the long trajectory: reincarnation and life after death

275 Pages·2009·5.66 MB·English

THE LONG TRAJECTORY: REINCARNATION
AND LIFE AFTER DEATH

DR. ERIC WEISS, © 2009
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

0. Introduction - 1

00. Preliminary Definitions - 6

01. Challenging Evidence - 20

02. Science and Metaphysics - 43

03. Actual Occasions, As Above So Below - 61

04. From Possible to Actual - 79

05. Rethinking Causality - 106

06. The Creative Advance - 119

07. The Waking World and its Transphysical Dimension - 145

08. The Transphysical Worlds - 179

09. Mandalas of Time-Space - 188

10. Transphysical Humans - 223

11. Reincarnation - 243

12. Concluding Reflections - 269
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0. INTRODUCTION

I would like to begin by saying a few things about the origin and purpose of this book.
These chapters began as a series of lectures organized and sponsored by the Esalen
Center for Theory and Research, founded by independent scholar Michael Murphy,
author of The Future of the Body.1

Mike likes to convene groups of passionate and competent scholars to discuss issues and
themes that are not being addressed anywhere in academia. One of these conferences—
begun in 1998—focuses on the topic of reincarnation and life after death.
The core of this conference consists of a group of scientists from the University of
Virginia who have been studying the question of survival of consciousness after death
and the evidence for reincarnation since 1968. Their research continues a long scientific
tradition going back to William James and Frederic Myers in the nineteenth century.
Since that time, a large amount of hard scientific evidence has been documented that
strongly suggests we do not die with the death of our bodies, and the evidence also makes
a very powerful case for reincarnation.

To say that what happens to us after our bodies die is an important issue is, to put it
mildly, an understatement. In fact, I would claim that this is one of the most important
issue we can talk about—whether as scientists, philosophers, or lay people. Who among
us has not at some time wondered, “What happens to my personality when I die?” or
“What happens to the people we love when they die and cease to function in our waking
life? Where do they go? Where do we go? What happens?”

Indeed, questions such as these, and the answers we provide, are immensely important to
the structure of our civilization. It is clear to me that whatever we believe about what
happens to our sense of self or personhood at the end of our days strongly affects our
outlook on life. It determines our sense of ethics and profoundly affects our values. For
example, if we believe that at death everything about us is extinguished, and we ask:

1 Murphy, Michael, The Future of the Body, New York:Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992.
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“What is life for?” we are likely to conclude that it is nothing but an opportunity to
gratify our emotional, intellectual, and physical needs during the short span we are alive.
That kind of attitude toward life and ethics encourages the tide of consumerism that
dominates and afflicts modern civilization.

If, on the other hand, we do survive the death of our bodies, and, further, if we are
involved in a sequence of reincarnations that is somehow a part of the evolution of the
universe, then our whole attitude toward ourselves and toward life has to change. The
question of our destiny, the meaning of our existence, and all of our attitudes towards
ethics would dramatically change.

Let me give some examples. Suppose, as a society, we were to confirm the fact that
people’s personalities survive bodily death, and suppose we were to find a way to
regularly communicate with people who have died
· What would that do to our property laws? Could dead people still own property?
Who has the rights to dispose of the estate?
· What would that do to our secrecy laws? Could people be expected to keep state
or financial secrets after they died? And what if we discovered that the deceased
could eavesdrop on our conversations? What would that do to our sense of
privacy?
· What would this do to our large religious institutions with their conflicting ideas
about the afterlife?

From these few examples, you can get a sense of how widespread the consequences
would be if we came to know that the personality survives bodily death, and if we found
a way to be in reliable contact with the deceased. Make no mistake: This is a profound
issue. Nevertheless, it is not being formally considered, as far as we know, in any serious
academic institution in the United States—or, indeed, in any country of the world! It
seems to us that our Esalen group is the only formal group in academia working to
understand the “long trajectory” of human destiny, the profound nature of the human life
cycle—in other words, to fathom the full facts of life and death.
2
Our team of scientists and other scholars began research nearly a decade ago with a
commitment to evaluating, organizing, and documenting robust scientific evidence that
supports the hypotheses of life after death and reincarnation. We published the results in
a thoroughly researched and documented book Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology
for the 21st Century.2 We regard this as a landmark demonstration that the human
personality is more than the body, and a powerful argument that the human personality
survives bodily death.
Having assembled a formidable body of evidence, our next task is to ask: “If survival and
reincarnation are actual facts, how can we make sense of this? This question is important
for two reasons.
First, in the absence of a theory of some kind, it is very difficult to accept the facts. It is
often the case that people will reject data that don’t fit into the categories through which
they customarily interpret the world. It is a source of frustration and bemusement among
parapsychologists that many prominent scientists reject the data of parapsychology out of
hand because they believe, on the basis of their usual way of understanding things, that
those data are simply “impossible.” Indeed, the picture of reality in the background of
much scientific research is so mechanistic and reductionist that it is almost impossible, in
that context, to understand the existence of consciousness itself, let alone survival, by the
personality, of the death of its body.
Nonetheless, the data is there to be explained. As Galileo is reported to have said after is
conviction by the Inquisition, “And yet, it moves.” The reference to Galileo is relevant
because the problem that we face in academia today is quite similar to that faced by
Galileo in his day. Many of the Learned Doctors at Galileo’s university felt no need to
look through Galileo's telescope – after all the idea of planets having moons was simply
too preposterous to be entertained. It was not facts that finally awakened the world to the
power of scientific reasoning – it was rather the articulation, by Newton, of general

2 Kelly, Edward F., and Kelly, Emily Williams. Irreducible Mind. New York: Rowman and Littlefield
Publishers, Inc., 2007.
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scheme of ideas which organized and made intelligible the scattered findings of science
up to that point.
So we need a theory to help make the data with which we are amassing more coherent in
part because such a theory will help to make the data more intelligible and, thus, more
acceptable to the scientific community. But we also need a theory because, when a good
theory is found, it opens up the possibility of a deeper and more comprehensive
investigation of the data.
A good example of the power of theory in stimulating deeper research is the development
of the Mendeleev’s Table of the Elements. A first consequence of this theory was the
recognition of elements that had not yet been discovered, and then their subsequent
discovery. A later consequence of this theory was the recognition of the possibility of
elements that had never before existed, and the subsequent creation of those elements in
the laboratory. And these are only two of the developments in chemistry that were
inspired by this theory.
If the study of the long-trajectory of human existence is to open up to scientific
investigation, if it is ever to become a topic upon which many investigators can focus
their attention, it will only be when the data currently available concerning survival and
reincarnation, along with the associated data of parapsychological investigation, is first
coordinated into a general picture of reality.
Whatever theory that we develop to coordinate the data which we are about to present,
that theory, to be credible at all, will also have to be coordinated with the scientific
understanding of reality which our civilization has pieced together over the last 400 years
of sustained social effort.
In this book, I will outline a way in which such a coordinations may be achieved.
Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, work on the areas covered in this book
has been rare. The ideas offered in this book sketch out a new way of approaching the
understanding of the actual world. While these ideas have a lineage - they are drawn
from the works of Alfred North Whitehead, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Ernst Cassirer
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and many other thinkers - nonetheless they will be unfamiliar to many of my readers.
Also, those of my readers who know some of these authors well will find their ideas used
in unfamiliar ways. There is no way to open up new territory like this without new ideas
and new language.
Finally, though this book was very much inspired by my work at the Esalen Center for
Theory and Research, this book is my own, and is not reflective of any consensus of our
working group.
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00. PRELIMINARY DEFINITIONS
This book focuses on two ideas. First, that the personality formed during life does, in
fact, survive the death of the body; and, second, the idea that we do incarnate more than
once.
I will explore these two challenging and provocative ideas in four steps:
· First, in this introductory chapter, I will start with a series of definitions that
specify just what I mean by “survival of bodily death” (I will often refer to this
phenomenon as “personality survival”). In turn, this will require a preliminary
definition of what I mean by “transphysical worlds”—a key concept in this work, as
we will see. I will also offer a preliminary definition of reincarnation, and then end
this chapter with a set of five propositions that capture the essence of this book.
· Second, in the next chapter, I will present a summary of the scientific
evidence that points toward the truth of these five fundamental propositions.
· Third, in the several chapters that follow, I will discuss what the world must
be like if these propositions are true. I will do this by outlining a metaphysical system
capable of supporting the truths of modern and postmodern science and the truths of
parapsychology that support our fundamental propositions.
· Finally, I will discuss an expanded vision of the human life-cycle, and what
this implies for the long trajectory of human evolution.
Let us start, then, with some fundamental definitions.
The Physical Body
By “body,” I mean the living body as it experienced in waking life. I am assuming that
the living body contains inorganic entities such as atoms and molecules, and that these
atoms and molecules are organized (in a manner to be explored) into cells, tissues and
organs.
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This definition of “physical body” is unremarkable, but I do want to emphasize that I am
most emphatically not making the assumption that the human body can be reduced to
inorganic entities and their dynamic interactions. In other words, I am not suggesting that
the body is already “dead” or insentient, even when it seems alive. In working to
understand survival and reincarnation, the question of what makes the physical body a
living body is one to which we will have to pay considerable attention. When I refer to
survival, by the personality, of bodily death, I will always mean the “physical body” in
this sense. Later, I will broaden the definition of “body” to include transphysical bodies,
as well.
Personality
I want to propose that we define personality in terms of five different characteristics. As
you review these, I invite you to check them against your own experience.
Being an individual among other individuals
It is certainly possible to refer to entities that transcend or pervade the entirety of the
actual world. Such beings may be referred to as Divine and may, perhaps, be reasonably
called “gods,” but such beings are not what I have in mind when referring to a
“personality.” A personality, as I am defining it here is, first of all, finite. It is neither
omniscient nor omnipotent. It is not a god.
A personality is an individual and, as such, it is a finite being. It is not co-extensive with
its environment, and it exists in the presence of others. To be finite is to be an individual
existing in interaction with other individuals of some type. Further, individuals in causal
interaction with one another must share some coherent context in which that interaction
takes place. I will express this by saying that a personality is always contextualized by a
world of some type.
Various arguments can be advanced in favor of this idea, but I am going to introduce it
here as a definition. I am using myself as a paradigm of what I mean by personality. After
all, one my deep motivations for developing the ideas in this book is to discover the
destiny of my own personality after the death of my physical body. As a personality, I am
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a finite being. I find myself in a world full of other beings—beings like myself who keep
me company, and many other beings constituting the complex context of my existence.
All of these beings exercise causal effects on one another, and all share a common system
of spatial and temporal relations. These entities constitute the world in which I live,
move, and have my being.
Throughout this work, when I use the term “world,” it does not refer to a planet in a solar
system, but rather to a system of individuals causally interacting in a common space and
time, and serving as a context for the life of personalities.
If I am going to survive the death of my body in a way that is truly interesting to me, I
want to survive it as a finite being in a world I can explore. I am, therefore, assuming that
personality is a finite being playing out its existence in a coherent world of others.
Consciousness
The word “consciousness” has been used in so many different ways that each author is
now obliged to define it for him- or herself.
In this work, I propose that we define consciousness as “that factor of experience by
virtue of which there is feeling and choice.”
Feeling
When I say that consciousness is the factor of existence that brings feeling, I am using the
word a sense that includes all types of sensation. Later on, I will contrast feeling with the
idea of efficient cause that our educated commonsense imports from classical physics.
When we think of a cause (especially when we are being scientific about it), we mean an
event that directly precipitates another event in its immediate future. For example, if I
throw a ball through a window, the window will most likely break. The movement of the
ball causes the breaking of the window. When we think of cause in this way, we assume
that both the rock and the window are entirely insentient and completely unaware of what
is happening to them. If I were to suggest that the window “felt” the rock shattering it, I
would most probably be accused of naïve anthropomorphism. On the other hand suppose
the rock hit me instead. In that case I would most certainly feel the impact.
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