The Self-Aware Universe
by Amit Goswami

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Book Reviews of The Self-Aware Universe

Book Review:

MATTER, MIND and DESTINY
Summary: 4 Stars

Review by:
David S. Devor
Exec. Director, Project Mind Foundation
http://www.webscope.com/project_mind/project_mind.html

Copyright 1995 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

If the matter/mind, science/spirit question interests you, this is a book you should read. It is rich in fact, observation and speculation and constitutes a serious contribution to the new proliferation of books attempting to bridge temporal and transcendent worlds. If you are not a physics buff and yet are a little familiar with popular notions of quantum mechanics, you may wish to read the introductory material that runs until page 24, and then skip over the technical sections to part three on page 147. This section is called "Self-Reference: How The One Becomes Many" and includes chapters entitled "Exploring the Mind-Body Problem," "In Search of the Quantum Mind," "The `I' of consciousness" and "Integrating the Psychologies." Part 3 is concerned with the issues themselves while everything up to page 147 is concerned mainly with physics and the question of non-locality. This technical section will be especially useful for those who wish to see Goswami's arguments anchored in physics theory.

What we have here is a physicist and associates with more than a passing acquaintance with spiritual matters, applying insights gleaned from physics to a wider understanding of life. The "new paradigm" he offers is not so new but Goswami does succeed in drawing fairly solid analogies between recent thinking in physics and the world of spirit and meaning. He bases himself on "monistic idealism" which he claims is "the correct philosophy for science in view of quantum physics"[p.54]. The idea of monistic idealism is, roughly, that the prime reality is outside space-time and generates all temporal or "local" phenomena. But this is about as close as Goswami ever comes to delivering on the promise of his subtitle, "How Consciousness Creates the Material World." So if this is what interests you, be warned that this book is not a work on cosmology.

The crux of the argument is that nonlocal, distance-independent, instantaneous effects have their source in a transcendent domain outside of space-time. Goswami begins by illustrating the relationship between consciousness and quantum measurement and claims that it is observation or awareness that collapses a "quantum wave" into a local, observable phenomenon.

The implication is that collapse (and thus observation) creates the restricted temporal world. Limited awareness and subjectivity derive from time-lags, memory and "tangled hierarchies." I quote: "According to monistic idealism, objects are already in consciousness as primordial, transcendent, archetypal possibility forms. The collapse consists not of doing something to objects via observing but of choosing and recognizing the result of that choice"(p.84). Goswami claims that our choices are made nonlocally and not in the ego where we think they are made. Thus the source of consciousness and quantum action is nonlocal, outside the time- space continuum. Their local expressions are the local results we normally and unwittingly call "reality."

Another key element, a corollary of monistic idealism, is the notion that mind is not an epiphenomenon of the brain but that the brain is a physical expression of mind that mediates between local and nonlocal (transcendant) reality by acting as a quantum measuring device. "The conviction has been growing among many physicists that the brain is an interactive system with a quantum mechanical macrostructure as an important complement to the classical neuronal assembly"[p.169]. Consciousness (usually outside awareness) is shared by us all but we are unaware of our unlimited, everpresent consciousness which originates outside of space-time. The "self" is defined as "the a relationship between conscious experience and the immediate physical environment"[p.199].

As deeply as this book probes into the theoretical details of matter and psychology, it disappoints in the vagueness of its recommendations for the future where it resorts to fluff. "I propose that science and religion in the future perform complementary functions -- science laying the groundwork in an objective fashion for what needs to be done to be done regain enchantment, and religion guiding people through the process of doing it" [p.216]. "In the new science, which infuses a new worldview, we draw upon science and religion and ask practitioners of both to come together as co-investigators and co-developers of a new order"[p.224].

Where Goswami comes closest to raising cogent possibilities for the future is in chapter 16, "Inner and Outer Creativity." Here he touches on aspects such as the nonlocality of creativity and that it involves new contexts. But he neglects, entirely, the motor of creativity and the imperative of all life - desire - including motivation and commitment. According to T.Kun's new book, Project Mind - The Conscious Conquest of Man & Matter Through Accelerated Thought (Unimedia, Indian Rocks, FL, 1993), desire, calling and commitment, are the essence of Creation and of the creativity that will eventually allow us to bridge locality and nonlocality - science and spirit.

According to Kun, science, by addressing the enigma of matter, is already engaged in the highest calling of spirituality. All that is lacking is the level of intensity that characterizes the best of spiritual striving in order to turn the entire human body into an creative intrument of vision. Thus "holistic science" would begin to give our body, which in its entirety is really a brain-mind, its full expression of what Goswami calls its "quantum mechanical" potential. We would thus be filling our conscious role in granting nonlocality its rightful expression within the local temporal world which, for us, is destined to be the receptacle of the transcendent and of which the ephemeral matter of this world is the mere crust.

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