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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Dr. Amit Goswami's
Creative Evolution
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Universal Consciousness seems to operate discontinuously, without lead-up or prelude, in many of its expressions.
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Editor's note: The following is from Dr. Goswami's book, "Creative Evolution: A Physicist's Resolution Between Darwinism And Intelligent Design."
creativity, in any context, tends to exhibit itself with an element of discontinuity
Attempting to provide a model for the atom, Niels Bohr said its various orbital levels are like a multi-tiered building. Electrons reside on the stories. But when an electron moves from a higher to a lower floor of the building, the path traveled is not conventional. He called it a “quantum leap.” The electron does not traverse intervening space, Bohr asserted, but, in some sense, pops in and out of existence discontinuously. One moment the electron is on one level and the next it’s on another.
In the article on “Creativity,” a large corpus of testimony from creative notables in many fields of enquiry suggests that the truly original idea has no lead-up or prelude. Suddenly and seemingly, the new idea is simply dropped into one’s head. As “The Wedding Song” uses the phrase, it’s “something never seen before.” The singular insight constitutes a discontinuous trajectory of arrival.
Without intermediaries or warm-up, a great number of new species suddenly appeared on Earth 530 million years ago. It’s called the Cambrian Explosion. Defying Darwinism's "gradualism," the coming of these new biological organisms was a discontinuous one, a kind of "jump" in the fossil record.
As there is good evidence that Universal Consciousness served as agent of the collapsing of quantum possibility waves concerning the Cambrian Explosion, this creative force, as a defining characteristic, often seems to operate discontinuously in its various expressions.
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The Big Bang: collapsed probability waves produced the first matter, immediately shepherded by quantum morphic fields
As we learn more about the inner workings of quantum mechanics, we begin to perceive the nature of the origin of the cosmos.
Dr. Goswami speaks of Universal Consciousness paring down the infinite quantum possibilities. This pruning and narrowing led to a generalized embedded philosophy of how things should work in the universe, as expressed in its “laws,” habits, and characteristics.
This philosophical basis became codified in quantum morphic fields, says Dr. Sheldrake. These fields are “hidden blueprints” which organize energy, and constitute the underlying shaping essence of apparently self-organizing systems.
And so what we have, 15 billion years ago, concerning the Big Bang is the initial “creative discontinuity” of Universal Consciousness. Just as matter, material particles, are brought into existence by a process revealed in the Double-Slit experiments, so too, 15 thousand million years ago, in a hot explosive instant, Universal Consciousness collapsed probability waves to create matter.
This newly-created matter was then immediately shepherded by morphic fields which fashioned the inchoate matter, progressively and over time, into the familiar systems we see in the universe today.
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Editor's last word:
from Amit Goswami’s Creative Evolution:
Dr. Gerald Schroeder: “These [Cambrian] fossils … indicate that all animal phyla [body shapes] appeared almost simultaneously 530 million years ago in the [Cambrian Explosion]. All further development was confined to variations within each phylum. One of the great mysteries of animal evolution is why no new phyla have appeared since that Cambrian explosion of life.”
… there have not been any new phyla since the Cambrian age… And new classes within a phylum stopped emerging some 400 million years ago… The next lower hierarchy, new orders, stopped emerging about 60 million years ago…
Richard Goldsmith [writes]: “Can this mean anything but that the type of the phylum was evolved first and later separated into the type of classes, then into orders, and so on down the line.”
creativity, in any context, begins with a bang and then slows down into a narrowing of complexity
"… biological creativity [reflects the usual method of creativity at large]… All fields of human creative endeavor have one thing in common: Creativity in a new field takes off with an enormous flare. With time and proliferation of (subfields), complexity develops and the speed of progress slows. The same pattern is observed in biological evolution… 50 million years ago [we find that] mammals suddenly exhibited an amazing [burst of variety] into about 24 different orders – rabbits, rodents, elephants, [etc.]. The resultant Age of Mammals took only 12 million years to establish itself. After that the progress slowed down."
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