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Is There Life After Death?
Science and the Survival Hypothesis
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WILLIS W. HARMAN, PH.D.
Willis W. Harman, Ph.D., was president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and emeritus professor at Stanford University until his death in 1997. His books include Higher Creativity, Global Mind Change, and New Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. The following chapter is based on a film interview and a public address given at the Institute of Noetic Sciences Conference on Consciousness in Chicago, Illinois.
"Most scientists would claim that there is no satisfactory scientific
evidence to support the hypothesis of the continuation of personhood
through the transition called death .... It is essential to recognize that
science in its present form is not in a position to deny the possibility."
Dr. Willis Harman
The question of whether our personhood in some sense persists through the death of the physical body became an issue in the Western world mainly after the middle of the 19th century, when the prestige and implications of modem science had become such as to seriously challenge the folk belief in some kind of survival of personal consciousness. Interest in the question peaked around the turn of the century and waned to a mere trickle after World War 1. There was a slow resurgence of interest beginning in the 1960s, and we seem set for a fresh look at the question in the 1990s.
The question is obviously important to the individual, relating as it does to his or her values and life goals. But it is important to society as well. Our present health care system spends a major fraction of its resources keeping people physically alive past the point where, with a different cultural outlook on mortality, they would be preparing for a dignified and meaningful death. The concept of survival is central to spirituality and religion. Most important, the fear of non-survival the fear of death as ceasing existence underlies many other fears, fears which will be even more prevalent as modem society undergoes a paradigmatic transition that is uncharted but imminent.
Most scientists would claim that there is no satisfactory scientific evidence to support the hypothesis of the continuation of personhood through the transition called death. That objection would be based largely on the presumption that discarnate intelligence is simply impossible; consciousness and memory cannot be imagined to exist in the absence of a physical brain. It is essential to recognize that science in its present form is not in a position to deny the possibility. That is because the present epistemology (way of knowing, "rules of evidence") of Western science rules out any consideration of consciousness as a causal reality. Thus, it does not find in its understanding of causality anything resembling a self or personality, endowed with reason, will, and a valid sense of value either before or after death.
The eminent British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington made this point with a story of an ichthyologist a scientist who studies fish who explored the seven seas with a net of one inch mesh, and after a lifetime of research arrived at the scientific conclusion that there are no creatures with a diameter less than one inch each!
Thus, we have this basic perplexity. On the one hand, there is a tremendous amount of empirical, anecdotal, clinical, and traditional evidence suggesting that in some sense the essence of the person survives physical death, and that the realm of the after death is not so discontinuous with Earthly life as we might have been led to assume. On the other hand, there appears to be no way within the conceptual systems of contemporary science to make any sense out of this concept.
The Challenge to Scientific Epistemology
The puzzle of consciousness embodied or discarnate poses the most fundamental challenge to the dominant scientific epistemology. The late Nobel laureate neuroscientist Roger Sperry long insisted that the scientific account of the universe cannot be complete or accurate unless it includes consciousness as a causal reality.' To include consciousness as a causal foreseen though we take that fact to be obvious in our everyday lives is to abandon the whole idea of a strictly scientific worldview within which everything obeys inviolable "scientific laws" and conscious intention has no place. The quantified relationships of conventional science do, of course, describe what happens under those conditions when consciousness as a causal factor is not interfering and so they are as useful as they ever were for prediction, control, and the design of manipulative technologies. But that science quantum physics and chaos theory included is in no way qualified to deny the efficacy of consciousness, whether or not it appears to be embodied.
We will, in time, have an adequate science of consciousness a science that will be based in the totality of human experience, not merely the phenomenal (that is, in physical sense data). For that we need an epistemology of the subjective. There is good reason to feel that development may not be far off.'
Earlier Attempts to Explore Survival within a Scientific Framework
The medieval worldview was characterized by a continuum between this world and the next, such that the question of continuation of consciousness didn't even come up. This continuum had been shattered by the scientific revolution, so that by the mid 19th century there was a near total discrepancy between the religious worldview within which the survival issue was presumably resolved, and a scientific worldview within which the question was irrelevant.
About this time, considerable public interest developed in the phenomenon of medium ship, wherein a person in an altered state of consciousness appears to be able to receive communications from discarnate entities, and on occasion to evoke such physical manifestations as raps, table tipping, Ouija board influencing, and the like. In the United States, the spontaneous occurrence of such abilities on the part of the Fox sisters triggered a flurry of enthusiasm. Eventually this attracted the serious interest of scholars such as Sir Oliver Lodge and Frederic W. H. Myers in England, and William James in the United States; and led to disciplined investigation and the creation of professional societies, the most prestigious being the Society for Psychical Research, formed in 1882.
The messages came in various ways. Some were utterances by the medium, taken down by a clerical recorder. Others came in the form of automatic writing. A few more were inscribed on closed hinged slates (of the type that were commonly used by schoolchildren) in which a slate pencil had been inserted, and the closed slates are held by the researcher or placed under heavy objects to eliminate any possibility of fraud. (On careful examination, the particles of writing material appeared to have been deposited on the slate face, rather than rubbed off the slate pencil in the normal way. Of course, the idea that writing could take place without a writer to move the pencil was not accepted by skeptics, but there seems to have been adequate critical observers to give the reports credibility).
One of the most consistently performing of the mediums was Mrs. Piper, thoroughly investigated on both sides of the Atlantic by James, Lodge, Myers, and others. On many occasions, she produced information that purported to come from the deceased communicator, and which was rather convincing. In a typical instance, Lodge handed her a watch that had belonged to his uncle, who had been dead for 20 years. "Uncle Jerry," contacted via this connection and asked about his boyhood, recalled (through the medium's voice) several incidents killing a cat in a place called Smith's field, owning a long snakeskin, and being nearly drowned in a creek all three of which were totally new to Lodge. Upon questioning two living brothers of the deceased uncle, one remembered the snakeskin but denied killing the cat. The other, however, remembered both the cat and playing in Smith's field, and he gave details of the creek incident.
Myers's investigations in England were outstanding, and toward the end of his life he summarized the evidence for survival in a landmark two volume work called Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.' He and his fellow researchers were consistently frustrated by the difficulties of studying mediumistic communication. He half jokingly promised his fellow workers that when he died he would devise an experiment that would leave people in no doubt as to his identity and survival. Beginning shortly after his death, and continuing for three decades, there was a remarkable series of communications purporting to come from him (with a few from his colleagues Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgwick, (who had also died by this time) which became known as the "cross-correspondences." These scripts came to a dozen mediums (Mrs. Piper being one) residing on three continents. They comprised fragments of messages, including parts of classical quotations, which were clearly incomplete in themselves, but when assembled at the British Society for Psychical Research office in London, fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.'
Myers's attempt to bring after death experience into the reach of science did not, it seems, stop with his death, nor even with the cross-correspondences. More than 20 years after his death, a sensitive in North Ireland named Geraldine Cummins began to take down through automatic writing, lengthy scripts attributed to the deceased Myers. These were published (with Cummins identified as author, but with a foreword explaining why she believed them to be transmissions from Myers) as two books, The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality.' They contain a fascinating report of his after death experience and his mapping of the after death possibilities, the latter being broadly similar to mappings that have appeared before and since from other sources.
All of the work with mediums over these many decades faced the obvious problem that, whatever the original source of the communication, there was no way of telling how much it had been corrupted by bubbling up through the medium's unconscious mind. This problem plagued all of the researchers from Frederic Myers on, and was a source of continual frustration, even when there seemed to be something significantly evidential in the messages received.
As if in response to this problem, shortly after magnetic tape recorders became widely used in the 1950s, messages began to appear on various tape recorders that purported to be from discarnate beings. Some of these were persons who, prior to their deaths, were involved with research on the survival issue. In still more recent times, as other technologies became available, these apparent communications have extended to involve television screens, video tape recorders, and words and images scanned into computer disks; to include real time two way communication; and to include photograph like images as well as verbal messages. All of this would seem on the face of it to constitute a totally preposterous claim, yet some of these communications, collected by researchers in at least six countries, comprise intriguing evidential significance.'
The Question Is Still Alive
Thus, there are two developments that together make it plausible that this field of research might take on a new life. One is the recognition that in order to include even ordinary consciousness as a causal factor in phenomena, science will have to be reconstituted on the basis of new metaphysical assumptions a new "epistemology of the subjective." The other is the emergence of new kinds of data that imply, at least, that progress will be made through the active collaboration of researchers on both sides of the curtain we call death.
One further development adds to the plausibility of growing interest in survival research. Bear in mind that the concept of the unconscious mind has become a widely accepted basis for psychoanalysis and other psycho therapies a full half century before it gained acceptance in strict scientific circles. So, it is not without significance that therapies based on recollection of past lives' and on the possibility of spirit attachment' are now well established, although the conceivability of neither concept is admitted by the scientific community.
We can begin to see, in outline at least, the kind of answer that is likely to come out of this new research field. Ken Wilber" has presented the case that when all the available evidence is brought to bear, it points toward an ontological reality that is a continuum from the material at one end of the spectrum, to Spirit at the other end. The human being is potentially able to become aware of the entire continuum, albeit in Earthly life (and particularly in the modem world), attention is primarily focused on the material. A more adequate science would direct its attention to the entire continuum, not just to the material end. Furthermore, it would include not only scientific (upward) causation for example, consciousness and behavior "explained" in terms of physical micro-phenomena but "downward causation" as well that is, causation from consciousness and spirit "downward" to the emotional and material.
From that ontological perspective, death appears less an extinction, than an awakening to "where one was all along." At death, the center of awareness shifts from the physical to higher planes (with perhaps a period of confusion and/or sleepy resting in between.) We don't go somewhere at death; we are already there. As this new view becomes real in our lives, fear of death disappears. We couldn't non exist if we wanted to!
"One great scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, came to the following conclusion about the limitations of science.
He once said, 'I can take my telescope and look millions of miles into space, but I can put it aside, go into my room, close the door, get down on my knees in earnest prayer, and see more of heaven and get closer to God than I can assisted by all the telescopes and material agencies on Earth.'
This profound statement still holds true today.
Since Newton's time, no scientist has been able to develop any instrument
for communicating with the Creator that is equal to the power of going
within through prayer and meditation. As Newton said, prayer took him
further than his scientific tools. He was referring to a process of
inverting one's attention to look and listen to what is within. That
looking and listening to the inner world is another name for meditation.
Sant Rajinder Singh
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