Would you believe that thousands of years ago there existed entire cultures that understood and experienced consciousness better than we do? None of us were there so we cannot be sure but it certainly seems so from the mythology and history of those times. Even today, if you go to an Indian village and interact with people, there is an openness about them that will take you by surprise.
The difference is this. When we live a simple life in harmony with nature, when there are no dominant belief systems that make and keep us afraid, we experience our consciousness in an expanded way quite frequently. In those expanded states, it is easy to experience positive emotions: love, kindness, curiosity, courage. In this way those simple village people have much more emotional intelligence than most sophisticates in rich countries.
Civilization happens when human beings interact with one another with positivity at least as often as negativity. When civilization happens, we as entire society become more creative; this is the way we have great literature, great arts and great classical music, even though in those ancient times people lacked science and technology, and comfortable living.
Intelligence is the ability to make the best of what you have—manifest and in potentiality–to respond to situations. The problem is ignorance. If you have abilities, but you don’t know it, what then? Obviously, the intelligent thing to do is to re-discover what you have.
In the middle of the twentieth century, America was at a crossroads. Several things happened. There was material affluence which released in some people a curiosity and urge for satisfying higher needs. And right then, teachers from the Eastern countries, Japan and India especially, came and taught meditative techniques to young Americans. On top of it, there were native American and Mexican Shamans who introduced “spiritual” plant extracts to experimenting young people supplemented by West’s own discovery of hallucinogens especially LSD. The great novelist Aldous Huxley called all these phenomena as “opening the doors of perception.” What was he talking about? Expansion of consciousness. That factor that we call quantum nonlocality; nonlocality that opens us to so many more avenues for intelligent play that we mentioned in the last two chapters.
We raised the question earlier if materialist science was created as a conspiracy for destroying Christianity as some claim? Could materialist science come about as a reaction to the re-enchantment of America that was happening in the sixties’, seventies’, eighties’ America?
Anyhow, the advent of materialist science and of course the Christian retaliation (moral majority) to that gave us the worldview polarization we see today. But that new age movement of those times, 1960-1990, did not entirely fail. It created what today we call the quantum science of consciousness.
In materialist science there is no room for consciousness. It is based on Newtonian physics which delves with the world as a bunch of objects. Locality (all communication needs signals), causality (only cause, no purpose can change the movement of things), continuity, (all movement is continuous), objectivity (how we see things must be independent of us), these are inviolable tenets of Newtonian physics; add to that the idea of material monism and you’ve got materialist science. Consciousness, on the contrary, must introduce a foreign concept to objective science—a subject or self. Even materialists cannot deny something called subjective qualia of our experience that needs to be explained.
What is a subject or self? The way it was recognized and experienced in ancient times, it is the subject pole of awareness which has two poles: subject and object. In other words, the subject is that quality of an experience that makes us the experiencer, that gives us the ability of experiencing objects separate from us.
The Apple Mac thesaurus refuses to give a synonym that is anywhere close to this meaning. So, we tried a synonym of subject—self. This time the Thesaurus responded with: ego. That’s something. Is ego an object? No, not completely, there is that subjective qualia, at least that is part of the ego that distinguishes it from the objects.
It is not the fault of thesauruses or dictionaries; they depend on the prevalent culture. The culture today has been much influenced by materialism which sees everything as objects. Then materialists try to find a scientific explanation of subjective qualia as guess what—an object. This is why the psychologist Abraham Maslow said, If you have a hammer in your hand and nothing else, you see the world as nails.”
The question in our present context is this: is seeing yourself as the experiencer of the world an ability that is desirable to you? It is a favorite saying of today: We are at the crossroads. Yes, we are. And of all these important choices of intelligence you have to make, one is right here: do you want to be an experiencer, the subject pole of an experience, of the objects of the world, objects of your experience? Or is it ok for you to continue living like the “more or less” object, a robot-with-experience—the me-centered way materialist scientists depict you?
When you have an expanded state of consciousness take notice. You will find that your experiences are more vivid. This is because you are more of an experiencer in those states. Your ability to experience things has been enhanced. It is ok to be a computer of artificial intelligence (although you never know it); it is certainly ok to be a human robot with experience; but it is worthwhile to explore your enhanced I-ness (Sanskrit asmita). The Sanskrit word for me-centeredness is idamasmita which translates as I-am-this-ness.
Please see what we are saying. Sanskrit is an old language spoken thousands of years ago. But this language has two different words, one for I-ness (asmita) and one for ego (idamasmita which literally means I am this or I am me). This is why we suspect that in those days people experienced there subjecthood as both I and I-me—the mostly me ego.
Anyway, the good news is that now it is all scientific. In quantum science we call the experience of I-ness the quantum self-experience. We theorize that our brain makes memory of that experience and all future experiences of a similar stimulus will be “reflected in the mirror of previous memories,” and this is what gives us the ego’s conditioned spectrum of experiences. In this way, quantum science predicts that there is a quantum self in addition to ego-self and also there is a preconscious between the two experiences which we enter when we meditate.
In our book, The Quantum Brain, all the details of this are explained, and the data in its favor discussed. For the sake of completeness, we will give you a little bit of a history of where the ancient knowledge was, where it got bogged down, and how we re-discovered all that lost knowledge in modern times.
Consciousness and Quantum Physics
What is the world made of? This is posited to us the modern people as a question that forever introduces a blinder in us? The world is made of stars, galaxies, all the objects around us. Of course! From then we take it for granted; it does not surprise us when some scientist claims that everything is made of elementary particles. Or that if we ever solve the mysteries of how elementary particles tick, we will find the answer to everything. And then from that vintage point, the question of solving the problem of subjective qualia seems like a question of complexity of the brain.
In a different time, 7000 years ago in India, there lived also researchers, people just like us, but also different in one important way—a different culture in which people’s experiences were vivid with subjectivity. They would wonder about the stars, but they would wonder more about this inner enchantment, where does that come from?
It was easier to meditate than go out and find ways such as building a telescope to look at those stars better. Meditation deepened their curiosity, Why at moments of deep meditation does it feel so expanded, why does it feel that we are one with the universe?
So, they meditated and meditated and meditated. They concentrated on the problem, in between they relaxed, but the burning question never left them. If one of our creativity researchers kept notes, he would have written in his diary: this is a pretty good bunch of creative dudes practicing do-be-do-be-do on their burning question, Where does the enchantment come from? (By the way, do-be-do-be-do is an abbreviated way of describing the creative process leading to an insight—alternate preparation and doing and relaxation and being.)
Then one day, one of the researchers fell into a state of deep unconscious, and yet it was not ordinary sleep. When he woke up from it, there was so much joy! He declared, “Listen ye, listen ye, Oh, sons and daughters of the immortal, I have seen the light behind the darkness.” Reality is Consciousness, a Oneness from which arises the manifest world of experience, of separateness. The “I” that we experience comes from consciousness; so do the objects on earth and in the sky. Yes, the stars, the galaxies, they are out there, but they begin in here, referring to consciousness in the suchness of its revelation.
Alright, it probably did not quite happen this way, the records of those olden days are fragmented. But do you see? Can you reconcile it with how you pictured reality before you read the above version?
Many people did not see; they were not researchers, they were thinkers. We call them philosophers today. Figuring out everything via rational thinking. No meditation, no do-be-do-be-do, no waiting for insight. If you look at the problem of consciousness this way, two conflicting ways of thinking would develop:
- Reality exists before the ability of experience develops: creation (Sanskrit sristi) is before the experience of seeing it (Sanskrit dristi). This is the view of the materialist scientist today. Matter first, then consciousness.
- But the opposite view above of the researchers still stood somewhat simplified in the mind of a different faction, call them spiritualists, religionists, depth psychologists, or transpersonal psychologists: consciousness first, then manifestation.
In India, this battle went on for a few millennia. Then a follower of Buddhism came up with the solution: Oneness is nothingness, no-thing-ness. Out of the nothingness, spontaneously arise both the experiencer subject and the experienced object. Manifest reality is a gift of dependent co-arising (Sanskrit: Pattitia sammutpada). Codependency (feedback) of the two poles of awareness eventually led to the ego.
This should have solved the problem, but it did not. Non-Buddhists did not like the idea of nothingness. Nothing comes from nothing.
So, humanity went into confusion; civilizations came and went. China, Greek, Rome, the Middle East, the West Europeans. Modern science was created and the materialists seemed to have won. The old view continued, however, in the minds of many, including religionists; its utility—value education stood huge in these people mind and could not be denied. Until recently. Now even the religionists are cynical. That leaves about fifteen percent of humanity who still cares about values, about human civilization, about higher needs and higher intelligence.
In this context came quantum physics. In two big doses. In the first phase, pre-World War II, physicists proclaimed:
1) matter and its close cousin energy both consist of elementary particles; the elementary particles of energy were called quanta (plural of quantum).
2) The solution of the equation of motion of these elementary particles revealed that they are not particles in their suchness: they are waves. Experiments such as the famous double slit experiment (go to U tube for good visual explanation of such an experiment) clearly demonstrated that we never see the quantum objects as waves, our attempt to see them converts them into particles. The conversion was called collapse of the wave into a particle.
3) If two waves interact, they achieve a special state of correlation also called entanglement, a state in which they communicate instantly; this state sustains even if the objects move galaxies apart. This is the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) correlation.
Unfortunately, the pioneers did not do a good job in searching for a meaning of all this. That was done in a second phase beginning in the fifties, post-World War II.
4) This phase was kicked off by the development of a quantum measurement theory—a detailed theory of how quantum collapse of a wave into particle takes place when we observe. It was mathematically shown that a) collapse requires a nonmaterial agency, material interactions cannot collapse quantum waves; this is the famous von Neuman’s theorem. b) Von Neuman also postulated that a nonmaterial agency was needed, and that it was the observer’s self-consciousness. A wave implies an object of many positions; particle can occupy only one position at a time. So clearly, the observer’s consciousness chooses the position where the particle will manifest; c) collapse is discontinuous, as in quantum leaps of creativity.
This was the first exuberant event in the minds of new age consciousness researchers who coined the slogan, “We create our own reality.” Unfortunately, these very important ideas were dismissed because of a paradox: if there are two observers of the same collapse event, who gets to choose the position of the manifest particle?
5) The idea of quantum correlation was taken seriously with the question of verification in mind. Thus came the famous Bell’s theorem and the physicist David Bohm’s idea of how using a correlated state of two electrons called the “singlet state,” one spins one way, the other the opposite way, the theorem could be tested.
This also created an exuberance among new Agers who sang:
Singlet Bell, singlet Bohm
Singlet all the way.
Oh what fun, it is to grasp
What the Bell theorem say.
6) Alain Aspect and his collaborators verified instant communication between correlated quantum objects. Instant communication implied signal-less communication, implied that the quantum waves reside in a domain of reality outside of space and time because in space and time all objects communicate with signals. Eventually, quantum waves began to be called waves of possibility and the domain of their inhabitance the domain of potentiality.
This also created a lot of excitement from the scientists and consciousness researchers. In the corridor of a conference hotel, one physicist was heard to retort to another angrily, “If one does not understand the importance of Aspect’s experiment, he has to have rocks in his head.” Indeed so. In everything-is-matter philosophy, nonlocality is a no-no; material interactions cannot simulate nonlocality.
7) One physicist soon after had an insight that correlated all these earlier findings in one coherent new scientific paradigm of reality: Consciousness, a potential oneness, is the ground of all being presiding over the domain of potentiality in which quantum possibility waves of both subject-potentialities (e.g. an observer’s brain) and object potentialities (e.g. an electron) reside. In a collapse event, the oneness splits into a subject/self and object(s) as consciousness identifies with the observer brain.
No more paradoxes of who gets to choose. The ground of being is a oneness-consciousness. Who gets to choose in the observer effect? Both in their Oneness, or no one but the oneness if you prefer. However, remember that the observer’s consciousness is not separate from the Oneness. It is just that the ego loses most of its causal potency because of all that reflection in the mirror of memory.
One sad thing to note. This time, hardly any physicist rejoiced, even the new agers. Although fortunately, there were lot of excitement from psychologists and even a few religionists. One new age physicist said, “Goswami has gone too far.”
Ok, you guessed it. The last insight above was due to Amit, one of the coauthors here. Why the resistance? Because the new paradigm threatens to integrate science and spirituality. The new view is this: if we do science with the primacy of consciousness as the base, then only, quantum physics becomes paradox free. But primacy of consciousness is a view that is incomprehensible to people who have very infrequent experience of expanded consciousness. And that means most people of the world except the fifteen percent we keep talking about.
What is remarkable here is the 85% also include most of the people of religion including Indian Hinduism. Only people who have some sort of meditative practice can appreciate the value of this quantum synthesis.
Consider this. For millennia, we have lived with the idea of oneness, even the idea of dependent co-arising—how the one becomes many; even so the Eastern religions are considered to be mysticism in the West instead of engaging with the science behind these ideas.
Ok, in the West, Christianity prevails. But even the founder of Christianity, Jesus Christ also enunciated the concept of Oneness of consciousness and the problem of explaining the many. He called it the above and below dichotomy, more sophisticated language would call it the transcendent-immanent dichotomy in the evocative words from the Gospel of Thomas.
Quantum science has finally given us a way of investigating reality in its enchanted suchness, in simple words, how to live higher intelligence, no ignorance, no conflicts.
Excerpts from The awakening of intelligence