Dualism or idealist monism as the best model for survival after death data

But why are there two memory storage mechanisms, one in the brain and one in spirit?

I think it is made essential by the high degree of intricate embedding of spirit in the brain structure during physical life. This intricate intertwining and embedding in the neuronal structure is so extensive that under these conditions the conscious mind, a combination of immaterial spirit and brain-generated data processing, is unable to directly access immaterial memory information which is part of the mobile center of consciousness. Or, at least, the psyche embedded in the brain can't access this immaterial spirit information instantly enough for the needs of physical life. So the overall design includes neural data storage probably in the cerebral hemispheres, as a sort of fast access memory store. At least a working hypothesis.

Cases of severe hydrocephalus where there is only a thin layer of neural matter despite retaining almost normal consciousness, would be where the embedded spirit has partially withdrawn itself from the body, but still maintains the spirit/body interface through neural plasticity. In these cases memory would mostly be maintained via the spiritual memory store.

Of the six, māyā, the sense of duality, is the most difficult to overcome, as it forms the foundation of the other five limitations. In practical terms, the subtle body is important here, because it functions as a vehicle for the partial release of the limitations, precisely because the subtle body, that component which transmigrates, is less closely bound by the five limitations than the physical body. Yet even though the subtle is not bound so tightly by time, for the subtle body māyā remains operational. So Abhinavagupta tells us that the subtle body “is like the physical body, but it does not have limitations in terms of its spatial dimensions” (ĪPVV 306). It also is not bound by ordinary time as the physical body is.

Abhinavagupta understands that the physical body is intimately connected with a deeper template, that of a subtle body that we possess. This subtle body, the sūkṣma sarīra, is a very fine body, an outline of a body, a mere template. He tells us, “in fact, this very subtle body is a mere sketch. The gross body is placed upon it, filling it out” (ĪPVV 336). So our physical bodies fill in what is a somewhat indeterminate template of a body, a very subtle noncorporeal body. This is in keeping with a pervasive principle in Abhinavagupta’s cosmology, an appreciation of the homologies between the material and the mental. The form that the physical takes is predicated on a prior, less determinate form. This element of indeterminacy, a kind of fuzzy existence, is an essential feature of the “subtle.” The subtle has a greater plasticity, a capacity to take on different forms because the indeterminate nature of subtle existence allows it a greater freedom to express a range of potentialities. As the body becomes less subtle, more gross, it becomes more fixed, less capable of the kind of plasticity that allows for siddhis, powers that demonstrate the supernormal capacity of human bodies, for instance, the power to fly or to read others’ thoughts (keeping in mind that for an Indian model, another person’s thoughts are the workings of manas, “mind,” which is a form of matter). This Tantric model, we should note, is not so far from a model presented later in the present volume (Weiss, Chapter 13)**. A great deal of Tantric practice is designed to bring focused attention to the subtle body, with the goal of using the subtle body’s greater plasticity to generate or exercise these powers, these siddhis.

 

The physical body is the abode of nonmaterial forces; it entails energies and deities, with particular psychological signatures. Especially the idea of deities as nonmaterial forces is not inappropropriate here—Abhinavagupta tends to gloss deities in this text as psychophysical functions, even with a fundamentally panentheistic theology. Brahmā, for instance, presents a fundamental creative capacity that humans can demonstrate (ĪPVV 308).[8] And again, what happens on the subtle level, in this case on the level of particular forces like the creative force that is Brahmā, is replicated in this mundane lump of flesh we think of as the body. The body functions as the material instantiation of particular forces. So, the creator God Brahmā is located in the heart, because the heart is understood by Abhinavagupta as the place in the body where we create ideas, and so on, with different signature functions making a ladder, both physically and metaphysically in the body. These several cakras lining up along the spine allow our physical bodies to manifest the energies of various archetypal forces or intentions in the cosmos, and they focally demonstrate the link that enables us to express heightened capacities, for instance, an extraordinary creativity by focusing attention on the cakra in the heart.

-Loriliai Biernacki, from Beyond Physicalism . Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kindle Edition.

**For more on Weiss' metaphysics, see this thread but here's a sample ->

Up to this point, we have approached the topic of a new metaphysics from the bottom up—beginning with a definition of actual occasions and then seeing how to build an understanding of reality that not only includes the physical world familiar to science but also explains the existence of transphysical worlds. In this chapter, I will approach the subject from a different perspective—starting from our everyday waking experience and discussing what we call common sense.

In the modern era, conditioned by the ideas of the European enlightenment, the standard view of reality is based on two basic and, for the most part, unquestioned assumptions. First, that the physical world is the whole of the actual world; and second, that the physical world is vacuous—that it is not conscious, has no aim, and has no value for itself.

Following Whitehead, I reject both of these assumptions as fundamentally incoherent, mainly because they impel modern philosophy and science into the impasse of the mind-body problem and the quicksand of modern epistemology. If we view the world through the lens of those two metaphysical assumptions, we are effectively forced to conclude that we can never truly know anything about reality. Consciousness, and with it, knowledge, becomes incomprehensible at best and impossible at worst.

Clearly, we need a new set of basic metaphysical assumptions. And that is what we are exploring in this book.

From the apparently unaccredited summarization of Weiss's teaching about reality (at https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-e...it-aspects):

"One of Weiss’s central points in his presentation was that each of us lives in an imaginal body right now! We never leave our imaginal bodies even when we are awake. The way we see the physical world (which is, according to science, nothing but energies in a void) is the same way that we see things when we are dreaming – as a colorful, significant scene. Thus, we are already seeing the physical world from our astral bodies. When we die to the physical body, we find ourselves in the astral body, which we are already occupying before death. A simple way to get a sense of this is to reflect on the fact that when we day
dream, we can completely give our attention to it (we might even fall asleep). In this way we are accessing the subtle worlds just by shifting our attention. Thus, we are not leaving this world and traveling some where else so much as just shifting our attention to a world that we are always already embedded in. Likewise, when we dream at night, we just release into the subtle body that is always here all the time. We are already in it right now. When we die, we die into our various subtle bodies by letting go of the physical one."

Interestingly, this seems somewhat to parallel my cruder thoughts on the interface between spirit and brain and body, which were arrived at through reasoning from the paranormal data combined with intuition.

From Tucker's Before (Life Before Life):

...In several Asian countries, a family member or friend may mark the body of a dying or deceased individual in hopes that when that person is reborn, the baby will have a birthmark that matches the marking. This practice is known as experimental birthmarks...

Such birthmarks and birth defects are not rare among our cases. A third of the cases from India include birthmarks or birth defects that are thought to correspond to wounds on the previous personalities, with 18 percent of those including medical records that confirm the match. I should note that the actual percentage of all children reporting past-life memories who have birthmarks might be much lower. We often have to make decisions about which cases to investigate, and since we are particularly interested in the birthmark cases, we are more likely to pursue them than other types of cases. Thus, we end up registering more of them.

Again it seems we have at the very least a preservation of "information" between lives. One could say this is Idealism but it seems to be akin to a "physical" effect rather than something "mental".

This could fit into Weiss' conception of Whiteheadian Occasions, which have mental and physical qualities but are not completely one or the other:

Now, if we define memory as an experience of past experience, then we realize that any causal transmission is an experience of a past experience, and so it is a kind of memory. This identification of causal transmission with memory will be a useful component of our understanding of personality survival and reincarnation.

Whitehead suggests that all entities in the universe, including us, are composed of actual occasions. If so, and we apply the Hermetic principle one final time, then it follows that all discrete events in the universe are, on the inside, drops of experience.

Weiss, Dr. Eric M.. The Long Trajectory: The Metaphysics of Reincarnation and Life After Death (pp. 107-108). iUniverse. Kindle Edition.

From Tucker's Before (Life Before Life):

Again it seems we have at the very least a preservation of "information" between lives. One could say this is Idealism but it seems to be akin to a "physical" effect rather than something "mental".

This could fit into Weiss' conception of Whiteheadian Occasions, which have mental and physical qualities but are not completely one or the other:

A bit of further consideration by Weiss:

Many cultures recognized that honoring and dealing with their ancestors was a priority. They built special shrines and rewarded members of their communities who could communicate with the dead. It would be arrogant for us today to assume that these people were unenlightened or primitive. They were genetically identical to us and were at least as smart as we are. Throughout history, they experienced communication with ancestors as not only possible but as effective and valuable.

Furthermore, no pre-modern society made the strict distinction between “inner” and “outer” in quite the same way we do. The idea that reality might somehow exist “out there,” beyond experience, never occurred to them. Earlier civilizations assumed, rather reasonably, that they experienced reality as it actually is. The contents of dreams and apparitions were just as real for them as the contents of sensory perception—just in a different way. All pre-modern historical civilizations also understood the physical world to be accompanied by worlds of divine and demonic beings of various sorts and understood human beings as possessing bodies that could function in those worlds. These beliefs have been exhaustively documented in J. J. Poortman’s Vehicles of Consciousness. These transphysical worlds appear in my fundamental propositions (Proposition II) and are necessary for the existence of personality survival as defined in this book. I will offer arguments for the existence of these worlds independent of the historical evidence, but it is nice to have the support of my ancestors.

Weiss, Dr. Eric M.. The Long Trajectory: The Metaphysics of Reincarnation and Life After Death (pp. 38-39). iUniverse. Kindle Edition.

From the public domain version Weiss put out of his book ->

We are now in a position to dissolve the bewildering gap between mind and matter played out in debates between materialists, idealists, and dualists. Whitehead invites us to consider the possibility that all of actuality, whether objective or subjective, is composed of just one kind of entity: “actual occasions.” Experienced from the outside, actual occasions are objective events; experienced from the inside, they are drops of experience. Each moment of my experience is an actual occasion in the outer world. Everything I experience outside me is some configuration of other actual occasions. The process of manifesting as an energetic event on one hand, and of coming into consciousness as a drop of experience on the other, are the same process seen from two points of view.

The awareness of a subatomic particle and the awareness of a human being are evidently very different in degree, but we need not imagine that they are entirely different in kind. Once we realize that “to be aware of something and to respond” and “‘to be causally affected by something and to respond” are, in a deep sense synonymous and complementary phrases, many of the philosophical conundrums of modernity disappear. Consciousness presents itself no longer as an extra-cosmic mystery but as the crucial factor that, by making choices, resolves possibility into actuality and gives to the universe its discrete determinations. I am conscious not because I am miraculously different from all other material entities; rather, I am conscious precisely because I am, in my process of coming into being, structurally similar to all other material entities. Sentience goes all the way down.

We will now see that the arising of every actual occasion, or “drop of experience,” involves the same dynamic structure that includes experience, imaginative interpretation, and choice. For example, when I deconstruct a moment of my own waking life, I perceive that it grows out of an experience of the past. As I begin each new moment of my existence, I feel the last moment of my existence, and I feel the immediate past of the present situation around me. But my experience is more than that original rush of feeling. Not only do I feel the immediate past—in each moment I interpret the immediate past. This process of generating a coherent interpretation is quite complex. Whitehead has analyzed this in great detail, particularly in Process and Reality.87 For our purposes, we can be satisfied with a general description: the process of interpretation arranges all of the diverse data of the past into a coherent pattern, ordered around the mental pole of the “concrescence” occasion. (“Concrescence” is Whitehead’s technical term for the process whereby a new actual occasion arises out of the diverse occasions of the past and then becomes one of those diverse occasions for future occasions.) The process of interpretation is not uniquely determined by the past. It sometimes happens that in the process of interpreting the data of my experience, I have a new idea, a new way of organizing my perceptions. This capacity to introduce novelty into the interpretation of the past is part of what we mean by “imagination.” Finally, in order to close out, as it were, the interpretive process in any given moment, I must make a decision, a choice among many incompatible possibilities that my imaginative interpretations present. Say I am walking down a path that splits in two. I have a moment of awareness, an actual occasion, in which I must decide which of the two paths to take. I draw the situation into my awareness by a process of feeling the sensory inputs; I interpret the situation (possibly in some novel way); then I make a decision. Thus, we see that, in ourselves at least, every actual occasion of experience involves feeling, imaginative interpretation, and decision.

Weiss, Dr. Eric M.. The Long Trajectory: The Metaphysics of Reincarnation and Life After Death

Just read through this thread because it was linked in one I posted that tackled the same issue. I’m first of all very surprised at the collective intelligence on this forum. A lot of very nuanced and educated takes that dealt with a lot of thoughts I had on the issue. I felt very drawn to the idea on Advaita Vedanta that while there is some sort of unifying reality, there is some kind of functional duality that grounds what we call physicality and mentality.

A little factoid that got me thinking about this thread - Sri Lanka specifically has a good number of unsolved CORT cases because the children don't recall a name.

This isn't the only incident where it seems geography plays a role. Consider the case of Japanese solider reincarnates in Burma, despite Burma at the time having an incredible hostility toward the Japanese.

What does it mean if physical spatial distance seems to have impact on the spiritual? Is that a point for some kind of Monism?

There's this idea that the real dualism is between the Visible and Invisible, that we simply don't see what's going on but we're already in the "spirit world". Recently I've been seeing the appeal of this idea, though it isn't necessarily comforting...

Pure Dualists just have a different problem... of how mind and matter can interact at all.

Well if you use Stapp's approach, the only influence is on the timing of observations of the physical plane by an entity in the spirit plane.

I quess it is a moot point as to whether that is an interaction, but in any case, as I keep on saying, real science doesn't use its theories in such a nit-picking sort of way. 'They' only want to reject Dualism because it so neatly encapsulates a lot of paranormal data.

David

There's this idea that the real dualism is between the Visible and Invisible, that we simply don't see what's going on but we're already in the "spirit world". Recently I've been seeing the appeal of this idea, though it isn't necessarily comforting...

"...In ‘Ghosts in a Secular Age,’ columnist Ross Douthat began by invoking a report of a widow encountering her discarnate husband. The significant thing here was not so much the discarnate husband (again, we are veritable experts at ignoring the marvelous), but the fact that the couple hailed from the hyper-secular world of the New York literary establishment. The widow was Lisa Chase, and the husband, Peter Kaplan, was editor of the New York Observer. Douthat goes on to reference another essay he had written earlier about an outbreak of ghosts after the recent Japanese tsunami. There he invoked the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor to ask the question of why ghosts no longer appear in the present to the same extent that they seemed to appear in the past. The first possibility is that modern peoples experience the mystical and the ghostly as much as premodern peoples, but their secular culture or ‘immanent frame’ encourages them to privatize these and keep them out of the public culture. Hence the illusion that these experiences are uncommon or anecdotal flukes, statistical blips, as it were.

The second possibility is that what Taylor calls the ‘immanent frame’ somehow ‘buffers’ the self and prevents the numinous from reaching us to the same extent. As Douthat explains, ‘the secular frame somehow changes the very nature of numinous experience, so that it feels more attenuated and unreal, and the human self is more ‘buffered’ against its enchantments, terrors, and pull.’[2] Here, religious experiences are actually being repressed and made less possible, even impossible, by the cultural filter and subsequent heavily buffered self.


In Authors of the Impossible, I lean heavily toward this latter hypothesis, partly through reading Fort, partly through the ‘filter thesis’ of consciousness (which sees the body-brain, in effect, as a kind of buffering or stepping down of consciousness as such), but mostly through the work of the French sociologist and philosopher Bertrand Méheust, whose two-volume history of animal magnetism and psychical research in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century France demonstrates the same thesis in rich and erudite detail.[3] Following Bertrand, I suggest that we have literally made the once possible impossible. We have changed the texture and reach of the real, even if its potential spectrum remains the same as it always was (or is). Jack explores a similar notion in his Introduction through his concept of ‘ontological flooding,’ and many of the essayists return to the same tantalizing idea in their essays. Of course, we cannot prove this notion of a ‘culturally conditioned nature,’ as the Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino had it, but we can certainly think with it and see where it leads."


 - J. Kripal, Damned Comparisons & The Real