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In the case of human beings the additional question arises as to whether it’s possible for the soul to persist after bodily death. Now, normally, souls are associated with bodies. And the theory I’m putting forward is one that would see the soul associated with the body and with memories coming about by morphic resonance. If it’s possible for the soul to survive the death of the body, then you could have a persistence of memory and of consciousness. From the point of view of the theory I’m putting forward, there’s nothing in the theory that says the soul has to survive the death of the body, and there’s nothing that says that it can’t. So, this is simply an open question. But it’s not one that can be decided on a priori principles.

InThe Presence of the Past, you have an interesting theory of reincarnation. You suggest that people who have memories of past lives may actually be tuning in to the memories of other people in the morphic field, and that they may not actually represent reincarnated people at all. Would you care to comment on that?

Yes. I’m suggesting that through morphic resonance we can all tune in to a kind of collective memory, memories from many people in the past. It’s theoretically possible that we could tune in to the memories of specific people. That might be explained subjectively as a memory of a past life. But this way of thinking about it doesn’t necessarily mean this has to be reincarnation. The fact that you can tune in to somebody else’s memories doesn’t prove that you are that person. Again, I would leave the question open.

But, you see, this provides a middle way of thinking about the evidence for memories of past lives. Usually the debate is polarized between people who say this is all nonsense because reincarnation is impossible—the standard scientific, skeptical view (I should say, the standard skeptical view; it’s not particularly scientific)—and the other people who say this evidence proves what we’ve always believed, namely, the reality of reincarnation. I’m suggesting that it’s possible to accept the evidence and accept the phenomenon, but without jumping to the conclusion that it has to be reincarnation.

So your theory that information can be transmitted by these nonmaterial morphic fields makes plausible a paradigm in which telepathy and ESP can be understood. Can you explain how your paradigm makes sense of such phenomena?

If people can tune in to what other people have done in the past, then telepathy is a kind of logical extension of that. If you think of somebody tuning in to somebody else’s thought a fraction of a second ago, then it becomes almost instantaneous and approaches the case of telepathy. So telepathy doesn’t seem particularly difficult in principle to explain if morphic resonance actually takes place.

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