Jesus lamented, The kingdom of God is everywhere, but people don’t see it. Well, the evidence is subtle; it is easy for ordinary people to miss it. But scientists are special people; they are experts in deciphering subtleties of evidence. Why have they been missing the signatures of the divine? The Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman expressed this myopia of the scientists of recent times when he offered this admonishment against unbridled imagination. Said he, “Scientific imagination is imagination within a straightjacket.” The straightjacket Feynman and others of the materialist ilk wear is the straightjacket of the belief system called scientific materialism. And the doctrine that binds the most is the exclusive reductionist doctrine of upward causation–everything is the movement of elementary particles and their interactions.

This entire paper is an exercise in how to take the straightjacket of materialism off our back. I argue that quantum physics is showing us the way by giving us back downward causation and its agent—Quantum consciousness (popularly called God) acting through the observer. In Newtonian physics, objects are determined things. But in quantum physics, objects are possibilities for consciousness to choose from. When an observer looks, the observer’s consciousness chooses among the quantum possibilities to collapse an actuality of experience. Quantum collapse is downward causation.

Our own experience suggests and as the psychologist Carl Jung codified, there are four compartments of the quantum possibilities of consciousness: the material consisting of gross substance that is used for making representations of the subtle; upon collapse this one we experience as sensing. The vital consisting of blueprints for biological form-making; upon collapse this one we experience as feeling. The Mental consisting of meaning substance; upon collapse this one we experience as thinking. And the supramental consisting of archetypes of meaning and biological functions which we experience when collapsed as intuition (Goswami, 2004).

But how is all this evidence for the existence of God? It sounds like a Pogo cartoon; we have searched for God we have found Him/Her/It, and it is us! Maybe the ancient Hindus were right when they said there are 330 million Gods. Well it is six billion now because of inflation. If we are God, why do we live the way we do? Why do we have such hard time manifesting godly qualities like nonviolence and love?

The evidence for God is within us, but to see it we have to be subtle. To live it, we have to grow.

Materialists negated God or so they think, ever since Laplace, by tenaciously showing, case after case, that they “don’t need that particular hypothesis.” But recent theories, beginning with quantum physics, and data, are showing that we do need the God hypothesis. Below I will give four profound examples of theory and data from four different fields of scientific endeavor that prove conclusively the existence of downward causation, and implicitly its agent, God:

Quantum measurement

Biological evolution

Perception

Mind-body healing

We Create Our Own Reality, But . . .

It was in the nineteen seventies that the physicist Fred Alan Wolf created the evocative phrase “we create our own reality.” The images the phrase evoked led, however, to many disappointments. Some people tried to manifest Cadillacs, others vegetable gardens in desert environments, and still others at least parking spaces for their cars in busy downtown areas. Everybody was inspired by the idea of quantum creation of reality, no doubt, but the attempts of creation produced a mixed bag of results because the would-be-creators were unaware of a subtlety.

We create our own reality through quantum collapse involved in making an observation, but there is a subtlety in consciousness. We do not create reality in our ordinary state of consciousness, but in a non-ordinary state of consciousness. This becomes clear when you ponder the paradox of Wigner’s friend. Eugene Wigner was the Nobel laureate physicist who first thought of the paradox.

Imagine that Wigner is approaching a quantum traffic light with two possibilities, red and green; at the same time his friend is approaching the same light from the perpendicular road. Being busy Americans, they both choose green. Unfortunately, their choices are contradictory; if both choices materialize at the same time, there would be pandemonium. Obviously, only one of their choices counts, but whose?

After many decades, three physicists at different places and times, Ludwig Bass (1971) in Australia, myself (Goswami, 1989, 1993) at Oregon, and Casey Blood (2001) at Rutgers, New Jersey, independently discovered the solution of the paradox: consciousness is one, nonlocal and cosmic, behind the two people’s local individuality. They both choose but only figuratively speaking, the one consciousness chooses for both of them avoiding any contradiction. This allows the result dictated by quantum probability calculations that in many such crossings, Wigner and his friend each would get green fifty percent of the time; yet for any individual crossing, a creative opportunity for getting green is left open for each.

In 2003, I was invited to give a talk at a scientific conference on consciousness in London. After my talk, a BBC reporter had a question for me, “Does your theory prove the existence of God?” I saw the trap in his question immediately. If I said yes, he would have a sensational headline for his report, Quantum physicist supports the idea of God sitting in a majestic throne in heaven doling out acts of downward causation. So I said cautiously, “No and yes.” He seemed a little disappointed that I did not fall into his trap. I elaborated. “No,” because the God rediscovered by quantum physics is not the simplistic God of popular religions. God is not an emperor in heaven doling out downward causation–judgments as to who is to go to heaven and who is bound for hell. But also “yes,” because the author of quantum creation, the free agent of downward causation transcends our ordinary ego, is universal and cosmic, exactly like the creator God posited by all the esoteric traditions of spirituality. You can call It quantum consciousness, but Its flavor is uniquely that of what the traditions call God.

The oneness of choosing consciousness is an outcome of the question we pose: what is the nature of consciousness that enables it to be the free agent of downward causation without any paradox? The answer comes: Well, for one thing consciousness has to be unitive, one and only for all of us. This oneness of consciousness is then a prediction of the theory.

The Good News Experiments: We Are One

The good news is that not one, but four separate experiments are now showing that quantum consciousness, the author of downward causation is nonlocal, is unitive, is God. The first such experiment proving it unequivocally (that is, with objective machines and not through subjective experiences of people) was performed by the neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg and his collaborators (1993) at the University of Mexico. Let’s go into some details.

Quantum physics, besides discontinuity, gives us another amazing principle to operate with–nonlocality. The principle of locality says that all communication must proceed through local signals that have a speed limit. Einstein established this speed limit as the speed of light (the enormous but finite speed of 300,000 km/s). So this locality principle, a limitation imposed by Einsteinian theory of relativity precludes instantaneous communication via signals. And yet, quantum objects are able to influence one another instantly, once they interact and become correlated through quantum nonlocality. This was demonstrated by the physicist Alain Aspect and his collaborators (1982) for a pair of photons (quanta of light). The data does not have to be seen as a contradiction to Einsteinian thinking once we recognize quantum nonlocality for what it is–a signal-less interconnectedness outside space and time.

Grinberg, in 1993, was trying to demonstrate quantum nonlocality for two correlated brains. Two people meditate together with the intention of direct (signalless, nonlocal) communication. After twenty minutes, they are separated (while still continuing their unifying intention), placed in individual Faraday cages (electromagnetically impervious chambers), and each brain is wired up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. One subject is shown a series of light flashes producing in his or her brain an electrical activity that is recorded in the EEG machine from which an “evoked potential” is extracted with the help of a computer upon subtracting the brain noise. The evoked potential is somehow found to be transferred to the other subject’s brain onto the EEG of this subject that gives (upon subtraction of noise) a transferred potential (similar to the evoked potential in phase and strength). Control subjects (those who do not meditate together or are unable to hold the intention for signal-less communication during the duration of the experiment) do not show any transferred potential.

The experiment demonstrates the nonlocality of brain responses to be sure, but something even more important–nonlocality of quantum consciousness. How else to explain how the forced choice of the evoked response in one subject’s brain can lead to the free choice of an (almost) identical response in the correlated partner’s brain? As stated above, the experiment, since then has been replicated several times. First, by the neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick and collaborators in London. Second, by Wackermann et al (2003). And again by the Bastyr university researcher Leana Standish and her collaborators (2004).

The conclusion of these experiments is radical. Quantum consciousness, the precipitator of the downward causation of choice from quantum possibilities is what esoteric spiritual traditions call God. We have rediscovered God within science. However it is a new paradigm of science, based not on the primacy of matter as the old science, but on the primacy of consciousness. Consciousness is the ground of all being which we now can recognize as what the spiritual traditions call Godhead.

The Power of Intention

I hope you did not miss one of the most important aspects of the experiment of Grinberg–the power of our intention. The parapsychologist Dean Radin (1997) has done some more experiments demonstrating the power of intention.

One of his experiments took advantage of the O. J. Simpson trial a few years back. At the time, lots of people were watching TV, and Radin correctly hypothesized that people’s intention (generated in connection with the TV watching of the trial) would fluctuate widely depending on whether the courtroom drama was intense or ho-hum. So, on the one hand, he let a bunch of psychologists make a plot of the intensity of the courtroom drama (and hence the intensity of people’s intentions) as a function of real time. On the other hand, in the laboratory he measured the deviation from randomness of what are called random number generators (which translate random quantum events of radioactivity into random sequences of zeroes and ones). He found that the random number generators deviated from randomness maximally precisely at those times when the courtroom drama was high. What does this mean? The philosopher Gregory Bateson said, “the opposite of randomness is choice.” So the correlation proves the creative power of intention.

In another series of experiments, Radin found that random number generators deviate from randomness in meditation halls when people meditate together (showing high intention), but not at a corporate board meeting!

The inquisitive reader is bound to ask about how to develop the power of intention. The fact is we all try to manifest things through our intentions, sometimes they work, but less often than not. Now we see that this is because we are in our ego when we intend. But how do we change that?

This is a very good question. An intention must start with the ego; that is where we ordinarily are, local, selfish. At the second stage, we intend for everyone to go beyond selfishness. We don’t need to worry, we haven’t lost anything, when we say everyone that includes us, too. In the third stage, we allow our intentions to become a prayer: if my intention resonates with the intention of the whole, of God, then let it come to fruition. At the fourth stage, the prayer must pass into silence, become a meditation. Then.

Discontinuity

Downward causation occurs in a non-ordinary state of consciousness that we call God-consciousness. Yet we are unaware of it. Why the unawareness? Mystics like Sri Ramakrishna have been telling us about the oneness of God-consciousness and our consciousness for millennia, but we haven’t heard for the most part. Why this lack of hearing?

The Upanishads of the Hindus says emphatically, You are That, meaning you are God! Jesus said, no less emphatically, You are all the children of God. This is a key. We are children of God; we have to grow up to realize our God-consciousness. There are mechanisms that obscure our Godness giving rise to our ordinary I-separateness that we call ego. This ego creates a barrier against seeing our oneness with God and oneness with one another. Growing in spirituality means growing beyond the ego.

A key point is that quantum downward causation of choice is discontinuously exerted. If choice were continuous, a mathematical model, at least a computer algorithm, could be constructed for it and the choice would be predictable and not free and its author could not be called God. Our ordinary waking state of consciousness dominated by the ego smoothes out the discontinuity by compromising our freedom to choose. To be aware that we choose freely is to jump beyond the ego taking a discontinuous leap, call it a quantum leap.

If you are having difficulty picturing a discontinuous quantum leap, an idea of Niels Bohr can help. Electrons go around the atomic nucleus in continuous orbits. But when an electron jumps from one orbit to another, it makes the jump in a very discontinuous manner, it never goes through the intermediate space between the orbits. The jump is a quantum leap.

How does the cosmic, nonlocal quantum consciousness, God, identify with an individual, become individualized? How does continuity obscure the discontinuity? Primarily via observership and secondarily via conditioning. Before observership, God-consciousness is one and undivided from its possibilities. Observership implies a subject-object split, a split between the self and the world (see below). However, before conditioning, the world experiencing subject or self is unitive and cosmic. In this primary experience of a stimulus, God-consciousness chooses its response to the stimulus from the quantum possibilities offered to it by the stimulus with total creative freedom (subject only to the constraint of the laws of quantum dynamics of the situation, God is objective and is lawful whenever warranted!). With additional experiences of the same stimulus that lead to learning, the responses get prejudiced in favor of past responses to the stimulus (Mitchell and Goswami, 1992). This is what psychologists call conditioning. Identifying with the conditioned pattern of stimulus responses (habits of character) and the history of the memories of past responses gives the subject/self an apparent local individuality, the ego. When we operate from the ego, our individual patterns of conditioning, our experiences, being predictable, acquire an apparent causal continuity. We feel separate from our unitive whole self and from God. It is then that our intentions don’t always produce the intended result.

Experimental Evidence of Discontinuity

There are many situations, not just the atom emitting light, where analysis makes us quite unambiguously conclude that electrons do make quantum leaps quite routinely. For example, there is the phenomenon of radioactivity in which electrons sometimes come out from the nuclei of the radioactive atom. Analysis shows that the electrons “penetrate an energy-barrier” in order to see daylight of the outside world. But how can an electron penetrate an energy barrier? It is like you trying to penetrate an impossibly high solid wall. Some physicists use the term “tunneling” to describe this phenomenon. But that does not help much either; how can the electrons tunnel through the barrier when there is no tunnel! No! The correct answer is quantum leap. An electron jumps over the barrier, but without going through space to do that. Now it is on this side of the barrier; instant later, it is on the other side, quantum style.

But analysis is still theory; are there experiments that “really” show that electrons are not tunneling through an energy barrier, but really discontinuously quantum-jumping it? There are. The same kind of “tunneling” phenomenon is found in certain transistors. In that case, experimenters have shown that the electrons make the transition from one side of the energy barrier to the other faster than the speed of light. Since according to the experimentally verified theory of relativity, electrons cannot move faster than light in space, the electrons must be moving instantly without going through space; they are making a quantum leap.

In terms of possibility waves, the experimenter collapses the electron on this side of the barrier first; immediately after the electron is once again a possibility wave: one of its possible facets is that it is on the other side of the energy barrier. When our observation collapses the possibility wave on the other side, since no time elapses between the two observations, we must conclude that quantum collapse is discontinuous.

But it is a long way from a submicroscopic electron to a bulky human. How do we show that discontinuity is relevant for events pertaining to human consciousness that everybody can relate to? Are there indelible quantum leap signatures of the divine in macroscopic affairs of the world? There are.

Is Creativity a Quantum Leap?

I hope the question, Is creativity a quantum leap? is not evoking images of creative people, such as, Newton, Michael Angelo, and Rabindranath Tagore, jumping over great physical barriers. As you undoubtedly recognize, on the physical plane, quantum effects tend to be smoothed out at the macro level. We have to look at the mental plane, and that’s where creativity is at.

What is creativity? A little analysis will show you that work that we call creative, consists of a discovery of new mental meaning, it involves a big change in how we process meaning.

Take the case of Einstein’s relativity. When Einstein was a teenager, he came across a conflict between two theories of physics. On one hand, there was a theory by Isaac Newton; on the other hand there was a theory by Clerk Maxwell. Both great theories, and both verified in their own right in the domain of their originator’s intent. But the domains seemed to have overlaps and conflicts erupted in the domain of overlap. Einstein worked a long ten years on the problem of resolving the conflict, made some progress even, but a complete solution eluded him. Until one day, he woke up in the morning with the brilliant change of context of his entire thinking. The context of the problem was two conflicting theories of physics; but the context of his solution was how we look at time.

Before Einstein, people thought that time is absolute, everything happens in time while time clocks go on unaffected by other movements. Wrong, said Einstein’s creative insight. Instead, time is relative to motion. A moving clock, as one carried in a spaceship, runs slower. This new context of looking at time solved the conflict between Newton’s theory and Maxwell’s theory and enabled Einstein to develop a unified theory from which came the wonderful idea of E= mc². This is an example of creativity. But was it discontinuous?

It has to be. Because there was nothing manifest in anyone’s thinking anywhere on earth from which Einstein could have gotten the idea. No algorithm could have given it to him. This according to his own statement, “I did not discover relativity by rational thinking alone.”

To their credit, many scientists today agree with the idea that creative insights are quantum jumps in mental meaning and that they arrive discontinuously. Partly, this is because there is now a large body of creativity research which, through many case studies, has solidly established that creative insights, be it in the arts or in the sciences, are sudden. And partly also because many scientists intuit the discontinuity of scientific creativity themselves. How else would you explain the fact that one of the few established myths of science is about a creative event, Newton’s discovery of gravity. I am of course talking about the apple story.

Cholera broke out in Cambridge, so the twenty-three year old professor of physics, Isaac Newton, went to his mother’s farm in Lincolnshire. There, while relaxing one morning under an apple tree in his mother’s garden, young Isaac saw an apple fall. And, wham-O. The idea of universal gravity, that all objects attract one another via the gravity force, came to Newton.

Was it really like that? Some historians think that Newton’s niece, when she was visiting France, started the story. But why did this story become part of the physics lore even when most of the physics community until recently believed that science is done through trial and error–the scientific method–all logical and rational?

Somebody said, mythology is the history of our soul. If the traditional interpretations of the scientific discovery process were not doing justice to the soul, guess what? Mythology is created.

And of course, it is not just in science. There is enormous evidence of discontinuous quantum leaps in science, the arts, music, literature, mathematics and the like. You can find the evidence in many case histories compiled by creativity researchers (read for example, Briggs, 1990). You can also find the evidence in individual testimonies. Here is a sample:

Finally, two days ago, I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the Grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible. (Comment of famous mathematician Karl Fredrick Gauss.)

It [creativity] is like diving into a pond–then you start to swim. Once the instinct and intuition get into the brush tip, the picture happens, if it is to be a picture at all. (Comment by novelist D. H. Lawrence.)

Last evening I sat till twelve o’clock by my fire, smoking, when suddenly it came into my mind to write the “Ballad of the schooner Hesperus” which I accordingly did. Then I went to bed, but could not sleep. New thoughts were running into my mind, and I got up to add them to the ballad. I felt pleased with the ballad., it hardly caused me any effort. It did not come into my mind by lines, but by stanzas. (Comment by the poet Longfellow.)

Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. . . .It takes route with extraordinary force, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms. (Comment of the famous Russian composer Tchaikowsky)

I think the best proof for the discontinuity of the quantum leaps of creativity is our own childhood experiences of learning new contexts of meaning. The philosopher Gregory Bateson (1980) classified learning in two ways. Learning I is learning within a given fixed context of meaning; for example, rote learning, you memorize. But there is also learning II, according to Bateson, involving a shift of the context. This one takes a quantum leap.

When I was a three-year old, I remember my mother teaching me numbers. At first, I was memorizing how to count up to 100. Not much fun, I did it because my mother drilled me. She fixed the context. The numbers themselves had no meaning for me. Then she was telling me about sets of two–two pencils, two cats–or sets of three–three rupees, three shirts. This went on for a while, then one day unexpectedly, I got it. The difference between two and three (and all other numbers) became clear to me. Implicitly, I had understood numbers within a new context, the set; of course not in that language. And it was an extremely joyful experience. (Mind you though, the concept of set was implicit, not explicit in my consciousness when this experience occurred. Those days, sets were not introduced that early in our education.)

In the same vein, you may remember the experience of comprehending connected meaning for the first time when reading a story. Or the experience of comprehending what the purpose of algebra is. Or the experience of comprehending how individual notes properly composed make music come alive. Our childhood is full of the quantum leaping of such experiences.

Even dolphins are capable of taking quantum leaps of learning. Gregory Bateson (1980) tells us the story of the training of a new dolphin under his guidance. The animal would go through a series of learning sessions. In each session, whenever the dolphin did something that the trainer wanted repeated, the trainer would blow a whistle. If the dolphin repeated her behavior, she would be rewarded with food. This is usual training for showcase dolphins. Bateson introduced the additional rule that the dolphin would never be rewarded for behavior already rewarded in a previous session.

But in practice, the trainer could never maintain Bateson’s rule. The dolphin would be so upset of being wrong and not getting fish!

In the initial fourteen sessions, the dolphin was just repeating the behavior previously rewarded and getting unearned fish if she was too upset. Once in a while she was doing something new, but seemingly only by accident.

However, between the fourteenth and fifteenth sessions, the dolphin seemed very excited. When she came onstage for the fifteenth session, she put on an elaborate, clearly deliberate performance of “eight conspicuous pieces of behavior of which four were totally new, never before observed in this species of animal. From the animal’s point of view, there was a [quantum] jump, a discontinuity.”

For further exposition, read my book Quantum Creativity (Goswami, 1999).

Tangled Hierarchy

You may not have noticed, but there is another way that we can see a paradox in the observer effect. The observer chooses out of the quantum possibilities presented by the object the actual event of experience. But before the collapse of the possibilities, the observer himself or herself (his or her brain) consists of possibilities and is not manifest. So we can posit the paradox as a circularity: observer is needed for collapsing the quantum possibility wave of an object; but collapse is needed for manifesting the observer. More succinctly, no collapse without an observer; but no observer without a collapse.

If we stay in one level, the material level, there is no solution to the paradox. The consciousness solution works only because we posit that consciousness collapses the possibility waves of both observer (his/her brain) and the object from the transcendent reality of the ground of being that consciousness represents.

The artificial intelligence researcher Douglas Hofstadter (1980) gave us the clue for understanding what is going on. Such circularities, he noted, are called tangled hierarchies, and most interestingly, self-reference, a subject-object split, emerges from such circularities.

Let’s consider an example given by Hofstadter. Consider the Liar’s paradox expressed in the sentence, I am a liar. Notice the circularity: if I am a liar, then I am telling the truth; if I am telling the truth, then I am lying, ad infinitum. But this infinite oscillations has made the sentence very special–the sentence is speaking of itself, separate from the rest of the world of discourse.

But this apparent separation of the self of the sentence and its world depends on our understanding and staying within the rules of the English grammar. The circularity of the sentence disappears for a child who will ask the speaker of the sentence, Why are you a liar? But grammar, although the real cause, is implicit, transcending the sentence.

Similarly, in the observer effect, the reason it took us physicists a while to decipher the situation, the choosing consciousness–God–is implicit, not explicit, transcendent, not immanent. The collapse is tangled hierarchical giving the appearance of self-reference, the subject-object split. The observer-I, the apparent subject of the collapse arises co-dependently with the object as in the Buddhist doctrine of patticha sammupada (which means dependent coarising).

Whenever there is a collapse of a quantum possibility wave, there is a tangled hierarchy in its measurement. The fifteenth century Hindu mystic Sri Chatanya was once asked, “Is God separate from us (as in dualism) or is God nondual?” Chatanya’s answer is very telling: “God is both nondual and separate from us.” It is nondual of course but because of the self-reference brought about by the tangled hierarchy it seems dual. Along with nonlocality and discontinuity, tangled hierarchy is another indelible quantum signature of divine downward causation.

Those Fossil gaps! What Do They Prove?

My second important scientific evidence for the Divine signature of downward causation comes from biology. Everybody knows about the fossil gaps. Contrary to great number of biologist’ expectations ever since Darwin (1959), the fossil gaps never filled up with thousands upon thousands of predicted intermediates. The vast majority of the gaps are real. So what do they signify? What do they prove?

The neo-Darwinists, and majority of biologists fall into this category, still insist, they mean nothing. They are sold on a promissory evolutionism–eventually they will fill up.

The most public opponents of this view are followers of Biblical Genesis creation or creationism, the idea that God created life as it says in the genesis, all at once. There is no evolution. Fossils mean nothing significant and the fossil gaps are the living (or should we say dead) proof of that.

According to creationism, there cannot be any intermediates whatsoever. So biologists tout the few intermediates that are found in the fossil data as evidence for evolution as well as for Darwinism. This is highly misleading. It is true that the existence of intermediates between two fossil lineages (as between reptiles and birds) refutes creationism and proves evolutionism, but evolutionism is not synonymous with Darwinism which would require thousands upon thousands of such intermediates to verify.

A slightly less radical group than either of the two groups above subscribes to a philosophy called intelligent design. Like creationists, they (most of them anyway), too, believe (unnecessarily) that the fossil gaps mean no evolution ever. Species do not change much and an intelligent designer created them all at once. Implicitly, the intelligent designer is assumed to be God, but no reference is made to the Bible.

It is easy to criticize the creationists and the intelligent design theorists. The Biblical account of the creation of the world and the life in it, if taken literally, is just plain wrong; the geological and radioactive data evidence is against it. The intelligent design proponents are also wrong in part–there is too much evidence that species evolve from older species, we have too much common with monkeys, monkeys have too much in common with lower (in the evolutionary ladder) mammals, and so forth. Even today, if you look at early development of the embryo of a “higher” species, you will find that the stages resemble lower creatures of the earlier era. The Darwinists got this one right! Later species evolve from earlier ancestors; there is no doubt about it.

But neo-Darwinists are dead wrong when they say there is no meaning and purpose to evolution, there is no play of intelligence in the design of life and how it evolves, there is no “lower” and “higher” creatures. And their insistence that evolution is synonymous with Darwinism–a material process of blind chance and survival necessity is myopic. When you have only a hammer in your hand, you cannot but see the world as a bunch of nails. Darwinists are materialists, the ax they grind is the idea that everything is made of matter via upward causation, and all life is the play of genes–portions of DNA that carry hereditary information. There is no scope in such a philosophy to talk about meaning or of purpose or intelligent design except for any survival value that these ideas may have which allows them to evolve as evolutionary adaptation.

Let’s take the case of meaning. For meaning to evolve as an adaptive survival value, matter must be able to process meaning. But in grammar, there is a category difference between syntax and meaning. The symbol processing by matter in the form of a computer is akin to processing syntax; so the idea of meaning processing by matter has always been a little suspect (Searle, 1994). And recent research (Penrose, 1990) has confirmed that computers can never process meaning. How can nature select a quality from matter that matter cannot process?

This shortcoming of attempts to explain intelligent qualities as evolutionary adaptation becomes even more obvious when we ask, how does our ability to discover a scientific law arise? Such a discovery has survival value, that is not the question here. The question is, can the knowledge of scientific laws be coded in matter somehow? Can they arise from the random motion of matter somehow? Attempts to prove that such is the case have not had any success whatsoever.

The question of how consciousness can evolve in matter is another case in point. Can matter codify consciousness? is that hard question: how can interacting objects ever produce a subject-object split awareness? If material interactions can never produce consciousness, to think of consciousness as an adaptive evolved value does not make any sense.

So intelligent design aficionados have got this one right? Or have they?

Not quite. The conclusive scientific proof that there is purpose in God’s creation is that there is a biological arrow of time. By looking at the fossil data you can tell the direction of time, that time has gone from the past, from when the fossil data show only relatively simple life forms, to later times from when the fossil data show more and more complexity of life forms. And only the most recent fossil data show us humans, the most complex of living creatures. So the purpose of evolution is to create complexity and the biological time’s arrow moves from simplicity to complexity of living organisms.

All creationists and most intelligent design theorists deny evolution and justify their denial because an evolution in complexity is against the entropy arrow of time and is seemingly in violation of the entropy law. But by denying evolution they are missing the boat on one of the best pieces of evidence for God. Of course, evolutionists miss the boat by missing purpose and design in life.

So what are the fossil gaps evidence for? Maverick biologists from time to time have suggested what they signify. Apart from the slow tempo of evolution that Darwin suggested and neo-Darwinists are sold on, there is a fast tempo of evolution–so fast that there isn’t time to lay down fossils. This fast tempo is what produces the fossil gaps. In other words, evolution is like punctuated prose; there are abrupt and discontinuous punctuation marks among the otherwise continuous prose (Eldredge and Gould, 1972). The proponents of the idea are called punctuationists.

Another class of biologists called developmental biologists (also called organismic theorists because they emphasize the role of the organism) has de facto supported this idea of a second tempo. For they believe that significant evolution at the macro level must involve the coming into being of a novel organ. But a complex organ cannot evolve piece by piece. A little piece of an eye is no good for seeing. So such “macro-evolution” must be discontinuous requiring a fast tempo. But because in biology there has never been any plausible suggestion of a mechanism for a fast tempo, the idea has not found general acceptance in the biological community. Scientists don’t like living in an explanatory vacuum: If no theory of fast tempo is available, let’s proclaim that Darwin’s is the right theory of all evolution and explain away the fossil gaps (as in the theory of geographical isolation [Mayr, 1982]; a small population of a species gets geographically isolated and undergoes divergent and relatively rapid changes. When they reappear amongst the previous population, there is a discontinuity)!

There are also biologists who point out another important piece of data that also suggests discontinuity. Before all great creative evolutionary epoch of macroevolution, these theorists point out, that there always occurs some kind of catastrophe leading to a massive extinction of biological species. These catastrophes clear up the biological landscape for new evolution of species. And so the new evolved species have no need to compete for survival, and another pet idea of Darwinism goes down the drain.

So here’s what I intuit. The fossil data is some of the best proof of the existence of God, of God’s creativity. Creativity occurs through quantum leaps, taking no time. Only the creative process (see below) takes time. I submit that here is the new mechanism for the fast tempo of evolution! I will show below that this theory integrates the thinking of everyone: of the intelligent design proponents, because the designer is God, how can they complain? Of the developmental biologists, because indeed it takes creativity, one giant leap to “see” all the right possibilities for making a new organ and then make the organ. It satisfies the catastrophe thinkers because catastrophes are part of creativity, destruction before creation. The destruction is needed to open up new ground for the play of the new. The appropriate metaphor for God in this aspect of creativity is what Hindus would call Siva’s dance. God in this special aspect of Siva, the king of the dancers is first a destroyer and then a creator. The idea of creative evolution even should please the neo-Darwinists: Darwin’s slow mechanism is the conditioned limit of God’s creative downward causation–call it situational creativity.

Unconscious Processing

The biggest problem of biological macroevolution is this: a macroevolutionary step requires so many changes at the genetic level, so many mutations or variations! For example the development of an eye from scratch requires literally thousand and thousands of new genes. But each gene mutation or variation, according to neo-Darwinism, is selected upon individually. The likelihood of its being individually beneficial (meaning that it contributes some beneficial macro-level function to the organism) is quite small; in fact, gene variations are often just the opposite, downright harmful to the survival of the organism. So chances are high that individual selection would eliminate most gene variations. Considering this, it is easy to see that it must take a very long time to accumulate so many beneficial gene variations necessary for macroevolution.

The situation is saved by the idea of unconscious processing, a part and parcel of the creative process. It is conscious processing that costs time. But in quantum thinking, the gene variations are quantum possibilities anyway as emphasized by Elssasser (!981, 1982). Biologists do classical thinking assuming that the quantum gene variations would collapse without any help from consciousness. But we know better: quantum collapse requires consciousness and its power of downward causation. And any gene that is not expressed in creating a macroscopic trait remains uncollapsed, even from one generation to the next. Consciousness does not collapse the unexpressed genetic variations–quantum possibilities all–until a whole configuration of them when expressed will make a new organ. Consciousness waits for the right moment, as we do in our own creative process.

What is crucial is that consciousness has the vital blueprint of the organ that the biologist Rupert Sheldrake recognized as the “morphogenetic field,” the field of form making. These blueprints provide consciousness with clues or rough guidelines of what to search for in unconscious processing. When there is a match, a match that the Sheldrake (1981) calls morphic resonance, a quantum leap takes place all at once and consciousness makes a physical (organ) representation of the morphogenetic blueprint expressing all the necessary uncollapsed genes all at once (Goswami, 1997). No fossil record for the intermediate stages, because there are no intermediate stages!

In this way you see clearly that the fossil gaps are evidence of biological creativity, of quantum leaps in evolution. And as such they provide us with one of the most spectacular evidence for God (as quantum consciousness) and God’s creativity.

How about the occasional intermediate that does show up in nature? The morphogenetic blueprints are vital representations of archetypal functions. Sometimes in the journey of creative discovery two archetypes become involved and their physical representations occur simultaneously giving rise to an intermediate.

One question still needs to be addressed. In our own creativity, creativity consists of the individual human creative taking a quantum leap to God/quantum-consciousness making the creative quantum collapse possible. Clearly, the individual has a role to play. What is the role of the organism in biological creativity? We will return to this question later.

Synchronicity

There is now some consensus that the dinosaur extinction some sixty-five million years ago was brought about by a large meteor shower. This made room for the very important explosive evolution of the mammals (who were already in the scene but not getting anywhere because of the competition from other species) that eventually led to the evolution of the human being.

So is the evolution of humans on earth brought out by pure meaningless chance? If that is so, then how can we uphold purposiveness of biological evolution, when clearly, God’s purposiveness needed the help of a chance event?

There is no contradiction here with the scenario of biological creativity and purposiveness. Chance contingencies are often very important in the history of a creative act, except that we see them as components of events of synchronicity. Take the case of Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin. While Fleming was on vacation, a michologist on the floor below Fleming’s lab happened to isolate a strong strain of the penicillin mold which found its way to a petri dish upstairs in Fleming’s lab thanks to wind. An unusual cold spell for that time of the year helped the mold spores to grow while preventing bacteria to grow. And then the temperature went up, and bacteria immediately grew everywhere except in the petri dish. So a quantum leap occurred in Fleming’s mind in the form of a question: what is in the petri dish that prevents bacteria from growing?

Similarly, an event outside in the material arena (the meteor shower) and an event inside in the biological arena (the act of biological creativity) occur simultaneously and meaning and purpose emerge in the evolution of many new mammals. This is what the psychologist Carl Jung (1971) calls synchronicity.

In fact, as catastrophe theorists point out, these events of synchronicity are important because they open up the evolutionary landscape for the newly created macro organism. They also create a sense of survival/urgency for evolution in the organisms that survive the catastrophe. A sudden change of environment requires an equally sudden evolutionary jump. There is no time for waiting for slow Darwinian evolution to bring adaptation.

The Role of the Organism

Now we can see the role of the organism in biological creativity responsible for the fast tempo of biological evolution. In neo-Darwinism, the organism has no role to play; this is bitterly criticized by the organismic biologists (see Goodwin, 1994) who maintain that the development of the organism, in fact the organism itself, must have a role to play.

In the scenario above of how the quantum leap takes place, it is clear that development (of an organ) does play a crucial role. We can enunciate the role of the organism as well when we take account of the catastrophes that precede quantum evolution.

All creatives know that creativity requires a motivation, an urgency, usually a burning question, for human creativity. From the point of view of the whole quantum consciousness or God, there is the motivation of purposive evolution (also, see later). When an environmental catastrophe occurs, this evolutionary motivation percolates through to the individual organisms in a hurry because it coincides with survival necessity.

I further suspect that biological organisms have nonlocal connections through the vital arena, through the morphogenetic fields whose movement Indians call prana. Because of the dominance of the mind, this vital nonlocality is somewhat obscure for us humans. But the rest of the biological world, being non-mental, at least largely so, is not limited that way. So this nonlocal connection through the vital body acts as a species consciousness (think of it as a generalized species ego). I think it is this species consciousness that intends evolution in response to rapid environmental changes and quantum consciousness/God responds to this evolutionary call.

Connection with Neo-Darwinism

In between the quantum leaps of quantum evolution, what happens? It is easy to see that Darwinian slow mechanism is now enough to cope with slow environmental changes. Gradually, this builds up a gene pool of already environmentally adapted genes for the entire species, a pool that now can meet the adaptive needs of the species to meet environmental changes without having to develop new genes.

Note also that the creative leaps express a whole bunch of new genes. In some combination, these genes make specific organs. But a gene can be used and is used in more than one combination and in more than one context. In this way, you can easily see that the creative leaps of evolution also contribute to the cumulative build-up of the gene pool.

In human creativity, the ability to adapt to societal needs by inventing new combinations of old already discovered ideas is called situational creativity as opposed to fundamental creativity of discovery. Thus Darwinian mode of evolution can be seen as the special case of creative evolution involving situational creativity.

A good example is the famous case of gypsy moth in London that underwent a change in color from brown to black in response to environmental pollution. The “black gene” was already in the gene pool. The individual moths that were born with this “black gene” had selective advantage over the moths of the old color. Hence they survived, whereas the others didn’t. So, rapidly, natural selection wiped out the moths of the old color in favor of the new.

Finally, as Stephen Gould and others (intelligent design theorists included) have noted, the fossil data also show vast epochs of virtual stasis in the evolutionary history of all species. This corresponds to the limit of conditioned existence when no creativity, situational or fundamental, is needed.

The Biological Arrow of Time and the Future of Evolution

As mentioned above, there is a clear biological arrow of time–biological organisms evolve from simplicity to complexity. What defines complexity should also be clear from our account above of creative evolution. Complexity consists of new organs, either new, more sophisticated expressions of previously expressed biological functions (those archetypes and their morphogenetic blueprints) or expressions for entirely new biological functions previously not represented in the vital and the physical.

Neo-Darwinism cannot explain an arrow of time. Both of its steps, production of chance variation and natural selection has no preference for complexity over simplicity. Chance is of course another word for random and so can lead to more simple or more complex. Natural selection also, in the final reckoning, only selects for fecundity, the capacity for producing more offspring, not complexity.

In contrast, creative evolution has built-in propensity for producing new organs of complexity. So creative evolution solves the problem of the biological arrow of time: evolution proceeds in the direction of making more and more sophisticated expressions of more and more biological functions.

We can still ask: What is the ultimate objective of evolution? Where is evolution going? Or even more basic. If evolution is God’s creativity, what is God’s purpose that we see in evolution? Why create more sophisticated organisms? What is the meaning of this wonder-filled evolving biological universe?

As you know Christian Theologians are usually antievolution. But one glaring exception to this general rule is a Jesuit priest of the twentieth century named Teilhard de Chardin. De Chardin not only supported evolution; but also he saw clearly that evolution rises against the march of entropy to create increasing complexity and order first creating the biosphere, and then creating the noosphere–the sphere of the evolving mind. Then he went ahead and proposed that the future of evolution lies in the Omega point–a time when godliness becomes the going thing. It is easy to see the parallel to the idea of the Second Coming here.

One common thing in the history of creative ideas is that often a truly creative idea nonlocally expresses through more than one visionary. A second visionary to intuit this way was the Hindu mystic-philosopher Sri Aurobindo.

Hinduism is quite different from Christianity in its reaction to evolution. This is partly because the Hindu puranas in the mythology of the avataras–descent of God in biological form–can already be seen as depicting evolution. God’s first avatara is in the form of a great fish. The second is a great tortoise. The third is a boar. The fourth is man-lion. The fifth is the dwarf man. And from the sixth to the ninth depicts an evolution of the human being, from the primitive highly emotional mind to Buddha, a man of mental maturity and emotional equanimity. The tenth avatara is yet to come, again alluding to something like the Christian Second Coming (only it is the Tenth Coming here).

Of course, on the other side of Hinduism is a general dismissal of the manifest world as illusory and ephemeral, not worthy of one’s creative attention, evolution or not. Only the permanent, the unchanging reality underneath the manifestation, consciousness as the ground of being is to be the highest goal of human life to be dedicated to.

So Aurobindo’s philosophy was developed in this background. However, what is novel is that Aurobindo integrated the two forces of Indian thinking with the idea of first involution, then evolution of consciousness. Ken Wilber (1981) has put further flesh on the skeleton of Aurobindo’s (1996) work and so have I (Goswami, 2004).

Why involution? Aurobindo anticipated the necessity to see evolution in terms of a science within consciousness, beginning with consciousness, non-dual, the ground of being. All possibilities are there, past, present and future. So there is no time, it is a truly eternal unchanging reality–nothing happens. To make something happen, there has to be limitations. Hence involution–the imposition of a progressive series of limitations.

The game is play, purposive play, a play of expression, expression of all that is possible to express, “to make the unconscious conscious.” When you play a game, the first thing you do is to make a set of rules. A game without rules is no fun. God makes man in His/Her/Its own image. As below, so above. The first involution is to create a limitation of rules, contexts, and archetypes of all the movements and changes to come. This includes the rules of quantum physics; here on out, all permitted possibilities are quantum possibilities. So we now have the supramental world of quantum possibilities.

The next stage of involution is the further limitation of meaningfulness. Of all the quantum possibilities, let’s restrict to those that are meaningful. This gives us the mental world of meaning.

The next level of involution created the possibilities of the vital world, the set of morphogenetic fields that help create the particular biological forms that get to play.

The final limitation of the involution is the physical which is made in a special plan of micro and macro so it can be used as hardware for making software representation of what has gone before: the subtle vital, mental, and supramental worlds.

Now evolution begins with the creation of the first living cell. It goes through various stages always with directionality of more complexity and more order with the purpose of making more and more sophisticated representation of more and more biological functions whose blueprints are the morphogenetic fields. This is the evolution of life.

Eventually, the brain with neocortex evolves in biological beings and now mind can be mapped. Evolution now becomes evolution of the representations of mental meaning. The evolutionary story here is told in the scientific research of anthropology, sociology, and psychology. And undoubtedly, there are signs of evolution, actual stages, in all these research.

So what is the future of evolution in this picture? You can see it very clearly now. Mental evolution culminates with what Jung called individuation–when human beings learn en masse to mentally represent and integrate in behavior all the supramental archetypes. Aurobindo called this step the overmind. The next step is unimaginably glorious. It consists of developing the capacity to directly represent in our body all the possibilities of the supramental archetypes of mental thinking–love, beauty, justice, good, and all that which we call godliness.

For further elaboration of the ideas of creative evolution see (Goswami, in press).

Without God We Couldn’t Experience Anything! All of Our Senses Would Be for Naught

My third proof for the existence of God’s signature concerns the cognitive psychology of perception including extrasensory perception.

Many professionals and experts who wants to see a human dimension, an experiential dimension of science see clearly how the materialist straightjacket of the currently established paradigm of science is limiting the possibilities we are entitled to live. What they don’t see clearly is the best way to convince the general public and eventually the scientific community itself about the limits of today’s establishment science. Many of these people believe that it is the research of our so-called paranormal experiences, extrasensory perception (ESP) and all, that will show people the way to a new scientific paradigm. Naturally establishment scientists also fight back tooth and nail trying to discredit the paranormal research. And thus we hear all the controversies that surround paranormal research today. Is ESP real or is it all carefully concocted fraud by clever magicians? And the paranormal research is all bogged down from the controversy.

What has gotten lost from the public mind, and maybe even from the mind of most scientists is that we don’t need ESP to prove the inadequacy of the current scientific paradigm. Just a discussion of ordinary perception will do.

Just as biologists cannot explain life’s evolution, it is a fact that the much touted cognitive scientists who dominate academic research in psychology cannot explain ordinary perception. What is perception? Who perceives? What do we perceive? Can we perceive objects in their suchness? Whence come the subjective qualities (technically called qualia) of our perception?

So far our introduction to the new science of consciousness has been dominated by the explanation of “Who perceives?.” Indeed, this is the hard question for cognitivists and neurophysiologists who avoid answering it like plague. However, be assured that the other questions of perception raised above are equally difficult for the materialist scientists to address properly. It is a fact that the theorists of this field are forever bogged down in controversies they cannot solve. I will demonstrate in this section that the new paradigm of consciousness is as efficient in resolving these controversies and answering the rest of the questions of perception as it has been with the question of the subject or the self of perception.

I began this section with a discussion of ESP, so let me end this intro with one more comment on it. As you see the new paradigm unfold, you will see that ESP does have a place in it. As we will see later in the paper, ESP establishes the validity of our internal experiences in equal par with the external, although even there it is not an exclusive evidence by any means. ESP is more like the icing on the cake of the new science. The new science within consciousness is needed because the current paradigm cannot explain fully and adequately phenomena that constitute regular science.

Cognitive Models of Perception: Direct Realism and Representation Theory

Almost every experimental neurophysiologist or cognitivist, in fact, most people, has an underlying model of perception. An object represents a stimulus field that presents our perceptual apparatus–the brain–with a stimulus. The brain processes this stimulus, first with the eye and the retina, and then with its higher centers. Eventually, an integrated representation of the stimulus/object is made defining an image in a field of perception. And it is this image that we see.

But many questions thwart any easy validity to this very reasonable picture. Say, you are looking at a big cat. And you see a big cat, no doubt. However obviously your brain does not have enough room for a direct representation/image of this “big” cat. So where is this image that you see located?

Furthermore, the representation must be made of neuronal activity of some sort. How do your neuronal activities add up to a big cat that you actually see?

Also, who are you? Are you assuming that there is somehow a TV screen with a real picture on it (of the external object) in the back of your head and somehow you are looking at it? But if you think of yourself as a homunculus (a little replica of yourself) doing the looking inside the brain, either you are succumbing to dualism–you separate from the brain–or you get into an infinite regression–who is looking at the homunculus? Ad infinitum.

Experts called identity theorists tackle the question of “what do you see?” and “who are you that sees?” simultaneously by positing squarely that in every event of perception you do really see part of your brain–you and what you see all come out of the neuronal activity of that part of the brain. The experience you have and your brain’s neuronal activity are identical. But is this assertion credible? As one theorist, Smythies (1994), puts it–”how many identity theorists really believe it or apply it to their own daily lives?”

There is, after all, another way to get out of the infinite regression. Clearly, receiving information from an exterior environment requires making an image. But why should we assume that retrieving information from an image (internal object) requires making an image, too?

There is still another serious problem with the representation theory. Current sophisticated brain imaging techniques are showing that the perception of an external object often consists of integrating the neuronal activities of many widely separated brain areas. How does the brain bind them together to give us an integral whole that we experience, how do we explain the unity of experience? It smacks of nonlocality. This is called the binding problem.

There are additionally other more philosophical objections that can be raised against the representational theory and in favor of a model of “direct” perception (Smythies, 1994):

1. If all we experience is sensations in our brain–inside stuff, then why assume outside physical objects at all? Why not say that there is nothing but me and my sensations, why not succumb to solipsism? Or at least the kind of (dualistic) idealism that Bishop Berkeley posited?

2. How can we tell that the neuronal activities of my brain (the representation) really represent an external object if we can never directly see and compare with the object in its suchness?

3. If the objections above seem lethal enough why not posit that we (that is, the brain) directly perceive the object. This gives us the philosophy of direct realism: external objects are real and the brain directly perceives them without the intermediary of some internal images of them.

4. Also it is a fact that all our knowledge–about brain and about perception–comes from perception. Is it fair to use knowledge obtained by perception to refute the model above of direct perception? “That would be to cut off the branch on which we sit.”

So does direct perception make more sense than the representation model? Well, even the direct perception model does not explain how the subjective experience of a subject can arise from an object interacting with an object. There is the old “hard question” again.

There are other serious problems with the direct perception model as well. There are clearly cases where the properties of the representation making capacity of the brain enter. For example in color perception, is the color a property of the object? Most researchers now think that color is a property of the object as well as that of the brain representation.

More over, very importantly, direct perception does not explain the subjective qualia of our experiences of perception.

So we get into some inescapable conclusions from all this which is why cognitivists incessantly debate about how we can perceive at all. That the brain makes representations and the representations have an effect on what we see is undoubtedly true. On the other hand, television screen and homunculus-in-the-brain viewing pictures on it of an outside object that resembles the outside object is also hard to rationalize. The binding problem is a hard problem for the representation theorist as well. Finally, the philosophical problem of solipsism (the idea that each one of us can only be sure of one’s own consciousness, never of another’s) and dualistic idealism, and additionally, the problem of comparing with direct perception loom large.

Ultimately, the philosophical debate is one between (dualistic) idealism and (direct) realism. Dualistic idealists see the world as primarily ideas. To them perception happens primarily because of what we see inside of us. Idealists are the pure brand of representation theorists. Realists support direct realism of perception of objects that are outside and real. They want to avoid any reference to objects that are internal like the representations of objects inside the brain.

Cognitive scientists and neurophysiologists are often caught straddling both fences because with the advance of science they are in a position to study the previous black box of the brain and these studies are giving them (and us) obviously interesting results. But they cannot solve the conceptual quandary of which “ism” is right? (dualistic) idealism or realism? Philosophically, most cognitive scientists are supporters of some form of realism. And yet, without some emphasis of “internal” representations, how can they justify their trade?

Clearly, pure idealism is susceptible to solipsism and pure realism is unpractical. So from this view alone, it is desirable that we have a middle ground established giving some validity to both.

Below I will show that the philosophy of monistic, not dualistic, idealism (in dualistic idealism, propounded by Berkeley for example, God’s cosmic quantum consciousness is distinguished from human consciousness) can incorporate realism in such way as to offer solution of all the problems of perception.

Do We Have a Big Head?

The hint for how to accomplish such a rapprochement came already from two philosophers at two different times, Gottfried Leibniz in the seventeenth century and Bertrand Russell in the twentieth century who asked themselves the question, Can realism and idealism both be valid in how we see things? Their answer, though, was partially playful; it could not be taken seriously at the times they proposed it.

The idea is quite simple. Realism says that only the external object is real; only objects that we find “outside” of us are real because they are public and we can get consensus about them and make them the object of objective scientific scrutiny. Idealism says that we cannot directly see what is “outside” without the help of the intermediaries of our “inside” private representations. So these inside representations must be realer than the objects they represent. Or rather they better be, because objects in their suchness we will never know.

Easy solution, said Leibniz and Russell. Suppose we have a “big” head in addition to the small head that we normally experience so that so-called outside objects are outside the small head, but inside the big head. Then isn’t both realism and idealism valid? Realism because the objects are outside (the small head). Idealism because objects are also inside (the big head).

Sounds like sophistry, doesn’t it? It does until you process the solution through quantum thinking.

Quantum Consciousness and a Model of Perception that Works

You can recognize our “big” head in quantum terminology as our capacity for nonlocal processing that includes all “small” heads. In other words, when we choose in quantum consciousness or God-consciousness we are operating from the big head and all objects are “inside” of us. The choice collapses the wave of possibility of an object and also the wave of possibility of our small head, the brain. We identify with the brain-state collapsed and do not see it. We see the object separate from us giving us a “spiritual” experience of immediacy in which the object is seen in its “suchness.”

However, if the object/stimulus is one previously experienced, we do not usually recognize this “primary” collapse event. Instead, we see the object upon repeated reflection from the mirror of its past memory, which is subjective and individual. The past memories modulate the secondary collapse events so that the perception of the collapsed object acquires an individual flavor. This is what gives us the subjective qualia of perception.

Experiments show that the processing time of secondary collapse events is about 500 milliseconds or thereabouts. When we finally recognize the object, we are quite identified with our past memory, we are conditioned self, the “small” head of individuality. From this perspective, the material object is seen outside of us because of the shared fixity of the physical world.

How about that television-image-in-an-inner theater aspect of the representation theory? We have been forgetting something so far. Along with the external physical object and the observer’s brain there is something else that quantum consciousness collapses routinely–the mind that gives meaning to the observation. Now the brain representations of the stimulus are literally brain neuronal states, no doubt. They are not unlike the electronic movement on a TV screen. But we do not see the electronic patterns when we watch TV, do we? Instead, our mind gives meaning to the Rorschach of fluorescent spots on the screen produced by the electronic movement. Similarly in the case of perception, our mind gives the meaning to the neuronal configuration of each brain representation. Eventually, it is our mind that produces the recognizable image of the object of primary perception from the current neuronal representation as modulated by the previous memory.

The oneness of experience of the binding problem is also solved in the model presented here. Because consciousness is fundamentally nonlocal it can bind together all the different brain areas to produce one unified brain state of collapse.

So the final solution as presented here combines the best of realism and (dualistic) idealism, direct realism and representation theories. At the same time, it explains the suchness experiences that are denied in the Western philosophical tradition but that have long been recognized as spiritual experiences in all the major traditions. The theory also explains qualia of normal perception and solves the binding problem. And, of course, the problem of subject-object split nature of awareness and the ego-modality of normal perception are also explained from the get-go.

Now do you see why without God, we couldn’t see anything? And obviously, it is true not just about seeing, but about any experiences with our senses. Now you can appreciate the following quote from one of the Upanishads:

That immutable . . . is the unseen seer, the unheard hearer, the unthought thinker, the ununderstood understander. Other than it there is nothing that sees. Other than it there is nothing that thinks. Other than it there is nothing that understands.

Extra-Sensory Perception

Whereas the role of nonlocal quantum consciousness (God) is somewhat implicit in ordinary perception (you don’t see the role without a lot of analysis as demonstrated above), in ESP nonlocality is explicit; the only analysis we need is to demonstrate the role of consciousness.

Let’s set the context by describing a typical distant viewing experiment pioneered by the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff and replicated many times ever since by many other researchers. One subject looks at a double blind selected scene or an object and another (correlated) subject in a controlled laboratory at a distance draws a picture (or gives an oral description) of what his or her partner is looking at. What is viewed and the nonlocally received description of it are then compared. The experimenter looks for a matching rate that substantially beats the odds.

Targ and Puthoff made history by demonstrating success in such an experiment in their pioneering paper demonstrating nonlocal transfer of information and meaning from one mind to another mind. Subsequent experiments verified the efficacy of distant viewing in a variety of ways. I quote some of the notable ones (Targ and Katra, 1998):

· The effect persists even when matching is done objectively via the use of computers.

· One of the most stringent protocols used is the so-called ganzfeld experiments. A ganzfeld meaning whole field is created using sensory isolation of the receiver. The receiver is put in a sound proof room and visual field of the receiver is made uniform and featureless by covering his or her eyes with halves of ping pong balls and bathing them with uniform red light. Additionally, white noise is fed into the receiver’s ears using earphones. Many ganzfeld experiments have been conducted with good success rates.

· Distant viewing works with both psychic and non-psychic subjects, trained or untrained.

· Distant viewing works even at international distances.

· Distant viewing works between humans and dogs, even between humans and parrots.

If mind to mind nonlocal transfer of information and meaning is so well demonstrated, then why is ESP still controversial? Partly it is because ESP is such an affront to the belief system of our typical materialist scientist it causes cognitive dissonance. And perhaps, more importantly perhaps, because there is still no theory of this data that is universally accepted even by the parapsychology researchers let alone by establishment scientists.

Is the nonlocality exhibited in distant viewing an example of quantum nonlocality? Parapsychologists hesitate to accept this idea because of a theorem called Eberhard theorem that purports to have proved that no information can be transferred using quantum nonlocality. I have repeatedly pointed out that for information transfers between brains and minds in which consciousness is involved as the collapser of the synchronistic events that constitute the transfer of information, Eberhard’s theorem does not apply. And of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. My theoretical idea has been verified by the replicated transferred potential experiments.

Let’s discuss the latest experiment by Standish et al in 2004 which was designed much like a distant viewing except that EEG machines were used to demonstrate a “physical” and objective transferred potential. Two subjects are chosen satisfying the following criteria: knowing each other well; having previous emotional and psychological connection; and experience in meditation and other introspective techniques. One person called the “sender” is instructed to attempt sending an image or a thought and the other called “receiver” is instructed to remain open to receive any image or thought from the partner during the duration of the experiment. The sender and receiver are put in sensorily isolated rooms 10 meters apart and their brains are connected to individual EEG machines. Now the sender was alternately subjected to visual stimulation (stimulus on) and no visual stimulation (stimulus off). The subject called receiver doesn’t receive any light stimulation. In spite of this, the EEG of the receiver detected a signal whenever the sender’s brain was stimulated (was under stimulus on condition).

In this kind of experiment, there is all the proof one needs of the violation of Eberhard’s theorem because information is transferred nonlocally between brains. By comparing a transferred potential with the very little brain potential you get for a control subject, you can tell that somebody is sending information and when. And as I have stated before the only explanation of the transferred potential is that consciousness collapses the similar events in correlated brains. The same explanation holds for telepathy: consciousness collapses similar events of meaning in correlated minds.

Unfortunately, the parapsychological community has turned a deaf ear to my contentions so far perhaps because they are squeamish about accepting the primacy of consciousness. Perhaps now that I have conclusively demonstrated that nonlocal quantum consciousness is essential even for a paradox-free understanding of ordinary perception, the parapsychologists will see the light (in a flash) and abandon their hidden materialist prejudice.

Mind-Body Healing

Mind body healing refers to healing the human body, a physical ailment, via mental intervention like thought, belief, prayer, or visualization. Of many examples of mind-body healing, there is a subclass called spontaneous healing. This constitutes my fourth and final spectacular example of a definitive signature of the divine.

Spontaneous healing, healing without medical causal intervention, may be triggered by a variety of stimuli, medical procedures, and sometimes just plain intentions and faith. In science, unusual phenomena often give us more clues about the system we are dealing with. So what is the explanation of this particular unusual phenomenon?

Mental visualization has strong effect on the body. Indeed, visualization has been used with some success for the treatment of cancer patients (Simonton, 1978). But visualization works for some people, and doesn’t work for many other people although they may be quite good at it. What gives?

There seems to be a consensus now that includes even conventionalists, that a loving environment may be more conducive to healing. Similarly, the tangible effect of prayer by prayer groups for the healing of patients has been demonstrated so well that even many conventional health practitioners are persuaded as to the causal efficacy of prayer. So more and more, one finds the attempts of creating a loving environment and prayerful atmosphere even in hospitals of conventional healing. But seldom does a conventionalist bother to ask, Why does loving work for healing? Where does the causal efficacy of prayer come from?

Last but not least, even conventional medical professionals accept the fact that a good doctor-patient relationship accelerates healing. If healing is a material phenomenon and objective, then this too, is hard to comprehend.

We are missing an important ingredient of the healing that is taking place in the examples above. We are missing the quantum. There are a few explicitly quantum aspects of mind-body healing: the quantum leap, quantum nonlocality, downward causation, and tangled hierarchy. Until we include the quantum physics of mind-body healing, our understanding of some of its spectacular success will be incomplete.

Mind-body disease consists of physical ailments in which the imposition of mental meaning sets up disharmony in our vital and physical bodies. So mind body healing must involve changes in the meaning-context that mind sets up for the malfunctioning of the vital and the physical bodies of ours. Sometimes this change in the context of meaning processing by the mind comes about simply by reshuffling old contexts. This is when the continuous methods of mind-body medicine practices such as biofeedback and meditation, work. But some time, as in the cases mentioned above–spontaneous healing, and healing through visualization– the contextual shift cannot happen at the level of the mind itself. In those cases, mind-body healing is a misnomer.

The contexts of mental thinking come from the supramental domain of consciousness; to change the context to a new one, us mental beings will have to leap to the supramental. This leap is a discontinuous quantum leap and this is why this type of healing is quantum healing.

“Quantum healing” is a phrase that has been creatively intuited, albeit in rudimentary forms, by at least two physicians, Larry Dossey and Deepak Chopra. Dossey (1982) emphasized the quantum nature of the healing of a patient by another (other healing as it is sometimes called) such as through prayer as evidence of quantum nonlocality. Chopra (1990) correctly intuited the quantum nature of self-healing–that it consists of quantum leaps. Let’s begin our discussion with Chopra’s work.

Quantum Leap

In the nineteen eighties, the physician Deepak Chopra, was looking for an explanation of spontaneous self-healing. When talking about if anybody can claim to know the cure of cancer, he said, “If a patient can promote the healing process from within, that would be the cure for cancer.”

If this sounds like the Christian Science pioneer Marie Baker Eddy for whom if the mind could discover that all disease is illusion, then healing would follow, that is not an accident. Both Chopra and Baker Eddy are introducing the idea of healing as self-discovery. But Chopra went one important step further. Said he, “Many cures that share mysterious origins–faith healing, spontaneous remissions, and the effective use of placebo, or “dummy drugs”–also point toward a quantum leap. Why? Because in all of these instances, the faculty of inner awareness seems to have promoted a drastic jump–a quantum leap, in the healing mechanism.”

Chopra went ahead and introduced both consciousness and quantum physics into mind-body healing in an attempt to initiate new scientific modeling of this self-healing phenomenon beyond classical physics, chemistry and biology which have no explanation for it. In his seminal book, Quantum Healing, Chopra (1990) suggested that mind-body interaction in self-healing occurs through a “quantum mechanical body” and is mediated by “bliss”–consciousness.

To emphasize once again, mind-body healing is not brain-body healing. Fundamental in mind-body healing is downward causation: a thought, an emotion, a belief initiates the healing process. But the brain’s capacity for downward causation is dubious. So scientists who study mind-body healing, implicitly or explicitly adopt a dualistic mind-body interaction model. Unfortunately, this model is also fraught with difficulties. If mind and body are two separate substances, how could they interact without an intermediary? How would such an interaction be consistent with the law of conservation of energy in the material world? Hence Chopra’s brilliant suggestion: the intermediary in mind-brain interaction is consciousness. How does consciousness mediate the interaction of mind and body? “Through the quantum mechanical body,” says Chopra, a little vaguely, “mind-body healing is quantum healing.”

The vagueness of Chopra’s idea disappears when we realize that consciousness mediates mind-body interaction through the “quantum” nature of both mind and body. If mind and body are Newtonian objects of classical physics, there is no way to mediate their interaction without a major revision of known physics. But if both physical and mental objects are quantum possibilities within consciousness as posited here, then consciousness can simultaneously and nonlocally collapse the possibilities of a correlated body and mind to create the actual event of its experience.

The puzzle of mind-body healing is how a thought, a nonmaterial object, can cause the brain to make a material object, a neuropeptide molecule, for example, that will initiate a communication to the immune system or the endocrine system, eventually leading to healing. From the new view of this paper, consciousness simultaneously recognizes and chooses the context-changing thought of your self-healing (from among all the quantum possibilities that your mind and supramental body offer) along with the brain-state that has the new neuropeptide molecule. Of course, the quantum leap of creativity to the supramental is crucial here for healing. This is the idea that lifts quantum healing from being a plausible idea to a legitimate explanatory principle (Goswami, 2005).

Nonlocality in Healing

Dossey (1982) emphasizes nonlocality as the telltale sign of the quantum and consciousness in healing. The study by the cardiologist Randolf Byrd (1988) is one of the best indicating the quantum nonlocality of healing. Byrd’s study involved 393 patients at the San Francisco General Hospital’s Cardiac Care Unit on the effect of prayer, carried out at a distance by several home-prayer groups. The 393 subjects were divided into a group of 192 patients who were prayed for by four to seven different people and a control group of 201 who did not receive the benefit of any prayer at all. Neither the physician nor the patients knew who belonged to which group. Byrd finds the effect of prayer, even when nonlocal, strikingly positive. For example, the prayed-for patients were five times less likely to require antibiotics and three times less prone to develop fluid in the lungs (pulmonary edema), both statistically significant results.

How does prayer work? We can easily integrate both Dossey’s quantum nonlocality in other-healing and Chopra’s quantum leap in self-healing within one model. When somebody prays for you at a distance with purity of intention, consciousness, being nonlocal and unitive, simultaneously collapses the healing intention in your mind as in mental telepathy (although you may not ordinarily be aware of it because of noise–secondary awareness events–in your mind-brain complex). From then on, the same process, quantum healing, operates as in self-healing. In other words, this kind of other healing also involves self-healing. And this is true of most, but not all cases of spiritual other healing; the other (healer) nonlocally transfers intention at the level where choice and quantum collapse takes place, the level of the quantum self or unity consciousness.

One word of caution: experiments such as that of Byrd depends on statistics and a positive result is never guaranteed. This is consistent with the probabilistic nature of quantum physics.

Biological Creativity: Downward Causation in Healing

Many physicians have cited examples of spontaneous healing, some of them as dramatic as the overnight vanishing of a malignant tumor (see Chopra, 1990; Weil, 1995, Moss, 1984).

Conventionalists in the medical profession either dismiss the cases of spontaneous remission of disease under the general category of the placebo effect or, if the concept of placebo does not apply keep mum about them. Either way, they miss a grand opportunity for a new insight. Gradually, however, a new hypothesis is being considered within the medical profession–that our body already has, in many cases of illness, the requisite wisdom and mechanism for cure; we just have to discover it and manifest it (O’Regan, 1987; Weil, 1995). This idea, too, is limited because what is attributable only to consciousness (the power of creativity and downward causation) is attributed to the causally impotent physical body, mere hardware.

But suppose we boldly recognize the healing power of consciousness. Consciousness has the requisite wisdom (in its supramental compartment), the mechanism (choosing a new context for mental processing of meaning of emotions) for cure. It also has the power to discover what is needed (of making the quantum leap of insight). And it has the power to manifest the insight (by unblocking the vital feeling thus unblocking the associated vital blueprint and thus also unblocking the correlated physical organ reviving proper organ function).

In truth, faith in a doctor’s word as in the placebo effect gives a patient only a glimpse of his or her own healing capacity. To truly manifest this capacity, the entire program of creativity, going through all the stages of the creative process which ends in no less than a change of the context of one’s living, is essential.

Now the crucial question. If quantum healing really involves creativity of the mind, can we develop a program of action for healing ourselves based on this idea? It is true that creativity is acausal. In the olden days we used call a creative insight God’s grace. But it is also true that engaging in the creative process, in its four stages of preparation, incubation, insight, and manifestation with understanding, does help creative acts. What would this entail in the case of mind-body healing?

Suppose that instead of a belief that people are getting some sort of medicine as in placebo effect, patients operate under the conviction (a “burning” one because of the urgency of the situation) that they already have the mechanism for healing which they need to discover and manifest. The first step of such a creative question is preparation. Patients would be encouraged to research their disease (with a lot of help from their physicians, of course) and meditate on it. Such meditation will readily show the role of brain-mind doshas as to how we deal with mental stress, and how our habits of mentalization of emotions and suppression or expression of emotions as the case may be, contribute to the disease. One of the root causes of mental stress accumulation will also become clear: mental speed–hurrying and rushing–augmenting the pursuit of desires with accomplishments, anxieties and day dreaming. So the purpose of the preparation stage is to slow down the mind, and to create an open, receptive mind that is an essential first step toward any creativity.

At the next stage the patients and their doctors would try various new (to the patient) techniques of mind-body medicine. This is the stage of creativity in which we use unlearned stimuli to generate uncollapsed possibility waves of the mind and the supramental; but we don’t choose among the possibilities. Since only choice can create an event of conscious awareness (Goswami, 1993), what I am talking about is unconscious processing–processing without awareness.

There are well-known cases of “art-therapy,” in which people heal themselves by submerging into healing, beautiful, spiritual art. Art therapy does not work for everybody. But how does art therapy work at all, even for some people? The mental imagination of healing inspired by the art very soon gives way to unconscious processing galore opening up to a new vista of possibilities. Sooner or later a seemingly inconsequential trigger precipitates the quantum leap of insight: simultaneously the new supramental context and the mental gestalt that represents it appear manifest in conscious awareness. The insight leads to the corrective contextual shift of how the mind handles emotions. Manifestation of the insight begins at once: freed from the shackles of mentalization, feelings and the vital programs become functional once again leading to healing of the correlated organ concerned, sometimes quite dramatically.

I have already mentioned that there are some reported successes in treating cancer patients via the use of creative visualization (Simonton, 1978), for which the above` scenario applies. Here is particularly poignant description of one person’s quantum healing through visualization:

When I was in Mexico, I had started having pain in my chest. I went across the border and got an MRI scan, which showed a mass on my thymus connecting to the aorta. I decided just to wait, but a scan six months later showed it was still there.

I decided to spend a week at Carl Simonton’s healing center in California, and I imaged “sharks eating cancer cells” as they recommended. But toward the end of the week, I had this extremely vivid, spontaneous vision that wasn’t on the program. I saw a mass on my thymus as a piece of ice that just started to melt in these big, amazing drops. I’ve never in my life had this kind of clear image just come up by itself. And I knew instantly the drops are just teardrops. My whole life, through all the losses, I’d never been able to cry. Now there was this melting away of the oppression I’d been feeling; the deaths and the abuse in my childhood, the unresolved relationship with my ex-husband. The emotion was suddenly available, and it felt so powerful.

Four months later, I had another MRI, and the mass was gone–there was no sign of it. I had no new treatment. Whatever this mass had been, they said the only way they cold tell it had ever been there was from the previous two tests.

(Quoted in Barasch, 1993, pp. 273-274)

Clearly, the experience released the depression of emotions accumulated through a lifetime. And there is no doubt that the experience was sudden and unexpected, a genuine quantum leap.

A spontaneous remission, in this way of looking at things, corresponds to a creative insight, when we are able to choose “the healing path” out of the myriad possibilities generated by unconscious processing. This choosing is the work of unitive consciousness in its quantum self.

How does one experience this choosing of healing insight, this quantum self experience? Experiences vary. The example above was a vision. The physician Richard Moss (1981, 1984) talks of a cancer patient who attended one of his workshops. During the workshop, she was partly defiant and was not responding to the various attempts of Moss to energize her. But at some point Moss broke through her shell and she responded by participating in a spontaneous dance that led to a tremendous ah-ha experience. The following morning the patient woke up feeling so much better that Moss felt compelled to send her for a check-up. Miracle of miracles, her cancer was gone.

The patient in Moss’s anecdote experienced the more usual ah-ha of creative insight. But patients also report experiencing the choice itself, when the purity of the healing intention is crystallized. As an example, here is the physician Deepak Chopra’s (Chopra, 1990) account of the healing of a cancer patient through sudden insight:

. . . a quiet woman in her fifties, came to me about ten years ago complaining of severe abdominal pains and jaundice. Believing that she was suffering from gallstones, I had her admitted for immediate surgery, but when she was opened up, it was found that she had a large malignant tumor that had spread to her liver, with scattered pockets of cancer throughout her abdominal cavity.

Judging the case inoperable, her surgeons closed the incision without taking further action. Because the woman’s daughter pleaded with me not to tell her mother the truth, I informed my patient that the gallstones had been successfully removed. I rationalized that her family would break the news to her in time . . .

Eight months later I was astonished to see the same woman back in my office. She had returned for a routine physical exam, which revealed no jaundice, no pain, and no detectable sign of cancer. Only after another year passed did she confess anything unusual to me. She said, “Doctor, I was so sure I had cancer two years ago that when it turned out to be just gallstones, I told myself I would never be sick another day in my life.” Her cancer never returned.

This woman used no technique; she got well, it appears through her deep seated resolve, and that was good enough. . . . I must call it a quantum event, because of the fundamental transformation that went deeper than organs, tissues, cells, or even DNA, directly to the source of body’s existence in time and space.

(Chopra, 1990, p. 102-103)

I have cited several cases of spontaneous healing of cancer and have claimed that in each case, the cause is a quantum insight. To see clearly the dynamic role that the insight plays, it may help to analyze a little deeper into what has to be involved in these kinds of cases of cancer cure (Weil, 1995). There are always pressure on the cells of our body to become malignant, a condition in which they do not die at the expected time, they do not stay in the same place, and in general do not conform to cellular laws of regular behavior. But malignant cells do not represent cancer, only seeds of cancer. This is so because malignant cells distinguish themselves by displaying abnormal antigens (“not me”) on their surface membranes. So the immune system, whose job is to distinguish me and not me can recognize them and get rid of them. In this way cancer becomes reality only when for some reason this normal immune system function is inadequate (due to a physical or a vital body defect) or suppressed, for example, throiugh excessive intellectualism.

So spontaneous healing of cancer must be due to the sudden onset of such a dynamic surge in immune system activity that the cancerous growth is gotten rid of within days, even hours. Suppose the immune system inadequacy or suppression is due to faulty mental processing. A quantum leap to the supramental is accompanied by a shift of the processing of mental meaning and frees the blockage of feelings that correspond to the conscious experience of the movements of the vital blueprint of the immune system. This then can have the desired dynamic effect on the immune system in the form of reactivating its vital program of getting rid of cancerous cells with such vigor as to effect very rapid healing.

What does the data say on spontaneous remission of cancer? The Institute of Noetic Sciences researcher Brendan O’Regan (1987) who did perhaps the most extensive research on the subject, talked about three kinds of spontaneous remission cases. 1) Pure remission–remission with no allopathic treatment after the diagnosis is made; 2) remission with some treatment after diagnosis, but the treatment is clearly unsuccessful; and 3) the most unusual kind of remission in which the “cures are sudden, complete, and without medical treatment,” associated with spiritual cures.

The third class in the three classes above passes as quantum healing with clear discontinuous “spiritual” experience (or insight). I think that for the other two classes, healing may be due to situational reshuffling of previously known programs of the mind leading to adaptation of the new situation and healing. But they may also be due to the same kind of discontinuous quantum leap as the patients of class 3, except that the participants were not observant enough to note the special-ness of the creative moment. I think that this was due to the lack of preparation–the insight was not particularly meaningful to them to take notice.

The final stage of the creative process (Goswami, 1999)–manifestation–is also important to discuss in this creativity model of quantum healing. Manifestation is not complete with only the reactivation of vital programs that are needed for the normal functioning of the organ(s) involved. After the remission has taken place, the patient has to bring to manifestation some of the life style changes that are commensurate with the shift of context of mental processing of feelings if the remission is to be stable and permanent. For example, a lifestyle that produces excessive intellectualism and defensive reactions must give way to a more balanced one.

Let’s discuss the case of the former Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins about his self-healing from a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, a degenerative disease that causes the connective tissue in the spine to wither away. Experts estimated that his chance of recovery was one in five hundred. So the patient stopped standard medication and substituted it with mega doses of vitamin C, all this in full consultation with his physician. But most importantly, he watched funny movies (for example, old W. C. Fields’ flicks, the Marx brothers’ escapades, etc.), and read his favorite comic books. And miraculously, Cousins completely recovered from his condition and resumed his very productive life.

I think that Cousins went from a serious disease to healing more or less following the stages of the creative process. The first stage, his hobnobbing with standard medicine and all that was preparation. The second stage, watching and reading the funnies allowed him the all important relaxation “being” mode of creativity alternating with the “doing” mode of taking vitamin C (“do-be-do-be-do”). Eventually he got his quantum leap leading to recovery. And from all accounts, he did make life style changes.

Very importantly, creative healing is an idea that can be medically tested (Goswami, 2005). We can clinically study three groups of patients and compare their healing rate:

1. A conventional placebo group where the patients will be given a sugar syrup or some such placebo by a doctor to stimulate a belief;

2. A creative healing group where the patients will be aware and will be carrying out their own creative process in close cooperation of a doctor in the preparation stage (as Cousins did). This group will also carry out the manifestation stage if a creative healing takes place.

3. A control group, which will use placebo with full knowledge, but will not engage in the creative process for healing.

Tangled Hierarchy

A physician (of conventional medicine, of course) goes to heaven and finds a big line at the pearly gate. He is not used to wait in line, so he goes straight to St. Peter, the officer in charge of admission to heaven. Upon hearing his complaint, St. Peter shakes his head, “Sorry Doc. In heaven, even doctors have to wait to get in.” But just then, one fellow in white physician’s robe went running through the gate, paying no heed to the line.

“Ha,” says our doctor. “There goes a doctor without waiting in line! How do you explain that?”

“Oh,” chuckles St. Peter. “That’s God. Sometimes He thinks He is a doctor.”

The final point I want to make is that the role of the physician in creative healing has to change drastically. In conventional medicine the hierarchy imposed by the physician in doctor-patient relationship is clearly a simple hierarchy: The physicians tend to think that they are “God,” hierarchically superior to their patients who “don’t know anything” about health and healing. But that is clearly not true except maybe at the material level of the physical body; patients have the best knowledge of what is happening to their subtle bodies.

But the doctor-patient relationship is anything but a simple hierarchy, it is tangled beyond belief. I will cite an anecdote. A doctor was treating an asthma patient with real difficulty in breathing. Naturally, when the doctor heard of a new medicine, he called the production company for a sample, got it and gave it to his patient. His patient got relief with breathing within minutes; even his bronchial tubes seemed to remain open for longer periods of time.

Out of curiosity to check out the veracity of the drug, the doctor then administered a placebo to his patient. But now the patient’s difficulty in breathing returned. So the doctor was convinced that the medicine worked and wrote the pharmaceutical company for more samples. Imagine his surprise when the pharmaceutical company admitted that he was sent a placebo by mistake the first time. So what explains the efficacy of the so-called medicine then? Obviously, the doctor‘s belief in the medicine!

Simple hierarchy is detrimental to creativity. If the doctors are authoritarian, their patients will not feel encouraged to think creatively about their situation. Thus in creative medicine, the now-prevalent doctor-patient simple hierarchy has to give way to a co-learning relationship–a tangled hierarchy. Furthermore, conventional practitioners of medicine have developed a habit of looking at healing as objective science. Instead, healing is science as well as art, objective as well as subjective. You can learn all there is to learn about standing waves on the guitar string and all the rest of the physics of that musical instrument, but that knowledge will not replace the art of playing the guitar which needs creativity on behalf of the player. Creative healing, above all, will demand creativity in the physician-patient relationship. And that creativity begins with tangled hierarchy.

It is not going to be easy. Doctors are some of the most solipsistic people I know. They are experts in monolog. They remind me of the woman who, upon meeting a friend after many months, takes her to a coffee shop to “talk.” Of course, she only talks about herself. But then, she suddenly becomes aware. “Oh look at me, going on about myself. Let’s talk about you. What do you think of me?”

One of the most desirable aspect of the paradigm shift we are witnessing in medicine is that a transition from simple hierarchy to a tangled hierarchy in doctor-patient relationship is already taking place. I will illustrate this with psychologist Arnold Mindell’s story of how he discovered his concept of the dream body–a person’s total real personality as manifesting in different channels–while working with a terminal patient with stomach cancer. During one of the interactive sessions, the patient had a creative insight that he wanted to “explode” in self-expression as never before. Just before the patient was to go to the hospital, he had a dream that he shared with Mindell. In his dream, he was a patient with an incurable disease that could only be treated by a medicine that acted like a bomb. Suddenly, Mindell had his own insight; he saw the underlying unity in the concept of the dream body of the patient’s cancer, the bomb of his dream, and his need to explode in expression.

The creative experiences of the doctor and the patient did not end with just realizations, but they both completed the manifestation stage also. The patient left the hospital alive and stayed alive for a few years manifesting a change of lifestyle with his newly discovered expressive ability. And Mindell became famous for his successful dreambody work with patients.

For further details of mind-body healing, read my book The Quantum Doctor (Goswami, 2004).

Conclusion

Toward the end of nineteenth century, two clouds appeared in the otherwise lighted sky of classical physics. But as it supposed to be in science, scientists took these clouds seriously and the result was the famous paradigm shift in physics from Newtonian classical physics to relativity and quantum physics.

I have discussed above four concrete examples in four different fields of science in which a paradigm shift from the currently materialist one to one based on the primacy of consciousness (or popularly speaking, based on Theism) is called for to get rid of theoretical logjams and to explain solid new objective data. Is there scientific evidence of the signature of the divine? I hope you will agree that there is.

References