Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation, and Immortality

ISBN-13: 9781571747075

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing Company - Inc.

Publication Date: 12-01-2013

Pages: 304

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

Amit Goswami is a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon Institute for Theoretical Physics since 1968. Goswami received his PhD in physics from Calcutta University in 1964. He became best known as one of the interviewed scientists featured in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!? He is also featured in the upcoming documentary, Dalai Lama Renaissance (narrated by Harrison Ford). Visit him at amitgoswami.org.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

From Death to Immortality

    What is death? This seems easy to answer. Death is when life ends; it is the cessation of life. But do we know what life is? Do we know what its cessation means? Those questions are not so easy to answer, at least not in science.

    Most people are little interested in scientific definitions of life and death. In 1993, after my book came out proposing a new scientific paradigm for the nature of reality, a science based on the primacy of consciousness, I was on a call-in radio show. The first question was not on the nature of reality or consciousness. It was, is there life after death? At first, I was surprised; then I realized that this is the ultimate question about reality for many people.

    Even children want to know. In a letter to God, a child wrote, "Dear God, what happens when we die? I don't want to do it. I just want to know what it is like."

    What happens after death? In the past, this was a question you would take to your local priest or minister or guru or mullah or rabbi or Zen master or shaman. This was not regarded as a question of science at all. Science in those days dealt with mundane aspects of the world; religion was the source of answers to questions that mattered more intimately to people: how to live life, what happens after death, how to know God, and such.

    Not that one always got answers. A Zen aspirant went to a Zen master and asked, "What happens after death?" The Zen master replied, "I don'tknow." The practitioner was surprised. "But you are a master!" he protested. "But I am not a dead master," came the answer.

    However, many gurus of various religions were often less hesitant to provide answers. And the answers, for the most part, were simple (at least, those from organized religions). God is the ultimate emperor of the world, which is divided into good and evil. If you belong to the good, you end up after death in Heaven, a very desirable place of peace and joy. If, however, you follow evil, death thrusts you into Hell, engulfing you in fire and brimstone and suffering. The message of religion was "be good." And if being good is not rewarded here on Earth, it will be rewarded after death. Alas! In this sophisticated scientific age, this kind of answer does not satisfy.

    So are you going to get sophisticated and satisfying answers in this book? I hope so. The answers are based on a new physics called quantum physics, which when grounded in the philosophy of primacy of consciousness, gives us a visionary window through which flow gale winds of new answers to age-old questions. The questions and answers regarding what happens after death are only the latest of the discoveries of this new science. Read on.

What Survives?

    Who are you after death? Clearly, the after-death you could not be a physical or corporeal entity. So the idea of an incorporeal soul is popular. It is your soul that survives the death of your body, you are told. And after death, the soul goes either to Heaven or to Hell, depending on how you fare on judgment day.

    The pictures that many people make of what they expect Heaven to be like suggest that even in Heaven they very much expect to have their egos intact, as in Hollywood movies. To them, the ego is the soul. However, objections can be raised against such a belief.

    How do we get our ego-identity? Clearly, our experiences as we grow up shape the ego. Memories of these experiences most probably are preserved in the physical brain. Moreover, experiences alone (nurture) are not the whole of ego-development; it seems logical that our genetic endowment (nature) also plays a role. But both genetic and brain memories are physical. With the demise of the body and the consequent decay of these physical memories, can the ego function?

    Another argument against the soul as ego has been raised by the psychologist Charles Tart. Tart (1990) points out that the body and the brain are stabilizing influences for our identity. In dreaming, for example, we lose awareness of our physical body, and look what happens. Our identity can shift from one dream-body to another many times during the dream; there just isn't much stability in who we identify with. Similar things happen with sensory deprivation and psychedelic drugs. The normal, stable ego-identity that we experience in our waking awareness disappears in these altered states of consciousness. Tart thinks that this may indicate what the altered state of consciousness that we attain after death is like, unless there are other kinds of stabilization processes that we don't know about.

    So the nature of the soul, the nature of what survives at death, is a difficult and controversial question. It gets even more controversial, even more puzzling, when we ponder the continuum pictures—life and death as a continuum—of many cultures. Not only does something survive death, but that something returns in another body in another birth, and on and on the process goes.

Reincarnation

    The picture of a soul surviving in either Heaven or Hell after death is more or less the picture in popular Judeo-Christian cultures. Other cultures have it somewhat differently. Sometimes—for example, in Islam—the differences are minor. But sometimes the differences in the view of after-death reality are quite radical. Hindus in India, Buddhists in Tibet and elsewhere (although in Buddhism the concept of soul is very subtle), and many people of Chinese and Japanese ancestry even outside Buddhism believe in the soul and in Heaven and Hell, but for them a sojourn in Heaven or Hell is only the beginning of the journey. Heaven and Hell, in these cultures, are temporary residences, after which the soul must once again return to Earth. How long you stay in your temporary Heaven or Hell depends on your karma, a concept of cause and effect that comprises a ledger of good and evil but with one major difference.

    Doing good accrues you good karma, and bad deeds increase bad karma in your karmic ledger—just as in Christianity. Bad karma is unwelcome, of course; for example, many Chinese fear that if their earthly deeds are really bad, they will be born as rats or even as worms in the next life. But even good karma does not stop the wheel from turning. However much good karma you accrue, you cannot stay in heavenly perfection forever; you always come back to earthly imperfection. Thus enters the subtle idea that even good karma is not good enough. Even then you remain tied to the wheel of karma, the cycle of recurring reincarnation. And the karmic wheel is seen as propelling the vehicle of suffering.

    What can be better than accruing good karma, doing good in all your earthside actions and experiences? The Hindu and Buddhist idea is that there is an ultimate, perfected way of living, the discovery of which gets you off the wheel of karma. Hindus call this moksha, literally meaning liberation; and Buddhists call it nirvana, literally translated as extinction of the flame of desire.

    We can use philosophy to explain these differences between the Judeo-Christian and Hindu/Buddhist views in what happens after death. In one philosophy, the specific model of after-death reality that a culture develops depends on whether the culture is materially rich or poor. The purpose of religion is to entice people to live in the good rather than in the evil. If the culture is materially poor, people live in hope of enjoying the good life after death. If they knew about reincarnation, they would not hesitate to be bad once in a while and to take the risk of temporary hell. There is always the next life for being good. So the idea of eternal hell is important to keep them in line; they already know hell, they don't want an eternity of it. In affluent societies, on the other hand, the idea of reincarnation can be told.

    In affluent societies, people live in a class system in which most people are middle class. If you are middle class, then the worst thing that can happen to you is to become poor. Then the threat of reincarnation works since bad karma not only begets hell, it also begets a lesser life form (a lower class, for example) in the next incarnation. Such was the case with the Hindu caste system in affluent ancient India, where the idea of reincarnation flourished. This is now changing in India; most people are now poor there and the idea of reincarnation is no longer all that popular. On the other hand, today's Western societies with increased affluence have increasingly become class systems. And no wonder the idea of reincarnation is now taking hold in these societies.

    It makes sense. In After Death 100, you learn the basic concepts, God, good and evil, soul, heaven and hell. In After Death 300, you get the idea of reincarnation, the wheel of karma. There you ask questions that you couldn't think of in the one-hundred-level course. If there is life after death, why not life before life? Why do bad things happen to good people? And the best one, how can a truly just and benevolent God not give everyone the good life of Heaven?

    Compared to these courses, the idea of liberation is a five-hundred-level graduate course. You enter it only after you have indulged in a lot of "karma-cola." You enter it when you ask questions about the very nature of reality and about your connection to it, when you intuit that you, the world, and God are not separate and independent from one another. You enter it when the whole world of sentient beings becomes your family, and you want to serve your family in a new way.

    The philosopher Michael Grosso has called the recent revival of interest in reincarnation in America "the spontaneous formation of a myth of reincarnation," but it is more than the formation of a myth. I think we have graduated en masse from After Death 100 to the three-hundred-level course. And some of us already ponder taking the graduate course.

    When does the transition to the next-level course take place? The philosopher Alan Watts explained it pretty well. To Watts (1962), the wheel of karma is much like being at a carnival. Initially, as a soul, you are less adventurous. You hold on to the good life when you reincarnate. Only later do you realize that there is a greater learning opportunity in taking the more risky rides—being born as poor (but virtuous) or living a bumpy but creative life. But, even then, the ultimate suffering of boredom catches up with you; the idea of eternal attachment to the karmic wheel will seem dreadful to all of us sooner or later. The filmmaker Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters captures this sentiment perfectly:

... Nietzsche with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we live, we're gonna live over and over again the exact same way as eternity. Great. This means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. It's not worth it.
(Quoted in Fischer 1993)<

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