The question of rebirth

By Dr. Granville Dharmawardena

(December 28, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) I read the letters written by Dharmapala Senaratne, President of Sri Lanka Rationalist Association on the above subject in The Island (20th October and 2nd December 2009). The contentious nature of the phenomenon of rebirth arises from two main factors that make it a very controversial topic to talk about in public. One is that unlike in the cases of conception, birth and death, different religions express different and contradicting views on it. Some religions accept the views expressed by philosophers Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato, and endorse it as a true phenomenon. Some other religions accept the views expressed by Aristotle and reject it as untrue. Some religions that originally endorsed it and taught it as true did U-turns under political orders of Roman Emperors Constantine and Justinian, and now reject it as untrue. This religious factor is easily understood by anyone.

The greater part of the controversy arises from the following second factor. Unlike conception, birth and death which are, at least partly, within the scope of rational knowledge, rebirth is completely beyond it and one cannot appreciate rebirth on the basis of rational knowledge. Therefore, people who accept only rational knowledge ridicule it and quite emphatically reject it as untrue. Recently such a neurologist, Richard Rastac, rationally proved that human beings do not have minds. He looked for minds in his patients’ heads by examining them with X-rays, CAT- scans and PET-scans and stated that because he couldn’t see a mind in any of them human beings do not have minds. He is so blinded by rationalism that he cannot accept the fact that the mind is beyond the scope of rational knowledge and cannot be examined by scientific equipment designed to examine material features of the body which are amenable to rational investigation.

Today’s people are conditioned to accept whatever is scientifically proved as acceptable and reject what science is unable to prove. Our common sense is conditioned by the practice of science for over three centuries. What people generally refer to as science is classical science that originated in the 17th century. Founders of science, Isaac Newton and Rene Des Cartes limited the scope of classical science to visualisable aspects of the universe or what human beings could perceive with their five sense organs. Des Cartes introduced the concept that nature does not extend beyond what we can perceive with our sense organs and thinking of anything beyond the visualisable was ridiculed as meaningless. This limited the scope of science to rational knowledge of objects which were tangible and measurable. Scientists were thereby condemned to accept only rational knowledge that they could generate through their sense organs, left brains and conscious minds. Aspects of the universe (nature) that extended beyond these limits were ridiculed and rejected. The universe was recognised as a giant mechanical system operating according to exact mathematical laws and it consisted of material objects made up of small solid indestructible particles which moved in an absolute infinite three dimensional space and absolute time. Reductionism, determinism and absolute mathematical certainty were basic tenets of classical science. Modern science has shown us that these are not true and that uncertainty is a basic law of nature.

Until the dawn of the twentieth century scientists did not recognise that the universe extended beyond the visualisable three dimensional aspects of the universe. As it became evident at the turn of the 19th century that the universe is not limited to its visualisable aspects, scientists had to break through the three dimensional barrier imposed by classical science and venture to examine what was happening in unvisualisable realms. It was Albert Einstein who broke through the three dimensional shell of classical science and took science into four dimensions by introducing the theory of relativity.

Thereafter the advent of quantum science took our scientific knowledge deep into the unvisualisable and made us to understand previously unknown aspects of nature such as atomic phenomena, superconductivity, superfluids, lasers, consciousness and rebirth. The latest discovery in science which was done in 1997 by Nicolu Gisin of Geneva University which is hailed as the most important discovery in the whole history of science is unthinkable in terms of rational knowledge. Gisin scientifically and conclusively proved that the universe is nonlocal in nature. There is nothing within the mass of rational knowledge available to mankind that can be used as an example to illustrate his discovery. Therefore scientists use the Surangama Sutra in Buddhism as the example to illustrate it.

The technology that developed the world during the last half century such as electronics, computers, television, radio, internet, and lasers would not have been possible if science remained trapped within the limits of rational knowledge. The visualisable aspects of nature which are amenable to rational knowledge are accessed through the five sense organs, left brain and the conscious mind. Therefore rational knowledge is subject to the limitations of our sense organs. The unvisualisable aspects of nature are accessed by quantum scientists through the power of modern mathematics and computers, and seen through the right brain and the subconscious mind by Arahanths.

Scientific acceptability of rebirth is unthinkable for a person whose thinking is conditioned by classical science and I was in that category until I had to make a statement on it in Sydney which made me to scientifically study the phenomenon of rebirth. To my utter amazement I found that with the data available from scientifically acceptable sources and according to modern science criteria for scientific acceptance rebirth gets proved as scientifically true. Anyone interested can read my scientific research paper on rebirth on the internet.

Scientists have not been able to appreciate rebirth which is essentially an unvisualisable phenomenon because they have tried to look at it through classical science which is meant only to examine intelligible phenomena in visualisable realms. One cannot appreciate quantum phenomena such as the ‘quantum jump’ through classical science because they are beyond rational knowledge. Early philosophers believed that every thing happening in the universe could be understood by rational thinking and reasoning. Quantum science has shown us that this is not so. We have to now accept rebirth as a scientifically acceptable phenomenon. Let me illustrate rebirth with an example.

A few years ago, a 14 year old girl from a suburb of Colombo came to meet me at my residence with the complaint that she was getting frequent long lasting fainting attacks and no treatment had given her any relief. The only person who could give her some relief was a 16 year old boy living in her neighbourhood who could touch her hand and get her to recover and wake up. But the boy’s parents had stopped him from coming to her house. What she revealed to me was that in her past life she was the sister of one of the first five fighters of the LTTE and she had been trained to take his place in case he died. She had been trained in LTTE fighting techniques. She had also been trained in Bharatha dancing by the LTTE. She had been operating in Durga Hindu Temple in the north of Trincomalee where, while teaching Bharatha dancing to girls she had been brainwashing them and recruiting them to the LTTE. She had got friendly with am army soldier, Dinesh, hailing from the south of Sri Lanka and started a relationship with him. While walking along a road in Trincomalee one night both of them had got run over by a truck that came without lights. The 16 year old boy in her present life neighbourhood is the reincarnate of that soldier. Under hypnotic trance I asked her to do a karate performance that she learned in her past life which she did showing great talent. Then I asked her to do a Bharatha dance which also she performed very well. She did these in the presence of the other members of my family and her mother. Then I took her to a famous dancing teacher in Colombo and got her to perform Bharatha dancing. The teacher rated her as very flexible and experienced. She had never learned karate or dancing in her present life. She was performing what she learned in her past life. In her past life she was a Tamil Hindu LTTE fighter and in the present life she is a Sinhala Buddhist who understands Tamil conversation without having learned Tamil in her present life. It is a case of a LTTE fighter crossing over to the winning side before the war was over.

Her fainting attacks were due to the strong affection she had for soldier Dinesh. While she was unconscious her mind had been going to her past life times when she was making love with him. For her that was the time she was enjoying love making. After neutralising the relevant past life memories she got over the problem of fainting attacks.

This is only an example of past life therapy. A lot of such cases can be read from books written by some eminent psychiatrists in the USA and Canada. Past life therapy can never be explained on the basis of rational knowledge or classical science.