Asiana Anatta_NDE_Consciousness_Essay pdf.pdf (161.4 KB)
Looking for comments and critique for those interested…“The doctrine of anatta, properly understood, is not the enemy of post-mortem continuity but its most sophisticated ally. By refusing to locate identity in any fixed, static core, it opens the possibility of a continuity that is dynamic, process-based, and capable of transformation across lives and death.”
Hello UpasakaMichael,
I am reading your interesting document.
The pattern that re-emerges in the new life is causally connected to the previous one without being numerically identical to it.
If the cause-effect stream continues without splitting into two (or more streams) then it is numerically the same.
In addition to “gandhabba” concept, I think one can use “Manomaya kāya” as well. Though personally, I think that NDE visions might be of nimittas of those relatives/beings. IMHO.
Dear Citta: Thanks for commenting. I appreciate the feedback.
By “Numerical Identity” I mean two things are exactly one and the same. When you are reborn, you are not numerically identical to your past “self.”
It may also be true that some NDE perceptions are brain-based mental images. The psi part are the experiences of meeting past relatives that one did not know of, and in at least one case, meeting a deceased parent that the subject did not know had died. In other cases, there is abundant testimony of people observing their bodies from above, or observing doctors or family members in another part of the hospital. The NDE experiences can testify as to what was said and done in rooms far outisde the mental capacity of the brain to see or hear or observe. These are just a few examples of the NDE testimonies that would seem to go beyond an absorbed mental state like a nimitta perception.
I posted this in part as it is interesting discussion. The jury is still out of the science and metaphysics of NDEs, and all thoughts on these phenomena are welcome.
It is neither. Post-mortem continuity is an assumption which has to be adopted, in order to be in conformity with the mundane right view. As it deals with future, it is the function of faith, to accept it.
Anatta however aims at correcting the present here and now wrong view - sakkāyaditthi. Understanding of anatta does not involve future, but the present mode of being, in the case of puthujjana it is attavada. True, lack of understanding of anatta guarantees that one will have the future, but this again is the function of faith to accept it.
The emerging science… at most suggests the placing faith in the Buddha is justified…
Fascinating.
Have you read “Far Journeys”, by Robert Monroe?
There is research now into artificially-induced out-of-body experience:
Self-location—the sense of where I am in space—provides an experiential anchor for one’s interaction with the environment. … many researchers have defined self-location solely in terms of body-location—the subjective feeling of where my body is. Although this view is useful, there is an issue regarding whether it can fully accommodate the role of “first-person perspective”-location—the sense of where my first-person perspective is located in space.
… under experimental manipulations, one’s sense of “first person perspective”-location could be separated from where one’s eyes are physically located in space.
… Based on our findings, we suggest that, instead of defining self-location only in terms of body-location, the sense of self-location can be better characterized as the subjective experience of where I am in space that results from the interaction between body-location and “first person perspective”-location.
(The Sense of 1PP-Location Contributes to Shaping the Perceived Self-location Together with the Sense of Body-Location - PMC, emphasis added)
The neuroscientists used head-mounted displays, live video feed, and tactile stimulation to cause “‘first person perspective’-location” to separate from where the eyes are “physically located in space”.
I find that separation occurs naturally in the moments before sleep, but I don’t practice lucid dreaming.
I think the key to Gautama’s six miracles is the formation of a mind-made body. Maybe to the heavenly ear and eye, too. I don’t find any instructions for making that body!
Another great book in this regard is “The Ego Tunnel” by Thomas Metzinger.
Both EBT (I & Mine making) and modern neurophilosophy (Phenomenal Self Model) agree on the perception of a ‘Self’ as processual in nature… the manifested Virtual Agent has no actual permanent essence or control over what it takes to be itself (anatta). The perception of a continuously present ‘entity’ existing through time is dependent on the memory of past states being incorporated into the current experience (aka craving).
The blind spot of modern neuroscience is that it assumes that
(a) the underlying process of Self making is entirely localized to the brain with no possibility of say… local client/ cloud or quantum architecture and
(b) there is no possibility of personalizing data being shared between two instances of the process running at two separate spatiotemporal loci.
Various phenomena such as past memory recall, terminal lucidity, NDE, holographic memory, severe hydrocephalus - minimal brain, etc indicate that it might be otherwise.
Any investigation into these phenomena is immediately hampered by skeptics who insist upon experimentally verifiable methods of proving the memory to be real and true. Unfortunately, no such means exist to reliably and independently verify the authenticity of a memory.
Thanks Knigarian: I’d argue that the emerging science does more than justify one’s saddha in the Dhamma, but that science is confirming many of the insights of the historical Buddha as fact. I have this confidence that the Buddha saw and embraced, and taught, what is now being revealed as being grounded in advanced science.
Dhamma has no conflict with Science proper. Its methods are much the same (i.e., investigation of experience, remembering what has been investigated and forming a true view to accord with the factuality of experience investigated); but the material is different.
Reputable science (Physics) confines itself to the outside world and all science restricts itself (or should do) to publicly observable behaviour. Dhamma is concerned with investigating subjective mind, recognizing the outside material sphere, but leaving it to those who are interested in it. The purposes are different. Science is or should be guided by curiosity only and has no ethics; any ethics it employs are unfounded in it or borrowed from religions or philosophies which it rejects. It has no techniques for handling the subjective (pain, etc.) and can only handle behaviour illegitimately equated with pain (illegitimately because a scientist only knows of the existence of pain (in himself) by taking an unauthorized look into his own subjective unscientific experience). Dhamma is concerned solely with the elimination of pain, to which all else is subordinated. (Sep. 56)
Nanamoli Thera
Without the scientist there is no science; but science cannot, without inconsistency, admit the existence of the scientist; for the scientist is a man, and a man is not to be explained if feeling is ignored; and feeling is outside the domain of science.
…
The mistake is to approach consciousness by way of the body. But rational science, being essentially the study of what is public, namely matter, has no alternative. The laws of science are the laws of matter, and if these laws are universal then consciousness (whatever it may be) must necessarily be subordinate to matter. What science overlooks, and cannot help overlooking, is the fact that in order to know the body it is first necessary to be conscious of it—the body is an object (amongst other objects) of consciousness, and to seek to investigate consciousness by way of the body, instead of the other way round, is to put the cart before the horse. Consciousness comes first, and if it is to be known it must be studied directly (that is to say, by immediate reflexion).
Nanavira Thera
