Neurophysiologist Dick Burgess is trying to find scientific proof
for consciousness and the soul. Some of his evidence comes
from the story of Uttara Haddur, a Hindu woman who
suddenly began speaking an ancient form of Bengali in 1974,
without ever having studied the language. She told stories of
people in a village many miles away and said her name was
Sharada. University of Virginia reincarnation researcher Ian
Stevenson traveled to India to study her, and found out that
she was telling true stories about people and events from the
early 1800s. Burgess says, "This case is very difficult to
explain unless Sharada's soul is driving Uttara's nervous
system."
In the Deseret Morning News, Elaine Jarvik quotes Burgess as
saying, "For many years I shied away from the soul because
it had these religious connotations. But why not just be bold,
and take the evidence you have, without preconceptions,
and see if you can integrate it into a coherent network that
explains all these phenomena?
"We don't know what consciousness is. If we knew what its
properties were, then we might say, 'Of course it might
survive death because given its properties we can predict it
will not be dependent for its integrity on being interfaced with
the brain.' But we don't know now. We're very, very early in
this as a scientific endeavor."
One way he's studying this is by trying to see if the life force
that the Chinese call "chi" can be directed outside the body
towards chicken nerve cells growing in a petri dish, making
them grow faster. "The work is in progress, but it's
promising," he says. If it works, this will help demonstrate
that consciousness is not simply the way we perceive the
electrical impulses of our brain, but is a separate force.
He wants to study mediums, near-deaths experiences, cases
of apparent reincarnation, and out-of-body experiences. "The
data available from these sources is relevant and compelling,"
says Burgess. "But most academics are quite conservative."
Quantum physics has proved there's a God; now it might
prove there's a
soul as well.
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