This is an interview with Amit Goswami, Ph.D. Dr. Goswami earned his Ph.D. from Calcutta University in theoretical nuclear physics in 1964 and was a professor of physics at the University of Oregon between 1968 and 2003. Dr. Goswami was a senior scholar in residence at the Institute of Noetic Sciences during 1998-2000. He now teaches at the Institute for Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon.

His textbook on Quantum Mechanics is well regarded and widely used. He is the author of ten books, including The Self-Aware Universe, Quantum Creativity, Physics of the Soul, and The Visionary Window, and The Quantum Doctor. Dr. Goswami is a pioneer of a new multidisciplinary paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness, known as Science within consciousness. His research has been published in scientific journals in three different fields, physics, biology, and psychology. His next book, (working title God is Not Dead) is scheduled for publication this spring.

WTB — God Is Not Dead is an interesting title. When is the expected publication date?

GOSWAMI — In May is when we are expecting it but, you know, that is only a projected date.

WTB — Right, of course. Well, where should we begin? Basically do I read you right in saying that God is basically the author of downward causation?

GOSWAMI — Yes. God is the author of downward causation and, indeed, this is an objective God. So such a God can be introduced in science as an organizing principle. The objections against it, basically dualism is the major one. But using quantum non-locality, that argument can easily be resolved; and then mind and other subtle bodies, which is a major aspect of all spiritual definitions, those entities also can be introduced as quantum possibilities of consciousness once consciousness is regarded as the ground of all being. So, this is really a theosophical breakthrough. All theosophical problems that have bugged western philosophy since Descartes and people like Kant and so forth were all puzzled by them. They are all solvable like quantum physics has demonstrated. Of course my work started with Stanford University but there is a progression of it and this book, God Is Not Dead, is the culmination of that.

WTB — So what exactly do you mean by downward causation? Is that a good place to start?

GOSWAMI — Yes, the usual materialist model is of material causation upward from elementary particles to atoms to molecules to cells of the brain - and the brain is very dense. That is where consciousness, mind and all our experiences are caused. That is the materialist model. It is the upward causation model. In contrast, quantum physics says, but upward causation does not give us concrete objects. It gives us only possibilities. So then the quantum model is a natural way of thinking. Natural paradox is the way of thinking that consciousness is the ground of being in which matter exists as quantum possibilities. And downward causation consists of choice from these possibilities - the actual event of conscious experience.

WTB — So I gather you are an advocate of free will?

GOSWAMI — I am an advocate of free will and, of course, that is the very basis of — what happens then is part of Descartes' question. I mean Descartes, indeed, was a great philosopher, and he had this matter/mind split. But he was very emphatic that our free will is real, mind is real. He just didn't know how to answer the question of dualism. So now we know that mind is real. There is free will. But the question of dualism can be answered by saying that mind - which I call one aspect of Descartes' mind - is consciousness and that is what we call the ground of being. And then the other aspect of mind, which is the meaning processor, that we introduce as quantum possibilities of this consciousness along with matter. So matter, mind, vital energy body and the intuitive body of archetypes all are quantum possibilities of consciousness.

WTB — So what determines what aspect of mind you are using to effect a collapse of a wave function? GOSWAMI — That is the consciousness aspect. Vocabulary is important. Terminology is important. What normally we think of as "mind," we include consciousness in that word. This is the common terminology. But this terminology is still confusing and the confusion arises because people can't keep track of big 'M' and little 'm', mind. It is much easier to call consciousness that aspect of the bigger mind which collapses the possibility wave. And the rest of mind which processes meaning - basically me processing meaning is what is called mind.

WTB — It is called mind with a little 'm'.

GOSWAMI — Mind with a little 'm'. In this way, a consistent vocabulary can be given for this situation.

WTB — Would you consider the field of information at the level of the Planck scale as mind with a big 'M'?

GOSWAMI — The mind with a big 'M' within it involves everything including particles at the Planck scale; including everything, including matter, the mind with the small 'm', what you call vital energy, prana or chi in the East, and what we intuit as archetypes of Platonic vintage.

WTB — Wow! What provides the cohesion between the vital, the mental, the supermental, etc.

GOSWAMI — Right, that is the point. Consciousness produces the cohesion. However, what produces the cohesion but maintains the parallelism which mediates the interaction is the problem of dualism. We solve that by squarely saying that consciousness, non-locally, mediates the interaction between all these bodies non-locally - meaning without using signals. No signal is needed because these are aspects of consciousness itself. Consciousness just chooses among its own possibilities, and therefore no energy is exchanged. And in the process consciousness splits itself up into a subject that experiences the various objects that are collapsed.

WTB — To know itself in all potentials.

GOSWAMI — To know itself in all potentials, eventually. Of course that knowing itself becomes a little shrouded because of our conditioning. That conditioning establishes our individuality, and once we are conditioned we become kind of separated from that potentia where downward causation resides. And that is what produces all the camouflage.

WTB — Namely the ego?

GOSWAMI — Namely the ego; namely the appearance of solid material world outside of us; namely that we appear with an individuality that we cannot easily circumvent; and namely that we cannot reach that non-altered state of cosmic consciousness very easily. All this produces an enormous problem in our appreciating the vastness, the ground nature of ourselves.

WTB — I'm reduced to a personal question. So, in your understanding, what actually happens when I or someone else goes from normal waking consciousness into a meditative state and accesses, I guess you would call it, the super —mental; or when you go into a state of union and become one with all things and duality ceases?

GOSWAMI — Yes, that is what we call a Samadhi or Satori.

WTB — Exactly. So what exactly have "I" done to do that?

GOSWAMI — What you've done is to take a quantum leap. A discontinuous leap into the supramental from your ordinary mental conditioned state that you are used to, collapse. In other words, when we are operating ordinarily, our minds can process possibilities in what I call unconscious processing. But the possibilities that are available to us to choose from, you know, the ego is such a guard against the new that possibilities you are allowed to process are only those that are conditioned in us. So creativity is the process through which we can overcome the conditioning and, as you know, creativity has four aspects: preparation, just sitting - relaxed sitting or incubation are the tools, the first components of the process. Then suddenly insight takes place as a result of doing this relaxing which I sometimes jokingly call the do-be-do-be-do process.

WTB — Do-be-do-be-do process, I love it.

GOSWAMI — Then the last is the manifestation of what is received inside. WTB — Right, so in a way, and I know I am drifting into philosophic rather than physics questions here, but still in a way would you say that we don't have free will until we have reached a certain level of consciousness that transcends the box of our own personal limitations of the ego?

GOSWAMI — No, it is not that bad. We do retain one very important vestige of free will which is to say 'no' to conditioning. Even that is a little bit hard, but only a little bit hard. Almost everybody with just a little practice can say 'no' to conditioned habits. And in that saying 'no,' we become open. And then it depends on how much karma we have. Sometimes, you know, we say God is graceful and insights come even without trying. People do have spontaneous healings, spontaneous creativity, spontaneous arches of love and so forth. So we do get God's grace even thought we don't seem to deserve it. My theory is that such grace comes because although in this life we have not done the appropriate work but we have but we have done it in our past lives, so our good karma is with us. That is what is what is involved in such instant acts of grace where we do what we are doing without even trying.

WTB — Gee, I want to go in two places at once. I desire to leap into a larger philosophical direction and yet I think I need to go back and ask you about the four experiments that have been done recently that reveal the author of downward causation? In other words, reveal God? Would you like to get into enumerating any of those?

GOSWAMI — Well, these are four independent experiments of the same thing. The thing that they are experimenting upon is the possibility of non-local communication between two people with brains without any signals. This is crucial, because how can such non-local communication occur? They can only occur if there is a consciousness which is choosing from possibilities of both brains, and is non-local - without exchanging signals. These experiments then prove non-locality of consciousness, and therefore non-locality of consciousness is the author of downward conditioning. Right?

WTB — Okay.

GOSWAMI —All of the experiments are similar, so I will just give you the gist of the first experiment. Two people meditate together with the intention that they will communicate directly without signals. That is called non-local communication. Then, after about twenty minutes of meditation they are asked to continue the meditative state, but now they will be separated. They are put in separate Faraday chambers, electromagnetically impervious chambers. So there are no signals between them. And then their brains are attached to individual EEG machines and one subject is then shown a series of light flashes.

So, in response, the brain becomes active. It starts showing the signals which can be extracted from the brain wave recorded by the EEG. Inexplicably the second subject who doesn't see any light flashes also shows a signal when extracted from the EEG, of comparable strength and very comparable phase. The overlaps sometimes are over 70%. So there is no doubt that electric potential is being transferred from one brain to another without any electrical mediation - therefore proving non-locality of consciousness, because the only explanation that can be given is consciousness collapses out of the possibility of seeing light flashes in the second brain, the actual experience.

WTB — Who has conducted those experiments?

GOSWAMI — It was first done by Greenberg at the University of Mexico and then repeated by Peter Frenwick who is a neuro-psychiatrist in London. Then repeated by a fellow named Brokerman whose work I only know in reference. And then finally by Diana Standish at Bastyr University in Seattle.

WTB — I think I'll bang on about free will a little longer and add the element of creating personal reality. I was very amused when you gave me the example of the two people who walk up to a traffic intersection and they both want to cross and they both hit the crosswalk button, and they both want a green light -and so there is this battle of the wills, so to speak. What I seem to get out of your example was that on the quantum level everybody has a fifty-fifty opportunity to effect the quantum field and have whatever the outcome is, the green light go for them as opposed to the red light for the other person — or have I totally got that backwards?

GOSWAMI — No, it is essentially correct, except that you don't do it by the ego's will. It is the one who is more aligned with the will of cosmic consciousness - that is the one that gets the green. The trick is not to have force of our will, which is how we interpret as, you know, — there is a difference between free will and will. What we normally call will is strong-willed people. It is totally conditioned will. It is ego, egotism. That is not what counts. What counts is to lay aside being that will, which takes a stronger will actually if you thing about it, to say 'no' to the ego and become open to cosmic consciousness; a prayerful, submissive attitude but not a submission to any other ego but submission to the divine will. That is what puts us in synchrony with the Divine freedom of choice in which case the choice can be granted.

WTB — So it's not so much the fact that you've willfully decided and deliberately aligned yourself, but that you're automatically in a state of alignment and it is automatically decided; but if you are in a unified state, that is what you would have wanted in the first place.

GOSWAMI — Right, it is a bit circuitous, but when you think about it that is precisely what takes place: that we could not have done otherwise. When we are aligned — in other words, alignment is a process of surrendering, in which case our will - what we call normally will - becomes the free will and synchronized with that Divine will.

WTB — Wow! In others words, thy will be done.

GOSWAMI — Right, exactly.

WTB — Very interesting. There has been some understanding that to get to that place of alignment that basically what we are doing in the neural pathways of our brain, in essence we are turning our brain into a kind of a super conductive interface with quantum reality where there is no resistance. Here we go back to no resistance. Is that a fairly accurate way of looking at it?

GOSWAMI — Well, we have to be a little careful here. Brain makes separate representations of our experiences, and representations of basically mental meaning and vital feeling. Those representations are the most accessible to us that are made in a conjunction of both meaning and feeling. We make representations of our experiences and they help us to act. Nobody is, indeed, against this representation-making capacity of the brain because without it how can we learn.

WTB — The representational ...

GOSWAMI — The representational capacities of the brain - because without them there is no learning. Learning means making such a brain circuit which will be available for later use. When we are "good" the first time, then that is the quantum leap. But the next time I can be "good" just from my brain circuits. Right?

WTB — Right.

GOSWAMI — So what Carl Jung called individuation is actually taking many quantum leaps of being good, being creative, being loving and all that, and making brain circuits. And then the brain circuits will enable you to be good without effort, because the circuit is already there. You don't have to take a quantum leap every time. In other words, ordinary people like us, you and I, if sufficient, negative stimulus is given we will succumb to negativity. We will not be able to be good and good, good. But if we have enough brain circuits then in spite of much negative stimulus we might have a brain circuit that comes to our rescue and we can be positive most of the time. This is why Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs shows that positive mental health is available to only five percent of all people on the planet. And I think five percent is an over estimate. It is probably much less.

WTB — You think it is less than five percent?

GOSWAMI — Well, positive mental health is not very available, is it?

WTB — Apparently not.

GOSWAMI — And we don't even put most of the people to very strong stimuli such as is available in intimate experiences. Because if you take people who normally we see and experience, we see and experience them in rather easy situations, for the emotions are not aroused. But put them with their wives or family, husbands and so forth and if we could be privileged to witness such interaction, which we are not, we would easily see that they may be a very different persona in the presence of such intimate stimuli.

WTB — That's like the old joke about the guru who advises, "You think you are so enlightened? Go spend two weeks with your family." GOSWAMI — That's right, go back to your own village and see if the village people accept you. That village, of course, is very small. It is only the intimate relationships.

WTB — How are you finding your work being received?

GOSWAMI — This is a very, very good question. Well, in one hand my work is getting very widely known. You know, people often tell me that there is a very large number of internet references. So that is very gratifying, but on the other side of it, it is also true that mainstream science is taking hardly any notice of work of the ilk that I represent and a few others also represent. Although they are aware. It is not that they are not aware. But at this stage of the game I think benign neglect works for them. Unless we come to applications, I think chances are not very great that any celebration will take place because God has been rediscovered in science, or consciousness has been understood, the hard questions have been answered, or dualism has been solved. This is too esoteric.

However, breakthroughs are coming. I did write a book called The Quantum Doctor and very, very slowly I am getting invitations from very traditional establishment-type conferences suggesting that is one avenue where some response will come. Once it gradually comes, it will trickle down and can become an avalanche. The other place where I am working very hard right now, and am in the middle of research, is to develop a spiritual economics. Because the challenge is that if we can establish that the paradigm not only applies to subjects like evolution and health and healing, which are still esoteric to most people, but also applies to actually how we are living - right in the middle of our life, about democracy, about capitalism, about education. That is when the paradigm will shift.

WTB — Absolutely, because if it is not applied, what good is it?

GOSWAMI — Exactly, but the point is that today we live very differently. In the 18th Century people read such philosophers as Kant and philosophy was important to people somehow. Today we have lost that. Philosophy is hardly taught in the schools and by college level, philosophy is - of course people have requirements, but those requirements can be done away with taking such minimal courses that, you know, one should be ashamed of it. But that is the way it is. So there is hardly any interest in society. Mainly we learn to pick up information on the computer internet, and philosophy is supposed to be some article that you can borrow from the internet and write papers on that basis. Nothing else needs to be done. Nobody needs to think about anything because of the availability of internet and large number of data, literally we are losing our students. They just copy from the internet and that's it. Nobody has to think anything.

WTB — That's scary. What kind of applied experimental applications do you think it would take to catch mainstream physic's attention?

GOSWAMI — Well, physics and chemistry can be done without any of this. That is the first thing that causes difficulty, because physics and chemistry is about zillions and billions of objects. That is the statistical aspect of quantum physics and you can calculate probabilities. It makes the situation very mathematical, which physics and chemistry can deal with without invoking downward causation and collapse. In those limits the downward causation and collapse become identical with what quantum probabilistic consideration suggests. In chemistry - here is something interesting for you to hear. When there was no solution of the quantum measurement problem then we could at least have taken some solace that there was at least one or two international conferences every year on that subject. And then the problem was solved in 1989 by myself and two others around that time as well, and after that you never had these conferences. Indirectly people know that this problem has been solved, but it is benign. They will never actually explicitly acknowledge that the problem has been solved. And the same thing for quantum physics textbooks. The textbooks previously would just have something about the quantum measurement problem, and now less and less on quantum measurement problem. They will bypass it because if they mention it then it would be dishonest to say that it is still unsolved because a solution is available.

WTB — For our readers, could you do a quick synopsis of the problem of quantum measurement?

GOSWAMI — That is the problem of how possibilities that quantum physics gives us become actual events of experience. How our measurement of the possibilities actually collapses an actuality. In other words, that is collapsing the wave function.

This interview will continue in the February issue of The Bleeping Herald.