Physics of the Soul: The Quantum Book of Living, Dying, Reincarnation and Immortality [Paperback]

Interesting book. Here Amit Goswami attempts to validate the paradigm of a soul that survives the body eternally based on quantum physics. In this "monistic idealism" he equates the soul with the quantum monad and the Jivaman of Sri Aurobindo and the Atman in Hindu Vedic philosophy. This book is another paradigm that supposedly contains the answers to the surviving soul or quantum monad, the subtle body which enters a nonlocality (a connection of potentialities connecting every point in space an time) and carries our tendencies and phobias with us to our next reincarnation. How the purpose of life is a play or battle of two forces, creativity and entropy

Some of the book is on quantum mechanics, how matter gets bogged down in stubborn paradoxes and quantum measurement paradox, and so his science, as in Sri Aurobindo's, is the subtle, the supramental, mental and vital experiences, a science of consciousness and nonlocality where the quantum jumps take place in webs of interdependent connections.

Thought is conveyed of the six bardos found in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and their relation to the human memory of information that dies with us at death and the quantum monad & quantum memory, which he believes carries the tendencies and habitual patterns in each reincarnation. This of course takes us to angels and higher beings of consciousness, death yoga, karma, maya Akashic memory, techniques of meditation, creative thought verses thought, potentiality and the range of choices of actuality.And the idea of the self is all - solipsism, the ideas of how our consciousness collapses the potentialities, turning it into the reality.

I enjoyed the suggestion of three Tibetan practices of one: the death prayer or the Hindu bhakti yoga of devotion to a deity. This is usually done with a private and personal mantra. Two: living a life of service and sacrifice, the attitude that is, is one of service and applied positive meaning. "Instead of looking at pain and suffering and recoiling from the, we embrace pain and suffering to relieve not any pain but the pain of humanity." p. 194. In this, we mentally visualize ourselves containing all consciousness - solipsism, and the power to heal and extend love to all beings. We sacrifice ourselves in this mental capacity and breathing techniques. And Three: Jnana yoga of effortless contemplation, that of concentrating without concentrating or focusing without concentrating, the paradox of concentrative energy while relaxing your mind and this allows you to enter beyond the discursive thought processes to the silent consciousness of the observer self..

I particularly enjoyed a 4 page thought on Involution and Evolution. While in evolution we expand and raise ourselves to the whole, in involution we contract and lower to separate fragmentation in grosser levels, forgetting itself, and decreasing freedom. It is a play of consciousness where there really is no separation but rather consciousness forgets itself for the sake of play, it pretends to forget.

The last chapter of the book gives a good summary on nine interpretations of the soul and its survival and journey.

When death occurs in the family, our rational minds cry out to know more about life after death. Religions offer consolation that God is love and there is heaven beyond, but we wonder if there are any confirmations from studies of human minds which open doors to the after-life. Accordingly we have eagerly picked up books promising answers only to be quickly disappointed. Too many scientific words such as collective unconscious, determinism, morphogenetic fields, non-locality, etc., at best leave our minds only dimly grasping the author's intent. Reading into other cultures about dharma, maya, moksha, jivanmukta and vedanta, will cause us to send another promising book back to the library, or our lower book shelves, unread.
Aware of this too often encountered problem, the author of Physics of the Soul, has included a thirteen page glossary explaining the meaning and purpose of the lesser known words he has used. To those attempting to become adequate in reading this and similar books, such a service is a godsend. Using Goswami's glossary, we can not only understand his Physics of the Soul, but also, find light from numerous books previously beyond our comprehension.
Amit Goswami, along with other writers who have given many lectures and workshops, is aware of certain frequently asked questions. These he thoughtfully answers in chapter eleven. Here again, Physics of the Soul should draw, and hold, a much wider circle of readers than most books on similar esoteric concerns.

Consciousness and the laws of physics are highly intertwined to define physical reality. This relationship is murky since consciousness does not appear in any equations, although it is invoked in the interpretation of quantum phenomenon. Consciousness is not treated as a physical entity, like space and time (both of which can be measured in physical terms), and it does not have a physical existence like matter (or energy), but it is associated with living mater such as a human being. Purely from physical (and mathematical) considerations, very few have provided satisfactory explanations for consciousness and laws of physics, except for physicists like David Bohm and Roger Penrose. From neurobiological considerations efforts have been made to correlate these two concepts by Carl Jung, Karl Pribram, Stanislov Groff, Gerald Edelman, and many others. From metaphysical point of view, many from the school of Vedanta (Hindu philosophical tradition), school of Buddhist philosophy, early Greek philosophers and modern-day thinkers have dwelled in this subject, but a perfect harmony between physics and consciousness is not yet achieved. One of the problems is of course the implied dualism in the interaction of nonmaterial entities like consciousness or soul with physical body. Do we mean soul and body are two different things? How do we account for consciousness in the physics of an atom or a molecule? Is consciousness a fundamental force or a medium? How is it related to the other four fundamental forces of nature? There are many questions which require answers. In this book, the author considers soul, reincarnation, and transmigration in his explanation of physical reality. He is somewhat bold in suggesting the reader to consider data from; paranormal research, extrasensory perception (ESP), telepathy, near-death experience (NDE), and UFO encounters to gain knowledge about soul and consciousness. Certainly this approach may interest many mystics, spiritualists and new age groups, but very few physicists take these suggestions seriously.

The quantum physical basis for consciousness described by the author is mainly theoretical with little experimental support. This is summarized as follows: Reality pervades as undivided consciousness, as quantum wave function with probabilities for various possible states. Hence, consciousness is non-local; it is spread out across space and time. The act of observation leads to the collapse of this wave function into a self-reference that splits consciousness into apparent subject-object experience, which the author calls tangled hierarchy. The quantum measurement occurs in all living cells not just species with brain, but in the latter, thought, memory, mind, learning, etc., play a significant role in the subject-object relationship, and consciousness exists at various levels of complexities; the brain, organs, tissues, and cells. In addition, it is proposed that all individuals have subtle bodies besides the physical body. They are connected with our particular life processes. These are; a mental body (connected with our individualized ways of mentation); and a supramental body (that contains the learned themes of movement of the mind); and the vital body (bodies made of substances that are ethereal in nature). These subtle bodies neither interact with the phys¬ical body nor with each other, but they run parallel with the physical body. The subtle bodies are also quantum possibilities within consciousness. The subtle bod¬ies are also non-local (less localizable) and do not directly interact with the physical bodies, but consciousness recognizes parallel simul¬taneous states of the physical and subtle body for its experience. The consciousness synchronistically collapse similar states for non-locally separated brains that are suitably correlated. And the collapse of a unique state of experience into actuality is one of recognition and choice (quantum characteristics), not one of exchange of energy, so it is surmised that problems of dualistic interaction do not exist (classical characteristics). Consciousness mediates the interactions between subtle bodies or subtle body and a physical body, maintaining parallelism. But the bodies do not interact themselves directly thus avoiding dualism. Telepathy is a good example to support quantum non-locality of thought and mind.

Soul like consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. It survives death of the physical body, transmigrates and reincarnates in another body to form a continuum. Physical body represents quantum like possibilities that manifests as localized structure, but soul also represents quantum like possibilities (transcendent potentia) that has non-local correlation (can not be localized, could be anywhere in spacetime). Hence transmigration and reincarnation occurs through non-local quantum like phenomenon. The author invokes some parallel to the Tibetan book of the dead where various states of life and death called bardos form a continuum through life and death.

The author proposes that the memory of the vital and mental bodies is entirely quantum in nature (quantum memory) that occurs through conditioning of the possibility structure due to repeated experiences and it results from the basic dynamics of quantum mechanics. Thus, our individual mental and vital bodies are functional bodies, not structural like the physical body. Soul is the quantum monad, an individualized unit: The individualization of mind and vital body occur through quantum memory. This is the sole survivor of death of the material body, which carries the attributes from one life to another. It mediates reincarnation through transmigration.

The main problem with this theory is that quantum entanglement is known to occur between different quantum states (such as two spin states of an electron or a photon). How quantum entanglement or non-local interactions occur for subtle bodies whose physical states are unknown? Secondly, non-local interaction for larger bodies are very slow as described by quantum decoherence phenomenon. Is it possible that soul (consciousness) is a medium like ether (as invoked in Newtonian physics). Or is it a fundamental force linked to other four natural forces by unknown forces not yet discovered? The nature of dark matter and dark energy are still unknown. In light of these observations, I am uncertain if the author is on the right track.

1. Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge Classics)
2. The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe
3. Languages of the Brain: Experimental Paradoxes and Principles in Neuropsychology
4. The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives
5. The Holographic Universe
6. A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination