Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

Scientific Proof of the Existence of God

An interview with Amit Goswami
by Craig Hamilton

Before you read any further, stop and close your eyes for a moment. Now consider the following question: for the moment your eyes were closed, did the world still exist even though you weren’t conscious of it? How do you know? If this sounds like the kind of unanswerable brain teaser your Philosophy 101 professor used to employ to stretch your philosophical imagination, you might be surprised to discover that there are actually physicists at reputable universities who believe they have answered this question—and their answer, believe it or not, is no.

Now consider something even more intriguing. Imagine for a moment the entire history of the universe. According to all the data scientists have been able to gather, it exploded into existence some fifteen billion years ago, setting the stage for a cosmic dance of energy and light that continues to this day. Now imagine the history of planet Earth. An amorphous cloud of dust emerging out of that primordial fireball, it slowly coalesced into a solid orb, found its way into gravitational orbit around the sun, and through a complex interaction of light and gases over billions of years, generated an atmosphere and a biosphere capable of not only giving birth to, but sustaining and proliferating, life. Continue reading…

Interview at the World Forum of Spirit and Science

First of all, we would like to thank you for receiving us and mainly for your participation in the Legion of Good Will’s 1st World Fórum Spirit and Science, in October 2000, at the ParlaMundi of the LGW. Tell us about how do you feel in coming back to Brazil, launching the new edition of “The Self Aware Universe”, and also about the success of “Physics of the Soul”.

I feel great.  The Brazilian culture has always seemed to me to be open about such things as spirituality, survival after death, and alternative healing techniques that I write about.  It is nice that my belief is vindicated.

Continue reading…

Consciousness and Quantum Physics

There was a revolution in physics at the beginning of the last century, consisting of the discovery of quantum physics. The message of quantum physics is this: the world is not made of matter neither is it determined entirely by material causation that we sometimes call upward causation because it rises upward from the building blocks of matter–the elementary particles . There is a source of downward causation in the world. You can call this source consciousness if you like and think of it as the ground of all being.

To be sure, the mathematics of quantum physics is deterministic and based on the upward causation model above, but it predicts objects and their movements not as determined events (as in Newtonian physics) but as possibilities (for which the probabilities can be calculated enabling us to develop a very successful predictive science for large number of objects and/or events). And yet when we look at a quantum object, we don’t experience it as a bundle of possibilities, but as actual localized event much like a Newtonian particle. Moreover, quantum mathematics does not allow us to connect the upward causation-based deterministic theory with experimental data. How do the possibilities of the theory become actualities of experience simply by our looking at them? This is the mysterious “observer effect.” Continue reading…

From India, to England, to The Hague

I have been traveling a lot recently — to the subcontinent of India, where it was warm and nice, then to the cold rain of late winter London, then in March to the sunny but crispy cold weather at The Hague in the Netherlands.

In each of the places, I had a unique experience of consciousness, each of which reflects the ongoing journey taking place in the consciousness of many of us.

In India, I was the guest of Bhakti Vendanta Institute for their conference in Trichi in Southern India on the first anniversary of the passing away of Dr. TD Sing, a great scientist/spiritual teacher. TD Sing spent many years trying to integrate science and spirituality, and I became acquainted with him in that capacity.

What was interesting for me at the conference was talking to the students who attended my talk. Now, mind you, these are serious students of engineering of the famous Indian Institute of Technology. As such they are supposed to be gung-ho materialists, believing not only in the supremacy of matter, but also in the capacity of material technology to change the way humans should live all over the world.

But the students surprised me. They actually enjoyed the idea that science and spirituality can be integrated. They did not mind that this means giving up the idea of primacy of matter; in fact they welcomed it. I was especially surprised by the keen interest the students had in what I call Quantum Activism — how one can use the quantum ideas of creativity, non-local consciousness and tangled hierarchy to change their selves and the cultures they live in. Continue reading…