As the sun melts into the horizon’s embrace, with that iridescent and ethereal last shimmer of light before the evening closes, you are suddenly struck by thoughts of ultimacy. The transition from a molten golden sky into a starry tapestry of shadows, is enough to provoke such thoughts in anyone. Ever since the first spark of self-consciousness, one of the thoughts that has both paralyzed and mystified us, is whether or not we continue to exist in some capacity after death. Some believe we do, while others believe we do not. But of course, no one really knows. After all, “death,” wrote William Shakespeare, “is the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns." Although we cannot ask a dead person what their experience was like,
You left out rebirth. Dr, Iain Stevenson collected over 2000 cases "suggestive of reincarnation," and Dr. Jim Tucker carries on his work at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies.
Forgive me for this overly long excerpt from our book, "Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness, but I have yet to hear anything coming close to a reasonable rebuttal of the information here:
Rebirth: Across the Gap of Death
The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding) lies here, food for worms: but the work shall not be lost, it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more elegant edition... revised and corrected by the author.
(Self-composed) Epitaph of Benjamin Franklin
[The Soul, the] inmost entity... puts forward a psychic personality, [the psychic being], which changes, grows, develops from life to life; for this is the traveler between birth and death and between death and birth, our [surface personality is] only its manifold and changing vesture.
According to Sri Aurobindo, the purpose of rebirth is the evolution of consciousness. This evolution is not just for the sake of awakening the Soul to its true nature, but for expressing its infinite and unique qualities. Over the course of many lifetimes, the growing psychic being strengthens its connection to the Divine Soul behind, making it possible for the essential soul nature to be communicated more directly to the outer personality. In moments of special intensity, we may become aware of an inexplicable attraction or affinity, drawing us toward some goal of which we are – on the surface – entirely unconscious. These may be intimations of our true Divine Nature, summoning us to some work that is aligned with our deeper purpose. In those whose psychic being is more awake, such intimations may emerge spontaneously, or may be summoned by the touch of a synchronous outer event.
Lama Govinda was a German man who spent many years studying Buddhism in Tibet. In the course of his life, he received several striking confirmations that the work to which he had been drawn, was an expression of his Soul that transcended the surface personality of his current lifetime. As a child, he had written a story describing his spiritual beliefs and experiences – a story he thought one day to expand into a mystic novel. Years later as a young man, he read that story to an archaeologist friend who suggested he look at the work of a writer who, more than a century earlier, had started a similar novel that was left unfinished due to the writer’s early demise. Intrigued, Lama Govinda sought out this author’s works and found that not only were the ideas and characteristic phrases of the author uncannily similar to his own, but certain passages were literally identical. He also discovered that the writer had died of the same disease which had brought Lama Govinda to the sanatorium where he met his archaeologist friend.
Around the same time, he attended a gathering where he was introduced to a man who happened to be writing a biography of the deceased author. The man stared at Lama Govinda in shock because of the striking resemblance he bore to the only existing portrait of the author. More significantly, the earlier author had outlined a spiritual vision of the universe – an outline which precisely mirrored a plan Lama Govinda, as a youth, had drawn up for his present life’s work. He had realized the plan was too large in scope to be fulfilled in a single lifetime and had contented himself with addressing those subjects to which he felt most drawn by training or temperament. Lama Govinda later wrote that being able to pursue his work in the context of many lifetimes filled him with such peace and confidence that he was able to concentrate unhurriedly on the task of the moment, trusting that whatever was left undone would be continued in lives to come.
Lama Govinda had been living out his Soul’s calling across lifetimes but had been unaware of it until, as an adult, he encountered the series of “coincidences” initiated by reading his story to a friend. While traveling in Burma in the 1930s, he met an eight-year old boy who had awakened to the continuity of his Soul’s work at the age of four. Lama Govinda described seeing the little boy preach: “It was an astonishing sight to see a small boy speaking with the ease and self-assurance of a practiced speaker, his face radiant with happiness and his voice clear and melodious like a bell... it was a joy to hear this voice, that seemed to come straight from the depth of his heart like the song of a bird.”1
Lama Govinda later met with the boy’s father, who told him this story.
One day, on the way to a local fair, he and his two sons met up with a man who offered sugar cane to the children. The younger boy eagerly took the candy, but four-year-old Maung Tun Kyaing, told him, in a rather authoritative tone, not to eat it until he had offered a blessing of gratitude. As he uttered his admonition, a memory suddenly awakened and he directed his father to lift him to his shoulders so that he could give a sermon to the people on the virtues of giving. Considering this a childish whim, his father good-naturedly did as he was told. Much to his surprise, his little son began to speak with an eloquence and wisdom way beyond his years. Crowds gathered to hear him preach, but Maung Tun Kyaing was unfazed. Upon completing his sermon, he turned to his father and said, “Come...let us go to my [monastery].”
The boy gave directions to a nearby monastery – one he had never visited – and was taken there by his father. When the senior abbot came to meet them, the boy, rather than bowing as he had been taught, greeted the monk as an equal. The abbot said to him:
“Don’t you know [I am the head of this monastery]?”
“Certainly I know!” said the boy without the slightest hesitation. And when the [abbot] looked at him in surprise the boy mentioned [the abbott’s] name.
“How do you know? Did somebody tell you?”
“No,” said the boy. “Don’t you remember me? I was your teacher, U
Pandeissa.”
The abbot was taken aback, but in order to test him he asked the boy, “If
that is so, what was my name before I entered the Order? If you know it you may whisper it into my ear.”
The boy did so. And when the Abbott heard his name, which nobody knew except those who had grown old with him and had known him intimately, he fell at the boy’s feet, touched the ground with his forehead, and exclaimed with tears in his eyes: “Now I know, you are indeed my teacher.”
Lama Govinda goes on to recount further tests that were given to Maung Tun Kyaing in order to make certain he was indeed who he claimed to be. The boy led the others through the monastery, pointing out the room where he had slept, his meditation room, and many details of his former daily routine. In addition, the boy was able to read and interpret the Buddhist scriptures, written in the ancient language Pali, despite having grown up in a home where nobody knew how to read or write.
After all these proofs, nobody doubted he was a rebirth of the former abbot. Subsequently, the four-year old boy received numerous invitations to preach, and he spoke before groups of hundreds and thousands of people. When his family expressed concern that his health might be affected by his extensive preaching, he declared: “The Buddha spent innumerable lives in self- sacrificing deeds, striving to attain enlightenment. I too, therefore, should not spare any pains in striving after Buddhahood. Only by attaining the highest aim can I work for the benefit of all living beings.”
Soon news of the young boy’s fame reached Sir Henry Butler, then governor of Burma, who wanted to determine for himself the veracity of the boy’s story. After hearing only a little of the child’s masterful exposition of the essential teachings of Buddhism, any doubts he may have had were quelled. It was obvious to the governor that the boy was expressing his own understanding and not simply reciting words he had been taught.
According to Lama Govinda, Maung Tun Kyaing spoke with such conviction and sincerity that Sir Henry was visibly moved and encouraged the boy to bring his message to all the people of Burma.
“You should go from one end of the country to the other,” he said, “and preach to high and low, even to the prisoners in the jails, because nobody could touch the heart of the people deeper than you. Even the hardest criminal would melt in the presence of such genuine faith and sincere good will.”
And thus it happened that even the gates of the jails were opened to Maung Tun Kyaing and wherever he went he inspired the people with new religious fervor, strengthening their convictions and filling them with fresh life.
and here's a bit more about Stevenson, from the first appendix of our yoga psychology book:
The work of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, while also relying primarily on the use of the ordinary thinking mind, presents a strong challenge to conventional notions of the relationship between consciousness and matter. Over the course of several decades, Stevenson has conducted several thousand case studies of individuals (usually children) claiming to have recollections of a previous life. His work presents a strong challenge. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association has written of his “meticulous and extended investigations,” in which he has “painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases in which the evidence for reincarnation is difficult to understand on any other grounds... He has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored.”
As a young psychiatrist, prior to beginning this research, one of Stevenson’s major interests had been psychosomatic medicine, the study of the relationship between mind and body. Later, in the course of conducting reincarnation research, he became intrigued by the many cases in which birthmarks in a current life could be correlated with wounds reportedly received in a previous life, suggesting the “mind’s influence on the body across the gap of death.”272 In many cases, medical records, including autopsy reports, were found describing the precise location of a wound incurred by the person the child claims to have been in a previous life, and which matched the precise location of a birthmark in the current life.
Sometimes a child in his current life was found to have a specific disease identical to that of the former personality, and which was entirely absent in the child’s current genetic heritage.
In a particularly dramatic example, “a child in Turkey recalled being a bandit in his former life. He had committed suicide when about to be captured by the French police, [by wedging] the muzzle of his long rifle under the right side of his chin, resting the handle on the ground, and then [pulling] the trigger. In his new life, the boy was born with a huge gash mark under his chin. While Stevenson was investigating the case, an old man turned up who had remembered the bandit’s death and seen the condition of his dead body.”
Thinking as a physician. Stevenson conjectured, “if the bullet had gone through the brain in the manner described, there must be another scar where the bullet exited.”274 During his investigation, he asked the child if there was another scar, and one was found just to the left of the crown of his head, hidden under a thick crop of hair. In a presentation at the United Engineering Center in New York, Stevenson showed a slide tracing “the line of trajectory the bullet should have taken in its passage [from the gash under the jaw] through the brain...[which] was in perfect alignment with the scar mark on top of the head.”
Interesting though these observations and experiments may be, none of them involve the direct perception of the workings of consciousness. As physicist Arthur Zajonc notes,
Physics, chemistry, and neuroscience provide accounts for the mechanism of consciousness but say nothing about the experience of consciousness itself... Every science, if it would move beyond purely formal mathematical relationships, must incorporate qualities [i.e., subjective experience] into itself. All meaning inheres in qualities. The qualitative connects the formal treatment with experience... If our interest ultimately is consciousness, then we will require a means of investigation that is able to include the full range of conscious experience, and not merely a reduced set of variables easily amenable to quantification.
As long as researchers continue to rely on the outer thinking mind and outer senses as the primary means of gathering and analyzing data, they will not gain an understanding of the nature of consciousness that is substantially different from that of mainstream science. Limited to the surface consciousness, which takes things to be essentially separate from each other, we have no direct awareness of the relationship between consciousness and the object of study. Even more fundamental, we cannot, using only the surface mind, develop a truly comprehensive understanding, because [m]ind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer. Even with what exists only as obvious parts and fractions, [m]ind establishes this fiction of its ordinary commerce that they are things with which it can deal separately and not merely as aspects of a whole.
You left out rebirth. Dr, Iain Stevenson collected over 2000 cases "suggestive of reincarnation," and Dr. Jim Tucker carries on his work at the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies.
Forgive me for this overly long excerpt from our book, "Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness, but I have yet to hear anything coming close to a reasonable rebuttal of the information here:
Rebirth: Across the Gap of Death
The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding) lies here, food for worms: but the work shall not be lost, it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more elegant edition... revised and corrected by the author.
(Self-composed) Epitaph of Benjamin Franklin
[The Soul, the] inmost entity... puts forward a psychic personality, [the psychic being], which changes, grows, develops from life to life; for this is the traveler between birth and death and between death and birth, our [surface personality is] only its manifold and changing vesture.
According to Sri Aurobindo, the purpose of rebirth is the evolution of consciousness. This evolution is not just for the sake of awakening the Soul to its true nature, but for expressing its infinite and unique qualities. Over the course of many lifetimes, the growing psychic being strengthens its connection to the Divine Soul behind, making it possible for the essential soul nature to be communicated more directly to the outer personality. In moments of special intensity, we may become aware of an inexplicable attraction or affinity, drawing us toward some goal of which we are – on the surface – entirely unconscious. These may be intimations of our true Divine Nature, summoning us to some work that is aligned with our deeper purpose. In those whose psychic being is more awake, such intimations may emerge spontaneously, or may be summoned by the touch of a synchronous outer event.
Lama Govinda was a German man who spent many years studying Buddhism in Tibet. In the course of his life, he received several striking confirmations that the work to which he had been drawn, was an expression of his Soul that transcended the surface personality of his current lifetime. As a child, he had written a story describing his spiritual beliefs and experiences – a story he thought one day to expand into a mystic novel. Years later as a young man, he read that story to an archaeologist friend who suggested he look at the work of a writer who, more than a century earlier, had started a similar novel that was left unfinished due to the writer’s early demise. Intrigued, Lama Govinda sought out this author’s works and found that not only were the ideas and characteristic phrases of the author uncannily similar to his own, but certain passages were literally identical. He also discovered that the writer had died of the same disease which had brought Lama Govinda to the sanatorium where he met his archaeologist friend.
Around the same time, he attended a gathering where he was introduced to a man who happened to be writing a biography of the deceased author. The man stared at Lama Govinda in shock because of the striking resemblance he bore to the only existing portrait of the author. More significantly, the earlier author had outlined a spiritual vision of the universe – an outline which precisely mirrored a plan Lama Govinda, as a youth, had drawn up for his present life’s work. He had realized the plan was too large in scope to be fulfilled in a single lifetime and had contented himself with addressing those subjects to which he felt most drawn by training or temperament. Lama Govinda later wrote that being able to pursue his work in the context of many lifetimes filled him with such peace and confidence that he was able to concentrate unhurriedly on the task of the moment, trusting that whatever was left undone would be continued in lives to come.
Lama Govinda had been living out his Soul’s calling across lifetimes but had been unaware of it until, as an adult, he encountered the series of “coincidences” initiated by reading his story to a friend. While traveling in Burma in the 1930s, he met an eight-year old boy who had awakened to the continuity of his Soul’s work at the age of four. Lama Govinda described seeing the little boy preach: “It was an astonishing sight to see a small boy speaking with the ease and self-assurance of a practiced speaker, his face radiant with happiness and his voice clear and melodious like a bell... it was a joy to hear this voice, that seemed to come straight from the depth of his heart like the song of a bird.”1
Lama Govinda later met with the boy’s father, who told him this story.
One day, on the way to a local fair, he and his two sons met up with a man who offered sugar cane to the children. The younger boy eagerly took the candy, but four-year-old Maung Tun Kyaing, told him, in a rather authoritative tone, not to eat it until he had offered a blessing of gratitude. As he uttered his admonition, a memory suddenly awakened and he directed his father to lift him to his shoulders so that he could give a sermon to the people on the virtues of giving. Considering this a childish whim, his father good-naturedly did as he was told. Much to his surprise, his little son began to speak with an eloquence and wisdom way beyond his years. Crowds gathered to hear him preach, but Maung Tun Kyaing was unfazed. Upon completing his sermon, he turned to his father and said, “Come...let us go to my [monastery].”
The boy gave directions to a nearby monastery – one he had never visited – and was taken there by his father. When the senior abbot came to meet them, the boy, rather than bowing as he had been taught, greeted the monk as an equal. The abbot said to him:
“Don’t you know [I am the head of this monastery]?”
“Certainly I know!” said the boy without the slightest hesitation. And when the [abbot] looked at him in surprise the boy mentioned [the abbott’s] name.
“How do you know? Did somebody tell you?”
“No,” said the boy. “Don’t you remember me? I was your teacher, U
Pandeissa.”
The abbot was taken aback, but in order to test him he asked the boy, “If
that is so, what was my name before I entered the Order? If you know it you may whisper it into my ear.”
The boy did so. And when the Abbott heard his name, which nobody knew except those who had grown old with him and had known him intimately, he fell at the boy’s feet, touched the ground with his forehead, and exclaimed with tears in his eyes: “Now I know, you are indeed my teacher.”
Lama Govinda goes on to recount further tests that were given to Maung Tun Kyaing in order to make certain he was indeed who he claimed to be. The boy led the others through the monastery, pointing out the room where he had slept, his meditation room, and many details of his former daily routine. In addition, the boy was able to read and interpret the Buddhist scriptures, written in the ancient language Pali, despite having grown up in a home where nobody knew how to read or write.
After all these proofs, nobody doubted he was a rebirth of the former abbot. Subsequently, the four-year old boy received numerous invitations to preach, and he spoke before groups of hundreds and thousands of people. When his family expressed concern that his health might be affected by his extensive preaching, he declared: “The Buddha spent innumerable lives in self- sacrificing deeds, striving to attain enlightenment. I too, therefore, should not spare any pains in striving after Buddhahood. Only by attaining the highest aim can I work for the benefit of all living beings.”
Soon news of the young boy’s fame reached Sir Henry Butler, then governor of Burma, who wanted to determine for himself the veracity of the boy’s story. After hearing only a little of the child’s masterful exposition of the essential teachings of Buddhism, any doubts he may have had were quelled. It was obvious to the governor that the boy was expressing his own understanding and not simply reciting words he had been taught.
According to Lama Govinda, Maung Tun Kyaing spoke with such conviction and sincerity that Sir Henry was visibly moved and encouraged the boy to bring his message to all the people of Burma.
“You should go from one end of the country to the other,” he said, “and preach to high and low, even to the prisoners in the jails, because nobody could touch the heart of the people deeper than you. Even the hardest criminal would melt in the presence of such genuine faith and sincere good will.”
And thus it happened that even the gates of the jails were opened to Maung Tun Kyaing and wherever he went he inspired the people with new religious fervor, strengthening their convictions and filling them with fresh life.
and here's a bit more about Stevenson, from the first appendix of our yoga psychology book:
The work of psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, while also relying primarily on the use of the ordinary thinking mind, presents a strong challenge to conventional notions of the relationship between consciousness and matter. Over the course of several decades, Stevenson has conducted several thousand case studies of individuals (usually children) claiming to have recollections of a previous life. His work presents a strong challenge. The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association has written of his “meticulous and extended investigations,” in which he has “painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases in which the evidence for reincarnation is difficult to understand on any other grounds... He has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored.”
As a young psychiatrist, prior to beginning this research, one of Stevenson’s major interests had been psychosomatic medicine, the study of the relationship between mind and body. Later, in the course of conducting reincarnation research, he became intrigued by the many cases in which birthmarks in a current life could be correlated with wounds reportedly received in a previous life, suggesting the “mind’s influence on the body across the gap of death.”272 In many cases, medical records, including autopsy reports, were found describing the precise location of a wound incurred by the person the child claims to have been in a previous life, and which matched the precise location of a birthmark in the current life.
Sometimes a child in his current life was found to have a specific disease identical to that of the former personality, and which was entirely absent in the child’s current genetic heritage.
In a particularly dramatic example, “a child in Turkey recalled being a bandit in his former life. He had committed suicide when about to be captured by the French police, [by wedging] the muzzle of his long rifle under the right side of his chin, resting the handle on the ground, and then [pulling] the trigger. In his new life, the boy was born with a huge gash mark under his chin. While Stevenson was investigating the case, an old man turned up who had remembered the bandit’s death and seen the condition of his dead body.”
Thinking as a physician. Stevenson conjectured, “if the bullet had gone through the brain in the manner described, there must be another scar where the bullet exited.”274 During his investigation, he asked the child if there was another scar, and one was found just to the left of the crown of his head, hidden under a thick crop of hair. In a presentation at the United Engineering Center in New York, Stevenson showed a slide tracing “the line of trajectory the bullet should have taken in its passage [from the gash under the jaw] through the brain...[which] was in perfect alignment with the scar mark on top of the head.”
Interesting though these observations and experiments may be, none of them involve the direct perception of the workings of consciousness. As physicist Arthur Zajonc notes,
Physics, chemistry, and neuroscience provide accounts for the mechanism of consciousness but say nothing about the experience of consciousness itself... Every science, if it would move beyond purely formal mathematical relationships, must incorporate qualities [i.e., subjective experience] into itself. All meaning inheres in qualities. The qualitative connects the formal treatment with experience... If our interest ultimately is consciousness, then we will require a means of investigation that is able to include the full range of conscious experience, and not merely a reduced set of variables easily amenable to quantification.
As long as researchers continue to rely on the outer thinking mind and outer senses as the primary means of gathering and analyzing data, they will not gain an understanding of the nature of consciousness that is substantially different from that of mainstream science. Limited to the surface consciousness, which takes things to be essentially separate from each other, we have no direct awareness of the relationship between consciousness and the object of study. Even more fundamental, we cannot, using only the surface mind, develop a truly comprehensive understanding, because [m]ind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer. Even with what exists only as obvious parts and fractions, [m]ind establishes this fiction of its ordinary commerce that they are things with which it can deal separately and not merely as aspects of a whole.