stress, weakening the immune system’s ability to prevent infection. Hopelessness, he points out, increases the risk of heart attack or cancer (p69 of Life before Life). We must agree with his starting point as the role of psychology, mental outlook and emotion will here be shown to play a key role in precipitating the phenomena described in Chapters 3, 4, and 5. As we shall see a bit later, Dr. Stevenson is also in agreement.
As we delve further into the matter of causation of the physical phenomena we have just seen however, I depart significantly from one important aspect of the thinking of Drs. Tucker and Stevenson. The issue involved is neatly presented by author and psychologist Nessa Carey in her The Epigenetic Revolution. (p 234). She …show more content…
She rejects both. “Both of these refer to a theoretical construct that has no defined physical basis.” Those words are clear enough, but she refines it further in language equally as penetrating. Scientists, she writes, prefer to look for a mechanism that has a physical foundation. She finds that more satisfying than “defaulting to a scenario” in which something is “assumed, to be a part of us, without having any physical existence.” A scientist, she says, would want to probe the molecular events that underlie the psychological damage.
The “molecular events.” She speaks of the resistance to this approach from other disciplines, “which work within different conceptual frameworks,” something that, she says, puzzles …show more content…
Drs. Stevenson and Tucker both believe, I sense, though possibly erroneously, that the souls of the deceased persons, whom they call, as shall I, the “prior personalities” to be the vehicle for the transfer of memories. It must be said in behalf of these two scholars that neither of them are inclined to make an issue over this controversy that cuts so deeply on all sides, so much so that I cannot be certain that my reading of their minds is correct. They are content, like the scientists and scholars they are, to present us with facts, but their beliefs seem to me to leak through. If I am incorrect, then I feel that either or both of them have decided to leave this mystery to the vast field of the unknown. I would not be in agreement with either position, or with leaving the mechanism to the unknown. They have reckoned, perhaps justifiably, without consideration of the relatively new subject of epigenesis, a matter to which we will turn a bit later. If that is not the right answer, the right one will eventually be found by science. At this point, I believe epigenesis to be the best
As we delve further into the matter of causation of the physical phenomena we have just seen however, I depart significantly from one important aspect of the thinking of Drs. Tucker and Stevenson. The issue involved is neatly presented by author and psychologist Nessa Carey in her The Epigenetic Revolution. (p 234). She …show more content…
She rejects both. “Both of these refer to a theoretical construct that has no defined physical basis.” Those words are clear enough, but she refines it further in language equally as penetrating. Scientists, she writes, prefer to look for a mechanism that has a physical foundation. She finds that more satisfying than “defaulting to a scenario” in which something is “assumed, to be a part of us, without having any physical existence.” A scientist, she says, would want to probe the molecular events that underlie the psychological damage.
The “molecular events.” She speaks of the resistance to this approach from other disciplines, “which work within different conceptual frameworks,” something that, she says, puzzles …show more content…
Drs. Stevenson and Tucker both believe, I sense, though possibly erroneously, that the souls of the deceased persons, whom they call, as shall I, the “prior personalities” to be the vehicle for the transfer of memories. It must be said in behalf of these two scholars that neither of them are inclined to make an issue over this controversy that cuts so deeply on all sides, so much so that I cannot be certain that my reading of their minds is correct. They are content, like the scientists and scholars they are, to present us with facts, but their beliefs seem to me to leak through. If I am incorrect, then I feel that either or both of them have decided to leave this mystery to the vast field of the unknown. I would not be in agreement with either position, or with leaving the mechanism to the unknown. They have reckoned, perhaps justifiably, without consideration of the relatively new subject of epigenesis, a matter to which we will turn a bit later. If that is not the right answer, the right one will eventually be found by science. At this point, I believe epigenesis to be the best