Consciousness and Materialism: Integrating Science and Spirituality

Consciousness, not matter, is the true foundation of reality, challenging materialism and integrating science with spirituality.

### The Self-Aware Universe: Integrating Science, Consciousness, and Spirituality
* 📚 The book "The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World" by Amit Goswami challenges the traditional Western scientific view that **matter is the primary reality** and proposes that **consciousness is the foundation of all existence**.
* 🧠 Goswami's work suggests that modern science actually validates the ancient idea that **consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all being**.
* 🔬 Quantum mechanics plays a crucial role in this paradigm shift, with phenomena like **quantum superposition**, **wave-particle duality**, and **quantum entanglement** challenging the traditional materialist worldview.
* 🤔 The book explores the mind-body problem, proposing that the brain-mind is an interactive system with both **classical and quantum components**, within a basic idealist framework where **consciousness is primary**.
* 🌌 Goswami's philosophy suggests that the universe is **self-aware through us**, with the "self" being a relationship between **conscious experience and the immediate physical environment**.
* 🌿 The book calls for a new paradigm that integrates **mind and spirit into science**, moving beyond the **materialistic worldview** that has dominated Western culture.
* 💡 Goswami's work emphasizes the importance of **self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management** in understanding ourselves and the universe.
* 🌟 The book concludes with a call for **creativity** and a recognition that "the universe is creative; you and I in our creativity are the **living proof** of it."

For hundreds of years, we have bowed to the objectivity of science but have cherished subjectivity and religion in our living. We have allowed our lives to become a set of dichotomies. Can we now invite science to help integrate our ways of living and revolutionize our religions? Can we insist that our subjective experiences and spiritual philosophy be allowed to extend our science? 64,000 is the median number of words per book. The average person reads about 200 words per minute. Simple math will tell us that is one book in 320 minutes. To accomplish this in 7 days, numbers say you would have to read for 45 minutes a day. Don't forget to subscribe, hit that notification button, like, comment, and share. Enjoy! Welcome to the Book of the Week series. Every week, as I read another amazing title, I share it with the world. My name is Igor, SF Walker. Today we look at:

The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World by Amit Goswami. So how about you slow down and relax. Reduce all that noise, for just a bit. Make that choice and decide to listen. In this video, we explore a title that shatters the widely popular belief held by Western science that matter is the primary stuff of creation and proposes instead that consciousness is the true foundation of all we know and perceive. Stick around till the end, I will share with you some tools I have and use that will help you tremendously in this game of life. Discover a way to find out what actually motives you, what innate human need is driving all of your decisions and your behavior. I will share some tools to improve your self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management. Science, you see, proceeds by a very fundamental assumption of the way things are or must be.

For this assumption, is that there exists, “out there,” a real, objective reality. This objective reality is something solid; it is made up of things that have attributes, such as mass, electrical charge, momentum, angular momentum, spin, position in space, and continuous existence through time expressed as inertia, energy, and going even deeper into the microworld, such attributes as strangeness, charm, and color. However, we are still left with a flock of mysteries, paradoxes, and puzzle pieces that simply do not fit. The universe does not seem to exist without a perceiver of that universe. There is too much quantum weirdness around, too many experiments showing that the objective world — one that is running forward in time like a clock, one that says action at a distance, particularly instantaneous action at a distance, is not possible, one that says a thing cannot be in two or more places at the same time — is an illusion of our thinking.

We have come to accept materialism dogmatically, despite its failure to account for the most familiar experiences of our daily lives. In short, we have an inconsistent worldview. There is a demand for a new paradigm — a unifying world view that will integrate mind and spirit into science. The centerpiece of this new paradigm is the recognition that modern science validates an ancient idea — the idea that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all being. Behold the following quantum properties: 1. A quantum object (for example, an electron) can be at more than one place at the same time (the wave property). 2. A quantum object cannot be said to manifest in ordinary space-time reality until we observe it as a particle (collapse of the wave). 3. A quantum object ceases to exist here and simultaneously appears in existence over there; we cannot say it went through the intervening space (the quantum jump).

4. A manifestation of one quantum object, caused by our observation, simultaneously influences its correlated twin object—no matter how far apart they are (quantum action-at-a-distance). Instead of positing that everything (including consciousness) is made of matter, this philosophy posits that everything (including matter) exists in and is manipulated from consciousness. Note that the philosophy does not say that matter is unreal but that the reality of matter is secondary to that of consciousness, which itself is the ground of all being — including matter. Maslow neglected to take into account the consequences of unquestioned materialism, which is dominant in today’s Western culture. Most Westerners accept as scientific fact the idea that we live in a materialist world—a world in which everything is made of matter and where matter is the fundamental reality. In such a world, material needs proliferate, resulting in desire not for spiritual progress but for more, bigger, and better things:

bigger cars, better housing, the newest fashions, amazing forms of entertainment, and a dazzling extravaganza of present and future technological goodies. If only matter is real, as materialism has taught us to believe, then material possessions are the only reasonable foundation for happiness and the good life. Of course, our religions, our spiritual teachers, and our artistic and literary traditions teach that such is not the case. On the contrary, they teach that materialism leads, at best, to a sickening surfeit and, at worst, to crime, disease, and other ills. There was once a Cossack who saw a rabbi walking through the town square nearly every day at about the same time. One day he asked curiously: “Where are you going, rabbi?” The rabbi answered: “I am not sure.” “You pass this way every day at this time. Surely, you know where you’re going.”

When the rabbi insisted that he did not know, the Cossack became irritated, then suspicious, and finally took the rabbi to jail. Just as he was locking the cell, the rabbi faced him and said gently: “You see, I didn’t know.” Before the Cossack interrupted him, the rabbi knew where he was going, but afterward, he no longer knew. The interruption (we can call it a measurement) offered new possibilities. The world is not determined by initial conditions, once and for all. Every event of measurement is potentially creative and may open new possibilities. The antithesis of material realism is monistic idealism. In this philosophy, consciousness, not matter, is fundamental. Both the world of matter and the world of mental phenomena, such as thought, are determined by consciousness. In addition to the material and the mental spheres (which together form the immanent reality, or world of manifestation), idealism posits

a transcendent, archetypal realm of ideas as the source of material and mental phenomena. Realism grew out of our everyday perceptions. In our everyday experiences of the world, evidence abounds that things are material and separate from each other and from us. Of course, mental experiences do not fit neatly into such a formulation. Mental experiences, such as thought, do not seem to be material, so we have developed a dualistic philosophy that relegates mind and body to separate domains. The integration of science and mysticism should not be too disconcerting. After all, they share an important similarity: Both grew out of empirical data interpreted in the light of theoretical explanatory principles. There is no object in space-time without a conscious subject looking at it. Consciousness is the agency that collapses the wave of a quantum object, which exists in potentia, making it an immanent particle in the world of manifestation.

What we see depends on the theories we use to interpret our observations. How we reconstruct the past always depends on the theories we use. Thus arises the old philosophical puzzle about which is real: the theoretical image that we actually see but only privately, or the empirical object that we do not seem to see directly but about which we form a consensus? There are optical illusions. There are creative and mystical experiences of subjective images that do not necessarily correspond to anything in the immediate consensus reality. This is the paradox of perception: We cannot seem to trust the authenticity of either our theoretical image or the consensus, public, empirical object. Philosophical “isms” are born out of such paradoxes. Historically, two schools of philosophy have debated what is really real. The idealist school believes that the theoretical image is more real and that the so-called empirical reality is but ideas of consciousness. In contrast, realists hold that there must be real objects out there—objects

about which we form a consensus, objects that are independent of the subject. We need to transcend the paradox. There are many ways of thinking about the mind-body problem, many ways to reach conclusions, and many subtleties to be accounted for. As we embark on a tour of what I will call the University of Mind-Body Studies, I would like you to bear these subtleties in mind. Imagine that all great mind-body thinkers are here, now, at the University of Mind-Body Studies, where the traditional faculty from throughout history teaches the solutions—old and new, dualist and monist—to the mind-body problem. Before you enter the university, a word of caution: Retain your skepticism and always refer any philosophy to your own experience before you invest your allegiance. Dualism has difficulty in explaining mind-body interaction. Material monists negate free will and hold consciousness to be an epiphenomenon,

merely the software clamoring of our biocomputer hardware. Even monistic idealists fall short because they too undermine the experience of the personal self, being too enamored by the whole. Can quantum mechanics break the deadlock on some of these tough questions? Why is personal selfhood a difficult problem for idealism? Because in idealism consciousness is transcendent and unitive. One might well ask why, then, and how the sense of separateness arises? The only view of the brain-mind that is complete and consistent in its explanatory power is this: The brain-mind is an interactive system with both classical and quantum components. These components interact within a basic idealist framework in which consciousness is primary. 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. The brain-mind is a dual quantum system/measuring apparatus. As such, it is unique: It is the place where the self-reference of the entire universe happens. The universe is self-aware through us. In us, the universe cuts itself into two—into subject and object. THE SELF (the “I”) is not a thing but a relationship between conscious experience and the immediate physical environment. In a conscious experience, the world appears to be divided into subject and object(s). Upon reflection in the mirror of memory, this division produces the dominant experience of the ego. The salient experiences of the “I” are as follows: 1. Intentionality (purposeful,

directional focusing toward an object, including desire, judgment, and speculation) 2. Self-awareness (sense of self) 3. Reflectivity (awareness of being aware) 4. Ego-experience (feeling that the self is a unique entity with a certain character, personality, and contingent personal history) 5. Attention (experience of the ability of the self to direct its focus toward one object or another) 6. Transpersonal-self experiences (moments of revelation or insight, as in the creative ah-ha experience) 7. Implicit experience of the self (experiences in which there is division of the world into subject and object but no explicit experience of “I”) 8. Choice and free will 9. Experiences related to the unconscious. They are intimately connected with one another. The universe is creative; you and I in our creativity are the living proof of it. In determinism, the world machine allows us to evolve only in its image, as mind machines. But

there really is no world machine. In our desire for harmony and for prediction and control of our environment, we created the idea of the world machine and projected that deterministic image onto nature. “Someday,” said the Jesuit philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, “after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness ... the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world man will have discovered fire.” And there you have it: The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World! Please do help out, it's easy, simply like this video so more people can enjoy it. Share it too and spread the word. Leave a comment and share your thoughts. Subscribe to my channel and stay up to date. Link to this book is in the description below. Buy it. Read. Never stop learning. Especially learning about yourself and nature. So gift yourself by taking the free human needs

test on my website and find out what actually motivates you, what innate human need is driving all of your decisions and your behavior. If you feel you are ready to improve your self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management even further, do check out my Master of Life Awareness program. Links are in the description below. Thank you Love & Respect.

Self-Aware Universe by Amit Goswami Ph.D. Book PReview: How Consciousness Creates the Material World

SF Walker

For centuries, we have lived in a dichotomy between science and religion, but now there's a call to integrate the two.

The video discusses "The Self-Aware Universe" by Amit Goswami, which challenges the notion that matter is the primary force of creation and instead proposes that consciousness is fundamental.

The speaker also offers tools for self-awareness and understanding human motivation, highlighting the mysteries and paradoxes that challenge the objective reality proposed by science.

Materialism has become a dominant worldview, yet it fails to account for our daily experiences.

A new paradigm is needed, recognizing consciousness as the ground of all being, with modern science validating this ancient idea through quantum properties.

The philosophy suggests that everything, including matter, is influenced by consciousness, challenging the notion that material possessions are the foundation for happiness and the good life.

The Intersection of Consciousness and Reality

The rabbi's imprisonment by the Cossack highlights the creative potential of interruptions and measurements in shaping reality.

Monistic idealism posits that consciousness is fundamental, determining both the material and mental spheres of existence.

The debate between idealism and realism centers on the nature of reality, with idealists emphasizing the primacy of consciousness and theoretical images, while realists argue for the existence of independent, objective objects.

The mind-body problem has various perspectives and solutions, with dualism struggling to explain interaction and material monism negating free will.

Quantum mechanics may offer insights, but idealism's transcendent consciousness complicates the sense of separateness.

The brain-mind is proposed as an interactive system with classical and quantum components, with self-consciousness arising from a tangled hierarchy of consciousness.

The self is characterized by directional focusing, self-awareness, reflectivity, and a unique ego-experience.

These aspects are interconnected and challenge the idea of a deterministic world machine.

The universe's creativity and our desire for harmony have shaped our understanding of consciousness and self-awareness.