Chapter 4

God and the World

Our old science tells us that what is real is the material universe, that our individual brains are material, and that our experience of our egos and of God are merely epiphenomenal experiences of these brains. Some mystics say that only God is real, and that the manifest world is unreal. The popular version of Christianity tells us that both the material universe and God are real, but they are separate realities.

The new science tells us that the universe, God, and we are not really separate: the separateness of God, the world, and us is an appearance, an epiphenomenon.

So what is real and what is epiphenomenon? That is the question. Or is it?

If our consciousness is unreal, there is no reason for me to write this book or for you to read it. So why do we—materialists included—read, write, research, and want to know reality, and even love and want to be happy? Because in our hearts, we know that our consciousness is real, that it has causal efficacy. There is vitality in our feelings, there is meaning in our conscious thoughts, and there are purpose and value in our intuitions. As Descartes argued long ago (using a slightly different language), we can question the reality of everything else, but not of our consciousness. In the same vein, is the material unreal? If you talked about the unreality of the material world to Zen masters of old times, those connoisseurs of subtler states of consciousness, they might have pulled your ear and, when you would complain, asked, “Why are you complaining about what is unreal?”

The real questions are these: Why does the world appear to be separate from us? What does the fact that we get lost in this separateness from the universe and from each other do to us and to the human condition? Is there any way to go beyond this dynamic of separation?

In the new science, we find that the world is here because of us and that we are here because of the world. (See chapter 7.) The separation dynamic is one of mutual creation, our prerequisite for play in manifestation. When we creatively comprehend this, the separation dynamic loses its hold on us. The story of the universe is our story. When we understand ourselves, our consciousness, we also understand our relationship with the universe and with God, and the separation becomes a portent for play.

What happens to this sense of manifest play when the separateness is seen as illusory? I hope you are curious to find out. I hope you are tired of the old play of real separateness, which has given us the nightmares of terrorism, energy crisis, global warming, and the possibility of nuclear war. I hope you are ready to explore the potential of a science within consciousness, as well as the potential of waking up to subtler levels of consciousness. I hope you are ready to appreciate the importance of the scientific rediscovery of God.

Many of the present inquiries of materialist science sound more like the medieval question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Does knowing every little detail about a black hole give you any inkling about how to love or forgive? The old tired science cannot give us answers to our big problems. Why is there so much terrorism and how do we deal with it? Why is there so much violence? And how do we deal with our children committing mass murders? Why is there so little love? How do we reintroduce ethics into our society and love into our families? Are ethics important? If so, how do we teach ethics and values to our children when our pervasive materialist science professes that the world is value-free? Why the ongoing economical ups and downs with capitalism? How do we produce steady-state economies? How do we transform capitalist economics so that the gap between the rich and the poor becomes narrower instead of wider, so that even the poor can use their minds to process meaning? How do we make our business and industry ecology-friendly, so that we can protect our planet against global warming and other ecological disasters? Why are politics so corrupted? How do we defend democracy against the power of money, the media, and the fundamentalists? How do we curb the skyrocketing cost of health and healing?

Like the question of consciousness, these are hard, even impossible questions for the materialist worldview. But materialists go on claiming that the answers are right around the corner, an attitude that the philosopher Karl Popper called promissory materialism. It is only human to stick our heads in the sand when hard questions are asked; materialist scientists are no exception. But while these scientists deplore the “George Bush syndrome” in the case of global warming, they turn around and display the same attitude when it comes to acknowledging that a paradigm shift is necessary and inevitable in order to include consciousness in our science and worldview.

Meanwhile, just as global warming is endangering our world, urgent social problems are growing that cannot be solved within the materialist approach; in fact, for most of these problems, materialism is the root cause. And of course, there are also those age-old subjective human questions that materialist science avoids: What is the meaning of my life? How can I love? How do I become happy? What is the future of my evolution? These questions are impossible for the materialist, but the new science within consciousness allows us to make a good beginning in finding answers to them.

But can we put God/consciousness back into our systems of knowledge to change our behavior and societies in time to avoid the catastrophes that are threatening us? Yes, we can.

I will tell you my hypothesis: even those influences that have led us today to near cataclysm are part of a purposive movement of consciousness that is already under way to avert these catastrophes. Meanwhile, the looming catastrophes are trying to tell us something important; this we have to decipher. We have to recognize the meaning and purpose of the movements of consciousness. Then the choice is ours. Do we align ourselves with the evolutionary purpose of those movements, do we run against it, or do we play apathetic?

You also have to recognize the one common aspect of all the catastrophic problems—conflict. Current terrorism has its root in the conflict between materialism and religion. It is not only the fundamentalist Muslims of the Middle East who are fighting the materialistic “Great Satan” empire of the United States, but also Christian fundamentalists within this country. Economic and ecological problems are superficially due to the conflict between individual and collective interests, to ego values (such as selfishness and excessive competition) and being values (such as cooperation, win-win philosophy, intuition, creativity, feeling, happiness). Ultimately these causes too can be traced to the conflict between materialism and spirituality. On close examination, the major reason that health costs are rising is our fear of death and the conflict between ignorance and wisdom—again, materiality and spirituality. The decline of ethics and values in our families, our societies, and our schools is clearly due to this conflict. To enter the world of true solutions is to resolve the conflict.

INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE MOVEMENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Spiritual traditions of the East understand the individual movements of consciousness very well, and that is what they emphasize. Living in the world produces an individual identity (ego) superimposed upon the cosmic God-consciousness. This is the ignorance that obscures the wisdom of oneness. Easterners believe that through many incarnations, the ego identity gives way to God-consciousness, and knowing that one is God, one is liberated from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Hence the adage from this point of view: you cannot change the world, you can only change yourself. Whatever change the world undergoes will come through these individual changes.

But in the West, the belief in only one life has undermined the drive for self-realization and transformation. Instead, the emphasis has been on ethics: following certain rules of behavior to bring oneself in alignment with God. Even under the aegis of materialism, the West has developed a social consciousness in which there clearly is some imperative for social ethics:

There is only one life and it is too short

Let's work together and improve our lot.

So today we also have activists who try to change the world, but often have no spiritual notion of changing themselves. Can we see the necessity of both trends and integrate them?

EVOLUTION

In both the East and the West, whether we believe in reincarnation or in one life, the emphasis of spirituality has been to unite with a transcendent God. Spiritual philosophers, of course, are quite aware that God is also immanent in the world, but somehow they more or less have managed to undermine our pursuit of that unity in the immanent world. To some extent, this has contributed to making the world culture materialistic. More recently, spiritual traditions have allowed the affairs of the world to be dominated by materialist science, which until recently has propagated materialism in the world without any challenge. Only in the last few decades has a challenge to materialism surfaced from within the tradition of science itself.

In dualist cultures, spiritual philosophers have wondered why a perfect God creates an imperfect world. In nondualist cultures, spiritual philosophers have occasionally wondered aloud why God is immanent in an imperfect world when He could have forever stayed in heavenly perfection. The answer to both concerns is, of course, evolution. In both cultures, spiritual thinkers have missed evolution. God becomes manifest in the immanent world to manifest its unmanifested possibilities. The world begins the journey of evolution imperfect, but that is only a beginning. Consciousness evolves toward perfection in manifestation, toward seeing its perfect nature in manifestation.

Because spiritual traditions have neglected worldly affairs in general, it is not surprising that they have not recognized evolution to be a major part of the manifest play of consciousness. Coincidentally, materialist science, which discovered evolution (and used it to obstruct the influence of religion in society), has not seen evolution as a major force in our life either. More or less, biologists are content with an inadequate theory of slow and gradual Darwinian evolution. In Darwinism, evolution is posited to occur in two steps. First, variations occur in the hereditary components (the genes) of a species; second, members of the species that survive and reproduce in greater numbers will pass along their genes through what is known as natural selection, giving the species a better chance of surviving. In this way, although evolution is seen as relevant to our survival, it has no other importance. If it would improve the chance of survival for the human species to become less complex, less oriented toward meaning and values, that direction of evolution would be OK with the Darwinists. In short, evolution is all about physical survival, not spiritual development.

But this, too, has been changing. The empirical persistence of discontinuities in the geological record, fossil gaps, has made it clear that (neo-) Darwinism, which predicts continuous evolution, is an inadequate theory and that we must invoke downward causation and biological creativity for a complete theory of evolution (Goswami, 1997a, 2008). In the new approach, evolution is recognized as purposive and as a major force in our lives.

In the last century, two philosopher-sages, Sri Aurobindo in India and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the West, had the revolutionary insight that evolution does not end its journey toward increasing complexity with humans. According to Aurobindo, just as animals have been the laboratory for nature to evolve humans, similarly human beings are currently the laboratory for evolving superhumans. And in superhumans, we will see the heavenly qualities that we strive to attain—love, beauty, justice, good, etc.—come forth and evolve toward perfection. The end of evolution is when we reach the omega point of perfection, according to Teilhard.

We have to recognize that evolution is also a play of consciousness—a purposive, collective play. The collective movement toward social consciousness that started in the West (mainly) is important and an essential and integral part of the movement of manifest consciousness— the evolution of consciousness. So here again the Eastern and Western views of life must be integrated. We have to proceed toward individual salvation as in the East, but we also have to contribute to evolution. And clearly, we add more to the movement of evolution as we shed our ego identity in our journey toward God.

We need a new kind of activism with a new adage: you cannot change the world, but you can change yourself, always with the perspective of collective world evolution in mind. This is what I call quantum activism, in which we work on transforming ourselves using the power of the new physics, but while paying attention to the evolutionary movement of consciousness as a whole, always trying to heed its needs.

Religions have traditionally encouraged us to follow God for personal salvation, for alleviation of our suffering, for the discovery of effortless happiness in living. But for most types of suffering, we now have antidotes (albeit temporary ones). It is no longer clear why we should make arduous efforts to establish God in our lives, to embrace additional suffering for some elusive happiness in the future. Some people among us, of course, still do it anyway, and we wonder why. What motivates them? I submit that the motivation for finding God in our lives comes from an evolutionary pressure for those ready to move beyond their ego-boundary. The very existence of this pressure suggests that we are preparing for a new evolutionary stage. This is what was foreseen by Aurobindo and Teilhard.

SO WHAT IS OUR RESPONSE TO EVOLUTION?

The time has come, I declare, to acknowledge the rediscovery of God within science. If it requires a paradigm shift of our science from its base of matter to a base of consciousness, so be it. We must also proceed to actualize the God potency within us, as far as each of us is capable, if we are interested in the welfare of the world.

I suggest that you can do a lot of things to begin a journey from separateness to unity, from ego-consciousness to God-consciousness, and from stasis to evolution. Here are some starters:

Think quantum! Think possibility!

Explore the potential of consciousness.

Explore the possibility that your separateness from the whole is illusory; study the nature of your conditioning.

Practice and realize the power of freedom of choice.

Pay attention to your inner experiences and your subtle bodies in addition to the outer and the gross.

Resolve conflicts and integrate partial (and conflicting) bits of wisdom into a whole.

Prepare to wake up to the nonlocality of consciousness.

Recognize the importance of working on your own transformation while acknowledging the evolution of consciousness (movement of the whole). Pay attention to the movements of consciousness as they pertain to our social institutions.

Move from the world of impossible problems (materialist science) to the world of possible solutions (science within consciousness).

THE PLAN OF THE BOOK

I hope that the Part One of the book has given you a good introduction to the God that we are rediscovering in science and shown you in what way the scientific God is different from the God of pop religions. But please note that in the most fundamental basics—downward causation, the existence of subtle bodies, and the importance of godliness—there is agreement. This agreement is most important, and I hope it will encourage further dialogue between the (new) science and dualistic popular religions.

As promised in chapter 1, Parts Two, Three, and Four present the new evidence in support of the existence of God.

In Part Two, I introduce the nature of the quantum signatures of the divine in some detail and expound on the experimental verification of downward causation, quantum nonlocality, discontinuity, and tangled hierarchy in psychology and in biology. This includes an explanation of the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious and between life and nonlife. Part Two ends with a discussion of creative evolution, a God-based theory of evolution that explains the fossil gaps and the why and how of intelligent design.

Part Three consists of the theory and experimental proof of the existence of the subtle bodies; these aspects of the subject allow us a very timely extension of science to tackle the “impossible” problems of biological and psychological sciences. These include questions about the nature and origin of our feelings of being alive, about the validity of homeopathy and acupuncture, and about the value of divining phenomena such as dowsing.

Part Three is also about the new psychology and how it explores the “mind of God.” I explain why we have both inner and outer experiences and why both are important for science to validate and expound on the notion that “my father's house has many mansions” (Bible, John 14:2). Is God up above, down here in immanence alone, or down under? Questions like these shed new light on how to investigate and know God. Data on dreams, states of consciousness, reincarnation, ethics, and altruism tell us about the soul.

Creativity, love, transformation, and healing are examined as examples of divine downward causation in Part Four. They are all shown to provide irrefutable evidence for the existence of a transcendent God.

Part Five deals with quantum activism and what we can do to evolve ourselves and our society in accordance with the evolutionary agenda of consciousness. Here I also discuss how to unleash the transformative power of quantum physics in our journey of quantum activism.

The book ends with two special epilogues. The first addresses the young scientist confused by the claims of materialist science that do not add up. The second shows that Jesus, the father of Christianity, was quite tuned to the lessons of quantum physics. He knew.

IN SUMMARY

There are aspects of the phenomenal world that are impossible to address within the materialist view of science (only one level of reality—material—and only one source of causation—upward):

It is impossible to collapse quantum possibility waves to actual events.

It is impossible to explain quantum measurement—the collapse of the quantum possibility wave into an actual event.

It is impossible to explain discontinuity in terms of only continuous operations.

It is impossible to generate nonlocality from local interactions alone.

It is impossible to bring about circular, tangled hierarchy from linear simple hierarchies.

It is impossible to distinguish between conscious awareness (the subject-object split of an experience) and the unconscious (no subject-object split awareness).

It is impossible to distinguish life from nonlife.

It is impossible to explain the interior experience (the first-person subjective) in terms of the exterior (the third-person objective).

It is impossible to explain the processing of meaning in terms of symbol processing capacity.

It is impossible to explain feeling from symbol processing capacity alone.

It is impossible to explain the laws of physics from material movement alone.

The incompleteness and inadequacy of our dominant paradigm of science show up clearly when we encounter phenomenon after phenomenon that is impossible in the materialistic scheme. These constitute real, impossible gaps in our understanding that a materialist science can never bridge, even in principle. It is in these impossible-to-explain gaps that God is rediscovered.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven and earth, oh materialist, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Acknowledge it!

This reminds me of a story about Mulla Nasruddin, a figure from the 13th century, the subject of stories throughout the Middle Eastern world. He was found working vigorously with a pail of water, shaking the water, beating it with his hands, kneading it, creating quite a spectacle.

Somebody asked, “Mulla, what are you doing?”

To this, Mulla said, “I am making yogurt.”

The questioner was shocked. “Mulla, you can't make yogurt out of water!”

Mulla replied, “And what if it works?”

The difference between the usual gap theology (see glossary) and the scientific approach presented here is, of course, that we are not content with merely suggesting God as an explanation for the gaps in materialist science. Instead, we build a new verifiable science based on the God hypothesis with experimental evidence.

How can God be said to have been rediscovered in science? Because we have a verifiable scientific theory based on the God hypothesis that explains in full scientific detail how the impossible becomes possible, how the gaps are bridged. And most important, some of the crucial predictions of this theory have already been verified in scientific experiments. In the years to come, we can look forward to further laboratory verification of this new science.

So, have I succeeded in providing enough scientific evidence for the existence of God? For some people, especially the religious fundamentalists, unless you are providing evidence for their God that satisfies their theology, no evidence will be enough. Similarly, the hardcore materialist will not be persuaded by any amount of new data, new verifiable predictions, new explanations of old puzzles, or new resolutions of impossible paradoxes. But in between these two extremes, there are many people, laypersons and professionals alike, scientists and nonscientists, who will appreciate what I have presented—for the simple reason that never before has it been possible to integrate so many disparate scientific fields and notions with so very few new assumptions, the primary one being God as quantum consciousness.

If you have read this far in this book, you are one of those people. And it is up to you to judge if this book helps you in your journey to God or evolution or both. I have done my best to provide you with concepts to research and to internalize, maps for the journey to view, questions to ponder, intentions to arrive at, and jobs to do.