Amit Goswami - The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicists Guide to Enlightenment

The institutional separation of science and spirituality began in the seventeenth century in the West when the philosopher Ren Descartes divided reality into mind (the domain of religion) and matter (the domain of science). This division spread to Asia through the British domination of the East in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The separatist paradigm of science, developed further by Newton and others, gave way, however, in the twentieth century to a new paradigm, quantum physics. This new understanding has created a window in the boundary wall separating science and spirituality. This book is one of the early explorations of this promising window.

The word quantum means a discrete quantity, and it (rightly) elicits images of tiny submicroscopic objects. Indeed, it is with submicroscopic phenomena that quantum physics began. But after almost a century of using it to delve into the mystery of matter, it is clear that quantum physics by itself is not complete; the observer, consciousness, is necessary to complete it. Logic dictates, as I demonstrate, that this consciousness, necessary for the closure of quantum physics, is the same consciousness that mystics throughout the world and recorded history have encountered. This cannot be a coincidence.

Thus opens the visionary window, the opportunity to invite into science the idea of consciousness as the ground of all being and to recognize it as the metaphysical basis for a new paradigm of sciencea science within consciousness.

For many decades materialists have attempted to subjugate the spiritual territory, to explain away spirituality as an emergent epiphenomenon of matter and material interactions. As a result, spiritual philosophers, especially in the West, have become somewhat defensive. Part of their defense has been to chart out territories: science applies to lower aspects of reality, to the behavior of matter and life and mind; spiritual philosophies and religions apply to the higher aspects of reality. But this Cartesian truce has outlived its usefulness and reflects an unnecessary insecurity.

The same defensive wisdom tried to maintain the science/spirituality divide by claiming that science changes and therefore it is not to be trusted as a path toward the eternal spirit. I agree that spirit is eternal, and science must be based within the truth of eternal spirit. But within the eternal spirit, there is the question of cosmology and its evolution, which spiritual traditions themselves are forever trying to decipher. This is where science can be a valuable co-contributor.

The triumph of the separatist Newtonian paradigm was its success in explaining the cosmos without God, without consciousnessor so it seemed. But then paradoxes kept showing up, and anomalous data, not only in quantum physics but also in biology and psychology. It is a fact that Newtonian biology cannot explain life or health or cognition.

The new science within consciousness acknowledges the role of consciousness in cosmology and in the evolution of the cosmos, including biological evolution. This I promise to demonstrate. The new cosmology, not surprisingly, is found to be quite consonant with the ancient vision of spiritual traditions, which is helping to build it. And reassuringly, the current Newtonian paradigm of science remains valid within its established arena of applicability.

The book is not only about the contribution of spiritual traditions in building a new integrative science; in the last part of the book I show that the new science can repay its debt by helping us understand the efficacy of spiritual practices. Give-and-take between science and spirituality thus applies all the way, as it should for the two most comprehensive endeavors of humanity.

The cartography of inner space I offer is complete and satisfying and is consonant with all the spiritual traditions of the world. However, for setting forth this map, I have used many Eastern concepts and terms (most often Sanskrit) simply because the Eastern terminology is very precise in this realm.

In The Self-Aware Universe I argued, convincingly I hope, that consciousness is the ground of all being and that this metaphysics is a more inclusive and appropriate one for present and future science. In the present book I show how the new metaphysics can deal with what Ken Wilber and others call the great chain of beingfrom nonlife to life to beings with mind to soul to spirit. With this extension of scientific cosmology and the new breakthroughs of thought developed in this book about the methodologies of science and spiritual traditions, I then show that an integration of science and spirituality is now an accomplished fact. In this way, if The Self-Aware Universe can be compared to Newton's breakthrough that started modern science, The Visionary Window can be compared to the subsequent developments by Maxwell and Einstein that completed the classical physics worldview.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of living in the world today is compartmentalization, torn as we are between two competing worldviewsone the godless, rationalized creation of the old separatist Newtonian science, the other the spiritual knowledge that resonates abidingly in our hearts. I offer this book to you, the reader, as a guide to the practice of quantum yoga.