Of course, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition has
reincarnation. Is that testable scientifically?
Well, here's the hypothesis. Your psyche emerged some time while
you were in your mother's womb. It's continuing to evolve, and
eventually it's going to implode back into the substrate, carry on
as a disembodied continuum of consciousness and then reincarnate.
There's the theory in a nutshell. Is that one testable? My short
answer is yes, I think this is a testable hypothesis, and in
principle it really should be able to be repudiated. But we're also
looking for positive evidence.
There are two types of studies being done at the University of
Virginia. One is by Bruce Greyson. He's got a very good track
record of doing rigorous, objective scientific studies of alleged
-- I'm choosing my words carefully here -- alleged out-of-body
experiences and near-death experiences of patients undergoing
surgery. Does it ever happen that a person, while being under
general anesthetic, has an out-of-body experience and can actually
perceive something, as they hover above, that only the surgeons
see? That's an empirically testable question. And Greyson is
studying this scientifically.
So basically, the premise here is that consciousness can exist
outside the body. I've heard that Greyson has started these tests
but so far hasn't come up with any results.
Quite so. As you can imagine, the National Science Foundation is
not exactly jumping over itself to fund this type of research. Nor
is the NIH [National Institutes of Health]. This is outside the
paradigm. They're not interested in providing funding for things
that challenge the foundations of materialism. So basically, it's
like asking the Catholic Church to pay for research to show that
Jesus never lived.
OK, that's one test for out-of-body experiences. What about
reincarnation?
Well, lo and behold, at the same university -- they have some
chutzpah over there -- the University of Virginia, Ian Stevenson is
now retired from the psych department. He's not a Buddhist, he
wasn't a Hindu, and he didn't believe in reincarnation. Forty years
ago he heard anecdotes of children maintaining that this wasn't
their first life and giving detailed accounts of their alleged
memories of past life experiences. So he started studying it. On a
shoestring budget, he and a team of researchers did this for about
40 years. And about halfway through, he wrote a book called "Twenty
Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation." He scanned thousands of
accounts of children, throwing out most of them because they were
either false or the child could have heard about it from parents,
relatives, television and so forth. He then selected 20 cases where
the accounts given by the child wound up being true when they were
subjected to objective corroboration. He couldn't see any way the
child could have known this information. But he also said in that
book, "I don't believe in reincarnation. But I don't know what else
to do with these twenty cases because I can't see any other way to
explain them."
And then he did another 20 years of research and wrote another
book, "Where Biology and Reincarnation Intersect." It showed the
empirical findings of more cases of children giving these very
detailed accounts of past life experiences. And usually they were
not glorified, like I was Cleopatra or Einstein or somebody
spectacular. No, [it was like,] I was a philanderer, and one of the
husbands of the wives I had sex with shot me dead because I
cuckolded him. So that's not very glamorous, but that was the
recollection of one of these children. This is empirical evidence.
It should be scrutinized rigorously, but not thrown out
dogmatically.
So we should forget trying to strip Buddhism of its
transcendentalism. You haven't quite come out and said it, but
you're suggesting we should stop saying Buddhism is not a
religion.
Well, we have to be very cautious when we take these Western
categories -- religion, science, philosophy -- which are deeply and
inextricably embedded in our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman
heritage. But I have to add a footnote to our conversation about
reincarnation research. The Buddhists have been looking at this
critically and empirically for 2,500 years. They're not waiting
with bated breath to see what the people at the University of
Virginia come up with. They, unlike psychologists and
neuroscientists, have been exploring mental phenomena directly. And
they have specific strategies for going into a deep meditative
state, directing your attention backward beyond the scope of this
lifetime, directing it back to past lifetimes and coming up with
memories. So you have a template here.
This could be studied, together with skeptics. Train very advanced
contemplatives to tap into this substrate consciousness -- this
storehouse of memories from past lives, if it in fact exists -- and
do this in conjunction with neuroscientists and psychologists. If I
had unlimited funds, I'd say this is one of the most important
questions we can ask. Make this a 20-year research project, well
funded, with all the skepticism of science. Make sure you have some
hardcore atheists involved, but ones who are open-minded and not
just knee-jerk dogmatists. And then put it to the test. In 20
years, I think you could come up with something that could
repudiate or validate a startling, truly astonishing hypothesis
that there is such a substrate consciousness.
