Evidence for the Existence of the Soul
(Non-physical Conscious Self)

Madhavendra Puri das
May 2005

Are you your body, or something more? Is there part of you that can function independently of your physical brain and body? How does this part relate to the rest of you? Does this part survive the death of your physical body? If so, where does it go after death? Let us explore these fundamental questions, which have challenged the greatest minds throughout history.

First, note that psychological states are influenced by the chemical state of the brain. Drinking alcohol or taking certain drugs profoundly influences our psychological experiences. When certain parts of the brain are damaged, certain abilities are impaired or lost. Many people take this to mean that human beings are nothing more than their physical bodies and that the mind is nothing more than a name for complex electrochemical events in the brain: the physical brain and body are everything, and mind and consciousness are totally dependent on them.

But there is another hypothesis consistent with the facts: the hypothesis of a non-physical conscious self that monitors the brain and translates a particular pattern of electrochemical events in the brain into a particular psychological experience. For example, when you look at a man wearing a red shirt, a specific pattern of electrochemical events is established in your brain, and the conscious self recognizes this pattern and translates it into the experience of seeing a man wearing a red shirt. Because we are strongly addicted to enjoying our physical bodies (for example, try renouncing sex or your favorite foods), we have forgotten that we are inherently different from these bodies. This strong attachment to and identification with our bodies obliges us to accept the impairments and limitations arising from damage to our bodies, although we ourselves are never actually impaired or damaged. This identification generally persists until the body is completely unusable for sense gratification, at which time we abandon it and obtain another.

Reincarnation is supported by extensive empirical evidence published by scientists at major universities, as presented in our article Evidence for Reincarnation. This empirical evidence is very impressive due to the large database and careful documentation. Moreover, the article also eliminates alternative explanations, beginning with normal means of communication (including fraud), which is ruled out by the knowledge the subjects have of obscure, detailed and verified events in the lives of the identified previous personalities, who are generally ordinary people, which means that their lives were never publicized in any way. Next, ESP is ruled out. Then possession and intermittent influence by the discarnate previous personalities are ruled out, leaving reincarnation as the only viable explanation for the data. I recommend reading our article Evidence for Reincarnation, which provides the strongest case I have ever seen that each one of us is inherently different from the physical body and able to function independently of it.

Some scientists, who are unfortunately very vocal, dogmatically refuse to examine this evidence, and so they are unaware of how impressive the evidence for transcorporality actually is. But all scientists accept the findings of modern neurobiology as reported in thousands of papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and backed by hundreds of professors of neurobiology at the finest universities in the world. It is therefore very important to consider an argument for transcorporality based on this neurobiological evidence. The neurobiology of vision has been extensively studied during the last forty years at major universities around the world. There are a number of websites on this, for example the University of Utah website http://webvision.med.utah.edu/VisualCortex.html (See especially the scientific papers listed in the bibliography).

When light enters the eye, it is focused on the retina, which consists of highly-specialized cells at the rear of the eye. The retina transforms this light into complex electrochemical events, which are sent to the brain via the optic nerve. Hundreds of millions of neurons in various parts of the brain are involved in vision. A common form of electrochemical event, known as an action potential, is a triangular-shaped voltage wave that propagates along the output conduit (generally known as the axon) of a neuron. This voltage wave is created and sustained by a carefully-orchestrated flow of potassium and sodium ions through the cell walls of neurons and their axons. The orchestrated flow is mediated by highly-specialized molecules known as voltage-controlled protein gates, which are situated in the cell walls of neurons and their axons. For nice references on this, including animations, please see:

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/matthews/channel.html

http://intro.bio.umb.edu/111-112/112s99Lect/neuro_anims/a_p_anim1/WW1.htm

http://bcs.whfreeman.com/thelifewire/content/chp44/4402002.html

http://psych.hanover.edu/Krantz/neurotut.html

http://www.tvdsb.on.ca/westmin/science/sbioac/homeo/action.htm

When you look at a particular scene, a particular complex pattern involving millions of electrochemical events is established in your brain. When you turn your head and look at something else, a different particular complex pattern of electrochemical events is established in your brain. When turning your head and looking at a new scene, you do not perceive any time lag in seeing it, which means that the new pattern must be established very quickly—within a few milliseconds at most.

How can we explain the fact that our actual conscious experience of seeing is qualitatively completely different from the electrochemical events in the brain? When you look at goldfish swimming around in a blue fish tank with various colorful rocks and seaweed, the only physical events occurring in your brain are the motions of various ions and molecules. But you are not aware of the motions of these ions and molecules—you are aware of the fish and the seaweed and the rocks. There is a huge gulf of difference between the motion of ions and your conscious experience of seeing fish swim. Therefore, you, the conscious self, the one who actually experiences seeing different scenes, must be fundamentally different from your brain and body.

Thus, we have arrived at a profound realization: each one of us is inherently different from our physical brain and body. Then what are we, and why do we falsely identify with that which we are not, namely our physical bodies? These vastly important questions are dealt with in our article Evidence for Reincarnation, which also provides a completely different kind of evidence that we are inherently different from our physical bodies.