Guy Spiro: Amit, I usually like to start by asking people to briefly tell their story. How did you get from where you started to where you are now with your work and your understanding?

Amit Goswami: I’ll tell you two stories. One begins in 1973. I’m a materialist and work in theoretical nuclear physics. Giving a talk at a nuclear physicist conference, I found myself being full of jealous energy and felt that I’d given a very bad rendition of my work. Everyone else was representing their work well and getting all the attention, and poor me is not getting anything. This goes on for the whole day. At one o’clock in the morning I find myself finishing up a second packet of Tums but still have enormous heartburn. This is at Asilomar, a place on Monterey Bay, California. So I go out on the veranda into the ocean air and all of a sudden I have this absolutely coming from nowhere thought, “Why do I live this way?” I was very surprised to hear this from wherever and took it seriously. That’s when I began to ask the question, is there any way to live better, with more integration of my work and my life? That began the journey.

     Fast forward to 1985. I’m working on a quantum measurement problem. I’ve found a problem that makes me happy, much to the puzzlement and disappointment of my department, who put a lot of pressure on me, but no matter, I am pursuing this for the last five years. But the problem is very difficult, it’s the problem of the observer effect. What is it in the observer that can transform quantum possibility waves into actual events? I’m stuck with the idea that, of course, observer consciousness is a brain phenomenon. I’m still a materialist, but I’m flexible enough to listen to other people, so I’m talking to mystics a lot.

     This particular evening I’m talking to a mystic name Joel Morwood. He takes the usual mystical attitude and I take my usual haughty physicist attitude, so we are getting nowhere. But then he gets emotional and says, “You have scientist blinders on, that’s why you are not seeing things right. There is nothing but God.” I was very puzzled by this and then, all of a sudden, the words made sense to me. There was an abrupt turn in my consciousness. I had been hearing those words from mystics for some time. Of course, in my childhood I had an upbringing with the Upanishads and the Vedas in India, so I thought I knew the words, but I didn’t.

     At that moment, a veil lifted and I knew them. Not only did I know the words, I also knew that although everybody thinks that science can be done only with materialist metaphysics, that a scientist must wear the materialist straightjacket, otherwise he can’t do science; at that moment I knew that science can be built on the new metaphysics and that consciousness is the ground of all being. There is nothing but God, but stated in modern terms, consciousness is the ground of all being.

     That brought me full circle. I found the basis of a new paradigm and started developing it. I have already found some answers for not only the quantum measurement problem, but for a new psychology, a new biology, a new enterprise medicine and my latest work is developing a spiritual economics.

GS: Those who insist on living in a strictly physical universe are really limiting their options.

AG: Absolutely. When you think that everything is made of matter, which is such a limiting assumption, and that everything is coming from the basis of elementary particles and their interaction, another limitation, what happens is that it robs the human being of free will and free choice. It robs us of real creativity. It robs us of the idea that we can change, we can transform, and it robs us of the idea that mind brings us meaning and there are values in our life. What Plato called archetypes: love, beauty, justice, truth; these aren’t even relevant. Whatever is valuable for the human being is all shot in the materialist approach as either a meaningless epiphenomenon of the dance of elementary particles or as something that evolved from our Darwinian evolution as an impetus for survival. These are both very limiting ways of looking at these very lofty ideas and the human being is not properly treated. We try to live the way we live, and part of it is good and part of it is bad, really bad at this stage or our evolution. What happens is what is happening right now, calamity, problems that we cannot solve with our materialist metaphysics.

GS: You mentioned the Upanishads you grew up with. It’s fascinating that when you get to what I term the spiritual technology behind the religions, it’s all the same stuff. It’s all talking about exactly what we’re talking about. The Judeo-Christian system for instance, at essence, is about consciously shaping the unformed into the formed.

AG: I think that is totally correct. Eventually, I think we’ll begin an era I call Post Secularism where the science of spirituality will be acknowledged by everyone. A large consensus will be built and we’ll see mainstream scientists and the religious fundamentalist give up their dogmas just a little bit, so that a conversation can begin. That’s all we need. There is scientific basis for most of our spiritual instincts and we can begin a dialogue for integrating the two in our psyche.

GS: Earlier you mentioned the observer effect. What I have found is that no matter how fast I spin around, I can’t see reality shaping before me.

[laughter]

AG: It’s not that the observer shapes the reality in the ego. That is the biggest misunderstanding of it. Some got a little carried away by the whole thing. We create our own reality sounds good, but this is where misconceptions occur.

GS: We are deep into a paradigm shift from one age to another, whatever one may think of that. One way I tend to put it is a big part of the old paradigm was that the lower self was to surrender to the higher self, which works. But the new paradigm is that you realize that you are your higher self.

AG: You are your higher self, yes. The surrendering is a letting go of identifying with the conditioned aspects, the storyline that we build of ourselves. Along with the storyline there is a part of us which is our character. This character is a better identity in the sense that it’s not bound to particular local stuff. This character, it turns out, comes from non-local memory and this is very good because this is our stepping stone to that cosmic consciousness that is beyond our local individuality. As we begin to understand our true nature, we begin to find the way to creative freedom. This is why I have started this movement called Quantum Activism where our goal is to activate the desire to reconnect to this higher consciousness that is us. We are completely capable of acting both in our ego and in this higher consciousness, and when you do that, your life becomes full. We then can make the right decisions and solve our problems, which cannot be solved at the same level that we created them. We created them from our ego; we must go beyond ego in order to solve them.

GS: Somebody really famous once said something about the truth, and it sets you free?

[laughter]

AG: I love it.

GS: When you apply what we’re talking about to his teachings, or the Buddha’s, or Lao Tzu’s or any of them, they all make sense and they all work.

AG: Exactly, we are coming from different creeds and different religions, but when we recognize that there is only one multicultural science of spirituality, then all of our differences can be settled. There’s no need to abolish our individual religions, no need to even abolish materialism as a creed, but we need to talk with each other and open our hearts enough so that when a problem arises, we can solve it in a way that is satisfactory to everyone.

GS: Bring it down to something useful to the regular individual. How can people use what we’re talking about to improve their lives?

AG: Quantum Activism, the method that I, myself, am pursuing and helping other people to pursue, has two prongs. One prong is personal transformation and the other is working on social systems to create a more healthful environment for people to transform. In our personal life, for a long time, we have misunderstood much of the spiritual method practices. Now proper understanding is coming and we know the process with which spiritual transformation works with the creative process. We know the stages of the creative process. We know that it is a beautiful dance of doing and being, and a more relaxed life style is necessary instead of the complete do-do-do lifestyle that we pursue in the West. This is understood now, and will facilitate people’s working with creativity. You have to take quantum leaps of creativity in order to transform, in order to be the real change in our life. I sometimes put it this way: “do-be-do-be-do,” I’m doing, I’m being. When you do that, then results come. We get insights, and on the basis of these creative insights, which is a much stronger intuition, we can change. We use these insights as a vehicle for change. Still, we have to walk our talk and go though a process of change, but that comes because now I am convinced that I need to change. I also know how I need to change, therefore, I can do it. That’s the personal part.

     The second prong is the social part. As you know, our social systems were discovered in the 17^th-18^th centuries as modernism, a system of philosophy where both mind and matter were valid, although developed in a dualistic philosophy, which Descartes gave us. Because this dualistic philosophy is inadequate it gives us a paradox because the question becomes, how does something not material interact with material? All these social systems were developed within a philosophy where mind was still relevant. In materialism, mind is not relevant. It does not have any independent causal efficacy. With materialism shaping the social systems, democracy, capitalism, liberal education, they’ve all become very corrupted and distorted. They are not working in the way that the founders intended. Today we don’t have Jeffersonian democracy, we don’t have Adam Smith’s capitalism, not that Adam Smith was perfect, but we don’t have the intents of Jeffersonian democracy or Adam Smith’s capitalism. The intent for both was to spread the processing of meaning to many more people. Before these systems came about, we had feudal systems where only a few people got to practice meaning in a personal way, meaning of their life, meaning of the world, meaning of the Gospels ...

GS: You believed and did what you were told.

AG: Exactly, you had to pursue somebody else’s meaning. That’s just not adequate, so we had the dark ages. With Jefferson and Adam Smith and many more contributing to it, what happened was a tremendous liberation. This system, democracy and capitalism, along with liberal education, had this capacity. With materialism, they’ve become narrow again, and notice the tendency today, it’s not that we want to spread the wealth, this has become an oxymoron in American politics. Anyone talking about spreading the wealth is a socialist. But spreading the wealth is not the issue, the issue is that if you have tremendous gaps between the rich and the poor, what happens is that, again, meaning processing becomes fairly compartmentalized. Only the rich get to do it. You have dropped the standard of living, and what you formerly called middle class is being pressed into the poor class where they have to spend every waking hour making things match, namely making a living, so there is no spare time to process meaning. So we are creating that same feudal situation which led to the dark ages. That’s what is happening and that’s why more and more people don’t understand. Their reaction times have gone haywire, they have poor attention span and their comprehension of meaning is zilch. Why is that? Because they don’t have time to process meaning anymore and this is the issue. It is not just the localization of wealth. It is robbing ordinary people, people who formerly were middle class, who had large amounts of leisure time and had the opportunity to process deep meaning. They’re being shoved aside, so much so that all they have time for is a little bit of entertainment, hence we’ve gotten rid of literature, we’ve gotten rid of poetry, because people don’t have any time to read high literature, they only have time for trashy entertainment.

GS: From the point of view of the super rich, when you have a powerful middle class, it gets uppity, and you have a problem with that. When you were just talking it struck me that it kind of comes full circle into believing in a physical universe, because if you live in a physical universe, then there are finite resources. There’s only so much energy and so much of what it takes to live, and if you don’t get enough, you’re just plain out of luck.

AG: Exactly, so this is the first problem that we have created for ourselves, not realizing that our riches are inside of us. We must look at things more fully, not just recognizing our material dimension, but also recognizing the mental dimension of meaning, the vital dimension of feeling, and especially, most importantly, the supermental dimension of values and archetypes.

GS: I sometimes make my radical physicalist friends angry when I say, “Look, the first thing you have to realize is that it isn’t real.”

AG: What makes it real is the subtle dimensions. The physical is very useful because it gives us a way of making representations that we can look at of the subtle. So nobody can ignore the physical, nobody should, but at the same time, to make the physical supreme is to get rid of why the physical exists at all. If there is no subtle, then there is no physical. In that sense, you are completely right.

GS: You know the bit about the fish—give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. I’ve added another level to it—teach him the true source of fish and he can feed the world.

AG: Wonderful. Yes! That is why there is the saying, “give me that knowledge with which I can solve all problems, knowing which, I can see through every problem there is.” That is the knowledge of the fact that we have freedom to choose, we have creativity, and that knowledge is just so basic, so empowering. This is the goal of Quantum Activism. I would like, in my lifetime, if possible, but within the next few decades, to see humanity take a major quantum leap, where creativity is not just for a select few, but will truly enrich the life of literally millions, if not billions, of people.

GS: I’ve come to view it as that it’s really all there for us to have fun with. We let it get out of control and we have to get it back under control. I often say that we have to stop identifying with mind. People really do tend to think that the noise in their heads is who they really are.

AG: They have to get rid of this supremacy of rational thinking at the expense of feeling and intuition. Rational thinking is computable, so in materialism, only rational thinking is permitted because all you have is your mind as a computer. But we are not just a computer, we are capable of feeling, we are capable of intuition. Those are the ways that we get out of our computer being. It is very important for us to engage in feelings of love, feelings of positive emotions, and similarly, it is very important for us to heed what our intuitions are telling us about ourselves, about our past, about the meanings of our lives that are going to unfold in this very lifetime.

GS: We have to make this accessible. It has to be presented in a way that anybody on the street can understand and start to make use of it.

AG: We have to teach it in the schools. What has happened is that the schools emphasize too much the three “R”s. Schools have become job training places and this is not what liberal education is supposed to be. Liberal is the same word as liberation, liberty, and that’s about freedom, and what is freedom without creativity? Ordinary freedom is the ability to choose what you want to be in your life, but freedom is more than that, it is also freedom to choose the unknown. Freedom to choose the unknown is what creativity is about and we have to teach that to our children. They have a natural ability to learn the unknown and we should fan it and develop it, instead of making it into job training, which was not the intention of people like Jefferson. We are literally violating the human spirit, human evolution, the direction of human evolution, when we narrow our education in this way. Not only do we have to change our social systems of democracy and capitalism back to the original intention, but we also have to put real emphasis on education.

GS: Please talk a little bit about your latest book and your movie.

AG: There are two new books, one is God Is Not Dead and the other is Creative Evolution. God Is Not Dead is a summary of the new science of spirituality. What it does is show the evidence for God. It’s really an evidence for downward causation and God is seen as the agency of downward causation. What I mean by downward is not to designate God as an emperor sitting in outer space looking down upon us, but instead down from a higher consciousness. Because it’s a higher consciousness we can call the causation from it downward causation. So, one tries from quantum possibilities to choose one facet of the possibilities to bring out a particular event of experience at that particular moment.

GS: We do have to understand that the creative process is from the higher rates of vibration to the lower.

AG: Right. That’s why we call it downward causation, not to imply that simplistic picture of God that people have. God is just this agency of downward causation. You can call that agency by any other name you like. I call it Quantum Consciousness. Sometimes people call it the Akashic Field, using a Sanskrit word. Akashic basically means non-local.

GS: Sometimes I call it George.

[laughter]

AG: Why not? So God Is Not Dead talks about the proof that has come, scientific evidence for downward causation. Quantum physics makes it clear what downward causation consists of, but it also makes it very clear that downward causation comes with indelible signatures. What I mean by that is that the quantum signatures of downward causation are three properties. Two of them will be quite easy to understand, the third one is a little obscure. They are non-locality, signal-less communication—communication without the intermediary of signals—which is quite familiar to us because ESP is now believed by almost ninety percent of people to be real, and there’s really so much evidence now. In fact, there’s even evidence for what is supposedly material information transfer.

GS: You’re talking about particles can be at two places at once?

AG: Almost like that. It transfers. The information that one particle has transfers to another particle, so to speak, and therefore it’s almost like somebody being at two places at one time, because information is at two places at one time without a signal. So it’s tremendous non-locality. This cannot be stimulated by material interaction, this is the best part of non-locality. Non-locality cannot be stimulated by material interaction of any kind. Therefore, you have an absolutely definitive signature that we have something new, downward causation. It cannot be stimulated by outward causation from the elementary particles.

     Similarly, we also have discontinuity. That’s another signature of downward causation. All material interactions are continuous. So discontinuity cannot occur in that description, whereas we find evidence for discontinuity even in biological evolution. This I have shown in much more detail in a book called The Creative Evolution which is my newest book. I have shown that the gaps in the fossil records that have been an enigma to Darwinism can be explained by assuming that we have biological creativity playing a role in the biological evolution, and this creativity consists of quantum leaps of discontinuity. This is why we have fossil gaps. There are fossil gaps because there are no fossils. There is no time to lay down fossils. Epochs can be very quick, instantaneous, the transformation from one species into another.

GS: We have seen instances lately of shockingly fast evolutionary process haven’t we?

AG: Exactly. Darwinism can’t explain this because Darwinism is a slow process. It’s a slow accumulation of changes, variations and nature selecting among the basis of survivability. But those are very slow and continuous processes, whereas epochs are sometimes compared to punctuation marks in otherwise continuous prose. However you picture them, there are very fast epochs of evolution and it’s just undeniable. So how do you explain them? There seem to be two templates of evolution. There is a gradual evolution which Darwinism can and does explain. But there is also macro-evolution, large scale evolution which always seems to take place with this very adaptive epoch understanding, quantum leaps are the best way of explaining them.

GS: You took quantum leaps on that balcony on the west coast and in the conversation in 1985.

AG: Yes, I did, and I have given all the arguments in the book Creative Evolution. That version is that in biological evolution, consciousness makes similar quantum leaps of creativity in the epochs of evolution. You get many other consequences of this theory. In fact, you get a new biology as an additional benefit for this approach. And we need a new biology because the current biology has no space for feeling, no space for intuition, and the new biology establishes the human being as a full human being, not just a materialist machine.

GS: Excellent. Please tell us about the movie.

AG: This is about Quantum Activism, the book that I’m now working on. The movie is a pre-cursor, an introduction to the book which will have more details, but the movie talks about this process that is going on. There is a paradigm shift. The movie starts with that message and we get into the question of, if there is now evidence for downward causation and an agency for it that we may call God, then what are we doing about it? What can we do about it? My answer is Quantum Activism. We can change our self according to the guidelines that quantum physics, downward causation gives us, and we can change our society. We can give a helping hand to our fellow human beings to make the same changes, which amounts to also changing our social systems. Because, as we said earlier, our social systems have been so corrupted now by materialism they are literally closing up the avenues of creativity and love and higher values and higher meanings for ordinary people.

GS: And that’s not fun!

AG: That’s not fun and that’s not the intention. Who wants to live that way? That is not 21^st century living, it is going back to the 16^th-17^th century, pre-revolution, feudal way of living and we cannot go backwards. Evolution never goes backwards.

GS: It begs the question, what’s the point?

AG: Exactly. So we must get back the meaning of our life and we must explore the meaning of our life. We must do what the founding fathers told us, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

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