Excerpt from "Quantum Creativity"

The following excerpt is taken from the book Quantum Creativity by Amit Goswami. It is published by Hay House (Available March 3, 2014) and available at all bookstores or online at: www.hayhouse.com

Scientific materialism has shaped modern science and Western society for the better part of the last one hundred years. By emphasizing the external world, materialism has excluded the relevance of our internal experiences of feeling, meaning, and intuition. Which in turn has marginalized the arts, the humanities, ethics, religion, and spirituality—indeed, our consciousness itself—both in the academy and in society at large. God has been declared a delusion, and in a wave of cynicism people have lost not just their religious faith but also their belief in intangible values—love, goodness, justice, beauty, and even truth.

Modern science originated from the struggle to break free of the religious dogma of medieval Christianity: a wrathful God ruling over heaven doling out rewards and punishments when we die. Unfortunately, the materialist philosophy of science is also dogma. Make no mistake about it; there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that everything is matter. In fact, there is much evidence to the contrary.

So one dogma has given way to another: that consciousness is operational, mere language; that the psychology of the unconscious is touchy-feely voodoo; that mind is only brain; that there is nothing to feelings and intuitions other than what value arises from their role in Darwinian evolution; that there is nothing to the self other than psychosocial and genetic conditioning.

If the self does not exist, if consciousness is a mirage, if there is no other source of causation than material interaction, how can we take the ultimate creative step? How can we make profound changes in ourselves? To understand human creativity we need a new paradigm that includes both matter and consciousness; it must be inclusive of all human modes of experience—sensing, feeling, thinking, and intuition. We have discovered such an inclusive paradigm. We call it science within consciousness. It is based on quantum physics and the metaphysics that posits consciousness as the foundation of all being.

As a young adult, the psychologist William James was depressed by his belief that the deterministic philosophy of reality—that every movement is determined by physical laws—was correct. He was actually ill for several years. Then he discovered the philosophy of free will, and decided that his first act of free will should be to believe in free will. That decision brought him not just good health, but also a lifetime of creativity.

Today we’re seeing an epidemic of depression because people can’t find fulfillment in the spiritual and emotional void of the materialist worldview. Fortunately, the antidote is on its way. It is now clear that accepting the implications of quantum physics means making a basic change in our scientific worldview, from the primacy of matter to the primacy of consciousness. Here are some fundamental aspects of this new science.1

• Consciousness is the foundation of all being.

• Manifest matter is preceded by quantum possibilities or potentialities. There are two realms of reality—potentiality and actuality. Conscious choice collapses the possibilities into manifest actuality. Since this choice is made from a state of consciousness beyond the ego, we refer to it as a “higher” or “quantum” consciousness; spiritual traditions refer to it as God. And since our conscious choices are shaped by higher consciousness this process can be described by the term downward causation.

• Within one undivided consciousness, there are four worlds of quantum possibilities: the material world that we navigate with our senses, the vital world whose energies we feel, the mental world in which we think and process meaning, and the world of archetypes that we intuit—truth, beauty, love, goodness, justice, etc.

• Conscious choice precipitates the collapse of quantum possibilities (waves) of each world into the manifest realm (of actualities). The multiple parallel worlds do not directly interact; consciousness mediates their interaction (figure 1).

• The collapse is nonlocal, meaning that it requires no local communication or exchange of signals. The need for local communication via signals holds true only for space-time; quantum consciousness is nonlocal and therefore outside of space and time.

• The quantum collapse from possibility to actuality is discontinuous. The word transcendent, which we apply to the realm of pure potentiality, evokes both nonlocality and discontinuity.

• In the transcendent quantum realm of pure potentiality, consciousness remains undivided from its possibilities and there is no experience. Collapse produces “dependent co-arising” of an experiencing subject and an object that is experienced.

• Creativity is fundamentally a phenomenon of consciousness discontinuously manifesting truly new possibilities from transcendent potentiality. This is why in ancient traditions creativity is referred to as a marriage between (transcendent) heaven and (immanent) earth.

• The mind gives meaning to the interaction of consciousness and matter.

• The value of creative work comes from what we intuit, what Plato called archetypes.

• The role of the brain is to make representations of mental meaning.

• Creativity is invention or discovery of new meaning. What is truly new is meaning invented or discovered using old or new archetypal contexts and combinations thereof.

When we use the new paradigm of science within consciousness to understand creativity, we make room for everyone willing to accept their own central role in creating the experience of their lives. It also tells us about the role conditioning plays, and what you can do about that. Creativity involves the causal power of consciousness choosing from quantum possibilities. If you learn to access this causal power and learn to manifest its message you can create any and every aspect of the life experience you desire.

Freud and Jung were right when they said that creativity has much to do with our unconscious, which they defined as the repository of repressed stuff—personal and collective respectively. Quantum physics has given us an even broader picture of the unconscious: as the unmanifest—the realm of possibilities.

For most of us, creative motivation requires a crisis—either externally, like a threat to our physical survival or an internal crisis of intense suffering. But how does curiosity become so strong for some people even in the absence of crisis? One answer may be a particularly close connection to one or more of the values that most inspire us: love, beauty, justice, goodness, and truth. As you travel on your own creative journey, your curiosity to know an archetype will gain traction. And as it does, evolution itself will be served. In the new science, evolution has a purposeful aspect that Darwin suspected but could not include in his theory—to express and manifest the archetypes in human experience and living. Or, to put it more poetically, to manifest heaven on earth. As we attune ourselves to the evolutionary purpose of the universe, our curiosity becomes ever more intense.