Death and reincarnation – spirit and matter
The transmigration of souls was a core of Pythagorean teaching. What philosophy says about it and what research exists.
Beside number, the soul stood at the centre of Pythagoras’ teaching. The Pythagoreans taught that it is immortal and after death passes into new bodies (see Pythagoras). Philolaus describes the body as a prison or tomb of the soul, to which it was bound as a punishment (see The ancient sources).
Gadamer on Pythagoras
In The Beginning of Philosophy the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) considers the religious side of the Presocratics, from Homer via Orphism to the cult of Dionysus. What interests him most is that in this cult the soul stands at the centre of religious life. Gadamer notes that ancient biographies present almost all early thinkers, from Anaximander to Parmenides, as followers of Pythagoras. He reads it this way: Pythagoras united in himself the basic motifs of early philosophy, the riddle of numbers and the riddle of the soul and its fate. The passage is also found in Alfried Lehner, Die Esoterik des Pythagoras (The esotericism of Pythagoras).
Physicists on the soul
Meanwhile some well-known physicists consider a physically describable soul at least conceivable, as the German book Die geheime Physik des Zufalls. Quantenphänomene und Schicksal (“The secret physics of chance”) collects. The starting point is entanglement, which Einstein set aside as “spooky action at a distance” and which the Viennese physicist Anton Zeilinger, among others, demonstrated experimentally. Hans-Peter Dürr, long director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, held that the dualism of the smallest particles is not confined to the subatomic world. The dualism of body and soul was as real to him as that of wave and particle, and he thought of a universal quantum code linking all matter since the Big Bang. Consistently, he believed in an existence after death: this world is, as it were, the slag, the tangible, the beyond is the comprehensive, far greater reality by which our life is already embraced.
The idea is not new. C. G. Jung and Wolfgang Pauli searched from 1947, in a lively correspondence, for a physical interpretation of synchronicity, coincidences experienced as meaningful without a causal link. The Heidelberg medical engineer Markolf H. Niemz, who studies near-death experiences, suggests that the soul departs at the speed of light at death. The physicist and physician Christian Hellweg found that the properties of the mind correspond exactly to those of the puzzling quantum world. John A. Wheeler observed that many physicists’ hope for a basically classical world was dashed by new experiments. And the physicist and molecular biologist Jeremy Hayward considered it possible that consciousness is a basic element of the world alongside space, time, matter and energy, perhaps even more fundamental than space and time. Should this be confirmed, science and religion would no longer stand opposed but complement each other like a right and a left shoe.
Perception during cardiac arrest
Of the many reports of near-death experiences, what matters here is not the familiar, tunnel, light and life review, but a single detail. Again and again people describe after cardiac arrest exactly what happened around them while they were unconscious: from which cupboard the doctor took the syringe, who said what, sometimes even what someone was thinking. People present later confirmed such statements. When the heart stops, no blood flows, and with the brain all the senses fail. How then can people perceive when the organ of perception is not working, and, as they report, more awake than ever before in their lives? Whether such reports withstand strict scrutiny is disputed. If they do, they would suggest that an immaterial mind perceives even without a body.
Then death too would need rethinking. It creates fear and apparent meaninglessness, and from these grows the wish for numbness in thoughtless consumption. What is dream, what is reality? Do we fall asleep in death, or wake up? These questions lead back to the main concern of this site, reflecting on first causes, and to the four living creatures around the throne of God: energy, space, time and matter, the Pythagorean tetractys (see The throne of God and the number 24).
Research on reincarnation
Can more be said about rebirth than an article of faith? Is there serious research on it? Worth reading is the work of the mathematician and physicist Joachim Felix Hornung. His websites present findings on reincarnation research, near-death experiences and research into the afterlife, as well as spiritual aspects of organ transplantation, and distance themselves from modern esotericism. They also explain what “esoteric” originally meant for Pythagoras: the knowledge of the inner circle, as opposed to what was taught to outsiders. Hornung also published a critical examination of the usual method of testing medicines by double-blind studies, and a story, Doaram, der Seher (Doaram the seer).
The subject remains here a pointer to the fact that for the Pythagoreans number and soul belonged together: whoever recognises the order of numbers also recognises something about the place of the soul in the world.