In this part of the allegory, we see how the conscious self leaves the gross physical body, accompanied by the intelligence, mind, and subtle senses. When they leave, the gross physical body disintegrates. The conscious self then receives another gross physical body. The kind of body received depends on the condition of the subtle material body, which is composed of intelligence, mind, and subtle senses. The subtle material body is the template upon which the gross physical body is constructed. This model allows one to account for reports of past life memories, such as those researched and verified by Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia in his book twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. In the Shrimad Bhagavatam model, the mind is the storehouse of memory, including memory of past lives.
In his next life, King Puranjana becomes Vaidarbhi, the daughter of King Vidarbha. When grown, Vaidarbhi becomes the Queen of King Malayadhvaja. At the end of his life, King Malayadhvaja retires to the forest and takes up the process of mystic yoga. The Shrimad Bhagavatam (4.28.40) informs us: “King Malayadhvaja attained perfect knowledge by being able to distinguish the Supersoul from the individual soul. The individual soul is localized, whereas the Supersoul is all-pervasive. He became perfect in knowledge that the material body is not the soul but that the soul is the witness of the material body.” In this state of higher awareness, Malayadhvaja, following the yoga process, deliberately leaves his material body and achieves liberation from material existence.
Queen Vaidarbhi (formerly King Puranjana) is overwhelmed with grief at her husband’s departure. At this point, King Puranjana’s Unknown Friend (the Supersoul), appears before Vaidarbhi as a brahmana (saintly teacher). The brahmana says to Vaidarbhi: “My dear friend, even though you cannot immediately recognize Me, can’t you remember that in the past you had a very intimate friend? Unfortunately, you gave up My company and accepted a position as enjoyer of this material world.
. . . You were simply captivated in this body of nine gates.” The brahmana then instructs Vaidarbhi further about her original position as a purely spiritual self in the spiritual world. The message is that we should return to our original spiritual position, in which we have a spiritual body with spiritual senses. But if we choose not to do this, then we can remain in the material world, in a body adjusted to our desires. The body could be that of a demigod in the heavenly material planets, or that of a human being on earth. It could also be that of a plant or animal. Human life therefore takes its place in a cosmic hierarchy of life forms.
In this summary, I have extracted only the principal elements of the City of Nine Gates allegory. The complete account is much more detailed, and allows one to make an even more subtle and refined model of self-mind-body interaction in the environment of a multilevel cosmos, divided principally into regions of gross matter, subtle matter, and spirit. This model does not fit easily into present categories of the mind-body debate. Although dualist, it partakes also of idealism and monism. It does, however, allow one to integrate many categories of evidence from normal and paranormal science, as well as evidence from humanity’s wisdom traditions, into a rich synthesis, providing fruitful lines of research confirming and refining a complex model of self-mind-body interaction.
The potential explanatory power of this model, called by some the Gaudiya Vaishnava Vedanta (GVV) ontology, has been recognized by quantum physicist Henry P. Stapp, of the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory. Stapp observed (1994, p. 1), “The possibility that this ancient way of viewing Nature might be useful in science arises in the context of contemporary efforts to understand the empirically observed correlations between conscious processes and brain processes.” Such efforts are, according to Stapp, hampered by the concepts of mind and matter inherited by modern science from previous centuries. He finds the selfmind-body triad helpful in explicating the ideas of knower and known: “GVV accomodates these ideas in a straight-forward way by making a clear distinction between the subjective conscious knower, the spiritual
‘I’, and a mental realm that contains certain things that he can know directly. This mental realm, in contrast to the Cartesian realm of mind, is materiaclass="underline" it is constructed out of a subtle kind of matter. The introduction of this second material level, mind, provides . . . a basis for coherently extending the mathematical methods of the physical science from the gross physical world into the realm of mind, while leaving intact the knower, or self” (Stapp 1994, p. 9). All in all, Stapp considered GVV ontology to be “internally consistent and compatible with the available scientific data” (Stapp 1994, p. 3). We can now begin our review of elements of spiritual cosmology in Western thought. There are many ways in which such a survey could be arranged. I have chosen to proceed as much as possible in time order.
The Presocratic philosopher Empedocles (c.495–c.453) spoke of gods, demigods, humans, and other species, each with their natural realm of existence. Empedocles said that if a soul inhabiting the body of a demigod, blessed with long life, commits a sinful act, then for many thousands of years that soul must take birth “in the forms of all manner of mortal things and changing one baleful path of life for another” (Kirk and Raven 1957, fragment 115). Empedocles described himself as “a fugitive from the gods and a wanderer” (Kirk and Raven 1957, frag. 115). He said, “Already have I once been a boy and a girl, a fish and a bird and a dumb sea fish” (Kirk and Raven 1957, frag. 117). He held that by philosophical insight and a pious life a soul can return to its original position.
Ideas of reincarnation were also found in Orphism, the Greek mystery cult that influenced some Presocratic philosophers and Plato. George Mylonas (1950, p. 178), an archeologist and art historian, said the Orphics believed humans were made from the ashes of the Titans, representing matter and its powers. But because the Titans had previously devoured Zagreus, a son of Zeus, whose essence was deathless, humans contained both divine and material elements, the divine being immortal and the material temporary. Mylonas (1950, p. 181) said, “Through purification and ritual, through sacred literature and initiation into the mysteries, through the Orphic life and asceticism, man could hope that the divine essence in him, his soul, by the intervention of divine grace would free itself of the original impurity, would escape the Great Circle of Necessity and the ever recurring weary cycle of rebirth, would attain redemption. . . . That was the supreme aim of life.”