The Survival of Bodily Death
Eighth Invitational Conference
May 21 to 26, 2006

Conference Summary by Frank Poletti

Conference Participants

Neuroscientist and Irreducible Mind author Ed Kelly;
Frederic Myers specialist Emily Kelly;
Psychotherapist and author Adam Crabtree;
Child psychiatrist and reincarnation researcher Jim Tucker;
Near-Death researcher Bruce Greyson;
Quantum physicist Henry Stapp;
Chairman of Esalen Institute Michael Murphy;
Transpersonal psychologist and researcher Charles Tart;
A. N. Whitehead and Sri Aurobindo scholar Eric Weiss;
Historian of science Bob Rosenberg;
Sri Aurobindo biographer Peter Heehs;
Philosopher of consciousness Christian De Quincey;
William James scholar Bruce Wilshire;
CTR Coordinator Frank Poletti.

Group Review of the Current Survival Data

Here is what some of the leading researchers who have participated in the Esalen conferences said about the survival data:

Emily Kelly

Kelly began by saying that she does not think individual areas of survival research can or should be ranked in terms of the strength of the evidence. However, she does think that certain areas are currently weaker and not yet solidly or reliably verifiable from an empirical standpoint. These are:

• Mediumistic readings of more recent vintage (late 20^th/early 21^st century)
• Electronic voice phenomena
• "Past-life regressions" under hypnosis
• Hauntings

Kelly went on to say that there are other research areas that she does consider more scientifically reliable. In particular, she noted that individually strong cases and lines of research exist for each of the categories below:

• Mediumship
• Near-death experiences (NDEs), especially cases involving normal or enhanced mental functioning when the physical brain is grossly incapacitated (as in coma, cardiac arrest, or deep general anesthesia)
• Death-bed visions and other forms of apparitions
• "Possession" cases
• Cases of the reincarnation type

Bruce Greyson

Greyson followed by concurring with Kelly's overall position. So rather than repeat her list, he added a few extra points:

• Greyson finds the Pam Reynolds case the most compelling NDE case.
• Accurate reports in NDE states of deceased relatives that were unknown to be already dead are compelling to Greyson.
• Children who remember past lives often display strikingly similar behavioral traits and hard to develop skills that were prevalent in the reputed previous life.
• The high degree of intentionality, agency, and intelligent action in the best apparition cases is also compelling to Greyson.

Jim Tucker

Tucker followed Kelly and Greyson by reviewing some of the cases of children who recall past lives.(These cases have been mentioned in previous conference summaries, and the reader is welcome to review them there.)Tucker noted that there are 2,500 cases registered in the University of Virginia files of children reporting these memories, with many of the statements being verified to be accurate for one deceased individual. In addition to such apparent knowledge, Tucker noted that some cases also include other prominent features:

• Highly specific entrance and exit wounds of a deceased person that correlate strikingly with birth marks on the child.
• In extremely rare instances, a child demonstrates xenoglossy, the ability to speak a language that has not been learned.

Ed Kelly

Ed Kelly followed Tucker by highlighting both the richness and the meticulousness of the early research on survival, emphasizing again the research on trance mediumship by persons such as William James, F. W. H. Myers, and numerous colleagues. Kelly reviewed briefly the following cases or areas of research:

• The mediumship of Mrs. Piper (discussed in chapters 4 and 5 of Irreducible Mind), which originally compelled William James to take psychical research seriously, and especially its "GP" phase, as investigated and reported by Richard Hodgson.
• The "cross-correspondence" cases, which spanned several decades of the early 20^th century. In these, multiple mediums (who were physically separated and sometimes even located on different continents) received communications which, although fragmentary and unintelligible individually, subsequently proved to be interpretable as pieces of a puzzle deliberately constructed by one or more ostensibly surviving personalities in order to demonstrate their continued existence. The best such cases turned upon voluminous amounts of detailed knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, knowledge that was characteristic of the deceased communicators, but far surpassed the attainments of the mediums (such as Mrs. Piper).
• The sober conclusions of various eminent scholars including Curt Ducasse, C. D. Broad, H. H. Price, Stephen Braude, Alan Gauld, and Ian Stevenson, who have reviewed the entire literature of the subject in depth and with an open mind. A good example is the illustrious American psychologist Gardner Murphy, who after decades of intensive study found himself unable to dismiss the evidence for survival: "It is the autonomy, the purposiveness, the cogency, above all the individuality, of the source of the messages, that cannot be by-passed. Struggle though I may as a psychologist, for forty-five years, to try to find a "naturalistic" and "normal" way of handling this material, I cannot do this even when using all the information we have about human chicanery and all we have about the far-flung telepathic and clairvoyant abilities of some gifted sensitives. The case looks like communication with the deceased" (Challenge of Psychical Research, p. 273).

Murphy also emphasized, however, what he termed the "biological difficulty", the fact that evidence for survival seems inescapably in conflict with mountains of other evidence supporting the conventional mainstream picture of mind-brain relations – that everything in mind and consciousness is generated by physical processes occurring in brains. For Murphy, this amounted to an irresistible force striking an immovable object, a conflict he could not resolve. The concluding chapter of Irreducible Mind, however, argues that this apparent conflict can in fact be overcome. There, we have already sketched a spectrum of theoretical positions which can be reconciled with leading-edge contemporary physics and neuroscience, yet appear – unlike the conventional mainstream view - capable of accommodating the full range of empirical data. The central ongoing task of the Survival Seminar is to determine which of these models is in fact most promising, and to flesh it out in greater detail.

In sum, Kelly said that areas of research like those outlined above have provided significant evidence supportive of the survival hypothesis, and clearly warrant further research and theorizing. He also emphasized, however, that in order for that theorizing about survival to be effective and meaningful, it must constantly remain grounded in the best available empirical evidence. This is our ongoing mission.

Charles Tart

Tart said that he considers the general parapsychological data, such as: psychokinesis (or PK), precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychic healings, to have been repeatedly verified under rigorous conditions. Tart's working hypothesis is that the human mind can do things that transcend the seeming limits of the physical brain. Tart also mentioned that he has been impressed by mediumship cases. In recent years, Tart has added the NDE data and OBE data to his own list of highly reputable research and evidence. In this regard Tart mentioned the Pam Reynolds case (please see the conference summary for the May 2002 Survival conference for more details on this).

In summation, the loose and unofficial group consensus was that only when all the various lines of data and research are taken together as a whole does the survival hypothesis become compelling as the most parsimonious explanation. And thus at the very least, all of these areas of inquiry deserve further careful investigation with an open mind and a rigorous empirical approach.

Henry Stapp
William James, A. N. Whitehead, and Quantum Physics

http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/stappfiles.html

Stapp keeps this site regularly updated with new papers, and it includes significant sections from his forthcoming book Mindful Universe, which is written for a more general audience.

During the non-technical part of his presentation, Stapp looked at the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, John von Neumann, and Werner Heisenberg, and how each of these thinkers has influenced his own conceptions of quantum physics and consciousness. Stapp noted that for his current book-in-progress, he is going back to William James's phenomenology and demonstrating how it is consistent with some of Stapp's own research findings.

With respect to Whitehead, Stapp discussed how and why he thinks that his "process ontology" (meaning that his theory of reality or being is constantly developing, evolving, moving—i. E., in process) can serve as a framework for understanding the quantum physics of Heisenberg and von Neumann. Stapp mentioned that it is important to realize that instead of following in Newton's historical footsteps, Whitehead preferred Leibniz's relational conception of space and time. Thus, he started his own system from a very different standpoint than that of classical Newtonian physics. In Whitehead's major philosophical work Process and Reality, there are several sections on what he calls the "extensive continuum," which is his term for the more relational structure of space and time. As Stapp described in detail some of the technical aspects of quantum physics, he demonstrated how the mathematical formalisms are indeed consistent with Whitehead's metaphysical outlook.

As he proceeded, Stapp offered a few quotations from Whitehead to illustrate his points:

"This continuum is itself merely potentiality for the vision."

"Continuity concerns what is potential. Whereas actuality is incurably atomic."

"The contemporary world is divided and atomic—the multiplicity of definite actual entities. These contemporary actual entities are divided from each other and are not overlapping, and are not themselves divisible into other actual entities."

After reading these quotations, Stapp said that the basic Whiteheadian approach, in which the potential of the extensive continuum turns into the actual and definite world, is consistent with quantum mechanics. According to the Heisenberg and von Neummann interpretations, the quantum state is indeed continuous like Whitehead's "extensive continuum" until an event happens.

Stapp thinks that Whitehead was correct to emphasize the atomistic and discrete nature of reality. Stapp cited Heisenberg to show the resemblance:

"The observation itself changes the probability function discontinuously. It selects of all possible events the actual one that has taken place. Since through the observation our knowledge of the system has changed discontinuously, its mathematical representation has also undergone a discontinuous change."

Later in his presentation, Stapp showed how many of Whitehead's core ideas were already prefaced in the work of William James. Stapp cited some passages from Whithead's writings and then James's to show the parallels. Whitehead wrote:

"The final facts are all alike, the actual entities, and these are drops of experience."

"These drops of experience, also called actual occasions (happenings), are the final real things of which the world is made."

Whereas William James had already written:

"Either your experience is of no content of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content and change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds, or drops of perception. Intellectually and upon reflection, you can divide them into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all."

Stapp pointed out that James's phenomenological descriptions of personal experience became the basis for an entire metaphysical system in Whithead's Process and Reality.

After comparing Whitehead and James, Stapp turned to James's view on the human soul, namely that he rejected the notion of a substantial soul. Stapp explained that in James's writings the key phrase here is "fantastic laws of clinging."By this, James meant that all we ever know by direct experience are drops or moments, so the fascinating question is how do such drops come to congeal or form meaningful and recognizable gestalts. According to Whitehead, the soul must be a coherent sequence of these drops (or actual occasions). What we call the "stream of consciousness" is a sequence of events. Stapp speculated that if there is survival after death, then we might try to think about it in terms of how James's "fantastic laws of clinging" continue to cling even after the passing of a physical body and brain.

At the end of his presentation, Stapp discussed some of his contemporary collaborations with neuroscientists to test what he calls the Quantum Zeno Effect (see Stapp's website for more details). Although they are looking at how quantum processes influence brain activity, Stapp emphasized that this work at the interface of neuroscience and quantum physics is fundamentally different from the work popularized by Roger Penrose a few years back. Stapp mentioned that he was recently with six neuroscientists from UC Berkeley, who are working on a proposal to study the Quantum Zeno Effect with rigorous experiments. In particular, they are looking at the speed at which brain states become synchronized (neural synchrony). They hypothesize that certain synchronies in brain activity may occur so fast that classical physics (non-quantum physics) is not able to account for the results.

Overall, Stapp is serving an essential role as the survival group proceeds. In particular, he is ensuring that both the empirical researchers into the survival-related evidence and the more speculative philosophers of the big picture both stay grounded in the rigorously verified empirical results coming from quantum physics.

Charles Tart
State-Specific Sciences and the Survival Hypothesis

http://www.paradigm-sys.com/ctt_articles2.cfm?id=53

Other articles and information by Tart can be found at this URL:

http://www.paradigm-sys.com/

Tart said that even though the editor of Science received around 100 letters in response to his article, still today this type of research is cutting-edge and thus rare in institutional settings. But more individuals than we might think are open to this line of research. Tart noted that a psychiatrist wrote him years ago to say that when first reading Tart's proposal in his ordinary state he rejected it, but while he was in an altered-state-of-consciousness (or ASC), he thought it made total sense to him. Tart said that we might think of ASCs somewhat like foreign lands. We can travel there, but when we return, what we have are our differing reports of those types of terrain. By comparing the reports of different travelers, we can get a useful idea of the territory.

Tart gave an overview of the scientific attitude and methodology that he has employed for many years in his research. He calls it the "mandala of science." This mandala involves moving through various stages in a circular or spiral-like process. At minimum, there are four stages:

1. Observation: the careful study of experience.
2. Theory generation: the proposal of an explanatory framework.
3. Testing: rigorous testing aiming for replication and predictability.
4. Peer review: social discussion regarding one's results.

After describing the mandala above, Tart warned of the human capacity for self-fulfilling rationalization. We can all create an explanation for anything and make it sound plausible. This fact makes the 3^rd stage critical. Predictability and testing the results stemming from predictions is an essential procedure to keep us from self-validating our own biased views. Overall, Tart said that good science is a cyclical process that moves through these stages on the mandala.

Turning to the evidence for survival, Tart said that we could employ research strategies in ASCs to help complement the survival research that is already being conducted by researchers in ordinary states. Tart ventured that there may be properties of ordinary consciousness that prevent a fuller acceptance of the survival data by widespread numbers of people. He said that our ordinary state can often act like a selective filter that limits what we can understand. Some ASCs that are already widely practiced include REM stage dreaming, lucid dreaming, and shamanic states. Tart pointed out that in REM dreaming there is little or no input from the body's senses. So, it may be a vague indicator of what survival might be like. Likewise, lucid dreaming and shamanic journeying are also types of practices that could indicate something of what the survival state is like. Tart would like to see these practices subjected to greater scientific research.

Tart pointed out some of the irony in his proposal, because ASC's are already involved in survival research, such as mediums and apparitions. But Tart's proposal goes further than this. He said that in stabilized ASCs, researchers could:

• Communicate within these states
• Confirm or disconfirm each other's experiences and observations
• Reason about their observations in these states
• Test theories about these states

If employed broadly enough and with rigorous scientific controls, these features could help substantiate or disconfirm some of the leading hypotheses coming from the current survival data. On this note, Tart said that our current understanding of the mediumistic state is not very sophisticated. He said that we could train mediums for greater consistency and accuracy in reporting. This approach could pay off by helping to eliminate or substantiate the superpsi hypothesis.

Tart emphasized that the often apparently revelatory quality of ASCs can sometime be an obstacle to the more objective approach of the sciences. ASCs can be either validating in a scientific sense or indoctrinating in a more theistic or religious sense. The scientific attitude of open-minded inquiry for truth's sake alone is crucial. Buddhism, by way of contrast, looks like a state-specific-science but according to Tart, is generally not because it has a pre-established belief system that can shape and/or cloud people's experiences in ASCs.

In response to Tart's presentation, Michael Murphy made some interesting social and historical comments. He noted that our globalized age is unique in that we have a growing scientific knowledge of the evolving universe that the traditional spiritual systems were simply not aware of. In addition, multi-cultural input coming from the convergence of various lineages has heightened our awareness of the relativity of culture and the prevalence of bias. But fortunately, the advent of modern psychology is providing both practitioners and scholars with a greater self-reflexive capacity that provides those involved in today's research with a more subtle sense of personal bias and the tendency to project one's assumptions. Murphy said that his own work in The Future of the Body provided a trans-cultural taxonomy of human experience and then proposed a unifying pattern to help explain the data. To ensure that such a trans-cultural approach continues and that humanity does not fall backward into religious dogmas, we will need a strong-willed embrace of the method illustrated in Tart's mandala of science.

Murphy closed his comments by noting that Sri Aurobindo himself circumvented such dogmas in his own practice and vision by rigorously deconstructing his ongoing meditation practice. Murphy said that this deconstructive approach comes out strongly in Aurobindo's Record of Yoga, which he kept from approximately 1909 to 1927 (most meticulously from 1912 to 1920). This record includes notations on his various experiments and experiences. Murphy said that Aurobindo was brutally honest in this and thus exemplified the scientific attitude that Tart described in his presentation. Murphy said that later in Aurobindo's life, he could have benefited from the more robust peer review that exists today in the globalized marketplace of spiritual practices. Overall, both Tart and Murphy emphasized that the scientific attitude has an advantage over traditional spiritual schools and approaches, because the scientific attitude ultimately is oriented toward peer review. Thus, it is more open, humble, honest, and ready to revise its findings in light of new evidence.

Eric Weiss
Spacetime, the Subtle Worlds, and Whitehead and
Sri Aurobdindo's Ontology and Cosmology

Then in 2005, Weiss continued by challenging the basic metaphysical assumptions of modern science, particularly how they prevent us from creating a coherent metaphysics in which survival makes sense. For background on that presentation, the reader can click here.

In 2006 the first of Weiss's two presentations addressed some of our habitual ways of conceiving spacetime. Drawing from Whitehead's metaphysics, Weiss contrasted what he called a mandala-like perception of spacetime with the geometrical and mathematical version of spacetime used in scientific measurements. One of the main points that Weiss emphasized throughout his presentation was that spacetime as it actually is (not as it is abstracted by science) is shot through with consciousness. Thus, in a coherent metaphysics we do not need to add consciousness to an already existing spacetime. Instead, we need to recognize that they are intrinsically connected from the start. Furthermore, it is this key shift that enables us to begin to grasp the spacetime structure of the non-physical subtle worlds where post-mortem survival takes place. Weiss helped explain these ideas step-by-step to make sure the conference participants understood just how deep and significant a change he was proposing in our conception of spacetime.

Weiss started his presentation by emphasizing that our ideas of space and time are inextricably intertwined with our habitual thoughts about matter, energy, causality, consciousness and so on, so that understanding the spacetime of the subtle worlds requires nothing less than a complete metaphysical and cosmological revolution. To begin to make the shift toward understanding this proposal, Weiss suggested that we must first grasp that there are two different spacetimes that we often conflate because we have not thought about them clearly. The first is the mathematically defined space of physics. We generally imagine this space to be an objective and geometric container in the sense that it would still be there even in the absence of any consciousness. The second is the 'inner space' that contextualizes our perceptions of the outer world and various individual entities. This space is what we directly experience. In it, we are always at the center and origin of our own set of coordinates. Sometimes this space is subject to misinterpretation, as when we see a small close thing as a large distant thing. Weiss pointed out that we usually assume that the space of personal perception is generated by causal processes in the outer spacetime of physics. In fact, the major efforts of cognitive science are directed at producing some plausible explanation for how the energy and matter that operate in mathematical spacetime are capable of generating a conscious representation. The habitual idea of most scientists and philosophers is that the "real thing," the ontologically privileged domain, is "outside" in mathematical spacetime, thus perception and perceptual space are considered epiphenomenal or derivative.

To further explain his ideas, Weiss suggested that our personal experience of space is like a mandala. It is always centered around our privileged point of view and is intrinsically coherent to us. So, if we start to imagine that space is really like this, then we can start to see that the mandalic structure of space places conscious perception at the center of all coherently ordered arrays of phenomena. All perceptions of space are conscious and coherent from the perceiver's point of view. Space is not a container in which these kinds of perceptions are occurring. Instead, space is made up of an ongoing sequence of these mandala-like perceptions. Weiss proposed that the mandala-like structure of experience is the actual spacetime in which the creative advance is unfolding. In other words, perceptual space is not something derivative from events in outer, geometrical space. Rather, perceptual spacetime is spacetime itself, and geometrical space is simply a convenient abstraction that allows us to describe certain features of the perceptual space mathematically for the purpose of measurement and accurate comparison.

Next, Weiss explained how several of William James's ideas were incorporated into Whitehead's metaphysics of spacetime. What Whitehead called an "actual occasion" is an elaboration on what James called a "momentary thinker." Whitehead envisioned all of reality as causally interrelated "thinkers." In his system, each actual occasion houses the entirety of its causal past and is, in turn, housed by subsequent occasions in the future. For example, what I thought a moment ago has a causal effect on me now, and so forth. So, if all events in the actual world are thinkers, then understanding the causal interaction among these thinkers (among actual occasions) becomes crucial for understanding reality. Furthermore, it is possible to translate Whitehead's word "concrescence" as James "momentary thinker." And we can translate Whitehead's word "prehension" as a causal connection among these concrescences. Weiss said that this is entirely consistent with James' program in "Essays on Radical Empiricism," where he suggests that relations among entities, as well as entities themselves, are actual. According to Whitehead, each of us, in every moment, is a thinker, an actual occasion. Each of us houses the entirety of our past. Thus, each of us is an atom of spacetime. The entirety of the past is contained in our experience. Our experience is not a representation of the past, it is the actual past causally expressing itself in our present moment of experience and existence. In contrast, the scientific paradigm encourages us to imagine our experience to be a mere representation of the outer world, as if we are in a glass bubble, and some outer reality is being selectively represented on the surface of that bubble. But in Whitehead's metaphysics there is no bubble. Our direct experiences are always the core components of the real spacetime.

As he concluded his first presentation, Weiss re-emphasized just how radically different this understanding of spacetime is. Often, people think that Whitehead is proposing that these actual occasions are inside a container we call spacetime, but Weiss said that this is incorrect. Instead, Whitehead's proposal is much more revolutionary. Lastly, this revolution in our understanding of spacetime is crucial for us to begin to grasp the spacetime of the subtle worlds, because this revolution implies that spacetime is the transmission of immediate experience and not a box-like container in which events happen. This novel view of spacetime thus allows us to imagine how events in subtle worlds operate in ways that are both similar and different than events here on earth.

Sri Aurobindo's Ontology and Cosmology

Weiss said that according to Aurobindo and the Vedic tradition the ulimately concrete is called "Brahman."This term is often defined as the "One without a Second." By starting with Brahman, Weiss said we can derive everything else in the universe of experience, such as the one and the many, consciousness, the possibilities named by abstractions, value, and so forth. Weiss pointed out that materialists and scientists, who start their explanations of reality from abstracted categories, have led our culture into a philosophical cul-de-sac. This is apparent from the fact that materialists have been stuck for decades in their attempts to explain the emergence of novel properties in the universe and to explain the so-called mind/body problem that deals with the split between dead matter and conscious experience. Weiss said that the all-important key is to start from the ultimately concrete, so that everything else can be derived by logical acts of derivation.

Weiss moved to the next key term in Aurobindo's ontology "Sachchidananda," which is generally translated as "Being-Consciousness-Bliss." Because we are humans with symbolic cognition, we can only grasp at the ultimately ungraspable Brahman through a set of coherently interrelated concepts. Sachchidananda enables us to do this. Weiss said that there are four concepts involved:

• Being
• Consciousness
• Force
• Bliss

Although the term Force is generally left out of the popular translations of "Sachchidananda," Weiss said it is crucial.

Being is understood in a sense that encompasses both the potential and actual in reality. It is the possibility for actuality itself, and also the specific potentiality for all determinate forms of being. This notion of Being is comparable to Whitehead's eternal objects and Plato's Forms. Thus, we can see it as the repository of all abstractions.

Consciousness is the general source of illumination, the indefinable transparent luminosity that is the space in which all being emerges. It is the capacity that selectively highlights determinate possibilities, and the capacity to take a perspective on reality. In this latter sense, it is the nucleus of the "I."

Force is the intrinsic capacity of consciousness to manifest that to which it attends. It is what physicists call "energy."Weiss pointed out that Consciousness and its Force are ultimately inseparable. What we call Consciousness is the inside, while Force is the corresponding outside.

The last term Bliss might be better translated as "Value" Weiss said. The key idea here is the enjoyment of the values that emerge from the interplay of Consciousness, Force, and Being. The usual translation of the Sanskrit term "ananda" has, in English, superficial and hedonistic connotations that the word Value does not.

Next, Weiss described one of Aurobindo's most unique terms "Supermind."This is the faculty of Sachchidananda by means of which it is able to manifest specific universes. There are three primordial powers of Supermind:

• Self-multiplication (or self-variation, the power of perspective)
• Self-limitation
• Self-absorption

The first power of Supermind brings forth a multiplicity of centers of consciousness, each of which can take a perspective on all of the others. Weiss pointed out that this multiplicity (often called the "Dance of Shiva") has not yet reached the stage of self-limitation. It is rather the One Divine being manifesting as many Divine Beings.

Weiss paused to emphasize a key point: if this overall ontology is correct, then we must face squarely the question of how the initial conditions of evolution came into being. If all of reality is grounded in a self-illuminated enjoyment of being, why is there a world of ignorance, fear, pain and hardship? The answer to this question is expressed in terms of the doctrine of Involution. Involution is the exercise of the second and third of the Supermental powers – Self-limitation and Self-Absorption.

Self-limitation is the capacity of the Divine to impose filters on the ways in which its many selves come to know one another. To make this clearer, Weiss described the ways in which various entities in this universe experience each other. At the most complex level, thinking entities, like ourselves, know each other. This involves a depth-dimension of cognition and an empathic capacity that binds us into a unified cosmos. Next comes organic entities, which do not have the dimension of cognition, but still feel each other. Weiss said that here there is a distinction between empathy in the higher evolutionary ranges, versus mere attraction and repulsion in the lower evolutionary ranges. Finally, inorganic entities (like matter) lose the dimension of feeling, and thus experience each other essentially as disturbances of force (mediated by what scientists call gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces). Importantly, the lower entities are on the evolutionary scale, the more filtering there is between them.

As the Supermind manifests a series of worlds, it first filters out transcendence and universality to create a world of pure mentality. This is a world without inorganic matter, a world of minds knowing each other telepathically and communing in an experience which we can barely fathom, but which, the tradition holds, we experience during periods of deep sleep. Next, the Supermind filters out cognition, to leave a world of feeling and imagination. This is the world of dreams, the Astral, Vital, or Imaginal World, the world that we have some very limited experience of through our memories of dreams, or some much clearer experience of through out of body experiences, or lucid dreams. Lastly, the Supermind filters out imaginal variation to leave a world of inorganic entities that are blindly involved in self-perpetuation. In is in this way that the physical world comes into being, and establishes the basis for an evolutionary ascent. Weiss pointed out that according to this view, the Divine can do all this in full self-knowledge of its own being and its own doing. From this point of view, everything in this and all universes is just God at play. But this knowledge is something that some of us have only intellectually and speculatively. Most actually experience the world as finite, cut off, and conditional. In order to account for this, we have also to posit that God has the capacity for Self-Absorption.

The capacity for Self-Absorption can be illustrated with an analogy. Just as we, lost in the details of our social roles, can forget our own human freedom and become lost in our actions, so too, the Divine, can become absorbed in His/Her/Its own actions, and become, in some sense, trapped in finitude. It is as if God sets up a one-way mirror and recedes behind it. God, who is utterly self-illuminated, knows that He/She/It is being us, but we don't know that we are God. So, altogether, we come to a notion of ourselves as God, self-differentiated, self-limited, and self-absorbed.

In conclusion, Weiss said that over the course of the physical evolution of our universe human beings emerged as complex beings with multiple bodies at the mental, astral, and physical levels. So at death, the human physical body falls away, leaving the other bodies to pursue their own destinies in their own worlds. Ending on this note, Weiss turned the floor over to Peter Heehs, who picked up with Aurobindo's thoughts on rebirth.

Peter Heehs
Sri Aurobindo and the Evolutionary Purpose of Rebirth

Heehs started by noting that reincarnation is accepted by cultures representing roughly half of the world's population. He noted that even the arch-metaphysical skeptic from the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, reasoned that if one accepts the immortality of the soul, then rebirth is a logical and natural result. Heehs said that anthropological research has shown that many indigenous and preliterate cultures believe in reincarnation. Several ancient cultures did as well. The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras is well known for his remarks on the transmigration of the soul. And there are records of pre-Upanishadic shamanic traditions in India that also referred to something like rebirth or reincarnation. Heehs made a distinction between "reincarnation" and "transmigration". Most non-South Asian cultures that accept rebirth do not admit any individual karma or purposive logic to the process. This belief may be called "transmigration", while the term "reincarnation" is reserved for the belief that there is a larger purpose or logic to the overall process. Turning to Buddhism, Heehs said that for most Buddhist schools there is no soul. Instead, there is only a continuation of sanskaras or tendencies in what might be thought of as streams of karma. In contrast, the Abrahamic religions of the West place a great deal of emphasis on the survival of the individual soul. This trend runs through early Christianity, Gnosticism, and Jewish Kabbala. Lastly, Heehs pointed out that even thought many traditions espouse rebirth, very few (if any) of them give detailed accounts of how it works or what is like on the "other side."

Turning to Aurobindo's views on the topic, Heehs said that Aurobindo's understanding of reincarnation was embedded in his broader view of the evolutionary purpose of the universe. Aurobindo thought of reincarnation as a necessary feature of an evolving world. He recognized a positive purpose for individualized souls as part of this larger evolution, namely to fully embody Divine being in life. This view is in contrast to those of Buddha and Shankara, who saw no developmental significance to the process of rebirth.

Aurobindo viewed the physical body as a one of several human "bodies." When one dies, the core Divine spark in each soul (called the psychic being) starts to shed these other sheaths or layers one by one. The first to go after the death of the physical body is the vital sheath. After that, the mental sheath dissolves, and the psychic being is left. On the return back to incarnated life, this process reverses itself. The incarnating soul will take on mental, vital, and physical bodies before birth.

Heehs clarified that according to Aurobindo, what survives bodily death is not the full and easily recognizable personality, but rather more rudimentary elements or tendencies from one's various lives. These are then shuffled together again in the process of making a new personality. In an unpublished letter Aurobindo wrote, "But after all, it is a line of consciousness and not a personality that returns." Aurobindo's thinking on the subject departed from the notion that a specifically identifiable person or personality was what reincarnated. In short, there is no survival of the complete personality, only a set of surviving tendencies organized around the spark of the Divine. This is not individualized in terms of the specific personality traits or facial features, etc., of past embodied lifetimes. This undermines the popular idea that John Smith (or Napoleon) is reincarnated as Ramesh Sharma (or the writer of the latest reincarnation saga).

Aurobindo retained a scientific and experimental attitude about the topic. He took a scientific-like interest in children who reported past life memories. He thought these reports merited investigation. In fact, some of his statements lend credence to one possible interpretation of the research of scholars like Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker, which is that violent deaths often result in a quick re-entry back into this world. In his main text The Life Divine Aurobindo wrote, "There are cases in which there is a rapid rebirth of the exterior being with a continuation of the old personality and even the manner of the memory of the past life."

Heehs also made a few comments about the notion of other realms or worlds (cf. the bardos of Tibetan theory) where a reincarnating soul might go before coming back to this particular world. Although we tend to think of "worlds" as physical places, Heehs made clear that Aurobindo thought of them as particular states or statuses of consciousness rather than physical places. To use an aesthetic metaphor, worlds are like different harmonies when compared to the harmony of the physical world. According to Aurobindo, such worlds exist, but they are non-evolutionary. In Aurobindo's epic poem Savitri, there are mythic-like gods and demons that inhabit these worlds. But in an important sense, these heavens and hells can also been understood as subjective states created by the individuals who inhabit these worlds. (This lends support to the Tibetan idea that the bardos are to a great extent self-created worlds.) Heehs mentioned that Sri Aurobindo's life partner, the Mother, was a sophisticated initiate into the capacity to travel through such worlds. When she was in Algeria, she received an occult-like training to travel to different planes or worlds. Heehs noted that the Mother made major contributions to Aurobindo's own thought and that this was not inconsistent with the larger Indian tradition of acknowledging a leading role for the feminine and Divine Mother.

Overall, Heehs said that Aurobindo's view on rebirth was thoroughly teleological. As he once wrote: "The soul assumes birth in order to manifest Divine perfection, to manifest the Divine in life. That is all we can say."

Following both Weiss's and Heehs's presentations on Aurobindo, Michael Murphy made a number of interesting comments about Aurobindo's biography. For a summary of the major events of Aurobindo's life, please see the conference summary from the May 2005 Survival conference, which can be accessed by clicking here.

After commenting on Aurobindo's life, Murphy made come interesting historical comparisons the put into broad relief the nature of transformative practice and the advance of human spiritual realization. Murphy began by noting that in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries Calcutta was a rich center for comparative mysticism and cultural cross-fertilization with Indian, British, and even German scholarly influences all intermingling. Already by the mid to late 19^th century, Calcutta was bringing forth the robust mystical realizations of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, which would later influence Aurobindo. Murphy highlighted how all of these mystics were influenced by the unique cross-cultural mix of this region and moment in history.

Murphy then noted that a similar pattern—in which spiritual advances are stimulated by a fertile cross-cultural mix of activity—can be seen in the origin of the Upanishads. At the time these documents were compiled, there was a high degree of cultural intermingling in northern India. Murphy suggested that the exposure to more pluralistic cultural activity may have motivated the Brahmanic priests to formalize their revelations by writing them down as the form we today recognize as the Upanishads.

A third historical example Murphy made reference to was first brought to his attention by the Zen Abbot Richard Baker-Roshi, who has participated a few times in these Survival conferences. Baker said that many significant developments within Buddhism were spurred by attempts to translate Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit into Chinese. This seminal effort had many ripple effects, including laying the groundwork for the great koan literature of Japanese Zen. What was crucial to this long historical process was the high level of sophisticated comparative spiritual discussion and inquiry that it required. Murphy said we might think of it as one of the longest lasting think-tanks of comparative analysis that has ever existed.

Murphy then mentioned a fourth such period in human history, which occurred in late antiquity in the West, stretching from before Plotinus's life up through the early medieval period, in which one can trace the evolution neo-Platonic thought and practice. Various strains of neo-Platonic thought influenced Jewish Kabbala, and even Islamic mystical schools, which would in turn influence the rise of Western esotericism during the Italian Renaissance.

Overall, Murphy observed that these lineages of transformative practice and trans-generational wisdom seem to occur in fits and starts throughout human history. In light of this, Murphy suggested that part of the current task of Esalen's CTR is, first, to recognize these moments as legitimate reservoirs of insight about the ongoing evolution of transformative practice, and then, second, to synthesize their wisdom with modern insights from the 20^th and 21^st centuries. If we look broadly enough, Murphy said we can see that different historical periods have brought forth different types of experience more robustly than others. Thus, from our vantage point today, we can begin to make better sense of the evolution of humanity's spiritual realization. Lastly, as a result of CTR's current Esoteric Renaissance series, Murphy has become attuned to how comparative explorations of transformative practice have always been deeply rooted in these lost or broken lineages from the past. On this note, Murphy mentioned that Jeff Kripal's forthcoming book, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, should help frame Esalen's own historical role within this larger context.

Other Presentations
Bruce Wilshire and Christian De Quincey

On Thursday morning Christian De Quincey gave a colorful power point presentation that provided a comprehensive overview and introduction to panpsychism, the philosophical position that views all of matter as having some degree of consciousness. De Quincey has written two insightful books on this issue: Radical Nature and Radical Knowing. For more information about them and about De Quincey's thoughts on panpsychism, please see his website by clicking here: http://www.deepspirit.com/sys-tmpl/door/

Conclusion