Are we created by our brains, or are we “tuned into” our brains until death?
Towards a model of consciousness that fits all the data
Table of Contents
- The quick version
- Where existing models of consciousness fall short
— A word on qualia - The “tunable conduit” model of consciousness
- Extending the tunable conduit model to include signals originating outside the brain
— Evidence for the extended model gathered under controlled experimental settings
— Does this evidence contradict established science? - A word of caution
- Evidence thought can exist purely in “conduit” form
— Evidence from near-death experiences
— Evidence from young children reporting verifiable ‘past-life’ memories
— Evidence that spirit entities encountered under hypnosis can confer accurate information previously unknown to the subject - Potential clues on the physics of souls
— Clues about the functional role souls play in the brain
— Clues about the wave-like nature of souls
— Clues about the soul’s relationship to time / alternative realities
— Clues about “free will”
— Clues about what defines the boundaries between souls - The limits on what may be possible
— Neale Donald Walsch’s Out-of-Body Experience
— Milarepa’s handprint
— Sri M’s account of meeting the Sai Baba of Shirdi
— Could the commonalities in these accounts explain other weird observations (UFOs, cryptids)? - Questions that keep people up at night
— Do “evil” spirits exist?
— Is “karma” real?
— What is the point of it all?
The quick version
Many scientists assume that the brain “creates” consciousness, but this assumption makes a logical error. In order to do science, we express our ideas in terms of concepts. A “concept” is ultimately a collection of mental sensations (e.g. images flashing into your mind, a feeling, a word popping into your head, etc) that we give a name. In other words, the building blocks of all concepts are mental experiences. The sense of “being conscious” is the most fundamental mental experience, without which mental experiences do not exist. It follows that the sense of being conscious is the most primitive “concept”.
From this, it follows that the statement that “brains” “create” “being conscious” is literally inconceivable (that is, impossible to experience conceptually), as it requires us to imagine a state without “being conscious”, which is synonymous to a state of no experience, and since mental experiences are the building blocks of concepts, a state of no experience is literally inconceivable. Instead, we try to approximate it by imagining a silent existence. This means we cannot conceptually distinguish a state of “no existence” from a state of silent existence. It follows that the claim that functioning brains “create” consciousness should be replaced with the claim that functioning brains are the sole entities capable of creating signals within consciousness, as the latter statement is conceivable while the former is not.
All neuroscientific evidence to date shows that a functioning brain is capable of creating signals within consciousness. None of it establishes that a functioning brain is the sole object capable of creating signals within consciousness, particularly in light of the great deal of evidence (e.g. from near-death experiences) that shows a conscious agent can exist (that is, have experiences) without receiving signals from a functioning brain.
In addition to showing that our consciousness can receive signals that do not originate from our brains, the evidence also indicates that the state of this consciousness shapes that which we call “chance” in our external reality. Consider this 2018 review of over 1000 experiments performed across 11 categories, published in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association (here is a non-paywalled version), which concluded:
The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of [psychic phenomena], which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms
One of the experiments featured in that review is the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton. It tested the hypothesis that during time periods in which there is unusually strong coherence in what people are thinking about (e.g. a terrorist attack), random number generators based on quantum tunneling are more likely to produce correlated results. The main experiment concluded in 2015, and the odds ratio in favor of the hypothesis was a trillion to one. The list of time periods was pre-registered and can be found here, and the result was not observed for duration-matched “control” time periods surrounding the pre-registered time periods. As for the claim that these phenomena would require a force-carrying particle that should have showed up in experiments by now: the aforementioned Global Consciousness Project at Princeton proves that these effects work by altering probabilities of observations at the quantum mechanical level. They are not a “force” in the conventional sense at all. A more detailed writeup on the experiment, as well as its implications for physics and “free will”, is available in another medium piece:
A more complete treatment of this topic, as well as a model to explain the evidence, is presented in the remainder of this article. The model is built from the ground up, starting with observations about what it means to be conscious.
Where existing models of consciousness fall short
Have you heard of the “neural binding problem” of consciousness? It refers to the problem of how things like color, shape, size and motion are handled by largely distinct neural circuits but are nevertheless experienced together. The most elementary example is that we don’t confuse a red circle and a blue square with a blue circle and a red square because we don’t experience shape and color separately. Although much progress has been made on solving this aspect of the binding problem, the larger problem remains a mystery; to quote from this 2012 review published in Cognitive Neurodynamics: “there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene…that is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience.”
Similarly, have you ever wondered what creates the distinction between those things that we are aware of and those things we are unaware of? For example, when we move our hands to catch a ball, our brain does a lot of processing to determine how our muscles should move — but we are not aware of all that processing, as it is largely subconscious. This issue of what creates the distinction between the conscious and the subconscious is called the “boundary” problem of consciousness, and to date there is no theory of physics to address how this boundary is created.
Third, have you wondered what distinguishes actions that we perceive as coming under “free will” from actions we take unconsciously? Regardless of whether you believe “free will is an illusion”, there is no question that humans perceive themselves as being able to exert “willpower” to guide their actions. Why do some processes appear to be influenceable through “willpower” and not others? The obvious answer, of course, is that decision making processes that we are “aware” of are the ones that we exert “willpower” over, but this now reduces to the boundary problem: what distinguishes decision-making processes we are “aware” of from ones we are unaware of?
A word on qualia
The term “qualia” refers to the “elements that make up conscious experience” — things like “the redness of red”, “the taste of sugar”, “the sound of a bell” and so forth. I think it’s worth spending a moment to reflect on just how weird qualia are.
Consider this thought experiment: you have a color scientist (named “Mary” in the original thought experiment) who studies all the known facts about color; she studies the wavelengths associated with the term “red”, the chemical reactions that occur when light from particular wavelengths hit the retina, which neurons fire, and so forth — but she does this study while viewing the world through lenses that filter everything to greyscale. The thought experiment then asks: after having studied all these known facts about color, imagine Mary takes off the lenses and looks at the world for the first time. Will she learn anything new? The natural answer is, of course, that she will learn “what the experience of color is like” — that is, she will experience the qualia of “redness”, “greenness” etc. for the first time, something that you do not get from merely knowing the wavelengths associated with these colors. The question then becomes: how is this knowledge represented?
Here’s another thought experiment: for all you know, when I look at an object that has a color from the red wavelength range, I may be experiencing what you experience when you look at a color from the green wavelength range and vice versa; that is, our internal representation of ‘redness’ and ‘greenness’ may be swapped, but as long as we use the same words in the same ways, we wouldn’t necessarily notice. We can of course argue that if there were a difference in what “redness” and “greenness” look like for you and me, this would show up as some difference in our biological circuitry — e.g. perhaps a difference in neural wiring. However, that is an assumption, because we currently have no theory by which to even represent how “redness” and “greenness” appear to an individual, much less how they would map on to a measurable biological differences.
The purpose of these thought experiments is to draw your attention to how qualia exist as a distinct “layer” of reality that cannot be fully communicated through language. We can only explain concepts in terms of other concepts we have created, and qualia are the building blocks of how we internally represent concepts; when I think of a concept, I conjure images and sounds corresponding to what that concept represents. Those images and sounds are all qualia.
If qualia are the building blocks of how we represent concepts, and concepts are the building blocks for how we describe everything else, then I hope it is clear why we cannot have a complete understand ourselves if we don’t have an understanding of qualia. This is the fundamental reason I find it odd when people assert that “we are no more than [biological] machines” — perhaps they mean humans have “nothing resembling a soul”. But what if we just use “soul” as a conceptual word for “something that experiences qualia”?
The “tunable conduit” model of consciousness
It is commonly assumed that our conscious experience is created by brain activity because when regions of the brain are inactivated, people report losing consciousness associated with those regions. However, consider this analogy: if a radio is tuned to a radio station, and the radio station experiences an equipment malfunction and goes down, the radio will pick up silence; this does not mean the radio was created by the radio station. In other words, setting aside the logical error I mentioned in the first section of this article (that pointed out that the idea that brains “create” consciousness is literally inconceivable as it requires us to imagine a state of no consciousness), all the evidence used to argue that our conscious experience is “created” by brain activity is equally compatible with a model in which the brain merely generates signals that our conscious experience is tuned into.
A model in which our conscious experience is tuned into and thus receives signals from the brain has a number of advantages:
- It can address the binding problem: signals from distinct brain circuits are integrated because they have a common receiver tuned into them.
- It addresses the boundary problem: the limits on what we are aware come from the limits on what our conscious experience is tuned into.
- It provides a distinct category of actions to correspond to the “feeling of free will”: actions that correspond to changing what our conscious experience is tuned to, which is another way of saying “changing what we are focusing on”, correspond to actions that feel like they are under our free will. As far as I can tell, every action that falls under my “free will” can, on some level, be described as a change of what I am focusing on. One might ask: what is the mechanism by which a change of “focus” impacts our actions? Based on observations that attention is related to synchrony, we can postulate that our conscious experience may act as a conduit for energy transfer — that is, having our conscious attention “tuned into” various parts of the brain may allow those parts of the brain to coordinate their activities. This would also agree with the vibration-based model implicit in the idea of “tuning”; vibrations are a form of energy propagation. (Also see the article on the Global Consciousness Project that suggests “free will” fits into to the laws of physics by affecting the outcomes of events that physics currently models as “random” at the quantum mechanical level)
- If we accept the idea of a tunable conduit, qualia could be represented as the particular pattern of energy flowing through the conduit. This aspect would be testable if we found a way to recreate the pattern of one person’s conduit in another to see if it created similar qualia even in the absence of sensory input.
However, even if we accept 1–4, that still doesn’t rule out the possibility that this “tunable conduit” is created by the brain; e.g. one could argue that it somehow emerges from the brain’s electromagnetic fields. To address this, I am forced to bring your attention to perhaps the more contentious portion of this article: the (rather large) amount of evidence indicating that conscious experience is not solely created by brain activity.
Extending the tunable conduit model to include signals originating outside the brain
Let’s think about how we might distinguish between the hypothesis where our conscious experience is solely created by brain activity, and the hypothesis where our conscious experience is tuned into brain activity but is not created by it. If the latter hypothesis is true, you would expect that, when the brain goes “quiet”, your conscious experience is be more likely to pick up signals that do not originate from your brain.
Let’s frame this more formally. Consider the following additions to the “tunable conduit” model:
- The substrate of the tunable conduit exists in a fully interconnected medium that has properties resembling a “collective consciousness”. The distinction between entities within the collective consciousness comes from the fact that different parts of the collective consciousness oscillate in different ways and are thus tuned into different experiences; the reason humans do not normally notice signals that don’t originate from the brain is that such signals are typically “drowned out” by the much louder sensory signals of the brain.
- The “conduit” of consciousness is not limited by the space/time constraints that matter experiences, and it can thus connect events that are temporally and spatially separated; this may even be necessary to address the binding problem of consciousness.
Evidence for the extended model gathered under controlled experimental settings
A prediction of Extension 1 is that when sensory input from the brain is silenced, conscious entities might be able to pick up qualia experienced by other conscious entities. As it so happens, several studies have found evidence that when subjects are placed under conditions of sensory deprivation, they show a weak but statistically significant ability to pick up on “neighboring” thoughts. In these experiments, a “receiver” is placed in a state of sensory deprivation while a “sender” focuses on a randomly chosen image. Later, the “receiver” is asked to select one of four images that matched the sensations they experienced while under sensory deprivation. Meta-analysis of these studies finds that the receiver selects the correct image 35% of the time, and the odds of this happening by chance across the various studies are around one in a billion. Several other studies have found evidence for related phenomena (broadly referred to as ‘psi’ phenomena in the psychology literature), and a 2018 review of over 1000 studies across 11 categories, published in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, concluded:
The evidence provides cumulative support for the reality of psi, which cannot be readily explained away by the quality of the studies, fraud, selective reporting, experimental or analytical incompetence, or other frequent criticisms. The evidence for psi is comparable to that for established phenomena in psychology and other disciplines.
Lest you think psychologists are all statistically incompetent, in 2016 no less an authority than the president of the American Statistical Association said, in their presidential address:
I would like to question whether anyone actually lives under the guiding principle that Data beat Anecdotes. I certainly haven’t seen much evidence of that. Even a cursory knowledge of what’s happening in politics should convince us that anecdotes often beat data, and powerfully so.
I can provide a more concrete example based on the research I have done in parapsychology. Parapsychology is concerned with the scientific investigation of potential skills that are commonly known as psychic abilities, such as precognition, telepathy, and so on. For many years I have worked with researchers doing very careful work in this area, including a year I spent working on a classified project for the United States government, to see if we could use these abilities for intelligence gathering during the Cold War. This 20-year project is described in the recent book ESP Wars East and West by physicist Edwin May, the lead scientist on the project, with input from his Soviet counterparts.
At the end of that project I wrote a report for Congress, stating what I still think is true. The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically, and would be widely accepted if they pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at data! And on the other extreme, there are true believers who base their belief solely on anecdotes and personal experience. I have asked the debunkers if there is any amount of data that could convince them, and they generally have responded by saying, “probably not.” I ask them what original research they have read, and they mostly admit that they haven’t read any! Now there is a definition of pseudo-science — basing conclusions on belief, rather than data!
When I have given talks on this topic to audiences of statisticians, I show lots of data. Then I ask the audience, which would be more convincing to you — lots more data, or one strong personal experience? Almost without fail, the response is one strong personal experience! Of course I’m giving you an extreme example, and I think people are justifiably skeptical, because most people think that these abilities contradict what we know about science. They don’t, but that’s the subject for a different talk!
The empirical evidence for precognition is why I introduced Extension 2, and in the section below titled “does this evidence contradict established science”, I discuss hints from the recently-discovered antipodal duality that our understanding of causality is incomplete. I also encourage the reader to look at this article from Jan 2023 titled “Quantum aspects of the brain-mind relationship: a hypothesis with supporting evidence”, published in the journal Biosystems.
A quick note on failed replication attempts: while it is true that not all attempts at replicating these phenomena are successful, the successful replications (including by people who explicitly disbelieved such phenomena despite their findings showing a positive effect) are sufficient in number that they withstand meta-analysis. Unfortunately, the mere existence of studies that fail to replicate such phenomena is enough for some to conclude that the studies that do find an effect must be products of fraud/incompetence. This seems like a case of motivated stopping (a term to describe when people ignore an obvious third alternative, or have an argument whose obvious counterargument they would rather not see). To understand why, let’s step back and, in accordance with the scientific method, consider which observations are to be expected under the hypothesis being tested. These are experiments on whether subjects can detect thoughts of other conscious entities. The experimenter is a conscious entity. If an experimenter goes in convinced that the effect doesn’t exist, that belief is a thought; you should expect that belief to interfere with the experiment. A prediction of this model is that two experimenters with different beliefs who are conducting the same ‘psi’ experiment are likely to observe different effect sizes for the phenomenon.
It so happens that this prediction has been validated: two experimenters with different beliefs conducted the same experiment to measure the same phenomenon in the same setup. One saw a “Psi” effect (the term parapsychologists use for these phenomena), one did not. I got to learn of this experiment through Scott Alexander’s 2014 article on parapsychology; Alexander, a psychiatrist and skeptic, said the experiment “sends me into fits of nervous laughter every time I read it” and that “this is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results”. Alexander concluded the blog post by openly admitting he was going to rely on his own personal opinion to dismiss the meta-analyses on these effects, given that he couldn’t actually find flaws with them. Also, insofar as authority counts for something, a key figure in these meta-analyses is Professor Daryl Bem of Cornell University, a prestigious establishment psychologist who tried his hand at these types of studies and, to his surprise, got positive results.
Does this evidence contradict established science?
Let me quickly address why, to quote the 2016 president of the American Statistical Association, “most people think that these abilities contradict what we know about science”. From discussions with skeptics, I’ve gathered that this claim stems from an argument made by physicist Max Tegmark, who asserted about 20 years ago that such phenomena would require the presence of a new type of particle, but there was no evidence for the existence of such a particle at the energies relevant for day-to-day life. The flaw here seems to be in assuming that a new type of particle is necessary. In March 2022, physicists published evidence of a new duality called the antipodal duality, found by accident (Professor Lance Dixon at Stanford was putting together slides for a lecture and was getting confused because he noticed a similarity in the formulas for two seemingly unrelated particle collision outcomes). The crux is that the duality seems to involve causality and suggests that the Standard Model of particle physics is incomplete — not because there is a new as-yet-undiscovered particle, but because there seems to be an as-yet-undiscovered symmetry involving existing particles, and this symmetry may have implications we have not thought of yet.
A word of caution
Before we continue, I want to strongly caution the reader against blindly believing things said by someone who appears to be a spiritual medium. Genius is often close to madness, and a recent study at Yale found that the brains of psychics are similar to the brains of diagnosed schizophrenics in that they form associations easily. While it’s not inconceivable that a spirit-like entity would find it easier to communicate through a brain that forms associations easily, a repressed part of one’s own psyche communicates through similar channels — e.g. apocalyptic visions may just be the subconscious mind’s way of making sense of world news. I recommend this TED talk by Eleanor Longden, a diagnosed schizophrenic who made peace with the voices in her head by understanding they represented her subconscious fears.
I also want to acknowledge that many are repulsed by the idea that conscious awareness could exist independently of the brain in no small part because they have experienced trauma at the hands of a religion that used this idea to instill a fear of “hell”. Let me first assure the reader that I do not believe “hell” or “demons” exist; in fact, I have watched paranormal “documentaries” and have concluded that even if the documentaries are not staged, at most there is evidence for an entity whose biggest threat posed to humans is that they like to knock down vases.
In case you’re wondering about my motives for writing this: at the time of writing, I was not affiliated with any parapsychology research [update 2023/10/21: this changed following my own research into the Global Consciousness Project in August 2023], and I have no financial incentive to write this piece. I have a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford and a B.S. in Computer Science and Molecular Biology from MIT, so there are many other things I could be doing. Nevertheless, I think we have a moral duty to confront this evidence because of the implications. If we are all part of a collective consciousness, a case can be made that any disharmonious act against another conscious entity will eventually ripple back to affect us (e.g. during the “life review” that often occurs during near-death experiences, people report being able to experience every event in their life from other people’s perspectives). Most acts of cruelty are fueled by a belief in separateness; these findings suggest the separateness is a fallacy that comes from mistaking ourselves for our biological bodies.
Evidence thought can exist purely in “conduit” form
Here’s where things get uncanny.
Consider what it would mean if the representational power of the aforementioned “extended conduit model” was complex enough that thoughts could exist independently of brain activity. It would imply that sentient entities could exist in the medium of the collective consciousness itself, without any need for a mass-containing body. Such entities would align with the colloquial understanding of “souls” or “spirits”.
Is there evidence that a thinking entity can exist without a brain? Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on who you are), yes.
Evidence from near-death experiences
Near-death experiences involve cardiac arrest, which means the brain is deprived of blood flow and thus oxygen. Without oxygen, metabolism cannot occur, and the brain cannot perform its usual functions. This review, published in a journal edited by the Missouri Medical Association, describes lines of evidence demonstrating the persistence of consciousness while the brain is in this oxygen-deprived state. On a basic level, the fact that these subjects are reporting highly lucid experiences while their brain is oxygen-deprived (Line of Evidence 1 in the previously-linked review) is odds with current neuroscience theories, because it is not clear how can the brain generate lucid, organized experiences without oxygen powering metabolism. Note that the key word is lucid; we know the dying brain can hallucinate, but those hallucinations are highly disorganized.
But more compelling for me is the finding that subjects who report an out-of-body experience are able to describe their resuscitation procedures significantly more accurately than those who do not report an out-of-body experience (Line of Evidence 2 in the review). This is often done in a way that requires a perspective localized outside the physical body, for example:
- Pam Reynolds described the device that a doctor used while operating on her brain even though her eyes and ears were blocked during the operation
- Stephanie Arnold said “I could see what my husband was wearing when he got off the plane” (this quote appears in episode 1 of the documentary series “Surviving Death”)
- Anita Moorjani said she could “see her brother boarding a plane in another country” and “heard the conversations between her husband and the doctors taking place outside her room, about 12 metres away down a hallway”, which she later verified with her husband.
Note that the idea of “viewing things from a great distance away” also appears in what are called “remote viewing” experiments that the 2016 president of the American Statistical Association studied as part of her work with the US government.
Another finding that is notable to me is that the accounts of near-death experiences have a lot of cross-cultural similarity (Line of Evidence 8); it seems that, apart from misidentification of entities encountered during these near-death experiences as religious figures (e.g. claiming to have seen ‘guardian angels’), key elements in these accounts (encountering guide-like entities, meeting deceased relatives, experiencing a life review) tend to appear regardless of a person’s cultural background — even in children (Line of Evidence 7).
Incidentally, during these “life reviews”, it is not uncommon for people to view long-forgotten past events that are later confirmed to have happened (Line of Evidence 5). This raises a question: is memory ‘stored’ in the brain at all? Or are memories stored in the medium of the collective consciousness, and merely accessed by the brain provided it can get the linked soul to adopt the right tuning frequency? After all, the neuroscience of memory — in particular, the question of “where memories lie” — is still largely a mystery. Which brings me to:
Evidence from young children reporting verifiable ‘past-life’ memories
The Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine has compiled thousands of case studies on young children reporting “past life” memories with highly specific, verifiable details such first and last names of close relatives and the locations of hidden treasures. In fact, in about 30% of cases, the child has unusual birthmarks or birth defects attributed to events of the past life, and a study found that these birthmarks/birth defects corresponded to the locations of wounds in autopsy photographs of the deceased to a degree that cannot be explained by chance. Such reports are consistent with the idea that memories exist in the collective consciousness rather than in the brain, and the brain merely “tunes into” the memories. In fact, this PubMed article (pdf available on scihub) details cases where heart transplant recipients sometimes report dramatic preference changes and specific memories associated with the (anonymous) donor’s life. There is also an (admittedly anecdotal) case where such memories helped solve an unsolved murder (apologies for the second-hand link; I haven’t chased down the original source yet). The heart has neurons (some even think of it as a little brain); is it possible that the neuronal activation patterns in the transplanted heart cause memories from the donor’s life to “leak” to the recipient?
At this point, people often ask why, if past lives exist, most people don’t seem to remember them. An obvious evolutionary reason to suppress past-life memories comes from looking at people who don’t seem to be able to repress memories from their present life — i.e. people who are hyperthymesic (that is, they remember nearly everything in their life with great precision). Hyperthymesics often struggle with depression and anxiety due to their difficulty with letting things go. Past-life amnesia may serve a largely protective function, insulating us from traumatic memories or pathological ways of being. Consistent with this idea, most cases of children who do retain past-life memories are cases where the remembered life involved a gruesome death (hence all the cases where birthmarks/birth defects aligned with wounds on the autopsy photographs of the deceased). Fortunately, these memories tend to fade around the same time other childhood memories fade.
Which brings me to the question of why childhood memories fade in the first place. The mainstream explanation for why childhood amnesia occurs is that the brain is not developed enough to encode such memories. However, some hyperthymesics claim to remember back to when they were a newborn even though hyperthymesics don’t display precocious cognitive development. Based on the fact that traumatic past-life memories tend to fade with early childhood memories, it seems natural to consider the possibility that the main purpose of childhood amnesia is to seal away residual past-life memories at the (relatively minor) cost of losing early memories from the present life. Hyperthymesics appear to have an abnormality in how this amnesia manifests in that they have more of a sharp cutoff on in their memory stream rather than a gradual fade.
An aside: the study in which birth defects corresponded to locations of wounds on the deceased reminds me of studies done in Michael Levin’s lab at Tufts University that found organ development is goal-driven — that is, organisms seem to have an idea of their end state and can develop towards this end state even when the initial state is messed with (e.g. in the experiment involving “Picasso Frogs”, the organ positions in the tadpole were moved around, but the tadpole still managed to develop into a normal-looking frog). This is concordant with the idea of a child potentially developing birth defects due to “memory leakage” of an alternative image of “how they should look”.
Evidence that spirit entities encountered under hypnosis can confer accurate information previously unknown to the subject
This line of evidence comes from the behavior of psychotherapy patients placed in a hypnotic trance. Perhaps the most well-known of these cases is an experience documented by Dr. Brian Weiss, a graduate of the Yale University School of Medicine, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Miami and Head of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami. In his book “Many Lives, Many Masters”, which he says took him four years to publish due to fear of professional blowback, Weiss recounts his treatment of a patient he calls “Catherine” who came to him with debilitating anxiety symptoms. For 18 months, he tried conventional methods to treat her symptoms. When nothing seemed to work, he tried hypnosis to help her remember childhood traumas that may have been the source of her symptoms. He thought he had found enough to explain her symptoms, but they did not improve, so during one such session he issued the instruction “go back to the time from which your symptoms originate”. In response, Catherine began recounting what sounded like memories of a previous life, even though she did not believe in reincarnation (she was Christian). Afterwards, her symptoms improved. Weiss was skeptical, but his skepticism was eroded when Catherine relayed highly personal knowledge about his family and dead son when she was in the “space between lives” (that is, a transition period Catherine would enter following the death scene of a previous life). Specifically, this is what Catherine said (Weiss recorded the sessions, and I have reproduced the quote verbatim):
“Your father is here, and your son, who is a small child. Your father says you will know him because his name is Avrom, and your daughter is named after him. Also, his death was due to his heart. Your son’s heart was important, for it was backwards, like a chicken’s. He made a great sacrifice for you out of his love. His soul is very advanced…his death satisfied his parents’ debts. Also he wanted to show you that medicine could only go so far, that its scope is very limited.”
Weiss said all of this was true, that there was nowhere to look it up, and that he could not think of a way for Catherine to have known this. Weiss’ firstborn son had died at 23 days old from a one-in-ten-million heart condition in which the pulmonary veins were incorrectly routed — as if his son’s heart was backwards. Weiss had been considering internal medicine, but this death prompted him to make psychiatry his profession, because he was angry that modern medicine could not save his son. Weiss’ father had also died of a heart condition, and Avrom was his Hebrew name (harder to find than his English name). Weiss says his daughter “Amy” was named after him.
As an aside, on the subject of reincarnation and Christianity, Weiss wrote in his book that he did some digging and found that references to reincarnation were deleted from the New Testament around 325 A.D. because they were perceived to weaken the growing power of the church by giving humans too much time to seek their salvation. I have been unable to verify if this claim is true.
Potential clues on the physics of souls
I’ll be frank: overall, I found Weiss’ book annoying. When Catherine was in the “space between lives”, she relayed incredibly vague messages from guide-like spirits about how the purpose of life is to learn and so forth. Weiss seemed entirely focused on what was therapeutically beneficial to Catherine and did not probe her for details on what she was witnessing in this “space between lives”, even though that’s where all the interesting details were. Neither did Weiss push back or attempt to clarify the messages coming from guide spirits; instead, he treated them with a mystical reverence. I was displeased.
Fortunately, Weiss isn’t the only person to have done this with patients; Dr. Michael Newton, a psychologist who seems to have been working around the same time as Weiss, had an uncannily similar account of stumbling on past-life memories during a regular hypnosis session — except unlike Weiss, he was not shy about probing clients for details on what they saw in the “space between lives”. Clients in this state are not particularly chatty, but over time he was able to spot consistent themes in the accounts and compiled a surprisingly detailed picture of “life in the spirit world”, spanning death until rebirth. The book does not put much effort into convincing the reader that the accounts should be taken seriously, and Newton mainly provides excerpts that he claims are representative of what multiple clients have said rather than presenting transcripts of all his session, so in many ways you have to take him at his word that the accounts are representative. However, I still highly recommend the book — if nothing else, it’s a fantastic source of ideas.
Clues about the functional role souls play in the brain
Here is a description of a soul “synchronizing” with the brain of a newborn child:
This description of the soul filling “gaps” in the brain is consistent with the idea that souls address the Binding Problem (discussed at the beginning of this article). The idea of “synchronization” between the brain and a wave-like soul is concordant both with the previously-discussed “tunable conduit” model and with a Feb 2023 study that showed the brain works like a resonance chamber. It also fits with an Oct 2022 MRI study that found evidence of entanglement in the brain in areas related to consciousness, because if the soul functions outside of typical spacetime constraints (and entanglement is a prime example of coordination between observations that are spatiotemporally separated), it could confer some of this flexibility to the brain, thereby allowing the brain to coordinate activity across spatiotemporally separated locations — i.e. precisely the issue that the binding problem struggles with. Also, the subject’s description of an “emptiness” in the brain that the soul is designed to fill implies that brains co-evolved with souls, which makes sense if souls play a role in processes as fundamental as binding and memory.
Clues about the wave-like nature of souls
You might have noticed that vibration metaphors are extremely prevalent in any discussion of the soul, and the accounts in Newton’s book are no different. In addition to the account of “synchronization with the brain” above, one subject who was an electrical engineer explicitly drew analogies to radio waves when describing their experience (relevant highlights in blue):
Clues about the soul’s relationship to time / alternative realities
Have you heard of Neale Donald Walsch? He is the author of the “Conversations with God” book series. The story goes that one day he wrote an angry letter to God detailing his frustrations, and was about the toss the pen aside when his hand started “moving on its own” and wrote down “do you actually want answers to these questions or are you just venting?”. The resulting back-and-forth was “transcribed” word-for-word into the Conversations With God book series.
You could probably model Neale’s experience as some form of schizophrenia, but Neale is pretty high-functioning, and the Yale study mentioned earlier indicates the line between high-functioning schizophrenia and being a psychic medium is blurry. Given the clarity with which the book addresses several (admittedly not all) questions posed, I think the book may be a decent source of hints on how things work. For example, the books repeatedly make the claim that souls exist the past, present and future “at once” (which I understand to mean that souls experience a subjective time dimension that is different from our universe’s time dimension). This claim also pops up in statements from individuals who (1) show some evidence of being able to access an abnormal state of consciousness and (2) claim to be channeling spiritual wisdom (e.g. hypnotically regressed individuals in Dr. Brian Weiss and Dr. Michael Newton’s works, people who have had near-death experiences, Yogis, Ekhart Tolle, etc). Thus, I think it’s worth considering whether there is something to the hint. It does happen to align with the aforementioned empirical evidence on precognition, which challenges conventional views about causality.
This view of the soul would imply that the reason we experience a given moment of time is because our soul’s vibrational pattern is tuned into that moment in time, and the reason we experience time as moving forward while in a body is that some (unconscious) aspect of our soul is configured so that our vibrational pattern evolves to track time in this way. One could even extend this to the idea of alternative realities by positing that the reason we experience a given reality is that our soul is configured to “follow” that reality. Such a model would be consistent with the fact that Dr. Newton’s subjects reported that in the spirit world there exists technology to view alternative timelines. For example, “Case 25” is of a subject describing a location in the spirit world called “the place of life selection” (allegedly a place souls go in order to choose preview lives that they have the option of incarnating in, should they agree to incarnate) — note the subject’s use of the phrase “I’m programmed for tracking time on Earth”:
These descriptions have so many technical specifics that I can’t help but be reminded of the “simulation hypothesis” (i.e. the idea that we are living in some sort of computer simulation), except to me it sounds more like a MMORPG (“Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing-Game”) where souls are the “players” and bodies are the “avatars”. In fact, Earth is often called a “difficult” planet in Dr. Newton’s books (because it poses both physical and mental challenges), and is variously described by subjects as a “stage play”, a “warzone” (where the war is against the illusion of separateness), and a Parks & Rec project where the goal is to get humans to be peaceful so that it won’t be so traumatizing to come to Earth.
Update July 23rd 2023: I discovered that the model proposed above, including the statement about alternative realities, lines up exactly with information from a specific channeled source (in which a human enters an altered state of consciousness and perceives themselves to be spontaneously channeling information from an external entity) — in this case, entities channeled by Darryl Anka. Interestingly, the primary channeled entity, called “Bashar”, claims to be a non-human intelligence from what we would consider to be far in the future in a “parallel timeline”, and the entity says its species is humanoid because they are genetically descended from humans. I won’t pretend that this is anything more than conjecture at this stage, but I’ve found many other things “Bashar” has said to be either helpful or thought-provoking, so you might enjoy looking into it too.
Clues about “free will”
One other “hint” that was in one of Neale’s books is that “free will” is exhibited by “sentient beings”, which are beings that are “large enough and sophisticated or complex enough to reflect self-awareness”. Here is the quote (click on the image to zoom, and see the blue highlights) — frankly I had trouble following this section, but a hint is a hint and maybe it will resonate with you:
I am not sure how this would map onto the physics of consciousness, but if the rules by which the state of the collective consciousness changes are such that they could contain an element of recursion (e.g. supposing it is possible to configure an entity such that the entity must refer to the rules by which it changes in order to determine the rules by which it changes), then perhaps this recursive element is what is called “self-awareness” — after all, “self-awareness” requires forking off a part of the self to look back on the self. Perhaps “free will” corresponds to making a choice about the “base case” of the recursion?
If we accept that “self-awareness” confers free will, the natural next question is “how is a soul imbued with self-awareness”? Is there a process by which “newborn” souls are shaped to be self-aware? As per this account by one of Dr. Newton’s subjects of the process by which newborn souls are formed, the answer is yes; fragments of soul energy separate from an “egg-shaped mass” and are imbued with self-awareness in a process that involves “drying” and “sparking” the soul’s energy, and those souls responsible for taking care of these newborn souls are called “Incubator Mothers” (I told you, fun ideas if nothing else…):
Clues about what defines the boundaries between souls
When formulating the tunable conduit model, I proposed that the distinctions between entities in the collective consciousness arose from differences in the vibrational properties they adopt, as the vibrational properties determine which set of experiences one is “tuned into”. This is roughly consistent with the answer provided in Conversations With God Book 3, where the separation between souls stems from differences in “density” caused by soul energy manifesting at different “speeds”:
The descriptions also suggest soul energy is split up in a hierarchical fashion, such that portions of soul energy that are closer together in the hierarchy are likely to feel “closer” (think “soulmates”):
These responses are roughly consistent with the accounts in Dr. Newton’s books; in those books, souls are described as being organized into primary and secondary “clusters”, where souls in a cluster tend to interact with each other across lifetimes (the sizes of the secondary soul clusters in Newton’s books roughly lines up with the size proposed in Conversations With God for the size of a “single” soul; I guess definitions of a soul can vary). In Newton’s books, more advanced souls are even described as dividing up their soul energy so that, for instance, they can incarnate in two lives “in parallel”, or have one portion incarnate while the other portion continues activities in the spirit world (consider this subject who said they work as a guide for nine other souls in the spirit world):
If I had to formalize what it means for a soul to divide up its soul energy, it would go something like this: in the “tunable conduit” model, soul energy corresponds to the size of the conduit (i.e. the amount of energy transfer a conduit can mediate; if the conduit were represented as a vibration, the energy of the wave would be proportional to the square of its amplitude). My thinking is as follows: imagine that souls can be represented as multidimensional vibrations. A soul that “divides” its energy likely designates some vibrational modes that are permitted to change between the splits, and some vibrational modes that must remain common; it is the common vibrational modes that maintain the links between the splits and is what allows for communication/“soul recognition” between the splits, with the caveat that for most incarnating souls this communication is drowned out by sensory signals from the body.
The limits on what may be possible
Consider the following three anecdotes from seemingly disjoint sources:
Neale Donald Walsch’s Out-of-Body Experience
In the prologue of a fairly obscure compilation of a handful of near-death experiences, Neale Donald Walsch revealed that many years before the publication of his (by that point very famous) Conversations With God series, he had a very powerful out-of-body experience following an intense argument with his wife. Immediately following the experience he says he was in such an altered state of consciousness that he could observe matter at a sub-molecular level. In fact, he said he could position the mass-containing particles in his hand to avoid the mass-containing particles in his bathroom wall in order to put his hand through the wall. Here is the relevant excerpt:
Unfortunately, he struggled to retain the awareness of how to do this and was told it was for a similar reason as why a sponge cannot soak up the ocean: doing so would “burn every connector” in his brain. Neale was not an author of the book in question (he just wrote the prologue on invitation), and he was already well-known for Conversations With God at that point, so I see no incentive to make such a story up (if anything, the story kindof makes him look bad because he says he just sat on the experience and returned to his everyday life as a radio host until he underwent the life crises that led to writing Conversations With God, as though God was saying “ok you didn’t get it the other way, so how about this way”). Perhaps he had a schizophrenic break, but there is no evidence that the people around him noticed anything amiss beyond saying that he “looked ten years younger”. It’s worth reading the full account, which I have taken screenshots of and provided here.
Milarepa’s handprint
This refers to a handprint embedded in the rock of a Tibetan cave. Here is a picture of the handprint:
Here is a description of the handprint from the book “becoming supernatural” by Joe Dispenza:
I don’t know if I’d agree with Joe that the guide’s words “made perfect sense”, but if it weren’t for the fact that I’d encountered Neale Donald Walsch’s account of his OBE, I might have dismissed this as some weird geology. The idea of being able to modify matter at a sub-molecular level is common to both accounts, and Walsch’s full OBE account does convey that separateness is an illusion.
Sri M’s account of meeting the Sai Baba of Shirdi
Sri M is a modern-day Yogi. His autobiography contains a pretty wild account of meeting the Sai Baba of Shirdi. It’s wild because it features him walking through a door:
A video of Sri M discussing the experience is here — you can see he is very reluctant to share it because he knows it makes him sounds “like a nut”. I was looking for an indication that this was not a normal ability, and appreciated that his Babaji said “don’t try passing through closed doors next time, you might end up with a flattened nose”; I don’t think this was a joke. Once again, I was reminded of Neale Donald Walsch’s account of having a brief ability to put his hand through his bathroom wall.
Could the commonalities in these accounts explain other weird observations (UFOs, cryptids)?
I had never placed much credence in UFO sightings — I always assumed they were likely the result of a clandestine human-run project — but I recently learned that economist Robin Hanson wrote an article titled “My Awkward Inference” in which he says that after looking at the data on UFOs, he has been forced to place considerable weight on the possibility that “real/amazing devices from secret groups on/beyond Earth” exist. I wouldn’t have connected this to soul activity except for the fact that I recently started watching the documentary Hellier for fun and learned that paranormal investigators say they were surprised to find that they measured “legitimate [paranormal] activity” at locations associated with UFO/cryptid encounters (cryptids being a catch-all term for weird creatures).
I have to admit, the idea that advanced souls would choose to appear as flying saucers or “bigfoot” is so laughably strange that I’m reminded of the descriptions in Dr. Newton’s books of souls who escape to earth to prank humans (except those were described as beginner souls, but hey, who says advanced souls can’t have a sense of humor). That said, if we accept that a sufficiently advanced understanding of soul physics confers the ability to manipulate matter at a sub-molecular level (as suggested by the accounts above), it becomes harder to rule this out. I was (begrudgingly) reminded of the following passage in Conversations With God Book 3 that discussed travel in the societies of “highly evolved beings” (HEBs):
The passage above suggests that advanced souls can convert between mass and energy at will, and unfortunately for my human ego, we do know that mass and energy can inter-covert according to E=mc². I interpret the image of “a stone skipping across water” to mean that our universe exists within a larger, possibly higher-dimensional reality, and that movement through the portion of that larger reality that isn’t our universe is akin to the stone moving through air, while movement within our universe is akin to the stone moving through water.
This idea has become especially relevant in light of the pentagon whistleblower report that claimed the US collected “intact or partially intact” alien vehicles as part of a program that was hidden from Congress. Of note, when asked how such crafts could have travelled through space and gone “undetected” by the general public, Grusch (the lead whistleblower) said that the crafts “may not be traveling through space as we understand it”, and may instead be “coming from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here” (compare this to the image of a stone skipping across water). This aligns with a statement in Conversations With God Book 3 (published in 1998) that HEBs are already here on Earth trying to help humanity:
Also, Conversations With God Book 4 (published in 2017) explicitly centered on the topic of earth have visitors. You might have the thought “that’s a lot of books — perhaps the author has developed ulterior motives?”, but I think the book was introduced to provide extra guidance specifically on this topic. Importantly, Book 4 made the point that we shouldn’t blindly assume that all visitors are here to help us, as being technologically advanced does not equate with being “highly evolved”:
However, the book also made an unambiguous statement that we do not need to fear being destroyed by violent, technologically advanced societies, because the Highly Evolved Beings would intervene on our behalf:
I don’t want to fear-monger, but if you are planning on going on out-of-body adventures, please read this report of a DMT user’s (harrowing) experience of getting lured into what sounds like a hyperspace cult — if nothing else, it’s educational on what to watch out for. The user says the entities in the cult demanded blind trust in exchange for gifts, and eventually began pressuring him to “empty [himself]” so that he would mentally be at their mercy. This is in stark contrast to how Conversations With God Book 4 says actual Highly Evolved Beings operate; primarily, they operate by slipping constructive ideas into the slipstream of the “collective unconscious”, which would then resonate/inspire those humans who were attracted to such ideas. The book was very clear that it violates an “unwritten code” for them to enter anyone’s mind in a “personally intrusive way”. Also of potential interest: the book said that once every 1000 years or so, HEBs have even taken human form in order to get our attention. Perhaps Sai Baba of Shirdi, mentioned above, is one such HEB? Relevant excerpt below:
Questions that keep people up at night
I’m including this section mainly because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I don’t want people to get carried away with speculation.
Do “evil” spirits exist?
The possible existence of “evil” spirits is the main reason anything to do with spirituality is shrouded in fear, so I feel it is important to talk about even if my answers here are more speculative. A fairly consistent message from the aforementioned sources is that there is no such thing as “inherently evil” entities. To me, the proposed wave-like nature of souls provides a first-principles reason for why this might be so: waves that harmonize have larger amplitudes, and “evil” is characterized as disharmonious by nature; if there were an entity that was “disharmonious by nature”, its wave-like form would mean it would become rapidly weak as its movement progressed.
Still, this does not rule out the possibility that an entity can behave disharmoniously until its energy dissipates. If this is a topic that keeps you up, I recommend Dr. Newton’s aforementioned “Journey of Souls” book (the one compiled from interviews with hypnotically regressed individuals) for a model by which to think about this that may bring some peace of mind. The gist is that, yes, regressed subjects do make mention of souls (or more accurately, soul fragments — see the next section) who were displeased with how their lives went and who reflected this displeasure by doing things like spooking future inhabitants of the house they once lived in (nothing drastic; all in the realm of knocking vases over). There are also mentions of souls who, due to their involvement in cruel acts while alive, are ashamed to face their peers after death and thus prefer seclusion on earth. In a follow-up book, Newton provides accounts of “Redeemer” spirits whose “job” it is to go to these souls and say things like “don’t you think it’s been long enough” (told you, fun ideas if nothing else). But perhaps my favorite was the mention of spirits who are basically “kids” (beginner souls) that sneak off to earth to play pranks on humans; once again, other souls are tasked with the job of stopping this from happening too much 😅
That said, Newton’s follow-up book does mention that, in extreme cases (I guess think psychopathic serial killers?), the “damage” to a soul’s energy pattern is so great that it is not possible to heal though the usual procedures, and such souls actually pose a threat to other souls. I interpret “damage” here as meaning “influences on the soul’s ‘future’ behavior that come from having behaved in cruel ways in the soul’s ‘past’” (I put ‘future’ and ‘past’ in quotes because souls are described as evolving along a time dimension that is separate from the time dimension of Earth’s universe). Such souls are referred to as “atrocity” souls — harsh word, I know, and Newton thought so too, but the hypnotized subject interviewed was very matter-of-fact about it and asked what other word would describe such acts. According to the interviewee, such souls are given the following three choices: 1) incarnate in several lives where they are likely to be on the receiving end of the abuse they inflicted in order to “repair” the damage, 2) dilute their soul with fresh energy in a way that would cause a loss of identity, or 3) exist in seclusion from other souls. The subject seemed to indicate that few souls opt for (1) because they are afraid that they will repeat their old mistakes if they were to incarnate again (i.e. the abused would become an abuser). While (2) was the preferred alternative, the subject stated that said some souls ‘will not stand’ for loss of identity and thus go for (3).
Is “karma” real?
Because I have introduced the idea that souls might incarnate in lives in which they are likely to experience abuse in order to have a chance to “repair” soul damage, I’m worried this may be interpreted as “people who experience abuse deserve it” (a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, huh?). Setting aside that two wrongs don’t make a right, Newton’s work is very clear that some souls incarnate in lives where abuse is likely in order to sharpen their empathy for the abused, even if there is no “soul damage” to repair. Other sources (e.g. Neale Donald Walsch’s books, Sri Aurobindo’s writings) support this view; “karma” is best understood as a way to “gain all perspectives” so that a soul does not begin to identify with lives that look a particular way. Here is an illustrative example in which a subject talks about a life in which “he” (or “she” as the subject was a woman in that life) played the role of a caretaker for their severely burned brother (“Idis” is the name of the subject’s spiritual guide — think of spiritual guides as mentor figures who oversee a soul’s development):
On a related note, Newton’s books say that while souls may go through phases during which they prefer to incarnate in one gender over another, this preference evens out over time (and yes, Newton does say that the memory of having preferred a body that looks different from the body one is currently in can lead to gender dysphoria).
What is the point of it all?
If a soul can divide its energy into soul fragments, this implies it is possible for souls to merge their soul energy into “mega souls”. What would be needed for two formerly separate souls to merge their soul energy? By analogy to what humans need in order to be able to get along: the souls would need to understand and respect each other’s perspectives. Presumably, karma is a measure of how “imbalanced” one’s perspective is, and “paying off” karma refers to rebalancing the perspective such that one can integrate with other souls. In other words, “the point of it all” may be to gain ALL the perspectives so that we can integrate our soul energy with other souls and thus experience the awesomeness that comes with it:
(until the awesomeness gets old, which in Conversations With God is said to be the point at which souls are spawned again as newborn souls so that they may experience the rise to awesomeness once more).
I wonder if this is the reason plural verbs are associated with respect in many very different languages (e.g. Hindi, Spanish, etc): in soul-land, the “mega souls” in charge of everything really are a “we” in a literal sense of being comprised of many co-operating sub-souls. I also wonder whether this is why the “plural” identity resonates with so many people — maybe plural folk are tapping into splits in their psyche that correspond to divisions in their merged-soul hierarchy? (I personally think I have way too many splits for them to ever agree on a name for any given sub-part).
Anyway, that’s where I’m at right now. I plan to update this article as my understanding evolves. Hope it was thought provoking/informative!
