Death and the Quantum

A New Science of Survival and Reincarnation by Amit Goswami, 1995

It is as Sri Aurobindo (1989) says. The fundamental necessity of our embodied life is to seek infinite creativity on a finite basis. But the physical body, the basis, by the very nature of its organization, limits creativity. In order to continue our quest for creativity, the only option we have is to change the physical body as needed.

In the process of involution, first the mental and then the vital substratum are conceived as possibilities, but there is no manifestation, no evolution, until the involution is completed with the conception of the physical. The first subtle body/quantum monad forms out of the continuous unity of the subtle vital substrata simultaneously with the collapse of the first self-referential living cell. The collapse brings about separateness in both the physical and vital substrata, an apparent division of reality into two: one that cognizes and lives and another that is cognized and becomes the playground or the environment, for the living. Memories begin forming. The physical memory consists of both classical and quantum memory--classical that can be played back and quantum memory that consists of a modification of the probabilities of each possibility in favor of what has been experienced. This leads to the increasing individualization of the living cell. The journey of individualization achieves a major step when the nervous system and brain evolve and mental bodies enter the play.

Simultaneously, the correlated subtle body associated with the physical body, begins forming quantum memory and, in turn, begins its journey of individualization. The process of individualization of both the physical and the associated subtle body continues as each contributes to the conditioning of the other. Individualization comes to full fruition in the human being . In the process of imagination, a physical brain-mind representation is made of the subtle mental and emotional stuff. In the process of perception, representations of the physical world are made not only in the physical brain but also in the subtle body (through modification of the probabilities of certain mental and vital possibilities). In fact, the picture that consciousness perceives in the event of perception is an amalgam of both the physical and the subtle.

Notice that once a reasonable repertoire of these representations in the physical brain-mind is completed, the brain-mind begins to act like a computer that has learned how to perceive the physical world by itself. This obscures the essential association of the subtle body in our actions, which, of course, continues to evoke itself in events of creativity, responses to novel stimuli, imagination, and so forth. SCIENCE WITHIN CONCIOUSNESS