Buddhism at present diverges from science, in incorporating in its worldview various apparently out-of-body experiences, including the possibility of mental processes unlinking from a dying body, and relinking with a growing embryo — i.e. rebirth. See the formidable investigations of Ian Stevenson.[1]  Most schools discuss a period between death and rebirth known in Tibetan as the Bardo. Are these notions accessible to objective study? There is no need to debar science from the phenomena of the psyche, and even the suggestion of karmic links between one’s willed actions and later events should be, to some extent, testable scientifically.

Rebirth is coherent if the mind is not just physical events.  The mind is certainly very conditioned by the brain and the body.  Consciousness always finds itself in a body, but traditional Buddhism says it might not be a physical body. What would your mind without the vehicle of a physical body be like? It may be unencumbered by the burden of flesh, but it would also be, I guess, lacking in many abilities.  For example, the influence of the senses is quite mysterious.  In the Bardo, one probably can’t do anything to physical things — the body is the interface with a physical world.  One probably can’t think in a linear fashion — no plans, no thinking things out, no deliberate recall etc.  If you are unused to it, you are just swept along in a dreamlike condition — ‘why is all this happening to me?’  Or you are blissed out and thoughtless like the devas.

There isn’t even a persistent entity, a Self, during life, so there is definitely no soul that persists from one life to another.  But yet the Buddhist view is that the karmic processes that you have set in motion during your life don’t simply vanish at the moment when the body becomes a corpse.  Somehow they are still viable; they can germinate and have an influence over another person, newly conceived.  More than an influence — the view is that a foetus growing in its mother’s womb can’t survive without some non-physical contributions from a previous life.  So it’s not you that survives death, yet processes that have built up during your life do go on to have their own consequences in another future life.

This is the Dalai Lama on rebirth.  “The various instances of consciousness… come into being because of the presence of preceding instances of consciousness, and since matter and consciousness have totally different natures, the first moment of consciousness of the new being must be preceded by its substantial cause, which must be a moment of consciousness.  In this way, the existence of the previous life is affirmed.”[2]  Traditionally, rebirth is not seen as an issue of faith, but is something that can be verified through rational inference, according to the Dalai Lama, and I would add the testimony of others, and perhaps personal memory.

In any case, there is no doubt that mental processes influence the physical through karma — and eventually the whole universe will probably be radically affected by the presence in it of self-aware beings.[3]

---

[1] E.g. Ian Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (University press of Virginia, 1974).

[2] The Universe in a Single Atom, 141.

[3] See David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality (Penguin, 1997).