We rarely think about who we really are. Performing certain actions, communicating with other people, and indeed, simply dreaming, we perceive our existence as a given, not really thinking about what actually controls our body, what shapes our thoughts, what exactly is inside us perceives information about the surrounding world.
Modern science calls this consciousness. Moreover, it is believed that this is not an object, not a process, not some kind of entity. Since science is entirely and completely materialistic, it interprets consciousness as a complex function of the brain. A completely different approach to consciousness and the body (the brain is part of the body) is observed in idealists. These thinkers believe that on the contrary, consciousness is primary, and the body is secondary. In their opinion, the material world does not exist at all outside their perception.
Both theories have their merits and demerits. However, both have one thing in common - each has a set of qualities that describe a particular personality. In religion, this aggregate is called the soul. One way or another, the fact of the presence of the soul is recognized by everyone, however, each philosophical direction interprets this concept in its own way.
Humanity, since its inception, was most interested in only one question: is the soul immortal? The fact of the mortality of the body was obvious, but did the consciousness fade away forever or disappeared somewhere?
The idea of reincarnation, that is, the transmigration of the soul into another body at the time of death, is present in many religions. These include, first of all, the Eastern religions: Hinduism, Shinto and Taoism. Also, the idea of reincarnation is accepted by various streams of esotericists, pagans, Kabbalists and even Gnostics.
Separately, it should be said that initially Christianity was also built using the ideas of reincarnation. However, in 325 at the Council of Nicaea, this teaching was rejected by a majority of the priests present at the council. As a matter of fact, this council was something like a party meeting at which the charter of the new "party in power" was adopted: the new clergy created a new religion. As a result of the decision of this council, the "scriptures" were edited and censored and the doctrine of reincarnation was removed from the Bible.
Thus, the majority of people who are in religions, to a greater or lesser extent, consider the transmigration of souls to be a perfectly acceptable thing. Many enthusiasts have been involved in testing this idea. One of them was the biochemist Ian Stevenson.
It should be said right away that this was not some religious fanatic who had "gone", but quite a serious scientist who defended his dissertation in medicine at the age of 25. For over 50 years he has been collecting evidence of reincarnation. The beginning of his search was the story of an Indian boy.
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So, in 1964, eight-year-old Gopal Gupta in India, in the presence of guests of his family, suddenly announced that he was not really Gopal at all, but Shaktipala Sharma, the director of a large pharmaceutical company in the city of Mathur, who was shot by his own brother 8 years ago in order to to take company for yourself. Neither Gopal, nor his family, nor their acquaintances were in Mathura, however, the circumstances described by Gopal exactly repeated all the details of the murder that took place eight years ago.
Of the more than three thousand cases investigated by Stevenson, about three dozen had serious confirmation. All of them belonged to children no more than five years old. Stevenson wrote that there is nothing more mysterious that children who can barely speak, operate with serious adult concepts and know the characters of individuals who lived in a completely different place and even theoretically have no opportunity to contact their families.
Stevenson described his work in four books, in which he described the most striking and impressive cases of reincarnation; right there he cited biographies of people whose souls lived in different bodies. Stevenson tried to explain these phenomena in various ways, primarily from the point of view of his specialties - biochemistry and psychiatry.
The opinion of the scientific world about the work of Stevenson was divided, however, about two-thirds of the scientists to whom he turned for reviews, noted that the work was carried out with sufficient scientific rigor and its results can be considered quite scientific. But the most surprising thing was that Stevenson considered reincarnation to be a completely material process and did not doubt at all the material basis of the human soul.
Perhaps, the reason for such assumptions was the experiments of Duncan McDougall, conducted by him at the beginning of the XX century. Investigating the weight of tuberculosis patients at the time of death, McDougall made a discovery, the essence of which boiled down to the fact that at the time of death the body weight decreased by 10-20 grams. Based on this, he concluded that this is precisely the mass of the soul leaving the body. In order to make sure that such a loss of mass is peculiar only to humans, McDougall conducted similar experiments with dogs and other animals, and did not observe any loss of mass.
Interestingly, the scientific world practically did not criticize the results of McDougall's experiments. And it is not surprising - the experiment was carried out according to all the rules, the accuracy of the scales was sufficient. Well, it's true, it should be said that having agreed with the conclusions about the loss of mass, the idea that this is the soul was not openly supported by anyone. The question of the soul has been hanging in the air for almost a hundred years.
However, over these hundred years, having failed to explain this phenomenon in any way, the scientific world has decided to effectively avoid inconvenient results. From 2008 to 2013, nearly a dozen scientists, from physicists to biologists, rushed to criticize McDougall. Moreover, all their quibbles were of a purely technical nature: either the scales, they say, were "not the same", then "it was not possible to repeat" and so on. Although, no one tried to repeat his experiments! Which is, to say the least, strange. Tuberculosis is still the cause of death for a huge number of people; it would seem, take it and repeat it, refute the theory that seems to you incorrect. But there are no volunteers. Perhaps they are afraid of the opposite result …
