Time Consciousness and the Mesorah

"Thus a situation has developed which is quite paradoxical in human terms: The barriers of the past have been pushed back as never before; our knowledge of the history of man and the universe has been enlarged on a scale and to a degree not dreamed of by previous generations. At the same time, the sense of identity and continuity with the past, whether our own or history's, has gradually and steadily declined. Previous generations knew much less about the past than we do, but perhaps felt a much greater sense of identity and continuity with it."

Hans Meyerhoff, Time in Literature. Quoted in Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, p 79 by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

 

"When I sit down to learn, the giants of the masorah are with me. Our relationship is personal. The Rambam sits to my right, Rabbenu Tam to my left. Rashi sits at the head and explains, Rabbenu Tam asks, the Rambam decides the halakhah, and the Rabad objects. All of them are with me in my small room, sitting around the table…. Learning Torah is the intense experience of uniting many generations together, the joining of spirit to spirit, the connecting of soul to soul. Those who transmit the Torah and those who receive the Torah are invited to meet one another at the same historic juncture."

Rav Soloveitchik, U-vikashtem Mi-Sham, p. 232

Sippur Yetsiat Mitzriam, Narrative Therapy and Amalek as Deconstruction

“Narrative therapists are interested in working with people to bring forth and thicken stories that do not support or sustain problems. As people begin to inhabit and live out the alternative stories, the results are beyond solving problems. Within the new stories, people live out new self images, new possibilities for relationships and new futures.” 

Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, Jill Freedman and Gene Combs, p.16

"This book is not about imposing new stories on people's lives or giving advice. Instead, this book invites readers to take a new look at their own lives and to find significance in events often neglected, to find sparkling actions that are often discounted, to find fascination in experiences previously overlooked, and to find solutions to problems and predicaments in landscapes often previously considered bereft...This will provide the reader with the options in knowing how to go forward." 

Retelling the Stories of Our Lives: Everyday Narrative Therapy to Draw Inspiration and Transform Experience, by David Denborough, p. x, quoting Michael White

“Every time we ask a question, we're generating a possible version of a life” 

David Epston, in Freedman & Combs, p. 113

"It is stated in the Haggada that 'All those that tell the story at length is praiseworthy,' for story-telling [sippur] leads to knowledge [da'at], as the verse states 'and that you may tell in the ears of your son, and of your grandson...  that you may know that I am the Lord.' Since the Exodus from Egypt is written in the Torah and the Torah was given to Israel, it has the potential to awaken the force of redemption, for the redemption moves from potential to actual through story-telling. This is similar to the relationship between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah through which Israel creates new understandings of Torah. This comes through the power of language, which reveals hidden reasons.

The Tannaim [R. Yosi the Gallilean, R. Eliezer, and R. Akiva] mentioned in the Haggada accomplished this when they expounded that each plague consisted of four or five plagues and at the splitting of the sea two-hundred and fifty plagues. These plagues were hidden in the plagues [explicit in the narrative], and they brought them from potential to actual. This is the meaning of  'All those that tell the story at length is praiseworthy,' that they increase and expand the miracles through story-telling of the Exodus. 

The final redemption will emerge when all of the hidden aspects of the narrative of the Exodus from Egypt will become clarified. The initial redemption included within it the future redemption...through remembering and recounting the Exodus it will bring the Messianic era. 

When Israel left Egypt it was intended that this would be the final rectification, with the revelation of God is One and His Name is One. However, the wicked Amalek confused Israel, as it states: '[Amalek] cooled you [the Children of Israel] on the way'. Therefore we must remember our hatred of Amalek for all time since they caused all future exile. Only through telling the story of the Exodus from Egypt every year will the ultimate rectification emerge and the name of Amalek erased little by little." 

Sefat Emet, Pesach, 5635

Iyov and the Goodness of Life and Existence

1. It is contradictory to maintain that one's life and existence as a whole is bad and still seek to support life and existence or mourn its demise. Therefore,

2. If one does support life and existence they implicitly believe that life and existence is overall good. Therefore,

3. If one believes that life and existence as a whole is good then the question of theodicy is greatly weakened. Since the overall expression of God's creation is good, the existence of evil elements is not as troublesome. Therefore,

4. Iyov (Job) is the primal book of theodicy since after his suffering Iyov wishes he would have never lived, i.e. that life/existence is bad. 

מַדּוּעַ, קִדְּמוּנִי בִרְכָּיִם;    וּמַה-שָּׁדַיִם, כִּי אִינָק
  לָמָּה לֹּא מֵרֶחֶם אָמוּת;    מִבֶּטֶן יָצָאתִי וְאֶגְוָע

כִּי-עַתָּה, שָׁכַבְתִּי וְאֶשְׁקוֹט;    יָשַׁנְתִּי, אָז יָנוּחַ לִי

"Thus Spoke The Lover:

"It is forbidden to burn or to destroy by direct action any sacred texts, their commentaries, and their explanations. A person who destroys them by his direct action is given "stripes for rebelliousness.

"To what does the above apply? To sacred texts written by a Jew with a sacred intent. However, should a Jewish heretic write a Torah scroll, it and the name of God it contains must be burnt, since he does not believe in the sanctity of [God's] name and did not compose it for this purpose. Rather, he considers this to be similar to any other text. Since this is his intent, the names [of God he writes] do not become holy."

-Rambam, Mishna Torah, Yesodei ha'Torah 6:8 (trans. Eliyahu Touger)

"In order to have its desired effect, study of Torah must conform to two conditions. These are reverence for the study itself and constant rectification of one's own deeds. The only reason why Torah has any power at all is because God bound his most precious Influence to it, making it dependent on the Torah. It is for this reason that reciting it and comprehending it can transmit this Influence...

"Because of this fact, it is imperative that one should have reverence and awe when involved in Torah. What one is then doing is approaching his God and involving himself in transmitting a great light from God to himself. The individual involved in the Torah should therefore be abashed of his human lowliness and tremble before God's loftiness. He should rejoice in what he can attain, but even this should be combined with the greatest possible awe.

"It is all important that one should not behave frivolously when involved in the Torah, and not show any disrespect for its books or their words. When occupied with the Torah, one must realize before Whom he stands...

"If this condition is not met, however, then it will not result in any such Illumination, and reciting words of Torah will be no different from any other human speech. Reading it will be no different than reading a letter, no different than considering any worldly matter. Quite to the contrary, such involvement will be considered a misdeed, since this person is approaching the Holy without reverence, and behaving frivolously in the presence of his Creator and occupying himself with His holiness.

"The value of a person's study, and the level of the resulting Influence, therefore vary according to the degree of reverence and the measure of his respect and attentiveness."

R. Moshe Chayyim Luzzato, The Way of G0d, 4:2:5 (trans. R. Aryeh Kaplan)

"This is the way of Torah. She does not reveal herself except to he who loves her, who knows the Torah, whoe wise heart compels hm to constantly pass back and forth each day at the gate of her palace. She then reveals her face to him from her upper chamber, giving a hint [of her presence], after which she immediately withdraws to her place in concealment...In this way the Torah is revealed and concealed, following the one whom she loves, to around him and awaken him."

-Zohar, Mishpatim 2:99a (trans. R. Avraham Sutton)

"Imagine, for a moment, that you are the universe, But for the purpose of this thought experiment, let us imagine that you are not the disenchanted mechanistic universe of conventional modern cosmology, but rather a deep-souled, subtly mysterious cosmos of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence. And imagine that you are being approached by two different epistemologies - two suitors, as it were, who seek to know you. To whom would you open your deepest secrets? Would you open most deeply to the suitor - the epistemology, the way of knowing - who approached you as though you have no interior dimension to speak of, no spiritual capacity or value; who thus saw you as fundamentally inferior to himself, who related to you as though your existence were valuable primarily to the extent that he could develop and exploit your resources to satisfy his various needs; and whose motivation for knowing you was ultimately driven by a desire for increased intellectual mastery, predictive certainty, and efficient control over you for his own self-enhancement?

"Or would you, the cosmos, open yourself most deeply to that suitor who viewed you as being at least as intelligent and noble, as worthy a being, as permeated with mind and soul, as imbued with moral aspiration and purpose, as endowed with spiritual depths and mystery, as he? This suitor seeks to know you not that he might better exploit you but rather to unite with you and thereby bring forth something new, a creative synthesis emerging from both of your depths. He desires to liberate that which has been hidden by the separation between knower and known. His ultimate goal of knowledge is not increased mastery, prediction, and control but rather a more richly responsive and empowered participation in a co-creative unfolding of new realities. He seeks an intellectual fulfillment that is intimately linked with imaginative vision, moral transformation, empathic understanding, aesthetic delight. His act of knowledge essentially an act of love and intelligence combined, of wonder as well as discernment, of opening to a process of mutual discovery. To who would you be more likely to reveal your deepest truths?"

-Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, pg. 39

Models of Torah - Part VI - Torah as Worlds, Galaxies and Universes

Some of this post is speculative so please feel free to argue or add to it...

As we approach the Messianic era[i] scientists and philosophers not only discuss worlds and galaxies, but universes and dimensions as well. Some hypothesize that our universe[ii] is but one of the infinite yet interconnected universes that make up a multiverse or omniverse; reality consists of higher and lower planes (and branes!) and multiple dimensions.[iii]

Kabbalistic literature, albeit in a different sense, has described four general universes through which the Divine light is filtered.[iv] These are defined as different dimensions of reality with their own unique properties of space, time, and being.[v] Asiah, the Universe of Action, is the universe with which we are immediately familiar physically and spiritually. Yetzira, the Universe of Formation, is the plane of feeling and song - of angels. B'riah, the universe of Creation, is the dimension of thought and mind.[vi] Atzilut, the world of Emanation, is the world of the Divine, without any concealment.[vii]

These four universes correspond to the four levels of the Torah, PaRDeS (p'shat, remez, d'rash, sod).[viii] Each dimension of Torah is its own universe with its own laws:

P'shat corresponds to Asia in that it's method of interpretation must conform to the logical categories of Asia. The logic of Asia dictates that an interpretation of a text is constrained by literary and cultural context, [ix] principles of human psychology and the laws of time and space.[x] This method of interpretation occurs in a Nefesh-state-of consciousness,[xi] and can be compared to a realistic painting.

Remez corresponds to Yetzira, the universe of emotions and song, since Remez views the text as musical notes,[xii] as symbols intuiting something much greater. There is no connection between the symbol and that which it symbolizes.[xiii] This method of interpretation occurs in a Ruach-state-of-consciousness, and can be compared to an Impressionistic painting.

D'rash corresponds to B’riah[xiv] as it is rule-based interpretation, flowing from the associations of the intellect, but which nevertheless does not conform to the constraints of the linear thinking of P'shat.[xv] Furthermore, it uncovers the “sub-conscious” of the text. This method of interpretation occurs in a Neshama-state-of-consciousness, and can be compared to a Cubist painting.

Sod corresponds to Atzilut as it discusses that universe - interpreting the Torah and the events and laws recorded therein from the perspective of the highest spiritual reality.[xvi] This method of interpretation occurs in a Chaya-state-of-consciousness, and can be compared to an Abstract painting.

Each of these universes contains mansions, or self-contained worlds and galaxies. The Torah, too, is not only composed of Universes, but it also contains infinite worlds and galaxies within each Universe. As R. Hutner writes[xvii]: “Since Hashem looked into the Torah and created the world, therefore, all the seventy[xviii] ways of understanding the Torah have a corresponding seventy worlds parallel to them. Hence, every understanding of Torah reveals a corresponding world that is attuned to that understanding of Torah. Therefore, what one learns in Torah through p’shat confers a happening of p’shat in the world of p’shat[xix]...this is the foundation regarding all the ways in which Torah is learned."[xx] However, as much a each interpretation is its own world, sometimes interpretations are variations on the same theme and thus form a galaxy, an orbit of worlds around a sun.

Indeed, Reality is a multiverse yet it is a unity. "What is below is above." So too the Torah - each level is a higher abstraction of the previous,[xxi] and each level informs the other.[xxii]

[i] See the Lubavitcher Rebbe and Rabbis Yitzchak Ginsburgh, Moshe Shatz, Joel david Bakst, and Herman Branover
[ii] http://www.etymonline.com/
1589, "the whole world, cosmos," from O.Fr. univers (12c.), from L. universum "the universe," noun use of neut. of adj. universus "all together," lit. "turned into one," from unus "one" (see one) + versus, pp. of vertere "to turn" (see versus). Properly a loan-translation of Gk. to holon "the universe," noun use of neut. of adj. holos "whole"
[iii] For example, see Clifford Pickover, Michio Kaku, Fred Wolf, Bernard Carr, and Alex Vilinkin
[iv] Nefesh ha’Chaim, 1:12
[v] R. Steinsaltz, A Thirteen Peddled Rose, pg. 3, based on Sefer Yetzira.
[vi] Souls (and Seraphs) are from B’riah
[vii] See Siddur ha’Mekubalim on how the four universes are reflected in the Siddur. In short, Birchot ha’Shachar are in Asiah, Pesukei d’Zimra are in Yetzira, Shema is in B’riah, and Shmoneh Esrei is in Atzilut.
[viii] Ohr Gedaelyahu, Breisheit 5b quoting the Sefas Emes (Thanks to R. Yaakov Shlomo Weinberg for this source). This applies to all works written b’Ruach ha’Kodesh. R. Yaakov Elman (Modern Scholarship in the Study of Torah, pgs. 242-250) quotes many sources that maintain the view that a work written with Divine inspiration contains multiple levels of meaning (Pardes, Shivim Panim etc.), especially R. Yonasan Eibescheutz (Urim veTumim, kitzur tekafo kohen, nn.123-124), R. Tzadok ha'Kohen (Machesevet Charutz 6a-b), and R Yisrael Dov Ber of Zledniki (Shereit Yisrael 6c).. See Avakesh for a discussion of this.
[ix] One aspect of this is the original intent of the author. Although this is debatable according to Post-Modernists, a) I think it is the common-sense approach, b) interpretations not like the original intent of the text have their place in other methods of interpretation (such as Remez).
[x] However, the events described in the Torah sometimes only occurred in a higher world. R. Dessler (Michtav M'Eliyahu 1: pg 308, based on Maharal, Gevurot Hashem, Second Introduction; see R. Micha Berger here and here) gives examples of miraculous events in the Torah which only occurred in a higher world: a) Yaakov’s “Kefitzat ha’Derech; b) The sun standing still; c) the sea splitting.Also see Ramchal and Leshem on Ma’aseh B’reisheit which is discussed here.
With this said, if one's view of reality is flat then even their p’shat reading of Tanakh will make little or no sense. They will try to force the miraculous into the three dimensions that their senses perceive and bizarre interpretations follow.

[xi] Da’at Hashem, pgs. 349-374 discusses partially that Pardes also corresponds to Naran Ch”y (the five levels of the soul). See Eitz Chayim, Sha’ar Hanhagot ha’Limud, Chapter 1. However, see Sha’ar ha’Gilgulim, Hakdama 18.
[xii] I heard in the name of Shlomo Katz that ReMeZ is ZeMeR backwards. As pointed out above, Pesukei d’Zimra is in Yetzira.
[xiii] R. Hirsch on the beginning of Mishpatim gives the famous analogy of a student’s notes to a lecture regarding d’rash. Also see R. Kook, Kadama l’Eyn Aya for a discussion of Remez.
[xiv] R. Hutner (quoted below) and R. Dessler (Michtav M'Eliyahu 1: pg 308) use this to explain Ta’anit 5b which states “Yaakov did not die” – this is only true in the world of Derash/B’riah.
[xv] Maharal, Be’er ha’Golah, Be’er Shlishi, compares the Torah to a tree. P’shat is the root but d’rash reveals the many-sides of the tree. He relates this to his conception of “Elu v’Elu.” See here and here on Cubism.
[xvi] This level of reality is not written in the Torah except in code. The Maharal, Gevurot Hashem, Chapter 17, explains that this is why the Torah does not explicitly recount how the maidens of Pharoah’s daughter died – they only died a spiritual death. This also explains why olam ha’bah, which occurs in the higher planes, is not mentioned in the Torah explicitly but it is mentioned in Remez, Derash, and Sod.
[xvii] Pachad Yitzchak, Pesach, Ma’amar 52:3. Thanks to R. Yaakov Shlomo Weinberg for the translation.
[xviii] The Vilna Gaon writes that there are forty-nine approaches to the written Torah and seventy approaches to the Oral Torah (Shir haShirim 2:4) and that within the seventy approaches there are six-hundred thousand more approaches (Shir haShirim 5:10).
[xix] R. Hutner calls this world a “world of p’shat” while I’m connecting it to “Asiah.”
[xx] R. Tzadok takes it further - an innovation within one creates an innovation in the other. See the lectures of R. Yaacov Haber for how this played out in Jewish intellectual history. One might wonder if an innovation in Remez only cause an innovation in Yetzira, or does this innovation have a parallel in all of the universes.
[xxi] See Shiurei Da’at, Dor Haflaga for an example of this.
[xxii] Vilna Gaon, Mishlei 5:18, and R. Menachem Mendel of Shklov’s note on Mishlei 2:9

Deeper is Higher - Part V

Children Who Remember Previous Lives

"I was telling these stories [of children who remember previous lives] to my friend Gene Weingarten, a Washington Post writer and editor and one of the most skeptical individuals I have ever known, the kind of guy who would rather feed his hand into a meat grinder than admit to believing in paranormal phenomena. Gene let me finish. Then he said, "You remember that story about Arlene's brother, right?"

"Arlene, Gene's wife, had been raised in Connecticut, the daughter of multigenerational Northeasterners. However, as soon as her younger brother, Jim, could speak, he would say, "I was born in Dixie.'"

"'It wasn't just that he kept saying it," Arlene told me when I asked her about it. "It was that word - Dixie. We didn't know anybody who used that word. Who would use that word in Connecticut in the 1960's?'"

"I asked her whether she or her parents ever thought that it might have anything to do with a previous-life memory.

"'Are you kidding?" she said. "We just figured it was more evidence that he was a weird kid.'"

"Then the family took their first road trip south, to Florida. Arlene only had a foggy memory of the trip, but thought that her mother would probably remember it clearly. I called her mom, Phyllis Reidy, who now lives just up the Florida coast from Miami.

"There was no interstate in those days, of course, so we drove all the way down old U.S. 301. Arlene was nine and Jim was six. One of the first things Jim had ever said was, 'I'm from Dixie.' He said it all the time. And he spoke oddly too. We always said it sounded like he had some kind of accent. We used to ask him if he was from Boston, and he said, 'No, I'm from Dixie.'

[...]

"Then, when we drove into the South, he got all excited, started talking a mile a minute about how his grandmother and grandfather came from Dixie and his mother and father did, too, and I said 'We're your mother and father,' and he said, "No, you're not,' just flatly, like that.

"We were in Georgia, just south of the South Carolina line, and he really started going nuts. 'I'll show you were we used to live,' he said. 'There it is! Its way up there, up that hill and in back of those trees.'"

[...]

"After that trip, he never talked about being from Dixie again. The accent lasted about two weeks after we got home, then it disappeared."

"Although Phyllis said that she didn't think Jim would even remember the incident, I got his number and called him. Jim Reidy is now a television engineer living in Massachusetts.

"I don't remember much more than my mother told you," he said at first..."I could always picture that house- the porch, swing, the weeping willow, the picket fence. I also remember my parents."

[...]

"What did you make of all that?" I asked. "Did you think maybe you had been reincarnated?"

"Not really," he answered. We were Irish Catholics, and reincarnation didn't really fit into that picture. But it got me to thinking, maybe there were parallel universes, or some such thing." (Old Souls, pgs. 216-218).

Introduction

As far as I know, this is not one of the 2,500 cases that Ian Stevenson, and his colleagues, have collected over the last 50 years. It was taken from a book called "Old Souls: Compelling Evidence From Children Who Remember Past Lives," which tells of a skeptic, Thomas Shroder, who accompanied Stevenson on a few of his trips around the world, searching for, documenting, and analyzing, in his characteristic methodical way, the thousands of children who claim to remember previous lives. Cases have been found on every continent (except Antarctica), although some places, such as India and Lebanon, have a much higher density of reported cases. Stevenson wrote "European Cases of the Reincarnation Type" to illustrate Western cases.

There are generally two types of cases: A case can either be a "within-family" or a "stranger" case in which the subject is claiming to be a previous personality who has no connection to his current family. In the "stranger" case, it may either be "solved" or "unsolved," meaning that the previous personality has either been identified and compared to the current subject or he has not been identified.

A model case consists of six characteristics, and to be included within Stevenson's database, located at the University of Virginia, a case must have at least two characteristics (Tucker, Life Before Life, pg. 27). I will use the example of Corliss Chotkin, Jr., whom Stevenson visited on four separate occasions, to illustrate most of these six characteristics (Stevenson, Children Who Remember Previous Lives, pg. 57-59).

1) Prediction of rebirth - "[A]n elderly Tlingit fisherman (of Alaska). Victor Vincent, told his niece, Mrs Corliss Chotkin, Sr., that after his death he would be reborn as her son...Victor Vincent died in the spring of 1946. About eighteen months later (on December 15, 1947), Mrs. Chotkin gave birth to a baby boy...When Corliss was only thirteen months old and his mother was trying to get him to repeat his name, he said to her petulantly: "Don't you know who I am? I'm Kahkody"; this was the tribal name Victor Vincent had had."

Predictions are common among the Tlingit and the Lamas of Tibet. Stevenson points out that this can sometimes weaken the strength of a case because reincarnation was already expected and the parents may have inadvertently pushed the child in this direction. However, when the prediction of rebirth is accompanied with promised identifying signs it is much stronger...

2) Birthmarks or birth defects related to the previous personality - "He showed her two scars from minor operations, one near the bridge of his nose and one on his upper back; and as he did so he said that she would recognize him (in his next incarnation) by birthmarks on his body corresponding to these scars...Corliss Chotkin, Jr. had two birthmarks, which his mother said were exactly at the sites of the scars to which Victor Vincent had drawn her attention on his body. By the first time I [Stevenson] first examined these birthmarks in 1962, both had shifted, according to Mrs. Chotkin...but they remained quite visible, and the one on Corliss's back impressed me greatly. It was an area on the skin about 3 centimeters in length and 5 millimeters in width; compared with the surrounding skin it was darker and slightly raised. Its resemblance to a healed scar of a surgical wound was greatly increased by the presence at the sides of the main birthmark of several small round marks that seemed to corresponding to positions of the small round wounds made by needles that place the stitches used to close surgical wounds."

Stevenson has written two massive volumes, consisting of 2,200 pages, on birthmarks and birth defects as providing evidence for reincarnation. These can be found here, and here , with a summary of this work here. This evidence is strongest when an autopsy or medical reports of the Previous Personality can be located to match with the birthmarks or birth defects of the current subject.

3) Announcing dreams of rebirth - "When Mrs. Chotkin mentioned Corliss's claim that he was Kahkody to one of her aunts, the latter said that she had dreamed shortly before Corliss's birth that Victor Vincent was coming to live with the Chotkins. Mrs. Chotkin was certain that she had not previously told her aunt about Victor Vincent's prediction that he would return as her son."

Another case of announcing dreams, which is particularly interesting: "A Burmese wife whose husband was away from home on a long journey had a dream in which a deceased friend seemed to be asking for permission to be reborn as her child; she did not like this proposal and (in the dream) told him not to come to them. When her husband returned from his journey, he told her that he had dreamed of the same old friend and had told him (in his dream) that he (the friend) would be welcome to be reborn in their family. In the due course a child (Maung Aung Than) was born who later made statements suggesting that his father's acceptance had prevailed over his mother's attempted veto."

4) Statements about previous life - Besides Corliss's claim that he was "Kahkody," as mentioned above, "he also mentioned two events in the life of Victor Vincent about which she [his mother] did not think he could have obtained information normally." Corliss's case is weak on statement so I will quote one the case of Sujith Jayartne, a boy from Sri Lana:

"Sujith said that he was from Gorakana and lived in the section of Gorakawatte, that his father was named Jamis and had a bad right eye, that he had attended the kabal iskole, which means "dilapidated school," and had a teacher named Francis there, and that he gave money to a woman named Kusuma, who prepared string hoppers, a type of food, for him. He implied that he gave money to Kale Pansala, or Forest Temple, and said two monks there, one of whom was named Amitha. He said that his house was whitewashed, that its lavatory was beside a fence, and that he bathed in cool water.

"Sujith had also told his mother and grandmother a number of other things about the previous life that no one wrote down until after the previous personality had been identified [unlike the preceding statements]. He said his name was Sammy, and he sometimes called himself "Gorakana Samma." Kusuma, the woman he mentioned to the monk, was his younger sister's daughter, and she lived in Gorakana and had long, think hair. He said that his wife's name was Maggie and their daughter's was Nandanie. He had worked for the railways and had once climbed Adam's Peak a high mountain in central Sri Lanka. He had transported arrack, a liquor that was illegally traded, in a boat that had once capsized, causing him to lose his entire shipment of arrack. He said that on the day he died, he and Maggie had quarreled. She left the house, and he then went out to the store. While he was crossing the road, a truck ran over him, and he died.

"The young monk went to Gorakana to look for a family who had a deceased member whose life matched Sujith's statements. After some effort, he discovered that a fifty-year-old man named Sammy Fernando, or "Gorakana Sammy" as he was sometimes called, had died after being hit by a truck six months before Sujith was born. All of Sjith's statements proved to be correct for Sammy Fernando, except for his statement that he had died immediately when the truck hit him. Sammy Fernando died one to two hours after being admitted to a hospital following the accident." (Life Before Life, pg. 87).

5) Recognizing people or things connected to the Previous Personality - Getting back to the case of Corliss Chotkin Jr., "When Corliss was between two and three years old, he spontaneously recognized several persons whom Victor Vincent had known, including Vincent's widow." He "spontaneously recognized a stepdaughter of Victor Vincent. She was at the docks in Sitka, where Corliss happened to be with his mother. Corliss, suddenly noticing her, called out excitedly: 'There's my Susie.'" In this instance, Corliss's mother was acquainted with Susie, although she had not noticed her before Corliss did. In the best of these spontaneous recognitions, the subject identifies someone who is completely unknown to any person with him."
Stevenson does not attach a tremendous amount of importance to recognition when they are made under uncontrolled situations, e.g. when the subject is tested in front of the previous personality's family to see whether he makes correct recognitions. This is due to the leading nature of the questions asked and possible hints given to the subject. However, in some cases he has been able to control for such variables.

6) Unusual Behavior Related to the Previous Personality - "Corliss combed his hair in a manner closely resembling Victor Vincent; both Corliss and Victor Vincent stuttered; both had a strong interest in boats and in being on the water; both had strong religious propensities; and both were left-handed. Corliss also had a precocious interest in engines and some skill in handling and repairing them; his mother said he had taught himself how to run boat engines."

This evidence is at best convincing when taken together as a whole; no individual match between the Previous Personality and the Current Subject is quite convincing. However, Stevenson discusses other behaviors which are more convincing: 1) Emotions appropriate for the memories he claims to have, e.g. upon meeting the family of the Previous Personality, the Current Subject ardors the sisters but dislikes the brother of the Previous Personality, just like the Previous Personality felt; 2) Behavior (phobias, tastes, interests, skills, sex-type) that is unusual in the family of the Current Subject but corresponds to the traits of the Previous Personality, e.g. the Current Subject is afraid of water and the Previous Personality died by drowning in water; 3) Xenoglossy, i.e. the ability to speak a foreign language that they have not learned normally (this is rare but not rare enough for Stevenson to write a book about it).

In an up-coming post we will discuss the suggested explanations of this well-documented phenomenon.

Deeper is Higher - Part IV.5

Materialists attempt to reduce NDEs to pharmological, physiological-neurological or psychological mechanisms.

Pharmological explanations suggest that drugs administered during medical care, especially anesthetics, are responsible for a NDE. This explanation is problematic primarily because many NDE occur without medical care and drugs. Furthermore, many researchers have pointed out that those patients under pain killers or anesthetics have fewer and less detailed NDE. Lastly, accounts of hallucinations under the influence of drugs are different in key ways than a NDE (Life After Life, pg. 145).

Neurological explanations posit that NDEs are the outcome of brain activity during the death process. The Dying Brain Hypothesis is most famously attributed to Susan Blackmore. The feelings of bliss are triggered by the release of endorphines under stress, anoxia (lack of oxygen in the brain) and hypercarbia (high carbon dioxide) may be responsible for the tunnel vision and light, and temporal lobe stimulation may cause the life review and out-of-body distortions. However, Blackmore admits that these explanations do not account for the entire experience, and . A critique of her book can be found here. Among the problems with these type of explanations is that many cases of NDE occured when the patient was clinically dead under medical supervision. Some suggest that the brain wasn't totally dead and that there must be lingering "fragments of conscioussness" or "neural activity that is so minimal [that] it goes undetected." Yet if that were the case we would except a fragmentary or minimal experience instead of life-transforming, inspiring and lucid visions.

Psychological explanations are too many to count and generally not convincing in the slightest; NDEs are caused by expectations about death, or they are really a memory of one's birth, or an evolutionary advantage by feigning death, or memes etc. A more reasonable explanation is that a life-threatening emergency evokes a crises response wherein their REM state hijacks perception and the person will disassociate (The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion, pg. 424). This explanation is lacking because not all NDEs occur under stress, or it happens so sudden that there is not enough time to have a crises response (for example, being blindsided by an oncoming car).


Now let us turn to some positive evidence for a spiritual explanation: NDEs demonstrate that consciousness can exist independent of the brain. Notice I do not suggest that NDEs conclusively demonstrate that there is life after death, because we do not know what lies beyond "the border" from which all returnees inevitably return. To begin I will quote some NDEs themselves.

"Pam Reynolds...had a giant basilar artery aneurysm...Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler...was a specialist and pioneer in a rare, dangerous, but sometimes necessary technique called hypothermic cardiac arrest, or 'Operation Standstill.' He would take her body down to a temperature so low that she was essential dead, but then bring her back to a normal temperature before irreversible damage set in...As the surgery began, her heart was stopped, and her EEG brain waves flattened into total silence....and her temperature fell to 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

"When all of Reynolds' vital signs were stopped, the surgeon began to cut through her skull with a surgical saw. At that point, she reported that she felt herself "pop" outside her body and hover above the operating table. From her out-of-body position, she could see the doctos working on her lifeless body. She observed, 'I thought the way they had my head shaved was very peculiar. I expected them to take all of the hair, but they did not.' She described, with considerable accuracy for a person who knew nothing of surgical practice, the Midas Rex bone saw used to open skulls. Reynolds also heard and reported later what was happening during the operation and what the nurses in the operating room had said.

"At a certain point, she became conscious of floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel with a light. Deceased relatives and friends were waiting at the end of this tunnel, including her long-dead grandmother. She entered the presence of a brilliant, wonderfully warm and loving Light and sensed that her soul was part of God and that everything in existence was created from the Light (the breathing of God). This extraordinary experience ended when Reynolds' deceased uncle led her back to her body (The Spiritual Brain, pg. 154; See here for more discussion of this case).

This is one such where there is "veridical perception" of verifiable objects. Kenneth Ring describes five such cases, including a case where a nurse at Hartford Hospital states that she worked with a patient who described a NDE in which she saw a red shoe on the roof of the hospital during her OBE, which a janitor then retrieved. Pim van Lommel reports a case in which a coronary-car nurse removed dentures froma cyanotic and comatose heart-attack victim and placed them in a drawer. The patient was revived by CPR, and a week later the nurse saw him again in the cardiac ward. "The moment he sees me he says: 'O, that nurse knows where my dentures are" (The Spiritual Brain, 155, 322). Skeptics of course discount such evidence as anecdotal and sometimes even poke holes in the stories. But I wonder at which point it becomes highly unlikely that all such stories are hoaxes, misinterpertations, false memories etc.

In the post of OBEs I already pointed out similar cases not involving NDEs which demonstrate veridical perception. There too I mentioned Ring's collected stories of blind people seeing during OBEs and NDEs.

"Third," I quote from The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion, pg. 425, "is the frequency with which people who are near death report meeting deceased friends and relatives...Surely some of us would wish to converse with Elvis, or John F. Kennedy, or Marilyn Monroe, or Kurt Cobain." It seems that there is something more here than just a hallucination.

In conclusion, while I do not claim that all NDEs, or all aspects of NDEs, must occur in reality, I do believe that the evidence is on the side of the survival theory. It is possible that there is a continuum of experiences - some are fully internal and hallucinatory, while other are real external experiences that one's consciousness perceives when one makes the journey to the Light.

Deeper is Higher - Part IV

Near-Death Experiences

A Near-Death Experience (NDE) is an episode where someone either came very close to death or were resuscitated after being clinically dead, and subsequently recounted experiences during the time they were "dead." The length of their time dead ranges from minutes to hours; the book 90 Minutes in Heaven recounts a lengthy NDE, and I once heard of a lady who woke up in the morgue and was able to describe in intricate detail her entire life from infancy (she then told the story to a rabbi who told it to me).

However, not all people who are pronounced clinically dead have this experience. A 1982 Gallup poll estimated that about 4 % of the population reported a NDE. Cardiologist Pim van Lommel found that 18 % of 344 heart-attack survivors who were clinically dead reported a NDE. Bruce Greyson reported that 10 % of Americans reported some recollection (The Spiritual Brain, pgs. 156-157).

The first part of a NDE usually consists of an Out-of-Body Experience (OBE) which we discussed here. However, a NDE goes beyond an OBE. Raymond Moody, in Life After Life, was the first to really make NDE part of mainstream consciousness and research. Although most people who have experienced a NDE have difficultly expressing it, finding it ineffable, Moody counts ten common, although not universal, elements to a NDE:

1) Hearing the news of one's death, (2) feelings of peace and quiet, (3) various unusual auditory sensations, (4) traveling through a dark tunnel, (5) out of body experience, (6) meeting other spirits (usually relatives or friends), (7) encountering a Being of light (sometimes described as God),(8) having a review of one's life,(9) reaching a border or limit, and (10) coming back to one's body.

A more current survey by van Lommel counts five general aspects: (1) OBE, (2) Holographic life review, (3) Encounter with deceased relatives or friends, (4) Return to the body, and (5) Disappearance of fear of death.

The effect of a NDE on one's life is nothing short of transformational. Besides losing the fear of death, they also find meaning in life (Life After Life, pgs. 82-87). They become more compassionate and loving (The Spiritual Brain, pg. 161) Even when NDE's follow an attempted suicide (which tend to not be so positive), the patient usually abandons thoughts of suicide (ibid, 159).

Deeper is Higher - Part III

Charles T. Tart defines OBE's as having two crucial aspects: "(1) you find yourself experientially located at a place other than where you physical body is , and you may or may not see your actual physical body from an outside point of view; and (2) your consciousness feels clear during the experience...he generally feels that he's in his general state of consciousness, so that the concepts of space, time and location make sense to him (pgs. 190,196)." This is in contrast to a Near-Death Experience (NDE) which has an altered-state of consciousness component. However, OBEs are almost always occur during a NDE, and therefore there will be some overlap between these two experiences.


Unlike telepathy and psychokinesis, OBEs and NDEs are so common and striking that no one (that I know of) denies their existence; the only question is one of interpretation. The NY Times has reported that OBEs can be "induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain," and therefore concludes that it the experience is the result of the "brain's attempt to make sense of conflicting information." You can see a video of this here. Susan Blackmore, a leading researcher and philosopher on OBEs and NDEs, basically concludes the same, but puts a little pseudo-Buddhist twist on her reductionist theory.


However, before we get to the evidence against the "brain-only hypothesis," I want to point out the logical flaw in this argument. It may be true that certain experiences can be induced under certain conditions but that does not mean that all such experiences, or something similar to it, must share the same explanation. In this case, OBEs occur in many different conditions- in extreme stress and in sleep, with volition or involuntarily, in meditation and hypnosis or during mania and drug use. Bruce Greyson, a foremost expert on NDEs, is quoted as saying "We cannot assume from the fact that electrical stimulation of the brain can induce OBE-like illusions that all OBEs are therefore illusions." Also see here. This is a common mistake that skeptics of the paranormal make; if they can come up with one explanation during one condition they generalize it to all such paranormal experiences. We will come back to this point in later posts.



There are two main pieces of evidence that demonstrate that an OBE, at least sometimes, is not a hallucination but an experience where the self leaves the body.

"As her physician was closing the incision, Sarah's heart stopped beating...But the emergency was over in a minute for it took no more time than that for the anesthesiologist to defibrillate her...She had some thing else to show that amazed her and the rest of the surgery team as well - a clear, detailed memory of the frantic conversation of the surgeons and nurses during the cardiac arrest; the OR layout; the scribbles on the surgery schedule board in the hall outside; the covering of the sheets covering the operating table; the hairstyle of the head scrub nurse; the names of the surgeons in the doctors' lounge down the corridor who were waiting for her case to be concluded; and even the trivial fact that her anesthesiologist that day was wearing unmatched socks. All this she knew even though she had been fully anesthetized and unconscious during the surgery and the cardiac arrest. But what made Sarah's vision even more momentous was the fact that, since birth, she had been blind (Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul, pg. 17-18)."

Kenneth Ring in Mindsight have reported dozens of cases where the blind have some sort of sight during OBEs or NDEs. Regardless of whether these visions were independently verified by others, it is still quite unexpected for a blind person to see during an OBE if it were just a hallucination. From my limited research it seems that blind people on psychedelic drugs do not experience visual hallucinations.

The second type of evidence is when an OBEr sees something that at their body's position would be impossible to see. I first heard of this from a friend about a friend who trained himself to have an OBE before falling asleep. To check whether he was really leaving his body or it was just a hallucination, he placed a playing card on the other side of the room without looking at it. During the OBE he would travel to the other side of the room and look at the card. When he woke up he would check whether he could "guess" the right card. He could. These homemade experiments went on until a well-known Kabbalist (you could guess who) told him to stop.

Charles Tart had the same idea and here is an account of one such experiment with Miss Z: "Each labatory night, after the subject was lying in bed, the physiological recordings were running satisfactorily, and she was ready to got sleep, I went into my office down the hall, opened up a table of random numbers at random...I the slipped it into an opaque folder, entered the subjects room, and slipped the piece of paper onto the shelf without at anytime exposing it to the subject. This now provided a target which would be clearly visible to anyone whose eyes were located approximately six and a half feet off the floor or higher, but was otherwise not visible to the subject. The subject was instructed to sleep well, to try and have an OBE...She was also told that if she floated high enough read the five-digit number, she should memorize it and wakw up immeidately afterwards to tell me what it was...The number 25132 was indeed the correct target number near the cieling above her head...the odds of guessing a five-digit number by chance alone on one try are a hundred thousand to one (The End of Materialism, pgs. 202-203)."

It seems that the only other plausible explanation of this story is telepathy so take your pick...

Deeper is Higher - Part II

We previously discussed evidence in favor of telepathy. Now we turn to the related phenomenon of psychokinesis (PK), or telekinesis. Again there are many ways to interpret the evidence, assuming it is accepted, but it seems to be impossible to understand it within conventional materialistic philosophy. Thus it will either influence the way we understand mind or the way we understand matter.

I will mostly discuss examples that 1) were observed in the laboratory, 2) where action occurred at a considerable distance, and 3) which involve conscious will, not emotion, such as the typical Poltergeist cases.

"Ingo Swamm in 1974 was asked to influence a magnetometer which had previously been found to be extremely well-shielded and which was showing the periodic curve of the decay of a magnetic field. Swann asked where and what the apparatus was; was told to find out for himself; tried to use ESP to do so; reported success and gave a description of it which the listening physicists accepted as accurate - and at the moment he reported finding the apparatus, the previously regular decay curve flattened out. As Swann's attention turned to the group, the decay curve became regular again. An observer then asked Swann to try to increase the decay rate, and for another short interval, the decay rate became much faster (Psychokinesis, ed. Stanley Krippner, pg. 100)."

"This device [a cloud chamber] ordinarily is used to trace high energy atomic particles, whose tracks are marked by formation of fog droplets. When the healer [Olga Worrall] placed a hand at each side of the chamber, a broad wavelike fog pattern appeared. It was entirely different from that ordinarily caused by ionizing particles. Two months later, Worrall at her home about 600 miles distant tried at a prearranged time to influence the cloud chamber. Three minutes later the experimenters observed again the anomalous wavelike cloud formation. The test was repeated successfully the same evening (ibid. pg. 63)."

PK has been studied in the laboratory for over seventy years. J.B. Rhine in 1934 at Duke University began to test the idea that the fall of dice may be influenced by mental intention. In these and subsequent experiments the general populace was tested, not self-proclaimed psychics. Rhine reported affirmative findings, which spurred fifty years of further research on dice and other objects and, of course, harsh criticism. Nevertheless, most parapsychologists were convinced that PK did occur and the focus of the research turned from "proof-oriented" to "process-oriented" research; the role of mood, personality, altered states of consciousness, skepticism, individual ego identity, and other variables were tested to see how that influenced PK performance. In 1989 Dean Radin, using meta-analysis of the best experiments (based on the criteria of the critics) from 1935 to 1987, concluded that the overall hit rate for all control studies was 50.2 percent, and for all experimental studies was 51.2 percent. Statistically this results in odds against chance of more that a billion to one (The Conscious Universe, pg. 134).

In the 1969 Helmut Schmidt created a random-number generator (RNG), an electric circuit that generates either a I or 0. In short, it is an electric coin tosser.Schmidt and a host of other researches found consistently significant results and moved on to "process-oriented" research (even testing animal's ability at PK with some positive results). Radin using meta-analysis found that the RNG findings were consistent with the dice experiments (about 51 percent), and produced odds against chance beyond a trillion to one (pg. 140). Interestingly, Radin, along with Nelson and Bierman, studied the effect that groups of people could have on an RNG. They chose times where hundreds of millions or billions of people would be focused on a single place. For example, RNG's located in Princeton and University of Amsterdam were recorded during the O.J. Simpson verdict. They predicted that five independent RNG's would show unexpected order when the verdict was announced. And indeed all five RNG's suddenly peaked to its highest point in the two hours of recorded data (pg. 166).

We have barely touched the basics of PK research. For a good up-to-date summary of the research see The PK Zone by Heath.

Therein she summarizes the different theories attempting to explain PK. Energy Transfer theories, of the Eastern or Western schools, postulate some sort of semi-physical energetic force within a person which connects to the world energy. Electromagnetic theories maintain that waves carry telepathic or psychokinetic information. Acausal theories maintain that PK is the result of ESP. Mind-Matter Interplay theories suggests that the universe will change itself to match the desires of the mind. This could work in different ways: 1) the world conforms to the will of the performer, 2) PK is an illusion and the mind is informed of the right time or place to get its desired response, or 3) the mind is not separate from the universe, and to change one is to alter the other.

Although she favors Mind-Matter Interplay theories, she concludes that PK is probably not a uniform process and there is no need for only one explanation. However, what is important for us is that PK demonstrates that the power of the mind is not limited to the individual mindbody, and this suggests that it cannot be reduced to the brain, and perhaps it is of a non-physical nature.

Deeper Is Higher

In "There Are No Living Atheists" I attempted to show the complete absurdity of materialistic philosophy. We want meaning, we yearn for it. We want to ascend to the heavens but we have become "men of matter," our spiritual senses dulled by the onslaught of Western culture and the monotony of daily life. Our first step, then, must be to dig deeper into our own soul and sense the Transcendent One, Blessed is He, from within. Modern culture, in the name of science, has tried to convince the world that we are nothing but genes and neural circuitry (and maybe even memes!). Our first goal is to show that this is not the case mostly through paranormal psychology and the philosophy of the mind.

I. Paranormal psychology

Larry Dossey has pointed out that "these anomalous experiences are commonly called paranormal events. But 'paranormal' is a deceptive word, because in view of their widespread occurrence, there is nothing 'para' about such events...Those who turn away from this area need a wakeup call, a reality check (The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion, pg. x)."

There are two ways to go about proving the reality of the "anomalous" - anecdotal evidence or controlled scientific studies with statistical data. Regarding the former, Rupert Sheldrake has reminded us that "anecdote" comes from the Greek an and ekdotos, meaning "not published." However, once published it becomes a case study, and case studies, a form of observation, is the starting point of science. I think the most intellectually honest approach is the same as the one applied to Chassidic stories: If you deny all of them you are a heretic and if you believe all of them you are a fool. To discount every paranormal experience as a either a lie or a fluke is plainly ridiculous. Strange things happen in the world everyday to ordinary people, and to deny them is to live in a little box. It was quite sad to read Tom Schroder, in "Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives," struggle to deny the convincing stories he intimately experienced.

For the sake of space and time I will recount a few stories and some of the outcomes of the scientific studies in every category of paranormal experience, together with some of the arguments and counterarguments. In this post we will discuss telepathy. After that telekinesis and distant healing, followed by out-of-body and near-death experience, and evidence for reincarnation. Lastly, our discussion of mystical experiences will join the soul and the Divine.

Mario Beauregard, in "The Spiritual Brain," defines Psi as a "stable, low-level, effect, typically a little too high to be chance (pg. 169)." Perhaps the most common form of telepathy is "phone call telepathy." Every one has had the experience of thinking of somebody, not particularly prone to call you, and then very shortly after receiving a call from that very person. For some people this occurs quite frequently.

Another very common form of telepathy is emotional impressions. Ian Stevenson, in "Telepathic Impressions" has carefully recorded twenty-three such impressions. For example, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hughes were traveling to Crewe when Mrs. Hughes got the strong impression that she should continue traveling to Chester where her cousin lived. They changed their plans and when they arrived to find out that her cousin had been praying for her to come; she had lost Mrs. Hughes address and wanted to inform her of her newly discovered illness (pg. 41).

Another such case is recounted in "The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion" (pg. 11): "Melanie...is jogging across a bridge when she's hit by a truck and hurled onto a concrete embankment. Around the same time, her parents are at a meeting on the other side of the continent when her mother jumps up and says to her husband, "Glen, something's just happened to Melanie." She is right - and since the interruption is recorded in the meeting minutes the coincidence is memorialized."

Other times certain images may be picked up. For example, a patient was describing to his therapist his uncle's new girlfriend, when the therapist noticed an image of peaches. The patient then mentioned that the girlfriend had four younger sisters from Georgia and that the girlfriend's father had always called his five daughters "five Georgia peaches (The Sense of Being Stared At, pg. 36)." Another example is that of "dream telepathy" in which a "receiver" will go to sleep, monitored by an EEG, and during REM a "sender" will focus on a picture. Then the reported dream was compared to the picture that the sender focused on. The overall hit rate from all 450 trials was 63 % (The Sense of Being Stared At, pg. 50).

Transference of images have also been studied in the lab. Sensory deprivation experiments, called ganzfeld, have "receivers" in a very relaxed state and a "sender" trying to send the subject one out of four possible images. Meanwhile the subject would speak about his impressions. After the session the subject would be shown the four images and choose which most closely corresponded to his experiences. The expected hit rate by guessing at random was 25 % while the actual hit rate was consistently above 30 % (The Sense of Being Stared At, pg 51). A meta-analysis of all ganzfeld telepathy studies up to 1997 revealed a probability of a million billion to one against chance (The Spiritual Brain, pg. 171).

Now, there are three general categories of explanations for telepathic experiences:

1) The Materialist dismisses it as pseudoscience and anecdotes, or throws up his hands and hopes for the time when materialistic science can accommodate such events.

2) The Quantum Physicist draws attention to entanglement in the micro-world or to multiple dimensions. Or Controversial Biologist, Sheldrake, views the world in terms of morphic fields and extended minds. These approaches do not necesarily deny the existence of a non-material mind.

3) The Spiritualist views this as another argument in favor of a non-material mind. However, the nature of this mind/soul has different interpretations - energy, world souls, mind-bodies, and of course, Dualism. That is for later. One interesting caveat based on Sheldrakes, work. He has argued that animals also show evidence of telepathic impressions. This is not necessarily an issue within Judaism as there are some sources which discuss some form of spirituality or consciousness within animals (and non-living entities). For example, see Shiurei Da'at, I:2 which has a kabbalistic explanation of Perek Shira.