—including his karmic accumulation, ‘steps down’ from the outermost layer of the energy field surrounding the body to the one closest to the body and then into the body itself through cellular structures, when translated into incarnate life. . . . If karmic patterns are not resolved, more energy builds up during life to sustain the source of consciousness with highly charged material. Since it is not dissipated, this energy aggregate persists in time and incarnations.” Wade’s formulation mirrors the devolution concept, whereby a conscious self is gradually covered first with mind and then matter.
Summary of Chapter 6
Any scientific explanation must begin with certain axioms or assumptions that are not proven. If we demand proof of initial assumptions, then we fall into an endless regress of proofs of assumptions, and proofs of proofs of assumptions, and proofs of proofs of proofs of assumptions. So it is generally taken that initial assumptions should simply be reasonable on the basis of available evidence. Today, most scientific explanations of human origins begin with the assumption that human beings are composed solely of ordinary matter, the commonly known chemical elements. And this assumption, although not proved, is considered reasonable in terms of the available evidence. But in making this assumption scientists are not confronting all of the available evidence. I am, of course, speaking of the kinds of evidence described in this chapter. Even the highly skeptical carl Sagan, who in his book the Demon-Haunted World attacked many claims for the paranormal, said therein, “At the time of this writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers, (2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images ‘projected’ at them; and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation” (Sagan 1995, p. 302). There are, I am convinced, other categories of such evidence worthy of study. And when all of this evidence is considered, the assumption that humans are composed of three substances—matter, mind, and consciousness, as I have defined them—becomes reasonable enough to serve as the foundation for an alternative research program for explaining human origins.
Such an alternative research program should be welcomed. Those who hold that mind and consciousness are produced, as emergent properties, from the matter in the neuronal circuitry of the brain are faced with major difficulties. They have not been able to explain in any detailed and convincing way how molecules interacting with each other according to known physical laws produce consciousness. This has led some researchers (Griffin 1997, p. 132) to propose that material atoms have, among other intrinsic properties, some slight degree of consciousness. When combined together these slight bits of consciousness can, some suggest, combine to form the intense and highly concentrated consciousness that we all experience. This idea is called panexperientialism. But if each atom possesses only a dim awareness, of what would it be aware? Most likely, an atom would only be aware of the atoms in its immediate neighborhood. Exactly how this local dim awareness of other atoms could transform into a concentrated, individualized, global awareness is not specified in any convincing way.
Griffin (1997, p. 133), following the philosophy of Alfred north Whitehead, and the earlier philosophy of Leibniz, suggests that “a multiplicity of individuals at one level can be subordinated to a ‘dominant’ individual with a higher level of experience and greater power.” The idea seems to be that among all the individual atoms in the human body, each with its own little bit of awareness, there is one dominant atom with a much higher level of awareness, to which the others are subordinated. This takes one beyond the normal panexperientialism, and introduces something very akin to the atma, the unit of individual consciousness in the vedic model. By introducing a quite radical distinction between the properties of different kinds of material particles, Griffin inadvertently reintroduces the matter/consciousness dualism he sought to avoid by his panexperientialist idea.
A “dualistic” atomic panexperientialism of this kind is potentially compatible with the vedic model. According to Mantra 35 of the Brahma Samhita, a Sanskrit hymn to the universal creator, the Supersoul or paramatma enters into each atom. In a conversation with his disciples in London (August 17, 1971), my guru A. c. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada explained that an individual soul or atma is also present in the atom along with the paramatma (conversations 1988, v. 2, p. 351). The bodies of living things would thus contain many atoms, each with soul and Supersoul. But the expression of the soul’s consciousness is heavily covered in this condition. The bodies of living things would also contain a dominant soul-Supersoul pair that would be the soul and Supersoul not of a single atom but of the complete organism, giving the organism as a whole a developed individual consciousness connected to the global consciousness of God.
Some scientists suppose that consciousness may be a quantum mechanical effect. These scientists include physicist david Bohm, physiologist Karl Pribram, nobel-prize-winning physicist Brian Josephson, mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, and neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona, has called attention to tiny structures called microtubules in brain cells as possible centers of quantum effects related to the generation of consciousness (Radin 1997, pp. 284–285). But there is no proof that consciousness is associated with microtubules in brain cells. furthermore, left unexplained is why consciousness, of all things, should emerge as a result of a quantum mechanical effect in structures composed of ordinary molecules. At present, quantum mechanics says nothing about the origin of consciousness. Radin (1997, p. 287) points out: “An adequate theory of psi . . . will almost certainly not be quantum theory as it is presently understood. Instead, existing quantum theory will ultimately be seen as a special case of how nonliving matter behaves under certain circumstances. Living systems may require an altogether new theory.”
Physicist Helmut Schmidt did some of the original psi experiments with random number generators. As we have seen, RnGs use radioactive decay to interrupt streams of alternating ones and zeros. These radioactive decays are the result of quantum jumps in the states of atoms, causing the emission of electrons. Because these emissions are, according to quantum theory, random, the sequence of ones and zeros picked out by the emissions should also be random. This means that over time there should be fifty percent ones and fifty percent zeros. But in his experiments Schmidt found that by mental efforts subjects could cause an increase in either ones or zeros, beyond what could be expected by chance. Schmidt said (1993, p. 367): “The outcome of quantum jumps, which quantum theory attributes to nothing but chance, can be influenced by a person’s mental effort. This implies that quantum theory is wrong when experimentally applied to systems that include human subjects.” In other words, quantum theory is in this case wrong, because its predictions do not apply to the random number generator experiments. Schmidt added, “It remains to be seen whether the quantum formalism can be modified to include psi effects.” It is doubtful that this can ever be achieved. This suggests the incompleteness of quantum mechanics as a description of reality. Accordingly, it may never be possible to give some simple set of equations that explains everything in the universe. Quantum mechanics may have its applications for a certain subset of reality, but it is not all encompassing. The goal of a mathematical theory of everything may therefore be forever beyond reach.