The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Reared in the Hindu tradition, quantum physicist Amit Goswami integrates our spiritual heart with our scientific head.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Quest Books (November 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0835607933
• ISBN-13: 978-0835607933
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #802,620 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Visionary Window, January 15, 2001

By	Deb Dorff (Roswell, GA USA) - See all my reviews

Unlike Dr. Goswami's other books, which often meander and seem too technical for a layperson, this book is extremely well-written and easy for anyone interested in the new physics and spirituality to understand. This is a fascinating account of exactly how quantum physics might be used to explain such complex spiritual phenomenon as reincarnation, karma, shaktipat, the chakras and physical death. Dr. Goswami's father was a Hindu guru in India. However,as a small boy hiding in an English library during the Indian War of Independence, his son read all of Einstein's works and began a lifelong journey to find explanations in the laws of physics for the most mysterious spiritual tenets of the ancient Upanishads. Today, Dr. Goswami teaches quantum physics at the University of Oregon, and is a scholar in residence at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Consequently, he seems the most qualified of the "new physicists" to integrate Eastern spirituality with Western science. This books offers people in the West nothing less than a real opportunity to understand God, and, as such, is probably the most spectacular book you'll ever read.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, Unification of Eastern and Western thought., October 18, 2001

By	Tony Martinez (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

Many students of philosophy understand and appreciate both
Western materialist philosophies and Eastern philosophies
more centered on consciousness. Like looking at an atom,
and looking at a galaxy, these two philosophies needed a
middleground to connect them
In this book, Goswami is the first person ever to unify
the two seemingly disparate ideologies. He provides the
middleground in a way that books like "The Tao of Physics"
fail to do. (They only "hint" at the connection).

I am very happy that I bought this book.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Consciousness--The ground of all being, August 12, 2007

By	David J. Kreiter (Iowa City, Iowa USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Visionary Window: A Quantum Physicist's Guide to Enlightenment (Paperback)

Seventy years after the quantum revolution began, Amit Goswami peered through the visionary window to behold a truth that Eastern traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism have known for centuries: "Consciousness is the ground of all being". For him this revelation synthesized the two disciplines of science and spirituality.

Traditional Western science has treated consciousness as an epiphenomenon of matter, an emergent property of the brain. But Goswami insists that this produces a paradox. If consciousness is necessary for decoherence, the process by which quantum possibilities become reality, how is it possible that consciousness can arise from the very material consciousness creates?

If however, we turn this idea on its head, and show that matter is an epiphenomenon of consciousness, then the paradox disappears. Matter is within consciousness. "We don't have consciousness, rather consciousness has us" (52). It is only because of our memory that we have a secondary awareness, which creates the illusion that consciousness is an individual experience.

A universal consciousness helps explain some quantum decoherence experiments in which a conscious observer has been illiminated from the experiment. For example, in an experiment called the "Quantum Pinball (Scientific American, November 1991) the results showed that just the mere possibility that knowledge could be gained, was sufficient to collapse the quantum potential into reality.
Another advantage emerges from the hypothesis that consciousness is the ground of all being. It once and for all relieves us of the anthropocentric burden that the univese was created just for us. It isn't our own consciousness that has brought us into being, but rather the result of the constant self-referential communication between universal consciousness and matter, in an endless scurring toward greater and greater complexity and meaning.

In the last portion of the book, Amit Goswami includes chapters on subjects such as reincarnation, angels, and quantum healing. If this makes you queasy, rest assured, Goswami is a physicist to the core. This book was well worth the read, and a very good follow-up to his book, "The Self-Aware Universe" (see my review on Amazon).

This review by David Kreiter, author of Quantum Reality: A New Philosophical Perspective.