Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

The Signatures of the Divine

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. Continue reading…

The Dalai Lama Renaissance

Movie Synopsis
At the cusp of the new Millennium, forty visionaries and innovative thinkers left the United States with high expectations of changing the world. They set off for India to meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at his residence at the mystical foothills of the Himalayas.

Expectations were very high for this five day series of discussions about how to change the world and solve some of its most crucial problems by creating solutions from a “synthesis” of their varied disciplines. Artists, scholars, physicists, astronomers, business leaders, doctors and authors all longed to meet and speak directly with the Dalai Lama. His Holiness became a mythic figure who could and would transform each person and bring about the kind of alchemy and action that all expected to occur.

All participants, including the Dalai Lama, were taking the gathering very seriously and holding high hopes of affecting real positive change in the world on a profound level.

What happened surprised them all. Continue reading…