“... On the one hand, we welcome the benefits derived from a science that assumes the materialist worldview. On the other hand, this prevailing worldview fails to satisfy our intuitions about the meaningfulness of life.

“During the past four hundred years, we have gradually adopted the belief that science can be built only on the notion that everything is made of matter – of so-called atoms in the void. 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. Our predicament has fueled the demand for a new paradigm – a unifying worldview that will integrate mind and spirit into science. No new paradigm, however, has surfaced.

“This book proposes such a paradigm and shows how we can develop a science that embraces the religions of the world, working in concert with them to understand the whole human condition. 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.”

(Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe. My emphasis.)

On the topic of how the western world came to adopt its strange worldview, how it famously came to believe in The Ghost in the Machine, I strongly recommend the first chapters of Rupert Sheldrake’s The Presence of the Past, which is also a presentation of his theory of morphic resonance and the habits of nature.

I liked this photo, taken from a currently non-functioning site to which I have linked it. Professor Goswami describes himself here.