I just sat for the oddest interview I’ve ever given as part of the roll out of the new Spanish edition of Old Souls (Almas Ancestrales, they are calling it). The questions from El Diario seemed to presume that I had some special knowledge about the ultimate nature of reality and the nature of God even. My first instinct was to say, What do I know about that shit? But in the end I decided to try to answer as honestly as I could. Interview below:
Q: More than 25 years ago you witnessed and heard, together with Dr. Ian Stevenson, a series of extraordinary stories from people, especially children, who claimed to remember their past lives. With the perspective that time gives, what feelings does the memory of those experiences you lived in countries like Lebanon, India or the United States produce in you now?
A: First of all, those trips were among the most memorable of my life. I had the opportunity to experience life in those countries on an intimate level not available to tourists, and to meet and get to know extraordinary people. I also had the privilege of watching Ian Stevenson at work. In my opinion, Stevenson was an historic figure, courageously following a rigorous course of research into one of life’s greatest mysteries even though he knew it would make him suspect in the scientific community whose respect he longed for. In the quarter ce
ntury since those field trips, nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory “normal” explanation for the phenomenon of small children spontaneously speaking accurately about the details of the lives of dead strangers. My impression at the time was that the children who remembered, and the people who testified to their statements, were sane, honest, and sought to gain nothing.
Q: In recent decades, have you continued to investigate other cases that have provided you with new evidence about reincarnation?
A: I’ve followed the new cases as they arose through my connections with Dr. Stevenson’s successor at the University of Virginia, Jim Tucker, as well as stories that have appeared in the media. Many more such cases have come to light, cases with all the compelling details of the cases I wrote about. It has become clear that these cases are not all that rare, even in Western cultures.
Q: We are body, mind and soul. However, we live in a purely materialistic time, of spiritual bankruptcy, dark times where the ego rules, where we live on appearances, on the exhibition of the body, and where we even boast of our ignorance. What is the soul?
A: You’ve hit on an important point. One of the biggest problems in making sense out of these cases is the lack of a clear working definition of what a soul is. Is it simply a collection of memories, personality traits, innate abilities and proclivities? If so, advances in neuroscience in recent years all trend toward the idea that all those things arise from physical, biochemical processes in the brain and body. This is the biggest obstacle to accepting these cases as evidence for reincarnation. Nobody has yet come up with a testable theory of how any elements of an individual’s personality could survive the physical destruction of death and transfer to a new body. And yet any fair examination of these cases will find that at the very least some of them cannot be explained through any known process. To me, it underlines how little humans know about the ultimate nature of reality.
Q: “The one who looks out dreams and the one who looks in awakens,” Jung said. How do we find our center, our true essence, the divine part within us?
A: I wish I knew. For my part, I try not to fool myself that I know the answers, and I try not to be uncomfortable about not knowing. The fact that we all find ourselves here, aware of ourselves and able to use our senses and tools we create to explore the infinitely complex universe that surrounds us is a miracle, and the more we embrace and celebrate that the better, even though we probably have no better prospect of grasping ultimate reality than a dog has of understanding calculus.
Q: Reincarnations, mystical experiences, near-death experiences (NDEs), telepathy, precognition… There are a series of phenomena that challenge our understanding of reality. Life is a tremendous and fascinating mystery, a manifestation of the divine, of the numinous. Why have we forgotten it?
A: I don’t know if we ever knew it in the first place. There was an initial set of conditions that have evolved according to physical laws in such a way that stars and planets formed, and that on at least one of those planets chemical reactions organized themselves into living organisms that could react with increasingly sophisticated responses to their environment. Eventually those environmental responses grew to include self-awareness, permitting us to explore the world and ask those questions. To me, if there is something that can be called divine, it would be whatever that initial energy was that set all this in motion, and permeates everything we are and do.
Q: People who have experienced NDEs claim, when they wake up, that they have seen the medical team resuscitating their own body, that they have had encounters with loved ones or beings of light, that they have been able to go through walls and have information about things that were happening in the antipodes of the place where they were. These experiences on the other side, on the other side of the visible, can only be explained with the principles of quantum physics…
A: Actually. I think that is a misunderstanding of quantum physics. Many non-physicists think that quantum physics is weird and mysterious, and therefore should be used to explain any weird or mysterious phenomenon we encounter. It is true that the quantum world, the world of things far too small for us to sense directly, does not operate in ways we can intuitively grasp. But when quantum particles come together in enormous numbers to create the world we can see and interact with, their weirdness averages out and becomes the sensible world we’re familiar with. Physicists don’t understand everything about the quantum world, but they understand enough to know that they aren’t completely missing any forces large enough to create such large-scale effects like disembodied souls. That doesn’t mean that I think we should disregard these anomalous phenomena. I think they merit close scrutiny, But the explanation for them lies elsewhere.
Q: “If quantum mechanics has not had a profound impact on you, then you have not understood it,” said Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. It is impossible that what quantum physics tells us about the behavior of subatomic particles does not leave us astonished, do not make us shake any certainty that we handle…
A: To me the philosophical lesson of quantum physics is that behind the world we see and think we grasp is a vast complexity that is beyond our ability to intuitively understand.
Q: If matter is collapsed energy, if everything is energy vibrating at different frequencies, what is reality, an illusion, pure maya as the Hindus say?
A: The illusion is that we can intuitively grasp the universe.
Q: What is your idea of God?
A: To me God is the initial energy and set of physical laws that set the universe in motion and continues to animate it.
Q: Do you believe that physical death is the end of our existence or is there life after life?
A: I guess I think that even if these cases are really evidence of some people who have returned after death in a new body, the fact is that 99.9 percent of us have no previous life memories. And what are we if not our memories – the literal story of our lives? I ask myself, if I were to be reborn, but completely forgot everything about my current life, how would that be different than if I didn’t come back at all? So I put my energy into fully living this life, while I have it. Who says for something to count, to be valid, it must extend infinitely? The only reality we have is the present moment. That is what I try to cherish.
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