Of the dicta of materialism perhaps one of the most important dictum is that the psychical can be reduced to material occurrences/motions in brain tissue which originate from molecular processes (following a reductionist line). The implication of this is that after death consciousness or mind is terminated since it arises from the brain, and the brain is no more.
But this is quite unreasonable if not completely absurd because in principle the materialist dictum is asserting that "where states x are correlated with dissimilars y; when y is no more, x is also no more.” This, however, is a false conclusion. It is like saying music is correlated with a radio. When the radio is accidentally broken, there is no more music (even though the radio signal with the music is still present despite the broken radio). The fact is that correlation between music and radio is not the same as identity. In the same vein, with a flat-lined electro-encephalogram (EEG) of the brain, consciousness is still present. This has been confirmed by Dr. Pim van Lommel in a publication of his in The Lancet, December 2001, entitled: “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest; a prospective study in the Netherlands.”
If, as materialists claim, brain tissue is the ‘maker’ of consciousness, how is it being made when there is no EEG present? Using our previous radio analogy, how is a radio which has been turned off or accidentally broken, which is believed to be the maker of music, making music? The simple answer, it is not. But we all know that a radio signal exists, although we can’t see it. And if the radio is turned back on, the music resumes.
Bringing this matter up in The Zennist blog, is meant to drive home the point that Buddhists who do not accept the Buddha’s teaching of rebirth by way of consciousness (viññâna/vijñâna) are in wrong view and need to recant.
The careful research of Wijesekera published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 84/3 (1964): 256, entitled,”The Concept of Viññâna in Theravada Buddhism,” says:
“In view of such evidence the conclusion is difficult to avoid that the term viññâna in Early Buddhism indicated the surviving factor of an individual which by re-entering womb after womb (gabbhâ gabbham: Sn. 278, cp. D.iii.147) produced repeated births resulting in what is generally know as Samsara.”
It should also be noted that in the Maharatnakuta Sutra (C.C. Chang, A Treasury of Mahayana Sutras) there are several passages like these where the Buddha says:
"Just as a silkworm makes a cocoon in which to wrap itself and then leaves the cocoon behind, so consciousness produces a body to envelop itself and then leaves that body to undergo other karmic results in a new body” (230).
“When the consciousness leaves the body, it carries all the body’s attributes with it. It assumes an [ethereal] form as its body; it has no body of flesh and bones. Because it has the senses, it has feeling and subtle memory and can tell good from evil” (230).
A sincere Buddhist should not reject this nor adhere to a materialistic belief such as consciousness is a product of the brain (this is not science—it’s materialism). To do so is to attack Buddhism itself, in effect, turning Buddhism into a materialistic religion, a philosophical position that has been sufficiently refuted except for those, who without success, are still trying to resurrect this absurdity. In fact, it is more likely the case that matter doesn’t exist.
German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg said: “The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct 'actuality' of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however.” Mathematician John von Neuman went so far as to assert that the only privileged position is when observation passes from the material brain to the observing mind, which implies a distinction between the two. This leads us to Donald Hoffman's new theory of “conscious realism” which I touched on before in The Zennist (September 1, 2013) that “consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world.”
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