Michael Prescott's Blog

New book: Life & Afterlife (pinned post)

Though this blog is kaput, its content — appropriately enough — lives on after death! 

Recently I published a nonfiction book culled from years of blog posts and also containing a great deal of original work. I call it LIFE & AFTERLIFE, and it's available in a variety of editions, including Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple Books, and trade paperback. The ebook edition is priced at $2.99, the paperback at $9.99 (about as low as I could go, given the publisher's costs).

This is an entirely different book from my earlier effort THE FAR HORIZON, which tackles the same subject but from a more philosophical perspective. With LIFE & AFTERLIFE, my focus is on empirical evidence rather than "what it all means."

This link takes you to the Amazon sales page, where you can find LIFE & AFTERLIFE in paperback and Kindle editions:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQKBVVR7/

You can also visit my newly revamped author site: http://michaelprescott.net.

 

The Past Lives Podcast

My one-hour interview with Simon Brown on The Past Lives Podcast is now available online. Stream it here. 

The focus, naturally, is my recently released book The Far Horizon. The book deals with reincarnation only in the later chapters. The podcast, despite its name, explores a variety of other topics, as well.

Book recap: The Simulation Hypothesis

This isn't so much a book review as a summary of The Simulation Hypothesis, by Rizwan Virk. I'd highlighted a lot of text in the ebook, so I decided to reproduce many of these highlights as a general indication of what the book is about. 

I may do an actual review in the future. For now, I'll just say that I found the book brisk and readable, and despite occasional lapses of grammar, the main ideas are presented clearly.The author's treatment of the evolution of video games was particularly interesting. His analysis of spiritual and paranormal topics (religion, NDEs, UFOs) was less compelling and seemed somewhat less well informed, but at least he is open to these possibilities. One area of possible confusion is that at some points he speaks of downloading consciousness into an avatar, but at other points he refers to the entire physical world, including the avatar, as being rendered on the "screen" of consciousness. There appears to be an inconsistency here.

Overall, I liked the book and recommend it to those who are interested in this type of speculation. For the record, I don't believe we are literally in a conspirer simulation, but I think computation serves as a useful model for making sense of many paradoxical phenomena, including the subject matter of parapsychology. 

In any event, here are some key points, arranged by topic and not presented in the order in which they appear in the book. Blank lines between quotes indicate that the quotes are not found together in the book. In some instances they are separated by many pages.

 

 

Excerpts from The Simulation Hypothesis by topic: 

 

The Great Simulation 

By treating the world not as physical (and we’ll see that the physicists have admitted it is not) but rather as information and computation, we might be able to come to a more comprehensive understanding of the natural universe.

Oxford’s Nick Bostrom, in his 2003 paper which popularized the Simulation Argument, refers to a species which is able to build these hyper-realistic simulations is becoming “post-human.” I like to say that such a civilization has passed the “Simulation Point.”

I call this video game the “Great Simulation.”

 

Video game technology 

[A basic "game loop":] 
1. The computer presents the existing state of the game world and your character. 
2. The player issues a command. 
3. The program changes the game state based on this command and other factors. 
4. Repeat

The world [of a video game is] a graphical representation, or a “rendered world,” populated by graphical characters and graphical objects.

The techniques used to graphically represent a large game world and render only a portion of the game world at a time – the portion that the player’s character is observing – [have] significant impact on the simulation hypothesis.... We’ll see there is a direct parallel [between quantum phenomena and] the conditional rendering of video games.

[Games have] the ability to store and track the state of a large number of simultaneous characters (whether a PC or an NPC) and the state of the shared, persistent game world as information. The information, which is the basis of everything that goes on in the virtual world, is stored somewhere outside the rendered world – on cloud servers that are invisible to those inside the world and rendered as needed.

Not only is a virtual world in modern MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games] larger than we can see on one screen, it isn’t fully rendered into pixels until and unless it’s necessary.… Only those places in the world where there is an observer get fully rendered as pixels.
This is ... the basic idea of a rendering engine – it converts from mathematical points to a set of pixels that can be shown to the user in a video game.
Where is the rest of the world if we are rendering only a small part of it at a time? What is it stored as? It is stored as a set of 3D computer models – which by themselves cannot be seen by the player unless they are rendered.

Video games are optimized to render only that which is needed. The rest of the “world” exists in some informational form, so computing resources aren’t expended unless and until they are needed.

Some specific rules that a rendering engine might follow include:
Do not render anything that is obscured, or behind other objects (that the user wouldn’t see)
Adjust the field of view by quickly adjusting the pixels that have already been rendered
Pre-cache the scenes adjacent to the current one (to make them quicker to load)
Calculate/render new pixels only when necessary

The modeling techniques developed for video games are the same models that are used by 3D printers, and once again we see physical objects being reduced to digital information. A table created in Minecraft or Second Life … consists of digital information that is rendered using the basic building blocks of the game (pixels), which persist inside the virtual world as long as the world is running. Can we say any more of the physical world around us?

These [early] games became the first to have well-defined physics engines. This means that they obeyed some (scaled-down) version of Newton’s laws of classical mechanics.

MMORPGs are still rendered on individual computers – as such, a “shared rendered world” doesn’t really exist. Each computer renders what is happening in your scene. If my character is present and yours is present, then both of our CPUs/GPUs will be rendering the scene based on shared information. Where is this information? It is both decentralized and centralized – it is sent from the client machines based upon every choice you make and then synchronized and sent to the other people that are in the same place that you are.

 

Informational patterns in nature 

The cells in your body have been replaced many times – you are literally not the physical person that you were many years ago. There must be some “information”… that defines who you are and tells the cells how to grow. This applies not just to healthy but also to diseased cells; theoretically if all the cells are replaced, then the diseased cell should just disappear on their own. This doesn’t happen because of patterns of information. Even biological entities, at their core, follow a computational structure.

[Stephen] Wolfram, by studying [the] cellular automaton and its similarity to nature, proposed that nature itself might be a collection of computer programs. He referred to these as simple programs and believed that simple programs were a basic building block of all science. Science, then, instead of being the study of physical processes, is really the study of computation and information involving things like recursion, registers for storing information, etc.

In his autobiography, [John] Wheeler summarized three phases of his long career in physics: “Everything is Particles” evolved to “Everything is Fields” which eventually evolved to “Everything is Information”.

 

Reality and illusion 

In many Vedic texts, maya connotes a “magic show, an illusion where things appear to be present but are not what they seem.” There is another term that is used in the Hindu Vedas, the lila. [It means "play".] The word play has dual meanings – first that the world is built from a spirit of playfulness and creativity, and second, that what we see can be thought of as being like a stage play …

If maya is a kind of illusion, then what is beyond the illusion? There is, in the Hindu traditions, Brahman, the absolute “real” world beyond form, and in the Buddhist traditions, the dharma, the absolute basis of reality from which all phenomena emanate. While they don’t say exactly what this world is like, there is a resting place for souls between lives, called the bardo.

We are players outside the game (and thus conscious entities) playing characters inside the video game.

 

Running simulations 

Many ... questions in life may be computationally irreducible. This means that we would need to run a computer program through many different steps to figure out where a particular planet might be, or where a particular particle may end up in a turbulent flow of particles, or where a biological population might end up after a number of years.

Sometimes we need to “rewind” our computer simulation and rerun it to see a different set of variables before we know exactly where we will end up.

 

Quantum indeterminacy

At the heart of the matter is QI (or quantum indeterminacy) which means that all outcomes exist until and unless one particular outcome is observed. In the case of quantum bits, this means that the bit has values of both zero and one – until and unless it is observed.

A much better explanation of QI and why it exists – that it is a form of “conditional rendering” for a shared simulated universe.

In quantum physics, this collapse of a probability wave into a single future seems to happen based on conscious observation or measurement. In a video game, the path that any player follows depends on the conscious choice and subsequent rendering of that choice on the player’s own computer (which can be thought of as his or her “machine of consciousness”).

While there may be a master “state” on the server in multiplayer video games, rendering is done on each client machine. This corresponds to the finding in quantum physics that a probability wave collapses to a specific reality only when there is an observer.

There is a computer that is keeping track of all things in our physical world, and it doesn’t have the resources to render every possibility. It only needs to render those things that we, as conscious participants or players of the game, observe.

“Quantum indeterminacy,” says Elon Musk …, “is really an optimization technique.”

 

Many worlds, parallel universes 

[Do] these parallel worlds actually exist or are [they] simply probabilities in a probability tree that is created by whomever or whatever is rendering the world around us[?]

It’s not at all unreasonable to assume that if the universe gets “copied” or “branched” that there are optimizations for accomplishing this – and that what is being copied is actually information and not physical particles.…

If the universe is seen as a virtual world with a game state, then we can envision how multiple probable futures can be generated (as information, not as physical worlds), and then choices can be made through this branching tree of possibilities using some evaluation function.

[Thomas] Campbell posits that there is a “Fundamental Process” that drives evolution of consciousness, biology, and even inanimate objects. The Fundamental Process, as he defines it, is a process that tries out every possibility, through trial and error, and gravitates toward the possibilities that are evaluated as the “most profitable.”

A computational model of the [multiple] universes as information allows for significant compression and optimization, and computation provides a mechanism that might actually be able to produce this kind of result: a giant computer system crunching numbers with the rendering engine that only renders when it’s needed.

 

Quantized space and time 

Time inside video games is quantized, based on the steps of the simulation, which is some multiple of the processing time of basic operations in the CPU (or GPU).

All computer simulations rely on some time clock to control the simulation, and if we are really in a simulation, there should be some evidence of this. If quantized time proves to be correct, that lends even more credence to the idea that there is a clock-speed and minimum distance in the 3D world around us.

Every object would have a 3D representation within [the virtual space we use inside computer programs and simulations] – typically (x, y, z) coordinates – and a fourth coordinate for time, t. If the speed of light is fixed, and the smallest possible pixel is fixed, then the minimum quantum of time would be defined by light traversing the smallest pixel.

The Planck length … is defined as a unitof length equal to 1.616229 (38) x 10 [to the power of -35] meters and is considered the smallest possible length of space that we can reliably measure.

The speed of light seems to be the constant that relates space to time.

If space-time is pixelated, then we can use the constant speed to get a quantized time, a clock-speed of the simulation.

Using the Planck length, which physicists now generally acknowledge as the smallest possible measurable distance of length in our 3D reality, the value T in our equation comes out to a very small number, which is essentially how scientists have come up with the Planck time constant.

 

Quantum entanglement

If two pixels are co-related on the computer screen, then both physical pixels would be getting their value from the same point in memory. If we change the memory value (let’s say its RGB value from red to green), then both pixels should change on the screen from red to [green]. 

Let’s suppose pixels A and B share the same value in memory (in this case they are based off of the same address in memory). If we change the value in memory, then both pixels will automatically change, at least as long as they share the same memory location. If pixel A was to then suddenly start using a different spot in memory, we might say that they are no longer shared – or ... no longer entangled.
In quantum entanglement, it is possible for particles to de-cohere as well, by interacting with the environment, or by simply measuring the quantum state. This can easily explain how pixel B now gets its own value in memory, so that its state can be saved independently from pixel A.

 

Remote viewing

Since the client software is doing rendering based on the position of the virtual camera, it is possible, within the virtual world, to place the camera anywhere in the room!

 

UFOs

If we think of a 3D virtual world as having x, y, z coordinates, then teleporting would be a matter of setting new x, y, z coordinates without having to go through the points in between.

Some UFO researchers contend that UFO sightings have both an objective and a subjective component. When I met Jacques Vallee in 2017, he told me that he had documented cases where several people were together and some of them saw the UFO and others didn’t. This led him to believe that there was a consciousness aspect to UFOs. What could cause one person to see a UFO and another standing right next to them not to see it?
If we go back to the idea that each of us is conscious in a videogame-like simulation, then each of us would have to render the physical world on our own “computer” – in this case, in our own consciousness. A situation where the command is to render the UFO on person A’s consciousness now while not rendering it on person B’s only makes sense in the context of a distributed multiplayer simulation as opposed to a shared physical reality.

Since all the rendering is done on individual computers, it’s possible for one player to see an object in the scene that is not possible to other players, a process we call narrowcasting.

 

Subtle bodies

In many of the Eastern traditions and their new age updates in modern times, there’s the belief that certain subtle bodies, which contain consciousness, actually leave the physical body while we are asleep and that this [is] the same as being afk [away from keyboard].

In the Vedas, the five sheaths (koshas) correspond with the three bodies: the gross body, the subtle body, and the causal body. The gross body (sthula sarira) is the physical body that we all know about. The subtle body (suksma sarira) keeps the physical body alive and transmigrates with the soul across bodies and separates from the physical body at birth. The causal body (karana sarira) is the seed that creates the subtle body and the gross physical body.…
The subtle body is considered a template for the physical body in the Vedic literature.

In a simulation, each character has a rendered body. What is this based on? Information about the body (the character) is stored in some non-rendered state, but then a 3D model defines the look, shape, and feel of the character’s physical body. This 3D model isn’t visible to other people in the rendered world, yet exists somewhere in memory or on disk and is indispensable from the actual character/player. The model is usually drawn using polygons and is considered a “mesh” of lines outlining the shape of the character’s body, which is then textured to create the actual character’s rendering in the game world.

 

NDEs and the life review

Like an intelligent screen recording while we are playing a videogame, [the Great Simulation] provides not just a record but an evaluation of the gameplay and help[s] us to keep score in the video game. These recordings are available for us in the afterlife, and “God” reviews than with us give us the “judgment” according to the Western religious traditions.

During what we call [the] death of the character in the simulation, the player starts to wake up in another reality.
What is this other reality? All we can say for sure is that it is outside the rendered world of the shared video game, and there are other conscious beings there.

In fact, the decision to “go back” and continue the life of the character we were just playing is a lot like the crude “insert another quarter now to keep playing!”

 

Angels

Just who are these entities recording our deeds? According to some traditions, these entities might be angels, though they sound a lot like AI that monitors and automatically records our actions and plays them back to us later.

Beings that are not in the rendered world but are watching and influencing us is a good description of what these religions call angels and demons.

As we look to the recording angels, we see that they are as much “functions” as they are “entities” – i.e., they have a specific purpose and rules to follow to achieve that purpose in supporting us through this “testing ground” of life on earth.

 

Reincarnation and karma 

The twin concepts of karma and reincarnation sound a lot like video games in which a player has multiple lives and an ongoing list of “quests” and “achievements.” The accomplishment of one task (or quest) unlocks new quests that get added to the list. This is a lot like the process of creating new karma described in Buddhism.

In Eastern traditions, consciousness is transferred to multiple bodies in a series of incarnations. This is a direct analogy to a single player who plays multiple “roles” or “characters” in a role-playing game.

[The] quest manifest [in a video game] is like a running total and is a subset of all possible quests; it is run by a quest engine.

This [series of quests] builds up experience and levels up our character based on some map or tree of quests and achievements that have been selected for us by our particular karma.

The karma of the player would be lessons or achievements the player may need to accept that “finish” over many lifetimes, while the karma of a given character may need to be resolved during the life of this character.

Lost in the bardo

Let’s consider a series of items, and then look at where they may take us. 

 

Item: During a near-death experience, a man found himself being tormented by demons. Terrified, he reached back into his childhood to the only faith he had ever been taught and prayed to Jesus for salvation. Instantly he found himself lifted out of the experience into a higher plane.

 

Item: A deeply religious Christian, undergoing a near-death experience, found himself in a stereotypical Christian heaven, complete with "pearlescent gates," streets of gold, and choirs of angels. He came back convinced that he had been to heaven, though he remained skeptical of other NDEs that encompassed different, nonbiblical experiences. 

 

Item: A survey of Hindus in India who underwent NDEs found that many of them reported being taken to the afterlife by angelic messengers known as yamdoots, whose role is to escort the deceased to the next life. In many Hindu NDEs, the experiencer's death was attributable to a bureaucratic error, which was promptly corrected by returning them to life.

 

Item: Spiritualist literature abounds in descriptions of Summerland, a paradisal environment enjoyed by most people after death, which bears a striking resemblance to earthly life. Gardens, cottages, and other homely delights are recounted in detail. People are sometimes said to engage in sex, create artworks, plant flowers, or hold regular jobs.

 

Item: Accounts of postmortem existence often feature puzzling omissions and elements of vagueness that cannot be resolved even after repeated follow-up questions. Exactly how the spirits spend their time, whether there are alterations of day and night, whether people need to sleep, and other details either vary unpredictably or are never satisfactorily addressed.

 

Item: Oliver Lodge's book Raymond recounts purportedly postmortem communications with his son. Among other details, Raymond says that some people in the afterlife smoke cigars and drink liquor. Lodge was ridiculed for believing such far-fetched claims. And yet his book contains much veridical material produced by mediums – statements they had no way of knowing, which were later verified, and at least one startlingly accurate prediction.

 

Item: In some channeled literature and séances, communicators claim that Shakespeare and other great poets are continuing to write. Yet no convincing snippet of original Shakespearean poetry ever comes through. On the rare occasions when original poetry is proffered, it is no better than doggerel.

 

Item: Communicators disagree with each other on such fundamental questions as whether or not reincarnation is real, and whether or not there is a God. 

 

Item: In The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality, the alleged spirit of F.W.H. Myers, as transcribed by Geraldine Cummins, warns that Summerland is a plane of illusion which he compares to the land of the Lotus Eaters in Greek mythology. The Lotus Eaters kept themselves perpetually intoxicated and existed in a hallucinatory state. Myers insists that however attractive Summerland may be to its inhabitants, it is not ultimately real, and when an individual spirit recognizes this fact, he will immediately be elevated to a higher plane.

 

Item: Longtime OBE researcher Robert Monroe reported bizarre experiences on other planes of existence that often had an illogical dreamlike or nightmarish quality.Still, his experiences are hard to dismiss as nothing more than dreams, because of their occasional veridical content. 

 

Item: So-called alien abductions have much in common with out-of-body experiences. In both cases, the experiencer typically reports being drowsy or asleep, then feeling his body start to vibrate before he rises horizontally from bed and floats through the air, often passing through a wall or window. Other than the science-fiction aspects (little green men, flying saucers, lab experiments), the only significant difference between abductions and OBEs is that the OBEs are understood to be nonphysical; the person looks down and sees his physical body lying prostrate and temporarily abandoned. By contrast, abduction experiences are assumed to be physical, probably because the person is simply unfamiliar with being out of the body.

 

Item: Hypnotic regression to an alleged between-lives experience, in which the patient remembers an intermediate experience after one earthly incarnation and prior to the next, typically discloses an afterlife environment markedly different from that described in NDEs and mediumship. In between-lives accounts, the spirits typically do not take human form but exist as blobs of light in an abstract landscape. Unlike the residents of Summerland, they remember all their past lives and the other members of their soul group. And they participate in planning their next incarnation, during which they will necessarily sublimate their higher consciousness and all knowledge of their life-plan.

 

Item: Sometime between the 8th and 14th centuries, Tibetan monks authored a document known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It delineates various stages of postmortem existence, stages known as bardos. As is often the case with religious writings, the book is highly formalized, with successive stages neatly ordered in groups of seven and said to last for a specific number of days. Leaving aside these elaborations, the essence of the narrative is that dying persons experience “luminosity" or "the clear light of being." If they recognize this light as their own higher self, they will merge with it and avoid subsequent incarnations. Most people, insufficiently spiritually advanced to do this, proceed to a series of visions, both positive and negative, which are generated by their own minds but perceived as objectively real. They find themselves fully immersed in these thought-forms, which reflect their deepest expectations, fears, and hopes, all the while cut off from the higher self. If plagued by frightening images, they are advised to appeal to a personal deity in order to rid themselves of troubling thoughts. At a late stage in the process, they are brought before the Lord of Death and subjected to judgment by looking into the mirror of karma. As before, they are advised to realize that the scene is nothing more than a mental projection; most people, however, cannot manage it. Eventually they are shuttled back to earth in a new incarnation, still caught in the wheel of rebirth. 

 

Okay. Now let's assume, for the sake of argument, that all of the above items are factually correct as far as they go. Can they be reconciled? I think so ... and it's not really even that hard.

 

Upon death, a person sees "the clear light,” which near-death experiencers know as "the being of light," sometimes perceived as literally the light at the end of a tunnel. As some near-death researchers, notably Kenneth Ring, have speculated, this being of light is, in reality, one's higher self. Most people, however, will misinterpret it as God, i.e. something outside of and distinct from themselves, a basic error which prevents them from uniting with the light. Then, just as the Tibetan Book of the Dead suggests, they move into a realm of illusions produced by their subconscious minds. People with a background in Christianity or Hinduism will see environments consistent with Christian or Hindu imagery. People who are subconsciously troubled may find themselves in a hellish environment, which they can escape by focusing on a personal deity - just as one NDEr escaped from the "demons" tormenting him by appealing to Jesus. 

 

Most people in our secular age find themselves immersed in a virtual-reality environment similar to the earthly world they have left – an environment conjured up by the collective unconscious of many like-minded souls. This is what spiritualists call Summerland, the Lotus Flower paradise discussed by Myers. As a plane of illusion, Summerland can incorporate any ideas in the inventory of the subconscious, including cigars, whiskey, sex, gardening, meeting William Shakespeare, and whatever else may seem pleasurable or interesting. But since Summerland residents are not actually meeting William Shakespeare, they are unable to produce any satisfactory examples of his new work. And because they are Lotus Eaters, they will be hard-pressed to explain exactly how they spend their time or even what time is. They are in a hallucinatory state which they mistake for a higher reality.

 

The "life review" common to many NDEs and some channeled accounts, and described in Buddist terms as peering into the mirror of karma, is another illusory, self-generated experience - which may account for the fact that a person typically sees what he needs to see and feels that he is being judged only by himself. 

 

At this stage of consciousness, the individual is not aware of his higher self, his soulmates, or his previous and upcoming incarnations. He may or may not believe in reincarnation or in God. His knowledge is partial and conjectural. He still sees as through a glass darkly. The higher self, temporarily cut off from the ego-persona, enjoys a different experience, as remembered by hypnotically regressed patients who report between-lives memories.

 

Even without having a near-death experience, people can encounter other planes of existence generated by their own thoughts and possessing a kind of quasi-reality. This is the case with many out-of-body experiences, and it accounts for their dreamlike qualities. It is also the case with so-called alien abductions - nonphysical experiences generated (presumably) by imagery gleaned from popular science fiction. In previous eras, the same types of "abductions" were interpreted as the work of demons, angels, faerie folk;- the popular mythology of the time.

 

Skeptics of near-death experiences, mediumship, and channeled literature are right to point out the discrepancies, illogicalities, lacunae, and cultural biases that crop up in these cases. But they are wrong in assuming that the cases can thereby be explained away in materialistic terms. The best accounts contain too much veridical material. The actual explanation is that the experiences are real but hallucinatory - actual adventures in nonphysical realms, but adventures realized in terms of thought-forms and cultural constructs dictated by the experiencer's own mind. 

 

These sojourns in what the Tibetans call the chonyid bardo and sidpa bardo take place below the evolutionary level of the higher self, on a lower plane where postmortem existence is largely dictated by the biases, assumptions, and limitations of the subconscious mind. Such existence is a virtual-reality simulation, real enough to be fully immersive and widely shared, but not real enough to withstand the direct apprehension that yields liberation. Most NDErs who report visiting the afterlife remember this kind of experience. Most mediumistic communicators exist at this level also. Communications from higher-level entities are rarer and more difficult to evaluate or verify, since they typically lack evidential content.

 

This way of looking at things may help bring some order to the disparate collection of case histories reported as NDEs, mediumship, OBES, hypnotic regressions, and transcendental experiences, which have many commonalities but also many discrepancies. 

Enos, Redbeard, and Dave

In some earlier blog posts, later collected as an essay, I talked about a diamond as an image of the oversoul or higher self, with each facet of the diamond corresponding to a different incarnate personality. Here I'd like to expand on that idea, taking the purely imaginary case of a particular oversoul and its incarnations.

Let's say that this oversoul has incarnated three times, first as Enos, a peasant; then as Redbeard, a pirate; and currently as Dave, a podiatrist. In this case the diamond has three facets. They are separate and distinct from each other, but they are all part of the diamond itself.

While incarnated, Dave is largely unconscious of the oversoul. I use the word “unconscious” deliberately, because I think that the unconscious (or subconscious) mind is the point of access to the higher self. The higher self is not the subconscious; on the contrary, it would more accurately be characterized as a superconsciousness. Both the subconscious and the superconscious are part of what F. W. H. Myers termed “the subliminal self.”

Dave is not entirely cut off from his higher self; intuitions and inspirations come to him from the oversoul, by way of dreams, meditation, or reverie. And it is possible for Dave to cultivate his openness to such information, expanding his awareness. Still, during his earthly lifetime, the oversoul is mostly out of sight – not unlike the 9/10 of an iceberg that lies submerged.

As a young child, Dave remembered a previous life in vivid detail – the life of Redbeard the pirate.* By the age of eight, these memories had faded. Young children have a more immediate connection to the oversoul; they do not draw a clear distinction between reality and imagination, or between the products of conscious thought and subconscious imagery. They are open to input from their higher self in a way that most adults are not. Dave remembered Redbeard's life, not because the Dave personality had previously existed as the Redbeard personality, but because both personalities stem from a common source, and the young Dave was in contact with that source.

It seems he was most likely to remember only the oversoul's most recent incarnation. He remembered Redbeard, but not Enos. If each incarnation is a stepping stone to the next one along a path of continuous growth, then it might be expected that the current personality would be most closely in touch with the last one. The Dave personality is, in some ways, an outgrowth of the Redbeard personality. In some cases, this outgrowth results in the carryover of specific personality traits or even physical traits (birthmarks or birth defects corresponding to wounds or injuries sustained in the life if the previous personality). 

Children are more likely to remember a past life that ended abruptly, usually because of violence or the sudden onset of disease. Most spontaneous past-life memories reported by young children are of this type. Possibly this is because a life interrupted represents a partially missed opportunity, which the new incarnation is intended to correct. Redbeard, not unlike many pirates, lived fast and died young, before he could learn the lessons planned by the oversoul; Dave represents the chance to complete this phase of the oversoul's education.

Dave, as an adult, has a near-death experience in which he finds himself, in his own recognizable human body, meeting departed friends and loved ones in a beautiful garden. The experience plays out this way because he is still identified with the Dave personality and not with the oversoul. At a certain point in his NDE, Dave encounters a being of light, which he first interprets as Jesus (a holdover from his religious upbringing) and then, more broadly, as God. Actually, the being of light is the oversoul, which Dave, who is consciously unfamiliar with it, interprets as an outside entity. He simply cannot imagine himself as part of this radiant superconsciousness, which is so far above his own limited awareness. But as the being of light draws nearer, he finds himself merging with it – though only partially and temporarily. For Dave, this is an unforgettable experience. It feels as if he has merged with God, become one with everything, and attained infinite wisdom. In fact, however, he has merged – not with God – but with his own oversoul, and his wisdom, while greatly expanded, falls well short of omniscience.

Sometime after his NDE, Dave goes to a hypnotist who puts him in a deep trance and regresses him to a point before his own birth. In that state he experiences a "between lives" existence, as reported by the hypnotized subjects of Michael Newton, Brian Weiss, and others. Because he has been regressed to a stage before birth — that is, before the Dave personality came into existence — he is now identifying with the oversoul, which is the source of that personality. As a result, Dave's recollection of his between lives existence differs from his NDE. In his NDE he was still identifying with the Dave personality, so he experienced himself having Dave's body, meeting Dave's friends, and seeing religious imagery consistent with Dave's belief system. In his hypnotic regression, he is not identifying with the Dave personality but with the oversoul, so he experiences himself without a human body and without Dave's personal characteristics. Typically, Newton’s subjects saw themselves and their friends (who are other oversouls) as shapes of light in different colors, moving through an abstract geometrical landscape. They had a full recollection of their various incarnations, as well as a full memory of their between-lives schooling and associations.

In short, the being of pure light moving through an unearthly geometric environment is the oversoul, while the recognizable human form moving through a garden paradise is the incarnate personality.

But which one is the real locus of consciousness? Is it Dave or Redbeard or Enos or the oversoul? Arguably, each one of them represents the same locus of consciousness, only viewed from a different perspective. It's a Flatland thing. Flatland is the classic 19th century satire by Edwin Abbott that presents two-dimensional people living in a two-dimensional world. When one of them is lifted into Spaceland, our three-dimensional plane, he sees things from a whole new perspective. Some of what he sees would have been inconceivable to him when he was still in Flatland. For instance, he can now see inside a windowless Flatland house even if all the doors are closed. Why? Because Flatland houses have no roofs (there is no third dimension, hence no up or down). The displaced Flatlander, hovering over the flat sheet of paper on which Flatland is drawn, can simply look down and see the interior of the house. It's a very simple and obvious, but only if one has the perspective afforded by the third dimension. My guess is that the spiritual realm has additional dimensions not only of space but of consciousness, and that these additional dimensions provide the perspective necessary to resolve what appear to be impossible contradictions in our realm.

When the hypnotist regresses Dave to an even earlier point, he remembers the life of Redbeard the pirate and even the life of Enos the peasant. But he reports those lives from a somewhat detached perspective, because he is still predominantly identifying with the oversoul. I remember that one of Newton’s patients, after discussing a life lived as a woman two or three hundred years ago, spoke some words to this effect: "the experience was good for me, and I believe it was good for her, too." (I’m paraphrasing from memory.) I always found this rather confusing. The hypnotized subject seemed to be treating the incarnate woman as a separate person, rather than as himself in a different guise. But in terms of our present hypothesis, the statement makes sense. It is the oversoul commenting on a particular incarnate personality. Dave's oversoul could be expected to make the same kind of statement: “The experience of the Dave personality was useful to me, and I believe it was a positive experience for the Dave personality itself."

Incidentally, hypnotic past-life regression is often explained in terms of cryptomnesia — the purported ability to remember even the most trivial details of books and movies that the person encountered decades earlier. Though these details have been consciously forgotten, they are aid to be retained in the subconscious and to be brought forward under hypnosis. There’s no doubt that many, though not all, regression cases can be explained this way (see The Search for Yesterday, by D. Scott Rogo), but the explanation itself raises interesting questions. By what mechanism does the mind retain all these details, and how does hypnosis afford access to them? I would suggest that the details are retained by the superconscious, and that a deep hypnotic trance opens the door to this fund of knowledge. I'd also suggest that the life review reported in some NDEs involves immersion in this memory archive. And since the oversouls collectively represent all the souls that have ever incarnated, they collectively have a complete record of all memories and subjective experience — a treasure trove known in mystical circles as the Akashic records. 

Continuing his spiritual exploration, Dave starts going to mediums. Some appear to have genuine paranormal abilities. He finds that they talk about different “levels of vibration” corresponding to different spiritual planes. He begins to suspect that the higher vibrational levels correspond to higher dimensions of consciousness — that the mediums are really talking about changes in the frequency of consciousness itself. (The channeled book The Unobstructed Universe makes this point.) The Dave personality exists at one vibrational level, while the oversoul exists at a higher vibrational level. Moreover, as Dave learned from his hypnotic regression, the oversoul itself is part of a select group of oversouls who work together on their mutual development – what might be called a collective oversoul. And it is certainly within the realm of possibility that each collective oversoul is part of a still higher collective, and so on, as consciousness expands in widening ripples.

Dave also finds that discarnate personalities speaking through mediums say they must lower their vibrational level in order to communicate with those of us on earth. He speculates that a deceased person, having transitioned to the afterlife, has greater access to the oversoul and thus is raised in vibration – just as he was, temporarily, when he partially merged with the being of light. The thin pipeline connecting the Dave personality to the oversoul's superconsciousness via the subconscious was expanded, albeit briefly, into a wide channel. He suspects that, had the NDE continued, he would have retained his own personality but also enjoyed access, on a continuing basis, to a wider spectrum of the oversoul's awareness. The deceased people speaking through the mediums are in this condition of expanded consciousness, but to communicate with earthly human beings, they must restrict their newfound access to the oversoul and shrink down to something close to their original limitations. This is why spirit communicators often say that they can only express a fraction of who they now are and what they now know. It is also why spirit communication is so difficult for those on the other side.

Another thing Dave notices is that a medium never says that a given communicator is unavailable, having already reincarnated. Skeptics sometimes seize on this fact to question either mediumship or reincarnation. But if the diamond hypothesis is correct, then we would expect all deceased personalities (Enos and Redbeard, for instance) to remain in the spirit world; reincarnation involves the manifestation of a new personality extruded from the oversoul, not the recycling of a previous personality.

What Dave is learning is that he is part of something larger than himself, which is in turn part of something still larger. His ego may resist this idea; it wants to be Mr. Big! His spiritual journey involves letting go of the ego, at least to some degree. Not coincidentally, by diminishing his attachment to the ego, he reduces his identification with the Dave personality and increases his identification with the oversoul, which he may experience, subjectively, as “the witness” who observes his thoughts and actions in the background — a witness who becomes apparent during those meditative moments when he quiets his chattering mind.

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*I'm using some artistic license in having the young Dave recall a life as a pirate, since children who recall a past life almost always remember a life that ended only a few months or years before they were born. Redbeard presumably died much earlier than that. 

Out of time

Here's something that I found interesting in relation to the topic of my last post. I've been reading Dying to be Me, by Anita Moorjani, her account of her powerful NDE and subsequent "miraculous" healing from cancer. The book, though a bit overlong and occasionally repetitious, is clearly a labor of love, and I don't doubt the author's sincerity. Her rapid and medically inexplicable healing seems to be well documented, and the NDE itself has many classic features while also offering a certain novelty.

What makes it relevant to the previous post is her description of time as experienced -- or not experienced -- during her astral adventure. 

In one passage recounting her NDE, she writes, 

I reached a point where I once again strongly sensed the comforting presence of my father surrounding me, almost as if he were embracing me.

Dad, it feels like I've come home! I'm so glad to be here. Life is so painful! I told him.

But you're always home, darling, he impressed upon me. You always were, and you always will be. I want you to remember that.

This struck me as similar to the notion I advanced in my last post -- that the higher self, existing outside of time, is always on the 4th Plane (or however you wish to describe it), even while the ego associated with ordinary consciousness is incarnated on earth. 

She goes on to write, 

What subsequently happened is incredibly hard to describe. First, it felt as though whatever I directed my awareness toward appeared before me. Second, time was completely irrelevant. It wasn't even a factor to consider, as though it didn't exist.

This is not an unusual feature of NDEs, but I point it out because, again, it suggests that the higher self exists outside of time -- at least time as we understand it. 

Later in the book, Moorjani expands on the idea of timelessness in connection with reincarnation (all emphases in the original):  

… the concept of reincarnation in its conventional form of a progression of lifetimes, running sequentially one after the other, wasn't supported by my NDE. I realized that time doesn't move in a linear fashion unless we're using the filter of our physical bodies and minds. Once we are no longer limited by our earthly senses, every moment exists simultaneously. I've come to think that the concept of reincarnation is really just an interpretation, a way for our intellect to make sense of all existence happening at once.

We think in terms of “time passing,” but in my NDE, it felt as though time just is, and we're moving through it. This means that not only do all points of time exist simultaneously, but also that in the other realm, we can go faster, slower, or even backward and sideways.…

… time, space, and solid matter don't always exist as we normally think of them. During my NDE, I felt that I could focus on any point in time that I needed to access.

Because of this, I believe that when someone has a glimpse of what have previously been interpreted as “past lives,” they're actually accessing parallel or simultaneous existences, because all time exists at once.…

... all time and space exist right now, and we're simply moving through it ... 

This perspective of timelessness is clearly bound up with her identification with the higher self, which (in my scheme) occupies the 4th Plane at all times, because it exists apart from time: 

I often use the phrase infinite self in place of terms such as higher self, soul, and spirit. In order to be a little clearer, understand that I'm referring to the part of me that was aware during the NDP that I'm not just my body–the part of me that felt I was one with every single thing. I was merging with pure consciousness as an infinite, magnificent being, feeling the clarity of why I'm in this body and life at this point in time. This is also the part of me that understood that the illusion of separation is created by identifying too strongly with the external.…

In truth, I'm not my body, my race, religion, or other beliefs, and neither is anyone else. The real self is infinite and much more powerful–a complete and whole entity that isn't broken or damaged in any way. The infinite me already contains all the resources I need to navigate through life, because I'm One with Universal energy. In fact, I am Universal energy.

Moorjani's "infinite self" or "infinite me" is what I think of as the higher self of the 4th Plane (and higher planes). Note that she experienced her father as being free of the prejudices, judgmentalism, and repressive tendencies he exhibited while on earth. Yet he was still identifiable as her father. I suggest that she encountered her father's higher self, which never suffered from earthly limitations, and that she was able to recognize him because there is a continuity of existence and experience from the earthly person to the higher self -- just as there is a continuity between the triangular base of a pyramid and its other sides (to recycle the image from last time). 

Birth and rebirth

Update, June 25: I mistakenly attributed quotes from Testimony of Light to a different book by a different author. The error is corrected now. Thanks to Robert McLuhan for noticing the mistake. 

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I've often commented on the biggest inconsistency in ostensibly channeled communications about the afterlife — the question of whether or not spirits reincarnate. The same concern shows up in Stafford Betty's worthwhile book The Afterlife Unveiled, which consists largely of excerpts from channeled material.

Betty, a PhD in Theology, teaches religuous studies at California State University and has a special intetest in mediumship. In his concluding chapter, Prof. Betty writes: 

I wish I could report that there was unanimity on this very important subject [of reincarnation], but the facts don't permit it. This lack is the main reason I leave open the possibility, however slight, that this entire literature could be coming from the subconscious beliefs of mediums rather than from spirits. There are many reasons for thinking otherwise, and they impress me far more than this lone thorn among so many flowers growing together harmoniously, but there is no denying the prick.

Still, Betty's own book showed me that explicit references to reincarnation are found in some of the oldest modern mediumistic accounts. It does not appear to be the case, as I'd previously believed, that reincarnation scarcely makes an appearance in the older messages but starts appearing regularly in the more recent ones. Instead, there seems to have been a certain tension over this issue right from the start. 

I was already somewhat aware of this, having read The Spirits' Book (free PDF here). This well-known volume was compiled by Allan Kardec and originally published in 1857, not too long after the modern Spiritualist movement began. Kardec's communicating spirits make no bones, so to speak, about reincarnation, which they view as a natural part of any spirit's evolution. 

Asked, "How can the soul that has not attained to perfection during the corporeal life complete the work of its purification?", the spirits answer: "By undergoing the trial of a new existence…" Additional questioning brings out the clarification that the new existence must be a physical one:

The soul, in purifying itself, undoubtedly undergoes a transformation; but, in order to effect this transformation, it needs the trial of corporeal life… we all have many such existences. Those who maintain the contrary wish to keep you in the same ignorance in which they are themselves… In each new existence, a spirit takes a step forwards in the path of progress; when he has stripped himself of all his impurities, he has no further need of the trials of corporeal life.… he who advances quickly spares himself many trials. Nevertheless, these successive incarnations are always very numerous, for progress is almost infinite. 

Returning to Stafford Betty's book, we find a discussion of reincarnation in his chapter on the 1914 book Letters from the Afterlife, in which Elsa Barker channeled Judge David Hatch. The discarnate Hatch tells us: 

You should get away from the mental habit of regarding your present life as the only one, get rid of the idea that the life you expect to lead on this side, after your death, is to be an endless existence in one state. You could no more endure such an endless existence in the subtle matter [of Hatch's world] then you could endure to live forever in the gross matter in which you are now encased. You would weary of it. You could not support it…

I could probably force the coming back [to earth], but that would be unwise, for I should then come back with less power than I want… it is better for me to rest in the condition of light matter until I have accumulated energy enough to come back with power. I shall not do, however, as many souls do; they stay out here until they are as tired of this world as they formerly were tired of the earth, and then are driven back half unconsciously by the irresistible force of the tide of rhythm. I want to guide to that rhythm…

When the soul enters matter, preparing for rebirth, it enters potentiality, if we may use such a term, and all its strength is needed in the herculean effort to form the new body and adjust to it.

Hatch goes on to explain that “the tendencies of any given life, the unexplained impulses and desires, are in nearly all cases brought over" to the new incarnation, though specific memories are usually forgotten. 

Another thing I noticed when reading The Afterlife Unveiled is the sharp similarity between some channeled accounts and the accounts given by the hypnotically regressed patients of Michael Newton and other therapists interested in between-lives memories. Typically, these patients describe an afterlife environment that is more abstract and unearthly than "Summerland" accounts, while saying that their own bodily forms are essentially patterns of light and color. 

As I wrote in an older post, 

There also is very little discussion [in Newton's accounts] of what has been called Paradise or Summerland -- the earthlike environment of the afterlife, featuring gardens, meadows, houses, birds, etc. Some of Newton's subjects do recall studying in a beautiful library, but for the most part the afterlife environment, as they depict it, seems to consist of blobs of color (which are souls) zipping around in a rather abstract geometric setting. It reminds me a little of the old sci-fi movie Tron.

Newton's patients also report being part of a group soul — an organizational unit that allows spirits to learn from each other and make progress together. 

Compare all this with the discussion of reincarnation in another of Betty's sources — The Road to Immortality, channeled by Geraldine Cummins and published in 1932. (Complete text online here.) The communicating spirit, allegedly famed psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers, tells us that on the fourth spiritual plane the spirit acquires

a body entirely dissimilar from the human body. As regards appearance, it can only be described as being apparently a compound of light and colors unimaginable. The shape of this form is influenced by all the ego's past acts so far as they have impressed themselves on his deeper consciousness. This colored compound may be grotesque, bizarre in form, may be lovely beyond words, may possess strange absurdities of outline, or may transcend the loftiest dream of earthly beauty… 

Within the subtle world of which I speak you will perceive a variety of forms which are not known on earth and therefore may not be expressed in words. Yet there is a certain similarity, a correspondence between the appearances on this luminiferous plane. Flowers are there; but these are in shapes unknown to you, exquisite in color, radiant with light. Such colors, such lights are not contained within any earthly octave, are expressed by us in thoughts and not in words…

Betty summarizes the book's presentation of the group soul concept: 

Myers introduces us to the Group Soul, one of the hallmarks of the Fourth Plane. A Group Soul is “a number of souls all bound together by one spirit.” There are countless Group Souls, each headed and inspired by a single spirit of uncommon power. Each Group Soul might contain as few as 20 souls or as many as a thousand. And there is some unifying interest, for example music, that acts as the thread that binds the group together.… Most Group Souls significantly quicken progress. Myers is himself a member of one: “The interesting feature of my state here is that I am within a larger mind, and many of my affinities are contained in it.” He tells us we will “realize how fine and beautiful is this brotherhood within the one being; how it deepens and intensifies existence; how it destroys the cold selfishness so necessary to an earth life.”

Of special interest is the economy of the Group Soul. Each soul is so privy to the experiences of its fellows that the lessons normally learned only by a succession of many reincarnations can be speeded up. It works like this:

“… what the Buddhists would call the karma I had brought with me from a previous life is, very frequently, not that of my life, but of the life of the soul [in my group] that preceded me by many years on earth and left for me a pattern which made my life. I, too, wove a pattern for another of my group during my earthly career. We are all of us distinct, though we are influenced by others of our community on the various planes of being.”

Myers tells us he will not reincarnate. The surrogate experiences of his brothers and sisters, which he feels with as much intensity as if he were the actor, are teaching him all the remaining lessons of earth needed for his advancement.

Another point made by Newton's patients is that they plan out their earthly lives before birth, even choosing their parents. Yet the vicissitudes of life and the vagaries of free will mean that the plan — mostly forgotten by the conscious mind while incarnated — is often not carried out successfully. This idea is paralleled in Betty's excerpts from Testimony of Light (1980), by Helen Greaves, a book of material purportedly originating with a deceased nun, Frances Banks. Note that Greaves' book was published 14 years earlier than Newton's first book, Journey of Souls. 

Here is how the life plan is described by "Frances Banks":

Somewhere in the deeps of my mind two ‘blueprints’ are brought forward into my consciousness. These are so clear that I can (literally) take them out, materialize them and study them. One is the Perfect Idea with which my spirit went bravely into incarnation. The other is the resultant of only a partially-understood Plan… in fact my life as it was actually lived… First of all the mind looks at the whole comparison, and sets the blueprints side-by-side. This is the first shock; a true humbling of yourself to find that you did so little when you would have done so much; that you went wrong so often when you were sure that you were right. During this experience the whole cycle of your life-term unfolds before you in a kaleidoscopic series of pictures. During the crisis one seems to be entirely alone. Yours is the judgment. You stand at your own bar of judgment. You make your own decisions. You take the blame.… You are the accused, the judge and jury.

Readers of Newton's accounts obtained from hypnosis sessions will find this description strikingly familiar.

And here is Frances on the group soul: 

Whilst I was meditating in my golden garden, I found myself ‘transported’ to… a cluster of entities about a Teacher. Immediately I experienced a rise of consciousness, an upsurge of joy, a mingling of unity and harmony which colored my hole being. I cannot explain this in any of the terms, though I doubt whether they will have the same connotation for you. I knew this was right for me. I had come into my own. There was no definite acceptance, the entire operation was unobtrusive and simple, yet I had the conviction that all was well, that I was amidst my fellow-travelers on the Way.

This "upsurge of joy"and sense of belonging are typical of the reactions of Newton's hypnotized patients, often expressed in highly emotional terms. 

Finally, it's worth mentioning a little-known channeled book called The Afterlife of Leslie Stringfellow, which Betty discusses in one of his early chapters. Stringfellow died in 1886. Thereafter, his mother obtained fifteen years of mediumistic communication allegedly from him. Eventually she wrote up the best of these and published just one hundred copies of the resulting book, which she called Leslie's Letter to His Mother. Betty writes, "Leslie's Letter to His Mother was lost to the world until a librarian at the University of Arkansas, Stephen Chism, stumbled across a copy and was so intrigued by it that he undertook to bring it out in a new edition (2005) with the title The Afterlife of Leslie Stringfellow." 

What does Leslie say about reincarnation? I'm not sure. I did not see it mentioned in Betty's overview, but in his last chapter, Betty reports, "One of our seven sources (Benson/Borgia) says nothing about [reincarnation] and even implies that it doesn't occur. The other six do mention it, and five of those six endorse it."

"Benson/Borgia" refers to the famous book by Anthony Borgia, Life in the World Unseen* (1956). Presumably, then, the Stringfellow book does contain some discussion of reincarnation — and given its early date and near-total obscurity, I'd be interested to know what it says. So I've ordered it. (Amazon sells only used copies, starting at $95, but the book is available from the publisher for $14.95.) 

It should be noted that even some contemporary channeled material throws cold water on reincarnation. The Risen, by August Goforth and Timothy Gray, quotes its discarnate coauthor as stating emphatically that reincarnation does not occur. 

So what can we conclude from all this? First, reincarnation has been part of Spiritualist literature from early days, and is not a later accretion inspired by the Theosophy and similar movements. Second, there has never been unanimity on this issue. Third, there are interesting parallels between some channeled material and the accounts of between-lives hypnotic regressions. 

If reincarnation is a fact, it would seem most likely that the group soul concept is intimately connected with it, and that the whole process is more subtle and complex than it might appear. The channeled material attributed to Seth and to Silver Birch tends in this direction also.

Voltaire may yet be proved correct in his observation: "It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection."

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*By the way, I should note that Borgia's book, Life in the World Unseen, has always read like fiction to me. Prof. Betty's summary of the book does nothing to change my impression. 

Slices of life

As readers of this blog know, I've been puzzled by the divergence between two sets of afterlife reports. One set essentially involves a trip to either a disturbing, hellish limbo or a beautiful paradise (known as Summerland to Spiritualists), while the other set involves an immediate awareness of a higher self that chooses various incarnations for the purpose of growth.

The trouble is that the first set of reports (often found in NDEs and mediumship) typically has little to say abut reincarnation and suggests that the earthly persona continues after death. But the second set (obtained through hypnotic regression and the channeling of allegedly advanced spirits) insists on reincarnation and regards the earthly persona as a temporary role that is quickly discarded. 

Moreover, the two sets of reports differ in other aspects. The first set focuses on an earthlike environment of gardens, parks, homes, and even cities, inhabited by beings in human form, while the second set tells of a more abstract environment of pure geometry in which souls see each other primarily as glowing lights (with different colors of the spectrum relating to different degrees of spiritual evolution).

The easiest course of action would be to jettison one set pf reports and concentrate exclusively on the other. But I think there is pretty good evidence for both, although the first set has been more extensively investigated, and the second set is weakened by the inherent problems of hypnosis (e.g., hypnotized subjects may confabulate or may be influenced by the hypnotist). If I had to choose just one set, I'd go with the first, but I suspect that there is some truth in each set -- but not the whole truth in either.

Noodling on this, I sketched out the simple little diagram reproduced below. I admit this could look a lot better if done on a computer, but I'm busy right now and don't have time to put together a better chart. Still, this crude drawing at least gets the basic idea across.

The idea is that the Self, in the sense of the totality of the spiritual entity that we know as "I," may extend across various levels of existence. Spiritualists are always talking about different planes of reality, and the implication is that we travel from one plane to the next. But suppose that our Self actually cuts across all the planes simultaneously, and what "travels" is only our awareness (or at least our primary awareness, in the sense of of our principal focus). Moreover, suppose that time either has no meaning in this scheme or operates very differently from the way it does in our spacetime universe. The end result is that the Self could operate on various levels at once, and the story told by the Self when focusing on its experience in one plane would differ from the story it tells when focusing on a different level of experience. 

Though I did not mark it this way in the diagram (because I didn't think of it), we could label each sub-Self as Self 1, Self 2, Self 3, etc., with higher numbers representing higher levels of existence. Note that the Self is depicted as a circle on each plane, and that the radius of the circle varies consistently as you go from one plane to the next. Awareness on higher planes is represented by a bigger radius, while awareness on lower planes is represented by a smaller radius. This simple graphic tries to express the idea that consciousness expands as it moves deeper into the system.

Note also that various circles are slices of a cone, which represents the Self in its entirety. The cone expresses the idea that these circular slices or cross-sections are part of a larger, continuous whole which bridges the gaps between the planes. Because the Self is ultimately one entity, no matter how it may be sectioned into slices, no part of it is really cut off from the rest, which means that the relatively restricted awareness of the earth plane can come into contact with the higher awareness of higher planes (perhaps through prayer, meditation, or a burst of insight sometimes known as "cosmic consciousness"). This viewpoint also dovetails with the hypothesis popularized by Aldous Huxley that the brain serves as a "funnel" or "filter" restricting a wider range of consciousness. 

Perhaps this diagram, though obviously simplistic and metaphorical, can make some sense of the conflicting sets of reports. NDErs and ordinary mediumistic communicators are reporting from the level of awareness depicted here as "limbo" or "Summerland." Those who recall past lives under hypnosis, and especially those who recall a life between lives, may be reporting from a higher (or deeper) level of awareness. In this respect it is worth noting that between-lives therapists insist that only the deepest stage of hypnosis can access these memories. Naturally, the reports of purportedly high-level channeled beings would also reflect a higher plane of awareness. 

What is perhaps most noteworthy is the implication that all of this is going on at the same time, or perhaps "outside of" time. While it may seem as if we are engaged in a long and tedious struggle to attain spiritual enlightenment, this model suggests that we have already attained it -- in fact, that we never had to attain it because it was part of us from the beginning. The various lower levels of awareness with their more restricted range (represented by smaller radii) are part of a continuum with the highest level of awareness, so whatever we are seeking on this plane has already been found (actually did not have to be "found") on the higher plane. And the awareness on that plane is just as much "I" as the awareness on this plane; it is not a separate entity, though it may feel separate from the limited perspective of earthly life.

Finally, notice that the various cross-sections form a series of concentric circles, suggesting that each smaller circle is contained within the larger one. Nothing is lost; there is only expansion to a wider point of view. If this is correct, then it may be wrong to say (as, in the past, I have) that the ego is sloughed off after death. It may be more correct to say that the ego is subsumed within a wider consciousness that places it into a more appropriate perspective, thus robbing it of its power to mislead or confuse. This higher awareness, even on the limbo or Summerland planes, would be consistent with many reports of communicators who see their own mistakes more clearly than than they did on earth, and who (especially at the Summerland level) have risen above their earthbound limitations of perception. The field of induced after-death communication offers many examples of communications that seem to come from this level of awareness.

I'm not sure how clear this all is, and being busy, I can't revise and clarify my remarks as much as I ordinarily would. But it just may be the case that the apparent contradiction between the two sets of afterlife reports can be resolved by looking at the whole issue from a different perspective. 

My thanks to commenter Juan, whose remark about slicing off circular sections of a sphere probably got me thinking along these lines (although I realize I am not going in quite the direction he suggested). 

 

The tip of the iceberg

In some of my recent posts I've been looking at the question of a duality in our spiritual nature. The main reason for my interest in this recondite topic is that there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of scenarios spun about life after death. In one scenario, the individual with all his faculties intact (and even enhanced) relocates to a spiritual world and proceeds to learn and evolve in this new environment. In the other scenario, the person sheds his ego like a worn-out coat, remembers that he has lived many lives and that all the lives were essentially roles he played, and proceeds to plan a new incarnation. 

Reconciling these two storylines is not easy. In fact, it may be impossible, unless we concede that there are two parts to each of us, a soul and a spirit, and that while the soul may live in Summerland, the spirit is busy reincarnating on Earth. 

But how can this be? What sense does it make to talk about a person or a self, if it can be split apart, or if if it was never actually united in the first place? 

The best answer I've found to this question is in an essay by Michael Tymn called "The Enigma of Reincarnation." It's a short, well-written piece, so I'd suggest that anyone interested in this subject simply read the whole thing.

What stands out for me is a certain uniformity of opinion that emerges from various "channeled" sources over a long period of time. The viewpoint that takes shape is simple enough to grasp in principle, but probably impossible to understand in detail, because it would require us to think outside the limitations of our own (earthbound) minds. 

Essentially, the idea is that the individual self (call it the soul) is part of a larger group soul (call it the spirit). The spirit is akin to the higher self, the spirit guide, the guardian angel, etc. The soul, on the other hand, is basically the personality-centered ego-mind we know as "me" in ordinary life. Various souls, each a unique individual, contribute to the totality of the group soul or spirit. 

The channeled entity Silver Birch compared the whole system to a radiant diamond. The diamond as a whole is the group soul; the facets of the diamond are the individual souls. He also compared it to an iceberg, with the tip of the iceberg representing the individual soul and the greater submerged mass representing the group soul. 

Tymn also quotes from the purported communication of a long-dead Glastonbury monk, who was asked why he remained connected to the ruins of the abbey he had loved in life, instead of venturing into the higher planes of the spirit world. Via automatic writing the monk replied, “Why cling I to that which is not?  It is I, and it is not I, butt parte of me which dwelleth in the past is bound to that which my carnal soul loved and called home these many years. Yet, I, Johannes, amm of many partes, and ye better parte doeth other things – Laus, Laus Deo – only that part which remembreth clingeth like memory to what it seeth yet.”

It appears to me that if the two lines of evidence for the afterlife are both valid -- that is, if the Summerland scenario and the reincarnation scenario are both true -- then we have to concede that old Johannes was right. We are indeed "of many parts." We do possess uniqueness and personhood, but we are also part of a larger whole that has its own purpose and intentions. We are both bounded and unbounded; we are defined and limited by our individuality, yet we partake of something larger. And we cannot really grasp this paradox with minds conditioned by ordinary earthly reality. We can state it in words, but we can't make complete sense of it, because it is too far removed from our bodily, physical experiences. 

Some understanding of our multi-part spiritual nature seems to have found its way into many religious traditions -- even into Christianity, which distinguishes between soul and spirit in its founding texts (though not many modern Christians would acknowledge this distinction). We seem to simultaneously identify with the small self of the ego and personality, and with the big self of the witness or oversoul or "cosmic consciousness." I, for one, can't see how the apparently indivisible thing I call "my self" can actually be two very different things at the same time. But I gather that such is the case. 

And if so, then it may help to explain how these two scenarios can coexist. The soul speaks through mediums and remembers its earthly life; it may or may not have any glimmer of the bigger picture, which includes reincarnation, and thus mediumistic communications on this subject may be confused and conflicting. The spirit (oversoul, group soul) speaks through hypnotic regression sessions, identifying with each earthly life as it is lived, but shedding that identification between lives. Each one -- spirit and soul -- is truly "me," but in a different respect.

As a very loose and perhaps not very helpful analogy, we might think of a photon, which can be either a wave or a particle -- two very different modes of expression, yet neither is any less real. The oversoul might be likened to the wave, which is a probability distribution encompassing all possible locations of the photon, while the soul might be compared to the particle, a unique point in space and time. Without the particle, the photon would remain only a potential; without the wave, the photon would be incapable of movement and change. 

Or we might think of the duality of yin and yang -- two complementary principles that make up a single whole, yet remain distingiushable. 

But all these comparisons ultimately fail. As Michael Tymn reports: "Trying to explain reincarnation to humans, Silver Birch added, is like trying to explain the color of the sky to someone who has been blind from birth." And as he also tells us: 

When Frederick Bligh Bond asked another of the Glastonbury spirits, a more fluent speaking one, about reincarnation, the spirit replied:  “You understand not reincarnation, nor can we explain.  What in you reincarnates, do you think?  How can you find words?  Blind gropers after immutable facts, which are not of your sphere of experience.”

Little big man

Another great case from The Survival Top 40 is the James Leininger reincarnation case. This story is sufficiently well known that I don't think I need to summarize it; anyway, Miles Edward Allen's excellent summary is readily available at this link.*

[*Update, 2023: The Survival Top 40 site is gone, but Allen recaps the Leininger case in this YouTube video. ]

Besides the strongly evidential value of James' statements about the plane he piloted, the ship he flew from, the names of his fallen comrades, etc., there are three aspects of the case that strike me as particularly interesting. 

First, little James showed strong emotions when remembering his past life as a pilot. The whole episode began with James' nightmares, in which he struggled and screamed in bed. Whatever he was experiencing was obviously vivid and terrifying. Moreover, he showed flare-ups of righteous indignation that would seem more appropriate for a WWII flier than a two-year-old. As Miles Edward Allen recounts, when James identified his ship as the Natoma, his father replied that the name sounded Japanese. "Little James grew indignant and said no. It was American!" It's certainly credible that a patriotic serviceman would have that reaction; after all, it was the Japanese who shot him down. James, on the other hand, was probably too young to know or care about the Japanese through his own personal experience. 

Second, James' description of the downed pilot, given while he was in the throes of his nightmare, was "Airplane crash! Plane on fire! Little man can't get out!" I don't know if this has been commented on by others, but I couldn't help wondering why James would describe the pilot as a "little man." After all, the pilot was a full-grown adult, considerably larger than James, a toddler. It occurred to me that the description would make sense if the pilot were viewed from a distance - that is, from an external vantage point. Looking down (say) on the struggling pilot in the cockpit, one might very well see him as a "little man." Such a perspective is commonly reported in NDEs and OBEs, when a person rises out of his body and looks down on himself from a height. There have also been reports of "dual consciousness" in such situations, where the person is simultaneously looking at his body from an external perspective and still experiencing the pain or anxiety of his physical body. If James was in fact remembering an event from a former life, it is possible that he was reliving the pilot's experience of separating from his dying body while still maintaining some connection to it. Naturally James was much too young to have been exposed to NDE literature or influenced by it.  

Finally, the coda to Miles Edward Allen's summary connects neatly with accounts given by people who have been hypnotically regressed to remember a life between lives - that is, a spiritual existence bookended by earthly incarnations. Accurately describing a "big pink hotel" in Hawaii and his parents' romantic dinner on the beach, James said, "When I found you and Mommy, I knew you would be good to me." The dinner in question took place five weeks before James was conceived. Many life-between-lives subjects have stated that they were allowed to choose their next set of parents, and that they would look in on various couples before making a selection. Again, it seems impossible that a young child would know anything about this research, especially since his parents were committed Christians who rejected the very idea of reincarnation until James' own testimony eventually changed their minds. 

To me, the evidential details supplied by James (exhaustively researched and confirmed by his father), in combination with his intense emotional connection to the memories, his arguably NDE-like description of the "little man" in his wrecked plane, and the similarity of James' last remark to life-between-lives testimony, add up to an especially powerful case.

It may be worth adding that the great majority of children who spontaneously recall a past life report that their previous incarnation ended suddenly, either by violence or a quickly fatal disease. Perhaps an unexpected death, one that the soul is not properly prepared for, is more likely to be recalled in the next incarnation, either because of lingering trauma or from a sense of unfinished business. James' story clearly fits this pattern; he remembers dying young, in combat, on the very last day before he was scheduled to ship home.