No Soul for Westerners - Part 2

Implications of Anatta for Parapsychology

In Part 1, I outlined what the Buddhist doctrine of anatta (no self or no soul) mean in terms that people raised with classical Western educations could understand easily. In Part 2, I promised to discuss what implications anatta might have for Western parapsychological theory and research. Since I’m only a casual student of parapsychology, I’m going to confine myself to a few casual observations.

First, let’s consider why we should even care. Isn’t anatta a matter of religious belief that applies only to Buddhists, like the belief in transubstantiation applies only to Christians? That’s easy. No. Like many other aspects of Buddhist teaching, the doctrine of no self is a matter of empirical observation. It may come in various foreign-looking or sounding trappings, but ultimately it’s about discerning the true nature of reality by use of a standard set of methods available to anyone (broadly speaking, meditation). Even from a purely intellectual point of view, the concept of anatta is not that difficult to translate into Western understanding and experiences; it’s just that in Western culture there is pressure to continually reframing the discontinuous nature of lived experience into culturally sanctioned concepts such as the eternal soul.

Second, let’s consider self and soul. I’ve been using the terms interchangeably, but in fact they are not quite the same. The standard translation of anatta is no SELF. I often replace SELF with SOUL simply because the notion of a soul is a master category for organizing personal and social identity in Western cultures; it tends to subsume and/or imply self. The notion of anatta in Buddhism is NOT equivalent to the lack of a belief in a soul, i.e., a materialist or atheistic standpoint (well, at least not a materialist one. You could probably argue the atheism point until the cows come home, but that would be time better spent meditating). What it does mean is that there is no single personality, identity or soul that exists either during this lifetime or after this lifetime is over. There is reincarnation, but what gets reincarnated is not a specific person – it’s just random clumps of karmic flotsam floating on the sea of compassion. Like my favorite quote from RM Jiyu Kennett says, the bag that carried fish in it once still has a strong smell of fish about it even after it has been emptied.

Which sets us down squarely on the parapsychological doorstep of research done by Ian Stevenson and his colleagues on reincarnation. Stevenson’s work is interesting; a typical case would be a young child spontaneously making detailed statements about persons and events he or she could not know about, which then are shown to be understandable as the memories and concerns of someone who died nearby recently. If we believe Stevenson’s cases to be valid, in Western terms we might say the soul from a dead person was reborn in the young child, resulting in the child’s out-of-place memories. This interpretation fits what many Westerners think they know about karma, reincarnation and Buddhism, all of which somehow turn out to fit nicely into a comfortably familiar, mostly Judeo-Christian belief system with a reincarnation twist.

On the other hand, there’s no compelling reason to invoke the concept of a soul, self or personal identity as an explanation for Stevenson’s data. The bag smelling of fish (anatta) model would in fact work equally well. That is, if we accept Stevenson’s case data as valid, the child’s out-of-place memories could just as easily be interpreted as the left over, unresolved karma from some dead person’s life, now attached to a new human form so that it has another opportunity to be converted – that is, to have an act of agency expend its unresolved force and so come to rest in the ontological reality labeled as the Cosmic Buddha.

With something like Stevenson’s research, what’s important is that the data were collected at all. He didn’t attempt to create or sustain a religion or a system of political power with the information he searched out. Something was going on; he collected data as best he could and tried to generalize from it. Is there some kind of real phenomenon behind the type of cases Stevenson collected? I would argue yes, on account of various types of circumstantial evidence - but I really don’t know for sure. Does it have anything to do with reincarnation? I doubt it, at least as we use the word in my culture. Similar arguments could be made for the collection of ‘evidence’ in ‘ghost hunting’ ‘expeditions’ (a veritable firestorm of implicitly biased terminology).

In my effort to understand the Buddhist concept of anatta, I came to realize that rebirth and reincarnation are different things, particularly as culturally and historically understood (see Part 1). Lawrence Sutin documents how Westerners did not let partial or flawed understanding of foreign concepts prevent deploying those concepts for their own sociocultural ends. Here I argue that including anatta, understood accurately, in one’s theoretical toolbox can contribute to thinking about weird phenomena -  if only for guarding against cultural bias by asking what happens if we DON’T take the self or soul as the unit of analysis.

Of course, the negation of the self is exactly what strikes at the heart of parapsychology. Some parapsychologists want to reduce weird phenomena to perceptual anomalies while others are willing to admit there might be self-based psi abilities, but at its conceptual heart parapsychology takes the person as the unit of analysis. I don’t have a problem with either of those approaches except as totalitarian, reductionist agendas. I am an educated Western person myself and admire the methodological chops of parapsychologists. They are some of the very best academically credentialed, intellectually rigorous, open-minded and honest people when it comes to wrangling the weird into some kind of accountability. But if you take away from them the individual sense of self, body, personality or individual as the unit of the study, what will they have left?

Identification of strange personal and interpersonal phenomena, meticulous data collection and record-keeping, and careful, well-informed and broad-minded theory development and testing, I would suggest. But that sounds hard, and there’s always YouTube.