I - Rebirth and the Soul

No Self

A central Buddhist teaching is "anatman", often translated as "no self" or "no soul". In particular, this teaching denies a doctrine that was held by other religious groups in the Buddha's time, two and a half thousand years ago. Part of the reason for the emphasis placed on "anatman" was that it helped to draw the line between Buddhism and other Indian religious movements. We might wonder whether that reason is still important! However, the absence of a self is still a central part of the Buddhist approach, it is still useful as a guide in meditation practice, and it is still valuable as an insight into what our minds are. Anatman reminds us that if we look for a central area inside us, a part of us that is above the world of change, and always in control, we will not find it. In the ordinary sense, of course, we all exist. We have grown up. Psychologists will tell us that we each have an "ego". I can say, for instance, that I am the same person who was born some years ago, wh o fell asleep last night, dreamt, and woke up again. None of this conflicts with the Buddhist denial of a permanent independent controlling self - and neither does the doctrine of rebirth.

At the time of the Buddha, the idea of rebirth seems already to have been known. It seems, however, to have been only one of several views that were being taught in India at that time. The Buddha chose to teach in terms of rebirth, so if we are interested in Buddhist teaching, it is not perhaps foolish to take the idea seriously.

Materialism

Now there is a popular view, materialism, which some people call "physicalism". This approach considers that what we are is "nothing but" the effect of the physical laws of physics. Chemistry is based on physics, and biology is a complicated expression of chemistry and physics. Believers in materialism think, of course, that "when you die - you rot". This kind of mechanistic view does have some difficulties. A materialist can, at least in principle, explain a lot about what we do, what we say and how we react. But materialism cannot even begin to offer an explanation of awareness itself. (Some cognitive scientists seem to refer to this part of consciousness in terms of "qualia".) Attempts to provide materialistic explanations of awareness generally rely on smuggling in the inexplicable under the cloak of "complexity", "emergent properties" or some other term. Another strategy is to attempt to banish awareness on the grounds that it is an illusion . Some even claim that awareness does not even exist! But I don't think that these approaches work. I sometimes wonder whether the proponents of materialism have actually noticed their own awareness! I suggest that this failure to explain awareness is the last unmade stitch that causes the whole materialistic tapestry to unravel.

Dualism

If we can't swallow materialism, we might prefer a "dualistic" model. Then we would have the world of matter, ant matter would follow (mostly) physical laws. In addition, we would have "minds" or "souls", and they would be quite different in nature from matter. At some special place in the human body (the brain, perhaps, or the heart) the "mind" or "soul" would then connect to the material world, gathering impressions and causing us to act. At death, the connection would be broken. The mind would wander off, to heaven, to hell, or to make a new connection with a new body, which it would put on like a new suit of clothes. This view turns up in various disguises all round the world. It is found, for instance, in theistic religions such as Christianity. In it's "reincarnation" version, it seems to have been held by many Buddhists. It too, however, has a number of problems. One of the biggest is the question of just how the connection between the two parts of existence is made. Is there a part of the nervous system that does not obey the same physical laws that apply to the rest of the world? If so, which part, and why? Why is the freedom not to obey physical laws restricted to this special area?

Modern variations:

To be fair, quantum mechanics shows that "physical laws" are not as rigid as they seem at first. The difficulty of predicting the weather may provide a helpful example here. The air obeys laws that are well understood and are, in fact, rather simple. But even though they are simple, the behaviour of the atmospheric system depends so much on the exact details of it's present state, that the computation needed to simulate it is just too great. We use huge computers, but the results are limited - the weather is unpredictable even though we understand a lot about the air. The same idea might apply, perhaps magnified many times, to a system like the human brain, which is extraordinarily complex and delicate. Large changes in its behaviour might be affected by tiny, even sub-atomic, differences. That would mean that for a "mind" to interfere in the states of a brain, it would only need to make the tiniest of changes. If those changes are tiny enough, the known laws of physics might n ot have to be broken. Indeed some interpretations of quantum mechanics involve consciousness as an integral part of the process that determines reality.

Against dualism:

But even with this modern support, the way the two spheres, mind and matter, meet still has an awkward feel about it. The dualistic view also, I think, fails to do justice to the intimacy with which our nature as human beings is bound up with our bodies. The body's chemistry is linked to mood and feeling, to learning and to motivation - indeed to all human action. Change the chemistry, and the personality changes. Change the personality, the chemistry is affected. As the brain deteriorates under the ravages of, for example, Alzheimer's disease, the person fades away. It is because physical pain is such an immediate part of our experience that the body is such a basis for suffering. The close association between mental and physical states does harmonise with the tantric view of "the unity of mind and prana", even if not with some other Buddhist versions of the mind/body relationship.

An alternative

But if neither the materialistic nor the dualistic model is satisfactory, is there another possibility? I suggest that the first of the above views involves an uncritical acceptance that matter is the substrate of the world, while the second view is an attempt to "doctor" the first view. It is possible on the other hand to consider that the "substrate" of the world is something more like mind, awareness or consciousness than it is like the blind matter in which both the materialists and the dualists believe. (I put "substrate" in quotation marks because the considerations of emptiness suggest that we should be rather careful about such ideas.) This would mean that the material world is something that emerges from the weaving together of thoughts, feelings, perceptions and habits accumulated over immeasurable time. What we call physical laws would be an expression of the density of that weaving, just as a silk rope or a canvas is given its strength by the interaction of huge numbers of fibres. Each single fibre is so feeble as to be almo st negligible, but woven together they form a tough rope.

Turning our idea of the structure of the world around like this may make everything appear in a new light, but it does not disrupt our practical knowledge of the way things work. The materialist might think that our bodies and brains come first, and that "we" are an abstraction, a label for what they are doing. Under this alternative view we can instead say that our bodies and brains are the expression of what we are. Our experience of being embodied individuals emerges from the woven fibres of past actions, rather like a picture emerges from the coloured fibres of a tapestry. We take part in the continuation of those actions and in the way the pattern develops. As our body decays our consciousness dims and withdraws into itself, much as we do in sleep. And then? It is not unreasonable to suppose that whatever urge caused our previous embodiment to arise and develop will stir again, and that we will again join in the process of projecting, perceiving and creating "the world" - that is, to be reborn.

I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting that "everything is just mind". I am not sure that it is easy to specify exactly what "mind" is. I have even more doubt about going on from that to distinguish it from other things and to say that mind is real, other things are not. Even less, of course, am I suggesting that everything is just in "my" (or "your") mind, which is the view known as solipsism. I am merely suggesting that awareness, or the possibility of awareness, lies close to the root of things, and that matter, in whatever way it can be said to exist, is as much a product as a substrate.

On this view, rebirth is not really a matter of our mind withdrawing from our body and being then forced somehow to enter another. It is rather a matter of actively participating again in creating the world, once one round of experience has dissolved.
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