AMIT GOSWAMI

'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 upcoming documentary about the Dalai Lama entitled Dalai Lama Renaissance (which is narrated by Harrison Ford).

Contents

Professional life

Science and spirituality

Literary activities

Musings

Quotations by Amit Goswami

See also

Works

References

External weblinks

References in print

Audio references

Criticism

Professional life

Originally from India, Goswami received his Ph.D. from Calcutta University in physics in 1964, from where he moved to the United States early in his career. Fully retired as a faculty 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.^[1]
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 up-wards 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.^[2][3]

Literary activities

Goswami is the author of ten books, including a well regarded and used university textbook on quantum mechanics, and a series of popular works relating to physics and spirituality such as ''Quantum Creativity'', ''Physics of the Soul'', and ''The Quantum Doctor''. His book ''The Self-Aware Universe'', is a popularized account of this approach to understanding quantum physics and consciousness, wherein he applies his hypothesis to the mind-body schism stating: "The Universe is self-aware through us."

Musings

Goswami is in favor of lucid dreaming, which simultaneously allows to adopt 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.^[4] Rather tabooed and rarefied topics like death, reincarnation and immortality drew Goswami's interest of research.^[5]

Quotations by Amit Goswami

See also

★ Consciousness causes collapse

★ Integral thought

Works

★ ''The Cosmic Dancers: Exploring the Physics of Science Fiction'', with Maggie Goswami, Harper and Row, 1983, hardcover, ISBN 0-06-015083-1

★ ''The Self-Aware Universe'', Tarcher, 1995 reprint, softcover, ISBN 0-87477-798-4

★ ''The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment'', with Deepak Chopra, Quest Books, 2000, hardback, ISBN 0-8356-0793-3

★ ''Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation and Immortality'', Hampton Roads Publishing, 2001, softcover, ISBN 1-57174-332-4

★ ''Quantum Mechanics'', Waveland Press, 2nd edition, 2003, hardback, ISBN 1-57766-321-7, (intermediate to graduate level textbook)

★ ''The Quantum Doctor: A Physicist's Guide to Health and Healing'', Hampton Roads Publishing, 2004, softcover, ISBN 1-57174-417-7

★ List of articles and essays by Amit Goswami^[6]

References

1. The Online Bulletin of
SCIENCE WITHIN CONCIOUSNESS, Volume 1, No 2; ''Can Science And Spirituality Be Reconciled?'' by Amit Goswami, Fall 1996 [1]
2. ''The Quantum Doctor Is Here!'' DANBO Geophysics (2006)
3. ''Healing Journeys'' Suzie Daggett interview A. Goswami [2]
4. ''A Chat with Dr. Amit Goswami'' By Lucy Gillis, Dreaming Lucid Exchange (LDE) (2005) [3]
5. ''Death and the Quantum: A New Science of Survival and Reincarnation'' »Online Bulletin of SCIENCE WITHIN CONCIOUSNESS« by Amit Goswami (1995) [4]
6. List of articles and essays by Amit Goswami [7]

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