Amit Goswami is a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon Institute for Theoretical Physics since 1968, teaching physics for 32 years. After a period of distress and frustration in his private and professional life starting at the age 38, his research interests shifted to quantum cosmology, quantum measurement theory, and applications of quantum mechanics to the mind-body problem. He became best known as one of the interviewed scientists featured in the 2004 film "What the Bleep Do We Know?". Goswami is also featured in the recent documentary about the Dalai Lama entitled "Dalai Lama Renaissance", and stars in the newly released documentary "The Quantum Activist".

Originally from India, Goswami received his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta in physics in 1964, from whence he moved to the United States early in his career. Fully retired as a faculty member since 2003, he is now engaged in far–reaching national and international speaking engagements. He teaches fairly regularly at the Ernest Holmes Institute, the Philosophical Research University in L.A.; Pacifica in Santa Barbara, CA; and UNIPAZ in Portugal, and is a member of the advisory board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where he was a senior scholar in residence during 1998 to 2000.

Science and spirituality

In the late 1980s Goswami developed an idealist interpretation of quantum mechanics, inspired in part by philosophical ideas drawn from Advaita Vedanta and theosophy. Calling his theory "monistic idealism", he claims it is not only "the basis of all religions worldwide" but also the correct philosophy for modern science. In contrast to materialistic conventional science, he claims that universal consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all existence, in congruence with mystic sages. Consciousness, deemed as the precursor of physicality, arises from conscious observation through a process intimately connected to wavefunction collapse in a quantum measurement. Once the assumption that there is an objective reality independent of consciousness is put aside, the paradoxes of quantum physics are explainable, according to Goswami.

As a pioneer of a self-styled multidisciplinary scientific paradigm, he refers to himself as a "quantum activist" engulfing in research on the "Science within consciousness", which comprises and explains the "downward causation" and the upwards drift in the fields of physics, biology, and psychology and more recently the healing arts, thus resulting in varied theories of integral medicine based on five interchanging levels of existence: the physical, the vital, the mental, the supra-mental intellect and the limitless bliss state.

Musings

Goswami is in favor of lucid dreaming, which simultaneously allows adoption of the equipotency of the waking and the dreaming state and precipitates creativity. This skill, so he claims, has provided him instantaneous insights regarding superconductivity in regard to the structure of the atomic nuclei. Following this he discovered the self-owned illusion that mind and brain are identical. Rather tabooed and rarefied topics like death, reincarnation and immortality drew Goswami's interest of research.

Quotations by Amit Goswami

"Consciousness is the ground of all being."

"Then I had a dream that felt like an admonition to me. I heard it so clearly: 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead is correct. It's your job to prove it!' […] One of those [big dreams] can change your life."

"Old paradigmers […] will take a long time to change."

"We have to introduce consciousness into science, but to do this consciousness must have some structure to manifest itself. That structure requires mind, vital energies, supra-mentality, soul in other words."

"Mystics, contrary to religionists, are always saying that reality is not two things -God and the world- but one thing, consciousness. […] The problem with science has always been that most scientists believe that science must be done within a different monistic framework, one based on the primacy of matter. […] quantum physics showed us that we must change that myopic prejudice of scientists, otherwise we cannot comprehend quantum physics. So now we have science within consciousness, a new paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness that is gradually replacing the old materialist science. […] the new paradigm resolves many […] paradoxes of the old paradigm and explains much anomalous data."

To Learn More

Consciousness causes collapse - Integral thought

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