The Quantum Truth of

Rebirth

Irreducible Mind, Quantum After-Death Personality Survival

and the Buddhist Metaphysics of Cyclic Existence and Rebirth

The title of this chapter was inspired by a recent article by the Theravadin monk Thanissaro

Bhikkhu entitled The Truth of Rebirth and Why it Matters for Buddhist Practice. In this article

Thanissaro Bhikkhu rebukes the supposedly modernizing movement within Western Buddhism which

seeks to remove the central doctrines of karma and rebirth in the mistaken belief that such notions are

unscientific. He writes:

Rebirth has always been a central teaching in the Buddhist tradition. The earliest records in

the Pali Canon indicate that the Buddha, prior to his awakening, searched for a happiness not

subject to the vagaries of repeated birth, aging, illness, and death. One of the reasons he left

his early teachers was because he recognized that their teachings led, not to the goal he sought,

but to rebirth on a refined level. On the night of his awakening, two of the three knowledges

leading to his release from suffering focused on the topic of rebirth. The first showed his own

many previous lives; the second, depicting the general pattern of beings dying and being reborn

throughout the cosmos, showed the connection between rebirth and karma, or action. When

he did finally attain release from suffering, he recognized that he had achieved his goal because

he had touched a dimension that not only was free from birth, but also had freed him from ever

being reborn again. After he had attained release, his new-found freedom from rebirth was the

first realization that occurred spontaneously to his mind.

…

So the theme of rebirth is woven inextricably throughout the Buddha’s teachings. And freedom

from rebirth has been a central feature of the Buddhist goal from the very beginning of the

tradition. All of the various Buddhist religions that later developed in Asia, despite their other

differences, were unanimous in teaching rebirth. Even those that didn’t aim at putting an end

to rebirth still taught rebirth as a fact. Yet as these Buddhist religions have come to the West,

they have run into a barrier from modern Western culture. Of all the Buddha's teachings,

rebirth has been one of the hardest for modern Westerners to accept. … For people who have

felt burned or repelled by the faith demands of Western religion, there is the added barrier that

the teaching on rebirth is something that — for the unawakened — has to be taken on faith.

They would prefer a Buddhism that makes no faith demands, focusing its attention solely on

the benefits it can bring in this life. So for many Westerners who have profited from the

Buddha's psychological insights and meditational tools, the question arises: Can we strip the

Buddha's teachings of any mention of rebirth and still get the full benefits of what he had to

teach? In other words, can we drop the Buddha's worldview while keeping his psychology and

still realize everything it has to offer?i

Thanissaro Bhikkhu argues that this approach is unacceptable and he focuses on the details of the

doctrines of the Pali Canon in order to prove the point that the concepts of karma and rebirth are essential

aspects of Buddhist theory and practice.

The term ‘rebirth’ is used rather than ‘reincarnation’ because some Buddhists consider the latter term

involves the non-Buddhist notion of a ‘fixed’ soul. In this chapter the term ‘reincarnation’ will also be

used, but it is necessary to keep in mind the awareness that there is no implication of a fixed entity

involved. Buddhism asserts a continuity of a changing energetic process of mind-potentiality, not a fixed

essence. And such a psycho-metaphysical view, contrary to many people’s beliefs, has scientific

credibility.

In a recent paper entitled ‘Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality

Survival’ quantum physicist Professor Henry Stapp concludes that ‘contemporary physical theory’,

which is essentially quantum mechanics, requires the recognition that:

…strong doubts about personality survival based solely on the belief that postmortem survival

is incompatible with the laws of physics are unfounded. Rational science-based opinion on this

question must be based on the content and quality of the empirical data, not on a presumed

incompatibility of such phenomena with our contemporary understanding of the workings of

nature.ii

In other words, according to Stapp’s analysis, whilst it is the case that quantum physics in no way proves

the survival of personality neither does it rule it out. In fact, as we shall see, a thorough investigation of

the quantum situation together with non-quantum investigations from various other fields of enquiry

naturally leads to the conclusion that survival of some immaterial aspect of the psychophysical

embodiment of human and perhaps other sentient beings is highly likely. Furthermore the most likely

scenario is fully in accord with Buddhist ‘epiontic’ psycho-metaphysics.

One of the motivating factors behind Stapp’s paper is the evidence marshaled together in the

important book Irreducible Mind: Towards a Psychology for the 21st Century, particularly the evidence

concerning Near Death Experiences (NDE’s). In the introduction to his paper Stapp indicates his

fundamental skepticism to the possibility of the personality surviving death, but he writes that:

…in contrast to the doubters who refused to look through Galileo's telescope, I have, in spite

of my skepticism, perused certain documentations of such claims that have been brought

insistently to my attention by scientists judged by me to be intelligent, critical, and sober-

minded. One such document was particularly arresting. It is the book Irreducible Mind, written

by Edward and Emily Kelly and several other scientists personally known to me. While

insufficient to quell my life-long doubts, this account has rendered reasonable the task of

examining whether the phenomena in question, if assumed to be veridical, could be reconciled

with contemporary physical theory in a natural and reasonable way.iii

An interesting feature of this guarded endorsement is the indication that he is only prepared to even

consider evidence and arguments advanced by people judged by him to be ‘intelligent, critical, and

sober-minded.’ This might on first consideration seem entirely reasonable, but it actually depends upon

the criteria which Stapp employs to decide exactly who is judged to be worthy.

Stapp indicates that he has a preference for what he calls “conservative and rationally coherent

conceptions of quantum physics.”iv But although it is incumbent upon us to pursue coherent

conceptions of reality, who is to say that reality is “conservative”? Exactly what is meant by this?

This is a very significant point for in his brilliant works Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics

(2004) and Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer (2007) Stapp

himself has argued that the materialist paradigm, which as he so correctly and powerfully demonstrates

has been completely undermined by quantum discoveries, operates as a unexamined and now clearly

mistaken metaphysical assump-tion for many scientists and philosophers. Despite this, however, Stapp

ap-pears to be comfortable to put in the place of an assumption of meta-physical materialism, an

equally unproven assumption of metaphysical con-servatism:

… “quantum mechanics” is understood in diverse ways even by highly respected scientists,

and in a vast array of disparate ways by many others. Within this grand collection of putative

interpretations there would undoubtedly be no difficulty in finding some outlandish conception

of quantum mechanics that would accom-modate even the wildest of assumptions about the

nature of reality.v

Here Stapp is laying out his credentials as being among the ‘intelligent, critical, and sober-minded’

interpreters of quantum theory as opposed to those who would embrace ‘wild’ assumptions about the

nature of reality. But what exactly are the criteria to be employed, is it all down to Stapp’s individual

judgment as implied in the earlier quote?

Such considerations are very pertinent to the current topic precisely because if one approaches such

topics as the reality of paranormal phenomena and their relationship to the discoveries of quantum

physics with the attitude that, although the material world seems to have vanished, nevertheless the world

must at least be conservative in its metaphysical makeup then deeply significant insights might be

missed. After all, what could possibly be less ‘conservative’ than a vast universe apparently explo-ding

into existence from ‘nothing’ at the moment of the ‘big bang’ thirteen and a bit billion years ago?

For some part of 2009 I was privileged to be involved in quite a vigorous email correspondence with

Stapp after I approached him to ask whether he would read some chapters of the books I was working

on at that time. These books I finally completed and published as Quantum Buddhism: Dancing in

Emptiness – Reality Revealed at the Interface of Quantum Physics and Buddhist Philosophy and The

Grand Designer: Discovering the Quantum Mind Matrix of the Universe. Stapp was very gracious and

read some chapters and for a while was very encouraging and we exchanged and commented upon

various articles we were working on. Our correspondence, however, came to an abrupt end when Stapp

became aware that I was proposing and arguing that Buddhist metaphysics had ‘thoroughly’ and

‘precisely’ anticipated the metaphysical discoveries of quantum theory (I nowhere suggested that

Buddhists knew matrix mechanics or the Schrödinger equation). Stapp was completely dismissive of

my views, saying that

Because of the lack of available-to-human-beings words and concepts, any description back

then must be vague and mystical within the conceptual/verbal structures known to scientists

today: a mere groping that could cover a multitude of positions expressible today.vi

In his conclusion Stapp wrote:

… although there are lots of correlates between QM and Buddhism, the claim that some

“rigorous” arguments have established, on the basis of the connections cited here, that the

ancient Buddhists understandings, as specified by their actual words, prefigured the detailed

understandings provided by QM, is not rationally borne out, and that to claim so reflects badly

on the claimant. I would advise some moderation of your claims.vii

I replied to Stapp indicating that I had no intention of moderating my claims because I was certain they

were correct and appropriate. I also analyzed his objections and indicated where I thought he was

incorrect or misunderstood Buddhist metaphysics.

Furthermore I suggested that in many respects Buddhist philosophy has a much more mature and

profound understanding of the metaphysical implications of the nature of quantum reality and the

‘emergence’ of ‘classical’ reality, an understanding which might help researchers in the field of the

foundations of quantum theory if only they would abandon Western academic arrogance. I indicated

to Stapp that I thought his attitude displayed a remarkable and inappropriate hubris which assumes that

only Western philosophical reasoning and scientific investigations could reveal or comprehend the

nature of reality. In reality, however, the various metaphysical investigations and formulations of

Buddhist philosophy clearly anticipated the “multitude of positions expressible today” as I have since

demonstrated in my many articles such as ‘The Elegance of Enigma: Quantum Darwinism, Quantum

Bayesianism (QBism) & Quantum Buddhism’ which explicitly demonstrates the same metaphysical

dis-cussions in 10th through to 14th century Tibet as is currently exercising the minds of those involved

in debates on the metaphysical implications of quantum discoveries.viii

One of the last articles I sent to Stapp was entitled ‘Quantum God?’ In this article I investigated the

extent to which quantum theory could allow the notion that we might consider the pool of infinite

potentiality under-lying the process of reality which is implied by quantum theory to be ‘God’. I

concluded that:

It cannot be said that quantum theory supports the vast theological panoply of belief about

the nature of ‘God’ which is maintained within most mainstream Christian theology. The

basic elements which we can attribute to the common meta-physical structure are:

• An infinite pool of potentiality which has the fundamental ‘epiontic’ nature of awareness.

In Buddhism this ground awareness is asserted to be non-dual which means it does not have

the split into experiential subject-object

• The internal mechanism of self-unfoldment which manifests itself as the minimalist ‘desire’

for the unfolding of meaning-experience into as many experiencing sentient beings as

possible'

• The metaphysical ‘existence’ of two interdependent, distinguishable yet inseparable realms.

The first is the ultimate, primordial realm wherein lie all the infinite possibilities for

manifestation; the second realm is the realm of the unfoldment which ‘floats’ within the

first realm. This second ‘seeming’ realm unfolds through the ‘epiontic’ quantum

mechanism.

This is the fundamental, minimal metaphysical structure which can be derived from a

comparison between quantum theory and religious metaphysics. The decision to call the

ultimate realm God, Dharmakaya or Al-Haqq is clearly extra and is hardly going to be

decided by looking to quantum theory.

My point was that one could call the realm of infinite potentiality ‘God’ if one were so inclined as long

as one was also aware that such a God was not really the God of mainstream Christianity. Shortly after

Stapp wrote in a paper ‘Minds and Values in the Quantum Universe’:

This [quantum] situation is concordant with the idea of a powerful God that creates the

universe and its laws to get things started, but then bequeaths part of this power to beings

created in his own image, at least with regard to their power to make physically efficacious

decisions on the basis of reasons and evaluations.ix

It is surely startling to find that someone who urges quantum ‘conservatism’ finds no problem with the

notion of a quantum God but takes exception to Buddhist Mind-Only metaphysics (Yogachara-

Chittamatra), which posits the ground of reality as an infinite pool of potentially energy-awareness.

Stapp has written an excellent book Mindful Universe in which he argues that the nature of reality is

essentially Mind-like, which is a central Buddhist Mind-Only doctrine! Furthermore, as we shall see, the

account of why Stapp now thinks that quantum theory is consistent with life after death, and therefore

reincarnation, is pure Buddhist Mind-Only metaphysics! Here indeed is a quantum mystery.

In his book Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics Stapp tells us that the evidence of quantum

theory:

…upsets the whole apple cart. It produced a seismic shift in our ideas about both the nature of

reality, and the nature of our relationship to the reality that envelops and sustains us. x

However, as we have seen, it appears that Stapp doesn’t like his apples too widely distributed, preferring

them to land conservatively within easy retrieval range. And it is intriguing to try and fathom why Stapp

favors a conservative upturning of apple carts.

According to the recent book How the Hippies Saved Physics, by David Kaiser, Stapp was a ‘charter

member’ of the Fundamental Fysiks Group (FFG). The core thesis of Kaiser’s book is that it was the

work of the members of the FFG, which focused on the metaphysical implications of Bell’s theorem at

a time when issues of quantum interpretation were gener-ally denigrated, led to key discoveries such as

entanglement and the no-cloning theorem, although the no-cloning theorem actually derived from a

refutation of one of Herbert’s proposals. However, another central concern of many of the group was

the possible interconnections between the new quantum discoveries and speculative and controversial

putative phenomena such as telepathy, psychokinesis, time travel and the interconnection of mind and

matter as posited by the psychologist Carl Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli.

Another recurring interest amongst some members of the group was the possible connection between

quantum physics and Eastern philosophies. Thus Nick Herbert wrote in his book Quantum Reality:

Nothing exposes the perplexity at the heart of physics more starkly than certain preposterous

claims a few outspoken physicists are making concerning how the world really works. If we

take these claims at face value, the stories physicists tell resemble the tales of mystics and

madmen.xi

And Gary Zukav, who was not a physicist but was helped by members of the group, in his The Dancing

Wu Li Masters:

… physicists are not the only people who view the world this way. They are only the newest

members of a sizable group; most Hindus and Buddhists also hold similar views.xii

And, of course, Fritjov Capra, in his cult classic The Tao of Physics:

A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated

as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries into the nature of the universe.xiii

Capra’s book became a bestseller and, although lambasted by some reviewers such as physicist and

staff writer for the New Yorker Jeremy Bernstein who called it a “superficial and profoundly

misleading book”, was welcomed by many in the profession of physics teaching as improving the

image of physics as an academic subject.

As Kaiser points out, Capra’s book draws on:

… several of the Fundamental Fysiks Group’s favorite physicists, among them Henry Stapp,

David Bohm, and John Wheeler. Like group member Jack Sarfatti, Capra emphasized

Wheeler’s shift from “observer” to “participator,” even including a long quotation from one of

Wheeler's little-noticed conference talks on the theme “The idea of ‘participation instead of

observation’” Capra noted, “has been formulated in modern physics only recently, but it is an

idea which is well known to any student of mysticism,” which, after all, has always required

“full participation with one's whole being.”xiv

And this emphasis on the participatory nature of quantum reality is also a central aspect of Stapp’s

work. In his upsetting of the apple cart passage for instance Stapp indicates that the evidence of quantum

theory places actions at the center of the metaphysical structure of reality, quantum theory, he writes:

…upsets the whole apple cart. It produced a seismic shift in our ideas about both the nature of

reality, and the nature of our relationship to the reality that envelops and sustains us. The

aspects of nature represented by the theory are converted from elements of being to elements

of doing. The effect of this change is profound: it replaces the world of material substances by

a world populated by actions, and by potentialities for the occurrence of the various possible

observed feedbacks from these actions.xv

This view maps directly into the Buddhist notion of karma, a term which actually means ‘action’. In

the Buddhist worldview the notion of karma-vipaka, or action and feedback, is central; the notion of

the universe as a ‘self-excited’ feedback loop, driven by intentional actions (Pali: kamma, Sanskrit:

karma), is central to Buddhist metaphysics. In his exposition of the nature of kamma Thanissaro

Bhikkhuxvi tells us that:

Buddhists … saw that karma acts in multiple feedback loops, with the present moment being

shaped both by past and by present actions; present actions shape not only the future but also

the present. Furthermore, present actions need not be determined by past actions. In other

words, there is free will, although its range is somewhat dictated by the past.xvii

The quantum perspective presented by Stapp, and others, actually indicate the quantum mechanisms

underlying the operation of karma-vipaka.

Most of the members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group were comfortable with the notion of quantum

physics penetrating into the realm of the ‘mystical’. However it would appear that some of them had a

rather naïve, perhaps almost adolescent, appreciation of what ‘mystical’ states were and what their

achievement entailed, thus Nick Herbert explained that in the Consciousness Theory Group, a spinoff of

the Fundamental Fysiks Group:

We would take any drug (some of us), compose bizarre music, use EEG output in unusual

ways, consort with psychics, Tarot readers, tricksters, shamans, sex magicians and millionaire

toy manufac-turers.xviii

The impression one gets is that of a very undisciplined and hedonistic approach to the attempt to generate

‘mystical’ experience and explore the nature of consciousness.

Such an approach is widely at variance with Buddhist metaphysics and practice. For example,

according to Buddhism ‘supernormal’ powers such as telepathy and direct recall of past lives are results

of the attainment of advanced meditative states. However in order to achieve such meditative states a

practitioner needs to practice moral discipline, restraint of the senses and deep and committed continuous

practice of shamatha, or concentration meditation, leading to samadhi which is a state of continuous and

stable focused awareness which can stay unwavering and undisturbed by conceptual thought for

extended periods of time. In a discussion of shamatha and samadhi the Buddhist practitioner and writer

B. Alan Wallace refers to the advanced state of being able to remain in such a state for twenty-four hours

although results can be obtained by being able to rest in this focused and unwavering state for four hours:

Instead of being able to rest effortlessly in unwavering samadhi for twenty-four hours, one

may do so for only four hours - still far beyond anything considered possible according to

modern psychology! This is what Tibetan Buddhists refer to when speaking of “achieving

shamatha” and “settling the mind in its natural state.” To achieve this degree of samadhi may

require a year or two of intensive training, meditating ten hours per day. While at first glance

such an investment of time and effort may seem impractical, consider that this is far less time

than it takes to earn a graduate degree in astronomy. If the study of the heavens had been left

to naked eye observers, we would still believe that a mere 3,000 stars revolve around the

Earth.xix

The significant point here is that according to the Buddhist psycho-metaphysical worldview

practitioners who attain such extraordinary states of advanced mastery of the mind can have direct

insights into the nature of reality.

The kind of direct metaphysical insights that the Buddha had when he achieved enlightenment

revealed to him, amongst other things, the illusion-like nature of the universe, the ‘epiontic’ nature of

the basic ‘dream-stuff’ of reality, the cause and effect mechanism of ‘karma’ operating within the

‘epiontic’ ‘dream-stuff’ of reality, and the operation of dependent origin-nation (Sanskrit:

pratītyasamutpāda; Pali: paticcasamuppāda, also trans-lated as ‘dependent co-arising’). And an

important aspect of these insights was a direct knowledge of previous lives. The following is from the

Samannaphala Sutta (The Fruits of the Homeless Life) which outlines the phases of enlightenment:

And he, with mind concentrated ... applies and directs his mind to the knowledge of previous

existences. He remembers many previous existences: one birth, two, three, four, five births,

ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty births, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand births, several

periods of contraction, of expansion, of both contraction and expansion. There my name was

so-and-so my clan was so-and-so, my caste was so-and-so, my food was such-and-such, I

experienced such-and-such pleasant and painful conditions, I lived for so long. Having passed

away from there, I arose there. There my name was so-and-so ... And having passed away

from there, I arose here." Thus he remembers various past births, their conditions and details.xx

“Periods of contraction and expansion” refers to the universe!

The metaphysical details of quantum theory, then, would certainly have been known to the Buddha,

as will clearly become apparent. He could hardly have been fully enlightened without this knowledge

concerning the fundamental functioning of the foundational ‘dream-stuff’ making up the process of

reality. Such a notion, however, is likely to seem outlandish to people veering on the side of

‘conservatism’, and who also assume that only Western modes of investigation can penetrate the

secrets of reality.

In an article in the Times Science vs. the Near-Death Experience the reporter and science author

Brian Appleyard wrote that:

[NDE’s] happen all the time. They may happen to everybody, however they die. Remarkably

similar experiences have been reported throughout history in all cultures. Obviously, most are

lost to us, because being near death is usually the immediate prelude to being dead. But

precisely because high-tech hospital resuscitations are so effective — around 15% of cardiac-

arrest victims are revived — we can now regularly hear news apparently from beyond the

grave. And it sounds like very good news indeed. You don’t really die and you feel great.

What could be nicer? NDEs are so common, so vivid and so life-transforming — survivors

frequently become more compassionate, religious and serene as a result of what they

experience — that scientists, philosophers, priests, psychologists and cultists all want a piece

of the action.xxi

The reason that NDE’s appear to becoming more common is that instances of people being brought

back to life after cardiac arrests are increasing in number. According to Dr Parnia, who is studying the

phenomenon, it is correct to say “to say that experiences after cardiac arrests are actual death

experiences rather than near-death experiences.” NDE’s are often associated with out-of-body

experiences, and, as Appleyard writes:

There are thousands of reports of OBEs but the two most famous cases are Pam Reynolds and

Maria’s Tennis Shoe. Reynolds, an American singer, watched and later reported on with

remarkable accuracy the top of her own skull being removed by surgeons before she moved

into a bright glowing realm. But it was Reynolds’s account of the surgical implements used

and the words spoken in the theatre that make the case so intriguing. Maria, meanwhile,

underwent cardiac arrest in 1977. She floated out of her body, drifted round the hospital and

noticed a tennis shoe on a window sill. It was later found to be exactly where she said it was.

The shoe was said to be invisible from the ground and not in any location where Maria could

have seen it. Such stories suggest that OBEs should be scientifically verifiable.xxii

There are a great many reports of NDE’s which involve people near death or clinically dead, with

apparently no brain function, who find themselves floating out of their body and then after being revived

are able to report exactly what was happening during the time that they were apparently dead. Some are

reported in IM and many others can be found on the internet. Often these experiences involve tunnels

leading towards blissful lights, spiritual figures and dead family members who tell the person that should

return to look after children or finish some task.

The evidence would certainly seem to suggest that awareness can in some form operate

independently of the body. However:

There are plenty of sceptics who will pounce on negative results or even positive ones with

any signs of ambiguity. Dr Peter Fenwick, a neuro-psychiatrist who has overseen Parnia and

Sartori’s work, admits that, whatever the outcome, there will still be “wriggle room” for

sceptics.xxiii

But as we saw in a previous chapter, on many occasions sceptics will facilitate their ‘wriggle’ by

ignoring or distorting the evidence. Some skeptics wriggle their way into arrant stupidity. According to

Appleyard:

Susan Blackmore argues that we have OBEs all the time. Think about your last holiday.

Picture a scene from that holiday. Many will see that scene as if from outside themselves —

they will be a character in the picture, as they are in OBEs reported in NDE narratives. It’s

just what our brains do, say the sceptics: they secrete mind in all its fabulous variations and

with all its incorrigible delusions. There’s nothing there to get all weird about. The soul is not

a soul, the brick is a brick and the brain is just a 1.3kg bag of water, fat and carbohydrates,

subtly organised to provide us with the illusions of freedom and thought.xxiv

The quantum physicist John Bell said of the ‘many worlds’ view of quantum theory that if it were to be

taken seriously it would not be possible to take anything else seriously. This surely also applies to the

ridiculous assertion that recalling holidays is equivalent to floating out of one’s body while it is brain-

dead and then precisely seeing what is happening in the room or even miles away. In true inimitable

style Blackmore produces materialist absurdity. Furthermore in a quantum age a brick is not a brick in

the sense that she means, even on an atomic level it is 99.9999999999999% not a brick. In the section on Near Death Experiences (NDEs) the authors of IM consider the various

‘explanations’ desperately offered up by defenders of the materialist faith and demolish them all with

rigor and precision. It is worth looking at the kind of refutations offered in IM in order to get an idea of

the rigor of the analysis. For example the claim that oxygen deprivation can account for NDEs is dealt

with as follows:

One of the earliest and most persistent of the physiological theories proposed for NDEs is that

lowered levels of oxygen (hypoxia or anoxia), perhaps accompanied by increased levels of

carbon dioxide (hypercarbia), have produced hallucinations.... One study frequently cited is that

of Whinnery (1992), who compared NDEs to what he called the “dreamlets” occurring in brief

periods of unconsciousness induced in fighter pilots by rapid acceleration in a centrifuge... He

claimed that some features common to NDEs are also found in these hypoxic episodes, including

tunnel vision, bright lights, brief fragmented visual images, a sense of floating, pleasurable

sensations, and, rarely, a sense of leaving the body. The primary features of acceleration-induced

hypoxia, however, are myoclonic convulsions (rhythmic jerking of the limbs), impaired memory

for events just prior to the outset of unconsciousness, tingling in the extremities and around the

mouth, confusion and disorientation upon awakening, and paralysis, symptoms that do not occur

in association with NDEs. Moreover, contrary to NDEs, the visual images Whinnery reported

frequently included living people, but never deceased people; and no life review or accurate out-

of-body perceptions have been reported in acceleration-induced loss of consciousness.xxv

Next up for refutation is the ketamine model:

... the suggestion that a ketamine-like endogenous neuroprotective agent may be released in

conditions of stress... Ketamine, an anesthetic agent that selectively occupies NMDA receptors, can

at subanesthetic doses produce feelings of being out of the body. Moreover, ketamine sometimes

produces other features common to NDEs, such as travel through a dark tunnel into light, believing

that one has died, or communion with God. - This hypothesis, however, also has problems. First, it

is not at all clear that ketamine experiences do in fact resemble NDEs. Unlike the vast majority of

NDEs, ketamine experiences are often frightening and involve bizarre imagery, and patients usually

express the wish not to repeat the experience. Most ketamine users also recognize the illusory

character of their experience, in contrast to the many NDE experiencers who are firmly convinced

of the reality of what they experienced and its lack of resemblance to illusions or dreams. Even if

ketamine experiences do resemble NDEs in some respects, many important features of NDEs, such

as seeing deceased people or a revival of memories, have not been reported with ketamine.

Furthermore, ketamine typically exerts its effects in an otherwise more or less normal brain, while

many NDEs occur under conditions in which brain function is severely compromised.xxvi

The authors further point out that a “naturally occurring ketamine-like substance ... has not been

identified in humans.”xxvii

Another reductionist account of NDEs is the view, propounded most notably by M. A. Persinger

(inventor of the putative God-helmet), that electrical stimulation of the brain can reproduce NDEs on

demand:

Persinger has also claimed that “a vast clinical and surgical literature ... indicates that floating and

rising sensations, OBEs, personally profound mystical and religious encounters, visual and auditory

experiences, and dream-like sequences are evoked, usually as single events, by electrical

stimulation of deep, mesiobasal temporal lobe structures”. His sole reference for this strong claim

is a paper by Stevens (1982). That paper, however, is confined entirely to descriptions of certain

physiological observations made in studies of epileptic patients, and it contains no mention

whatever of any subjective experiences or of electrical stimulation studies, much less of “a vast

clinical and surgical literature” supporting Persinger’s claim. Persinger goes on to claim that, using

weak transcranial magnetic stimulation, he and his colleagues have produced “all of the major

components of the NDE, including out-of-body experiences, floating, being pulled towards a light

hearing strange music and profound meaningful experiences.” However, we have been unable to

find phenomenological descriptions of the experiences of his subjects adequate to support this

claim, and the brief descriptions that he does provide in fact again bear little resemblance to NDEs

(e.g., Persinger, 1994, pages 284-285)....

Neurologist Ernst Rodin stated bluntly: “In spite of having seen hundreds of patients with temporal

lobe seizures during three decades of professional life, I have never come across that

symptomatology [of NDEs] as part of the seizure.xxviii

The authors go on to explain that the similarities between the hallucinations produced by electrical

stimulation of the brain and NDEs have been greatly exaggerated.

Once such physicalistic theories for NDEs and been disposed of the authors go on to say:

NDEs seem instead to provide direct evidence for a type of mental functioning that varies

“inversely, rather than directly, with the observable activity of the nervous system” (Myers,

1891d, p. 638). Such evidence, we believe, fundamentally conflicts with the conventional

doctrine that brain processes produce consciousness, and supports the alternative view that brain

activity normally serves as a kind of filter, which somehow constrains the material that emerges

into waking consciousness. On this latter view, the “relaxation” of the filter under certain still

poorly understood circumstances may lead to drastic alterations of the normal mind-brain

relation and to an associated enhancement or enlargement of consciousness.xxix

The authors of IM show that the reductive-materialist accounts of the phenomenon of NDEs are

desperately implausible attempts to explain the phenomenon away as merely a matter of matter mutely

and mindlessly mattering away to itself on the edge of material extinction. The only plausible account,

an account which fits all the other phenomena meticulously researched and presented by the authors

of IM, is that our everyday consciousness operates against the background of a much wider and deeper

pool of a more fluid realm of consciousness.

The authors of IM suggest that the notion suggested by Myers at the end of the nineteenth century,

that the brain is a ‘filter’ which focuses a deeper more universal pool of consciousness into the light of

the everyday world, accounts for all the phenomena that they survey with complete coherence and

adequacy. Furthermore, as physicist Henry Stapp has recently pointed out, this account is also entirely

consistent with quantum theory.

Before looking at the Buddhist view of the ‘epiontic’ functioning of ‘cyclic existence’ with its view

of continuous rebirth, or samsara, it is useful to outline Stapp’s recent indication of how quantum theory

is compatible with personality survival after death because his suggestions correspond pretty well with

the Buddhist worldview. Stapp first describes what he calls the orthodox quantum mechanics in which

in which a ‘Process 1’ (a term introduced by John Von Neumann) decision is made by human beings as

to how to interrogate ‘nature’ in order to force quantum reality to adopt a mixture of possibilities each

of which has a definite probability. According to Stapp:

The choice of the actually occurring Process-1 action is not specified, either deterministically

or statistically, by any yet-known law or rule: it remains, in this specific sense a “free choice”.

The origin and nature of this choice constitutes a huge causal gap in the orthodox theory, as it

stands today.xxx

This view of the situation divides the quantum situation into two realms. The first is a ‘physical’ realm

of potentialities and the second is a ‘mental’ realm of decision making as to what measurements to

perform on the part of human beings. Thus there is clearly an interaction between these two realms.

Stapp writes that:

The residents of these disparate domains become dynamically linked, producing an ontology

akin to Descartes' psychophysical dualism. But the mental and physical aspects are not two

independent Cartesian substances, each completely sufficient unto itself. On the physical side,

the quantum temporal evolution proceeds in discrete steps, with an interval of continuous

expansion of an array of possibilities for the occurrence of an “actual event”, followed by an

actual event that reduces this array to the subset compatible with a specific “experience”. On

the mental side, according to William James …: “Your acquaintance with reality grows

literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and upon reflection you can divide these

into components, but as immediately given they come totally or not at all.”xxxi

According to Stapp this viewpoint produces what he calls in his paper Nondual Quantum Duality

exactly that - a ‘dualistic quantum non-dualism’:

…quantum mechanics is thus dualistic in the pragmatic and operational sense that it involves

aspects of nature that are described in physical terms and also aspects of nature that are

described in psychological terms… This is all in close accord with classic Cartesian dualism.

On the other hand, in contrast to the application to classical mechanics, in which the physically

described aspect is ontologically matterlike, not mindlike, in quantum mechanics the

physically described part is mindlike. Thus quantum mechanics conforms at the

pragmatic/operational level to the precepts of Cartesian duality, but reduces at a deep

ontological level to a fundamentally mindlike nondual monism.xxxii

In other words there is a deep level of mind-like reality, corresponding to what Bohm referred to as the

‘implicate order’, which gives rise to an appar-ently ‘physical’ realm and a realm, or realms, of

experience and mentality. And these dualistic realms, which are essentially of the nature of Mind,

interact with each other.

It is easy to see that Stapp’s ‘dualistic quantum non-dualism’ maps pretty closely (despite his

objections) onto the Chittamatra-Yogachara or Buddhist Mind-Only metaphysics. In the following

quote the term ‘emptiness’ corresponds to Stapp’s ‘deep ontological level’ which he says is “fund-

amentally mindlike nonduality.” The Mind-Only metaphysical perspective tells us that the realms of

subjectivity and objectivity emerge in a dream-like manner from this deep level of nondual Mindnature,

which we can conceive of as an infinite pool of energetic nondual awareness-potentiality. The Tibetan

Buddhist teacher Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche explains:

That is a unique feature of the Yogacarin presentation of empti-ness, because emptiness is

normally understood as a complete neg-ation or a completely negative term rather than

something positive. Here, once subject and object are negated, emptiness, which is reality, is

affirmed in its place. A short passage from the Madhyantavibhanga says, "Truly, the

characteristic of emptiness is nonexistence of the duality of subject and object, and the

existence of that nonexistence."

“The existence of that nonexistence” is reality. Duality is removed, but emptiness itself is

another kind of existence. This is a contradiction in terms, from a logical point of view, but

that is how it is expressed. Yogacarins would say that logic has no place when it comes to

describing reality. That is how Yogacarins understood emptiness.xxxiii

In the Buddhist Madhyamaka, or ‘Middle Way’, metaphysical perspective ‘emptiness’ is described as

a purely negative phenomenon, an absence of substantiality. However, here it is clearly stated that from

the Chittamatra-Yogachara point of view the ground of emptiness is a ‘positive phenom-enon’

characterized as being the existence of the ‘nonexistence of the duality of subject and object.’ In other

words the ground of emptiness is a nondual ground of potentiality from which the phenomena of duality

(or the appearance of the phenomena of the dualistic world) arises. The ‘existence of the nonexistence

of duality’ is on a deeper, nondual level of reality than the kind of ‘classical’ type of existence we deal

with in the everyday world. The Mind-Only metaphysics describes the ground of the process of reality

as being of the nature of nondual Mind, in its personal aspect this ground level of nondual mind is

called the alayavijnana, the ground or substrate consciousness. It is this level of the process of reality

which carries potentialities from one lifetime to the next.

In his ‘Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival’ paper Stapp

seems to backtrack somewhat on his views expressed in his Nondual Quantum Duality paper. The notion

that all aspects are essentially mindlike, he tells us, leads us into the realms of a biocentric panpsychism

which, he indicates, is difficult to square with ‘common sense’. And it is here that, again, we meet with

Stapp’s conservatism (even though God and quantum theory are compatible for him!). The natural notion

that the process of reality is biocentric, which is indicated by the evidence, Stapp finds unacceptable. So,

in contrast to his earlier paper where he asserts a deep level nondual mindlike foundation to the co-

arising realms of objectivity and subjectivity, he now wants to assert an independent realm of the

‘physical’ which has its own internal momentum:

Nevertheless a solution of the biocentrism problem that is more commonsensical than

panpsychism is to allow Process-l actions that are not psycho-physical---i.e., to allow some

reduction events to lack mental aspects altogether. This solution would permit some reduction

events to occur by virtue of sufficient physical conditions alone, and to contain no localized

mental aspect at all. Permitting, under certain physical conditions, purely physical kinds of

Process-1 actions does not in any way curtail the need for the existence, in the quantum world

in which we human beings live, of the psycho-physical-type Process-l actions. These actions

are essential---within orthodox quantum mechanics---both for the conduct of our consciously

informed and controlled lives, and for the linkage between physical theory and empirical data

that constitutes the basis of the tests and applications of quantum mechanics.xxxiv

In other words Stapp now wants to say that there is an independent realm of physicality which operates

with Process-1 type events upon itself, as well as another ‘physical’ realm which interacts with the

mental realm for its Process-1 (‘collapse-of-the-wavefunction or ‘reduction’) events.

However, there is no reason to ditch the view that the ultimate source of both realms of physicality,

that which appears to be self-sufficient and that which appears to interact with mind, as being nondual

Mindnature, which we envisage as an infinite nondual energetic pool of potentiality which has an internal

quality of awareness. It is quite appropriate to conceive of both aspects of the dualistic world, mind and

apparent matter as arising from this deeper level. In fact this is exactly the necessary conclusion from an

in-depth investigation of Zurek’s quantum epionticity proposal, which underlies his notion of ‘quantum

Darwinism’. Stapp and Zurek’s accounts support each other quite happily and Stapp’s self-sufficient

realm of physicality is, as in Zurek’s decoherence account, ‘congealed’ Mindnature. So both Stapp and

Zurek’s viewpoints also map seamlessly onto the Mind-Only nondual Mindnature metaphysics.

Towards the end of his Personality Survival paper Stapp clearly acknow-ledges that the ultimate

source of the physical and mental realms must be mind-like:

When one gets involved with these metaphysical issues that seem to go far beyond the

verifiable practical applications of our scientific theories, we are confronted with the question

of what determined the form of the laws that seem now to prevail. A naturalistic solution,

suggested by the process of natural selection that has brought into being the presently existing

life forms, is that the physical laws of nature themselves were honed into their present forms

by some analogous process of selection. If we can push back to a time when only one or the

other aspect prevailed, then it is certainly much easier to imagine a basically mental world

creating for itself a physical substructure to attend to the minor details, than to imagine a purely

physical world creating a mental superstructure. For we ourselves, in our mental theorizing,

can readily dream up mathematical laws, but no one has yet been able to explain how

consciousness could emerge from mindless matter.xxxv

So here we have Stapp again suggesting a metaphysical view which is entirely consistent with the

Buddhist Mind-Only/Mindnature perspective - an infinitely creative field of Mind-like potentiality

which has some kind of internal mechanism which, through a quantum evolutionary process opera-ting

on all levels, produces the manifested worlds of apparent physicality and mentality. Such a process, of

course, would encompass Zurek’s quantum Darwinism with its ‘epiontic’ adage that ‘states that persist

become the fittest to persist’

It is worth noting the fact that Stapp’s ‘Nondual Mindnature Dualism’ and Zurek’s ‘epiontic’

metaphysical perspective are quite compatible. This is significant because in many cases debates are

carried on as if there must just be one final way of describing the metaphysical structure and processes

of reality. Quantum physicists and philosophers seem to be after the final metaphysical solution which

excludes all others. But as Hawking and Mlodinow have argued in the recent work The Grand Design

wherein they propose what they call ‘Model Dependent Realism’, it is more likely that there will several

overlapping and interlocking ways of viewing and analyzing the situation. Buddhist metaphysics has

always been happy with this approach.

In Zurek’s perspective the quantum realm is said to be a kind of ‘dream-stuff’ which is ‘epiontic’.

Quantum states constitute the ‘information’ pool which is interpreted ontologically by observers as

constituting the external world of apparent materiality. But these states have been generated through the

epistemological activities of those very observers acting within the ‘dream stuff is made of.’ This is

indicated by Wheeler when he speaks of the universe which is produced by “notes struck out on a piano

by the observer participants of all times and all places.”xxxvi And when there are no manifested sentient

beings around to epiontically perceive, and in so doing create and maintain the universe, the epiontic

process must be going on at a deep ‘unconscious’ level of the process of reality. This corresponds to

Stapp suggestion that:

…a natural resolution of the problem of biocentrism leads to a relaxing of the notion that all

reduction events must be psycho-physical events possessing both mental and physical

components. That natural resolution of the biocentrism problem is to allow, in addition to the

psycho-physical reduction events that dynamically connect our human thoughts to the

physically described world around us, reduction events that involve only physical

properties.xxxvii

This suggestion that at a certain level of the process reality only ‘physical’ properties are required for

the functioning of the apparently ‘material’ realm corresponds to Zurek’s observation that:

…whilst the ultimate evidence for the choice of one alternative resides in our elusive

“consciousness,” there is every indication that the choice occurs much before consciousness

ever gets involved and that, once made, the choice is irrevocable.xxxviii

Roughly speaking from Zurek’s viewpoint decoherence is responsible for the apparently independent

functioning of the ‘physical’ realm. Although we know that ultimately the process of reality derives

from the epiontic functioning of mind-like ‘dream stuff’, once the process gets under way the external

world appears to function independently.

But this does not alter the fact that ultimate evidence is ultimate. Ultimately the entire process derives

from a nondual realm of Mindnature. Superficially the views of Stapp and Zurek may seem very

different, but in the overall metaphysical demeanor they amount to the same thing. A fundamental

nondual ground of vast energetic-potentiality which has an innate quality of awareness and an internal

function of creative cognizance gives rise through its own internal epiontic process to the apparent

world of duality within which sentient beings have their temporary beings. So ultimately the universe

is bio-centric.

In Stapp’s account the ‘epiontic’ process is driven by ‘laws of clinging’, a notion which he derives

from the nineteenth century psychologist William James who:

…drew attention to “the fantastic laws of clinging that allow a stream of conscious thoughts,

with its ever-changing intermingling of related ideas, to hang together like a persisting entity.

If there were purely mentalistic laws of clinging, then in our normal streams of consciousness

these mentalistic laws could be acting in coordination with the physical laws of clinging, to

produce the coordinated streams of consciousness that we experience.xxxix

And, furthermore, Stapp suggests that such ‘mental laws of clinging’ must be a primary aspect of the

process of reality, underlying both physical and mental manifestations of the dualistic world.

Furthermore the only ultimate coherent view of the emergence of dualistic mind and the appearance of

the apparently physical world requires a deeper level of nondual Mindnature:

This line of thought suggests that the mental laws of clinging could be the more basic, and that

they could create the physical aspects to assist in whatever creative endeavor is afoot. xl

Such a view quite clearly accords with Zurek’s ‘epiontic’ viewpoint, and other related quantum

models of the process of reality such as Bohm’s ‘implicate’ holomovement perspective and Rupert

Sheldrake’s ‘formative causation’ paradigm in which persistent structures of ‘clinging’ are quan-tum

‘morphogenetic fields’. The epiontic states that are ‘fittest’ are those ‘which persist’, and vice versa,

because ‘mental laws of clinging’, operating within the quantum ‘dream stuff’ of fundamental

Mindnature, are the origin of the persistence. Thus we see that the apparent stability of the gross

physical world and the temporarily persistent structures of organic forms and mentality embodied

within sentient beings, which are formed and maintained by what Sheldrake calls ‘morphogenetic

fields’, arise and persist precisely because of a fundamental ‘clinging’ aspect within the operation of

fundamental Mindnature.

With this insight into the central importance of ‘mental clinging’ Stapp, following James,

rediscovers a key metaphysical insight that the Buddha had discovered and elucidated in a precise and

detailed manner two and a half thousand years ago. The Buddha’s presentation of the ‘epiontic’ process

of reality, is embodied in his doctrine of the chain of dependent origination (Sanskrit:

pratītyasamutpāda; Pali: paticcasamuppāda). In the Lokayatika Sutta the Buddha indicates that the

metaphysical nature of reality is a matter of mind-like potentiality being triggered into manifestation

through the ‘epiontic’ cycle of dependent origination which is driven by clinging and craving:

From ignorance as a requisite condition come fabrications. From fabrications as a requisite

condition comes consciousness. From consciousness as a requisite condition comes name-

&-form. From name-&-form as a requisite condition come the six sense media. From the six

sense media as a requisite condition comes contact. From contact as a requisite condition

comes feeling. From feeling as a requisite condition comes craving. From craving as a

requisite condition comes clinging-sustenance. From clinging-sustenance as a requisite

condition comes becoming. From beco-ming as a requisite condition comes birth. From birth

as a requisite condition, then aging & death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, & despair

come into play. Such is the origination of this entire mass of stress & suffering.xli

The canonical Buddhist presentation of these twelve links spreads them over three lifetimes because

this account describes how a developing structure of energetic-consciousness continuously takes

rebirth in the material realm because of a deep-seated clinging (upadana – which literally means the

‘taking up of what is offered’) to existence in the material realm.

The central Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination is an account of the way that a ‘clinging’

structured continuum of energetic awareness-cons-ciousness, involving gross to subtle levels – some

of which may be aband-oned at death, cycles through samsara – the cycle of suffering embodiment –

precisely because of the deep seated ‘attachment’ and ‘craving’ for embodiment on the part of

unenlightened sentient beings.

At death enlightened beings, who have relinquished the deep seated ‘clinging’ for embodiment,

blissfully dissolve into the nondual ground. When unenlightened beings die, however, they give rise

to a subtle ‘rebirth consciousness’ which carries karmic potentialities into a future rebirth and actively

seeks to re-embody itself. This rebirth consciousness is like a ‘clinging’ quantum morphogenetic field

carrying ‘seeds’ of potentiality derived from past actions. From the point of view of ordinary everyday

consciousness the rebirth-consciousness is ‘unconscious’ and for most people their previous lives

remain unconscious because the upper levels of gross consciousness do not have access to the rebirth

level of awareness, the ground-consciousness (alayavijnana).

The perspective outlined above can be viewed in the light of Stapp’s conclusion that:

If the reduction events need not always be dual in character, but can sometimes be purely

mental or purely physical, and if events of each pure kind can, under appropriate conditions,

cling together by virtue of their own dynamical laws, then it would seemingly become possible

for the mental and physical aspects of a living person to go their separate ways upon the death

of the physical body. For that fatal event would cause the disintegration of the physical

properties that normally allow the brain events to hang together with the mental ones. Because

the psycho-physical events associated with bio-systems are designed to receive mental inputs

that are properly mated to the physical event selected at this psycho-physical event, a

disembodied personality could perhaps latch onto a bio-system and thereby affect the physical

world. This would produce effects greatly at odds with what classical physics would allow.

For it would allow some aspect of personality associated with a deceased person to affect,

without any physical means of conveyance, the subsequent behavior of a living person. That

would contravene the precepts of classical physics. But if societies of mental events could

indeed persist without physical aspects, then such effects would not seem to require any basic

change of the known laws of quantum physics.xlii

Here, of course, Stapp is indicating the possibility of disembodied quantum ‘spirits’ (which hardly seems

‘conservative’!). However, it would also be entirely reasonable to consider that the ‘clinging’ structure

of mentality underlying this process, which according to Buddhism is not a fixed ‘soul’ but a developing

psychic structure, would not dissipate but, as Buddhist metaphysics asserts, seek further re-embodiment,

reincarnation, or rebirth. As we shall see later this is the most coherent explanation of the extraordinary

evidence presented in the work of the reincarnation investigator Dr. Ian Stevenson.

The Twelve Links of Dependent Origination (Paticcasamuppada) are expounded in the Sammaditthi

Sutta: The Discourse on Right Viewxliii and the Paticca-samuppada-vibhamga Sutta: Analysis of

Dependent Co-arisingxliv. I have taken additional information from Maurice Walshe’s Thus I have

Heard and the excellent Buddhism for Dummies by Jonathan Landaw and Stephen Bodian. The most

natural, and generally accepted, way of understanding the operation of these links is as spanning three

lifetimes, 1-2 relate to a previous life, 2-10 the present life (number 2 actually crosses between the

previous and current life because it is the rebirth consciousness that carries the karmic (Pali: kammic)

formations from one to the other), links 11-12 refer to the next life.

The twelve links are:

1. Ignorance (avijja): Ignorance is basically about the way that reality functions and what it amounts

to. And the fundamental ignorance is ignor-ance of the fact that the entire process of dualistic ‘reality’

is a dream-like illusion driven by ‘craving’ for existence. And this craving gives rise to dukkha, which

is suffering and dissatisfaction. The pervasiveness of dukkha in the dualistic world is the first of the

Four Noble Truths or Realities: (i) the pervasive existence of dukkha; (ii) the origin of dukkha which

lies in the existence of ‘craving’; (iii) the possibility of the cessation of dukkha; (iv) the path to achieving

cessation of dukkha by becoming enlightened. These ‘truths’ or ‘realities’ are called ‘noble’ truths

(realities) because they are only directly seen by ‘noble’ beings, i.e. enlightened beings.

Craving itself is actually a crucial element of the twelvefold chain of interdependent origination.

This means that the twelvefold chain itself is part and parcel of the second noble truth, because it is a

detailed and graphic depiction of the arising of dukkha, which is the first noble truth. Also it is clear

that part of the reason for the arising of dukkha, or suffering and dissatisfaction, is ignorance of anatta

(absence of fixed and inherent personal self and lack of substantiality in phenomena) and its co-

component anicca (the impermanence of all phenomena). Thus basically the ignorance indicated

concerns the fundamental and essential nature of reality and its functioning. On the Wheel of Life

image (see figure 1) this is illustrated by a hobbling blind man (top and slightly to the right of image –

the rest of the twelve links go clockwise around the ‘wheel’.

2. Kammic Formations (sankhara): Because of ignorance, sentient beings perform intentional actions

which have karmic (Pali-kammic) consequences, leaving traces upon the mind stream of the sentient

being performing the acts, of body, speech and mind. The image on the wheel of life is of a potter

fashioning a pot. The idea is that kammic actions fashion future poten-tialities.

3. Consciousness (vinnana) Karmic (kammic) actions condition the nature of the consciousness which

is projected into a future life. The image is of a monkey scampering down a tree, this represents the

consciousness, with kammic traces, leaving one life in preparation for the next. This rebirth

consciousness, which is a subtle consciousness carrying karmic traces will determine the nature of the

next link.

4. Name and Form / Mentality and Materiality (nama-rupa): The image is that of two travelers in a

boat, one of the travelers is form (rupa), which is the body; the other is ‘name’ or ‘mentality’ (nama).

Thus the body and mind, the psychophysical embodiment that one has in any lifetime depends on

previous lifetimes.

5. Six sense media / bases / gates (sal-ayatana) Represented by an empty house with six windows; the

six gates (ear, eye, nose, tongue, touch, and mental sense) are the bases for experience, although there

is no one inside, there is no fixed and permanent ‘self’ (anatta).

6. Contact (phassa): This link is represented by a man and woman embracing and kissing and …, but

in actuality this link is the coming together of senses and sense objects which then leads to the next link.

7. Feeling (vedana). Represented by a man with an arrow in his eye; feelings may be pleasant,

unpleasant or neutral.

8. Craving (tanha) Represented by someone drinking alcohol. Pleasant experiences produce a craving

for more of them. Unpleasant experiences produce cravings to be rid of them.

9. Clinging / grasping (upadana): Represented by a monkey snatching a fruit; this is a deep, instinctual

grasping at existence which is conditioned by endless lifetimes of habitual grasping. This grasping

becomes instinctually desperate at the time of death and conditions the leap into a future life.

Figure 1 – Wheel of Life

10. Becoming (bhava): Represented by a pregnant woman; here is the beginning of the next lifetime.

11. Birth (jati): A woman giving birth.

12. Aging and Death (jara-maranam): Represented by someone carrying a corpse. From the moment

we are born we are on the way to dying again!

This sequential description of the samsaric cycle of suffering (dukkha) is actually the detailed account

of the generation of the first ‘noble truth’ or reality of dukkha. The twelvefold cycle of links is clearly

driven at its core by ‘craving’ (tanha) and ‘grasping’ (upadana); which are the two crucial factors of

embodiment which are etched deeply and unconsciously into the psycho-physicality of embodiment.

A crucial feature of dependent origination is the ‘epiontic’ and ‘quantum Darwinian’ nature of the

process. As the Buddha said at the beginning of the Dhammapada “All phenomena are preceded by

mind”, indicating that all intentions leading to actions have effects at all levels of reality.

According to the Yogachara perspective it is the amplificatory mechan-ism of the universal karmic

cause and effect process within the fundamental epiontic dream-stuff of reality that creates the

appearances of the dualistic world. In this characterisation of the quantum process the appearance of

the ‘classical’ world of experience and materiality is generated through a continuous web of rapidly

repeated perceptions on the part of countless numbers of sentient beings over vast timescales.

The Buddhist philosopher William Waldron describes this fundamental aspect of the Yogachara

account of the functioning of reality as being driven by ‘self-grasping’ which is the deep instinctual

habit within all sentient beings to crave individuated experience. Waldron describes this as a ling-

uistically recursive process; however the ‘linguistic’ levels operative within the Yogachara account of

the process of reality operate deep within the psychophysical structure of embodiment, directly

structuring and deter-mining the potentialities for manifestation of future experience at deep

psychophysical levels:

…this linguistic recursivity, which colours so much of our perceptual experience, including

our innate forms of self-grasping, now operates unconsciously … and … these processes are

karmically productive at a collective level as well as indivi-dual level – that is they create a

common ‘world’.xlv

This constitutes an unconscious ‘intersubjective feedback system’ and therefore:

…it is the unconscious habits of body speech and mind to which we are habituated that give

rise, in the long term and in the aggregate, to the habitats we inhabit, the ‘common receptacle

world’ we experience all around us.xlvi

Although this formulation attributes the creation of the ‘common receptacle world’ to the unconscious

habits that ‘we’ have become habituated to (over countless lifetimes) it is important to understand that

this is also an inter-subjective process that begins at a deep non-individuated quantum level of the

universal process of manifestation into the dualistic experiential world. The universal process of the

unfolding of the ‘empty’ potentialities within the ground of reality arises because the function of

‘epiontic’ cognition, which unfolds the potentialities. Sentient beings are necessary agents of the

universal process of manifestation of experiential realms of duality and they therefore become

entrapped within the samsaric cyclic process of reality.

Thus we see that the ‘epiontic’ process of the ‘grasping’ for existence embodied within the links of

dependent origination as explained by Buddhist doctrine operate at all levels of the process of reality.

This process is driven by what Rupert Sheldrake refers to as quantum ‘virtual’ morphogenetic field

modules within ‘implicate’ quantum levels. Sheldrake describes the process of embryonic development

as follows:

The development of multicellular organisms takes place through a series of stages controlled

by a succession of morphogenetic fields. At first the embryonic tissues develop under the

control of primary embryonic fields. Then … different regions come under the influence of

secondary fields, in animals those of limbs, eyes, ears etc. … Generally speaking, the

morphogenesis brought about by the primary fields is not spectacular, because it establishes

the charac-teristic differences between cells in different regions that enable them to act as the

morphogenetic germs of the organ fields. Then in the tissues developing under their influence,

germs of subsidiary fields, fields which control the morphogenesis of structures within the

organ as a whole…xlvii

Figure 2

Furthermore:

…morphogenetic fields are not precisely defined but are prob-ability structures that depend

on the statistical distribution of previous similar forms. The probability distributions of

electronic orbitals described by solutions of the Schrödinger [quantum] equation are

examples of such probability structures, and are similar in kind to the probability structures

of the morphogenetic fields of morphogenetic units at higher levels.xlviii

Morphogenetic fields, then, are exactly the kind of quantum probability fields which would be created

or built up by the kind of processes involved in the quantum epiontic perspective. At the quantum level

atomic structures have been built up into the probabilistic fields of potentiality which under-lies the

material and organic levels of reality through the ‘epiontic’ process of reality over vast time scales.

Although the ‘external’ material world may appear to all intents and purposes to be independently

‘solid’ and immutable, the evidence that quantum probabilistic processes underlie the organic processes

of evolution, inheritance and morphogenesis is now clearly emerging. But, as was the case with the

evidence for neuroplasticity, the notion that these fundamental biological processes are fundamentally

quantum in nature is being resisted by academics with reputations staked on ‘classical’ perspectives.

“Ultra fast … functional quantum effects” have now been incontrovertibly demon-strated in one of the

most significant processes for the development and maintenance of life: photosynthesis. And there is

increasing evidence for a fundamental quantum component involving “room temperature quantum

coherence” in “bird navigation, the sense of smell, long-range quantum tunneling in proteins, biological

photoreceptors, and the flow of ions across a cell membrane.”xlix

The following comment upon recent evidence appears in a recent MIT Technology Review:

One of the biggest questions in biology is whether the processes of life are able to exploit

quantum effects to improve their lot. … we’re all made of quantum objects called atoms and

glued together by quantum forces. If you look closely enough at any biological process, you'll

see quantum mechanics at work. The question is whether nature exploits quantum mechanics

to achieve things that are not possible in the ordinary, classical world. There is a growing

debate on this topic. On the one hand, evidence has begun to mount that quantum mechanics

may play a role in processes such as photosynthesis, bird navigation and the sense of smell.l

Of course there will be critics of this emerging paradigm, there are many established and well-paid

academics, not to mention committed ultra-materialist Darwinian pundits, whose careers are based on

mistaken world-views. However it does not take an awful lot of thought to figure out that, if

photosynthesis exploits quantum techniques, the notion that other funda-mental processes taking place

at the molecular level such as the DNA replication, which must be quantum in nature, would not be

fundamentally quantum is absurd. Research is currently being conducted into quantum effects in the

functioning of DNA and it looks as if quantum entanglement and tunneling are involved.li

However, in the same way that the notion of neuroplasticity, a phenomenon which itself must have

a quantum basis, was erroneously thought by the academic establishment of the time to be impossible,

there currently still seems to be an ingrained feeling amongst biologists that fundamental life processes

must be classical. Why, well for one thing Dawkins, for example, does not understand quantum theory.

Because of this ‘classical’ bias the entire manner of posing the question is flawed.

Consider the assertion in the above quote that: “one of the biggest questions in biology is whether

the processes of life are able to exploit quantum effects to improve their lot.” The implication here is

that classical processes came first in evolution and only once ‘the processes of life’ had got themselves

under way using inefficient ‘classical’ methods did they look into the possibility of ‘exploiting’ more

efficient quantum effects that they had overlooked in their struggle for survival. If the universe is

fundament-ally quantum, and the processes of life derive from quantum fluctuations within the ground

quantum field at the beginning of time, the notion that classical processes came first is nothing other

than incompetent absurdity.

The close connection between Sheldrake’s quantum-based ‘formative causation’ hypothesis and the

quantum epiontic perspective resides in the fact that it is the quantum process of repeated perception or

activation at the quantum level that builds up the probability structures at quantum ‘implicate’ levels.

It is this internal quantum process, therefore, that creates morphogenetic fields. In other words

morphogenetic fields can be consi-dered to be classical level expressions of the deep operations of the

‘epio-ntic’ quantum level of awareness-consciousness. Such fields can clearly be associated with the

Buddhist notions of karmic (kammic) ‘formations’ and rebirth consciousness.

The manifestation of the dualistic realm of experience takes place through a hierarchy of quantum

epiontic levels, beginning with the merest spontaneous movement of the ground consciousness towards

the activity of perception. This movement of universal intentionality, which is a naturally innate

function of universal ‘empty’ consciousness, has the effect of activating, and thereby strengthening the

latencies of the potentialities within the ground of reality. Once the process has began the quantum

process of manifestation cascades through increasingly more complex levels of manifestation.

Sheldrake says that his hypothesis of ‘formative causation’, which has a great deal of commonality

with the Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination, does not explain the genesis of the cascade of his

manifestation of the evolutionary process; it only describes the mechanisms involved once the process

gets going:

The action of the morphogenetic field of a morphogenetic unit on the morphogenetic fields

of its parts, which are morpho-genetic units at lower levels, can be thought of in terms of

the influence of this higher level probability structure on lower level probability structures;

the higher-level field modifies the probability structures of the lower-level fields.lii

The necessary conclusion from the quantum epiontic perspective, however, is that the quantum realm

contains within it an innate perceptual ‘epiontic’ tendency to unravel quantum potentialities into the

dualistic experiential world through the process of quantum epiontic dependent origination which

operates at all levels of reality.

This fundamental epiontic aspect of the process of reality underlies the grasping (upadana – 9th link

of dependent origination) for becoming into existence (bhava – 10th link) which eventually leads to the

quantum morpho-genetic fields which are the kammic (karmic) formations (sankharas 2nd link)

underlying rebirth consciousness (vinnana 3rd link). As Nyanaponika Thera eloquently describes the

situation:

The desire for conscious awareness has the same character as that for sense impressions: the

craving to be alive, to feel alive in the constant encounter with the world of objects present to

conscious-ness (or present within consciousness - as the idealists prefer to say). But there is

still more meaning than that to be derived from the description of consciousness as a nutriment

if we consider that it is explained primarily as rebirth consciousness. This rebirth

consciousness, which is a single moment’s occurrence, feeds (or conditions) the mind-body

process (nama-rupa) of the present existence; and it is the arising of such moments of rebirth

cons-ciousness at the beginning of each successive life that continues the interminable chain

of future births, deaths and sufferings, Growth or proliferation is a characteristic feature of all

consciousness. Each rebirth consciousness, though its direct link is with the life imme-diately

preceding it, has behind it the inexhaustible store-house of the beginningless past, a vast

granary of potential seeds of life. Fed from the dark unfathomable recesses of the past…liii

The Buddha clearly indicated the movement of rebirth consciousness from one life into a mother’s

womb of the next life. The following is from the Mahanidana Sutta, which is an exposition of the links

of dependent arising:

From consciousness as a requisite condition comes name-and-form. Thus it has been said. And

this is the way to understand how from consciousness as a requisite condition comes name-

and-form. If consciousness were not to descend into the mother’s womb, would name-and-

form take shape in the womb?liv

This clearly indicates that the links of dependent origination function across lifetimes and that a rebirth-

consciousness actively seeks a womb. Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche explained this as follows:

The embodiment that we now experience is a physical one, which is nevertheless mental in

origin; it arises from the mind. Its origin, ultimately speaking, is the mind. When we go to

sleep and dream we experience the dream state, which is a different kind of embodiment. The

mind does not experience through the physical body at that point, but it experiences a purely

mental body, which is another kind of embodiment based upon habitual tendencies in the mind.

These tendencies can be subtle ones of dualistic clinging and obvious ones based on our

experiences during this life, which form patterns that arise in the dream state. Furthermore, in

the future, when each and every one of us dies, the physical body disintegrates and the mind

goes on to experience another state of being. This is a disembodied state, in that there is no

physical basis for the cons-ciousness. Nevertheless, there is a sense of embodiment in the mind

which we term the mental body. In that situation there is still an impression of “I”. I exist. And

so the three states-the physical body which is the maturation of karmic tendencies, the dream

body of habitual tendencies, and the mental body of the after-death state-constitute different

elements of rebirth, which follow one after the other in a continual procession.lv

In his brilliant exposition of the fundamental teachings of the Buddha, The Only Way to Deliverance,

R. L. Soni writes that:

Personality can be symbolized by a wave on water. Although born of the residual momentum

transmitted by the preceding wave, it is still a new phenomenon, so far as its material content

are concerned. As such, while the person is a kammic continuity from the past, he is a new

entity so far as the physical elements are concerned. However, none of the psychic elements

are transmitted only the resultant force passes over to produce a new life. It is no wonder,

therefore, that the Buddha, in the Majjhima-Nikaya 38, admonished a monk holding the view

that Vinnana continues as is and not as a mere “relinking factor.” A look at Diagram II shows

each wave with its start, its flow and its ebb. This, in relation to the person, symbolizes rebirth

existence, and death. Rebirth follows death, so long as there is some residual force as a seed to

manifest anew. Usually there is no lack of such seeds to carry forward the process of

existence.lvi

Figure 3 - SONI’S DIAGRAM II

Although we talk of a rebirth-consciousness this must not be thought of as a fixed entity but, rather,

a set of tendencies and potentialities. Such a view is entirely consistent with the quantum epiontic

perspective, all intentionality, both unconscious and conscious, leaves amplificatory traces operating

within the epiontic quantum level.

Figure 4 – SONI’S DIAGRAM VII

Figure 4 shows another of Soni’s diagrams which shows how the links of dependent origination

interpenetrate so that, although the 12 links are spread across 3-lifetimes in order to relate them to the

fact of rebirth, this does not mean that the links not mentioned in any one lifetime are not operative. In

the diagram I have added labels around the side to make it easier to comprehend. Links in capitals are

those mentioned in the standard 3-lifetimes formula, those in lower case are the links that Soni considers

must be implicitly operative although not explicitly mentioned within the ‘middle’ or current lifetime.

Soni writes in this context that:

The encircled Arabic numerals in Diagram VII represent the links …with respect to the past,

present, and future. The non-encircled numerals represent the links, which, though not

enumerated, are potentially present. Thus, in the present, the very presence of tanha (link

number eight) means the operation of avijja and the mental dispositions flowing from it (links

number one and two). Similarly in the past, the presence of links one and two meant the

operation of tanha, upadana, and bhava (links eight, nine, and ten). In this way, rebirth was

enabled in the present. As regards the future, the process must repeat itself. With rebirth

indicated, links three, four, five, six, and seven arise. Links eleven and twelve, namely jati and

jara-marana, exist in the future, the past, and as well in the present. As such, the conclusion is

obvious: five causes in the past gave rise to five effects in the present; and, five causes in the

present give rise to five effects in the future. A look at Diagram VII will clarify this point. Of

course, past means repeated rebirths retrospectively going into the infinite past, and future

means repeated rebirths going forth into the infinite future. Each existence is a process of jati-

jara-marana. This ever recurring phenomenon of rebirth-decay-death evidently implies

suffering.lvii

The next diagram that Soni offers us illustrates the manner in which all the links operate in every

lifetime but are explicitly spread over three lifetimes. This is shown, with additional labels for easy

comprehension, in figure 5. Soni writes about this diagram:

Each life, in the past, present, and future, is an entity complete in itself, according to the

operation of the Causal Chain. This is illustrated in diagram VIII. In each existence the

resultant-complex (uppatti-bhava or U.B.) is used as a base for the cultivation of a fresh causal

complex (kamma-bhava or K.B.) for results in the future. It is clearly shown that each life

begins with link eleven, jati or rebirth, and ends with link twelve, jati-marana or decay-death.

It will also be noted that the “past” ends with “death” and the “present” begins with “rebirth”;

the “present” also ends with “death” and the “future” begins with “rebirth.” Moreover, the

diagram significantly puts links one and two (avijja and sankhara) at the junction of uppati-

bhava and kamma-bhava in each existence; otherwise, tanha will fail to be actualized without

the presence of these two. If tanha is not activated, further processing in the Causal Chain will

cease. Tanha, certainly, is a link of special import. It not only maintains the integrity and

continuity of the Chain of Existence in the infinite past but also is responsible for sustaining

Paticcasamuppada in the present in order to make it continue in the future indefinitely.lviii

Figure 5 – SONI’S DIAGRAM VIII

Here Soni indicates the ‘weak point’ in the chain which binds us to samsara, the link between ‘feeling’

(vedana – pleasant, unpleasant or neutral) and ‘craving’ (tanha). In large measure the Buddha’s path is

designed to unlink this link through the cultivation of medititive dispassion.

This all-embracing psycho-metaphyscal analysis of the deep epiontic functioning of reality on all

levels conforms precisely with the findings of modern quantum theory and the quantum ‘formative

causation’ theory of evolution and morphogenises proposed by Rupert Sheldrake.

At the beginning of his inspiring book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying the Tibetan Buddhist

teacher Sogyal Rinpoche gives an account of two deaths that he witnessed when he was a young monk.

The first was of a monk called Samten who was not a fully realized practitioner, in other words someone

whose meditation abilities were not sufficient to allow him to move the focus of awareness to levels of

deep consciousness where the death process can be controlled. Samten was guided through the death

process by his master, Jamyang Khyentse:

As Jamyang Khyentse guided Samten calmly through his dying, he introduced him to all the

stages of the process he was going through, one by one. I was astonished by the precision of

my master’s knowledge, and by his confidence and peace. When my master was there, his

peaceful confidence would reassure even the most anxious person Now Jamyang Khyentse

was revealing to us his fearlessness of death. Not that he ever treated death lightly. He often

told us that he was afraid of it, and warned us against taking it naively or complacently. Yet

what was it that allowed my master to face death in a way that was at once so sober and so

lighthearted, so practical yet so mysteriously carefree? That question fascinated and absorbed

me. Samten’s death shook me. At the age of seven, I had my first glimpse of the vast power of

the tradition I was being made part of, and I began to understand the purpose of spiritual

practice. Practice had given Samten an acceptance of death, as well as a clear understanding

that suffering and pain can be part of a deep, natural process of purification. Practice had given

my master a complete knowledge of what death is, and a precise technology for guiding

individuals through it.lix

The second death recounted by Sogyal Rinpoche was that of a realized master:

Lama Tseten died in an extraordinary way. Although there was a monastery close by, he

refused to go there, saying he did not want to leave a corpse for them to clear up. … he just

gazed up into the sky and passed away … I was amazed that anyone who was staring into the

face of death could have that kind of confidence. … Khandro did go to fetch Jamyang

Khyentse. I shall never forget how he stooped to enter the tent. He gave one look at Lama

Tseten’s face, and then, peering into his eyes, began to chuckle. He always used to call him

“La Gen,” “old Lama”; it was a sign of his affection. “La Gen,” he said, “don’t stay in that

state!” He could see, I now understand, that Lama Tseten was doing one particular practice of

meditation in which the practitioner merges the nature of his mind with the space of truth and

can remain in that state for many days as he dies. “La Gen we are travelers. We’re pilgrims.

We don’t have the time to wait that long. Come on. I’ll guide you.” Transfixed, I watched what

happened next and if I hadn’t seen it myself I would never have believed it. Lama Tseten came

back to life. Then my master sat by his side and took him through the phowa, the practice for

guiding the consciousness at the moment before death. There are many ways of doing this

practice, and the one he used then culminated with the master uttering the syllable “A” three

times. As my master declared the first “A” we could hear Lama Tseten accompanying him

quite audibly. The second time his voice was less distinct, and the third time it was silent he

had gone.lx

This is an example of the extraordinary power of controlling the death pro-cess attained by very

advanced practitioners of meditation who constantly practice moving their minds onto the level of the

ground substrate-consciousness. And this “precise technology” of guiding oneself or others through the

death process is entirely consistent with Stapp’s account of quantum mentality and the survival of some

aspects of mentality through death.

The authors of IM, the work that prompted Stapp’s paper on after death survival, mention the

extraordinary investigations into evidence of reincarnation by Dr. Ian Stevenson with appreciation. Dr.

Ian Stevenson, who was a Canadian biochemist and professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia,

investigated many reports of young children who spontaneously recalled the details of a past life. He

conducted more than 2,500 case studies over a period of 40 years and published twelve books, including

Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.

Stevenson undertook reincarnation research throughout the world, including North and South

America, Europe, Africa and Asia. When Stevenson retired in 2002 psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker took over

his work and wrote Life Before Life.

Because he was aware of the controversial nature of the subject Stevenson was investigating he

deliberately made sure his research was meticulous and thorough, always seeking for the most watertight

cases and subjecting his own results to rigorous investigation. It is worth noting that Stevenson never

claimed that he had proved the existence of reincarnation, he remained cautious in his language and

referred to his cases as being “of the reincarnation type” or “suggestive of reincarnation”,lxi and he came

to the conclusion that “reincarnation is the best, even though not the only, explanation for the stronger

cases we have investigated”lxii.

Tom Shroder, a seasoned and award winning journalist and writer, accompanied Stevenson on field

trips to Lebanon and India and wrote the book Old Souls about his experiences during the research

trips. This book is very significant because Schroder starts out pretty much a skeptic, although he is

also aware of the massive prejudice against the notion of reincarnation which leads to shoddy and

inappropriate treatment of the evidence. Shroder describes his attitude when about to embark on the

first trip:

Could any presumption against reincarnation be so great, I wond-ered, that it wasn't even worth

the effort for a skeptic, someone independent of Stevenson's funding, someone thoroughly

sane, to check the evidence out for himself? I had no idea how Stevenson's cases would hold

up under close scrutiny. But given what was at stake - nothing less than possible concrete

evidence of life after death - weren't they at least worth a visit?lxiii

Old Souls is an excellent book to read on this subject because of the way in which Shroder’s amazement

at the evidence, and his attempt to come up with alternative explanations to that of reincarnation, comes

across.

Stevenson’s research shows that childhood memories which appear to suggest reincarnation

generally occur between the ages of three and seven years and then begin to fade. His basic methodology

was to make meticulous notes of the details of the child’s putative memories of the former life and then

to compare these to the details of the actual life of the deceased person that the child claimed to be the

reincarnation of. Usually this could only be done by getting detailed reports of people who intimately

knew the deceased person, but in a few cases Stevenson was able to track down documentary evidence.

Stevenson’s preferred to interview the child in question before any contact between the child and the

deceased’s family had occurred as this cut out the possibility of contamination through commu-nication

between the two ‘lives’. Stevenson found that in the majority of cases that he investigated the persons

of the previous life had met some sort of violent or untimely death. Further spectacular evidence

involved birthmarks corresponding to wounds and injuries suffered during the violent or accidental

death.

A fairly typical case, written about by Shroder, involved a boy called Daniel Jurdi in Beirut who

spoke of a previous life as a 25 year old mechanic called Rashid Khaddege who was thrown to his death

from a speeding car on a beach road. This case involved a definite physical resemblance between the

two ‘lives’ (figure 6). According to multiple witnesses, Daniel Jurdi provided the name of the driver,

the exact location of the crash, the names of the mechanic’s sisters and parents and cousins, and the

people he went hunting with — all of which turned out to match the life of a man, Rashid Khaddege,

who had died several years before the Daniel was born.lxiv

When Daniel and his mother were driving in Beirut, they passed the place on the sea called Military

Beach. Here Daniel shut his eyes, hiding them with his hands, and started crying. He then screamed,

“This is where I died.” And this spot at Military Beach turned out to be where Rashid Khaddege had

died. Daniel also related that in his prior lifetime, he was mechanic. Regarding the accident, Daniel said

that the driver, Ibrahim, was speeding and lost control of the car. Daniel said “I flew out of the car and

landed on my head.” When help came to assist the injured, Daniel said that he heard someone say,

“Leave this one, he’s dead.” Eventually, Daniel’s father sent an acquaintance to Kfarmatta, to inquire

about someone fitting Daniel’s description of a mechanic who died in an auto accident at Military

Beach. The Khaddeges heard about the story and visited Daniel.

Figure 6

In this case Stevenson, with Shroder in tow, tracked down a newspaper report of the crash, which

was not an easy task. Shroder writes of this event in Old Souls:

I hadn’t expected the impact. There, on the screen, in the obscure interior of a newspaper

published eighteen months before Daniel Jurdi was born, three years before he would tell of

dying in an auto accident, was an account of a routine fatality that matched the child's story

almost exactly: Military Beach, high speed, Ibrahim driving a Fiat, Rashid thrown from the

car. lxv

Further remarkable details emerged when Rashid’s family related their story of how they turned up

announced to see Daniel and his family; Daniel immediately recognized Rashid’s sister Najla and called

her by name, although he had never met her and should have known nothing about her:

A few years later the family heard from an acquaintance that Rashid had been reborn at the

Jurdis’ house in Beirut. This was around 1972. Muna went with Najla and a friend to meet the

boy. “Daniel did not recognize me, probably because I had changed so much,” Muna said. But

he saw Najla and he called her by name. “In what way had you changed?” I asked. … She

leaned toward me. “Before Rashid died, she was not so religious,” Majd expl-ained. “She says

she dressed like I do - pants, blouses, high heels. But after his death, she began to wear the

head scarf and the long dresses. She thinks Daniel wasn’t expecting to see a religious woman.”

“Did the Jurdis know you were coming?” I asked. “No, we came without an appointment. We

didn’t know the family. We just showed up at the door. Daniel was very happy when he saw

us. He said to his mother, ‘Bring bananas for Najla and make some coffee, my family is here.’

We were astonished. Rashid had liked bananas so much that my mother and Najla had stopped

eating them after his death because it reminded them of their grief.”lxvi

Daniel also spontaneously recognized Ibrahim, as well as Jijad, Rashid’s hunting buddy.

At this point in Shroder’s account it appears that there is absolutely no link connecting the two

families involved. But at a later point a potential, although tenuous, link between the families appears,

someone known to both families. Shroder then thinks that this link could contaminate the evidence, so

he r rehearses the kind of absurd story someone might try and make up to explain away the case and he

says:

I did not think that that kind of convoluted contamination was likely, only possible. It clearly

would be extremely unlikely for a two-year-old to hear and remember as much detail as Daniel

was given credit for - the name of the car’s driver, that the car had sped out of control and that

Rashid had been thrown out of it, that the accident had occurred near the water, that Rashid’s

mother had been knitting him a sweater. And, in any case, no grandmother’s tale could explain

the recognitions attributed to Daniel of the way to the Khaddeges’ home, of Rashid's sister

Najla, of Ibrahim and others.lxvii

The notion that the person known in a very peripheral way to both families would have conveyed the

detailed information between the families in a way that would enable a two year old boy to be able, let

alone want, to concoct the story is clearly absurd.

However, committed materialists who wish to avoid the implications of the evidence often produce

the most ridiculous reasons for simply dismissing it without any serious thought or investigation. The

following is part of a discussion between the Dalai Lama, Patricia Churchland and Antonio Damasio

reported in the book Consciousness at the Crossroads:

DALAI LAMA: There are specific recent instances in which two girls in India recollected the

names that they had known in previous lives. They knew the geography and the geographical

names. They could recollect their home village of the previous life and call it by name. They

also recognized textbooks used in their studies in a previous life, but they couldn’t even read

the texts in their present lives.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: How old were they?

DALAI LAMA: Four or five.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: They could have talked to practically any one in the meantime

who could have told them stories of the region and the people.

DALAI LAMA: In this case both girls now have four parents each. Because their memory is

so clear so convincing the previous two parents now accept each of them as being also their

own child. It was a case where the children recollected people and places precisely from their

previous lives – places they had never been to, where their parents had never taken them, nor

had their parents told them about them. It was totally out of their experience of five years of

their lifetime. They were able to recognise books that they were very fond of in their previous

life. Although they couldn’t even read, they were specifically attracted to those particular

books.

…

DALAI LAMA: I remembered this case because one of the two girls had died in an accident

with one part of her brain damaged. I myself a Buddhist, can’t find an explanation for that

small girl. You see, she recognized her previous parents very clearly, and also recognized her

own previous books. Yet she cannot read. From the Buddhist viewpoint, this is very difficult

to explain.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: So she was taken by people to the place where she lived in her

previous life?

DALAI LAMA: That's right.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: And in her previous life she had the accident?

DATAI LAMA: Yes. She was only about fifteen or sixteen when she died in the previous life.

The present parents, when they first detected these peculiarities, ignored the issue. The girl

said this is not my place, my place is somewhere else which has a different name. The parents

of this life didn’t take it seriously. They thought she was simply fantasizing. But she insisted

continuously. One day, her father told her, “Yes! All right, now show me.” The small girl took

her father very quietly a few miles away, to her previous home.

PATRICIA CHURCHLAND: It does raise the question of why it doesn’t happen more often.

If all of us are thought to have souls that come from other lives, then the problem is why each

of us does not recollect in great detail an earlier life. I quite honestly don’t have any beliefs

about my earlier life.

ANTONIO DAMASIO: That's exactly what I was thinking. Why doesn’t it happen more

often? What kind of education was that girl subject to? Was there anything special in that girl’s

upbringing that would have made that more likely?

DAIAI LAMA: In this particular case, I don’t know how to explain it. In her previous life, she

was an ordinary girl with no special training. Buddhism generally posits many different

degrees of vividness of awareness. One important thing to note is that in her previous life, she

had a healthy body but she met with a sudden death. So you see, when death occurs suddenly,

if one is in perfect health, one’s memories still remain very sharp.lxviii

The incredulous and lame remarks by Damasio and Churchland indicate that they are not even

predisposed to even seriously think about the evidence that the Dalai Lama is referring to. Churchland’s

remark about the children repeating information they have somehow heard from adults, given the weight

of evidence, is weak. Even if the children had heard something about the distant village, being able to

pretend to recognise previous parents with full emotional authenticity is surely another matter. To

entertain Church-land’s explanation seriously would mean that we accept that there are significant

numbers of children who are inexplicably driven to make up stories about previous lives who are also

brilliant actors and adepts at emotional deception.

Another case of this type that Stevenson investigated and Shroder writes about in Old Souls is that

of a seven year old Indian girl called Preeti. She remembered being Sheila, a teenager from a village

about 10 or 12 miles away, who was run over by a car. Preeti’s father told Stevenson and Shroder that:

As soon as Preeti could speak clearly … she said to her brother and sister, “This is your house,

not my house. These are your parents, not mine.” She told her sister, “You only have one

brother, I have four,” and said that her name was not Preeti, but Sheila, and gave names for her

“real” father and mother. She pleaded to be taken to her “home,” a town called Loa-Majra,

which was some ten to twelve miles away.lxix

Preeti’s parents told her to stop talking nonsense and ignored her protes-tations. When Preeti was four

she asked a neighbour who milked the family’s water buffalo to take her to ‘her village.’ This ‘milkman’

then asked a woman who had been born in the village of Loa-Majra if there was a man named Karna

married to a woman named Argoori who had lost a daughter called Sheila, which was the information

that Preeti had given him. The details turned out to be correct. Sheila had been hit by a car and killed.

When some men, one of which was Preeti’s previous life’s father, came to Preeti’s village she

immediately recognised him and ran over to hug him.

Preeti did not seem to recall actually being hit by the car but one of the details that Preeti gave about

her death prior to being reincarnated was ‘I had fallen from above and died.’ Later Stevenson and his

helper Satwant and Shroder found a press account about the accident in which Sheila had died. Shroder

writes about this:

I read a translation of the account: Sheila, fifteen, had gone with some other women to gather

grass for cattle feed. Sheila had forgotten her sickle and run back across the road to get it. I

read what happened next and stopped short. For one of the few times in my life, the cliché

about not being able to believe what I was seeing was literally true for me. I read the next

sentence again, slowly: The car hit Sheila and knocked her ten to twelve feet in the air. I was

astonished, then suspicious - maybe the writer had speculated as I had, then attempted to make

the account more persuasive by inventing the detail about the girl getting knocked into the air.

But the article contained no mention of Preeti’s cryptic comment about “falling from above,”

and, therefore, no obvious motive for inventing the detail.lxx

The cases investigated generally have many striking links of this nature, and often quite a few impressive

recalls and recognitions such as Preeti telling her parents “My house (i.e. Sheila’s house) is big and yours

is small,” which turned out to be true.

However, there are often also fragmentary and conflicting aspects which seem to weaken, although

by no means destroy, the weight of the evidence. In the Preeti case Stevenson recognizes the weak points

that will be focused upon by sceptics and says “Well I think the sceptics would have a good time tearing

that case apart.” I will hand over to Shroder’s narrative to finish the point:

Satwant looked at [Stevenson] quizzically. “What do you mean?” she asked. I turned to face

her. “Allow me,” I said. “You have this child who’s unhappy with her parents. She’s convinced

her parents don’t love her. And maybe the woman we just interviewed isn’t the only one from

Loa-Maya who married into the village. Maybe there are three or four other women who know

of Karan Singh and his family. And maybe Preeti is in the village one day and she hears a

couple of these women reminiscing about the old days, and they mention a teenage girl named

Sheila who was killed, and they also mention the father's name and the mother's name and say

how much they grieved for the girl. And Preeti thinks, ‘Maybe I'm not really from this family

that is mean to me. Maybe those parents who missed their daughter so much are really my

parents. And maybe I’m that girl who died.’ Because even at a young age she’s heard about

rebirth. so she starts saying, ‘you’re not my parents. My father's name is Karan Singh.’ The

milkman hears that and passes it along. The dead girl’s family wants to believe their dead

daughter has returned. So they come to see the girl, and there’s this big crowd. When they ask

Preeti who ‘her father’ is, she goes to the person everyone is staring at, and Karan Singh takes

this as complete confirmation. Similar things happen when he takes her back to his village.

Maybe she might even begin to make mistakes at first - she heads toward the wrong person -

but she sees people inching away from her or shaking their heads, so she finds the right person.

And when she asked where the married sister was? Maybe she had earlier overheard someone

say, ‘It’s a shame that Munni couldn't be here to see this.’ And it is no great leap in this culture

to assume that the reason a sister would not be at home is because she is at her in-laws.”

Satwant watched me with something between hurt and wonder. When I finished she asked,

“Is that what you really think?”

I thought about that for a minute.

“No,” I said.

The point is that the detailed alternative account that a sceptic would need to make in order to account

for the details are always ridiculous; which is why sceptics generally do not give detailed accounts of

individual cases but deal in vague generalities which only have a very superficial plausibility.

Another Stevenson case from Lebanon, which also demonstrates physical resemblance across

lifetimes, involves Suzanne Ghanem, who as a child remembered her past lifetime as Hanan Monsour.

Hanan was born in the mid-1930s and after her third child, she developed heart problems and had to

have open heart surgery. The procedure could not be done in Lebanon and as she had a brother living

in Virginia, she therefore arranged to have the surgery done at the University of Virginia.

However, Hanan died the day after surgery was done, which occurred in about 1965. Then 10 days

later, Suzanne was born and she had full memories of her past incarnation as Hanan, including her past

life name and the names of 13 Monsour family members. Suzanne gave enough information to be

reunited with her past life family.

Even Hanan’s husband, Farouk, a career police officer, accepted Suzanne as the reincarnation of his

deceased wife. To support this belief, Farouk pointed out that Suzanne could identify their friends by

name in photographs of them at social events, even though Suzanne had not met these individuals in

her contemporary lifetime.

Stevenson initially studied Suzanne when she was just a child in the late 1960s. Almost 30 years

later, in 1998, he revisited Suzanne and found that as an adult, Suzanne had the same facial features as

Hanan (figure 7).

Figure 7

In the discussion between the Dalai Lama, Damasio and Churchland, above, one tactic of the

materialist intellectual rearguard action is the issue of why more people do not remember previous lives.

Damasio also suggests that the girls might have been ‘educated’ into making their claims, an astonishing

weak attempted parry against overwhelming evidential odds. Again it is important to note that Damasio

and Churchland are not deeply pondering the issues involved, they have already decided that the

evidence must have another explanation, however desperately implausible, the explanation cannot be

reincarnation because they have decided ahead of any evidence that reincarnation cannot be a feature of

the process of reality.

One answer to the question as why there is not a greater number of children reporting previous lives

is supplied by the fact that in many of Stevenson’s cases, and also the case cited by the Dalai Lama,

involve violent deaths, so it looks as if a violent or untimely death predisposes, but does not guarantee,

past life recall.

Another reason is actually suggested by Damasio’s desperate suggestion that past life recall in

children is a result of them being ‘educated’ into the belief. As Shroder points out this argument can also

work in reverse:

..if you believe that the power of cultural belief is strong enough to create this mass delusion

that children remember specific details about the lives of dead strangers, don’t you have to

admit that it could work the other way around? That cultural belief could repress real memories

of previous lives…lxxi

And, indeed, there is suggestive evidence that this may be the case. For example one book review raised

the concern that many of Stevenson's examples were gathered in cultures with pre-existing belief in

reincarnation. In order to address this type of concern, Stevenson researched in Europe and then wrote

European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003) which presented 40 cases he examined in Europe.

Shroder did some research into cases in the United States and did not have difficulty finding some

convincing cases. One of them concerned the brother of a close friend’s wife, Shroder describes his

friend as “one of the most sceptical individuals I have ever known.” I will let Shroder take over again:

Arlene, Gene's wife, had been raised in Connecticut, the daughter of multigenerational

Northeasterners. However, as soon as her younger brother, Jim, could speak, he would say “I

was born in Dixie.” No, his parents, would correct him, you were born in Bridgeport,

Connecticut. But Jim would insist: “I was born in Dixie.” “It wasn't just that he kept saying it,”

Arlene told me when I asked her about it. “It was that word - Dixie. We didn't know anybody

who used that word. Who would use that word in Connecticut in the 1960s?” I asked her

whether she or her parents ever thought that it might have anything to do with a previous-life

memory. “Are you kidding?” she said. “We just figured it was more evidence that he was a

weird kid.”

Then the family took their first road trip south, to Florida. Arlene only had a foggy memory

of the trip, but thought that her mother would probably remember it clearly. I called her mom,

Phyllis Reidy who now lives just up the Florida coast from Miami.

“I remember we had a real load - my husband, my mother-in-law, the two kids, and myself

in our red station wagon,” she recalled. “There was no interstate in those days, of course, so

we drove all the way down old U.S. 301. Arlene was nine and Jim was six. One of the first

things Jim had ever said was, ‘I’m from Dixie.’ He said it all the time. And he spoke oddly

too. We always said it sounded like he had some kind of accent. We used to ask him if he was

from Boston, and he said, ‘No, I’m from Dixie. We may have said something like, ‘What do

you mean you’re from Dixie?’ But it never really went any further than that. We didn’t question

kids in those days.

“Then, when we drove into the south, he got all excited, started talking a mile a minute

about how his grandmother and grandfather came from Dixie and his mother and father did,

too, and I said, “We’re your mother and father and he said, ‘No, you’re not,’ just flatly, like

that.

“We were in Georgia, just south of the South Carolina line, and he really started going nuts.

“I’ll show you where we used to live,” he said. “There it is! It’s way up there, up that hill and

in back of those trees.””

“Did he describe the house?” I asked.

“It was an ‘old house’ was all he said.”

"Did you pull off the highway to go look?”

“We couldn't be bothered,…”

Might this indicate another reason why we don’t have more examples of recall of previous lives?!

In 2007 Jim B. Tucker, who has continued the work of Stevenson, published a paper entitled

‘Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives: Past, Present and Future Research’. In this paper

he described the following case as typical:

Kumkum Verma, a girl in India, is an example of the subjects that Stevenson studied

(Stevenson, 1975). She was from a village, but when she was 3-1/2 years old, she began saying

that she had lived in Darbhanga, a city of 200,000 people that was 25 miles away. She named

the district of the city where she said she had lived, one of artisans and craftsmen, and her

family did not know anyone from that district. Kumkum made numerous statements, and her

aunt wrote down many of them. Some of her notes were lost, but Stevenson was able to get a

copy of 18 of Kumkum’s statements that her aunt had recorded. The detail in these statements

included her son’s name in the life she was describing and the fact that he worked with a

hammer, her grandson's name, the town where her father had lived, and personal details, such

as having an iron safe at home, a sword hanging near the cot where she slept, and a pet snake

that she fed milk to. Kumkum’s father talked to a friend who had an employee from the district

in Darbhanga that Kumkum had mentioned. The employee went there to search for the

deceased individual, the previous personality, that Kumkum was describing. He found that a

woman had died five years before Kumkum was born whose life matched all of the details

listed above. Of note is the fact that Kumkum’s father, a landowner and homeopathic

physician, visited the family in Darbhanga once but never allowed Kumkum to see them,

apparently in part because he was not proud that his daughter seemed to remember the life of

a blacksmith's wife.lxxii

A list of typical features of the cases collected by Stevenson include:

• Claims were made spontaneously at very young age, often starting at 2-3 years old and

stopping by 6-7 years.

• Median length of time between death of previous personality and rebirth is 15 months.

• Claims involve ordinary lives, rather than grandiose fantasies. Sometimes the claim involves

a previous life in humbler circumstances.

• The details which are given of previous lives are matched with evidence to a high degree.

• In about 70% of cases the mode of death involves unnatural, violent and sudden death.

• Many children show behaviors connected with the previous life.

• Many children showed emotional attachment to previous family members appropriate to the

former relationship.

• In cases involving violent death over 35% of children displayed phobias related to the mode

of death.

• Many of the children practiced repetitive play linked to the previous life, acting out the

occupation of the previous personality and occasionally re-enacting the death scene.

Cases such as these have been found wherever researchers have looked for them and they have been

found on all continents except Antarctica, where no research has been done.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Stevenson’s research lies in his discovery of cases in which

the child has birthmarks which correspond to the violent death of the previous person. Cases such as

these were presented in an article entitled ‘Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on

Deceased Persons’ and formed the basis for the book Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. In his

article Birthmarks and Birth Defects Stevenson writes:

A correspondence between birthmark and wound was judged satisfactory if the birthmark and

wound were both within an area of 10 square centimeters at the same anatomical location; in

fact, many of the birthmarks and wounds were much closer to the same location than this. A

medical document, usually a postmortem report, was obtained in 49 cases.lxxiii

Figure 8a & 8b

Figure 9 Figure 10

Figure 8a shows the hypopigmented macule on the chest of an Indian youth who as a child remembered

the life of a man, Maha Ram, who was killed with a shotgun fired at close range. Figure 8b show the

location of the wounds on Maha Ram recorded by the pathologist. Figure 9 shows a large ‘epidermal

nevus’ on head of a Thai man who as a child said he remembered the life of his paternal uncle, who was

killed with a blow on the head from a heavy knife. Figure 10 shows the almost absent fingers on one

hand in a boy of India who said he remembered the life of a boy of another village who had put his hand

into the blades of a fodder chopping machine and had its fingers amputated. Other examples, including

the small, round puckered birthmark on a Thai boy that corresponded to the bullet wound of entry in a

man whose life he said he remembered and who had been shot with a rifle from behind and the

corresponding exit wound, can be found in Stevenson’s original paper which can be found on the

Internet.lxxiv

Stevenson’s obituary in the New York Times stated:

Spurned by most academic scientists, Dr. Stevenson was to his supporters a misunderstood

genius, bravely pushing the boundaries of science. To his detractors, he was earnest, dogged

but ultimately misguided, led astray by gullibility, wishful thinking and a tendency to see

science where others saw superstition.lxxv

However, the evidence collected by Stevenson is clearly suggestive of reincarnation, and when one

looks closely at the arguments claiming to debunk Stevenson’s work they invariably turn out to be

specious. For example the following is from a sceptical Internet article:

Furthermore, since we know that people can have memories and be completely unaware of the

source of those memories, he would have to be vigilant in identifying which memories were

likely to be the result of cryptomnesia. Also, there is the major problem of pro-viding an

explanation for how a personality can survive death and transfer to another body, something

Stevenson had no answer for.lxxvi

The claim concerning cryptomnesia is clearly false because in all cases the children had been nowhere

or seen no one which would account for the hidden memories required. This is an example of how

sceptical efforts to debunk Stevenson’s work do not engage with the accumulated detail of his work,

although they will pick upon one particular detail if they think they can provide a counter explanation

for that particular one. If one investigates the debunking claim, as we have seen, it will usually turn out

to be spurious. The general sceptical tactic seems to be simply to throw inappropriate and misleading

materialist advertising mud in his direction in the hope that people will not investigate too closely. An

explanation for the phenomenon of reincarnation has been outlined in this current chapter.

The sceptical internet article also claims that:

We need not grant that these cases can only be solved by appealing to a paranormal

explanation, however. Coincidence, faulty investigation, deception, and other normal

explanations are available.lxxvii

But, again, these aspersions are not correct; a rational and serious investigation of the evidence rules

these flaws out. If one looks into Stevenson’s procedures it is clear that he goes to great lengths to

eliminate the possibility of these faults and is always disappointed when he finds a possible case turns

out to have such flaws. It is true that in the early days of research one of his helpers turned out to be

deceiving him, but he found out and got rid of the person concerned. Sceptical attacks on his work,

however, bring this early event to the fore as if it taints all of Stevenson’s work. In the conclusion of

this article the author says that:

Those who want to believe in survival of a personality after death will likely ignore the

weaknesses in Stevenson's methods and praise him for his meticulousness, his devotion to

detail, his zeal to get every claim verified or disproved.lxxviii

But the reverse is equally the case. Those who do not want to believe in survival of some aspect of

personality after death (it need not be the entire ‘personality’, in Buddhist terms it is a ‘karmic echo’)

will likely ignore the strengths in Stevenson's methods.

Carl Sagan felt that Stevenson’s work fell short of providing proof of reincarnation but felt that

further research was warranted. In The Demon-Haunted World (1996), Sagan wrote that claims about

reincarnation may have some experimental support, he said that “at the time of writing, there are three

claims in the ESP field that deserve serious study,” and the third was the fact that “young children

sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they

could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.” lxxix Sceptic Sam Harris said of

Stevenson “either he is a victim of truly elaborate fraud, or something interesting is going on.”lxxx

In his book The Art of Disappearing the Theravadin monk Ajahn Brahm has a chapter called ‘Make

This the Last Time’. He extols the blissful advantages of jhana meditation as a preparation for letting

go of the material realm completely at the moment of death in order to blissfully disappear into the

infinite. He writes:

You’re realizing a great truth of Buddhism, something the Buddha also realized: the reason

you’re happy is because a whole heap of suffering is gone. The demons have let go of the rope

and you can breathe again. It’s wonderful when you experience this for yourself, because it

gives you direct insight into what we're trying to achieve. Because of the painful nature of the

body, we practice to detach from and transcend it, by going into the realm of the mind. When

you do this fully and irreversibly, you become a nonreturner, and you’ll never again be reborn

in the world of physical bodies. But if you don't get your meditation together, who knows

where your next rebirth will be.lxxxi

Here Ajahn Brahm indicates the aim of the Buddhist path as removing all the traces of clinging to

existence in order to realize the deathless experience of the nondual Mindnature ground of reality. In

Theravada Buddhism, which emphasizes the elimination of suffering and tends not to indicate the nature

of the result, the aim is seldom expressed in terms of ‘nondual Mindnature’ or anything similar. This is

a designation more in line with the Mahayana worldview.

The highly realized teacher Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche described the situation as follows:

This fundamental nature of mind as intangible emptiness, illumin-ating clarity, and dynamic

unimpeded awareness is what we term, in the Buddhist tradition, tathagatagharba buddha

nature, the seed or potential for enlightenment. It is that inherent nature of mind which emerges

as the fully enlightened experience. It is that which allows the fully enlightened experience to

take place in the first place. This is something that is shared by each and every living being,

human or otherwise. Anything that is sentient – anything that has consciousness - inherently

has this fundamental purity or nature of mind in its make-up. We find in the Buddhist teachings

that Buddha Shakyamuni said, “This tathagatagharba – this seed for potential enlightenment -

pervades all forms of life. There is not a single being that does not have this as part of its make-

up.” To give this experience a name for reference, or simply to label it for practical purposes,

in the Buddhist tradition we refer to this fundamental nature of mind as tathagatagharba - the

seed or essence of enlightenment. It is the potential for enlightenment. … If we recognize the

inherent nature of mind and its potential and learn how to cultivate it - learn how to cause it to

emerge through spiritual practice - then we ourselves can actualize that experience. We can

become a buddha. We can become completely enlight-ened.lxxxii

In this presentation, then, the aim of the spiritual quest is the direct realization of the nature of the mind-

energy of the process of reality. This requires the relinquishment of all the ‘afflictive obstructions’ and

‘cognitive obscurations’ which impede recognition of the fundamental Mindnature.

When a sentient being achieves full buddhahood through the path of a bodhisattva, a practitioner

who deliberately constantly returns into the realm of samsara in order to help all other sentient beings

towards enlightenment, the limitless accrued spiritual energy of his or her practice leaves an

inconceivable karmic echo of potential energy still active in helping sentient beings on the path to

enlightenment. This energy field is described as the three kayas, or bodies, of buddhahood. The primary

buddhakaya is the dharmakaya, the inconceivable realm of space-like, non-referential non-dual

awareness. The second buddhakaya is the sambhogikakaya (sambhogakaya) which is an immaterial

field of manifested awareness-energy of enlightened teaching potentiality which may be activated by

the aspirations of practitioners. The third buddhakaya is the nairmanikakaya (nirmanakaya) which:

…is of three types – (a) artistic nairmanikakayas (great artists, scientists, healers and so on);

(b) incarnate nairmanikakayas (any animate or inanimate manifestations by buddhas for the

welfare of beings); supreme nairmanikakayas who display the twelve deeds of a buddha (such

as Buddha Sakyamuni).lxxxiii

In the original Pali Suttas the Buddha indicates that this process may take many lifetimes. In all

forms of Buddhism (apart from some corrupt Westernized versions) it is accepted that the

psychophysical process of a sentient beings continuum looses the physical aspect at death and after

death remains as an energetic stream of subtle ‘grasping’ consciousness seeking re-embodiment. For

just about all non-advanced practitioners of course this process is hidden and there is absolutely no recall

of previous lives and it appears as if there is only one life.

In the Samannaphala Sutta (The Fruits of the Homeless Life) the Buddha indicated that the path

towards enlightenment can be facilitated by the prod-uction of a “mind made body”lxxxiv. This quasi-

stable mental structure of cons-ciousness is “what is mistaken for a soul of self.”lxxxv This suggests the

poss-ibility of consciously producing a quasi-stable mental structure which per-sists across sequential

lifetimes and thus being able to consciously control the death process. Indeed Mahayana bodhisattvas,

because they have generated bodhicitta (bodhichitta) which is a vast concern for the welfare of all

sentient beings, are able to retain certain subtle portions of the afflictive dispositions in order to postpone

buddhahood and therefore continuously take rebirth in samsara for the benefit of sentient beings:

The enhancing factor is not to relinquish the subtle afflictions that enable bodhisattvas to be

willingly reborn in samsara for the sake of accomplishing the welfare of others. The activity of

the knowledge of such bodhisattvas consists of liberating sentient beings continuously without

manifesting their own buddhahood.lxxxvi

Stevenson, reflecting upon the implications of the evidence he had collected that birthmarks may

correspond to physical traumas suffered by the previous embodiment said:

I find myself thinking increasingly of some intermediate ‘nonphysical body’ which acts as a

carrier of these attributes from one life to another.lxxxvii

The idea that there is an intermediate nonphysical body which occupies an intermediate state after death

and prior to reincarnation of rebirth is exactly the teaching of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo

Thötröl or Bar-do Thos-grol Chen-mo) which contain detailed description of the death process, the

nature and experiences of the intermediate state and the process of rebirth; the practice of these

instructions are a preparation for the actual process of dying.

In his introduction to the first complete translation of the The Tibetan Book of the Dead the Dalai

Lama tells us:

Normally in our lives, if we know that we are going to be confronted by a difficult or unfamiliar

situation, we prepare and train ourselves for such a circumstance in advance, so that when this

event actually happens we are fully prepared. …the rehearsal of the processes of death, and

those of the intermediate state, and the emergence into a future existence are at the very heart

of the path of Highest Yoga Tantra. These practices are part of my daily practice also and

because of this I somehow feel a sense of excitement when I think about the experience of

death. At the same time, though, sometimes I do wonder whether or not I will really be able to

fully utilise my own preparatory practices when the actual moment of death comes!lxxxviii

The following brief exposition of the process of death, intermediate state and rebirth is taken from the

Dalai Lama’s Forward to Death, Intermediate State and Rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism:

Those particles of matter, of combined semen and blood, into which the consciousness initially

entered in the mother’s womb at the beginning of the life, become the centre of the heart; and

from that very same point the consciousness ultimately departs at death. Immediately

thereupon, the intermediate state begins – except for those reborn in the formless realms of

infinite space, infinite consciousness, ‘nothingness’ or peak of cyclic existence, for whom the

new life begins immediately upon death. Those born within the realms of desire and form must

pass through an intermediate state, during which a being has the form of the person as whom

he or she is to be reborn. The intermediate being has all five senses, but also clairvoyance,

unobstructiveness and an ability to arrive immedi-ately wherever he or she wants. He or she

sees other intermediate beings of his or her own type - hell-being, hungry ghost, animal,

human, demigod or god - and can be seen by clairvoyants. If a place of birth appropriate to

one's predispositions is not found, a small death occurs after seven days, and one is reborn into

another intermediate state. This can occur at most six times, with the result that the longest

period spent in the intermediate state is forty-nine days. This means that those beings who,

even a year after dying, report that they have not found a birthplace are not in the intermediate

state but have taken birth as a spirit. In taking rebirth as a human, one sees one's future mother

and father as if lying-together. If one is to be reborn as a male, this sight generates desire for

the mother as well as hatred for the father – and vice versa if one is to be reborn as a female.

Being desirous, one rushes there to engage in copulation; but upon arrival, one sees only the

sexual organ of the desired partner. This creates anger which causes cessation of the

intermediate state and makes the connection to the new life. One has entered the mother's

womb and begun a human life. When the father's semen and mother's blood are conjoined with

this life or consciousness, they naturally and gradually develop into the elements of a

human.lxxxix

It is intriguing to note here that the “intermediate being has all five senses, but also clairvoyance,

unobstructiveness and an ability to arrive immediately wherever he or she wants.” This corresponds to

the Buddha’s description of the ‘mind-made body’:

And he, with mind concentrated … having gained imperturbability, applies and directs his

mind to the production of a mind-made body. And out of this body he produces another body,

having a form mind-made, complete in all its limbs and faculties. It is just as if a man were to

draw out a reed from its sheath. … Or as if a man were to draw a sword from the scabbard. …

Or as if a man were to draw a snake from its old skin. … He then enjoys different powers:

being one he becomes many – being many he becomes one; he appears and disappears; he

passes through fences, walls and mountains unhindered as if through air; he sinks into the

ground and emerges from it as if it were water; he walks on the water without breaking the

surface as if on land; he flies cross-legged through the sky like a bird with wings…xc

And it is remarkable that these supernormal abilities of passing through material objects, flying through

the air and so are precisely the features described by people having experienced Near Death Experiences.

The following are a few examples contained in the paper Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide

Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality after Death? Relevant Features and Illustrative Case

Reports:

In my delirium night and day made little difference to me. In the four-bedded ward, where they

first placed me I lay, as it seemed, in a constant stupor which excluded the existence of any

hopes or fears. Mind and body seemed to be dual, and to some extent separate. I was conscious

of the body as an inert, tumbled mass near a door; it belonged to me but it was not I. I was

conscious that my mental self used regularly to leave the body... until something produced a

consciousness that the chilly mass, which I then recalled was, my body, was being stirred as it

lay by the door. I was then drawn rapidly back to it, - joined it with disgust, and it became I

and was fed, spoken to, and cared for. When it was again left I seemed to wander off as

before.... In my wanderings there was a strange consciousness that I could see through the

walls of the building, though I was aware that they were there, and that everything was

transparent to my senses.

And:

When my friend came in she seemed to move as before a slow motion picture camera laying

the bouquet of flowers on the table with much deliberation, turning very, very slowly and

moving toward the door. I was aware of a sensation of deep cold, an inner cold, and things

grew dark, then black – “blacker than midnight in a cypress swamp” as James Meldon Johnson

describes the world before God created day and night. After this coldness and blackness came

oblivion. Suddenly it was as if someone had turned on a floodlight and I glowed in its warmth.

My first thought was “no pain – wonderful - I'm free - I can go where I please!” I went to the

window to see what was outside. In the street four stories down a boy was teasing a much

smaller girl, trying to take away her skates. I thought l should intervene but before I had really

left the room my husband came in. He said: “Linda, why do you leave us?” and l turned back.

I remember thinking it odd he was bowed over a figure on the bed instead of looking at me.

And:

As they started to carry me it was remarked that it would come as a blow to my people, and I

was immediately conscious of a desire to be with my mother. Instantly I was at home, and

father and mother were just sitting down to their midday meal. On my entrance mother sat bolt

upright in her chair and said, “Bert, something has happened to our boy.” “Nonsense,” he said,

“whatever has put such an idea into your head?” There followed an argument. But mother

refused to be pacified and said that if she caught the 2 p.m. train she could be with me before

three and satisfy herself. She had hardly left the room when there came a knock on the front

door. It was a porter from the railway station with a telegram saying I was badly hurt. Then

suddenly I was again transported - this time it seemed to be against my wish - to a bedroom,

where a woman whom I recognized was in bed, and two other women were quietly bustling

around, and a doctor was leaning over the bed. Then the doctor had a baby in his hands. At

once I became aware of an almost irresistible impulse to press my face through the back of the

baby's head so that my face would come into the same place as the child’s. The doctor said, “It

looks as though we have lost them both.” And again I felt the urge to take the baby's place in

order to show him he was wrong, but the thought of my mother crying turned my thoughts in

her direction, when straight away I was in a railway carriage with both her and father.

And:

I was standing there in the middle of the room and distinctly saw my dead body lying upon the

bed.... I started to leave the room and met one of the physicians, and was surprised that he said

nothing to me, but since he made no effort to stop me I walked out into the street where I met

an acquaintance of mine, Mr. Milton Blose. I tried to greet Mr.Blose by hitting him on the

back, but my arm went through him....

Paranormal perceptions, enhanced mental abilities, instantaneous moving across distances, passing

through material objects, as well as feelings of great peace and joy, tunnel experiences, visions of bright

lights and ‘other-worldly’ places are all features of NDE’s.

The following account, taken from Anita Moorjani’s book Dying To Be Me, suggests that NDE’s

sometimes verge on the sphere of enlightened nonlocal consciousness:

I continued to be fully aware of every detail of every procedure that was being administered

to me, while to the outside world I appeared to be in a coma. I continued to sense myself

expanding further and further outward, drawing away from my physical surroundings. It was

as though I were no longer restricted by the confines of space and time, and continued to

spread myself out to occupy a greater expanse of consciousness. I felt a sense of freedom and

liberation that I’d never experienced in my physical life before. I can only describe this as the

combination of a sense of joy mixed with a generous sprinkling of jubilation and happiness.

It stemmed from being released from my sick and dying body, a feeling of jubilant

emancipation from all the pain that my illness had caused me. As I continued to plunge deeper

into the other realm, expanding outward, becoming everyone and everything, I felt all my

emotional attachments to my loved ones and my surroundings slowly fall away. What I can

only describe as superb and glorious unconditional love surrounded me, wrapping me tight as

I continued to let go. The term unconditional love really doesn’t do justice to the feeling, as

these words have been overused to the point of having lost their intensity. But the physical

battle I’d fought for so very long had finally released its strong hold on me, and I had a

beautiful experience of freedom. It didn’t feel as though I’d physically gone somewhere else

– it was more as though I’d awakened. Perhaps I’d finally been roused from a bad dream. My

soul was finally realizing its true magnificence! And in doing so, it was expanding beyond my

body and this physical world. It extended further and further outward until it encompassed not

only this existence, but continued to expand into another realm that was beyond this time and

space, and at the same time included it.xci

Moorjani’s description has remarkable features in the context of considering that what is actually

happening in NDEs is, as Stapp intimated, that a conti-nuum of quantum-based awareness is leaving the

limited constraints of em-bodiment and moving into a purely quantum level of potentiality and aware-

ness (in the following quote ‘Anoop’ is Anita Moorjani’s brother):

Although I was no longer using my five physical senses, I had unlimited perception, as if a

new sense had become available, one that was more heightened than any of our usual faculties.

I had 360-degree peripheral vision with total awareness of my surround-ings. And as amazing

as it all sounds, it still felt almost normal. Being in a body now felt confining. Time felt

different in that realm, too, and I felt all moments at once. I was aware of every-thing that

pertained to me - past, present, and future – simul-taneously. I became conscious of what

seemed to be simultaneous lives playing out. I seemed to have a younger brother in one

incarnation, and I was protective of him. But I knew that this sibling's essence was the same

as Anoop’s, only in that existence, he was younger instead of older than I was. This life I was

now perceiving with Anoop seemed to take place in an underdeveloped rural setting, in a time

and location I couldn’t identify. We were living in a sparsely furnished mud hut, and I looked

after Anoop while our parents went out to work in the fields. As I was experiencing the

sensations associated with being a protective older sister, ensuring that there was enough for

us to eat and we were safe from any undesirable external elements, it didn’t feel like a past

life. Even though the scene appeared historical, in that realm, it still felt as though it were

happening here and now. In other words, time didn't run linearly the way we experience it

here. It’s as though our earthly minds convert what happens around us into a sequence; but in

actuality, when we’re not expressing through our bodies, everything occurs simultaneously,

whether past, present, or future.xcii

This is what one would expect if the NDE state of consciousness-awareness is ‘located’ (or perhaps

‘nonlocated’ would be the correct term) fully within the nonlocal quantum realm of potentiality wherein

all the potentialities for the partcular psychic-mental continuum are contained in quantum superposition

at the same time.

In his book Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living Dying, Reincarnation and Immortality

the quantum physicist Amit Goswami suggests that the intermediate entity which links between

successive lives is a quantum structure which he calls the ‘quantum monad’. In this book Goswami

surveys all the evidence from reincarnation research and quantum physics and concludes:

In principle, the use of such quantum monads is available to all of us. It seems, however, that

certain incarnate individuals are correlated via quantum nonlocality; they have privileged

access to the events of each others’ lives via nonlocal information transfer. It seems that it is

these individuals who share the same quantum monad in an ongoing fashion; it is they who

can be called the reincarnations of one another. The past life mental and vital propensities that

one inherits in this way is called karma in the Hindu tradition. Thus, the monad, the survivor

of the death of the material body, forms a continuum with the physical incarnations because it

carries, via its subtle vital and mental bodies, part of the individual identity … not the

melodrama, not the ego-content, but the character, the tendencies of mental thinking and vital

feeling, the (mentally) learned repertoire of contexts, also phobias, avoidances of certain

contexts - in other words, both good and bad habit patterns that we call karma. It should now

be clear that the propounders of life and death as a continuum are right, and therefore, the

Tibetan Book of the Dead is correct!

Goswami wrote Physics of the Soul in 2001; as time flows on the accu-mulating evidence only adds

support to the quantum truth of rebirth.

The authors of IM, who are supporters of the principle of the maxi-mization of intellectual

conservatism, say regarding the debate concerning reincarnation/rebirth and Near Death Experiences:

It involves a large body of relevant empirical evidence which is at present virtually unknown

to the great majority of laypersons and scientists alike. … We insist that anyone who wishes

to participate meaningfully in discussions of the survival question must study this literature,

thoughtfully and with an open mind.xciii

Unfortunately, however, as the authors of IM point out, it is more generally the case that those who wish

to maintain that it is impossible for an aspect of mind or consciousness to exist in some form

independently of the body do so by willfully ignoring the evidence.

An example of this is provided by the occasion when Alex Tsakiris asked Susan Blackmore, who

has established a name for herself as being a ‘debunker’ of the paranormal and claims for the reality of

NDEs, to appear on his Skeptico show to discuss the evidence for NDEs in the work of various NDE

researchers. Tsakiris asked Blackmore to look into the evidence presented by Jeff Long but Blackmore

replied that she no longer considered herself to be a researcher in the field, and was uninformed about

current research, and could not “face reading his book”. Tsakiris com-mented:

But hold on. You're still a public figure, a public intellectual, public scientist, and to remove

yourself, I think is fine, but you still express a very strong opinion about this. And when we

juxtapose that with what you just said, that I’m completely uninformed; I really heve no

opinion because I haven't studied the literature in 15 years and a lot has happened in 15 years.

I mean, don’t we need to resolve those to a certain extent?xciv

Blackmore went on to say that, although she had not read any books on the issue or done any research,

she had not heard of anything significant in the field which would make her want to investigate further.

She did, however, despite not knowing anything about new research, then go on to to assert that:

I mean some things we know very well, don’t we? We know what proportions of people have

them; we know that people are posi-tively changed afterwards; we know something about

those kinds of changes. We know that various drugs in particular, painkillers and those kinds

of things, we mention that our experiences and blur them rather than enhancing them. We

know that levels of carbon dioxide are positively correlated with those experiences.xcv

To which Tsakiris responded:

No, we don’t. And I don’t think we should get into that because you just said that you haven't

followed it for 15 years. If you want to get into it then I would put you opposite a researcher,

Pim Van Lommel or like I said, Dr. Jeff Long, or Dr. Bruce Greyson. People who are really

up to date on the research who have published, have collected data for 20 or 30 years rather

than - you're doing this thing again where you say, “I’m completely removed from the field. I

don’t have anything to say. I haven’t researched. I haven’t read any of the literature. I have a

stack of books I haven’t read and none of them are even NDE books. They're not even on my

table.” And then you're going to spout off all these things that you believe or that you assume

to be true without looking at the research. I appreciate just having an opinion, but I’ve got to

ask how well-informed is it?xcvi

Alex Tskiris devoted quite a few shows to discussions with NDE researchers and various ‘debunkers’,

and the conclusion he came to was:

… you’ll hear this over and over again from … skeptical neuro-logists, skeptics in general,

and mainstream scientists who haven’t looked at the data. What you’ll hear over and over

again is the research is heading towards a conventional explanation of near-death experience.

And here’s the thing. I’ve got to say – that’s not just a little bit wrong, that’s completely the

opposite of what’s really going on.xcvii

Dr. Ian Stevenson

i "The Truth of Rebirth: And Why it Matters for Buddhist Practice", by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, 23 April

2012, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/truth_of_rebirth.html ii Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival p17 iii Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival p2 iv ibid v ibid vi Personal email vii Personal email viii You can find this on my website and it will be published in a future book ‘Quantum Madhyamaka’. ix Stapp, H. P. (2010). ‘Minds and Values in the Quantum Universe’ in Information and the Nature of Reality, Davies, Paul

& Gregersen, Niels Henrik (eds), Cambridge University Press, p117. x Stapp, Henry (2007) p20 xi Herbert, Nick (1985) p16 xii Zukav, Gary (1979) xiiiCapra, F (1975) p36. xiv Kaiser, D (2011) p 157 xv Stapp, Henry (2007) p20 xvi A ‘Bhikkhu’ is a Buddhist monk xvii http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/karma.html xviii Kaiser, D (2011) p102 xix Wallace, B. Alan (2012) p152-153 xx Walshe, M. (trans.) (1987) p106 xxi http://www.mindpowernews.com/LivingDead.htm xxii ibid xxiii ibid xxiv ibid xxv Kelly E. E, Kelly E. W, Crabtree A., Gauld, A., Grosso M., Greyson B. (2007) p379 xxvi Kelly E. E, Kelly E. W, Crabtree A., Gauld, A., Grosso M., Greyson B. (2007) p380-381 xxvii Kelly E. E, Kelly E. W, Crabtree A., Gauld, A., Grosso M., Greyson B. (2007) p384 xxviii Kelly E. E, Kelly E. W, Crabtree A., Gauld, A., Grosso M., Greyson B. (2007) p382-383 xxix Kelly E. E, Kelly E. W, Crabtree A., Gauld, A., Grosso M., Greyson B. (2007) p385 xxx Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival p5 xxxi Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival p7 xxxii Stapp, H. Nondual Quantum Duality xxxiii Influence of Yogachara p109 xxxiv Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival p10 xxxv Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival p14 xxxvi John D., Davies, Paul C. W., Harper, Charles L. (eds) (2004) p577 – Wheeler, J A (1999) ‘Information, physics,

quantum: the search for links.’ In Feynman and Computation: Exploring the Limits of Computers, ed A. J. G. Hey, p309

(314). Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. xxxvii Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival p13 xxxviii Zurek, Wojciech. Decoherence and the Transition from Quantum to Classical – Revisited p4 xxxix Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival xl Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival p14 xli http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.048.than.html xlii Stapp H. Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory with Personality Survival p15 xliii Nanamoli Thera & Bhikku Bodhi – http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.009.ntbb.html xliv Thanissaro Bhikkhu – http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn12/sn12.002.than.html xlv Waldron, William S. (2003) p168 xlvi Waldron, William S. (2003) p169 xlvii Sheldrake, Rupert (2009) p136 xlviii Sheldrake, Rupert (2009) p145 xlix http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0883 l http://www.technologyreview.com/view/427870/the-quantum-biology-conundrum/ li http://www.technologyreview.com/view/419590/quantum-entanglement-holds-dna-together-say/ lii Sheldrake, Rupert (2009) p105 liii Nyanaponika Thera, ‘The Four Nutriments of Life’ –

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/wheel105.html liv http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.15.0.than.html lv Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche, ‘Mind, karma, Ego formation and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism’ - http://www.shenpen-

osel.org/issue6.pdf lvi Soni R. L. (1980) p58 lvii Soni R. L. (1980) p63-64

lviii Soni R. L. (1980) p65 lix Sogyal Rinpoche (2008) p4 lx Sogyal Rinpoche (2008) p5-6 lxi Harvey J. Irwin (2004). An introduction to parapsychology McFarland, p. 218. lxii Jim B. Tucker (2005). Life Before Life: A scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives, St. Martin's

Press, New York, p. 211 lxiii Shroder, T (2001) p37 lxiv Shroder, T (2007-02-11). “Ian Stevenson; Sought To Document Memories Of Past Lives in Children”. The Washington

Post and Old Souls lxv Shroder, T (2001) p67 lxvi ibid lxvii Shroder, T (2001) p74 lxviii Houshmand Z., Livingston R. B., & Wallace B. A. (1999) p73-74 lxix Shroder, T (2001) p155 lxx Shroder, T (2001) p159-160 lxxi Shroder, T (2001) p77 lxxii http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_21_3_tucker.pdf p544-5 lxxiii ‘Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons p405 lxxiv http://healpastlives.com/aboutus/comment/isreibio.htm lxxv Margalit Fox (February 18, 2007). "Ian Pretyman Stevenson, 88; Studied Claims of Past Lives". New York Times. lxxvi http://www.skepdic.com/stevenson.html lxxvii ibid lxxviii ibid lxxix Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World, Random House, 1997, p. 302 lxxx AlterNet / By John Gorenfeld (2007-01-05). "Sam Harris's Faith in Eastern Spirituality and Muslim Torture". AlterNet. lxxxi Brahm, Ajahn (2011) p121 lxxxii Kyabje Kalu Rinpoche, ‘Mind, karma, Ego formation and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism’ - http://www.shenpen-

osel.org/issue6.pdf lxxxiii Brunnhölzl, Karl (2011) p24 lxxxiv Walshe, M. (trans.) (1987) p104 lxxxv Walshe, M. (trans.) (1987) footnote – p546 lxxxvi Brunnhölzl, Karl (2010) p53 lxxxvii Goswami, Amit (2001) p136 lxxxviii Dalai Lama (Introduction) & Gyurme Dorje (Translator) (2006) xxviii lxxxix Lati, Rimpoche & Hopkins, J. (Editor) (1985) p10 xc Walshe, M. (trans.) (1987) p104-105 xci Moorjani, A. (2012) p65 xcii Moorjani, A. (2012) p67 xciii Kelly E. E, Kelly E. W, Crabtree A., Gauld, A., Grosso M., Greyson B. (2007) p597 xciv http://www.skeptiko.com/near-death-experience-skeptic-dr-susan-blackmore-responds-to-critics/ xcv ibid xcvi ibid xcvii http://www.skeptiko.com/steven-novella-dead-wrong-on-near-death-experience-research/