Dr. Amit Goswami – Love, Death and the Meaning of Life
This was my favorite dream – if we can build a society with the new quantum knowledge, where we teach meditation, we teach yoga, and stuff like that, there would be many, many minds slowing down, and exercises which would allow our creative motivations just out of curiosity. We would not be so careless about our suffering being so important to us at a major stage of our life.
Sylvia Henderson: You know, you touched on something that I think is important for people to hear and that is mind slowing down exercises that opens the door and allows us to move beyond our suffering. So, why is that? What is it about slowing down our thoughts, our mind, to allow us to do this?
Dr. Amit Goswami: When we slow down, our unconscious takes over. This is the thing, Sylvia, this is the crucial thing. Creativity consists of both doing and being. If we are into doing and constantly changing, all doing comes with thinking and so the mind is constantly occupied. There is no scope for the unconscious for this oneness to come into play. Unconscious is the oneness, so if you want the oneness to play a role and the values that govern the oneness to come into our life, then we have got to give the unconscious a chance.
Of course, every night you sleep that is true, and that is unconscious, but the problem is that if we do not prepare enough, then sleep does not come to our aid very much. So much more help is unconscious episodes during our waking hours, and we gain that through slowing down our thoughts and slowing down our feelings. It turns out we are in the unconscious and in that unconscious what happens is that the objects of potentiality they grow. And, of course, given the choice what could be deduced from it, a bigger pool of potentiality or a small pool of possibility? Obviously, we choose a bigger pool of potentiality.
Sylvia Henderson: Dr. Goswami, one of the things you talk about in that book is what the Newtonian Science touches upon which is the conditioned mind; but what Quantum Physics explains so well the concept of Dharma and even reincarnation and how they inter-relate, to be an endless journey. How do karma, dharma, and reincarnation have an impact on someone in that situation?
Dr. Amit Goswami: This is such an important question, especially in the culture we live in today. After the 5th Century A.D., because of political reasons, Christianity tried to welcome the concept of reincarnation, and this caused a lot of cognitive dissonance in this along with Psychologists in how to get a good hold on what the problem is with human development.
The problems decidedly that are in reincarnation karma, as you put it, influences us greatly and karma is nothing but propensities or habit patterns that remain from our past lives. Now some of these habit patterns are good, for example learning to learn, that is a very good habit. Learning to process meaning is a very good habit. Being purposeful is a very good habit.
Learning to love is a very good habit, but there are also, likewise, very bad habits. Procrastination, lack of forgiveness, lack of acceptance, these are very bad habits that we also hold, and if we have only bad habits, then these bad habits will prevent us from creative exploration. So, that is the problem with karma. When you say bad karma, we do not mean that we have done some wrong to somebody and that somebody is going to get us, no.
Nature is what is going to get us. Bad karma means we have developed some bad habits, and those bad habits are going to keep us away from investigating the new and investigating what makes us happy. Like love, beauty, and abundance. These things make us happy. So, this is the problem of karma.
Dharma is another very beautiful concept. It turns out that before we come into this life, we choose the kind of Archetype, which includes objects that we wonder about that everyone wants to explore like love, beauty, justice, wholeness, that I have already mentioned several times. You know, who does not want to explore love? Who does not want to explore beauty? Who does not want abundance in his or her life? These are the things that we want, but the question is, you know, we never find them.
Some of us are forever dissatisfied because we never found what type of Archetype that would give us the happiness that we seek, the satisfaction that we seek. The answer is that it comes from the incarnation you had chosen before you died the last time, and you must remember it. Of course, we also choose to birth, which is supposed to be helpful to remind us.
For example, if you want to explore music, this Archetype of beauty, then you would choose a musical family to be born into so that the remembrance comes easily. But, you know, it may also happen that you were born in a musical family, but then your parents divorced, and you moved away from the musical family. So, it is very important for everybody to make a concerted effort. If you are not satisfied with your life, that is a sure sign that you have not found your Dharma, the Archetype that you chose for yourself to explore in this life.
Sylvia Henderson: You know, one of the other things you talk about, which I found very interesting, was Poker Karma. That explains why we are not exact duplicates of our previous lives. Would you mind talking about that? You were talking about how you could be dealt five cards of information from your past life, but then the rest of it is kind of randomized.
Dr. Amit Goswami: Yes, very important information. I am glad you raised that issue. Let me tell you about the data that was collected by a past life regression therapist in Ohio. He, David Klein, had many people that he regressed to past lives and kept a regular journal of all these people’s data. And he found that many of his clients were talking about lifetimes, consecutive lifetimes, and he started to compare the propensities that karma brought in each of these lifetimes. He found that the propensities of being are not cumulative.
You do not bring all the propensities that you gathered in your immediate past life. So, why do you bring only a portion of it? This is the question that arises. In fact, Klein called this Poker Karma. Like you do not play all 52 cards in poker, you play with only five or seven cards. So, the analogy appears that you only bring a small number of propensities out of your whole bunch of cumulative propensities. Why is that? That is because you want to use those propensities for a specific archetype to explore.
For example, in my own life, I have known that I came to explore the archetype of wholeness, and that requires propensities that I have. You will find the Archetype which is particularly suited. Those propensities are particularly suited for the archetype you chose.
Now, I got rid of a lot suffering because there are many life circumstances which did not allow me to stay within the lives that I had started. I was not following the Archetype of Wholeness for the bulk of my life, and I knew that I could change my life, and in the course of that, I recognized that I have to integrate my life and livelihood and all these concepts.
Sylvia Henderson: There are other things that you touch upon in your book is about unprocessed emotions, and how they can affect us, especially physically. Why is it so important that we process our emotions, from a quantum physics point of view, why is that so important?
Dr. Amit Goswami: Yes, this question of emotion is a very important one because, you know, we are born with this negative emotional brain circuit which, of course, plays havoc with us. Those emotions that we recognize as anger, love, competitiveness, jealousy, envy and all those things, they create so many problems for us. But they are built into us so we cannot do very much about them except to realize that it is in our power to make positive emotions as well.
You do not have them in the brain as you are born, but we can make them; we can build them in our brain by creative exploration of the Archetype. For example, if we explore the Archetype of love. We can create positive emotions to replace those other emotions of anger and jealousy and hatred and negative judgments. We can balance them with positive emotional brain circuits. Start to explore the Archetype of love, which is not difficult because this is one of the Archetypes which is built into us. We do not have to really get initiated by making any big fanfare of exploration.
It is built into us in the sense that we have an immune system in our body in the form of one part of it is called the Thymus Gland. It is in the region of the heart, and the job of the Thymus Gland is to distinguish between me and not me. Now, when a stimulus comes to us like you are going on the street and a person of the opposite sex comes at you, and you look at him, you look at her, and I am having these enormous feelings in my Heart Chakra. Familiar, yes, tingles in the heart, heart-warming, what does it signify? It is built into us. So you have recognized the other as part of you. There is no longer any separation between the two of you. That is what we call romantic love.
An ordinary person who has not worked on love does not have a positive emotional brain circuit could stay in hate lifelong. We know that. People stay in it for lifelong, but people who have a love circuit in their brain do not stay in hate for more than a few minutes. In a few second, they are already over it, and they are immediately feeling love again in their hearts.
Sylvia Henderson: And that alone will help you step out of suffering for sure. I do want to remind everyone that Dr. Amit Goswami’s brand new book is coming out on April 1st. It is “The Everything Answer Book – How Quantum Physics Explains Love, Death and the Meaning of Life.” And if you would like to know more about
Dr. Amit Goswami, you can go to his website: www.amitgoswami.org. Dr. Goswami, thank you so much for this opportunity. It has been amazing, and a moment I will always remember.
