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

Panentheism is the position that understands the absolute as both immanent and transcendent. This holds whether the idea of the absolute is theorized as a divinity or simply as a principle of cosmology. The “theism” in “panentheism” nods toward ideas of deity; however, as a philosophical position in its own right, it is possible to formulate a panentheistic conception of an absolute as a principle of cosmology and not a deity. In this case, a panentheistic idea of the absolute suggests a capacity of consciousness to function both in terms of embodied human conceptions of consciousness and as an operative principle separate from embodied persons. For instance, a number of Asian traditions which rely on atheistic conceptions of the cosmos demonstrate a panentheistic model (Biernacki & Clayton, 2014).

- Biernacki, Conscious Body. Essay in Beyond Physicalism.

Elsewhere I have talked about how the "theism" term in Panentheism / Pantheism / Pandeism is somewhat inaccurate if it *has* to refer to the One as definitely being a Person.

Credit to Biernacki as she excellently articulates this better than I could.

This also starts to look closer to what I believe when I say the Many could exist for all time just like the One, even if the One is the Ground. Pagan polytheists could see the One as the Source behind the gods, for example. Or the Jains may see the One as the Ladder of Being. Daoists, of course, could see the One as the - from what I understand - impersonal Dao that is the Ground of their metaphysics & beliefs.

@Valmar - A discussion between Sheldrake and Matthew Fox, that agrees with the idea of a Cosmically Immense Soul...we got there over 20 years too late   ->

In the Vale of Soul-Making

A dialogue between Rupert Sheldrake and Matthew Fox

Originally published in Resurgence, 1999.

The soul is not in the body but the body is in the soul. A Dialogue.

Sheldrake:...

The soul is the animating principle, that which makes living things alive. In Greek it's called the psyche. We now think of the psyche as the human mind, but for the Greeks the psyche had a far wider meaning: it was the life principle of all living things, including plants. The Latin word for soul is anima, and is the source of our word animal. The traditional meaning of the word soul is far wider than the human soul. The soul is that which makes things alive. A starting point for any reflection on the nature of life is death, comparing the dead body of a person or animal or plant with the living state that preceded it. The amount of matter in the dead body is the same as in the living body, the form of the body is the same, and the chemicals in it are the same, at least immediately after death. But something has changed. The most obvious conclusion is that something has left the body and since there's little or no change in weight, that which has left is essentially immaterial.

In the animistic traditions of the world it was taken for granted that many things in nature are alive besides ourselves...

Souls have been brought back into science in the guise of fields. My own work is concerned with morphic fields. The morphic fields of organisms underlie not only their form, but also their behaviour; they play the role of the animal soul. They also underlie the activity of the rational mind.

Fox: I really love your writing about the soul as field. This is a profound contribution...
...NOW, HOW IS SOUL related to the body? I just want to say this: the soul is not in the body but the body is in the soul. It's a very important shift of conscious- news and it contradicts Plato's belief of the soul as a bird stuck in a cage that's not really going to get free until it dies. Believing that our body is in our souls means our souls are as large as the world in which we live, as the fields in which our minds play, and as the field in which our hearts roam. That's how big our souls are.

If our body is in our soul, then our body is an essential instrument that celebrates and praises, expressing the soul's passions: delight, wonder, joy, desire, grief, pain, suffering. The body is an instrument for our soul. Teresa of Avila's finest book, I think, is Interior Castle, her book on the rooms in the mansion of the soul. She goes through seven rooms but she ends tier book this way: "Now we've explored seven rooms in your soul, but in fact your soul has millions of rooms, most of which never have their doors opened. And in every one of them there are labyrinths and fountains and jewels and gems and gardens."...

...Eckhart says in the innermost depths of your soul God creates a whole Universe...

@Valmar - A discussion between Sheldrake and Matthew Fox, that agrees with the idea of a Cosmically Immense Soul...we got there over 20 years too late   ->
In the Vale of Soul-Making

It seems to me that to claim as Eckhart apparently did that within the soul is the entire Universe conflicts with certain paranormal phenomena, where for instance in deep NDEs the NDEr appears to experience more of his soul than he does during physical life, but he still senses himself as located in a specific location in the spiritual realm in what could be termed a "spirit body", whether hovering above his dying body or traveling through some sort of "tunnel" into the spiritual realms, or when reaching the destination at the end of the tunnel encountering the spirits of dead loved ones. In all of these experiences the NDEr feels himself to be mobile center of consciousness localized somewhere not everywhere, not spread all over the Universe.

If Eckhart's claim were true you would think the NDEr would sense himself to be expanding to encompass the entire Universe. If some NDE accounts do actually recount such experiences then I would be interested in reading some of those accounts.

It seems to me that to claim as Eckhart apparently did that within the soul is the entire Universe conflicts with certain paranormal phenomena, where for instance in deep NDEs the NDEr appears to experience more of his soul than he does during physical life, but he still senses himself as located in a specific location in the spiritual realm in what could be termed a "spirit body", whether hovering above his dying body or traveling through some sort of "tunnel" into the spiritual realms, or when reaching the destination at the end of the tunnel encountering the spirits of dead loved ones. In all of these experiences the NDEr feels himself to be mobile center of consciousness localized somewhere not everywhere, not spread all over the Universe.

If Eckhart's claim were true you would think the NDEr would sense himself to be expanding to encompass the entire Universe. If some NDE accounts do actually recount such experiences then I would be interested in reading some of those accounts.

Anita Moorjani’s NDE actually did:

During my near-death experience (NDE), it felt as if I were connected to the entire universe and everything contained within it; and it seemed that the cosmos was alive, dynamic, and conscious... In that realm of Oneness, it felt as though the whole universe were an extension of me.

More generally, from Bruce Greyson in Consciousness Unbound:

Near-death experiencers endorsed most often the mystical experience features of noetic quality, positive affect, and unity and least often ego loss, timelessness/spacelessness, and in-effability. Scores on the NDE Scale, indicating depth of NDE, were highly correlated with scores on the Mysticism Scale. However, factor analysis of all subjective features during the brush with death yielded two distinct factors representing mystical and near-death elements. Collectively, these studies suggest that NDEs have substantial commonalities with, but can be differentiated from, mystical experience.

So we can expect some overlap at the least. 

But I would also consider the fact that NDErs experience a variety of things, some do seem to be able to move around time and space as well at will. Some have 360 vision, some do not. Some experience their religion as the only way to avoid Hell, some experience things odder than that. The veridical components of NDEs are evidence of Survival, but their contradictions indicate they cannot tell us what Survival is actually like or what the nature of Mind actually is.

But there’s also way too many questions about the subtle/astral body being the actual soul. Can it be split into parts? If the problem with Materialism is that immaterial characteristics of Mind - Subjectivity, Reason, Aboutness of Thought, Memory - can only be correlated with Structure in the brain, what does having a subtle body made of something like ectoplasm or ether change?

Consider this case, where an apparition haunting one location [apparently teleports] when a medium in another location speaks of the spirit’s guilt, and then the apparition is never seen again when the owner she stole from forgives her.

Sheldrake’s view actually helps explain a lot more about why Psi works, or how a soul can be on the other side but around to chat with a medium, or how someone in another dimension can send a signal to someone in this one:

One other interesting aspect of this case is that, when Mandy was six, she asked her mother, “Do you remember the night I died? There was a bright star shining in the sky.” When her mother thought back, she realized that she had in fact noticed a star out over the garden, unusually bright and low, and had mentioned it to someone else at the time. Mandy continued, “That was my star. It was my way of telling you that I would be back.”

Essentially if a soul really is just some astral-body, then to communicate with the living they have to have an extended Mind anyway. Which just brings back the Mind-Body relation question yet now it’s the relation between varied aspects of Mind - both metaphysical & Psi-related - that plagued us about the Mind and the physical body.

I do think that some part of a soul’s journey does involve shifting from the physical body to what we could call a soul-body, but I don’t think this soul-body is what a soul should be considered to actually be.

Anita Moorjani’s NDE actually did:

I should note that IMO she didn’t actually experience Everything, in the sense of there only being One True Subject.

My guess is that mystical Wholeness is over-interpreted by those who have it to erase the Many because they are realizing their *own* Cosmic Soul is infinitely vast. 

Yet it seems to me this ends up actually feeding the Ego when you override the individuality of others into some kind of cosmic blob. Which is my concern with Absolute Idealists going around and insisting that everyone else’s Idealism that does include Personal Survival is really just like theirs.

Though I think, in any case, Sheldrake’s view is if not superior to Idealism then at least far more intuitive and inline with how people think, just the “dualist intuition” is inverted and placed into what we might call a panpsychism of fields & space…though he also calls it a Trinitarian metaphysics…

In the Vale of Soul-Making

I think this view, that bodies - whether biological or astral - are within the soul helps with the "Why Do Ghosts Wear Clothes?" problem in which one wonders why an apparition has clothing on most of the time.

Reading Ruickbie's The Ghost in the Time Machine, which [won] third place in the Bigelow Essay contest.

He makes an argument for Souls being somewhat like fields, though he does include precognition in his argument which admittedly I am wary of. (I just don't think time loops or information coming from the future to the past makes sense at all logically speaking.)

With that personal caveat out of the way, some choice quotes:

The materiality of things – this page, the eyes reading it and so on – are mostly empty spaces defined by probabilities surrounding infinitesimal balls of quarks in gluon fields. That is certainly not how we experience reality in the everyday world. And the immateriality of ghosts and consciousness suddenly seems less problematic.

...By modulating electromagnetic waves (light, infrared, radio, etc.) we can encode information; Mother Nature seems to do this with quantum states. This is the ‘bridge’ between cloud consciousness and the physical body.

Penrose and Hameroff both saw the metaphysical implications of this. Hameroff made it clear that “The connection to space–time geometry also raises the intriguing possibility that Orch-OR allows consciousness apart from the brain and body, distributed and entangled in space–time geometry,” and that “quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”...

Information seems abstract but only a physical object can compute information and that for the theory of information to work within physics, then it must have a physical quantity, yet physical information is independent of the physical object that contains it. As an example, take the writing of this essay: the words are formed in my mind, transferred through nerves to my fingers where they are expressed as kinetic energy hitting the keyboard and stored as digital information on my hard drive, this is then transferred across the internet to be reconfigured as the text you are now reading, a light signal received by your eyes and interpreted by your brain to produce the sensation of hearing these words in your mind. The information has crossed biological and man-made systems, it has been electrical, electromagnetic and kinetic energy at different times. At every point in the process the information has been something and resided in something, but the two were not dependent – the only constant in this process was the information, so we must think of the information as more fundamental. If information is independent of the system, and that information is consciousness (as quantum states of qubits) and the system the body, then the death of the body does not mean the end of consciousness.

=-=-=

[Laird]

That second video sort of answered my question in the other thread: Rupert says between 4:44 and 5:01 that whereas he thinks the bioelectric fields which shape an organism are inherited by morphic resonance, he doesn't think that Michael Levin knows how they're inherited.

Incidentally, Sci, why did you think these videos were relevant in this particular thread?