When my husband, Neil Feldman, died of cancer in 2015, he left behind a manuscript that was subsequently turned into a documentary that had its official debut at MIT on October 11, 2025.
(Producer Paul Howard, second from left, and his son, David, beside him on stage with Anita Goel, physicist and MD, the sponsor of the summit, the author Judy Scott Feldman, and Swami Sarvapriyananda, head of Vedanta Center in NYC.)
The Irish filmmaker Paul Howard directed the film, “Quantum Convergence. The New Science of Consciousness,” inspired by Neil’s book To My Next Incarnation. How Science Led Me to Spirituality. Our daughter, Anna, and I recorded Neil essentially drafting the book in videos we took of him the last year of his life, after he realized his life would be cut short. He had intended to spend his retirement years researching, exploring, and advocating a truce between the materialism of modern science and the ancient and modern spiritual traditions.
He wanted his book to excite thoughtful readers with the thrill of discovery he felt when in high school. Then, as a student of electrical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, he realized that both Einstein’s equations and quantum physics pointed to the same view of reality as ancient Indian thought, in particular Advaita Vedanta, a philosophy based in the Vedas. Both point to an underlying (or overarching) reality beyond the “reality” we can experience with our five senses. Neil left college to join the Vivekananda Vedanta Society of Chicago but was told by the head of the order to finish college before taking monastic initiation. He returned to Case, met me in a shared apartment, and, as they say, the rest is history.
Producer of the film Paul Howard learned of Neil’s book after having just completed a film exploring the scientific theories and spiritual insights of the physicist David Bohm called “Infinite Potential: The Life and Ideas of David Bohm.” He read Neil’s book and immediately wanted to adapt it. The new film features physicists including Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose as well as Swami Sarvapriyanda, head of the Vedanta Society of New York. I play a small role at the beginning as Paul narrates Anna’s and my trip to India in 2017 to scatter Neil’s ashes in the sacred Ganges. Anna and I, as well as the book’s editor, Tom King, are producers.
Now Paul is considering making a follow-up film which I may decide to help produce as well. It will explore recent scholarship on early Christianity, Jewish mysticism, and ancient exchanges between the West and ancient India that suggest direct spiritual influences, in both directions. I admit to having steered him in this direction by recommending he contact Princeton professor Elaine Pagels, a renowned scholar of the ancient texts known as the Gnostic Gospels. I’m a medievalist and since the 1970s have been fascinated by early Christianity – before the Roman empire codified four gospels as Christian canon and declared early mystical traditions heresy.
“There’s nothing like finding yourself late in life busier and more engaged in intellectual conversation than ever before. I’m loving it.”
Neil’s book, self-published and originally available at Politics and Prose bookstores, is probably now out of print. But it is free to download at the website we created to archive Neil’s videos that are the basis of the book.