Does your cat or dog have a soul? What about a flea?
In the last century, science has undergone several revolutions, with profound implications for answering this ancient spiritual question.
Traditionally, scientists speak of the soul in a materialistic context, treating it as a poetic synonym for the mind. Everything knowable about the "soul" can be learned by studying the functioning of the human brain. In their view, neuroscience is the only branch of scientific study relevant to one's understanding of the soul. The soul is dismissed as an object of human belief, or reduced to a psychological concept that shapes our cognition and understanding of the observable natural world. The terms "life" and "death" are thus nothing more than the common concepts of "biological life" and "biological death."
Of course, in most spiritual and religious traditions, a soul is viewed as emphatically more definitive than the scientific concept. It is considered the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing, and is said to be immortal and transcendent of material existence.
The current scientific paradigm doesn't recognize this spiritual dimension of life. The animating principle in humans and other animals are the laws of physics. As I sit here in my office, surrounded by piles of scientific books and journal articles, I cannot find any reference to the soul or spirit, or any notion of an immaterial, eternal essence that occupies our being. Indeed, a soul has never been seen under an electron microscope, nor spun in the laboratory in a test tube or ultra-centrifuge. According to these books, nothing appears to survive the human body after death.
While neuroscience has made tremendous progress illuminating the functioning of the brain, why we have a subjective experience remains mysterious. The problem of the soul lies exactly here, in understanding the nature of the self, the "I" in existence that feels and lives life. But this isn't just a problem for biology and cognitive science, but for the whole of Western natural philosophy itself.
What we have to understand is that our current worldview −- the world of objectivity and naïve realism -- is beginning to show fatal cracks. Of course, this will not surprise many of the philosophers and other readers who, contemplating the works of men such as Plato, Socrates and Kant, and of Buddha and other great spiritual teachers, kept wondering about the relationship between the universe and the mind of man.
Recently, biocentrism and other scientific theories have also started to challenge the traditional, materialistic model of reality. In all directions, the old scientific paradigm leads to insoluble enigmas, to ideas that are ultimately irrational. But our worldview is catching up with the facts, and the old physico-chemical paradigm is rapidly being replaced with one that can address some of the core questions asked in every religion: Is there a soul? Does anything endure the ravages of time?
Life and consciousness are central to this new view of being, reality and the cosmos. Although the current scientific paradigm is based on the belief that the world has an objective observer-independent existence, real experiments have suggested just the opposite. We think life is just the activity of atoms and particles, which spin around for a while and then dissipate into nothingness like a dust funnel. But if we add life to the equation, we can explain some of the major puzzles of modern science, including Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the double-slit experiment, entanglement, and the fine-tuning of the laws that shape the universe as we perceive it.
Importantly, this has a direct bearing on the question of whether humans and other living creatures have souls. As Kant pointed out over 200 years ago, everything we experience -- including all the colors, sensations and objects we perceive -- are nothing but representations in our mind. Space and time are simply the mind's tools for putting it all together. Now, to the amusement of idealists, scientists are beginning dimly to recognize that those rules make existence itself possible. Indeed, experiments suggest that particles only exist with real properties if they are observed. One point seems certain: the nature of the universe can't be divorced from the nature of life itself. If you separate them from each other, reality ceases to exist.
We are more than the sum of our biochemical functions. Even the tiniest flea is an incredibly complex living creature, with mouth-parts adapted to feeding on the blood of your cat or dog. They have long legs that allow them to jump up to 13 inches (200 times their own body length, making them one of the best jumpers of all known animals). They have little eyes and antenna, and possess sensory cells that transmit messages to the brain. In fact, they possess all the structures that coordinate sense perception and experience (they can even be trained to perform amazing tricks).
Whether person or flea, the experimental findings of quantum theory suggest that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality, paramount and limitless. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. From this viewpoint, by virtue of being a living creature, you can never die (see "What Happens When You Die?" and "Is Death the End?"). And the same thing goes for your little dog, too.
Voltaire, the great enlightenment writer and philosopher, once said, "Nobody thinks of giving an immortal soul to a flea." Now, nearly 300 years later, the mass of accumulated scientific evidence suggests we may have to.
Robert Lanza, M.D. has published extensively in leading scientific journals and has over two dozen medical and scientific books, including Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe. You can learn more about his work at www.robertlanza.com.
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Yes, there’s a lot. Let’s consider just one category of evidence offered by Near‐Death Experiences (NDEs). NDEs are experiences of extraordinary visions and perceptions during periods of unconsciousness among people who were medically dead or nearly dead due to various causes like accidents, diseases, surgeries or attempted suicides. From the viewpoint of scientific testability, the most relevant among the NDEs are the autoscopic out‐of‐body experiences (OBEs) in which the patients report having seen their body from a perspective outside the body – generally from above the operating bed – and also give verifiable descriptions of, say, the surgical procedures adopted by the medical staff or of the events in their immediate vicinity or even beyond their vicinity.Many such cases are documented by Dr Michael Sabom, an American cardiologist who has investigated NDEs for over three decades, in his book Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation. Here’s one of the cases. Sabom reports a case in which a patient recovering from sickness suffered an unexpected cardiac arrest. After he was revived, he reported that he had an OBE in which he had travelled down the hall and had seen his wife, eldest son and daughter arriving there, which was what had actually happened. This information is highly significant because (1) as he was soon to be discharged, he was not expecting his family members to visit (2) even if he had known that they would be visiting him, he couldn’t have known who would be visiting because he had six grown children, who took turns accompanying their mother when she came to see him (3) his family members were stopped in the hall that was ten doors away from the room where he was being worked on by the doctors and nurses (4) his face was turned away from them and (5) he was in the middle of being resuscitated from cardiac arrest. Sabom’s pioneering work led to hundreds of scientists all over the globe taking up NDE research under serious global forums like The International Association for Near‐Death Studies (IANDS) with peer‐reviewed publications like The Journal of Near‐Death Studies. NDEs are fully explainable from the spiritual science paradigm that the soul is the source of consciousness. The soul has its own sense of vision and normally sees through the optical center of the brain, the optical nerve and the physical eye, but in unusual circumstances of bodily disruption as in NDEs, the soul comes out of the body and sees without any physical apparatus. Therefore, NDEs offer a dramatic and authentic scientific demonstration that the soul does indeed exist and is the actual source of consciousness.
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Brainless Yet Intelligent
Question: Is there any practical scientific evidence that the soul – and not the brain – is the source of consciousness?
Answer: Yes, there is the sensationally incredible yet scientifically documented evidence of people who have practically no brain yet have normal or even abovenormal intelligence. “Is your brain really necessary?” was the title of an article published in the Science magazine in 1980 about the work of British pediatrician John Lorber. For several decades, researchers had documented anecdotal cases of individuals with very little or no brain, but Lorber, who also served as a member of the Nobel Prize committee, was the first to investigate them systematically and scientifically. He documented over 600 scans of people with the brain disorder called hydrocephalus and broke them into four groups:
• those with nearly normal brains.
• those with 50‐70% of the cranium filled with cerebrospinal fluid
• those with 70‐90% of the cranium filled with cerebrospinal fluid
• those with 95% of the cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid.
Of the last group, who would normally be expected to be severely retarded, half had IQs greater than 100. Here’s one dramatic example reported by Lorber: "There's a young student at this university, who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first‐class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain... When we did a brain scan, we
saw that instead of the normal 4.5‐centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid." And he is just one among many cases documented all over the world of intelligent individuals with little or no brain.These cases are no doubt rare, but their rareness doesn’t decrease their significance. Even if there’s one case of a person with intelligence and consciousness but without a brain, that one case is enough to disprove the theory that consciousness is produced by the brain. Vedic insights help us understand that consciousness is the energy of the soul. Normally the soul channelizes its consciousness through the brain into
the body and the external world. This consciousness perceived in the material body known as citta and it is a stepped‐down version of the original pure consciousness of the soul known as cit. By the processes of purification and meditation like mantra meditation, we can raise our consciousness from the citta to the cit level. At that level of consciousness, each one of us can directly, personally, experientially verify higher spiritual realities like the spiritual world and the ultimate spiritual reality, God.
Question: Do animals have soul?
Answer: Obviously. The soul is not the monopoly of humans.
How can we know the presence of the soul? By the remarkable difference in the behavior of living organisms and nonliving systems. Nonliving systems have three phases to their existence: creation, deterioration and destruction. Living organisms exhibit three more phases: growth, reproduction and maintenance. These additional phases, the Vedic scriptures explain, are due to the presence of the soul. And as these six changes are exhibited not just by humans but also by animals, we can safely infer that they too have souls. This logical inference concurs with the verdict of many Vedic texts which describe the soul’s journey through subhuman bodies. In fact, this Vedic conclusion is echoed by the scriptures of the Semitic religions. For example, Genesis 1.30 ( [Link]) declares that all creatures, whether on land, in the sea, or in the sky, have a ‘living soul’ within their body. God uses the words nephesh for ‘soul’ and chayah for ‘living’, which are the same two words used at other places in the Bible to describe the soul in human bodies.Then, why do some people think that animals don’t have souls? Because they misdiagnose the cause of human specialness. The great spiritual traditions – whether Eastern or Western – agree that among all living beings humans are special: they alone have the developed intellect for spiritual enquiry. From this universal fact of human specialness, some people make the sectarian extrapolation that humans alone have souls. However, this extrapolation is invalid because animals exhibit the six phases that characterize ensouled matter. The actual cause of the unique human capacity for spiritual enquiry is that the human body covers the souls lesser than an animal body. The Bhagavad-gita (3.38) states: “As fire is covered by smoke, as a mirror is covered by dust, or as the embryo is covered by the
womb, the living entity is similarly covered by different degrees.” In this enigmatic verse, the smoke-covered fire refers to the soul
covered by a human body, the dust-covered mirror refers to the soul covered by an animal body and the womb-covered embryo refers to the soul covered by a plant body. Just as smoke, dust and embryo are progressively thicker coverings; human body, animal body and plant body are progressively thicker coverings on the soul. That’s why, though the soul in animals and humans is of the same kind, we humans alone can express the soul’s innate search for spirituality. Therefore, let’s begin expressing it by acknowledging the latent spirituality of our younger brothers and sisters in the animal world.