerable evidence” for reincarnation, and that “about thirty others are as rich in detail and as well authenticated as the ten best cases of the present group”⁶. He is aware of nearly six hundred cases, of which he and his colleagues have investigated about a third.

    He considers alternative explanations: fraud, cryptomnesia, genetic memory, ESP, and possession. Although theoretically possible, he does not find these convincing in the best cases he is discussing — the reincarnation hypothesis seems more credible.

    To give a flavour of what we are talking about, here is the beginning of Stevenson’s first case history: “In April, 1950, a boy of ten named Nirmal, son of Sri Bholanath Jain, died of smallpox in his parents’ home in Kosi Kalan… On the day of his death he had been delirious and irritable. He said twice to his mother: ‘You are not my mother. You are a Jatni. I will go to my mother’. As he said this he pointed in the direction of Mathura and another smaller town in the same direction called Chhatta, but he did not mention either town by name… Shortly after making these strange remarks, he died.

    “In August, 1951, a son was born to the wife of Sri Brijlal Varshnay in Chhatta whom they named Prakash. …he showed no unusual behaviour until the age of about four and a half. At that time he began waking up in the middle of the night and running out of the house to the street. When stopped, he would say he ‘belonged in’ Kosi Kalan, that his name was Nirmal, and that he wanted to go to his old home. He said his father was Bholanath” (p20). The account continues with further interesting details.

    In a later book⁷, Stevenson makes an even more extraordinary claim, that birthmarks or birth defects on a person correspond to wounds or death blows from a previous incarnation. He says that such marks “provide an objective type of evidence well above that which depends on the fallible memories of informants. 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” (p2).

    He says that he is “well aware of the seriousness — as well as the importance — of such a claim” that “a deceased personality — having survived death — may influence the form of a later-born baby”, but “can only say that I have been led to it by the evidence of the cases” (p2). He believes that this is “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”. He agrees that there are other causes for such marks, yet thinks that these “account for less than half of all birth defects” (p3).

    We can easily understand why Stevenson is “aware of the seriousness” of this claim, since it deals a fatal blow to the philosophy of materialism; how on earth could a ‘memory’ of a wound from a previous life be represented on a later body according to the rules of orthodox science?

    Stevenson makes further astonishing claims regarding:

    1) Dreams. There are announcing dreams “in which a deceased person appears and expresses an intention to be reborn to particular parents… The dreamer is usually a woman who will be the mother of the baby in whose body the announcing deceased personality intends to reincarnate”. There are also departing dreams in which “a person who has died appears to a member of his or her family and tells the dreamer in what family he or she will reincarnate or perhaps has already reincarnated. In a few cases, the information thus conveyed has enabled the family of the deceased person to locate and meet the newborn baby said to be the reincarnation of that person” (p4).

    2) Phobias: “nearly always related to the mode of death in the previous life, occur in about 35% of the cases. A child remembering a life that ended in drowning may be afraid of being immersed in water; one who remembers a life that ended in shooting may show a phobia of guns and loud noises… These phobias often manifest before the child has begun to speak. There is no model for them in other members of the family, and the child has undergone no experience since its birth that could account for the phobia; hence the possibility that it derives from the previous life, as the child, when it can speak, says it does” (p7).

    3) Philias: “a desire or demand for particular foods (not eaten in the subject’s family) or for clothes different from those customarily worn by the family members”. There are also “cravings for addicting substances… and other drugs that the previous personality was known to have used. A few subjects show skills that they have not been taught (or sufficiently watched others demonstrating), but which the previous personality was known to have had” (p7).

    Erlendur Haraldsson carried on Stevenson’s work, and reports on his results in I Saw a Light and Came Here: Children’s Experiences of Reincarnation⁸. In it there is a foreword by Jim Tucker, who says of Stevenson, that once he began looking for such cases, he found hundreds more”. “He quickly saw that details the children gave could often be verified to match ones belonging to the life and death of one particular deceased person”. A review in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that “in regard to reincarnation he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases… in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds”. Tucker says of Haraldsson that he shows “the same dogged attention to detail that Stevenson did” (all quotes Pxi).

    Haraldsson has some interesting chapter titles:

• Between Death and Rebirth
• Between the Two Realms: Deathbed Visions
• Near-Death Experiences
• Spontaneous Contact with the Departed
• Contact Through Mediums
• Memories of Birth and Life in the Womb.

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Footnotes:

1. quoted in Reincarnation: a Study of Forgotten Truth, E. D. Walker, University Books, 1965, p48

2. ibid. p49

3. University Press of Virginia, 2nd edition 1974

4. as footnote 3, p16

5. ibid., p359

6. ibid., p2

7. Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, Praeger, 1997

8. White Crow Books, 2016

    Before I tell the story, here is some important background information. This comes from the life of Stanislav Grof, who is one of my intellectual heroes. He began as a psychiatrist in Marxist (therefore atheistic) Czechoslovakia, where he became involved in an experimental programme, using LSD for therapeutic purposes. Because this often induced spiritual experiences, he felt compelled not to reveal his results to the authorities there, and worked secretly. He later moved to the USA, where he continued this research, until LSD was made illegal. He then devised a system of intensive breathing to obtain the same results without using the drug. His patients explore their own personal unconscious, often go on to relive their birth, experience ego-death and rebirth, have past life memories, encounter archetypal beings (gods and goddesses), and much more besides.

    To understand what LSD does, we need to turn upside down the conventional scientific understanding of consciousness. The normal assumption is that consciousness is a by-product of the brain. Spiritual traditions believe rather that the brain limits consciousness, acts as a kind of reducing valve. This theory is called the Transmission Model, following the great American psychologist William James. (I have discussed this in an earlier article¹.) It seems that LSD somehow deactivates or bypasses the reducing valve, thus enabling consciousness to free itself from its everyday limitations.

    Now for the anecdote. Grof tells this story in The Adventure of Self-Discovery², but the following account is taken from Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe³, (a brilliant book which I recommend to anyone interested in new-paradigm science).

    “On occasion subjects also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality. In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension.It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple’s name, street address, and telephone number.

    “The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man’s problems and treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. ‘After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues’ jokes, had they found out’, says Grof. ‘I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: “Our son is not with us any more; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago” ’. ”

    Make of that what you will. From the point of view of science, of course, this is ‘only an anecdote’. The story can’t be checked, it can’t be repeated in a laboratory, and so on. This means that (materialistic) science can conveniently ignore such experiences, and dismiss them as unreliable, illusory, or ‘pseudoscience’. In order to arrive at a better understanding of the universe and how it works, I believe we need to start taking more notice of such anecdotes.

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Footnotes:

1. Consciousness and the Brain – the Transmission Model
2. State University of New York Press, 1988, pp.108–9
3. HarperCollins, 1996, p69

    This article comes within the context of an overall theme of mine, Why Christianity Must Change or Die.

    The Perennial Philosophy is the idea that at their heart all religions are the same, despite their apparent differences. It is the name of a book by Aldous Huxley, who outlined and discussed it there (1). It is also called Traditionalism, which I have heard described by the esoteric writer Gary Lachmann as “an extreme form of the Perennial Philosophy”. This is described in Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy by Kenneth Oldmeadow (2).

    If ‘extreme’ is a harsh word to use, some evidence that Traditionalism is at least extremely strict, perhaps dogmatic, is that Oldmeadow is critical of Huxley’s book. However, Frithjof Schuon, a prolific Traditionalist author, wrote The Transcendent Unity of Religions (3), which shows that the essential idea remains the same.

    Despite this, in the modern world most religious people think that theirs is the one true religion, and are sometimes extremely critical of the beliefs of others. This seems to be especially true of the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

    I am most concerned about Christianity, since that is the dominant religious force in Western societies, including the one where I live. Here I am not going to go into what I think Christianity needs to do. Instead I’ll just make a couple of observations.

    The Perennial Philosophy is more usually associated with Eastern religions, especially Hinduism; the Bhagavad Gita has been described as its finest exposition. In the preface to one edition of it, Sri Daya Mata says: “The underlying essential truths of all great world scriptures can find common amity in the infinite wisdom of the Gita’s mere 700 verses”, and “the entire knowledge of the cosmos is packed into the Gita”. It is interesting to note, therefore, that following the scientific revolution of quantum physics, in his classic book The Tao of Physics (5), Fritjof Capra immediately started to make connections with the ancient Eastern religions; he has chapters on Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen, but no chapters on Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. This strongly indicates that these Eastern traditions had a far better understanding of the nature and workings of the universe.

    There is a book called A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom (6), which is a thousand-page anthology of Perennial Philosophy quotes and thinking. It would be reasonable to describe it as a compendium of religious and spiritual truth down the ages. Although there are occasional quotes from the Gospels, and some quotes by Christians, most often mystics like Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, there are far more from Eastern traditions, Plato and the neo-Platonist Plotinus, Egyptian Hermetic sources, the Qur’ân, and more besides, including Native American sources.

    So, how seriously can we take Christianity’s claims to have exclusive access to the truth, and its rejection of other traditions?

Footnotes:

(1) Chatto & Windus, 1946

(2) Sri Lanka Institute of Traditional Studies, 2000

(3) Quest Books, the Theosophical Publishing House, 1993

(4) The Bhagavad Gita, Paramahansa Yogananda, Self-Realization Fellowship, 1999, Pxviii

(5) Wildwood House, 1975 and Fontana, 1976

(6) Whitall Perry, Perennial Books Ltd., Second Edition, 1981

    This article is a continuation from others in a series. Please refer to this article if any of what follows needs further explanation.

    Some time ago I wrote an article (click here) complaining that the BBC had produced a series of three programmes called Genius of the Modern World, their choices being Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Not being a fan of any of them, and finding their thinking deeply flawed, I speculated that the reason for including them was not that they were geniuses, rather that they were unrelenting atheists. This seemed to be their primary qualification.

    Interestingly, Paul Vitz mentions all three in the same breath as he develops his theory of the psychology of atheism: “Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud are famous as formulators of powerful theories, but these atheist masters do not bother to argue whether religious beliefs are true or false. Instead, they ask what motives would lead people to hold such beliefs. As we have seen, this mode of inquiry is equally applicable to them and their ideas” (1).

    Vitz names Nietzsche and Freud as two of his ‘intense atheists’. I have dealt with Freud in a separate article (click here). I intend to discuss Nietzsche at greater length in the future, so for the time being I’ll just mention that he fits perfectly Vitz’s Defective Father Hypothesis, in that his father died when he was four. It is probably also significant that his father was a Lutheran pastor, which would help to explain his extreme hostility to religion, especially Christianity, having been traumatised by the loss of his Christian father at an early age.

    Vitz says that Marx is a partial exception to his theory. He was a noted atheist, but this did not preoccupy him, as it did Nietzsche and Freud. We have to look for the reasons why he might have been disappointed by his father. “Although Karl’s father came from a long line of Jewish rabbis, he converted to Protestant Christianity, primarily for social reasons. … Young Karl knew that his father’s involvement with Christianity was superficial and it is possible that this awareness diminished Karl’s respect for his father. … When he was away at the university, Karl suddenly and radically rejected his bourgeois background… Hence, there is reason to believe that Marx’s lack of respect for his father is involved in his great hostility to the bourgeois class, of which his own father was his first and primary representative. In any case, his communist theory can be said to be a violent attack on everything his father represented; his ideas, therefore constitute a good prima facie case for his rejection of his father” (p124–5).

    Even if Marx is not an outstanding example of the Defective Father Hypothesis, there seems good enough reason to make a psychological connection between his later ideas and his background. It is interesting to note, however, that Marxism and atheism often go hand in hand (2), which suggests that there may be unconscious psychological connections between Marxist ideas and personal biography.

    In two earlier articles I have criticised the authors of Critique of Intelligent Design (3), firstly for misrepresenting the Italian Renaissance as a revival of materialism (4), and secondly for praising as accurate one of Freud’s weirder theories (5). There is reason to criticise them again. They have a chapter entitled Freud and the Illusions of Religion. It would be interesting to know what they would make of Vitz’s exposure of Freud’s atheism as an expression of his traumatic childhood. They have another chapter praising Marx, and treating his ideas on religion, if you’ll forgive the expression, as gospel truth. These authors should learn that, in order to make a point, it is not enough to give a history of people who agree with you and repeat their ideas; you actually have to demonstrate that their ideas are correct, or alternatively that opposing ideas are false.

    It is also interesting, as the authors note, that both Marx and Freud were heavily influenced by the atheistic philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, Freud going so far as to say that “I worship and admire this man the most”. Perhaps by now it won’t surprise you to discover that Feuerbach is another of Vitz’s intense atheists with a defective father, a fiery and impulsive man known in the family as “Vesuvius”, who had an affair with the wife of one of his father’s friends. They lived “openly together in another town, and she bore a child (by him)”. He only returned to live with his legal family when his mistress died (p43–44). It is not hard to imagine that Feuerbach was furious with his father (and therefore God the Father).

    In the light of Vitz’s theory, it seems reasonably clear that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud would all have benefited from Psychoanalysis, ironically in the case of the latter since he founded it. If they had done so, they might have discovered that their atheism was built on shaky foundations. They were called geniuses of the modern world by the BBC, when their only real qualification was that they were all vociferous atheists and, as Vitz shows, psychologically disturbed atheists at that. Since the other three authors are equally vocal in their atheism, and uncritically accepting of these figures, it is reasonable to suggest that they too might benefit from an investigation into their unconscious motives.

 

Footnotes:

(1) Faith of the Fatherless, Spence Publishing, 1999, p143

(2) Two outstanding examples would be Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, both of whom feature in Vitz’s book. Sartre is one of his intense atheists, his father dying when he was only fifteen months old. He devotes three pages to de Beauvoir, concluding that, having adopted atheism, Sartre became her God, which explains “her remarkable and unshakable allegiance” to him (p115).

(3) John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York, Monthly Review Press, 2008

(4) see The Decline of Humanism

(5) see The Psychology of Atheism — Sigmund Freud

    If interested, please see footnote (1) for links to the first three parts. It is not necessary to have read them in order to understand what follows.

    My purpose here is to reconcile the text of Genesis 1 with certain other spiritual traditions, even if that connection is not immediately apparent from the text as we have it. These traditions say that there is an ultimate ground of being, described as a void, emptiness, or nothingness which, paradoxically, in another manifestation, is also a fullness or pleroma, the totality of all that is, an ultimate oneness, which is creative. (Let’s call this the ‘God’ of Genesis.) It then divides and separates in a series of emanations, descending in a process of progressive increasing density through several levels, until it eventually becomes the material world. These levels have been given names like soul, causal, mental, astral, etheric, and physical. These terms are usually applied to human ‘bodies’ at the different levels. If this cosmology is correct, however, it would be a reasonable assumption that the same could be said of all creatures, and perhaps of larger organisms like the Earth, and even things considered inanimate. (Thus, there would be an astral, mental level, and so on, to the whole solar system, the whole universe.)

    I believe that Genesis 1 should be interpreted from this perspective; words like ‘waters’, ‘earth’ are not to be understood literally, rather symbolically. ‘Heavens’ are therefore not the skies, but a symbol of the higher, divine spiritual levels; the ‘waters’ are the lower non-material ones, and the ‘earth’ the material universe. This scenario would fit with what other spiritual traditions have to say. That does not mean that there are no confusing passages and apparent contradictions within the text, but it does at least give some insight into what the original author might have meant.

    This scenario opens up the fascinating possibility that evolution, the development of organisms, and reproductory processes take place at other levels as well as the material. This would help to resolve some of the problems of morphogenesis identified by Paul Davies in his book The Cosmic Blueprint (2), and is also an idea explored by Rupert Sheldrake with his concepts of morphic resonance, morphogenetic fields, and formative causation (3).

    With this in mind, it’s interesting to have a look at what Genesis 1 says. In the early verses there are clear references to the establishing of different levels of reality, for example verses 6–7: “And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters’. So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome”.

    Thus there are higher and lower waters. I think it would be ridiculous to try to interpret this literally in reference to actual water. The text continues in verse 9: “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky (i.e. the dome) be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear’. And it was so”. According to the spiritual interpretation, this means that the material universe (dry land) emerges from a non-material level (the lower waters), known as astral, or etheric. The text indeed suggests that the appearance of the dry land is a consequence of something happening to the waters. (What would gathering all the physical waters into one place mean?) This is essentially what quantum physics has come to discover, as originally expressed by Werner Heisenberg, Sir James Jeans, and Sir Arthur Eddington (4), and more recently by David Bohm in Wholeness and the Implicate Order (5), and Unfolding Meaning (6), which is a very interesting title from this spiritual perspective. I take his concepts of Implicate and Explicate Orders to refer respectively to the lower waters and the physical universe.

    Verse 20 says: “And God said: ‘Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky’ ”. Verse 24 says: “And God said ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind’ ”. I’ve read some Christian texts which have tried to reconcile Genesis 1 with the evolutionary history of life put together by Darwinian biologists, obviously with a view to making Christianity more credible to scientists. I suggest that a spiritual interpretation makes more sense of the text; creatures appear in non-material levels (verse 20, the waters and the sky) before they appear in the material (verse 24, the earth). It would make more sense, from a traditional spiritual perspective, if the two statements of verse 20 were reversed. ‘Birds’ are a well-known symbol of the soul because they fly in the ‘skies’, thus higher levels, which in theory should be necessary in order to generate the creatures of the waters. Thus ‘birds’ would not refer to the creatures with which we are familiar, rather to the soul-level of the creatures of the lower waters. However, the fact that they are both mentioned together as a prelude to life at the material level is significant.

    I accept that there are other parts of the text which are difficult to interpret from this perspective. I can only speculate on the reasons for this: have there been editorial changes, meanings lost in translation, or am I reading too much into the text? I suspect, however, that when the original Hebrew version was written, it was, for whatever reason, more profound than the version that has been handed down to us. If that is the case, even though atheists and scientists may mock and dismiss the picture presented, it is possible that the author or authors of Genesis 1 may have been onto something very profound.

 

Footnotes:

(1) click on part 1, part 2, part 3

(2) Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1989

(3) see, for example, A New Science of Life, 1981, revised edition Icon Books, 2009

(4) Werner Heisenberg: “The smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word: they are forms, structures, or — in Plato’s sense — Ideas” .

Sir James Jeans: “The universe is looking less like a great machine, and more like a great thought”.

Sir Arthur Eddington: “Matter and all else that is in the physical world have been reduced to a shadowy symbolism”. The material world “which seems so vividly real to us is probed deeply by every device of physical science and at bottom we reach symbols. Its substance has melted into shadow”.

(5) 1980, reissued by Routledge, 1995

(6) a weekend of dialogue with David Bohm, edited by Donald Factor, Foundation House Publications, 1985