Todd Murphy Lecture 2: Darwinian Reincarnation

Copied from Saltcube (posted: 08-Dec-11 04:03 AM)
Todd Murphy Lecture 2: Darwinian Reincarnation

1 hour 23 minutes
Loaded onto YouTube by brainsci on 21-April-2011
7,865 views since then

Todd Murphy

Although this is a series of talks on Spirituality and the Brain , tonight there isn't going to be a lot of brain science. Tonight the emphasis is more on anthropology, some brain function and a touch of physics.

I want to start out by saying that the work, the ideas, I'll be presenting to you tonight, I've been working on since 1985 . Which makes it somthing like 23 years that I've been trying to get these concepts together.

It came to a conclusion in 1999 - 2000 when the ideas that I will be presenting tonight, were published in The Journal for Near Death Studies.

The title of the publication was:

The Structure and Function of Near Death Experiences and Algorithmic Reincarnation.

Now, that makes it all sound all very heady but you have to write that way when your writing for the Journals.

When the paper was published, (and this is a peer reviewed scientific paper), once that was published there, and a theory of reincarnation was reviewed by a group of scientists, (who all agreed collectively that this was worth publishing). From that time on, reincarnation, became a matter of science for scientists to debate among themselves, both to see whether or not they agree with it, to see if the could find something wrong with it, and hopefully, eventually, come to some agreement that the hypothesis is valid.

Let's begin.

Copied from Saltcube (posted: 08-Dec-11 04:03 AM)

2 Reincarnation in Human Evolution - The New Science of Darwinian Rebirth.
2 Reincarnation in Human Evolution - The New Science of Darwinian Rebirth. - YouTube
(1:22:49) 7,695 views so far

(2:11)

Let’s begin.

Reincarnation and Near Death Experiences

One fundamental assumption that I make and it is almost impossible to build a scientific theory without an assumption of some kind, (if you don’t like assumptions you should leave Albert Einstein’s work quite alone because he uses several to build Relativity and it’s a fairly standard part of scientific method).

My assumption is that:

Near Death Experiences, (the stories and reports that come from people who die clinically and then come back to life) these are not just near death experiences, these are not experiences of people who almost die have. These are experiences that reflect the actual death process as it occurs in human beings, so that, if you die and don’t come back you end up with the same experience as those who die and do come back.

So

This is an important assumption and there are a few researches who don’t agree with me on this point they think that near death experiences have nothing to do with death per say or that we can’t draw that conclusion because there isn’t any final evidence.

This assumption allows me to use evidence and experiences from people who have died and come back to life as evidence in building the theory we’re going to be looking at tonight.

Todd Murphy Brain Scientist

Forumcode:http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...3985691910.jpg

(0:03:52)

Reincarnation

The Idea of reincarnation has many seeming points of origin in history. The Greeks believed in it. The Gnostic Christians seemed to accept it. It has a long history.

But

The very origin of the theory seems to have originated in India well before the time of the Buddha. And in their experience, (actually in their understanding) they felt the experiences that came to people, deeply in meditation were experiences that somehow opened Death’s door and allowed them to look into the other side.

http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...9176226931.jpg

That the profound states of consciousness that they would access in the course of meditation, yoga and so forth actually showed them what was going on in the realms beyond Death, (0:04:37)

(…) realms beyond Death 4:37 to 5:05

Now there’s some truth to this but in fact there were simply not enough near death experiences available to them for them to build their ideas about the after life from people who had actually seen it first hand. They felt that meditation, yoga, spiritual practices of a kind they called “sadana”

Dreamviewers: I just went Googling for a definition for “sadhana” I found this:

Sadhana
Yogi Ashwini Ji, Dec 21, 2004, 12.00am IST
The guru, through shaktipath, initiates a person on the path of sadhana. The process requires immense energy, which is transferred from guru to shishya. If this energy is channelised towards people who have no value for it, the energy dissipates. That is why it is said that knowledge or 'gyan' should not be distributed before people who don't value it. This can also be said for people who come to listen to a discourse not to imbibe gyan but to defy it. These people are not searching; they are ruled by ego.
They are not interested in sadhana, are a drain on the energy of the initiator and are no good for the evolution of mankind (which is the purpose of shaktipath).

Back to Todd Murphy:

(0:05:05)

They felt that meditation, yoga, spiritual practices of a kind they called “sadana” was actually a way to defete Death by breaking the cycle of Birth and Death and Rebirth and so forth.

Their whole notion of the afterlife was based entirely on experiences people had not during near death experiences but in meditation which is another context completely. And though there are some things that happen to people in the course of meditation that can also happen in the course of near death experiences the overlap isn’t quite good enough.

They actually missed it.

For me the starting point is here:

http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...9595232932.jpg

Charles Darwin

Dawinian L2 (5:40 to 6:40)

For me the starting point is here, Charles Darwin.

(5:40)

And what Darwin had to say that was important here is that human behaviours, human faculties, anything that humans or other species do or have about them is in one way or another a result of their evolutionary history and the adaptations and changes that they encountered through their evolutionary history. So the question is, and this is kind of the million dollar question, this got me started in 1985. When I thought of this question I thought “Wow, this is amazing. I can change the world if I can answer this question.

And the question is:

If reincarnation is true, if it actually happens, and if Charles Darwin is right,

Then

Isn’t reincarnation an evolutionary adaptation that contributed to the survival of our species at some point in our evolutionary history? :hrm:

(6:41 to 8:50)

That is worth letting-in for a moment.

If there is such a thing as reincarnation and everything about our species comes from our evolution then reincarnation is the product of biological evolution.

The same process that got us binocular vision, upright posture, the ability to walk as we do, our language. Everything about us comes from evolution.

We reincarnate

But because of the nature of the phenomena, this behaviour, (dying in a certain way for some certain purpose) is something that we can’t actually observe first hand, without being dead, we can’t prove reincarnation happens. What we can do though is look at the evolutionary advantage, (the value in terms of survival) that reincarnation would have conferred on us. And then look at some of the mechanisms as to how it might work.

And this would give the theory an explanatory power. And one of the things that tends to be the hallmark of a good scientific theory is that it can explain a lot, hopefully more than its predecessor. Now the predecessors to the idea that I’m going to be presenting tonight, which I like to call “Darwinian Reincarnation”, is the idea of sin, virtue, heaven, hell, God, judgement and that whole complex of ideas.

You don’t have to have a very good theory to explain things better than that complex of ideas explains explained them.

In terms of traditional reincarnation I read things that told me that if I ate pork I might reincarnate as a pig. If I swatted too many flies I might reincarnate as an insect. It is a guide to pushing people into a kind of morality.

And that’s different from a guide to the Truth. :seeker: (8:50)

(8:50 to 10:00)

Now, Near-Death-Experiences offer evidence that reincarnation should be able to explain, if it were right. And I’m talking about the traditions of reincarnation what we’ll be looking at tonight.

So

When I learned a little bit about Near-Death-Experiences I knew that this was a kind of evidence that classical reincarnation theory and certainly the notions of heaven and hell and judgmental god never could. It just plain didn’t fit.

(9:22 image)
http://www.saltcube.com/img/usr/herm...3805743333.jpg

There is a fundamental anomaly and for those who don’t have that in your working vocabulary I’ll give it to you briefly:

*An anomaly is something that is relevant to a field of science and that field has no explanation for it.*

I’m not going to burden you with a whole bunch of anomalies but there is something that traditional reincarnation theory can’t, (the theistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam can’t) explain and there’s something that Near-Death researchers have not been able to explain. (10:00)

(10:00 to 12:33)

I have several publications on the Journal for Near-Death-Studies. I get emails from people all the time from my web site about Near-Death-Experiences. I personally published an account of Near-Death-Experiences in Thailand, (another cultural group that hadn’t been tapped). And no one knows the answer to this question and that is:

*How is it that we can die in a certain way, having a certain set of experiences, when all opportunities for mating are gone at the moment of death?*

We can’t say, “Those who died this way survived and those who died that way didn’t survived. This is the normal filter of Darwinian Evolution but how do you get people who survived death so there’s an advantage of dying this way instead of that way?

And this remains the fundamental anomaly the fundamental unexplained phenomena in Near-Death-research. How in the world if we are biological creatures the result of Darwinian Evolution, natural selection, how is it that we could die in one way instead of another when there are no survivors from death?

Nowadays there are people who have heart attacks and they get defibrillated back into consciousness. There are people who get really badly hurt and the doctors can but them back together. But until about 30 years ago almost everybody who died, stayed dead.

So

This is a point that I want to be sure I’m clear on, and does everyone get why that’s a problem for science, the existence of Near-Death-Experiences?

Not quite

Okay

The classical method of evolution is that some members of the species have a trait. The ones that have that trait are more able to survive than others. The survivors go on, reproduce, and eventually the trait of the survivor fills the entire population. How do we select those who die one way from those who die another way because after you die there are no more opportunities remaining, there’s no more opportunities to pass your genes on? So if there’s a genetic component to dying the way human beings do, how on earth could that be separated from the people who died differently?

Is that a little clearer for everybody? :shadewink:

Good because it’s an important point and it’s slightly cumbersome to explain. (12:33)

(12:41 image)
http://www.saltcube.com/img/usr/herm...3858607234.jpg

So in order to go over this I’m going to have to look at Near-Death-Experiences one stage at a time. I did this in the last talk, it will be a little bit quicker this time.

The beginning phase of most near-death-experiences is out-of-body experiences.

You leave your body. Very often people find themselves floating below the ceiling and they look down at the scene and they see their own body. Some of these experiences don’t include that. But invariably they see things in their environment that they would have also seen when they were alive.

It’s not Astral Travel. You stay in this reality just viewing it from another perspective, possibly with another body, a subtle body. (13:25)

(13:25 to 15:20)

http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...3884953935.jpg

The next stage has been called the Tunnel and it is literally a matter of traveling through a tunnel. There’s a lot of light at the other end of it and eventually you go through it and you emerge at the light.

http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...3927330736.jpg

Here’s another view of a tunnel this one comes from a painting by the Dutch Painter (?). I believe this is a fifteenth century piece. And he had many, many visions in the course of his life. Some people think that he actually took hallucinatory drugs, other people think he had a near-death-experience other people think he was schizophrenic and simply prone to visions and hallucinations.

The Tunnel is a common vision, it’s a common hallucination.

It can occur in schizophrenia spontaneously. It can occur with peyote in American Indian religion ceremonies. It can occur following a head injury, you get hit on the head and you see stars. I’ve talked to a couple of people who had closed-head injuries and for an instant after the impact they saw nothing but a black space with a tiny point of light.

I haven’t read about it in the scientific literature but I’ve spoken to people who’ve had this.

And, there it is

(14:38 image)

http://www.saltcube.com/out-of-body/...3953791037.jpg

And it’s come to be called “The Void”.

But like The Tunnel it’s dark around the edges with a light in the centre. And like The Tunnel, the experience proceeds by moving along it and moving into the light where upon more things happen.

(15:00)

Out-of-body-experiences are not the only way that Near-Death-Experiences can begin and many Near-Death-Experiences have no tunnel in them at all.

So now we’ve got a couple of stages in, the next stage involves “Being in the other side”. (15:20)