According to Western materialist science, the time of our lives is limited - it begins with the moment of conception and ends with biological death. This assumption is a logical consequence of the belief that we are essentially bodies. As the body dies, decays, and disintegrates in biological death, it seems clear that at that moment we will cease to exist. Such a view contradicts the beliefs of all the world's great religions and spiritual systems of ancient and pre-industrial cultures, which saw death as a significant transition rather than the end of all forms of being. Most Western scientists reject or outright ridicule the belief in the possibility of continuing one's life after death and attribute it to ignorance, superstition, or human thinking in which desire is the father of thought, as well as their inability to accept the gloomy reality of transience and death.

In pre-industrial societies, belief in the afterlife was not limited to the vague notion that there was a kind of "that world." Mythologies of many cultures offer very accurate descriptions of what happens after death. They provide intricate maps of the soul's posthumous pilgrimage and describe the various environments in which deprived beings reside - heaven, paradise and hell. Of particular interest is the belief in reincarnation, according to which individual units of consciousness are constantly returning to the world and experiencing whole chains of bodily lives. Some spiritual systems combine belief in reincarnation with the law of karma and teach that the merits and failures of past lives determine the quality of subsequent incarnations. The various forms of belief in reincarnation are widely dispersed both geographically and temporally. They have often evolved completely independently of each other in cultures thousands of kilometers and many centuries apart.

The concept of reincarnation and karma is the cornerstone of many Asian religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Zarathhuism, Tibetan Vajrayana, Japanese Shinto and Chinese Taoism. Similar ideas can be found in historically, geographically and culturally different groups such as various African tribes, American Indians, pre-Columbian cultures, Polynesian kahunas, people practicing Brazilian umband, Gauls and druids. In ancient Greece, a number of major philosophical schools, including pythagoreans, orfics and platonians, professed this doctrine. The concept of reincarnation was taken over by the Essays, Karaites and other Jewish and Postidean groups. It has also become an important part of the Kabbalistic mysticism of medieval Jewry. This list would be incomplete if we did not mention novoplatonic and gnostic and in the modern age the theosophists, anthroposophists and some spiritists.

Although belief in reincarnation is not part of today's Christianity, early Christians had similar conceptions. According to St. Jerome (340-420 AD), reincarnation was attributed a certain esoteric interpretation, which was communicated to a selected elite. Belief in reincarnation was apparently an integral part of Gnostic Christianity, as best evidenced by the scrolls found in 1945 in Nag Hammadi. In a Gnostic text called Pistis Sofia (The Wisdom of Faith) (1921), Jesus teaches his disciples how failures from one life are transferred to another. For example, those who curse others will "experience constant tribulation" in their new lives, and arrogant and immodest people may be born into a deformed body and others will look at them from above.

The most famous Christian thinker who thought about the preexistence of souls and earthly cycles was Origenes (186–253 AD), one of the most important Church Fathers. In his writings, especially in the book De Principiis (On the First Principles) (Origenes Adamantius 1973), he expressed the view that certain biblical passages can be explained only in the light of reincarnation. His teachings were condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople convened by Emperor Justinian in 553 AD and declared and is a heretical doctrine. The verdict read: "If one proclaims the disgraceful pre-existence of souls and professes the monstrous doctrine that follows from it, let him be cursed!" even St. Francis of Assisi.

How can it be explained that so many cultural groups have held this particular faith throughout history and that they have formulated complex and elaborate theoretical systems for its description? How is it possible that, in the end, they all agree on something that is foreign to Western industrial civilization and that the proponents of Western materialist science consider to be utterly absurd? This is usually explained by the fact that these differences show our superiority in the scientific understanding of the universe and human nature. Closer examination, however, shows that the real reason for this difference is the tendency of Western scientists to adhere to their belief system and to ignore, censor, or distort any observations that contradict it. More specifically, this attitude expresses the reluctance of Western psychologists and psychiatrists to pay attention to experiences and observations from holotropic states of consciousness.

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