Salon.com interviews B. Alan Wallace former Buddhist monk and author of “Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge.” Wallace sees the technologies of Buddhism as a bridge between science and faith. During the interview Wallace makes the case for the existence of both reincarnation and out-of-body experiences.

“Well, here’s the hypothesis. Your psyche emerged some time while you were in your mother’s womb. It’s continuing to evolve, and eventually it’s going to implode back into the substrate, carry on as a disembodied continuum of consciousness and then reincarnate. There’s the theory in a nutshell. Is that one testable? My short answer is yes, I think this is a testable hypothesis, and in principle it really should be able to be repudiated. But we’re also looking for positive evidence.”

Wallace turns to two University of Virginia scientists to back up his claims to the (possible) reality of both phenomena, Bruce Greyson who has done work on the near-death experience, and Ian Stevenson, the founder of scientific research on reincarnation. While Greyson hasn’t released any results of his studies, Stevenson has published two academic studies of possible proofs of reincarnation.

“Ian Stevenson is now retired from the psych department. He’s not a Buddhist, he wasn’t a Hindu, and he didn’t believe in reincarnation. Forty years ago he heard anecdotes of children maintaining that this wasn’t their first life and giving detailed accounts of their alleged memories of past life experiences. So he started studying it. On a shoestring budget, he and a team of researchers did this for about 40 years…He scanned thousands of accounts of children, throwing out most of them because they were either false or the child could have heard about it from parents, relatives, television and so forth. He then selected 20 cases where the accounts given by the child wound up being true when they were subjected to objective corroboration. He couldn’t see any way the child could have known this information…And then he did another 20 years of research and wrote another book..It showed the empirical findings of more cases of children giving these very detailed accounts of past life experiences. And usually they were not glorified, like I was Cleopatra or Einstein or somebody spectacular. No, [it was like,] I was a philanderer, and one of the husbands of the wives I had sex with shot me dead because I cuckolded him. So that’s not very glamorous, but that was the recollection of one of these children. This is empirical evidence. It should be scrutinized rigorously, but not thrown out dogmatically.”

Wallace dreams of a well-funded 20-year study on the matter. Though I don’t think his only problem would be with the “dogmatic atheists” he worries about. There are plenty of monotheists out there who don’t want to hear about proofs of phenomena outside their theology. Wallace also falls into the trap of equating “religion” with “monotheism” in his description of how Buddhism is different.

“It’s not just a religion. It’s not theistic. It doesn’t posit the existence of God as standing outside of creation, governing it, ruling it, punishing the wicked and rewarding the virtuous. It doesn’t have any of that.”

Which is to say *his* Buddhism isn’t theistic. Many practitioners of Buddhism (including the Buddha himself) haven’t been shy about claiming the existence of gods and spirits. Non-theism in the Eastern mind is a different concept than in the Western (often Christian) mind. For many Buddhists non-theism means there isn’t an all-powerful creator who punishes and controls, not that gods don’t exist. Many modern Pagans could easily fit into a Buddhist cosmology. What Wallace means to say is that Buddhism isn’t like the dominant monotheisms, but I think most of us already knew that. What Wallace calls for is for is a more polytheistic view of truth and the universe, something modern Pagans (and Buddhists) can surely get behind.

Tags: Paganism