Science and Spirituality: A Quantum Integration (History of Science, Philosohpy and Culture in Indian Civilization)

$24
Item Code: NAF312
Publisher: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Author: Amit Goswami and Maggie Goswami
Language: English
Edition: 2006
ISBN: 8121508169
Pages: 197
Cover: Hardcover
Other Details 9.0 Inch x 6.0 Inch
Weight 400 gm
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Book Description
About the Book

The four-hundred year spilt between science and spirituality is now bridged. With the publication of Science and Spirituality: A Quantum Integration, the authors have demonstrated not only the long suspected metaphysical unity of science and spirituality but also their cosmological and methodological unity. Crucial to the new integration are ideas of quantum physics and quantum leaps, which embody a new science based on the primacy of consciousness as propounded in the Upanishads. Goswamis show in these paradoxes of quantum physics is resolved on the basis of a spiritual universe but also well-known paradoxes of life, mind, and health. With equally competent exposition of scientific theory and experimental data and spiritual cosmologies and practices, the authors take you through a scientific exploration of spirituality that is truly breathtaking. Even ideas of survival after death, reincarnation, and immortality are included. All the monumental traditions of India, Vedanta, Yoga and Tantra, become alive in their connectedness with this newest science within consciousness. This book will be useful for scholars and general readers as well.

About the Author

Amit Goswami is Professor of Physics in the Institute of Theoretical Science at Oregon University, Eugene. He is the author of numerous scientific papers, and two physics texts, including a textbook on quantum mechanics. He has written extensively on the theoretical physics, science and philosophy.

Maggie Goswami is the co-author with Amit Goswami of The Cosmic Dancers Exploring the Physics of Science Fiction and the Self Aware Universe how consciousness creates the Material world.

Foreword

The Godless view of science is not new. It has been differently articulated in different cultures, eastern and western. The Samkhva, Carvaka, Bauddha, Jaina and Vaiesika tradition of thought in India, though godless both in their inspiration and formulation, have been nonetheless associated with the promotion of various forms of science, natural and moral. The followers of these traditions, in spite of being atheist in the received sense has their own forms of dharma and theories of knowledge, jnana and vijnana.

In the west too many scientists of eminence, on their own admission, had been atheist or agnostic. Many others like Copernicus and newton, deeply religious in their life and belief, fetl no need of introducing the concept of God in their scientific works. One must admit her that neither the concept scientific works.one must admit here that neither the concept of god, dualist, theis, pantheist, nor that of science is sastra, vidya, uijnana, wissenschaft is unique. Coming close to our own time Einstein is found to have conceived god as harmony and sustained by feelings of punishments and reward, love and longing and cosmic unity, in that order. A personal God interfering with the causal course of nature is unacceptable to him. When with the realism of science and its cognitive claim religion is sought to be reconciled at emotive level, the unequal terms of reconciliation suggests the super venience of science over religion. Even if we speak, as Spinoza and Einstein do, of intellectual love of reality and highlight the affinity between the ideas of Buddha, Democritus, Kanada and Francis of Assisi, the balance between science and religion is not restored, at least not to an equal level or degree.

The concept of spirituality, like that of science is not entirely free form ambiguity. The former seems to be more comprehensive than the latter. Even those who are pronouncedly committed to materialism physicalism or naturalism find nothing wrong in liberally using the expression spirituality in aesthetic and ethical contexts. Realists like Einstein and materialists like Marx and Lenin are prepared to use it also in hard scientific domains. Reality and beauty go together and therefore, it is said, theories mapping reality are found to be simple and consciousness to a secondary or tertiary level of being. Scientific explanation of the phenomena relating to life and consciousness it is claimed, consists in their reducibility at least in Principle, to physical and causal laws. Life and consciousness may appearance from it. This is basically where the quantum physicist departs from the relativistic physics.

The epic battle of scientific ideas between Einstein and his followers, on the one hand, Niels Bohr and his followers, on the other, is bound to remind one of the similar battles between Nyaya, Vaisedika, Advaita, Vedanta and Buddhism on the nature of space and time. In the European tradition, we recall the debate between Newton Leibniz on the nature of gravitation. Often the debate between Einstein and Bohr has been represented under the title causalism versus probabilism. The contribution of the explores of a middle path is also very notable. The discerning historian of contemporary physics finds that refined and enriched by the ideas of Max Born, Heisenberg, von Neumann, and Schrodinger the controversy between Einstein and Bohr is being extended now by thinkers like Stephen Hawking on the one hand, and those like Roger Penrose on the other. Needless to mention, many authors have joined the debate imparting critical and creative dimensions to it.

But the main question which fascinates many students of this debate like Amit Goswami and Maggie Goswami is the role of consciousness in understanding the physical world. Does the modern scientific cosmology require us to postulate a cut between the mind and world or, to put it differently, between matter and consciousness? Firmly committed to the Advaita Vedantin world view and the primacy of consciousness, authors of this stimulating monograph tries to show how the principles of quantum physics show that the material world is a projection of human consciousness. Consciousness is the matrix of all that is matter, mind and life. This amounts to a straightforward rejection of epiphenomenalism, the view that consciousness is and epi effect of matter in motion.

The steps followed by the authors to arrive at this conclusion are mainly derived from the principles of quantum physics. They show the untenability of the basic concepts of classical physics, viz, continuity, determinism and locality, objectivity and reductionism. Bohr’s model of the atom shows the discontinuity of motion. Schrodinger’s quantum of possibility waves lent support to Bohr’s model of the atom shows the discontinuity of motion. Schrodinger’s quantum of possibility waves lent support to Bohr’s ideas discontinuous movement. Secondly, max born demonstrated that it is impossible to determine accurately both position and momentum or velocity at the same time. This indeterminism implies the collapse of the singularity claims of events. When consciousness collapses actuality from possibility, the scope of creativity, freedom from determinism, opens up. Thirdly quantum mechanics defends the idea of the discontinuous and instantaneous collapse of a widespread possibility wave and which vindicates the principle, in its classical form, is also discounted by the quantum mechanics. In the process of knowing the knower modifies the known, whatever that might be. The quantum objects have complementary natures, wave nature and particle nature. While the wave nature is transcendent or non-local the particle one is imminent or localizable. Both the complementary natures are not simultaneously measurable. In the Catuskoti Nyaya highlights the impossibility of describing an object in a definitive way.

All these arguments are marshaled to show that the worldly objects do not exist rather cannot be said to be existent in a mind independent way. The epistemological theories of internal realism, irrealism and quasi-realism are all engaged in showing in different ways how consciousness enters into our acts of cognitive determination and identification of objects. From the scientist like schrodinger to the scientific philosophers like popper and Kuhn have tried to show, by arguments and examples, how all forms of our knowledge are theory-laden and there is nothing like pure given or purely objective. The vedantin tries to establish the primacy of consciousness in a different way. When the ultimate reality, Brahma, is said to be pure consciousness, sankara tells us, without positing psycho-somatic dispositions and without postulating the principles of materialization it is impossible to account for the existence of the empirical world of sense and science.

Consistently with their conception of non dualism the athors have profitably used the twin Indian concepts, uttarana and avatarana, evolution and involution of consciousness. The highest consciousness is available even at the material plane. Matter says Aurobindo is sleeping God from the reverse end it is pointed out from matter evolves life. Mind over mind, and super mind, which is different but continuous level of the divine. Sri Aurobindo’s system of Purnadvaitavada is bound to remind one of Leibniz’s Law of continuity from obscure consciousness to clear consciousness and of Pierre Teihard de Chardin’s and Jullian Huxley’s concepts of evolution, from simple materiality to increasingly complex mentality and spirituality. All the types of monads, material, mental spiritual, said Leibniz form an continuity. To him the concept of quantum discontinuity was naturally unknown but his view of all pervasive spirituality has much in common with the quantum cosmology as interpreted in science and spirituality.

The India concept of yoga, which literally means union, has also been very innovatively used by the authors in their new interpretation of the quantum cosmology, highlighting the primacy of consciousness, the yogi and the cosmos are identical. Strictly speaking when the yogi is siddha, he gets merged into the cosmos. The refutation of dualism assumes a radical form in this work.

I am sure the readers, both professional scientists and the intelligent laymen interested in spirituality, will enjoy reading this highly interesting book. Even those who may not entirely agree with the conclusions of the book would be definitely stimulated by the quality of its insights and arguments.

Preface

The institutional separation of science and spirituality began in the West when the philosopher Rene descartes divided reality into mind and matter. Unfortunately because of the British domination of the east in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the separation also spread to the east.

Fortunately, in the twentieth century, this separatist paradigm of sciences that began with Descartes and newton gave way to a new paradigm, quantum physics, that has created a window for integration of science and spirituality. This monograph is one of the early explorations of this visionary window.

The word quantum means a discrete quantity and it (rightly) elicits the vision of tiny sun-microscopic objects indeed sub-microscopic phenomena is where quantum physics began. But after almost a century of delving into the mystery of matter with the help of quantum physics it has become clear that quantum physics by itself is not complete, it takes the observer, consciousness, to complete it. Logic dictates that the necessary consciousness for the closure of quantum physics is the same on the rsis of vendanta envisioned millennia ago. This cannot be a coincidence. Thus arises the idea, the visionary window, to invite consciousness as the ground of all being and the ontological basis for a new paradigm of science a science within consciousness.

The triumph of the separatist Newtonian paradigm was that is purported to explain the cosmos without God, without consciousness. I sure seemed that way for quite a while. But then paradoxes kept showing up, not only in quantum physics, but also in biology and psychology. It is fact that Newtonian biology cannot explain life or health or cognition.

The new science brings back the role of consciousness in it cosmology. The new cosmology, not surprisingly, is found to be quite consonant with the ancient vision of spiritual tradition which is helping to build it.

So far, it is all about the contribution of spiritual traditions towards building a new integrative science. In the last part of the monograph, I will show the new science is also repaying its dept by helping us understand why spiritual practices work. It is a give and take between science and spirituality all the way, as it should be.

Contents

Forwordvii
Prefacexiii
1Can Science and Spirituality be Recociled?1
Part I : The Quantum Leap
2Quantum Physics and the fall of materialist Ontology15
3Quantum Measurement and the Nature of Consciousness28
Part II : The New Cosmology
4Reconciling scientific and spiritual colmolgies45
5How Consciousness creates Biological order57
6Involution and evolution: How the New Science Vindicates sacred cosmology74
7The Science and spiritual of reincarnation89
Part III : Science and Spirituality
8The Science of inlughtenment and liberation107
9Practical vedanta: The science of Ritual and ethical Actions125
10Creativity of the Body and the meaning of Tantra134
11Science and Liberation151
12Science and the unity of all Religions158
Bibliography171
Index177
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