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"Quantum measurements
inject our consciousness into the arena of the so-called objective world. There is no paradox in the delayed-choice experiment
if we give up the idea that there is a fixed and independent material world even when we are not observing it. Ultimately,
it boils down to what you, the observer, want to see. "— AMIT GOSWAMI, The Self-Aware Universe
Daniel Pinchbeck,
in his excellent book “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, expresses a good
deal of interest in the work of Amit Goswami.
Excerpt from Pinchbeck’s book:
Advancing
the work of Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics, the physicist Amit Goswami proposes that the paradoxes of quantum
mechanics—nonlocality, action-at-a- distance, quantum uncertainty, and so on—can only be resolved through the
hypothesis that consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality of the universe. Instead of a dualistic split between
mind and matter, or subject and object, Goswami puts forth a philosophy that he calls “monistic idealism.” According
to this position, “the consciousness of the subject in a subject-object experience is the same consciousness that is
the ground of all being. Therefore, consciousness is unitive. There is only one subject-consciousness, and we are that consciousness,”
he writes in his 1993 book, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. Goswami posits
a “brain-mind” system in which the physical brain functions as a measuring and recording device, following the
rules of classical physics, while a “quantum component of the brain-mind…is the vehicle for conscious choice
and for creativity.”
It is the activity of consciousness, determining
the “quantum collapse” of a wave-form into a particle, that brings the world into being. “Consciousness
is the agency that collapses the wave of a quantum object, which exists in potential, making it an immanent particle in the
world of manifestation,” Goswami writes. Our subjective awareness arises as a result of a “tangled hierarchy”
in the brain, a closed loop of self-reference similar to the famous “liar’s paradox” (the man from Crete
who insists, “All Cretans are liars”). Since quantum collapse can only occur through a physical brain, the ego
is “an assumed identity that the free-willing consciousness dons in the interest of having a reference point.”
Esoteric disciplines and techniques of meditation teach us to observe our subjectivity, our ego-hood, with its continuous
babble of thoughts and worries, from an outside perspective, a “witness consciousness.” By doing this, we jump
out of our individually conditioned viewpoint, the self-referential circuit, and take the transcendent perspective.
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