Reincarnation, Karma, … Science?

Another etude on karmic law, reincarnation, and power of mind

Whenever you hear reincarnation and science mentioned in one sentence, and the article’s or speaker’s goal is to argue reincarnation, you will certainly hear the name Ian Stevenson soon enough.

Stevenson was a psychiatrist, whose “interest in the paranormal,” according to The Skeptic’s Dictionary, “derived from the influence of his mother, a devotee of theosophy.” Apparently his experiments with psychedelics (LSD and mescalin) further strengthened his “naive body-soul dualism”, but whatever the case, he collected ca. 3000 cases of children with memories that, as he claimed, were “suggestive of reincarnation.”

There were many skeptics who already shredded his work to pieces, but frankly none of them was really convincing — they all shrugged Stevenson’s data off as records of mere coincidences.

Well, even reincarnation as we know it (transmigration of soul) sounds as a more solid explanation.

However, in an article called “Ian Stevenson’s documentation of the afterlife” by professor Jerry Coyne, Ph.D. (department of Ecology and Evolution, UC Chicago), I found the following:

Champe Ransom, whom Stevenson hired as an assistant in the 1970s, wrote an unpublished report about Stevenson’s work, which Edwards cites in his Immortality (1992) and Reincarnation (1996). According to Ransom […] In only eleven of the 1,111 cases Ransom looked at had there been no contact between the families of the deceased and of the child before the interview; in addition, according to Ransom, seven of those eleven cases were seriously flawed. He also wrote that there were problems with the way Stevenson presented the cases, in that he would report his witnesses’ conclusions, rather than the data upon which the conclusions rested.

So, only 11 cases where the child and the family of the deceased did not meet prior to interview with Stevenson (Coyne also adds that there are sources that claim 23 such cases). In terms of facts — we have 11 to 23 cases suggestive of anomalous knowledge, at best.

And that can be explained pretty well:

• We are dealing with ca. 2% of the whole sample, a number which has no scientific validity, i.e. it indicates that the results are even grater bullshit than a “conspiracy theory” or pseudo-science. But OK, for the sake of argument let’s go with it anyway.
• All of those 2% are kids. That is, a very small subset of subjects, that all have naturally an easier “access” to altered states of awareness and have less conditioning than adults.
• Our senses collect enormous amounts of information, which also includes disturbances/noise in that information (i.e. happenings that are normally out of our sensible spectrum).
• In the end (see below), most of that data gets filtered out by our awareness, but is nevertheless recorded/stored/processed.
• Brain, among many other things, can create simulations (what we call creative thinking, but also dreams or intuition fall into this category), i.e. it creates connections between seemingly unrelated chunks of (also stored) data (and also triggers signals within body, that further generate input).
• The whole package is filtered by our awareness.
• Perception (i.e. that which we are actually conscious of) gets “compiled” into patterns (with the disturbances/noise rendered as patterns that we already know).
• The compiled chunk is finally cognized.

In short — we can construct the “reincarnation flashback” from information that is available here and now (plus memory, which is, too, here and now).

When you consider the causal nature of the universe (i.e. that all actions alter the flow of causal streams that are also known as Tao, Karma, Akashic records), all information reaching back to the beginning of creation must be perceivable or at least inferable from the current state (in all places simultaneously), and it seems that we have access to it simply with our five senses (sometimes even less than five) and our brain.

It’s obvious that my assumption begs the question — are human beings really that sensitive?

Still, the overall conclusion could be that reincarnation and karma even if we consider them real, are not what we generally understand. The former is not a transmigration of soul; the latter is not the notion of actions that get mirrored back at you (as a distinct person) in this life, or give you a beneficial personal rebirth.

Add to the mix that consciousness is identical “in” all sentient beings, (the same “I” is conscious of everything — a fact that can be verified), and you should see that although the old explanations still have meaning, they mean, as science tells us, something much more profound and alive.

But of course, you are welcomed to provide your alternative step-by-step explanations of these phenomena in the comments.