International Day Of Yoga

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Today is International Day Of Yoga. There is a sense of dis-ease about this but on the whole it seems positive. But what is Yoga? Something which is spelt with a capital letter for a start, but apart from that, what?

The tired and tested answer to this question always seems to begin with the sentence “Yoga means ‘to join'”, and of course it does, in Sanskrit, cognate with the English word “yoke” and the Greek ζεῦγμα, in this case representing union between individual consciousness and the divine. This is where it starts to get complicated so I’m going to explain the way I understand it and summarise my history with it.

Yoga is a practice based on a fundamental aspect of the Cosmos and consists of a balance, appropriately enough, between the mental and the physical, or more accurately, practical. By one account there are seven limbs: Raja, Hatha, Karma, Jñana, Bhakti, Tantra and Mantra. This is not a definitive list as there are different versions of it and the word Yoga can have other words appended to it such as Pranayama, Kundalini and Laya. Hatha Yoga is the well-known practice of asanas, which is what many people seem to think of when they hear the word “yoga”. This is stuff like surya namaskara, padmasana, halasana, gomukhasana, cakrasana etc. Some yogis disapprove of Hatha Yoga because they think looking after the body is an obstacle to transcending it, and whereas I disagree with that I also think it demonstrates how far from Yoga the practice has come in the West. Raja Yoga is meditation, Karma practical action such as housework and the general discipline of selflessness as a route to transcendence. Jñana the word is cognate with the Greek γνῶσις and the English “know”. It’s the Yoga of knowledge in the sense of enquiry into one’s own nature beyond the ego. Bhakti Yoga is the Yoga of the emotions and devotion, exemplified by Radha and Krsna and their relationship. I see Tantra as the Yoga of self-indulgence, and to be honest I’m uncomfortable with it. it may be unfair for me to describe it in that way. Finally, Mantra Yoga is the repetition of phrases to capture their essence as a path to enlightenment. As for the others, pranayama is a collection of breathing exercises and techniques, Kundalini focusses on the ascent of the coiled energy at the base of the spine through the other cakras and Laya is the dissolution of inner being into the Cosmos via meditation. These last two aren’t really limbs, and are also very similar to each other or the same.

I started the practice of Hatha Yoga quite a long time before I should’ve done in about 1971 CE when I was four. This happened because there used to be a TV series on Sunday mornings I think. Through most of the 1970s, I was somewhat aware of Yoga and in 1978 or so I got various Yoga books out of the library and started practicing it regularly and seriously. After that, in about 1980 I bought James Hewitt’s ‘Teach Yourself Yoga’ and followed that assiduously. My mother became worried that I was pursuing it as a religious practice, as I also did things like practice the kriyas and meditation, and also at that time the London Healing Mission began its campaign against Yoga and various other practices it regarded as occult and Satanic. Because my mother was an evangelical Christian, this was quite a strong influence on my life, and the organisation was insisting that people burn all their “occult” books and beg God for forgiveness for following the ways of Satan. This to my mind at the time, not yet being Christian, was just dangerous nonsense, and actually Satanic in itself. I tried to introduce some of my friends to it, but as a young teen I was probably a bit too keen on showing off for it to be appropriate for Yoga. I didn’t go veggie at the time either, although I considered it. I was keen on the idea that it should be done as an alternative to sports in my secondary school but didn’t pursue this thought. Many decades later, I wrote this idea up as a story. The problem was that I never received any formal instruction in Yoga, and in fact I didn’t go to a Yoga class until the 1990s. One possible legacy of this is that some of my joints are not in perfect condition, but this is not Yoga’s fault so much as me doing asanas when I was a child and my body was still developing, and because I didn’t have any education from others in it. Had I actually successfully campaigned for the inclusion of Yoga in my school, things would probably have been very different. I don’t know what position Yoga had in secondary education at that point. Funnily enough, I did have formal instruction in Tai Chi at the end of the ’80s, at Warwick Uni.

Yoga was, however, one of those things which stayed with me, and I did incorporate some of it into my everyday life such as pranayama, meditation and a handful of asanas. Later on, marrying Sarada made a big positive difference to how I practiced, although by then I did sporadically practice a series of asanas every morning and had been since about 1991.

I think of Yoga as part of the fundamental fabric of reality and the practice of it as in some ways akin to using the principles of physics to design an electronic device. I don’t think it “belongs” to anyone and don’t understand how it could. This brings up the first really depressing issue to do with Yoga: claiming intellectual property rights on it. This has been done a few times, notably by Bikram Choudhury, notorious for the claims of sexual assault in his classes, so to be ad hominem for a moment maybe this is the degree of enlightenment someone who would attempt to patent Yoga has. On the other hand, good sequences can be arrived at by people which are worth promoting.

I’m going to take a break from this more abstract stuff to describe my practice of Hatha Yoga this morning, after going for a run. I began, as I usually do in recent decades, by relaxing in Savasana, corpse posture. This is simply lying supine with relatively abducted limbs and relaxing. A very long time ago indeed, I induced a post-hypnotic suggestion which enables me to relax completely in this position immediately, but the usual practice, and perhaps a more mindful one, is to pass over one’s body either from head to toe or vice versa and relax muscle groups. Before I used Savasana, I used what I think is called the “spinal rock”, which is where you roll yourself into a ball on your back and rock back and forth. I followed this with Sarvangasana, the shoulderstand. A useful way to think about this is to imagine your body is a candle with your feet as the candle flame, which reminds you to keep it vertical. I usually do the supported shoulderstand and go immediately into Halasana, the plough. Since I was doing this in a small room and I’m 178 centimetres tall, I wasn’t able to touch the floor with my feet and in fact there is a general issue with being able to do asanas at all in this house because of how we’ve arranged the furniture. Space is just rather limited. I think there are supposed to be, in imperial, fifty square feet available per person practicing asanas. I then did a twist, Jathara Parivartanasana, although a variant where one reaches across with one’s free arm. Although counterposes are important, on this occasion I didn’t consciously do any, although I did do Jathara Parivartasana both ways round.

I’m having some difficulty describing the actual experience of doing asanas because it’s very much in the area of proprioception and various sensations which are hard to verbalise. One thing which is easier to verbalise is the cracking and clunking sounds and sensations one may get in one’s joints in the process. I wonder, in fact, whether it’s even a good idea to attempt to verbalise it in that way. At one point in the ‘noughties after doing quite a bit of Hatha Yoga, I became acutely and constantly aware of how I distributed my weight between my legs. I found that intrusive and unwelcome.

Vajrasana and a superficially similar asana where one stretches one’s arms above one’s head palm to palm came next. It’s an issue for me, and probably other people, that asanas can appear identical to an untrained observer while involving completely different balances of forces, and this is not problematic in this case but the fact that I’ve described these two as similar illustrates this possible confusion. They are not in fact similar. The version of Vajrasana I usually do is not the one where you put your hands behind your back in a prayer position but the much simpler one involving placing one’s hands upon one’s knees and tensing one’s whole body. The asana involving raising one’s arms above one’s head also involves kneeling but the emphasis is on stretching upward. Simhasana came next, which is the kind of thing one probably would prefer to do alone, or at least I would, due to self-consciousness relating to the facial expression. I always follow Vajrasana with Simhasana. This I then followed with Supta Vajrasana, partly because I wanted to have something to do a counterpose I actually knew to. In fact I didn’t touch my head to the floor on doing this, but there is a central focus in Hatha Yoga as many people, at least in the West, practice it, that one avoid “end-gaining”, which is perhaps a good general principle whereby one should live much of one’s life. This principle is actually from Alexander Technique, and amounts to the ends justifying the means in practical terms: getting there is definitely not half the fun if you’re end-gaining, and there can therefore be a lack of self-awareness involved. It was also the case, for different reasons, that my feet didn’t touch the floor during Halasana, but this doesn’t matter. That said, repeated and balanced practice of asanas can involve such events occurring. I’m avoiding saying “achievements” here. This issue will come up later in a wider context.

Supta Vajrasana I followed with Balasana, which I think is Suptasya Vajrasanasya counterpose. A counterpose is close to the inverse of another asana, or rather they’re each others’ inverses, with the same muscle groups and joints in the opposite states. Balasana, like Halasana and Sarvangasana, are inverted poses where the head is lower than the heart, which often means that the uterus is higher and should therefore be avoided during menstruation. Even after all this time, I’m not convinced that inverted poses are beneficial because it seems to me they put too much pressure on the cerebral circulation. Then again, it could be a case of “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and it can make sense to put the body under stress.

Next came Bhujangasana. This is one of two asanas I find very confusing, or in this case rather I used to. Bhujangasana involves flexing the spine while supporting oneself with one’s arms from a prone starting point. This looks exactly the same to me as pushing up with the arms until the back is curved dorsally, but as I understand it, the spine pulls up from the floor while the arms may almost be dangling from the shoulders and resting on the floor. I’m aware that I’m saying “floor” here when I might have said “ground” or “earth”, and I did in fact practice indoors. I’m also not saying “mat”. More of that later. Although I usually follow this with Dhanurasana, this time I didn’t.

Following Bhujangasana came the for me notorious Adho Mukha Śvānāsana (oh look, diacritics and everything – I copypasted that particular term). This is an asana I find utterly confounding, as some people know. It’s the Down Face Dog, and I included it in today’s session because I wanted to indicate its utterly confusing nature to me. My issue with Adho Mukha Svanasana is that its appearance gives no indication at all of how one is “supposed to be” distributing the forces in one’s body. It’s entirely unclear to me most of the time whether the hands are supposed to take the weight or the legs, essentially. I’m vaguely aware, and very willing to be corrected on this, that the general idea seems to be that one is reaching forward rather than resting on one’s arms and hands, but I find this so difficult that this asana is really off-putting to me. It casts doubt on whether I’m doing any other asana “properly”. I’m also aware that the language I’ve used in this paragraph kind of contradicts the general idea of avoiding end-gaining.

I followed Adho Mukha Svanasana with Trikonasana, which is fairly straightforward in comparison, and my final asana was Tadasana, and yes this does mean that I didn’t go back into Savasana at the end. More generally, this is just a hastily thrown together ad hoc session of asanas which is not particularly balanced or rationally planned. Some of them were included simply so I could write about them here. My sessions are not always like this. I should also mention that the different stages of asanas are accompanied by inhalation and exhalation, which serve to time the pace at which they are undertaken. Particular ratios of breathing and styles of doing so, in other words pranayama, can also be involved. It was notable that when I practiced in a class, I was initially much faster than everyone else, but after a few months I ended up being slower than everyone else, for this reason, which is surprising because I’m also aware that I breathe unusually slowly in other situations.

Regarding the surface I practice on, I rarely use a mat. This is because mats are usually padded, and this makes it harder to balance. Vrksasana is a good illustration of this issue, because standing on one leg is much harder on a yielding surface than a firm one. I think it’s usual practice to do asanas barefoot. Doing them on the first floor as opposed to the ground floor also feels psychologically peculiar to me because of the space I’m aware of beneath me – I don’t feel grounded. Ultimately the approach I would feel most comfortable with is to do it on a lawn, beach or meadow, i.e. a place where I’m in direct contact with Earth. Another aspect of using a mat is that it’s a material possession. This is also why I sometimes do asanas naked, but this basically means doing them indoors.

It’s important to be aware of two things relating to Hatha Yoga. One is that it’s only one aspect of Yoga and separating it from the rest of the approach can be inappropriate. Another is that recently there’s been a change in how people view Yoga. Perhaps in the past, if someone asked what kind of Yoga one practiced, one might say Hatha, Raja, Pranayama and so forth. More recently they would be more likely to expect one to refer to some kind of branded and commercialised practice such as Bikram, though probably not that specifically because of the scandals surrounding it. To me, those don’t even seem to be Yoga at all because of their involvement with global capitalism and their marketing, which would appear to take Karma Yoga completely out of the picture.

All of this contrasts dramatically with the recent Indian approach. Yoga is classed as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO, and this opens up the possibility of cultural appropriation but also of ethnonationalist exploitation, and it’s this last which has led to the creation of International Day Of Yoga by Narendra Modi. The fact that this is also the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere is not coincidental, having special significance in many cultures. The idea has many positives, and it is not, of course, up to the West to decide what should be done with Yoga, but it’s also quite reminiscent of the idea that Indo-Aryan languages are the original Indo-European languages and that the Aryans originated in South Asia. There are plenty of reasons why this latter cannot be so, for instance the presence of retroflex consonants in Vedic Sanskrit and the levelling of vowels to schwa in the same, and a similar issue is the promotion of Yoga as an Olympic sport. Yoga is widely perceived as about self-acceptance, being non-judgemental and not comparing oneself and others. There has actually been a Yoga Asana Championship in New York City. Whereas there’s no denying that a particular execution of an asana has aesthetic appeal, to me all of this is anathema to Yoga. The only way I can make sense of it is to wonder if the West has done something to the values of Yoga which meant that the likes of end-gaining were actually originally part of the tradition and have been lost. However, whether or not this is so, it’s hard to see where spiritual aspects of Hatha Yoga would come into this and it seems to have filtered out the whole of the rest of Yoga, such as Raja. Could there be such a thing as competitive samadhi?

On the other hand, what are Olympic ideals? The modern revival of the Olympics at least seems to have positive aspects, involving the replacement of warfare with athletic contests, and presumably sporting ideals regarding “how one plays the game”. It’s also the case that the modern Olympics originally included more than sport, encompassing for example town planning and architecture, and there are also exhibition sports. It still seems utterly bizarre to me that Yoga, by which Hatha Yoga seems to be meant, could be part of it, particularly in its current rather corrupted state.

I mentioned the London Healing Mission early on in this post. I have to tread a thin line here because, being Christian, I’m aware of certain attitudes towards Yoga and actions against it which pertain to specific people and small organisations which I don’t want to criticise publicly, but there have been quite public denouncements of the practice by Christians too. Some of these correspond to the Indian emphasis on Siva and the idea that it’s a spiritual path which does not include the saving power of Christ. This, to be fair, is at least levelled at Yoga as a whole rather than just Hatha Yoga, so in a weird way Christian opposition to Yoga has a more accurate view of it than the popular understanding of it. I am of course Christian, and I’ve even had tendencies towards being “that kind of Christian”, but I think there are elements of racism for some people, though not all, in this opposition. I do, however, have a remedy based on what might be termed the metaphysics.

The diagram which started this post has Samkhya as an early source for what I would call the discovery of Yoga, and Vedantism is another approach. “Vedanta” means “end of the Vedas”, and that source can also be seen in the diagram. Vedanta attempts in various ways to articulate the implications of the Upanisads, Bhagavad Gita and Brahma Sutras. Vedanta universally accepts reincarnation, moksa (also known as nirvana) as an ideal, karma as resulting from agency, a God-like first cause of the Cosmos, the Hindu scriptures as the best source of knowledge and the rejection of Buddhism, Jainism, Samkhya and Yoga itself. Hence with the Vedantist approach to Yoga, clearly some careful approach needs to be taken to understanding due to the fact that it rejects Yoga, but for a Christian it would seem to require unity between God and Isvara or Brahman. Although I do believe this is so, I don’t have complete confidence in the fact and in any case because Christianity for me involves intense personal focus on God through Christ, even to think about whether Hinduism is or is not antithetical to Christianity would only be relevant to me if I were actually Hindu myself, which I’m not, so I withhold judgement.

Consequently, I believe in Samkhya as the philosophy behind Yoga and see it as expressing fundamental truths about reality. Samkhya is atheistic, but I adopt it because I’m theist. Samkhya is atheistic because God cannot be observed and karma is a sufficient ruling principle in the Universe. I would prefer to see God as withdrawing from a portion of reality to allow the physical Universe to exist. This is the Jewish philosophical concept of Tsimtsum, “contraction”, which posits that G-d allows a finite, vacant space, “ḥālāl happānuy”, to exist in which physical events occur. Within this space, Samkhya operates, with its division between prakrti and purusa, “nature” and “consciousness” respectively. Also within it operate the three gunas, known as sattvas, tamas and rajas, positivity/vitality, dynamism and inertia, which initially condense separately out of primordial harmony and work themselves through, ultimately but temporarily becoming re-unified. This period of working out is the history of our current Universe. Yoga is based on this, seeing the jiva as a situation where purusa is in some form bound to prakrti. The gunas are present in all beings in different proportions, and are manifested in the practice of Yoga, for instance tamas is in my reluctance to do asanas first thing in the morning (tamas), and in other areas of my life such as procrastination or not wanting to tidy up. I’d venture to claim that tamas is in fact another name for thanatos, the death instinct. Rajas and sattvas can also be understood very prosaically in the practice of asanas. It’s well-known that Hatha Yoga makes one fart. This is technically understood as the action of rajas on the digestive system. It doesn’t have to be considered to be off somewhere in a mystical realm of some kind. Likewise, nothing I’ve said about Samkhya should contradict either empirical science or the Christian or other faiths.

Yoga is an extremely large topic and it’s hard to do it justice under pressure of time, so I will close with an observation made about cakras. Cakra is Sanskrit for “wheel” and is also cognate with that English word and the Greek “kyklos”. There often seems to be a lot of scorn piled upon the concept, but as I’ve said, nothing in Yoga or Samhya contradicts science, including medical science, and there is a particular way of understanding them which harmonises them quite easily. Each cakra is associated with an endocrine organ and with an inflexion point in the spine, including the cranium as part of that, thus:

Cakra name	Axial skeletal point	Endocrine organ
Muladhara	Tip of coccyx	Adrenal cortex
Svadisthana	Sacrum	Gonads
Manipura	L3 (most ventral lumbar vertebra)	Endocrine pancreas
Anahata	T6 (most dorsal thoracic vertebra)	Thymus
Visuddha	C7	Thyroid
Ajña	Occiput	Pituitary (both)
Sahasrara	Crown of skull	Pineal

The thing about this list is that it can be declared by fiat. Cakras can be seen as simply referring to at least this trio of association while remaining agnostic about the rest, or they can be extended. Claiming that they don’t exist is therefore foolish. Moreover, each of these inflexions of the spine is mechanically significant and connected to our evolutionary history. Brian Aldiss refers to “rational yoga” in his mainstream novel ‘Life In The West’. Very many aspects of Yoga can be understood rationalistically without contradicting scientific understanding, particularly with a Samkhya-based approach, and for this reason I adopt this approach. It’s particularly compatible with Abrahamic religion too, because it fits with a God who maintains the physical Universe through Tsimtsum.

However, there is one final irony here. After repenting and committing myself to Christ, I almost immediately fell away due to factors such as homophobia and opposition to veganism and Yoga. I also assiduously avoided raising the Kundalini because it was widely regarded as dangerous by yogis themselves. Then one day in the mid-‘nineties at Leicester Friends’ Meeting House, I went to a yoga session whose focus was on raising the Kundalini, and it led to two things: the intense presence of other Christians in my life and ultimately my return to the Christian faith. There is a pattern of this kind of thing happening in my life, and I definitely do not explain it through metaphysical naturalism.

Happy International Day Of Yoga!

The Anti-Universe

A prominent mythological theme is that of time being cyclical. For instance, in Hinduism there is a detailed chronology which repeats endlessly. Bearing in mind that the numbers used in mythological contexts are often mainly there to indicate enormity or tininess, there is the kalpa, which lasts 4 320 million years and is equivalent to a day in Brahma’s life. There are three hundred and sixty of these days in a Brahman year, and a hundred Brahman years in a Brahman lifetime, after which the cycle repeats. Within a Brahman Day, human history also repeats a cycle known as the Yuga Cycle, which consists of four ages, Satya, Treta, Dvapara and Kali. The names refer to the proportion of virtue and vice characterising each age, so Satya is perfect, life is long, everyone is kind to each other, wise, healthy and so on, satya meaning “truth” or “sincerity”, Treta is “third” in the sense of being three quarters virtue and one quarter vice, Dvapara is two quarters of each and Kali, unsurprisingly the current age, is the age of evil and destruction. Humans start off as giants and end as dwarfs. Then the cycle repeats. Thus there are cycles within cycles in Hindu cosmology.

The Maya also have a cyclical chronology, including the Long Count, in a cycle lasting 63 million years. Probably the most important cycle in Mesoamerican calendars is the fifty-two year one, during which the two different calendars cycle in and out of sync with each other. The Aztecs used to give away all their possessions at the end of that period in the expectation that the world might come to an end.

The Jewish tradition has a few similar features as well. Firstly, it appears to use the ages of people to indicate their health and the decline of virtue. The patriarchs named in the Book of Genesis tend to have shorter and shorter lives leading up to the Flood, which ends the lives of the last few generations before it, including the 969-year old Methuselah. Giants are also mentioned in the form of the Nephilim, although they are seen as evil. I wonder if this reflects the inversion of good and evil which took place when Zoroastrianism began, where previously lauded deities were demonised. There is also a cycle in the practice of the Jubilee, consisting of a forty-nine year Golden Jubilee and a shorter seven year Jubilee, and obviously there are the seven-day weeks, which we still have in the West.

The Hindu series of Yugas also reflects the Greek tradition of Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages, which was ultimately adopted into modern archæology in modified form as the Three-Age System of Stone, Bronze and Iron. The crucial difference between the Hindu and Greek age system and our own ideas of history is that they both believed in steady decline whereas we tend to be more mixed. We tend to believe in progress, although our ideas of what constitutes that do vary quite a lot. In a way, it makes more sense to suppose that everything will get worse, although since history is meant to be cyclical it can also be expected to get better, because of the operation of entropy. Things age, wear out, run down, burn out and so on, and this is the regular experience for everyone, no matter when they’re living in history, and it makes sense that the world might be going in the same direction. On the longest timescale of course it is, because the Sun will burn out, followed by all other stars and so on.

Twentieth century cosmology included a similar theory, that of the oscillating Universe. It was considered possible that the quantity of mass in the Universe was sufficient that once it got past a certain age, gravity acting between all the masses in existence would start to pull everything back together again until it collapsed into the same hot, dense state which started the Universe in the first place. There then emerge a couple of issues. Would the Universe then bounce back and be reborn, only to do it again in an endless cycle? If each cycle is an exact repetition, does it even mean anything to say it’s a different Universe, or is it just the same Universe with time passing in a loop?

This is not currently a popular idea because it turns out that there isn’t enough mass in the Universe to cause it to collapse against the Dark Energy which is pushing everything apart, so ultimately the objects in the Universe are expected to become increasingly isolated until there is only one galaxy visible in each region of the Universe where space is expanding relatively more slowly than the speed of light. This has a significant consequence. A species living in a galaxy at that time would be unaware that things had ever been different. There would be no evidence available to suggest that it was because we can currently see the galaxies receding, and therefore we can know that things will be like that one day, but they would have no way to discover that they hadn’t always been like this. This raises the question of what we might have lost. We reconstruct the history of the Universe based on the data available to us, and we’re aware that we’re surrounded by galaxies which, on the very large scale, are receding from each other, so we can imagine the film rewinding and all the stars and galaxies, or what will become them, starting off in the same place. But at that time, how do we know there wasn’t evidence of something we can no longer recover which is crucial to our own understanding of the Universe?

Physics has been in a bit of a strange state in recent decades. Because the levels of energy required cannot be achieved using current technology, the likes of the Large Hadron Collider are not powerful enough to provide more than a glimpse of the fundamental nature of physical reality. Consequently, physicists are having to engage in guesswork without much feedback, and this applies also to their conception of the entire Universe. I’ve long been very suspicious about the very existence of non-baryonic dark matter. Dark matter was originally proposed as a way to explain why galaxies rotate as if they have much more gravity than their visible matter, i.e. stars, is exerting. In fact, if gravity operates over a long range in the same way as it does over short distances, such as within this solar system or between binary stars, something like nine-tenths of the mass is invisible. To some extent this can be explained by ordinary matter such as dust, planets or very dim stars, and there are also known subatomic particles such as the neutrinos which are very common but virtually undetectable. The issue I have with non-baryonic dark matter, and I’ve been into this before on here, is that it seems to be a specially invented kind of matter to fill the gap in the model which, however, is practically undetectable. There’s another possible solution. What makes this worse is that dark matter is now being used to argue for flaws in the general theory of relativity, when it seems very clear that the problem is actually that physicists have proposed the existence of a kind of substance which is basically magic.

If you go back to the first moment of the Universe, there is a similar issue. Just after the grand unification epoch, a sextillionth (long scale) of a second after the Big Bang, an event is supposed to have taken place which increased each of the three extensive dimensions of the Universe by a factor of the order of one hundred quintillion in a millionth of a yoctosecond. If you don’t recognise these words, the reason is that these are unusually large and small quantities, so their values aren’t that important. Some physicists think this is fishy, because again something seems to have been simply invented to account for what happened in those circumstances without there being other reasons for supposing it to be so. They therefore decided to see what would happen if they used established principles to recreate the early Universe, and in particular they focussed on CPT symmetry

CPT symmetry is Charge, Parity and Temporal symmetry, and can be explained thus, starting with time. Imagine a video of two billiard balls hitting and bouncing off each other out of context. It would be difficult to tell whether that video was being played forwards or backwards. This works well on a small scale, perhaps with two neutrons colliding at about the speed of sound at an angle to each other, or a laser beam reflecting off a mirror. Charge symmetry means that if you observe two equally positively and negatively charged objects interacting, you could swap the charges and still observe the same thing, or for that matter two objects with the same charge could have the opposite charges and still do the same thing. Finally, parity symmetry is the fact that you can’t tell whether what you’re seeing is the right way up or upside down, or reflected. All of these things don’t work in the complicated situations we tend to observe because of pesky things like gravity and accidentally burning things out by sticking batteries in the wrong way round or miswiring plugs, but in sufficiently simple situations all of these things are symmetrical.

But there is a problem. The Universe as a whole doesn’t seem to obey these laws of symmetry. For instance, almost everything we come across seems to be made of matter even though there doesn’t seem to be any reason why there should be more matter than antimatter or the other way round, and time tends to go forwards rather than backwards on the whole. One attempt to explain why matter seems to dominate the Universe is that for some reason in the early Universe more matter was created than antimatter, and since matter meeting antimatter annihilates both, matter is all that’s left. Of course antimatter does crop up from time to time, for instance in bananas and thunderstorms, but it doesn’t last long because it pretty soon comes across an antiparticle in the form of, say, an electron, and the two wipe each other off the map in a burst of energy.

These physicists proposed a solution which does respect this symmetry and allows time to move both forwards and backwards. They propose that the Big Bang created not one but two universes, one where time runs forwards and mainly made of matter and the other where time goes backwards and is mainly made of antimatter, and also either of these universes is geometrically speaking a reflection of the other, such as all the left-handed people in one being right-handed in the other. This explains away the supposèd excess of matter. There’s actually just as much antimatter as matter, but it swapped over at the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang, time was running backwards and the Universe was collapsing.

In a manner rather similar to the thought that an oscillating Universe could be practically the same as time running in a circle because each cycle might be identical and there’s no outside to see it from, the reversed, mirror image antimatter Universe is simply this one running backwards with, again, nothing on the outside to observe it with, and therefore for all intents and purposes there just is this one Universe running forwards after the Big Bang, because it’s indistinguishable from the antimatter one running backwards. On the other hand, the time dimension involved is the same as this one, and therefore it could just be seen as the distant past, which answers the question of what there was before the Big Bang: there was another universe, or rather there was this universe. It also means everything has already happened.

But a further question arises in my head too, and this is by no means what these physicists are claiming. As mentioned above, one model of the Universe is that it repeats itself in a cycle. What we may have here is theoretical support for the idea of a Universe collapsing in on itself before expanding again. That’s the bit we can see or deduce given currently available evidence. However, in the future, certain evidence will be lost because there will only be one visible galaxy observable, and the idea of space expanding will be impossible to support even though it is. What if one of the bits of evidence we’ve already lost is of time looping? Or, what if time just does loop anyway? What if time runs forwards until the Universe reaches a maximum size and then runs backwards again as it contracts? There is an issue with this. There isn’t enough mass in the Universe for it to collapse given the strength of dark energy pushing it apart, but of course elsewhere in the Multiverse there could be looping universes due to different physical constants such as the strength of dark energy or the increased quantity of matter in them, because in fact as has been mentioned before there are possible worlds where this does take place. Another question then arises: how does time work between universes? Are these looping universes doing so now in endless cycles, or are they repeating the same stretch of time? Does time even work that way in the Multiverse, or is it like in Narnia, where time runs at different speeds relative to our world?

It may seem like I’ve become highly speculative. In my defence, I’d say this. I have taken pains to ignore my intuition in the past because I believed it was misleading. However, there appears to be an intuition among many cultures that time does run in a cycle, and the numbers these cultures produce are oddly similar. The Mayan calendar’s longest time period is the Alautun, which lasts 63 081 429 years, close to the number of years it’s been since the Chicxulub Impact, which coincidentally was nearby and wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. The Indian kalpa is 4 320 million years in length, which is again quite close to the age of this planet. Earth is 4 543 million years old and the Cretaceous ended 66 million years ago, so these figures are 4.6% out in the case of the Maya and 5% for the kalpa. Of course it may be coincidence, and the idea of time being cyclical may simply be based on something like the cycle of the day and night or the seasons through the year, but since I believe intuitive truths are available in Torah and the rest of the Tanakh, I don’t necessarily have a problem with other sources. Parallels have of course been made between ancient philosophies and today’s physics before, for example by Fritjof Capra in his ‘The Tao [sic] Of Physics’. Although much of what he says has been rubbished by physicists since, there is a statue of Dancing Shiva in the lobby at CERN and one quote from Capra is widely accepted:

“Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.”

Reincarnation

As a Christian, I’m not supposed to believe in reincarnation. That said, there was a time before the emergence of Christian orthodoxy when many Christians did, and more recently the Cathars, for example, did believe it happened. There is also an allegation in the gospels that John The Baptist was a reincarnation of Elijah. Some Jewish mystics also believe in it. However, two things about this. Firstly, I’m not Christian in the sense of having faith in Christ as a living God and Saviour in human form because there seems to be a lot of evidence against the idea that the Holy Spirit exists. Secondly, although one’s knowledge and faith in the doctrines of one’s religion should be a guide, they should never be an excuse for dispassionate observation of the evidence or its lack regarding a possible fact of the matter. Ultimately, our only duty in this respect is to the truth, assuming truth to be absolute and bivalent, and that a correspondence theory of truth is correct rather than a coherence theory, and approaching something in this manner ultimately strengthens any justifiable faith. It’s part of a cycle.

I’m going to start from Christianity. An early argument I made to other Christians regarding reincarnation was that it seems to be more just than having just one shot at life, after which you’re either damned or saved. It gives one longer to commit to Christ or otherwise and enables one to make amends and have as many chances as are needed for salvation. As far as I know, though, no Protestant, Orthodox or Roman Catholic church today accepts the idea of reincarnation as a general process. This has apparently not always been the case. The Cathars were a twelfth century Gnostic Christian sect who believed humans were angels trapped in physical bodies who would not enter heaven until they were purified (hence the name, from the Greek καθαρσις), and until then we would be reincarnated. Cathar Perfects also always travelled as same-sex couples, which led others to attribute homosexual relations to them, although it isn’t clear whether this was defamatory or a fact. It was said to be to avoid sexual temptation. Unsurprisingly, the Cathars were persecuted by the Church. The Albigensian Crusade was conducted against them and they were massacred and executed. In fact their doctrine doesn’t appeal to me because they’re Gnostic, but I hope I don’t need to say that I consider their massacre to be a great evil. They may have been an invention of the Church as an excuse to kill lots of people. I’m not aware of the details here. As a thirteen year old I liked the idea of the Cathars and regarded myself as one because I saw myself as a Christian who believed in reincarnation. A friend of mine saw this as a very bad thing because of their apparent tolerance of homosexuality. They were influenced by the Bogomils and a group I’ve not otherwise heard of called the Paulicians. The Bogomils were also Gnostic and opposed to physical and institutional places of worship as their own bodies were considered to be temples, which makes no sense to me because they were supposed to be Gnostics, who believe matter is evil and see the body as a prison as far as I know.

There’s a widespread belief among both supporters and opponents of reincarnation, that the early Church accepted the belief, and in particular Origen of Alexandria, born 184 CE, is said to have implied that it happened. Origen certainly believed that souls existed before conception. He also believed in a succession of universes in which souls appear to become incarnated in each æon, so that definitely sounds like a form of reincarnation, although not in the sense that someone living in his time might still be around today in a different body so much as that after the end of this æon, a new world will be created and they would live a life then, just as they had before this æon.

The soul has neither beginning nor end. [They] come into this world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defeats of their previous lives.

Falsely attributed to Origen but widely publicised.

It looks as if Origen’s cosmology has been vaguely passed on to people who later read into it what they wanted to hear, so when they hear the word “reincarnation”, more strictly μετεμψυχωσις, they tend to assume it means a soul living a series of lives in the same universe rather than having one instance per æon in a sequential multiverse. However, the fact that there were still Gnostic Christians around in the fourteenth century who had inherited their own beliefs from other religious groups suggests that there may have been an underground Gnostic movement which survived the early Church and, through all that time, maintained such a belief. In fact I’m wondering if Origen’s belief was in fact modified in the same manner as the popular misconception of it today has been, and that in fact they just plain did believe in reincarnation.

Judaism has a tendency to be quite positive in some places about beliefs which Muslims or Christians tend to clamp down upon. For instance, whereas orthodox Protestant and Roman Catholic churches usually reject divination outright nowadays, including the Kabbalah, Judaism not only embraces it as part of its own tradition but actually seems to prize it and encourage certain people, namely older men, to explore it. Jews do not perceive the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible – what Christians tend to call the Old Testament) to refer to reincarnation and the Talmud never refers to it either. However, the Karaites, a non-Rabbinical sect of Judaism which relies directly on the written Torah, believe in gilgul, “rolling” of the soul between bodies as they live out their lives. One reason for this is that it seems to explain the suffering of small children, because if they sinned in previous lives this can be seen as divine retribution. The Zohar refers to the idea several times, stating that a proud man (sic) might be reincarnated as an insect or worm. It also says Cain’s soul entered the body of Jethro and Abel’s the body of Moses. The Hasidim just plainly and explicitly believe in reincarnation and say that particularly enlightened individuals are able to remember previous lives. Apart from gilgul there is also dybbuk, which is spirit possession, and ʻibbur, which is where a soul enters a person’s mind from heaven to assist them. However, as far as I know observant Jews nowadays don’t usually believe in reincarnation. As usual, the specific beliefs of faithful and observant Judaism do vary considerably on this matter.

In the Christian New Testament, a claim is made that Jesus may be a reincarnation of Elijah.

 “See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. ⁶ He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”

Malachi 4:5-6, New International Version

This is of course the Tanakh, but in the New Testament, the following passage, one of several, appears:

They replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’

Matthew 16:14, New International Version

This at least suggests that many saw Jesus as an example of what was at some point referred to as ʻibbur, a soul descending from Heaven (which doesn’t seem to be a very Jewish concept incidentally) to help Jesus, or perhaps a plain and simple reincarnation of Elijah. This cannot, as far as I can tell, be reconciled with the later orthodoxy about the nature of Jesus Christ, but interestingly the phenomenon of ʻibbur is remarkably similar to Stapledon’s ideas in ‘Last And First Men’ and ‘Last Men In London’, and of course also somewhat similar to the idea of Bodhisattva.

So in the end, I think I would say that there is definite evidence for the acceptance of the idea of reincarnation in Judaism and heretical Christianity, and early on perhaps even in the embryonic Christian church itself. Of course that doesn’t mean reincarnation is a reality, but it’s just interesting that it isn’t as far from the Abrahamic tradition as is sometimes assumed. The Druze are another example of Abrahamic religionists who believe in it.

The spiritual home of the doctrine of reincarnation is of course generally perceived to be in South Asia, where it’s held to be true by Jains, Hindus, Buddhists and, perhaps surprisingly, Sikhs. Among them, the idea is more formalised and linked more explicitly to karma. Jainism, probably the most physicalist of all religions, sees the soul as weighed down by karma as a kind of subtle contaminating matter which sticks to it when one acts in such a way as to tie oneself to the cycle of life in the world below mokṣa, as with inflicting suffering, lying, theft or committing sexual misdeeds. Buddhism can sometimes analyse the soul completely away and just see things in terms of karma being passed on, and I will return to this as it seems quite significant to me. The idea of reincarnation in Hinduism is so familiar it isn’t worth going into here. It’s worth noting, though, that the link made between the moral quality of one’s life and reincarnation present in both Judaism and the dharmic faiths, and usually inherited in the West from this source, is not present in other parts of the world.

Pythagoras believed in reincarnation and passed the belief to other Ancient Greeks, and at the same time the religion of Orphism, which may have been influenced by Indian thought. Elsewhere in the world beliefs in reincarnation also exist, for instance among Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals. It could be that the religions of South Asia only happen to include belief in reincarnation because they better preserve a more universal ancient human tradition of spirituality than in many other places. In Siberia, children are given the names of dead relatives in the expectation that they receive their personalities. That said, other groups of peoples do believe in an afterlife instead, with no reincarnation, hence ancestor worship.

All that said, this needn’t imply that reincarnation actually happens. There are many near-universal beliefs which have turned out not to be so. Presumably at some point in the remote past, everyone assumed the world was flat, and everyone was wrong. But are we assuming here that those who do believe in reincarnation are in that particular aspect more ignorant than we are? For all we know, they were drawing conclusions on evidence that suggested that hypothesis. In a sense, the scientific method didn’t exist at that time but human beings were still capable of reasoning and used it to improve their quality of life, so why conclude they were wrong or merely superstitious? Why believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, or something else? It does stand to reason that fear or mere incomprehension that such a complex thing as a human personality and consciousness could cease to exist permanently with death, and therefore that the afterlife or reincarnation could be seen as rationalisations, but why choose one over the other? Does it say something about a culture which one they believe in? Are there other beliefs apart from extinction and oblivion?

I also have no idea which belief is more popular or whether they coexist in the same spiritual traditions.

A belief can be thoroughly explained as fulfilling some kind of emotional and social function without turning out to be incorrect. These two approaches are in different realms. In a less culturally integrated situation, belief in reincarnation can still satisfy some kind of need. One example of this is past life therapy. Here, a patient is hypnotised and regressed into time before their birth, at which point they may receive the impression of having lived other lives before this one. Dr Edith Fiore is one such practitioner. She has worked with countless people in this respect, making a connection between their current physical and mental conditions and experiences in their past lives. For instance, someone who suffered headaches might find she had been clubbed to death in a previous life or someone with a phobia of heights might find that they fell to their death previously. Now, I’m not convinced that these are real but I can see that it might help someone make sense of their life today to have these apparent explanations available and even that they might help resolve physical symptoms and illnesses to some extent. Fiore apparently went on to look at cases of spirit possession and alien abduction, which sets off my bogometer, but her work on past life therapy precedes these and I wonder what that’s about. I can still believe that this could be helpful even if it has no basis in reality. Fiore’s view seems to be that the soul has a fixed gender and passes from life to life, which manifests itself as someone mainly experiencing life as cis but without any necessary sense of incongruence or dysphoria when they’re trans. I can actually get on board with this in a limited sense because I think the cis/trans division isn’t primary. Rather, the division is between people for whom their perceived gender is significant and those for whom it isn’t, but of course I have a whole other blog devoted to that. I will just say two things here though. Firstly, I’m aware that there are gender-incongruent people who explain their condition as a soul of one gender in the body of a different sex, and secondly, I think most people who believe in souls also believe that they’re either not gendered at all or that they all have the same gender. I also have an issue with how non-binary and intersex people are supposed to fit into that picture. However, my point is that people in the here and now are using the concept of reincarnation as a therapeutic tool, to explain what they otherwise find inexplicable. However, past life regression often seems not to be historically accurate and may be confabulation. Even if the memories retrieved existed ready-made in the subject’s brain, the same may be true of dreams, and there is at least a lot of extraneous information in those which don’t correspond to waking life or anything in it. For instance, a couple of nights ago I dreamt my carpal bones are being guarded by a pack of dogs. This means nothing literally, though it probably does reflect my felt need to protect my arms from injury when moving my father around.

The notion of karma is another one of these. There is of course a cognitive bias called the “Just World Fallacy”, apparently also known as the “Just World Hypothesis”. This is the belief that life is fair. Consequently, when bad things happen to good people it’s sometimes because of something bad that they’ve done in the past, and doing good brings rewards. Sometimes karma is evoked to explain this, and before I go on I should state that I do in fact believe in karma but not in this way exactly. Sometimes, it seems more that a just and loving deity is acting to balance the scales of justice. A lot of this amounts to victim-blaming and self-aggrandisement, but the position of past lives is clearly evoked as one way to explain how, for example, a child might be born with a life-threatening health problem. I have to say that this particular version of karma is pretty irksome to me and can also come with a general negativity about life as found in, for example, Ayurvedic medicine, where reproduction and development are generally viewed in a negative light and by extension women are seen as inferior since they are thought of as the vessels for new life, i.e. a failure of a spirit to achieve nirvana. That’s a nauseating, disgusting view and I want no truck with it.

Some people do believe past life therapy is “real”, but that it doesn’t involve the patients’ own past lives. Rather, they see it as their minds reaching out into the past to find lives which resonate with their problems. This could explain, for example, the clichéed “I used to be Cleopatra” phenomenon. It is possible that someone felt an affinity with her and made that connection, and therefore that there is a genuine psychic connection which is not, however, the same as reincarnation. Or, much more simply, maybe they just have a strong desire to have lived a glamorous and important life, perhaps like that of Jayne Mansfield, who is of course someone I used to believe I was personally a reincarnation of. And as I’ve said, I do still feel, on seeing her eyes and face, that that’s me looking back at myself. A powerful impression, but not something which has any basis in reality. I’m not that delusional, or at least my beliefs are not delusional in that particular respect. It serves mainly as a reminder of how vivid these impressions can be.

The probability of any random person being a reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, Cleopatra, Napoleon or any other famous individual is of course very low if identity survives death and the self is incarnated in a single body as a complete entity. I don’t know how many Hollywood stars there were in 1967 but I do know there were more than a million births between Mansfield’s death and my birth, so even if there were a thousand of them the chances are only a thousand to one. It didn’t happen. No matter how strong and eerie my feelings are when I see her in a film or a photo, I know this is an illusion, but it illustrates the power these impressions have over the mind.

There do appear to be genuine memories of past lives. For instance, there’s a case of a mediæval peasant in England who suffered a head injury and is said to have been able to speak only in Ancient Greek when he recovered consciousness, and the religious context of that makes it unlikely that he would have faked that. This is of course also anecdotal. It’s also common for children to spontaneously recall apparent past life memories. These occur whether or not there is a belief in reincarnation in their community or family, and fail to correlate with mental illness, and they also take place where there is no contact with mass media. These memories are usually reported between the ages of two and five and the children concerned often seem to have phobias and likes which don’t seem to result from learned experience since birth. Sometimes these apparent memories correspond to those of another person whose life can be discovered, and there may be birthmarks corresponding to injuries sustained in that person’s life. This sounds outlandish of course, but it’s backed up by studies undertaken by medical scientists and is not in this case just anecdotal or hearsay. There’s a list of peer-reviewed scientific papers here. This is not just a load of superstition.

I think there might be two coëxisting explanations for this which are akin to dreams. It’s probably best to describe dreams first. Daniel Dennett is prominent among the proponents of the idea that dreams are not experiences but false memories. I agree with this to some extent but don’t think they are best explained in this way because of lucid dreaming and the axes which Dennett has to grind. His own explanation of lucid dreaming is pretty poor and violates Ockham’s Razor. You’ll probably gather that I have little respect for Dennett’s thought. Even so, it’s plausible to me that in waking life, dreams are reconstructed memories from the brain state during REM sleep. However, this doesn’t stop dreams from being experiences but may indicate that the relationship between consciousness and time is different with dreaming than it is during wakefulness, and this is also a waking explanation for dreaming and shouldn’t be taken as authoritative because the waking state of consciousness is not the only one and may not be given a higher status than others. Past life memories in small children could be similar. The physical state of the brain in early life is analogous to someone who has just woken from a dream because it may contain various things experienced as impressions and memories which didn’t actually occur in the literal past, but in a projected past created as a result of the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. However, just as dreams are a different relationship between consciousness and reality than waking consciousness, preëxistence could be too.

The reminiscence bump is a peak in strong memories of one’s life. For most people it occurs between fifteen and twenty-five. That is, people tend to remember that decade of their lives more vividly than the rest. Oddly, this doesn’t correspond to the age people go back to when they have dementia, which is often their thirties. Anyway, like most other people I do have this reminiscence bump, which for me corresponds to the years from 1982-92. However, musically I have recently realised I have a previous apparent reminiscence bump I can’t account for. A couple of years ago, I attempted to identify how much of the ’60s I could actually remember, and unsurprisingly a lot of this involved singles which I remembered from when they were popular and first released rather than having heard them since. I wrote these down and found, very surprisingly, that they were almost all from May 1967, which is two to three months before I was born. My current explanation for this is that I heard them in the womb, although that may not make much sense because babies are apparently born with synæsthesia and fail to label their sensory experience as consisting of separate senses. However, it’s also true that transracial children who were exposed to the auditory environments of their birth mothers in utero have been shown to pick up their parental languages significantly faster than those of their adopted communities, which suggests that fetuses can hear. This raises another issue. When does reincarnation occur? If it’s after the second trimester, do premature babies have souls? There are two explanations I can think of for my musical reminiscence bump which are interesting as opposed to probable. One is that I simply remember them from hearing them in utero. This is actually quite problematic as many scientists would reject the possibility that the human brain is sufficiently organised at that time to do that, and also I’m not sure how clearly an ear immersed in amniotic fluid with more such fluid between it and the amnion, uterine wall and abdominal wall can hear music. Our daughter clearly could hear fireworks five months after conception, but loud bangs are not the only part of instrumental and vocal music. Another explanation is that these are the memories of someone who was old enough to recognise music and remember it, possibly my mother or even Jayne Mansfield, or more likely, someone who was adolescent to adult at the time. Perhaps this is part of someone else’s reminiscence bump, born between 1942 and 1952.

There seem to be two major problems with reincarnation. One is that we don’t seem to have memories of future lives or lives of entities elsewhere in the Universe. I should probably explain this. The passage of time as we perceive it seems to be associated with being living, conscious bodies of the kind we are, and in fact we don’t always perceive it at all. If there is a soul existing separately from the body, it would seem to be in a timeless state which doesn’t experience time as flowing. That would mean that incarnations of the soul are like the spines of a sea urchin, puncturing spacetime in various places but converging at a central point which is the soul itself, not subject to spacetime. If this is so, it might be expected that there’s no difference between a life in the nineteenth Christian century and one in the thirty-seventh, or life here on Earth and another in a Bernal sphere in the Andromeda Galaxy back in the Eocene. But we only seem to remember adjacent lives in the relatively recent past. We also don’t seem to recall contemporary lives, which is a bit odd as well. A partial explanation is that we tend to remember spatiotemporally adjacent lives better than ones which are more distant, and our memories of the future tend to be interpreted as precognition, visions, prophecies, whatever.

The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a soul in the sense used here. This is problematic in various ways, for instance it doesn’t seem to explain how God can exist or how we can apparently communicate with the dead, because even if that’s faked by Satan or demons they would still be incorporeal beings, in other words souls. However, there seems to be nothing about the human body which suggests it’s “haunted” by a ghost-like entity. There’s no sign of the brain being able to do anything which isn’t amenable to naturalistic explanation. From a religious perspective, the Bible definitely seems to deny that there are such things as souls quite clearly, so a Christian such as I ought to be physicalist, believing only in conscious lumps of matter called people. Therefore, there is a problem. How can reincarnation happen if there are no souls to be reincarnated?

I think a clue to the explanation lies in the possibility of precognition. If we have a convincing impression of life in the future after our own deaths, we usually don’t interpret it as a memory of a future life but as extrasensory perception. We asymmetrically interpret ESP, real or not, according to when and where its source seems to be. An impression of a contemporary distant event or object is generally understood to be remote viewing (assuming it’s visual) or telepathy. The same impression of a future event or object is interpreted as precognition or prophecy. But when we have apparent memories of a time before our conception, we call that reincarnation, or see it as evidence of that. What’s wrong with the idea that we simply receive impressions throughout space and time and just label them as belonging to us when they’re from the past? Alternatively, what’s wrong with the idea of seeing future memories as future reincarnations? Quite a lot in the other case, but if you believe in reincarnation, why wouldn’t you have memories of future lives as well as past ones? And rather chillingly, maybe the reason we don’t have memories of past lives away from this planet is that we’re alone in the Universe. Even so, it seems more likely that we just experience lives which are nearby in time and space.

I mentioned previously that not all Buddhists believe in souls, but they still believe in reincarnation. This is because they don’t conceive of anything which makes up a person continuing to exist after their death for more than a very short period of time, except for their influence on the world. I should point out at this stage that I’m recounting this from memory. It’s true that what one does in one’s life sends out ripples which leave their mark on the world, very obviously through having descendants for example, but in myriad other ways. This doesn’t require a non-naturalistic account, and it means that these ripples, which could be seen as karma, could converge on the as yet unborn. This is closer to how I see apparent reincarnation.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m not remotely sceptical about psychic abilities and the supernatural. This is because they seem to be part of my and other people’s everyday experience and there doesn’t seem to be a naturalistic explanation for them. For instance, on many occasions I’ve experienced the symptoms which clients have had several seconds before they contact me for the first time, and I had a dream on 15th September 1983 of events which appeared to involve people I had yet to meet with recognisable landmarks and buildings in Leicester, a city of which I then knew nothing and had no idea that I’d end up living there. Moreover, this is not confabulation as I wrote a detailed description of the dream in my diary at the time. I think probably most people have these kinds of experience as well as many others which are at first wanting of a boring explanation but eventually get one with some careful thought or analysis. One of these is that the sheer plethora or experiences is bound to turn up the occasional coincidence which will register with one’s pattern-recognition device, the human mind, when it seems to be significant but not with the many more which don’t. But given that I learned to predict when a new client was about to ring me based on these experiences, for example, this doesn’t seem to fall into that category. Nor do I think I’m unusual in that respect. I would expect most people to have these experiences but perhaps dismiss them or ignore them. I do the same with many of mine, but I do acknowledge that they happen.

As I’ve said, Ockham’s Razor needs to be applied to this. We seem to have impressions gathered non-naturalistically, but we sort these into separate categories according to when and where they occur, so we end up thinking that there are different phenomena involved: precognition, telepathy and reincarnation. Reincarnation is particularly problematic because it seems to require belief in a soul. The simplest explanation is that since there is no soul in that sense, our minds simply receive accurate impressions from elsewhere in time and space through means other than our recognised physical senses. It may not even be necessary to abandon metaphysical naturalism here. We can just acknowledge that they exist but that we don’t know how they can.