Continued from Part 1 [0]

WTB — Is there anything about your new book God Is Not Dead that you think is really pertinent that we have not gotten into so far?

GOSWAMI — Well, fundamentally the rift between God and science occurred in two stages. As you know the first stage was to have Newton assert that heavenly laws are not different from earthly laws. Laws are the same and therefore there is just one science. Initially it was applied to just one science for matter only, and that eventually developed psychology and material psychology and people proposed that all this one science also applies to mind, applies to everything. The basis of this one science is material, everything is matter and there is only upward causation from elementary particles going upward. That's it.

So this is one aspect of it. However the second crucial aspect was life - living. That question was very important. Darwin then made the huge contribution showing that there is evolution. What does evolution do that is new? Newton suggested that all material objects are governed by laws that determined the objects. So how does life fit in? It was believed, at that time, that animals are nothing more than determined machines but that human beings have free will. That is what Descartes said.

WTB — Could you please clarify that?

GOSWAMI — Animals could be fit into machines but Descartes said that human beings have free will. So that philosophy called Modernism dominated. Although Newton's work was okay because it established the machine-determined nature of inanimate nature plus animals, but the question of human beings was the puzzling one. Do human beings have free will or not? That question still remains unsolved. So Darwin's work became the crucial thing there because Darwin said that there is evolution. We have evolved from animals. And since we have evolved from animals, if animals are machines, we must also be machines. So that became the full philosophy. Now with Darwin and Newton, behaviorism could say that we are also machines and we are just conditioned people, conditioned by the environment and not evolution.

WTB — By machines you basically mean a stimulus-response system?

GOSWAMI — In stimulus-response systems, response is determined. That is response can be determined from the history and the physical laws. This is the history of what took place, how we became like this. And then to undo it, we have to undo Newton, which quantum physics does very well. But the application of this new science must also be made in the aspect of evolution, because if Darwin is not negated then still this is very complete. One aspect, a very important aspect of the new science is to have a new theory of evolution which complements Darwinism by the idea that there are quantum leaps of evolution. This explains the fossil gaps that Darwinism cannot explain. The non-locality of consciousness, the biological fossil gaps being explained as quantum leaps of creativity; then very important data here is the data on the distinction of unconscious and conscious, which materialistic thinking cannot do. Then quantum healing: that is an impossible problem for materialism to solve because again there is no cause for this spontaneous healing data. There is no cause for healing. There is no medical intervention. There is nothing medical that was given to these people and yet they spontaneously came out of a very serious disease like cancer. How is that possible? I mean there is no materialist model that can explain overnight healing of cancer.

WTB — Right.

GOSWAMI — So that is very major data. And then reincarnation: we read major data now available for survival after death, as well as reincarnation. That data is a major piece. Dreams are further data. In general, the psychologies that have developed after Freud - depth psychology, Carl Jung and the transpersonal psychology of Abraham Maslow — they have a definite proof of experiences of higher states of consciousness. I have quoted Maslow already and his positive mental health data. So, the higher states of psychological, mental health, those data are very important.

WTB — I'm curious. What would you say comprises the soul, that aspect of self that keeps going in between lives?

GOSWAMI — Right, this is a very interesting question. How this came about is, of course, the idea of how we become individuals. Mind, vital energy, intuitive archetypal body, all these are continuous, one thing. They are not separable into micro-macro. Mind cannot be divided, in other words.

WTB — That is mind with a capital ‘M'?

GOSWAMI — No, this is mind with a small ‘m'. That cannot be divided. It is not possible to think of micro thoughts making up macro thoughts. Thought is just a thought. If mind cannot be divided then we cannot have any structure in the mental domain. So what is "I?" What is my mind versus your mind? The answer is, we are using the same mental possibilities - except by our conditioning and by our genetic buildup, we use particular patterns of mental functioning. That mental functioning is what distinguishes you and me. So we have a functional body depending on the habit patterns that we develop during our growing up period and after that. This part, and this will take a little bit of technical explanation so I won't go into details unless you want me to, but this is the part which can then qualify, not in a material body because that is not any memory of the kind that we make a tape record of. It is not that kind of memory. That is historical memory. It is just a pattern of habit. This pattern of habit is unsolved. It is qualified as modification of the quantum calculus that mind uses.

WTB — A modification of the quantum calculus?

GOSWAMI — Yes, mind consists of quantum possibilities also, right? There is a quantum dynamics which we have not discovered yet for the mind as well. That calculus has a probability structure, too. That probability structure is modified with the way we use the mind. That modification is the modification by mathematics. It is a mathematical modification, not due to physical writing down somewhere — noting it down to physical memory, but rather a more abstract quantum memory sort of thing- mathematical memory.

WTB — Would that quantum abstract form, so to speak, be like a standing wave function?

GOSWAMI — It is even more abstract than standing wave function. The mathematics is already there in other words. The modified mathematics that is modified in the way that I have used my mind, it is already there in the supra mental domain to guide my behavior. Every time I behave, that mathematics automatically comes into play, just like when you drop an object it automatically goes to the ground. But nothing is written on the object. Similarly my mental behavior is not written in my brain, but my mind responds in that way anyway. It is responding to the mathematics. So if I die, if this mathematics is available and by some prior non-local agreement a future being invokes the same mathematics as I did in my life, then that future being will be called my reincarnation.

WTB — Ah — so it's just picking up a pattern.

GOSWAMI — It is picking up a pattern and this is what the scholars call karma. Karma is nothing but a pattern of functioning, mental and vital functioning.

WTB — It makes sense that where you left off one life is where you pick up the next with the same pattern of function.

GOSWAMI — Yes, functioning pattern but a different body. There's a good reason that a different body is needed, because bodies develop entropy. So after a while we lose the elasticity to act properly. We cannot learn any more. We get Alzheimers or some other such serious thing. Most people get some sort of dementia and so we cannot function as well as we must in order to learn more. And there is a lot to learn.

WTB — Well, I'll say. Wow! I must admit, Amit, I don't know where to go from here. My mind is reeling into platonic forms and all sorts of things.

GOSWAMI — Great, great! That will be the basis of another conversation. But coming back to the evidence, this is really a book on both the evidence for God and then the question that is asked, "Is that okay?" So there is all this evidences and then what do we do about it? The thing is, that the evidence upsets people for two reasons. One very basic reason is that the evidence is distributed in various fields. The fact is that the physicist does not read books on transpersonal psychology. But if a physicist reads it, even then the physicist would assume that, "well, it's the personal psychologists know better. Whatever it is, psychologists will examine it. Let that problem be a problem of psychology." And similarly, evolution. If there is a problem with evolution, then the evolutionary biologists deal with it. Another kind of biologist won't bother. So in this way we have fragmented science so much and this is a problem for all of science.

So this problem of whether there is another principle, a new organizing principle, that is needed or not, this problem gets shafted under the carpet very easily, because individually physics has only one problem, the measurement problem, quantum measurement problem. And biology has basically two or three basic problems that it cannot solve, namely evolution, the fossil gaps, namely what is life, the origin of life. Neurophysiology has one problem, the problem of consciousness. It cannot solve how consciousness arises, how perception arises. It cannot solve it. Psychology has the problem of transpersonal psychology and depth psychology, the distinction of conscious and unconscious and how do we get these higher states of consciousness, the peak experiences and so forth. Healing, health, cannot solve the problems of alternative medicines such as Indian Ayurveda or Chinese acupuncture or how homeopathy works. Healing also has the problem of spontaneous healings that they cannot solve. But you see, all are visited in different subjects. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. We have, therefore, a very difficult situation where each can avoid responding to the totality of the problem.

WTB — Right.

GOSWAMI — I will give you an example. I was giving a talk to a physics department audience. As soon as I said consciousness collapses the quantum wave function, immediately one physicist said, "But consciousness is a problem of psychology. How can we comment on it?" You see, and the psychologist will say the same thing, "Quantum physics is the subject of physics. How can we comment on it?"

WTB — And perhaps humanity and God are a function of unity and we need to start thinking in unified ways.

GOSWAMI — Well, that too. You know there are functions of religion. Let religions worry about it. Why should we worry about it? The question is, of course, what can we do about it? It isn't that people avoid the question of God today, non-religious people avoid it. It is that people have become very used to living in a Godless society. There is an advantage because we don't have to anymore abide by values or act by the demands of ethics, because ethical demands do make situations where you have to compromise your deficiency and material level pleasure and earning money and going for power and all that.

It is like, you know, if you are a presidential candidate who believes in God, you cannot be elected because you have to do unethical things today in order to be elected. So, in this way we have made a Godless society almost imperative for all practical people. So now you bring in the question of God and you say that God exists, it presents a huge dilemma. What can we do about it? We don't really want to let God exist and really believe that God has downward causation, and God is active in the work of creative people because we don't want to be responsible for our actions and take this huge responsibility. The question then is, if ethics is a real, scientifically valid subject, which I have shown in this book, then we are in deep trouble. What can we do to re-establish ethics in our society? What can we do to re-establish ethics in our politics, in our education, in our economics and everywhere else? This idea that people who have to now become active and take on upon themselves the practicing of ethics, practicing the quantum values themselves. I call it quantum activism.

WTB — Quantum activism?

GOSWAMI — Quantum activism - the distinction with ordinary activism is very important. In ordinary activism we are trying to change the world while avoiding the responsibility of changing ourselves. In quantum activism we recognize that we are the world, and therefore we not only try to change the world, but we recognize that it is impossible without changing ourselves. But if we change ourselves in synchrony with the world, this is where the religions also miss the boat, we have to change ourselves but it is not an individual thing. It is not an individual situation, salvation. It is really a planetary salvation, because without changing the environment the idea of changing oneself is extremely shortsighted. It does not cognize that we have also a constant evolution that is going on. We cannot evolve. One person's evolution doesn't produce any evolution of the society. Society has to evolve also and consciousness demands it.

WTB — Doesn't each individual's consciousness affect the quantum field however and help uplift society?

GOSWAMI — Of course it does. But only if it is in synchrony in a certain sense. And that synchrony can be more effective if we are aware of it and from the get-go do it in a collective way. In other words, when the intention is there for a non-local participation of everyone, synchronized with my own evolutionary change, then the change can take root also non-locally. Otherwise it becomes individual at the level that other people learn from. You are only local. For example, all the effect of the great spiritual masters has been local. Their realizations largely went unshared from other people. That is because they were not aware of the import of making collective intention and become collectively organized, not only in the process of teaching, but also in the process of realization itself.

WTB — Yes, well, that's of course the work that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has been involved with along with John Hagelin.

GOSWAMI — Yes, those people have recognized the power of non-locality. But even then they have a materialist bias in terms of what consciousness is. So that doesn't help very much. With the present approach, all materialist biases have been removed and then we should learn to do it properly. And it will only get better. I am not saying I have the final word on any of this. But it will only get better provided we totally cognize the fact that consciousness is the ground of being, and everything is made of consciousness.