God - Proof of God

by Amit Goswami
Recently conducted experiments have proven that quantum consciousness can be seen as what
spiritual traditions call 'god'.
Can science and religion be integrated? What comes to mind immediately is that religions themselves
cannot agree with one another whereas science is basically monolithic. How can there even be trade
between the two, let alone integration?

First, it is only a perception that religions are pluralistic and science is not. Science is monolithic only
so far as science of matter - physics and chemistry - is concerned. Psychology, the science of the
psyche, has three different paradigms - behavioral-cognitive consisting of hard science orientation,
depth psychology consisting of Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian analytical psychology and their
derivatives with psychotherapy orientation, and humanistic-transpersonal-yoga psychology with
positive mental health orientation. Both the latter paradigms of psychology acknowledge downward
causation and subtle bodies in some form or other.

Medicine has the conventional allopathic medicine and also alternative medicinal practices that
complement it. A prominent part of alternative medicine is Eastern medicine that emphasizes subtle
energies called variously as prana, chi, and ki. And biology is in transition right now. The materialist
biology is highly developed but with some unsolved (maybe unsolvable) problems. Alternative biology
sees life as the handiwork of a purposive designer with the power of downward causation; but at
present it is so poorly developed that hardly anyone can call it a genuine alternative biology.

On the other hand, there is common ground for all religions in three respects:
o Most religions agree that there is God - an agent of what they call downward causation. This is to
be distinguished from materialists' upward causation model, namely that all cause originates from the
base level of matter, the elementary particles. Religions don't necessarily disagree with materialists'
upward causation, but they additionally posit occasional intervention by a (nonmaterial) God. Creation
events, for example.
o All religions also posit the existence of non-material 'subtle' bodies connected with our internal
experiences - feeling, meaning, and values - in addition to the material body. The subtle bodies
correspond to the pranamaya kosha, manomaya kosha, and the vijnanamaya kosha of the
Upanishads.
o Finally, all religions posit the importance of certain values as the goal of life, such as love, truth,
beauty, justice, goodness. These godly qualities are what give our life meaning, religions maintain,
because God designed us.

To integrate science and religion, we need to include downward causation and the subtle bodies in a
non-dualistic way

Materialist Arguments
Currently, the overall perception of science is that it is materialistic. The belief is that science cannot
be done without the dogma of material monism, which means that all things of our experience have a
material origin. It is only logical that the practitioners of materialist science should have something to
object and negate about the three religious contentions about reality enunciated above. The first,
downward causation, scientists negate because how does a nonmaterial God interact with matter? It
is dualism. For the second, the postulate of subtle bodies, the same objection is posed - how do the
nonmaterial subtle bodies interact with the material body? Dualism again. Dualism is not scientifically
feasible because two bodies that have nothing in common cannot interact without a mediator. And
there is no mediator that we can see, these scientists maintain.
Materialists also posit that God, consciousness, mind, feelings, values, all things internal besides
what we experience externally, matter, are explainable in material terms. However, so far this has
only been a promissory idea that the renowned philosopher Karl Popper called 'promissory
materialism'.

As for the third contention of religions, the importance of values in our lives, materialist science does
not exactly deny it. But they maintain that values originate in matter as genetic programs but no
programmer is required. Instead these programs evolve through Darwinian evolution (natural
selection) because they help the organism to adapt to environmental changes.

So the first problem of integrating science and religion is to generalize science to include downward
causation and the subtle bodies in a way that dualism does not ruin the integration. This is the
problem that has been solved by this author (for details, read my book The Visionary Window) using
some ideas of quantum physics.

Quantum Explanations
Quantum physics has a very obscure opening; this is what I call a 'visionary window'. If we look
through the window, new light appears that enables us to generalize materialist science in the
appropriate way. The new light consists of a shift in the metaphysical base of science, from matter
base to consciousness base.

In quantum physics, objects are not determined things of Newtonian vintage. Instead, they are waves
of possibility. When we observe, these waves 'collapse' into actual events in our experience. Instead
of spread-out waves, what we observe is a localized particle. This is the famous 'observer effect'.

A comedian in Kolkata was walking the sidewalk when a certain container of rasagullas in a display
window grabbed his attention. The fellow went into the shop and asked the mithaiwalla for some
rasagullas. But when the mithaiwalla started to bring out the rasagullas in the display window, the
comedian stopped him. "I don't want those; don't you have some of the same kind in your
backroom?" The confectioner was offended. "Sir, all my sweets are fresh and good," he said
indignantly. The comedian said, "No, no. I don't doubt that. But people have been looking at those
rasagullas!"

Looking affects objects, according to quantum physics. But if consciousness is a brain phenomenon
as materialist science posits, the observer effect is a paradox because then brain and its
consciousness both consist of possibilities only. Possibilities acting on other possibilities cannot make
actuality; try it and see. Imagine possible cars in a car lot. Also imagine possible money in your bank
account. Now imagine hard and combine the two possibilities. Do you expect a car manifesting in
your garage?

The resolution of the paradox is to turn the materialist view of consciousness upside down. Let
consciousness be the base of the world and let matter consist of waves of possibilities of
consciousness. Consciousness chooses from the possibility waves of matter within it to collapse the
actual events that we observe.

Note that in every event of observation, there is the object the observer is looking at, and a second
object consisting of the observer, a brain. Before observation, before collapse, both are waves of
possibility. When consciousness chooses, only then the brain is actualized along with the external
object as experiences, as appearances in consciousness. Consciousness identifies with the brain due
to a specialness of the brain that makes an object with a brain an observer. This conscious identity is
what we call the self, what we experience as a subject looking at the collapsed object.
Consciousness, the chooser, transcends both the immanent subject and object.
Behind our apparent individuality, it is our unity consciousness that chooses actuality from quantum
possibilities.

In this generalized science within consciousness, upward causation gives us the waves of possibility
to choose from; downward causation consists of the act of choice. Both modes of causation are
incorporated. And there is no dualism; the subject-object duality is seen to be an appearance!

Back in the 1970s, when quantum physicists were first proposing that we choose our own reality,
many people in America and Europe tried to manifest beautiful expensive cars for themselves. When
they couldn't, they tried at least to manifest parking spaces for their cars in crowded downtown areas,
but even then the success rate was not encouraging. Obviously something was missing!

Unitive consciousness
The next step was to realize that the choosing consciousness must transcend personality, must be
unitive - the same for all of us. If this were not so, you could look at a multifaceted quantum possibility
wave and choose one facet and simultaneously somebody else could look and choose an alternative
contradictory facet. The world then would be pandemonium. For the materialist model of individual
consciousness associated with each brain, the solution is called 'solipsism'. Only your consciousness
is real; everybody else is a fragment of your imagination.

Many of us feel this way, of course. A woman meets a friend after a long time, gets excited and takes
her to a café to "catch up". Over coffee, she talks and talks and suddenly becomes aware and says,
"Oh, look at me, talking about myself all this time. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?"

Nevertheless, for obvious reasons, solipsism is not a palatable solution. Consciousness saves the
situation by being objective, unitive. Behind our apparent individuality, it is our unity consciousness
that chooses actuality from quantum possibilities. This unity consciousness is what religions call God.
The Upanishads remind us of our God-consciousness with the statement, "You are That."

We don't ordinarily experience ourselves as God-consciousness because of how the brain works. Our
brain sifts all experience through our past memory. In the process, we become conditioned. We
respond to a familiar stimulus as we responded before, we acquire an ego-individuality based on our
habit pattern. And yet, whenever we are capable of rising above conditioning, God is there to enable
us make a creative choice.

Once we see consciousness as the ground of being that the Upanishads call Brahman and see
matter as possibilities within it, and see conscious collapse as the origin of subject-object appearance
of experience (resembling the doctrine of dependent co-arising, pattica sammupada of Buddhism), it
is not hard to generalize further. Matter gives us the experience of sensation; but we also have
experiences of feeling, thinking and intuition that religions associate with subtle bodies. Suppose the
subtle bodies also consist of quantum possibilities, what then? The event of collapse then not only
consists of choice from the material waves, but also choice from the other compartments of possibility
waves. So you look at a car and think, this is a car. Consciousness has collapsed both your brain (the
sensation) and your mind (the thought) mediating the mind-brain relationship. In this way another
problem of dualism is solved: consciousness is the mediator between matter and the subtle.

I hope you agree that that this is a good beginning for a genuine integration between science and
religion. How about the question of values? Are they adaptive, as the materialists claim? Or is there
God's handiwork in that issue? Space does not permit me to go into details but scientific advances
are finally enabling us to conclusively argue that feeling, meaning, and value cannot be adaptive
epiphenomena of matter. Our feelings come from our direct experiences of nonmaterial
morphogenetic fields that the biologist Rupert Sheldrake posited. And the mathematician Roger
Penrose has demonstrated that computers (matter) cannot process meaning, let alone values that
provide contexts for meaning. In this way, if matter cannot even process feeling, meaning, and value,
how can it present these qualities for adaptation or natural selection?

Oneness Experiments
The good news is that not one but three separate experiments are now showing that quantum
consciousness, the author of downward causation, is nonlocal, is unitive, is God. The first such
experiment proving it unequivocally (that is, with objective machines and not through subjective
experiences of people) was performed by the neurophysiologist Jacobo Grinberg and his
collaborators at the University of Mexico. Let's go into some details.

Quantum physics gives us an amazing principle to operate with - nonlocality. The principle of locality
says that all communication must proceed through local signals that have a speed limit. Einstein
established this speed limit as the speed of light (the enormous but finite speed of 300,000
km/second). So this locality principle, a limitation imposed by Einsteinian relativity, precludes
instantaneous communication via signals. And yet, quantum objects are able to influence one another
instantly, once they interact and become correlated. The physicist Alain Aspect and his collaborators
demonstrated this in 1982 for a pair of photons (quanta of light). The data does not have to be seen
as a contradiction to Einsteinian thinking once we recognize quantum nonlocality for what it is - a
signalless interconnectedness outside space and time.

Grinberg, in 1993, was trying to demonstrate quantum nonlocality for two correlated brains. Two
people meditate together with the intention of direct (signalless, nonlocal) communication. After 20
minutes, they are separated (while still continuing their unity intention), placed in individual Faraday
cages (electromagnetically impervious chambers), and each brain is wired up to an
electroencephalogram (EEG) machine. One subject is shown a series of light flashes producing in his
or her brain an electrical activity that is recorded in the EEG machine from which an 'evoked potential'
is extracted with a computer upon subtracting the brain noise. The evoked potential is somehow
found to be transferred to the other subject's brain onto his or her EEG that gives (upon subtraction of
noise) a transferred potential (similar to the evoked potential in phase and strength). Control subjects
(those who do not meditate together or are unable to hold the intention for signalless communication
during the duration of the experiment) do not show any transferred potential.

This experiment demonstrates the nonlocality of brain responses to be sure, but something even
more important - nonlocality of quantum consciousness. How else to explain how the forced choice of
the evoked response in one subject's brain can lead to the free choice of an (almost) identical
response in the correlated partner's brain? As stated above, the experiment, since then has been
replicated twice. First, by the London neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick in 1998. And again by the
Bastyr University researcher Leana Standish and her collaborators in 2004.

The conclusion of these experiments is radical. Quantum consciousness, the precipitator of the
downward causation of choice from quantum possibilities, is what esoteric spiritual traditions call
'God'. We have rediscovered God within science. Moreover we have a new integrative paradigm of
science, based not on the primacy of matter as the old science, but on the primacy of consciousness.
Consciousness is the ground of all being which we now can recognize as what the spiritual traditions
call 'Godhead'.

Power of Intention
I hope you did not miss one of the most important aspects of the experiment of Grinberg - the power
of our intention. The parapsychologist Dean Radin, in the 1990s, has done additional experiments
demonstrating the power of intention.
As an indicator of the intensity of intention, Radin measures the deviation from randomness of what
are called random number generators that translate random quantum events of radioactivity into
random sequences of zeros and ones. He found that the random number sequences deviated from
randomness maximally precisely at those times when the field of intention generated by people was
high. What does this mean? The philosopher Gregory Bateson said, "The opposite of randomness is
choice." So the correlation proves the creative power of intention.

In one series of experiments, Radin found that random number generators deviate from randomness
in meditation halls when people meditate together (showing high intention), but not at a corporate
board meeting!

Making the Leap

Downward causation occurs in a non-ordinary state of consciousness that we call God-
consciousness. Yet we are unaware of it. Why the unawareness? Mystics have been telling us about
the oneness of God-consciousness and our own consciousness for millennia, but we haven't heard
for the most part. Why this lack of hearing?

The Upanishads says emphatically, 'You are That', meaning you are God. Jesus said, no less
emphatically, 'You are all the children of God'. This is a key. We are children of God; we have to grow
up to realize our God-consciousness. There are mechanisms that obscure our Godness giving rise to
our ordinary I-separateness that we call ego. This ego creates a barrier against seeing our oneness
with God and oneness with one another. Growing in spirituality means growing beyond the ego.

A key point is that quantum downward causation of choice is discontinuously exerted. If choice were
continuous, a mathematical model, at least a computer algorithm, could be constructed for it and the
choice would be predictable and not free and its author could not be called God. Our ordinary waking
state of consciousness - the ego - smooths out the discontinuity by compromising our freedom to
choose. To be aware that we choose freely is to jump beyond the ego taking a discontinuous leap,
call it a quantum leap.

If you are having difficulty picturing a discontinuous quantum leap, an idea of the great physicist Niels
Bohr can help. Electrons go around the atomic nucleus in continuous orbits. But when an electron
jumps from one orbit to another, it makes the jump in a very discontinuous way; it never goes through
the intermediate space between the orbits. The jump is a quantum leap.

Random number generators deviate from randomness in meditation halls, when people meditate
together, but not at a board meeting!

How does the cosmic, nonlocal quantum consciousness, God, identify with an individual, become
individualized? How does continuity obscure the discontinuity? Primarily via observership, and
secondarily via conditioning. Before observership, God-consciousness is one and undivided from its
possibilities. Observership implies a subject-object split, a split between the self and the world as
explained before. However, before conditioning, the world-experiencing subject or self is unitive and
cosmic. In this primary experience of a stimulus, God-consciousness chooses its response to the
stimulus from the quantum possibilities offered to it by the stimulus with total creative freedom
(subject only to the constraint of the laws of quantum dynamics of the situation, God is objective and
is lawful whenever warranted!). With additional experiences of the same stimulus, the responses get
prejudiced in favor of past responses. This is what psychologists call conditioning. Identifying with the
conditioned pattern of stimulus responses (habits of character) and the history of the memories of
past responses gives the subject/self an apparent local individuality, the ego. When we operate from
the ego, our individual patterns of conditioning, our experiences, being predictable, acquire an
apparent causal continuity. We feel separate from our unitive whole self and from God. It is then that
our intentions don't always produce the intended result.

The inquisitive reader is bound to ask about how to develop the power of intention. The fact is we all
try to manifest things through our intentions, sometimes they work, usually they do not. Now we see
that this is because we are in our ego when we intend. But how do we change that?

This is a very good question. An intention must start with the ego; that is where we ordinarily are,
local, selfish. At the second stage, we intend for everyone to go beyond selfishness. We don't need to
worry; we haven't lost anything when we say everyone for it includes us too. In the third stage, we
allow our intentions to become a prayer: if my intention resonates with the intention of the whole, of
Ishvara/Allah/God, then let it come to fruition. At the fourth stage, the prayer must pass into silence,
become a meditation.

Amit Goswami is professor of physics at the University of Oregon.

He is the author of five books, including The Self-Aware Universe,
Quantum Creativity, Physics of the Soul, and The Visionary Window.
He also wrote a textbook on Quantum Mechanics
that is well regarded and used.