Self-Aware Universe

In this stimulating and timely book, Amit Goswami, Ph.D., shatters the widely popular belief held by Western science that matter is the primary "stuff" of creation, and proposes instead that consciousness it the true foundation of all we know and perceive.

His explanation of quantum physics for lay readers, called "a model of clarity" by Kirkus Reviews, sets the stage for a voyage of discovery through the common ground of science and religion, the entwined nature of mind and body, and our interconnectedness with all of creation.

Amit Goswami, Ph.D., is professor of physics at the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at the University of Oregon. Author of numerous scientific papers and two physics texts, one on quantum mechanics, he is also co-author, with his wife, Maggie Goswami, of the Cosmic Dancers. Richard E. Reed is an author and literary agent.

Excerpt:

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Chapter 13

THE "I" OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The conclusion of the preceding chapter bears repeating, for it provides the basis of understanding ourselves in the universe: The self of our self-reference is due to a tangled hierarchy, but our consciousness is the consciousness of the Being that is beyond the subject-object split. There is no other source of consciousness in the universe. The self of self-reference and the consciousness of the original consciousness, together, make what we call self-consciousness.

In a sense, we are rediscovering ancient truth. It is indeed wondrous that humankind implicitly has always known that self-consciousness results from a tangled hierarchy. This knowledge, inherent in many cultures, has appeared at different places and times in the archetypal picture of a snake biting its own tail.

It is the appearance of the world of manifestation that leads us to the experience of a self or a subject that is separate from the objects of appearance. That is, subject and object manifest simultaneously in the initial collapse of the Quantum state of the Brain-mind. As the romantic poet John Keats intuited: "See the world if you please/As a vale for soulmaking."

Without the immanent world of manifestation, there would be no soul, no self that experiences itself as a separate from the objects it perceives.

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