Most talk in the very small group of researchers who are looking into afterlife experiences focus on reincarnation or near-death experiences. But one interesting idea discussed in the June 2007 issue of Discover comes from researchers Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose who put forth the idea that consciousness results from quantum-level processes that occur in microtubules in brain cells. At this level, the Planck scale, we are now at a level that is almost unthinkably tiney. Hameroff noted, that it is possible that when the brain stops:
“quantum information at the Planck scale isn’t lost. It may dissipate into the universe but remain somehow entangled in some kind of functional unit, maybe indefinitely. If the patient is revived, the information gets picked back up again.”
This notion of some continued survival of consciousness that is not the soul per se, nor something we could put our fingers on during waking consciousness appears to have the most in common with certain Buddhist concepts of the afterlife. According to Penrose, all consciousness may have been established at the moment of the Big Bang. As such, the deepest level of our consciousness, according to this hypothesis, is the same thing that connects us to the rest of the universe and each other. We might tie it to what is called pure awareness. in some mystical traditions. On a relative level, this individual consciousness might reincarnate, Hameroff notes in that:
“maybe it gets picked back up again by someone someday.”
It is certainly an interesting notion where science and predominately Buddhist understandings of the nature of consciousness and the afterlife merge. Such a continued consciousness is hard to imagine, butit makes more sense to me than some sort of continued existence in a very human-like heaven or hell-like realm unless we grant that this Planck-level consciousness can also at some level do what our brains do and, as some Sufis might say, experience such realms of afterlife as another dream, just as our relative existence on Earth is a dream.
What would be most interesting to me is whether such a Planck-level “container” of consciousness is malleable or not. In other words, if this hypothesis was somehow proven to have merit, would this field of consciousness be different in someone who had lived a peaceful, meditative life as opposed to someone who did not. In other words, would our capacity for peace and goodness in this life make a difference in a post-life awareness? There seems to be good reasons to suggest that being at peace on many levels makes day-to-day-life far more rich. However, certainly if we were to know that our continued post-life awareness would be enhanced by meditation and spiritual practice, it would add another level of reasons to pursue such activities. Another questions would be from the perspective of a non-dualist who may ask is this Plankc-level of consciousness the subtle awareness that permeates everything and has nothing individulistic about it, or would it be somehow still relative to the ultimate "One."
