Having once been one to question anything which was not scientifically accepted, the constant verification of so many ancient eastern ideas by modern physicists was, for me, one of the most important reasons for following the vedanta path to its destruction.
One of the earliest concepts which snapped to my skeptical attention was the idea of reincarnation. I had been reared as a fundamentalist Christian with a world-view that regarded each person as the vessle of a single soul and that soul, went on to reap whatever the body had sown in this earthbound lifetime. Interesting mythology and a very motivating idea to keep the knee bowed and the eyes shut and the dollars rolling in.
When I rejected this way of thinking as absurd, I threw the baby bathwater and most of the bathroom out. I found kindred souls in the skeptics movement of which CSICOP (The Committe for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) was preimminent. This cleansing view of cartesian daulism and machine-world materialism snatched the fear from me. Between Ayn Rand, Issac Asimov, RUSH, and Skeptical Inquirer I was completely free of those nagging spiritual ideas. It was refreshing coming from the haunted world to which many christians banish themselves and their children.
The came Terrence McKenna and John Lilly. After a particularly horrible night of existential depression and drinking. I cut myself rather badly. 30 stitches worth. And I came to the conclusion that there had to be something more. As I sat in the bathroom at the emergency room, I picked-up a copy of OMNI which had fallen open to a page about Terrence McKenna, the late magical lepruchaun of the new reserved drug culture. I began to read anything I could find about shamanism and the idea that there was an invisible landscape behind what we see daily.
It was at that time that I met a fellow seeker on the exact same path. We spent several years on the beach every full moon drumming and allowing overselves to be taken by the greatest of shamanic traditions into spaces and dimensions which were only accessable otherwise through years of work in other traditions. It was during this period that the issue of time became an important one.
After the sense of personal doership dissappeared. This concept joined all others in a mushy mass of tricks of the light and time.
The newest thinking on the part of the physics community is that time is more like a fountain which constantly produces an infinite number of possible futures
or "universes." In one, Hitler won the war. In another, Einstien or Oppenhiemer had never been concieved. In many others, the earth itself is being destroyed in a million different ways. In certain states of consciousness, I have seen that it was possible to actuallu see, or briefly interact with one of these dimensions. Of course this is still all just more play of consciousness and moves one not an inch closer to Realization. But for a skeptic like me, it became easier to understand the idea of reincarnation. Not after death or in any pretend future, because future and after are time-bound words which rely totally on time being something constant. As we, know, time is a consequence of gravity and mass.
One of the finest illustration of this version of reincarnation was the movie "Groundhog Day" in which Bill Murray must get it right or continue to relive the same day again and again. Itīs worth a look.
Dan Burrello
