A Brief Rumination on the Question Does Some Part of Us Survive Death?

In response to my brief and fragmentary rumination on souls, an old and dear friend wrote me a note which included a spelling correction for detritus…

She then went on to write:

I recall Robert Thurman debunking the idea of reincarnation as wish fulfillment. He said, “What if ‘no reincarnation’ is actually the wish fulfillment?” He was pointing out the Western idea that we can eventually escape the consequences of our actions, and if all else fails, you just die and start over. Vs. continuing personal consequences, which could change the way we live, if we believed it might happen.

This led to a flood of thoughts, much of which I inflicted on my dear friend. Here’s the gist of that response still constructed in a more or less stream of consciousness mode, but slightly more orderly…

As to Professor Thurman’s argument. Actually this “moral argument” is used by Western theists in support of heaven and hell, as well as by advocates of reincarnation. It’s an appeal to emotion, a rhetorical device meant to make someone feel better about life in this world where bad people get away with bad things.

But, when addressing the question of whether there is or is not some form of post mortem reanimation, any moral argument is going to be a red herring. The question is not whether there should be reincarnation or heaven or heaven and hell, but whether some form of survival past death of a recognizable entity that shares the same sense of self as a being before death is factually true.

Now, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence asserted by lots and lots of people to suggest some sort of survival of ego or something similar past death.

A major problem for me with the literature is that while there have been many books and articles that support the thesis there is a postmortem existence, that the authors appear always to start as believers is problematic. I know sometimes people say they started as skeptics, but my limited survey of the literature and its debunkers suggests otherwise…

And here’s the really hard part.

Those who are skeptical and who have looked at the more famous assertions such as those recorded in Ian Stevenson’s “Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation,” have, to the best of my knowledge never been able to confirm any of these assertions.

As an illustration I tried to find the article by Leonard Angel examining what he considered the strongest case which was published by the Skeptical Inquirer, but it appears to not be available on the web. The gist of it was that Stevenson’s “best” case was full of holes big enough to drive a Mac truck through… There have been rebuttals, including one by Mr Stevenson himself. Again, they seem only to be believable by someone who wants to believe. (I’ll come to my biases in a moment…)

Probably the best general writer on the subject of consciousness who has deeply examined these claims, at least to my tastebuds, is Susan Blackmore, a Zen practitioner who has closely examined out of body and near death experiences. http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Zen/intro.htm. Her conclusions are devastating to any dualistic view that proposes any part of human consciousness that isn’t completely woven out of the stuff at hand and which disappears when the stuff rearranges itself…

So, to my biases. I’m aware of my personal inclination to skepticism and I try as best I can to be skeptical of being skeptical. My other bias is toward finding what is true whether it is palatable or not. This is why I admire Dr Blackmore so much. Clearly that has been her north star in her investigations of the mind and of consciousness.

My own attempt at a relentless examination of my mind and personality and my observation of others, particularly when their brains have been damaged one way or another, has led me to what seems an inescapable conclusion. The ego, the sense of self separate from others is a convention, a lovely thing, the word miracle works for me, but it is also a moment in time created by circumstances, all of which can be described in biological terms.

A harsh and not completely satisfactory frame, but, an accurate enough one for our purposes here is that consciousness is epiphenomenal to brain function.

My belief, so far, is, is that we are part of a monistic universe, where individual consciousness is an amazing moment in time, totally contingent upon conditions that will in time shift and break the phenomena into its constituent parts…

I have discovered much of what is taught in Buddhism and particularly in Zen works within the constraints of that view.

For instance as regards to the consequences of our actions. If we are constructed by our decisions and actions then each one reconstructs who we are. When we do something bad we are reconstructed immediately as a more damaged being. When we do something good we are reconstructed immediately as a less damaged being. We are what we do. And while we might want a more objective punishment or reward, the reality is sometimes that never comes. But there are, nonetheless, always consequences…

Now, at least in my life, the holes of this this-worldly or totally monistic Buddhism and Zen are mostly filled in through the lens of liberal religion as it currently manifests within the Unitarian Universalist view where the individual is thought to be unique and precious (1st UU principle), but exists only within a web of relationships (7th UU principle).

There is within Unitarian Universalism also a call for a responsible search for truth and meaning (4th UU principle). For me this calls for relentless honesty. In matters of the spirit, of self examination, using the disciplines of Zen. Complemented, I feel, in matters of the make up of the world where the scientific method cannot be beat…

Bottom line, there’s nothing but a burning light…

Two cents early on a Saturday morning while avoiding work on a sermon…