Puja — 2015-08-08

Audio recorded at Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this 127-minute presentation, Ilya Jurovic argues that Western Buddhists must ground their practice in the non-material nature of mind, which reincarnation research supports. He details Ian Stevenson’s systematic study of 2,500 past-life memory cases in children, of which 895 were verified and 65 bore birthmarks matching fatal wounds from the previous life. Two cases stand out: a Turkish boy with birthmarks correlating to his remembered suicide by gunshot, and a pair of identical twins (therefore genetically identical but psychologically distinct) who recalled being sisters killed in a car accident. Stevenson’s data both buttresses and challenges traditional Buddhist accounts. Jurovic then addresses quantum physics, near-death experiences, possession, and the high attrition rate in Western Buddhist centers—suggesting practitioners lack genuine conviction about rebirth and karma. Intended for serious students and those considering Buddhist practice.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 2015-08-08 – KR.mp3

Teacher: Kyabje Rinpoche

Collection: Nature of Mind

Date: 2008-08-15

Recorded at: Tibetan Buddhist Institute, Adelaide

Words: ~16,000

Welcome back everybody to the afternoon session. I’m sure that Ilya’s presentation will counteract the fact that it is nice and warm in here and that we have had a wonderful lunch. Ilya, thank you so much for organising the symposium and for your presentation this afternoon. For those of you who don’t know, Ilya Jurovic, Tenzin Tempur, is the Director of Jamyang Publications and resident translator here at Tibetan Buddhist Institute Adelaide. After studying mathematics and physics at the Swiss Federal Polytechnicum in Zurich and Lausanne, Ilya became a Buddhist monk at Rikon, Switzerland in 1983 and the late Geshe Rabten’s French translator at the Institute of Tibetan Studies in Switzerland.

After Geshe Rabten’s death, he studied Tibetan Sanskrit and Pāli at the University of Virginia under the aegis of Professor Jeffrey Hopkins and Chinese in the U. S. Defense Department program run jointly by Princeton University and Middlebury College while being resident translator of the Jefferson Tibetan Society. Ilya studied intensive Russian at the University of Indiana, Bloomington and Hebrew at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem and holds a licentate in theology from Institut Saint Serge Paris. He also studied Semitic languages, Aramaic and Hebrew, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

He has regularly published in leading European newspapers such as Le Journal de Genève and Le Temps, etc. Ilya studied Buddhist philosophy at Sera Je Monastic University, Karnataka, India, up to the seventh year after exceptional direct entry into the fourth year of studies through debate examination in front of the whole monastery and was one of the main forces behind the creation of Sera IMI, a compound providing Western Buddhist monks with the possibility to study at Sera Je Monastery. His recent publication include the Bodhichittavivarana with the interwoven commentary of Nāgārjuna as well as a large amount of unpublished material. So it is my privilege to now hand over to Ilya to present your topic. Thank you.

Thank you very much. So I’m wired for sound. I’m somehow connected with the video camera. Then my heart and beating pulse are not being monitored. But apart from that, everything is monitored.

I hope you can hear me well. Then I first would like to express my thanks to Jampa Gyaltsen for accepting to come yet again to our symposium which as you know was created at the suggestion of Khensur Rinpoche as a forum for western students of Buddhism to try to explain and express their own understanding of Buddhism for a western audience. And the topic we chose for this year is a topic which has been treated several times at TBI. It’s perhaps the foundational topic for Western students as Jampa Gyaltsen explained so clearly in his presentation. The issue of the non material nature of mind is a highly problematical issue for a contemporary western audience.

It is a non issue for a Tibetan audience and I’d say to a large degree for any traditional Asian audience. As it is the foundation block on which any type of spiritual practice whether it be Buddhist or non-Buddhist is constructed, it is something which must be addressed directly. It is on this that our spiritual practice rests or fails. There is it is very difficult to envision any type of spiritual practice erected on the concept of a mind which is a byproduct of brain activity. Likewise, if the mind is an independent entity from the brain which survives the destruction of the brain and might pre exist its existence then the issue of where the mind goes and where the mind may have come from becomes critical.

This is the gateway to all spirituality. So this is if you wish the main stumbling block for Westerners. I feel it cannot be emphasized too much and the goal of this symposium is to address it from a multiplicity of aspects. So Jampa Gyaltsen will focus on a more traditional Buddhist presentation of the material and since he is superbly qualified to do this, I will try to bridge the gap with what is known nowadays as you will see the bridging is sometimes quite convincing, sometimes awkward. It is the natural state of affairs of a work in progress.

So what if any evidence is there for the existence of past and future lives and if they do exist what might they be like? The first thing is to try to see whether the contemporary consensus is really a consensus or not. And in this matter I thought it would be very interesting to quote some leading creators of modern scientific understanding such as Sir John C. Eccles who in addition to being Australian happens to be Nobel Prize of Medicine and one of the foremost neurobiologists of the age. Sir John Eccles with Karl Popper, who as you may know is one of the or was one of the greatest philosophers of science, has strongly condemned what he knows or what he calls promissory materialism.

Promissory materialism is a prophetic type of materialism which basically asserts that while materialism cannot explain all the phenomena such as consciousness we are dealing with now. Given time it will. Now this prophetical promissory materialism has been in existence for the last two or three centuries. There are some phenomena where indeed a materialist account has prevailed, there are others where frankly materialism has been of little significance in promoting understanding, and this has led Sir John Eccles to stating, to the statement that promise free materialism amounts to a religious belief. Now this is something we ought to be aware of.

Most of you are exposed on a regular basis to articles, it might be the New Scientist, it might even be in Scientific American, or I suspect for most of us it’s just on Yahoo, with a picture of an fMRI brain scan and a statement, love arises from, and then you get to choose. It might be the hippopotamus, it might be the amygdala, whatever. In every single case you have the reduction of a mental state to a mechanism. This is not innocent, and this has very far reaching consequences for one’s understanding of what it means to be a human being and one’s goals. So we do have to try to understand whether this is grounded or not.

Now it is striking that leading neurobiologists such as Chalmers rather recently in a book on consciousness the hard problem, states that reductive physicalism, in other words reducing the mind to the brain level, has in fact nothing very useful to say about any aspect of consciousness. And when I was preparing one of my talks here a couple of years ago on neurobiology and consciousness, I read up a bit on the contemporary accounts of neurobiology, mainly the works of Professor Koch from Caltech. And I was actually quite surprised that frankly a latest synthesis course book was published around 2006, had little if anything to say about consciousness. Theories were advanced, broadly speaking these theories were the same theories which had been advanced in the 1920s. There was little evidence to support Crick and Koch’s assertion that consciousness might arise through the interface of electrical activity within the brain, there was little evidence also to contradict it.

It amounted to a private belief presented as if it would ultimately become scientific fact. This is promissory materialism at work. Now the question we have to address is, is the mind indeed material? In which case I would strongly suggest that we all repair a liquid espresso next door and spend a nice quiet afternoon having coffee, and our two friends here can disrobe because what they’re doing is meaningless. Or is the mind non material, in which case I think you should recruit more people to come to TBI?

Are there intimations of the non material nature of the mind, and if so what are? Broadly speaking these come from what is known as psi or parapsychology, and there are four types of psi which I think provide strong intimations of the non material nature of the mind. Cases of the reincarnation type we shall be talking about today: telepathy, remote viewing, and psychokinesis. However among these, if we want to endeavor to establish that the mind is non material, we need some evidence which satisfies at least three criteria. It must be easily testable, it must be broadly speaking credible for people who come from a strong materialistic background, and there must be a large body of replicable data.

In other words, if you say I saw the ghost of my late grandfather, and this proves to me that my late grandfather’s mind has survived death. Well this is not easily testable. I think for most of us it would not be terribly credible and there’s certainly not a large body of data. However there is psi which does satisfy some or all of these criteria, in my opinion specifically cases of the reincarnation type and telepathy. Telepathy has been extensively tested from the 1920s, mainly by Russian parapsychologists and more recently by American parapsychologists.

The Russian data, Vasiliev’s data, in my opinion is extremely strong and presented it at TBI. And cases of the reincarnation type have been studied in great depth by Professor Stevenson, and I think it is the most systematic study of these cases on record. So if we look at cases of the reincarnation type, we can find that broadly speaking memories of past lives fall within these so called spontaneous cases, or within two other categories we shall not be considering today. Those elicited by hypnotic regression, and those arising through meditation.

My apology, this projector does not like to come in green so you know I will try to avoid it in the future. But basically the spontaneous cases can be subdivided in those which are attested in children and those which arise in adults. In both cases some are verified and some are not verified. Verified means that the child or the adult has memories which he or she had no means of having by any other means and which have been verified as being true. These provide the strongest evidence we have, the strongest evidence on record of the existence of previous lives.

And those who hold to a materialist account of consciousness do have I think a moral responsibility to address this data and try to refute it. Now most of this work was done at my alma mater, the University of Virginia. I was very fortunate to be there when Professor Stevenson himself was professor, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry. I never met him but it’s one of those strange coincidences that within days of my arriving at the University of Virginia, as I was very much of a bookworm and I’m afraid that’s remained the case, I went to the university bookstore and I stumbled on a book which changed my outlook, 20 cases of the reincarnation type, which was Stevenson’s first major work published in the late 1960s where he took 20 purported cases of reincarnation, children remembering past lives, and analyzed. Then I was, I think, a fairly sincere young Buddhist at the period, a novice monk, who had just been told by professor Hopkins that if I wanted to study at the University of Virginia I better wear lay clothes, otherwise otherwise I’d get beaten up.

So I bought a tweed jacket, you know. And when I read this book it gave a very very strong grounding to my understanding of Buddhism. I had read other studies of reincarnation, especially by Martin Wilson, which had seemed very naive and somewhat folkloric, but this book 20 cases of reincarnation type was the first time I thought someone had studied reincarnation systematically. And one of Stevenson’s disciples, Professor Haraldson, points out that if such memories are true, as I said to you, then it is obvious the mind can exist without the brain. And in this case the present paradigm, which is that of the mind which is a byproduct of brain activity, is not to put too fine a point on it, false.

There really is no middle ground on this If cases of reincarnation type are confirmed, or if cases of telepathy are unambiguously confirmed, it is almost impossible to defend a mind which is of the nature of matter. Now these cases are rare. Haraldson mentions that in Sri Lanka he found on average five cases per year in a country of 18,000,000, which is interested in reincarnation, it’s a Buddhist country. But whether the cases are frequent or rare is irrelevant. What matters is whether they are true or not.

So I would like at present to cover briefly Ian Stevenson’s data and then we shall analyze some cases together. Stevenson studied approximately two thousand five hundred cases of the reincarnation. Of these, eight hundred and ninety five are verified. In other words, the memories are confirmed. And peer assessment has been very striking.

This is professor Doris Pappalardo Vilestov, also from the University of Virginia, professor of physics and applied science, who just before her retirement, and I suppose it’s a sign of the onus which falls on these studies, had the courage to state publicly that the statistical probability that reincarnation does in fact occur at least occasionally is so overwhelming established by thousands of already documented cases of remembered lives, and strongly buttressed by the incidence of birthmarks, in conjunction with many of Stevenson’s well documented cases, that cumulatively the supporting evidence is not inferior to that for most if not all branches of science whether physics, cosmology or Darwinian evolution. We do have therefore a very solid body of evidence we shall be addressing today which intimates that reincarnation not only does exist but might indeed be considered as a phenomenon which is scientifically established. Lester King, review editor of the journal JAMA, mentions that Stevenson presents cases in which evidence is difficult to explain on any other ground. And finally Harold Lief, writing in the journal of nervous and mental diseases which is a leading publication in the field, says that either Stevenson is making a colossal mistake or he will be known as the Galileo of the twentieth century.

Therefore as I have mentioned many times at TBI, I think it behooves those of us who are interested in Buddhism, westerners who are thinking of becoming Buddhist, or westerners who have become Buddhist but wish to strengthen their understanding to study Stevenson’s work. I think this takes pride of place over studying the Lamrim. The Lamrim comes later in one’s development, once the foundations are solid. Now let us look at a breakdown of Stevenson’s cases. As I mentioned, out of a total of 2,500, eight ninety five are verified, And an astonishing sixty five are verified with autopsies of the previous body, which establish a correlation between birthmarks on the body in this life, and the trauma or the wound causing death in the previous body. Within these 65, Stevenson has what he calls 35 best cases for which he sees no other explanation but reincarnation.

When you consider the difficulty of accumulating the data, this is quite astonishing. Now what are the alternate explanations to be excluded? First and foremost I would say is self deception. In our case as Buddhists we have a vested interest in believing in reincarnation. It is very easy therefore to push our minds in that direction, and pushing one’s mind in a direction in which it does not want to go is generally not a very good policy.

There are alternate paranormal phenomena which have to be excluded, and this is much more difficult to do. If a child claims to remember a past life, we must find means to exclude the possibility that the child is accessing the data through telepathy, or through clairvoyance, or through possession. Now in the two first cases it is quite straightforward. Both in the case of telepathy and clairvoyance there is not a strong sense of I, these are my experiences when I lived in this house, this is how things were one hundred and fifty years ago. These cases telepathy and clairvoyance do not provide a strong sense of I.

Possession is much more complicated to account for, and we will see today that there is no clear boundary between reincarnation and possession. There is a continuum. And in this respect Stephenson’s understanding of, or the data Stephenson uses to support reincarnation, is data which challenges some aspects of Buddhist orthodoxy. So what are the universal features of pretty much all children who claim to remember past lives? The memories appear at an early age, sometimes they cease a couple years later, sometimes they don’t, they continue into adulthood.

But in approximately seventy five percent of all cases, the child experienced a violent death in the previous life. And the mode of death is what is first and foremost remembered. In other words, the most traumatic event from a previous life. What are the occasional features? First and foremost physical resemblance, surprisingly enough, does exist between the previous life and the present life.

We’ll talk later about whether this is something which is accepted sociologically with Hinduism or not. Birthmarks are found on the sites where the person experienced a fatal wound or major physical trauma in the previous life. The temperament is similar. Memories, and these are not only verbal memories, but also what are known as procedural memories, remembering how to do something like playing the piano, carving a piece of wood, are transmitted from life to life, and one can experience vivid recurring dreams as well. One key feature within behavior when it occurs are phobias.

Unexplained phobias almost always connect with the mode of death in a previous life. Now gender distribution, unsurprisingly we have a majority of males who remember previous lives simply because male children attract more attention. A little girl says I remember being a Cleopatra, her mother doesn’t pat on the shoulder and say tell me more. Now many cases are preceded by announcing dream. We are already moving very much out of the fear of what is acceptable I would say to orthodox science and psychiatry.

These occur mainly in the Asian cases, the Turkish cases, the Lebanese cases. Someone comes, typically the person to be reincarnated and says very commonly I will be moving in with you. And within a matter of days the mother conceives or sometimes this can happen very late in pregnancy. Now Stephenson’s data is not analyzed. So all of this work is my own.

Unfortunately Stephenson died just before the GFC and funding has completely dried up. So we don’t have a systematic analysis of all 2,000 cases, but within the groups of cases which I studied within five thirty six so called solved, you know that it’s verified cases, death is violent in fifty one percent of the cases, and natural in forty nine percent of the cases. In another batch of 189 solved cases, death is violent ninety one percent of the cases, and natural in nine percent of the cases. And the latest figures I have read from Jim Tucker, who is Stevenson’s successor at the University of Virginia, indicate that approximately seventy five percent of all cases of the reincarnation type involve a violent death, not necessarily a death as a result of crime, but typically a violent accident, drowning or something of that nature. In other words, a life which is curtailed before its natural end.

One thing I have found very striking in cases of the reincarnation type is that the children manifest clear signs of PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, which you normally find for instance among soldiers who have survived the battlefield. And this is pointed out by Haraldson who did some very interesting work on the study, on the topic. And Haraldson points out that the most probable explanation is that up to seventy five percent of these children remember a violent death in their previous life. Now what is post traumatic stress disorder? Typically one experiences distressing uncontrolled obsessive thoughts, nightmares, intense psychological distress and physical symptoms such as sweating or even fainting.

You remember some of the cases I presented at TBI over the last couple of years you have clear instances of PTSD. Haraldson did a small study of phobias in subjects recollecting previous lives. This is mainly Sri Lankan subjects and you find that with a group of 57 subjects and 57 subjects as a control group, those who recollect previous lives are four times more likely to experience fears in various situations and places, and are typically more fearful than others. Recollecting previous lives is therefore I would say not a very pleasant statement of things. And we will see later on that it is something one should not try to stimulate either.

There are striking psychological differences between children who remember previous lives and those who don’t. In this group of children from Sri Lanka and Lebanon you can see that the children who recollect previous lives score very high on the dissociation checklist, a sign of mental disturbance. And the children of the control groups typically score much lower. Now keep in mind this is associated with clear memories which are verified. So, spontaneous recollection of previous lives is traumatic.

Now if we look at what I mentioned, phobias associated with recollection of the mode of death, and these these two groups of cases I analyzed, can clearly see in the first group of the one hundred and thirty five cases with a violent death, phobias were present in forty percent of the cases, and in the second group phobias were present in three percent of the cases. Now phobias are actually quite uncommon in the population at large. So these figures are fairly significant especially if you take the following two charts and I was very fortunate to find the data. I took a case of phobia involving water aquaphobia. Now you would typically expect aquaphobia to be quite rare in for instance a country like Iceland where people fish a lot and basically have constant contact with water.

But if you look at the instances of phobia of immersion among children remembering death by drowning, it is extremely high. It’s almost sixty five percent of more children. Whereas if you look at aquaphobia in the general population in Iceland, will find that it is in the range of two percent of the population. Then unfortunately I don’t have figures for other countries, phobias are not well studied, but this does give you a sense of the over representation of phobias among children whose mode of death was violent. Now in addition to phobias, a very striking and from a Buddhist standpoint difficult to explain component of Stevenson’s research are the natal deformities in verified spontaneous cases.

This is a young Nigerian child whose recollected personality had major skull surgery just before death and he was born as a child with this band surrounding the skull. Once again we have to try to get a sense of the general incidence of birth deformities before proceeding any further. Then it’s very difficult to get precise figures because much depends on what we understand as a natal deformity, but I shall pretty much rely on Kennedy’s work which used a data pool of 20,000,000 cases and assume that there are approximately one point five maybe one point six percent of all births which show some type of natal deformity. Stevenson as you can see compiled these natal deformities and birthmarks in exhaustive charts in reincarnation and biology, and I would heartily suggest to you to work through them. We do have two copies of reincarnation and biology in the library.

The first case I would like to cover with you is a case from a Muslim country, which is all the more interesting because even though there are minorities in Muslim countries like Turkey who believe in the existence of reincarnation such as the Druze, the majority of the population does not. And when these cases occur they are therefore all the more convincing. This case is a case of Ümit Farici in a very small town in Northeastern Turkey Antakya. Ümit Farici was born with very striking birthmarks. One birthmark under the neck, and one birthmark I will show you the photo of later on, at the top of the skull.

As well as with extremely clear memories of a previous life as a brigand who eventually committed suicide. He specifically remembered a life as a brigand called Şemsi Hayek and made verified statements. He had these two birthmarks and he had an extremely strong phobia of blood. Then the case is a bit problematical, and that’s why I wanted to present it here, because so far I have presented very strong and unambiguous cases. Then I would like to present some more real life cases to show you the problems we have when we try to address these issues.

The problem arises from the fact that the previously collected personality, Şemsi Hayek, was very famous in the area. And therefore it is difficult to say that any of the statements that the child made contained information he would not have access to otherwise. It’s not something we can say. In the next case I will present we will be able to assert that, but in this case no. So this case rests mainly on the birthmarks and on what you shall see is very striking uncontrollable behavior of the child which seems to corroborate the existence of such a link.

This is the recollected personality, Semir Hayek. And the life of the recollected personality was quite standard. He was born in a small village about 1912. That part of Turkey experienced rife banditry, his father was a bandit. And the turning event in the life Semir Hayek was the rape of his two sisters in 1932.

He took revenge by killing both rapists. This was quite common in that part of the world as well as in the part of the world where my family comes from. As recently as a couple of years ago one of my cousins did the same thing. It was just the standard way these things were handled. So he was tried and sentenced to death and escaped, and then became a bit of a Robin Hood figure who only stole what he needed and was finally, excuse me, betrayed.

The French who occupied that part of Turkey surrounded his house and torched it. And then after killing a sizable number of policemen, it seems he shot his own brother who was with him and then committed suicide. Now what is striking is that by the standards of the period, this is a world which is very alien to Australia, apart from murdering three policemen and wounding seven, he led an almost blameless life. In other words, probably did not drink and was very pious. You know, it’s a particular standard of blameless involved here.

We have to accept cultural differences don’t we? Now if we look at the birthmarks, facing, this was the birthmark on Semil Farici’s scalp. It was a young man who recollected as a child a life as Semi Hayek. And it corresponds quite strikingly and you will see in a couple of seconds to the trajectory a bullet would take if it penetrated under the chin and exited through the head. And this is an autopsy picture from someone who died of a similar cause in North Carolina.

You can see the remarkable similarity in the exit modes. It would be very difficult to fake something like this. Now this is a reconstruction of the tragedy of the bullet or the tragedy the bullet took when Şemsi Hayek suicided. The young child Ümit Farici, his reincarnation I think I can say remembers that as Şemsi Hayek he put the gun on the ground and positioned the barrel under his chin and then pressed on the trigger with his toe. Then he would have had precisely this tragic death, lifting part of the skull in the process.

Now what is very interesting with this case is that Semil Farici, the child who recollected being Semi Hayek, was born one to three days after Semi Hayek’s death. So this is very much at odds with I would say the traditional Buddhist presentation of reincarnation, where reincarnation occurs at the instant of conception. And this is why I mentioned earlier that Stephenson’s data on reincarnation presents a model of reincarnation which is much more akin to possession than to reincarnation as we understand it. This is something we as Buddhists must investigate. I’ve had many conversations on this with Geshe Gyatso at Sera trying to make sense of Stevenson’s data from a Buddhist context.

Then as a standard in these cases when he was two years old, he started giving details about his previous life. And what is striking in this case, one of the reasons for which Stevenson considers it strong, is that from the beginning he refused the name which was given to him. He was called Daham by his parents, he refused to respond to this name and would systematically burst into tears whenever his parents tried to force him to respond. Eventually, is very uncommon at that age, in that part of the world, when names are given basically for patrilinear reasons, in my case I bear the name of my grandfather, and this goes back almost seven centuries, every second generation there is an Iliya. So in this part of the world, Daham would have that same type of connotation.

The parents had to apply to legally change the name of the child, with the agreement of the local Islamic cleric, the local child. Then, as is common in these cases, he identified the name of his wife in a previous life and his sisters, had nightmares about the previous life. And what is striking is, and this is what makes this sort of case quite strong, he had an innate animosity towards the police and would actually often rush towards the police brandishing a stick, shouting that he would shoot them if they didn’t stop threatening his brother. Then what is very striking in this case is that both birthmarks bled at birth. There is no clear explanation for this parapsychologically.

The birthmark under the neck seems to have bled like a wound. In addition, Semil Fareci suffered from toothache in the general area where the bullet penetrated it probably would have shattered the jaw, I would assume. His recollected death is very striking, so there’s no clear evidence about how in reality Şemsi Hayek died. But Semil Farici gives an account of his death when he was Semir Hayek. A platoon of French police surrounded our house and since we fought back energetically, they poured gasoline in the house and set it on fire.

I saw that we were doomed, and so I told my brother to close his eyes. When he did as I asked, I shot him. Then I put the butt of my rifle on the ground and the muzzle under my throat. I released the trigger with my toe. That was my end.

But here, I am back on earth again. They say I was born the day after my suicide. He was born one to three days after the death of Semir Hayek. His mother says one day, but it seems very difficult, Stevenson points out, for the body to have been transported from a remote area back and all this in time because the mother said that she saw a dead body before giving birth. So three days according to Stevenson is a more realistic time interval, and I think he is probably on the right track.

So you can then see as far as the birthmarks are concerned a rather striking correlation. You have a birthmark on the crown, a birthmark on the right side of the neck and this corresponds exactly to the presumed trajectory of the bullet which caused his death. This situation created considerable problems between Ümit Farici’s family and the family of the late Semir Hayek. Şemsi Hayek’s family tried to claim the child, they wanted to adopt him legally. Ümit Farici’s family obviously refused.

As you can see these cases are not easy for the families concerned and in this particular case I think Semil Farici’s family gained absolutely nothing from the child claiming these memories. If anything probably included very awkward situations. And Stevenson points out, as I mentioned to you, that this is one of the few cases where the identification with the previous life was so powerful that the parents actually had to have the name of the child changed legally. So it is with the birthmarks I think some of the strongest evidence in this case. Second case I would like to present to you is an extremely interesting case.

It is one of a very small minority of cases where true twins, in other words monozygotic twins, clearly recollect both previous existences. So I presented one such case at TBI two years or so ago, the case of Ramkrishna and his brother Indika. Then this case is interesting because it’s a case involving two young English girls, the Pollock sisters, who had clear verified memories of previous lives, as well as birthmarks. The birthmark you can see on the forehead of little Jacqueline who is being held here with her sister Joanna by her mother at their christening. And I thought before going any further in presenting this case that I would talk a little bit about what it means to be a monozygotic twin and why even though these cases, the cases of monozygotic twins remember past lives are rare, they are extremely important for us.

Ordinary children are dizygotic, in other words they have two zygotes. Their genetic material is different. In dizygotic twins, in other words fraternal twins, the children are born together but once again the genetic material is different and you would expect and you see substantial physical differences between the children. In mono zygotic twins it is one egg which is fertilized by one spermatozoa. Therefore the fertilized egg, when it splits gives rise to two zygotes with exactly the same genetic material and often a shared placenta.

From a material standpoint, these two children are clones. Or you would expect everything which is physiologically dependent to be identical. If in addition they are raised in the same family, the milieu is basically close to identical. At this point any differences between the two children is due to something else and must be accounted for. When they remember clearly previous lives, then it becomes a fascinating case where we can try to understand what is due to karma, what is due to biology and what is due to nurture.

So such cases unfortunately are rare but when they occur they are very significant. These two twins were monozygotic, so this was established by blood analysis. Both clearly remembered previous lives, both made verified statements, and interestingly enough there were substantial physical differences between them, behavioral differences, intellectual differences, and both shared the same phobia related to their recollected mode of death. So those who claim that the mind is a byproduct of the brain find such cases very difficult to account for. Here you have two children which are basically clones raised in the same environment.

There are important differences between them psychologically as we will see. There are physical differences, one has a birthmark one does not. Then they share a phobia which has no grounding in their present life. Explanations or rationales must be provided for this. So these are the two children in their previous life before they died.

Joanna was some five years older than Jacqueline and little Jacqueline in her previous life had a scar on her forehead due to having fallen onto a bucket. Jacqueline was systematically mothered by her older sister and there was a very powerful attachment between them. Then I’d like to cover the recollected personalities first, and then we will try to see the correlation, if any, with the young twins. In the previous life, to repeat, they were not twins. In this life they are.

So first Joanna Pollock, in other words the older girl, was born to a father who after a spiritual itinerary ended up believing in reincarnation even though his wife did not. She was extremely close to her younger sister and interestingly enough she had a strong premonition that she would never become an adult. She said to her mother, I will never be a lady. I will never be a lady. Then both she and her sister were killed in a car accident, we will see later it amounted to murder.

Jacqueline, her younger sister, was extremely close to her older sister who mothered her and at age three fell onto or into a bucket and was wounded in the forehead. They actually had to make stitches. She was killed when she was barely six years old with her sister Joanna and a young boy on the way to church. They were basically murdered by a disturbed woman whose custody of her children had been abolished, and as a result of this she wished to harm the children of others. Now what is interesting is that if we look at the statements which were made by the twins in this life, in other words, Gillian and Jennifer Pollock, they identified their respective dolls.

Remembered that those dolls had been given to them for Christmas, and identified, you probably don’t have these in Australia, in the old days we had little toy clotheswinger you would basically use to press the water out of clothes. So they identified the toy clothes wringer which had become, belonged to Joanna, also remembering it had been given to them on Christmas. Then Gillian remembered that the birthmark on Jennifer’s forehead corresponded to the scar on little Jacqueline’s forehead, which came from falling on the bucket and stated so explicitly. And Jennifer was able to identify a smock which John Pollock’s wife who helped him with his milk deliveries used to wear but had stopped wearing. Observations of the parents in this case are very interesting.

The mother noticed that the twins spoke repeatedly about their death in the previous life when they were speaking to each other. Both noticed that the twins were very close to each other and strikingly even though they were of exactly the same age that Gillian mothered Jennifer just as Joanna had mothered Jacqueline. Interestingly enough, both shared a very strong phobia of cars, specifically cars in alleyways. And one time when a car in the alleyway in front of their house started the engine, they entered into a panic. They were actually hit when they were walking to school with a little boy by a car which crushed them against the wall of the alley which is leading to school.

Now what is striking in this case perhaps because the father believed in reincarnation, is that after the tragic death of his children, he developed an obsession, a conviction that they would return as twins to be born to his wife. And this is very odd and I have no explanation, a physician until the day of the delivery could only hear one heartbeat. Then I do not know if it is difficult to hear the hearts of twins or not, but I find this one quite perhaps evocative of this case. Now let us look at the differences between the twins. As I mentioned, these are two beings which are genetically identical.

Gillian was a reincarnation of the older daughter, had no birthmark on forehead or waist. Jennifer, the reincarnation of Jacqueline, had two birthmarks, one on the forehead and one on the waist. Jillian, they’re exactly the same age, was more mature, more independent, less affectionate, and mother Jennifer. Jennifer, the same age as Gillian, but in the previous life much younger, was immature, dependent, affectionate and submissive. So you can see that temperament seems to have carried through, and temperament seems to have overridden genetics in this case.

Now if we look at the location of the birthmarks, this is the scar on Jacqueline’s forehead when she fell onto a bucket, and this is the location of the birthmark on Jennifer’s forehead in the next slide. And you can see this very clearly on the pictures here. I don’t know if you can actually see the birthmark, it’s a bit faint. It was present even when Jennifer Pollock was 20 and the birthmark on her side as well was also visible. We do not know the source of the birthmark on her side.

I personally believe it’s a result of the accident. And what is interesting is that as the twins grew older they became more dubious about the memories they had had as children and became more skeptical, which I suppose is a very healthy sign basically. But one of the two twins had visions which corresponded to a place where her family had lived before she had been born. So these two cases I think are quite illustrative of the sort of cases Stevenson has studied, and I personally feel are the best way forwards to try to attempt to understand the phenomenon which we as Buddhists call saṃsāra or cyclic existence. These cases I think also give some of the strongest evidence to date regarding the non material nature of the mind.

The cases I have presented are weaker than some of the cases I have presented in the past at TBI precisely because I wanted to show you real life cases as opposed to some of the 35 best cases Stevenson has. Then as I mentioned there are other means of investigating previous life memories and I would like to cover briefly the critique of the elicitation of previous life memories with hypnotic regression. This is a critique which Stevenson has addressed. I myself have handled or performed such regression at the request of persons in the past and have stopped doing it precisely because of the side effects. The foremost pioneer in the field was the French scientist, Albert de Rochas, who studied past life regression cases at the École Polytechnique.

He was director of École Polytechnique in Paris and it was eventually suggested to him that he leave his position in light of his highly unorthodox interests. Hypnotic regression has some advantages and that’s why I relied on it to present some cases here at TBI this year. It is the only means to gain systematically a sense of patterns over several lives. It also I think will reduce the bias towards traumatic death which we find in Stevenson’s cases where seventy five percent of all children remember in traumatic deaths. And perhaps in the future we might engage in the sort of study which Wambach engaged in, which is highly controversial, a study of the social milieu of the recollected cases in the past.

However, hypnotic regression presents some substantial disadvantages. First and foremost is the induction of memories by the hypnotist. Second is cryptomnesia. In other words, remembering something one had forgotten, one had learned. You watch a program of the middle ages twenty years ago and you completely forget you ever saw the program, but when you regressed, you remember being Maid Marian in the Forest Of Sherman and make a very convincing case for it.

These are cases of cryptomnesia. Then another very big risk is the generation of fantasized personalities which are cathartic. In my case I’m sure if I was regressed I would remember having a magnificent head of hair. Then you would all be entitled to be highly dubious. And as Stevenson has pointed out, there has been no explanation of why recollecting past life trauma should be cathartic, should be beneficial.

Then Martin Orne, Professor of Psychiatry, expresses his own personal reservations pointing out that if things come out under hypnosis, not only are they generally speaking unreliable, but in most of the cases they are false. They refer to the induction of memories, cryptomnesia or cathartic memories. Stevenson goes much further and points out that most of the children he studied recall past life traumas a great deal and that doesn’t stop them from having phobias. So clearly there is, in the cases Stevenson studied, no cathartic benefit to recollecting past lives. This makes a strong case against the recollected lives being fantasized.

A fantasized constructed recollection might have cathartic benefits, which a true recollection would not have. We simply do not know. But the cases of the reincarnation type induced by hypnosis must be handled with care. And we need strong internal evidence in the case, which basically corroborates the veracity of the case. We need, in some of the cases for example the Brixton cases, we need data which the subject had no means of gaining access which we ourselves do not have access to, and which can only be verified after great effort.

Then Stevenson on the website of the division of personality studies makes a very clear statement of his position, or made a very clear statement of his position regarding hypnotic regression. Nearly all such hypnotically evoked personalities are entirely imaginary just as the contents of most dreams. And he adds, the procedure of hypnotic regression is not without some hazards instances have occurred in which the previous personality has not gone away when instructed to do so. I therefore do not undertake verification of details, except in the extremely rare instances that seem to show strong evidence of some paranormal process, such as speaking in tongues, xenoglossy. Stevenson studied some cases of xenoglossy where the personality, the previous personality spoke dialects of German which were used only in the Catholic cities of Germany in the 1860s.

And the regressed personality was a Kansas housewife. It’s very difficult to see how she would have access to data to which perhaps a professor of German at a German university would have access to this considerable difficulty. I would therefore like to present Stevenson’s conclusion of reincarnation in biology to you. I think it is a remarkably measured conclusion to two volumes which total a short 4,000 pages. I believe that the cases I have described in this work strongly suggest, although they certainly do not prove, of an influence by a deceased person on the embryo of a person who will be born later.

If reincarnation is accepted as the best interpretation for at least some cases, they further suggest an interaction between mind and body during life and the survival of mind after death. And finally they suggest that memories of the first person’s life exist on some intermediate vehicle between death and presumed rebirths. We are almost completely ignorant on why, if reincarnation occurs, only a few persons remember a previous life. A violent death figures so prominently in the cases we have been able to study, that we may wonder whether violence may act through concentrating attention and fixing memories of violence. I think this is a very balanced conclusion to what amounts to a life of work.

And then at present, would like to take some distance from Stevenson’s data and see to which degree it corresponds with the Buddhist presentation of past and previous lives in karma and where it differs. This is one of the oldest, actually it is the oldest reed of life from Ajanta Cave. The first thing to keep in mind is that Stevenson has an explicit bias against animal rebirths. It’s acknowledged, in 20 cases suggested as a reincarnation type, it’s lost in a footnote, so I had to chase to find it. I have generally adopted the policy of not including references to lives as subhuman animals.

The reasons we do not know. It could be because Stevenson’s family seems to have been associated with theosophy, and theosophists are dubious of animal rebirths. It could be because Stevenson felt his data was already provocative enough without having to try to explain how one might be reborn as an animal. I can’t say. But if we look at a comparison of the data and of Buddhist teachings, what we can say based on the Stevenson’s data is that past lives probably exist.

But it’s unclear whether every life has a previous life. That is certainly not established as a previous life. Stevenson’s data intimates that animal rebirth does occur; I gave you one case, in a case reported briefly, it’s one of the few cases outside. And it has limited evidence of lower value rebirths. Now if we look at Buddhist teachings, for the Buddhists past and future lives always exist, and animal rebirths are not only not rare but they are far more frequent than human rebirths.

Now Stevenson’s data intimates that children who recollect previous lives have generally died violently. From a Buddhist standpoint, we have nothing to say on this topic. It is not something which is interesting. Would probably make sense in terms of the dissolution of the subtle minds, but I have never heard any teacher make a comment that violent death increased the odds of recollecting previous lives. Now what is very striking is that Stevenson’s data repeatedly indicates that reincarnation can occur at any point up to the delivery of the child and in some cases possession occurs after the birth of the child.

This is completely at odds with the presentation of Adhudharma in which reincarnation occurs basically at conception. Stevenson’s data points out that children frequently have birthmarks where trauma occurred in a previous life. This trauma does not have to be fatal. In the case of Jacqueline, was just a scar. There is no correlation of this type which is accepted in the research.

And we had big discussions at Sera with Geshe Gyamtso on this one. Basically, the general feeling was that it was an effective maturation of another karma. But obviously, there cannot be from a Buddhist standpoint a correlation between, let us say, let’s assume having one’s toe crushed in this life and being reborn in the next life with a toe which is shorter than it should be. What can happen is that a karma accrued a large number of previous lives ago which was going to lead to the loss of the toe in one life, and this is Asaṇga’s viewpoint of the maturation of karma and it’s not Vasubandhu’s, leads to the loss of the toe in one life and to an atrophied toe in the next life. And then there is a seeming correlation, a seeming causal correlation between two subsequent lives simply because we are not able to go as far back as is necessary in time.

Now if we look at other aspects of Stevenson’s data and his teachings, Stevenson’s data gives no clear corroboration of the existence of karma. There is some type of correlation between deeds in one life and occasional results in future lives, which is not systematic. From the Buddhist standpoint, every experience of happiness and every experience of suffering in this life is a result respectively of virtuous and non virtuous karma in previous lives. Once again, it’s very possible that Stevenson’s scope which is controlled by the methodology is too limited. It is not possible to establish these correlations over two lives.

This would be very much in keeping with the Buddhist understanding of the 12 links. Then that there can be physical resemblance to the previous life’s body is clearly indicated in Stevenson’s work and it is there is anecdotal evidence among Buddhist communities for instance. It has been repeatedly pointed out that the voice of the reincarnation is identical to that of the previous lama. And this is seen as evidence indicating that the reincarnation is probably authentic, which makes the present situation more than more awkward. And also from Stevenson’s data, what infers that temperament and personality tend to be similar.

In Buddhist standpoint, this is indeed the case. So we can say that Stevenson’s data buttresses the foundations of the Buddhist position, but that in the details there are numerous points which are at odds with traditional Buddhist doctrine and which needs to be analyzed. Then if this is the case, I think we can say that irrespective of whether one is a Buddhist or not, there is a very strong case to be made for believing in reincarnation. Believing in karma is another affair. We know Jamyang Shepa in his great tenets points out that the Lokāyatas in ancient India could be subdivided into two groups.

Those which did not believe in any past and future lives and those who believed in past and future lives but did not subscribe to Karma. And this was due and that’s Dharmakīrti’s position to the fact that through their meditative equipoise, they were not able to trace karmic roots far back enough. And therefore events seemed coincidental or contingent. Then that would very much buttress a Buddhist reading of Stevenson. Stevenson is functioning with normally memories of immediately preceding lives.

Then it is very difficult to establish karmic linkage between eminent preceding lives and actual lives. It happens, but rarely, with needs of great power. If therefore it is rational to believe in reincarnation without necessarily becoming a Buddhist. One could perfectly believe in reincarnation without accepting karma, without accepting or considering that reincarnation is a bad state of affairs. We could consider that basically it’s quite pleasant to reincarnate from life to life.

This seems to be the position much of the New York place now. Then what do we make of the position of some so called western Buddhists who do not believe in reincarnation and I thought I would mention once again the case of Stephen Batchelor. I had the most interesting talk on this topic at Tuśita Dharmasala thirty years ago now. You know, think he’d probably say the same thing and I’d probably say exactly the same thing. I bring it up because Steve Bachelor is widely published and even more widely read.

He claims to be a Buddhist. And if I wanted to be uncharitable, I would say that he actually earns a living from being a Buddhist or he’s a professional Buddhist. But it is very difficult to see whether he actually is a Buddhist or not. He certainly describes himself as one on his website. He says Stephen and Martine Batchelor are Buddhist teachers who present a lay and secular approach to Buddhist practice largely based on the early teachings of the Buddha as found in the Pāli Canon.

Then the first part of the statement is probably acceptable. It’s up to oneself. But I would say that very few Buddhist scholars consider that what Batchelor represents has anything to do with what the Buddha taught in the Pāli Canon. And one critique of Batchelor’s Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, David Loy points out that Bachelor suffers from the classic predicament of rereading the thought of an ancient spiritual leader in the light of modernity or perhaps I would say more sarcastically in the light of one’s own limitations. So the Buddha Bachelor believes in is basically a better Stephen Batchelor.

Or as B. Alan Wallace puts it much more sharply, and I do not know that I would endorse everything he says, Batchelor brings to his understanding of Buddhism a strong antipathy towards religion and religious institutions and this bias pervades all his recent writings. Rather than simply rejecting elements of the Buddhist teachings that strike him as religious, which would be classically legitimate, one’s right not to accept teachings. Batchelor takes the illegitimate step of denying that the Buddha taught, ever taught anything that would be deemed religious by contemporary western standards. Being an agnostic himself, Bachelor recreates the Buddha in his own image. For practical purposes, I can personally consider Stephen Batchelor to be a disciple of Aldous Huxley.

But obviously, if you were to organize Aldous Huxley seminars, nobody would ever come. If you all organize secular Buddhism seminars, you feel the norm. So I have often thought that I would suggest to Steve if I met him next time to found the church of Aldous Huxley and to promote these teachings to be sincere and honest. And then Adam continues and this is where I think he is harsh but there is an element of truth to it. Communist regimes that are bent on destroying Buddhism from the face of the earth may be called the far enemies of Buddhism.

They are diametrically opposed to all that Buddhism stands for. Batchelor and Harris, the American neurobiologist who claims to be a Buddhist, present themselves as being sympathetic to Buddhism, but their visions of the nature of the Buddhist teachings are false facsimiles of all those that have been handed down reverently from one generation to the next since the time of the Buddha. However benign their intentions, their writings may be regarded as near enemies of Buddhism. And I think certainly Stefan Bachelor’s writings are harmful to the spread of the pure teachings. This is something we have seen at TBI.

This is something I have seen among western students. I certainly do not encourage indigenous to read bachelor’s works. Then in conclusion, I would like to quote Ian Stevenson. Why do mainstream scientists refuse to accept the evidence at all? There is strong evidence.

Then if the evidence is incomplete or misinterpreted, it behooves those who do not accept it to criticize it and point out the mistakes. And I think the answer lies in this passage of Eugene Brody’s review of Stevenson’s case to the reincarnation type. The problem lies less in the quality of Stevenson’s data than in the body of knowledge and theory which must be abandoned or radically modified in order to accept reincarnation. The problem does not lie in Stevenson’s research. The problem lies in the fact that it is totally at odds with the dominant paradigm.

And there are intellectual, scientific, and financial vested interests, which are huge in the preservation of the dominant paradigm. All of us in this room are the product of that paradigm. And in this matter, I would like to raise a question to which I have no answer. Is there a level of proof of reincarnation which would be acceptable to the scientific community? Because the trend seems to have been, certainly with reincarnation and telepathy, that the more data is accumulated which seems to indicate it, the higher the standard which one is supposed or the higher the level of data which one is supposed to provide increases.

Then one gets a sense that one is sort of running towards a limit without ever reaching it. Is it possible that the rejection of reincarnation is simply a dogmatic stance within much of modern science and that irrespective of the quality of the data, irrespective of the amount of the data provided, it will never be accepted. This is my personal feeling and it’s very much in keeping with certainly Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of scientific revolutions. Scientific revolutions are not peaceful processes. They do not occur by the smooth transition from one paradigm, let’s say the Newtonian paradigm to the relativistic paradigm.

Instead, these are traumatic and brutal events in which people’s reputations are shattered, institutions are destroyed and new institutions are created. And I think it will probably be the same with the non material nature of the mind because that is the core issue behind the issue of reincarnation of telepathy and affection. Should the non material nature of the mind become the new feature of a new dominant paradigm, that new dominant paradigm cannot coexist with the present paradigm. And the change will therefore be revolutionary. It will be painful and it is resisted as it always is by the dominant orthodoxies.

And this has led Edward Kelly in a marvelous book I would highly recommend to you Irreducible Mind to state our a priori commitment to a conventional physicalist account of the mind, in other words materialism, has rendered us incapable of dealing adequately with the mind’s most central properties. We need to re seek that commitment. I am not a neurobiologist by training. My initial training was in mathematics and physics. I had to read up on neurobiology here.

My father was a biologist. When I started doing these presentations at TBI, then I must recognize I was surprised at how weak the accounts for consciousness were. I mean, many western philosophers gave more convincing accounts of consciousness. The Buddhist account of consciousness is strong. The account of consciousness, consciousness, in other words, capacity to become conscious.

What you might call reflexive consciousness, this is something which is really very, very weak in contemporary neurobiology. Then this is what I wanted to cover today. We have some extra time for your questions. Thank you so much, Elia. Do you think that a greater understanding in time of quantum physics will see the collapse of the materialist paradigm?

What we have at present is a very strange situation where much of modern physics is post materialistic. Whereas the strongest bastions of materialism are in the life sciences, in biology, into a much lesser degree in medicine. Certainly in quantum physics, one is face to face with the reality that, and here it is a matter of interpretation, the act observation affects the status of observed subatomic phenomena. Now the orthodox interpretation, the so called Copenhagen interpretation, considers that observation is impossible without physical interference. And it is based on this that one can say that the act of observation causes the collapse of the wave function of the state vector.

And I mentioned here many times that there is an alternate explanation which is mathematically more sound for Neumann’s interpretation according to which it is actually the awareness by consciousness of the status of the observed phenomenon which causes the reduction of this phenomenon, elimination of the probabilistic component. And von Neumann advances an argument which has actually never been refuted. It’s known as a von Neumann cut. It involves basically moving the quantum mind boundary back into the brain and pointing out that if the brain without consciousness could cause the collapse of a wave function, matter as such would be causing the collapse of a wave function which is actually something which is very problematic. Then I mentioned to one of the students here when she asked me how it is handled by physicists that even when I was studying physics, it was a was a gentleman’s agreement.

It basically amounted to not talking about it. In other words, people would say, look, we know that all of this is very weird, and we have state vector reduction and quantum tunneling and things which make little or no sense, but we’re just gonna use quantum physics. And you don’t talk about the weirdness, and I won’t talk about it either. Now this gentleman’s agreement has been in place for some seventy years now, and there are a fair number of physicists who are basically challenging it. And this started basically after Bell’s research in the nineteen sixties which showed clearly that quantum physics was not something which was on the point of being superseded by a more systematic account of subatomic phenomena as Einstein had hoped.

But instead that quantum physics was based on Bell’s inequalities the way things are. Then I mentioned here that if we analyze result of quantum physics from the standpoint of Buddhist philosophy, there are only two schools of tenets which are compatible with quantum physics. It’s Cittamātra and Prāsaṇgika Mādhyamika. Svatāntrika Mādhyamika is not compatible because Svatāntrika Mādhyamika accepts that all phenomena are established from their own side, established by their own characteristics. And this is probably unacceptable within the fundamental understanding of quantum mechanics.

And then the two lower schools of tenets, Sautrāntika and Vaibhāṣika are both materialistic. I should qualify this here, realistic. They assert the external existence of phenomena independently of the mind observing them. Then those schools of tenets are definitely incompatible with quantum mechanics. They’d be compatible with Newtonian mechanics.

So to answer your question, I’m sorry. I got carried away in my my old love. You know? But to answer your question, yes, quantum mechanics bears the seeds of the destruction of materials. And as quantum mechanical approaches start to be used in biology, and this is resisted very strongly right now, then biologists are going to have to to abandon these rather primitive reductionist stances.

So the big question right now for instance regarding the nature of the mind, and it’s it’s very sharply debated, is whether we can give a quantum account of the mind at the level of the synapse between the neurons. This was Roger Penrose’s position. It’s Henry Stapp’s position as well, both are physicists. Then biologists are very hesitant about this one. It is theoretically possible.

There is no limitation to quantum phenomena to subatomic physics. We know that there are molecules like ammonia which manifest quantum behavior theoretically. There’s no reason quantum behavior could not occur at the level of synapses or even of the self. Then we have to rewrite biology. And then obviously, a lot of things are recorded in question.

Something as basic as a double blind test rests on the hypotheses that it is possible to separate the mind from the phenomenon observed. The moment that is no longer possible, a double blind test is impossible. So much of the foundations of scientific inquiry would be called immediately into question. That’s why there’s tremendous resistance. But I should point out that the solutions proposed by Henry Stapp and his colleagues, so called quantum account of the mind, which postulate that there is a mental and immaterial component are surprisingly similar to the account of the mind in Anuttara Yoga Tantra, in which subtle minds metaphorically ride on the winds which carry them, but actually they are of one nature but different isolates.

In other words, are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Now this is an extremely sophisticated account of the nature of the mind. I think many physicists would find this fascinating. Do you have other questions? I’m sure everybody wants to go for a tea break but, I had a question about, after, what is it, when people are clinically brain dead for periods of up to minutes and there is, they still remember things.

Have you looked into the research in that area? For instance, they die on the operating table for three minutes and have revived. Yes, I have. I mean you’re talking of what is broadly known as near death experiences and resuscitation. Then there are cases of this nature.

I presented one such case here, the Pam Reynolds case. I think this is a category of case which is very promising for bolstering the theory of the non material nature of mind simply because typically these cases occur in a clinical setting. Typically these are cases which occur in a hospital, on an operating table, then this is rather close to a laboratory setting. The problem is they occur relatively infrequently. They are starting to occur more frequently than in the past because of the progressive resuscitation, but we are far from the thousands of cases Stevenson has.

We are very far from the hundreds of thousands of cases we just studied in telepathy. It is that sort of volume of data we would need. And those cases are strong, especially when the person has is clinically dead, but more importantly, his brain dead and has access to data they would have no natural means to gain access to which happens in near death experiences which are verified. So Pim van Lommel had a lot of studies of these cases. Then there was a project in England, the AWARE study.

It seems the results did not live up to the expectations. So it’s very much a work in progress. My question is about the cases of Samil Farici and his and then the next one, Sunil Hayek, and the fact that one was born just days after the first one died. And you said that it’s more in keeping with possession rather than reincarnation. What is actually the Buddhist explanation of possession and how would that fit in then with that case?

It’s quite straightforward. It’s basically not different, I’d say, from the explanation you find in Roman Catholic demography. A spirit enters within a body, then there are two cases obviously. There is a case where possession occurs and the person’s consciousness was present at the time of possession. And then there is a case of possession of a dead body.

The Tibetans called entering entering into into the the body. Body. There’s not a lot left to add. These cases are very prevalent in India. I presented a case here which was studied by Stevenson.

There are differences between cases of possession and cases of the reincarnation type. First, in cases of possession, there is a fundamental switch in the person’s identity and it’s a switch which is durable. That’s not the case in case of the reincarnation type. In case of the reincarnation type, the child remembers a previous life but remains in this life. So if you consider that the mind in this life is possessing something which had the memories of the previous life, those memories coexist.

In cases of possession, that’s not the case. The Hindus called the the mind entering into another body. The previous memories are totally accounted. It is not clear if anything is left in the cases which Stevenson studied. And one case involving Indian girl who was possessed after going through what seemed to be death.

So it’s a case of. It was death in an Indian village. So we have to keep in mind, Kevin knows whether it is actually death by modern clinical standards or not. Certainly, the body went cold, the heart stopped, breathing seemed to have stopped. When she came back to life, her voice had changed, her behavior had changed, Her memories had changed.

Her educational level had changed. She had been a simple peasant girl. She, after she returned to life, spoke fluent Hindi, wrote very beautiful Hindi. Her dietary habits, which are a very important factor of caste in India, have changed. Nothing was left of the previous personality.

That is the big difference between cases of the possession type and cases of the reincarnation type. Now where Stevenson’s cases of the reincarnation type differ from the traditional Buddhist presentation is that the process of incarnation can occur up to delivery and it seems even beyond. Now this is something from a Buddhist standpoint we have no clear explanation for unless we assume that you had reincarnation at conception, death in utero, and then perhaps reincarnation again. At least I have never heard of these cases being covered. So I think it is a sign from my personal standpoint of the authenticity of Stevenson’s data that it presents these problems.

So I don’t know if anyone here has a scientific background but whenever you have perfect data, you know it’s cooked. Real data is never perfect. Account books might be perfect and accountants use tricks for that but real data is messy and the messiness is a sign that it actually is real. The statistical means for analysis. Do you have other questions?

Thanks Ilya. As well as gender being an issue in terms of the believability of young people’s experiences in terms of previous lives. The thing I recall in reading Stevenson’s article, which is the only thing I’ve read, is he says begins a sentence by saying about children reporting and he said that the children will report to their parents and anyone else who will listen. I remember that. And what that immediately brought to my mind was the cultural thing certainly in Australia, probably I don’t know about US or England, probably England, but something I grew up with and maybe people 30 didn’t.

Children should be seen and not heard. There’s a very strong cultural tendency. And also children in this culture, certainly in Australia, were removed immediately after birth for a number of hours in terms of being in close contact with the mother’s body. So those two phenomena are not common throughout the world but in and far worse in Australia than even in England where midwives took a much more active role. But yeah, I’m just wondering if you could comment on either the I say if there’s a relationship with cases like these.

I mean the issue is much more whether the culture or the parents give a space of openness for these memories which are fragile and problematical. Then Jim Tucker now is researching cases of reincarnation type in America. He hasn’t had a lot. The culture is quite hostile. So I think that explains a lot to you why many of these cases come from more sympathetic cultures, more understanding cultures.

You have other questions? Please. Unless someone else has an unasked question. You briefly mentioned about you having induced hypnotic regression in some people and you ceased because of the side effects. Could you elaborate on what those side effects were?

Well, I’m really sorry I had the confidentiality in the case. They were major and induced panic in the person. Then as a result, I felt this was not a benefit. Very limited benefit. Somehow, sometimes the demand is very strong.

People don’t fully measure what is involved, especially when it comes from Buddhists who are trying to ascertain the existence of past lives, you might think it’s of benefit. Then one has to analyze very carefully. I should point out one other thing about these memories. I mean, my limited work with these cases, one thing which is quite clear is that if the memory is a narrative, it is probably false. So the authentic memories seem to be images.

Slides. Then I have never asked my teachers about this. They would not talk about it. But an interest in past lives is really only warranted because if past lives exist, then normally so do future lives. Then it’s future lives we have some control over.

Past lives are finished. So I I fully agree with Stevenson. I see no cathartic benefit in hypnotic regression. The cases I had experienced of there was definitely no cathartic benefit. And the experiences or the purported memories which arise, if they are authentic, will often arise in a setting like a retreat.

There are cases among the Tibetans. The image I know a disciplinarian of who found his way as a child to the disciplinarian’s compound pointed her to his mother all along. Then those images are authentic. For us as a community which basically probably does not believe really in past lives, it’s very much up here and not here, the goal of these talks is to try to change our view. Then the Buddhist outlook is one in which ethics is rooted in past lives and future lives.

So as Buddhists, we do not believe in the innocence of a creator who judges. We believe that we ourselves will experience the consequences of physical, verbal, and even mental deeds in future lives. If we don’t believe in future lives, it is not possible for us or for this to be transformative for us. And this has led to what we see as problems of behavior among many western Buddhists. That’s the goal of these talks.

And for yourself, I think the only goal of an interesting past lives is to try to strengthen this conviction and then to try to understand how karma operates. Not just intellectually, but so that you can device so that we can device karmic strategies for ourselves. It is the way we take control over our lives. Just one last quick question. Building on what, we heard this morning about when babies are born there’s a previous life that, underpins their ability to breathe and some memories that have come across.

How do you distinguish whether those memories have come from the mother experiences that she’s had while the child is in utero? And clearly, if the mother’s still alive, it’s not reincarnation from her, although some of the things appear to be guided by her experiences while she was pregnant. I’m a bit confused about that. Well if you take the case of wheezing, your argument would imply that if there was fertilization in vitro and the embryo was raised in artificial in the year, it could never start to breathe because it could never have had a mother who could transmit those experiences in vitro. Obviously this makes no sense.

So if there was some sort of means of transmission from the mother to the embryo or the embryo was in utero, of the capacity to perform vital functions like breathing or the example which Candrakīrti gives which is sexual reproduction which is very striking. Then you would expect if the embryo had been fertilized in vitro and raised in artificial media, it would never as an adult gain these capacities. We all sort of automatically assume it would. It’s obvious. Now in this life, if you are saying that after fertilization, it is all the embryo is raised or is increasing in the mother’s womb, that through the mother it learns somehow to breathe and so forth.

The Dharmakīrti’s argument, you know. Dharmakīrti invokes breathing as, you know, the mechanism which clearly demonstrates the existence of previous lives. Then what you are saying is that if the embryo was cultivated out of the mother’s womb, this would not happen. Isn’t it? Life did this memory come from?

The mother’s or previous life? It certainly cannot come from the mother’s life. How could it? How could it? So we do not share the past memories of our parents.

Some Tibetans must have believed it because there were arguments against this. I never could see how it was possible. I’m just wondering, compared to our understanding of breathing that we’ve just talked about, how do we then explain something like transpiration of plants? From certainly Buddhists, and I would say this is not a scientific standpoint, it’s a material phenomenon. Then the mechanism, I do not know.

I do not know. Then how the material world comes into being from a Buddhist standpoint is almost a moot question. Obviously, Abhidharma is very interested in it. But nonetheless, for Buddhist thinkers, it was pretty much a moot question. Pretty much.

And that one I would be very much in keeping with his holiness. I think we have to ask scientists, photographists. They have the answer to that one. Do you know, Ilya, if there’s been work that’s been done with even people like Simil Farichi, the Pollock twins, having an understanding that they have had a past life, what difference it has made to their lives. And for that matter, people like James Leininger, who you haven’t mentioned.

Because with the research that I’ve read on people who’ve had the near death experience, it seems to have quite dramatically changed their lives away from materialism kinder and this sort of thing. I just wonder, you mentioned that the Pollock daughters became sceptical as they got older, and I just wondered if, what your understanding of the work, if there has been work done on how such an understanding has affected or changed their lives. No, I don’t know of any specific work in the field. I would say it would be very difficult to do because the data points are very different. So most of the near death experiences you refer to occur or are studied among westerners, which share a lot of shared cultural traits.

Typically, tend to be the products of highly materialistic societies with little or no hope for a future after death. Most of the cases of the reincarnation type occur in societies which believe in reincarnation or profoundly religious. I would not expect a child who has such memories to experience a type of transformation which an adult who did not believe in an afterlife in a materialist society would have after experiencing a near death experience. And near death experiences are very, I think, particularly powerful for westerners because they tie to the Judeo Christian heritage in a way in which cases of reincarnation type do not. Cases of the reincarnation type are very problematical for most westerners to take on board.

It is a reason for which Stevenson’s work has had little critical acclaim and more popular accounts of cases of of U. Experiences have turned into many of times bestsellers. Simply because for someone who has a Christian background, this seems to basically indicate the existence of a heaven, of means of light, of a god. It ties in with the early childhood beliefs and the cultural background. Then I think it is part of the reasons for which the division of personality studies at the University of Virginia focuses a lot less on cases of the reincarnation type.

The director of the division, Bruce Grayson, is mainly interested in NDEs. Near death experiences. And all of this is very much why his holiness to Dalai Lama has systematically discouraged the conversion of western western medicine because we do not escape our childhood in our past. So it’s nice that repeatedly said that it is safer to practice the religion, the face of one’s fathers, simply because that’s what one is raised in. Then our societies are broadly speaking faithless.

So the faith of one’s fathers for many westerners, especially the younger generation is nothing. Then between nothing and something, perhaps something is preferable. But when one has a strong heritage, then that heritage will color one’s outlook. It’s unavoidable. It’s unavoidable.

When I was young, I remember most of our Swiss Buddhists, they were Buddhists, but somehow god and the soul always entered the picture I’ve noticed over the years that the dharmakaya is god in this sense. It’s a normal transition, but the subtle mind is so that it’s as powerful as it used to be when I was young. You know? And people always perk up in the centers when you talk on the subtle mind, which is very strange. Here I always see everyone perks up.

There’s great interest. You know. And so Geshe Jampa Gyaltsen was very sharp. And he said, I really can’t figure this one out. When I talk of mind and mental factors which you have in your mind stream, you have direct access to, everyone looks bored and tired.

And when I talk of a subtle mind, which I don’t understand and you don’t understand and neither of us can use, everyone is very excited. Right? And this is a western trait. It’s a western weakness to be very Tibetans Tibetans call this, means very fikr, to like new things. We like things which are too advanced for us.

The basics of what counts. And for in our case, we can see in this center, I’ve seen this in other centers, the rate of attrition is so high. We’re looking, I give you the figures, at 97% attrition rate over ten years in the French centers. Here it’s in the same range from what I saw since I’ve been here. The rate of attrition is so high, it’s a clear indication that the basis, in other words belief in the non material nature of the mind, and belief that what we do in this life is linked to what happens in the future is absent.

That is absent, I I believe. Believe. Could be could be that. I mean, I remember when I was young. Right?

I was a student of Geshe Rabten, and then sixteenth Karmapa came to the West. There was this rush of students to go to the sixteenth Karmapa’s teachings, so I wanted to go. Then I asked Geshe Rabten, and Geshe-la was very skillful. He said, yes. I’m a student of Kalu Rinpoche, he said.

I’ll send you to receive those teachings in the future when it’s necessary. Then a couple of years later, the Dzogchen teachings came to the West. Right? They Sogyal Rinpoche, started teaching in France. And again, there was a rush.

Everyone everyone was into Dzogchen. Right? Now all the people I knew who were into Dzogchen, they no longer do Dzogchen. All the people who went to Mahāmudrā and they’re not into Mahāmudrā and no one has attained anything. Right?

So I don’t know what it is about the western temperament. It’s something within all of us. We have to be aware of this. You know, if you want to become wealthy, very wealthy, you must accumulate money religiously from very early on and a lot of it. Then it’s a very good metaphor for religious practice.

If you want to get somewhere with your practice, you have to work hard and continuously. It doesn’t happen otherwise. It does not happen. And you have to work at the basics. You can’t become very wealthy if you can’t do basic accounting.

That’s why we hammer the basics I think because if in this room a couple of us gain a conviction in the sense of knowing, not a valid cognizer, but a conviction, a mind that’s incontrovertible in other words, that reincarnation exists. That I think is sufficient to say this life was once spent. That’s a huge start. A valid cognizer, a fresh valid cognizer is very difficult to handle. Without the reasonings which Jampa Gyaltsen exposed this morning, it’s not possible.

And those reasonings, I think, cut little ice with us nowadays. Do you have other questions? What are your thoughts on becoming an organ donor? Is this part of the Tibetan Buddhist belief to be one? But it didn’t exist in Tibet so the issue never arose.

Generally speaking with the generous motivation to do something like that is very good. Then there is a problem in the fact that the organs must be taken from the body as soon as death has occurred. This is very traumatic and some fear that this might, or this will definitely cause a premature departure of the subtle mind from the body. Khensur Rinpoche gave a very, very clear answer about this one. If the motivation is a really generous motivation to help others, great virtuous karma is accumulated.

Then this can only lead to great results. And in our own case, since I basically assume none of us is able to use the subtle mind, meditate in the death state, then what difference does it make? What difference does it make? So it would be very good to do that. Very good.

And I have a question for you. You don’t have to answer. Because I’m about to put you on the spot. I’ll put you on the spot in the future. But if you answer, I’d like it to be sincere.

But think carefully, therefore. For you, as people who attend the center and who may be wavering still in your commitment to Buddhism, I think many of you are, what is the biggest problem? What’s the biggest problem? What’s the biggest obstacle? Sorry.

The biggest problem that I have ever had in three different Buddhist centres, Chenrezig Institute, Buddha House and TBI, has always been the lack of cohesion or harmony in the community. That has been pervaded all my experience in three different Buddhist centers. That’s something else. That is because Buddhists are not perfect which is a given. All of us are, you know, unfortunately struggling, you know, as best we can.

And frankly, lack of harmony often begins with oneself. But from the standpoint of the Buddhist teachings, because what we do see is an extraordinarily high rate of attrition. And that means that people come, they engage in what is called suspension of disbelief. In other words, they hang around going through the motions. For instance, prostrating, I have mentioned many times here that you should not prostrate if it’s not going to be sincere.

I have yet to see someone who has the honesty not to prostrate. And yet, we do have a very high rate of attrition. The last year, it’s quite shocking. So from your standpoint, within the Buddhist teachings, what is what pinches? What is the problematical area?

If you don’t want to answer, it’s perfectly okay. So from my own personal viewpoint, I try and think about that because, you know, I look at the teachings and you look at Milarepa who ran to the hills, and you go, how did he generate that motivation? And I can’t even come close to getting up in the morning and meditating the way that I should all the time. And so from my perspective, there is no consequence for not practicing. So the world keeps turning around.

Families stay the way they are. And it requires a firm conviction in a future life for there to be to do things in this life that are of no material benefit to this life and only to the future life. So why practice now is what you struggle with. And not that I have, but if you miss a day’s practice or you don’t do it, sure you feel a little bit bad. But, you know, there is no material consequence.

I don’t go to work. There is a consequence in this life, but there’s no benefit or consequence for practice. It’s actually detrimental. Yes. It’s a very good presentation.

I think it is really the the crux, isn’t it? Most of our students have left either because practicing affected their wealth or their marriage or both. In other words, because of this life. Right? Then I was contrasting the problems we have here with the experiences I have had with Russian Buddhists in Petersburg and Estonia.

One of the best western practitioners I know is a Russian Buddhist. And then I think one very big difference I see between your lives and her life is the absence of suffering in your lives. We have little experience of suffering. Obviously, there is by Australian standards, people feel they have a very hard time with it. You know?

But if one has a sense that one is basically always going to manage, that the government is always there in the background, then indeed this is a luxury. Why would one practice? As you put it so cogently. Obviously, if we’re moving into a world where this is no longer true, then you’d be well advised to practice what is possible to do so. Right?

I’ll give you something of the background of that girl. I think she wouldn’t mind. I will go a little bit over time if you don’t mind five minutes. You know? And it will show you the inner transformation I’m referring to which I don’t see happening happening here with most of our students.

Her father was killed by the communist authorities when he was 16. He was about to bleed to death in the streets of Tallinn while the ambulance waited because he was an autonomist in government. Her father was shot by the communist authorities just before the fall of the iron curtain. He was about to bleed to death on the street while the ambulance waited. They waited to take the body away.

Then she went to work in Germany as a waitress and she landed in an Albanian restaurant and they sold her as a prostitute to a brothel in Amsterdam. And the brothel owner, he also run the run the drugs in much of Holland, took her on as a mistress, but beat her regularly. He broke her jaw, he broke her neck. Then she ran away, went to England. And when I met her in England, she was trying to find a way out.

Very interested in Buddhism. She had had near death experiences in the coma induced by an accident. She went to India and this is a person who has no prior exposure to Buddhism who insisted on doing the Vajrasattva retreat, three months retreat. Then it was very awkward. The nun who ran the retreat was very hesitant, a two seater.

She said to me, you know, she’s very young. Then we were good friends. I said, I’ll give you my personal guarantee. I know where she comes from. And the retreat went very well.

At the end of the retreat, this nun sister Rita said to me, she’s the star. Finished the retreat, then started studying the Tibetan Kagyu tradition. At present, I believe she has offered in excess of 1,500,000 prostrations in Bodh Gaya. She has done a series of pujas and retreats. She has done retreat on Mount Kailash in Tibet.

She works as a nun, as a nurse in England. But this is a complete transformation of the person in fifteen years. Then this is what we should be seeing. Is this someone who takes the teachings very seriously? Very seriously.

He married a Tibetan, settled down very nicely. Then why is this not happening? That’s what you have to ask yourselves. My personal feeling is that you have not been bled enough by life. You have not suffered enough.

Then you still buy into the whole idea that somehow if something goes wrong, the doctor, the psychologist, the psychiatrist, what is it, central link you call it, and this could be central link will help you. Then there’s no particular pressure to practice. Then I hope for you that when the pressure comes on, these teachings of mental transformation will still be there. Because you can only study mental transformation and believe in mental transformation once you understand that it is impossible to control everything in this life. As long as you buy into the idea of control, which I think is a western bias, you will never see the point of mental transformation.

It’s just a matter of getting another job, of earning more money, of this or that, until you realize that there are situations which are hopeless, which you may find yourselves, and where it is your relation, your inner relation to the world which must change. This is my private opinion. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I was very struck because I met many cases in Russia, and their practitioners it’s astonishing. Like a blade. You know?

They learn Tibetan. They go on retreat. They meditate. And then I wondered what’s the difference with here. And the main difference I could see was the experience of suffering.

Maybe there’s something else I do. So I’ve taken a lot of your tea time. My apologies.

Key terms in this teaching

Cittamatra sem tsam pa (Tib)

The Mind Only school, one of the two Mahayana (Great Vehicle) philosophical schools. The Mind Only school does not accept external objects but does assert truly established self-knowers. LYWA

dzogchen

Literally "Great Perfection", the practice to attain the mind's natural, primordial state. LYWA

Highest Yoga Tantra Anuttara Yoga Tantra (Skt); la na mä pä gyü (Tib)

The fourth and supreme division of tantric practice, sometimes called Maha-anuttara Yoga Tantra. It consists of the generation and completion stages. Through this practice, one can attain full enlightenment within one lifetime. LYWA

Kagyü

The order of Tibetan Buddhism founded in the eleventh century by Marpa, Milarepa, Gampopa, and their followers. One of the four main schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Cf. Nyingma, Sakya and Gelug. LYWA

lamrim

The graduated path. A presentation of Shakyamuni Buddha’s teachings in a form suitable for the step-by-step training of a disciple. LYWA

Madhyamaka u ma (Tib)

The Middle Way school, one of the two Mahayana (Great Vehicle) philosophical schools. The Middle Way school does not assert true establishment even conventionally. There are two divisions of the Middle Way school: 1) Autonomists and 2) Consequentialists. LYWA

Mahamudra chag ya chen po (Tib)

The Great Seal; a profound system of meditation upon the mind and the ultimate nature of reality. LYWA

Sautrantika do de pa (Tib)

The Sutra school, one of the two main Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) philosophical schools. The Sutra school accepts both self-knowers and external objects. LYWA

Definitions adapted from the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive glossary, as taught in the Gelug tradition.