Are Dreams An Extension Of Physical Reality?

You spend a third of your life sleeping. What if your dreams are real? Perhaps our dismissal of dreams as “just dreams” is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness and physical reality.

“I am real” said Alice (in Wonderland). “If I wasn’t real, I shouldn’t be able to cry.”

“I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

We take for granted how our mind puts everything together. Everything we experience is a whirl of information occurring in our heads. Biocentrism — a new “theory of everything” — tells us that space and time aren’t the hard objects we think, but rather tools our mind uses to put everything together. They’re the key to consciousness, and why in experiments with particles, space and time — and indeed the properties of matter itself — are relative to the observer. During both dreams and waking hours, your mind collapses probability waves to generate a physical reality, replete with a functioning body. You’re able to think and experience sensations in a 3D world.

We dismiss dreams because they end when we wake up. However, the duration of the experience doesn’t mean it has any less basis in physical reality. Certainly we don’t think day-to-day life is less real because we fall asleep or die. It’s true we don’t remember events in our dreams as well as in waking hours, but the fact that Alzheimer’s patients may have little memory of events doesn’t mean their life is any less real. Or that individuals who take psychedelic drugs don’t experience physical reality, even if the spatio-temporal events they experience are distorted or they don’t remember all of the events when the drugs wear off (certainly, anyone they had sex with would confirm this).

We also dismiss dreams as unreal because they’re associated with brain activity during sleep. But are our waking hours unreal because they’re associated with the neural activity in our brain? Certainly, the bio-physical logic of consciousness — whether during a dream or waking hours — can always be traced backwards, whether to neurons or the Big Bang. But according to biocentrism, reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

In contrast to dreams, we assume the everyday world is just “out there” and that we play no role in its appearance. We think they’re different. Yet experiments show just the opposite: day-to-day reality is no more objective or observer-independent than dreams. The most vivid illustration of this is the famous two-hole experiment. When you watch a particle go through the holes, it behaves like a bullet, passing through one hole or the other. But if no one observes the particle, it exhibits the behavior of a wave and can pass through both holes at the same time. This and other experiments tell us that unobserved particles exist only as waves of probability.

Critics claim this behavior is limited to the microscopic world. But this “two-world” view (that is, one set of physical laws for small objects, and another for the rest of the universe) has no basis in reason and is being challenged in labs around the world. Last year (Nature 459, 683, 2009), researchers showed that quantum behavior extends into the everyday realm. Pairs of vibrating ions were coaxed to entangle so their physical properties remained bound together when separated by large distances (“spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein put it). “Such situations are not observed in nature,” stated the authors. “This may be simply due to our inability to sufficiently isolate the system of interest from the surrounding environment — a technical limitation.” Other experiments with huge molecules called “Buckyballs” also show that quantum reality extends beyond the microscopic world. And in 2005, KHC03 crystals exhibited entanglement ridges one-half inch high, quantum behavior nudging into the ordinary world of human-scale objects.

Whether awake or dreaming, you’re experiencing the same bio-physical process. True, they’re qualitatively different realities, but if you’re thinking and feeling, it’s real. Thus, René Descartes’ famous statement Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”).

Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lays out the full scientific explanation of Lanza’s theory of everything

Link to article in Huffington Post

Can a Tree Consciously Experience the World?

In “Avatar,” humans mine a lush moon inhabited by blue-skinned extraterrestrials, the Na’vi, who live in harmony with nature. Human military forces destroy their habitat despite objections that it could affect the bio-network connecting its organisms. On the eve of the big battle, the protagonist Jake communicates via a neural connection with the Tree of Souls, which intercedes on behalf of the Na’vi.

The movie suggests that we don’t understand the conscious nature of the life that surrounds us.

Although I saw the movie three times, I still cringe whenever someone tells me that a plant has consciousness. As a biologist, I can accept that consciousness exists in cats, dogs and other animals with sophisticated brains. Studies show that dogs have a level of intelligence — and consciousness — on par with a two- or three-year-old human child. In fact, in 1981, I and Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner published a paper in Science showing that even pigeons were capable of certain aspects of self-awareness. But a plant or a tree? To consider the possibility seemed absurd — until the other day.

My kitchen merges into a conservatory, a mini-rainforest with palms and ferns. While having breakfast, I looked up at one of my prize specimens, a Queen Sago tree. For the last several months I’d been watching it send up new fronds, which, since the winter solstice, have been repositioning themselves towards the shifting sun. During that time I also watched it respond to an injury to its trunk by sending out air-roots in search of new soil to re-root itself. It was a clever life-form, but clearly not conscious in any known biological way.

Then I remembered the episode of “Star Trek” called “Wink of an Eye.” In this episode, Captain Kirk beams down to a planet and finds a beautiful but empty metropolis. The only trace of life is the mysterious buzzing of unseen insects. When he returns to the ship, the crew continues to hear the same strange buzzing sound. Suddenly, Kirk notices that the movements of the crew slow down to a stop, as if time itself were being manipulated. A beautiful woman appears and explains to Kirk that the bridge crew hasn’t slowed down, but rather, he has been sped up, having been matched to the Scalosians’ “hyper-accelerated” physical existence. Back in real time, Spock and Dr. McCoy figure out that the strange buzzing is the hyper-accelerated conversations of aliens that exist outside normal physics.

We think of time — and thus consciousness — in human terms. In my mind, I could easily accelerate the plant’s behavior like a botanist does with time-lapse photography. The feathery creature, there in my conservatory, responded to the environment much like a primitive invertebrate. But there was more to it than that. We think time is an object, an invisible matrix that ticks away regardless of whether there are any objects or life. Not so, says biocentrism. Time isn’t an object or thing; it’s a biological concept, the way life relates to physical reality. It only exists relative to the observer.

Consider your own consciousness. Without your eyes, ears or other sense organs, you would still be able to experience consciousness, albeit in a radically different form. Even without thoughts, you would still be conscious, although the image of a person or tree would have no meaning. Indeed, you wouldn’t be able to discern objects from each other, but rather would visually experience the world as a kaleidoscope of changing colors.

Like us, plants possess receptors, microtubules and sophisticated intercellular systems that likely facilitate a degree of spatio-temporal consciousness. Instead of generating a pattern of colors, the particles of light bouncing off a plant produce a pattern of energy molecules — sugar — in the chlorophyll in its stems and leaves. Light-stimulating chemical reactions in one leaf cause a chain reaction of signals to the entire organism via vascular bundles.

Neurobiologists have discovered that plants also have rudimentary neural nets and the capacity for primary perceptions. Indeed, thesundew plant (Drosera) will grasp at a fly with incredible accuracy — much better than you can do a fly-swatter. Some plants even know when ants are coming towards them to steal their nectar and have mechanisms to close up when they approach. Scientists at Cornell University discovered that when a hornworm starts eating sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), the wounded plant will send out a blast of scent that warns surrounding plants — in the case of the study, wild tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) ?- that trouble is on its way. Those plants, in turn, prepare chemical defenses that send the hungry critters in the opposite direction. Andre Kessler, the lead researcher, called this “priming its defense response.” “This could be a crucial mechanism of plant-plant communication,” he said.

As I sat in the kitchen that day, the early-morning sun slanted down through the skylights, throwing the entire room into gleaming brightness. The Queen Sago tree and I were both “happy” the sun was out.

***

Robert Lanza, M.D. has published extensively in leading scientific journals and has over two dozen books, including “Biocentrism,” which lays out his theory of everything. You can learn more about his work by visiting his website at www.robertlanza.com.

Link to article in Huffington Post 

Rethinking the Nature of Life

Is there a higher level of being? Or are we merely a collection of atoms — more dust spinning around the center of the galaxy?

James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA, once said: “You’ve got to be prepared sometimes to do some things that people say you’re not qualified to do,” and “Since you know you’re going to get into trouble, you ought to have someone to save you after you’re in deep s–––. So you better always have someone who believes in you.” For me, that someone was Eliot Stellar, Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and Chair of the Human Rights Committee of the National Academy of Sciences.

As a student scientist there seemed to be no purpose to the universe. There were no fountains of youth, no lost gardens to explore in far lands. Something was missing, both from my life and from the scientific books in the library. I was also concerned about the failure to use this available know-how to improve the human condition in large parts of the world. This feeling brought me in medical school to compile a book indicating suggestions for necessary changes, thus offering a multifaceted picture of where science stood and where it intended to go. I invited the Secretary General of the UN, the World Health Organization, and Nobel laureates, among others. The response was overwhelming, dispelling any doubt I had about the need for the book.

And that was the problem. I sent the letters from my school mailbox, and the Dean’s office started to receive calls from the U.S. Surgeon General and others trying to locate me. The Dean of Students was convinced the project would fail and upset a lot of important people. But to my mind it wasn’t his concern. I said that in his office when he ordered me to send out letters to the contributors. When I refused, he told me I wouldn’t graduate if I didn’t comply. I told him I already got what I came there for — a medical education, not a piece of paper. When the conversation got heated, he said “I’ve never had a student talk to me like that.” I stood up (and finger pointed) responded “I find it difficult being in the presence of people like you. I’m talking to you as one human being to another.” He told me I’d better find a faculty member to defend me. So I went to Eliot Stellar.

When I refused to obey the Dean, I was summoned before the Student Standards Committee who told me they’d decline recommending me for graduation if I didn’t send out the letters. I was in deep s–––, but Stellar stood behind me. “You shouldn’t be in this alone. They’re bureaucrats — they don’t understand. The new Dean is from the testing agency. He needs to learn that all students aren’t the same.” One night Stellar called me at home. He was putting out the fire, and told me I deserved the MD degree. “The degree isn’t important,” I said “I got the education I came for.” At that point I heard his wife, Betty, say in the background “Tell him to ask his mother what she thinks.” “Shhh!” said Eliot. “It’s his decision.”

Many years later I was riding a trolley into the city and took an empty seat next to a well-dressed woman. She turned to me and said “You’re Robert Lanza, aren’t you? I worked in the Dean’s office and remember the day you had the fight with him. The office staff were all standing outside the door listening, and cheered when you told him off.”

Eliot Stellar died in 1993, my mentor, and one of the greatest physiological psychologists ever to live, and arguably the most decent human being I ever met.

I’ve often reflected upon Eliot Stellar’s place in the universe. This self-less man cared about everyone — his family, his students, and as Chair of the National Academy’s Human Rights Committee — the rest of the world. What greater act of transcendence is there than projecting your love and hope onto others? One can’t but come closer to God or Heaven than to merge oneself with the universal order of things. Eliot Stellar had become part of a greater reality. “The greatest good,” said Spinoza “is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature.”

This isn’t idle philosophy. Science, too, is beginning to grasp the non-linear nature of reality. Heisenberg, the Nobel physicist whose uncertainty principle transformed our understanding of the world, once commented: “Contemporary science, today more than at any previous time, has been forced by nature herself to pose again the question of the possibility of comprehending reality by mental processes.” Alas! The evidence has the weight of a boulder. Shall our vision forever flow around it? Experiment (PhysRevLett 49, 91, 1982) after experiment (Nature 459, 683, 2009) continues to show that entangled particles act as if there’s no space or time separating them, a result that’s intelligible only if we assume the mind transcends the existence of things in space and time.

From this viewpoint, we’re not just the collection of cells and molecules classical science describes. Heinz Pagels, the esteemed theoretical physicist, once stated: “If you deny the objectivity of the world, unless you observe it and are conscious of it (as many prominent physicists have), then you end up with solipsism — the belief that your consciousness is the only one.” Although Pagels’ conclusion is right, it’s not just your consciousness that’s the only one, it’s ours. “Know in thyself and All one self-same soul,” says the old Hindu poem “banish the dream that sunders part from whole.”

According to biocentrism, the mind transcends space and time in that they’re its tools, and not the other way around. This conception of reality dissolves away human individuality. “Sometimes,” said Thoreau, “as I drift idly on Walden Pond, I cease to live and begin to be.” The walls of space and time are illusory. We’re all ephemeral forms of an individuality greater than ourselves, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality, and its highest form; we’re forced to recall the words of the English poet John Donne, “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,” and to understand them in a more scientific way.

Years after graduating from medical school, I ran into the Dean in the hallway. He shook my hand and said, “As one human being to another” (referring to the day in his office). He congratulated me for my book “Medical Science and the Advancement of World Health,” which I dedicated to Eliot Stellar — who taught me that there’s more to life than the dance of atoms described in our science textbooks. I miss him.

Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza’s theory of everything.

View article on Huffington Post 

Could This Theory Provide a Glimpse of Our Ultimate Destiny?

Have you ever wondered what it’s really all about? How does this little life of ours fits into the larger picture — into a reality so huge the Universe itself is but a speck?

We go to and fro our affairs, baking cookies and digging up Sarah Palin bikini pictures, unaware of just how massively primitive our understanding of life and existence really is. Biocentrism, a new theory of everything, suggests we’re so far off the mark we might as well be reading comic books instead of textbooks on evolutionary biology or quantum physics. We peer out at the edge of the universe with our radiotelescopes, yet it’s only recently that scientists have started to question a worldview that stretches back to the beginning of civilization. It’s time to say goodbye to this old paradigm.

In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant declared space and time were properties of the mind. More recently, Einstein acknowledged “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” According to biocentrism, space and time arebiological constructs, suggesting there are other information systems that correspond to other realities based on logic completely different from ours. These algorithms are the key to consciousness and why space and time and the properties of matter are relative to the observer. Biocentrism suggests they’re not the only tools to experience reality. Although we experience a world of up and down, these algorithms could be changed so that instead of time being linear, it was for instance, 3-dimensional like space. Your consciousness would move through the multiverse, and you could walk through time like you walk through space.

Everything you experience is information occurring in your head. Space and time are just our way of making sense of things. They’re not objects, but rather the software that like in a DVD player, molds information into multidimensional experience. We take for granted how our mind weaves everything together. Even in dreams, it generates a reality, replete with a functioning body that interacts with a surrounding physical environment. Although a mental fabrication, you’re able to think and experience sensations just as real as you do now.

If you add that everything physically possible has to happen (as many physicists believe), what does that mean about our ultimate destiny? Where does your life and consciousness begin and end? It seems simple invertebrates may only experience existence in one dimension of space. Evolutionary biology suggests that life has progressed from a one dimensional reality, to two dimensions to three dimensions, and there’s no reason to think the evolution of life stops there. Ultimately, consciousness runs upward by insensible degrees from the lowest forms of life through to vertebrate existence, and far beyond us to extracorporeal (transcendental) existences that we can’t even begin to fathom. Although we experience them piece by piece, like the songs on a record, they represent parts of a unitary reality that exists outside the classical divisions of space and time.

It’s time to embrace this broader vision of reality. This became clear to me one afternoon, when as a boy, a small cottontail rabbit ran by me. There was nothing remarkable in that; nor did I think it unusual when he stopped a moment, holding up his paws and looking at me with the curious glance of the White Rabbit, as if to say, “Why, Robert, what are you doing out here?” But when the creature looked into my eyes and twitched its whiskers, I felt the Élan Vital in him, a certain sense of consciousness that cut across space. Then it ran off, and I too. You see, there was a joining, a projection of desires across the species boundary. For just a moment, I could feel the guide hairs on the back of my neck, even as the rabbit might have felt them himself.

Some people will say the sun was hot upon me that day, and that I shouldn’t burden my readers with this affair. They don’t think there’s any other explanation left. However, you’ve probably heard about the two-hole experiment, the quantum Zeno effect, and other experiments that suggest the structure of the physical world is influenced by human observation. The results of these experiments are fantastic, I agree. But when quantum physics was in its early days, even some physicists dismissed the findings as impossible. It’s curious to recall Einstein’s reaction to the experiments: “I know this business is free of contradictions, yet in my view it contains a certain unreasonableness.” Yet later he admitted quantum mechanics doesn’t contain any logical contradictions and is logically unexceptionable. Maybe so, but I’ve spent my entire career studying the basis of life. I have faith in life, not a set of equations.

No doubt the equations are right, but perhaps it’s wiser to interpret nature in terms of life rather than in terms of wave functions. To me, my interaction with the creature that inhabited that field was more complicated, and will in the end penetrate closer to the secret of the universe than any experiment that ever was carried out in a laboratory. As I have grown older, I have found myself puzzling over that little episode. Somewhere in it, I was sure, lay the secret,

It was only with the fall of objectivity that scientists began to consider again the old question of comprehending the world as a form of mind. Einstein, on a walk home, asked Abraham Pais if he really believed the moon existed only if he looked at it. Since that time, physicists have revised their equations in a vain attempt to arrive at a statement of natural laws that doesn’t depend on the circumstances of the observer. But in these days of disconnected theory, one point seems certain: the nature of the universe can’t be divorced from the nature of life itself. Indeed, quantum theory implies consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality. Only an act of observation can confer shape and form to reality — to a dandelion in a meadow or a seed pod.

But that’s not all. The late physicist Heinz Pagels once commented: “If you deny the objectivity of the world unless you observe it and are conscious of it (as most physicists have), then you end up with solipsism — the belief that your consciousness is the only one.” This may not unsettle you, except perhaps if you were standing in a meadow when everything was bathed in such pure light. But there I was, the creature a few rods off, its eyes fixed on mine.

I knew then that Pagel’s conclusion about solipsism was right. Only it wasn’t my consciousness that was the only one, it was ours. There was no doubt; that consciousness which was behind the youth I once was, was also behind the rabbit. Aye, behind the mind of every creature existing in space and time, and beyond them to intelligences in other realities we can’t fathom. “There are,” wrote Loren Eiseley “very few youths today who will pause, coming from a biology class, to finger a yellow flower or poke in friendly fashion at a sunning turtle on the edge of the campus pond, and who are capable of saying to themselves, ‘We are all one — all melted together.’”

Yes, I thought, we’re all one. There was a crackling of some twigs, and I jumped up in alarm. In another moment I popped down the large rabbit-hole under the rock. Down, down, down into a world of the unfathomable.

“Biocentrism” (co-authored with astronomer Bob Berman) lays out Lanza’s theory of everything.

Read this article on Huffington Post 

Where Did the Universe Come From? New Explanation of Our Origin

Contemporary science asks us to believe that the entire universe – indeed the laws of Nature themselves – just popped into existence one day out of nothing. How can anyone in their right mind accept such a thing?

We take physics as a kind of magic and don’t question that 14 billion years ago over a trillion quadrillion tons of matter suddenly appeared from – zilch? We’re told that space and time also magically appeared as well.

From the Big Bang to Sarah Palin is an enormous distance. It would be well to remember the experiments of Redi and Pasteur – experiments that put to rest the theory of spontaneous generation, the belief that life arose from dead matter (for instance, maggots from rotting meat, mice from bundles of old clothes) – and not make the same mistake for the origin of the Universe itself. We imagine time extending all the way backwards to the Big Bang, before life’s beginning in the seas. But experiments with real particles show that before matter can exist (or have properties) it has to be observed. Something must sustain it above the void of nonexistence and hold the world together in the midst of change. That something is the human (or animal) mind.

Past generations believed the world was a great ball resting on the back of a turtle; now science would have us believe it’s a fairy universe that appeared out of nowhere and that expands into nothing. Angels used to push and pummel the planets about; now everything is a meaningless accident. We’ve exchanged a world turtle for a Big Bang. By reminding us of its great successes at figuring out the mechanics of things, and fashioning marvelous new devices out of raw materials, science gets away with patently ridiculous ‘explanations’ for the nature of the universe as a whole. If only it hadn’t given us HDTV and the George Foreman grill, it wouldn’t have held our respect long enough to pull the old three-card-monte when it comes to these largest issues.

“One does occasionally observe,” Loren Eiseley wrote, “a tendency for the beginning zoological textbooks to take the unwary reader by a hop, skip, and jump from the little steaming pond…into the lower world of life with such sureness and rapidity that it is easy to assume that there is no mystery about this matter at all, or, if there is, that it is a very little one.”

Science has sought to extend space and time beyond our own emergence. It followed our footsteps backwards until they disappeared into the sea. The cosmologists picked up the story of the molten Earth and carried it backwards in time through the lower forms of matter to the Big Bang.

But physics has learned that the world doesn’t exist in a definite state independent of the observer. Tracing life down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it arose spontaneously from nonliving matter wants for the rigor of the quantum theorist. I have seen the test-tube-like contraption that’s said to mimic the geophysical environment of the primitive earth, and that attempts to explain the origin of life in mechanistic terms without reference to any observer. While a variety of organic molecules can be synthesized in many ways – and it can even be done in your bathtub – the experiments do not fail to have an animal subject. Our intercourse with the molecules is necessary for them to exist as real objects. Half of the experiment is the scientist, who doesn’t recognize that their consciousness renders possible the space, indeed, the very reality of the vessel itself.

There is no invisible matrix out there that explains our origin. Rather, for each life there is a universe, its own universe. According to biocentrism, each of us generates our own sphere of reality. We carry space and time around us like turtles with shells. The Universe is comprised of billions of spheres of reality, a mélange whose scope is breathtaking. Strikingly, anything you don’t observe directly exists only as potential – or more mathematically speaking – as a haze of probability. “Nothing,” said John Wheeler, the great physicist “exists until it is observed.”

Since time doesn’t exist on any level before observers, traditional pre-Earth explanations of the universe can’t explain our origin. Think of the universe like one of those globes you see in the classroom – it’s merely a tool that represents everything that’s theoretically possible to experience. But like a CD, the music only leaps into reality when you play one of the songs. Instead of the Universe having an absolute beginning, imagine, instead, that existence is like a recording. Depending on where the needle is placed you hear a certain song. This is the present; the music, before and after is the past and future. All songs exist simultaneously, although we only experience them piece by piece.

“Let man,” declared Emerson, “then learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind.”

Scientists have failed to see beyond their equations, to see the birds and butterflies husbanding their colors above the grass and trees against the sky. If only, coming home from the laboratory, they would look out upon the pond, and through the bulrushes, watch the schools of minnows rise to the surface to behold that vaster universe of which they are an intricate part.

We’re living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that life is an insignificant part of the physical universe (and sprung into existence from the Big Bang or bundles of old clothes), to one in which we – not the Big Bang – are the origin. Only for a moment, while we sort out the reality that time and space don’t exist without us, will it feel like madness.

Robert Lanza, MD is author of “Biocentrism,” a new book that lays out his theory of everything.

View this article on Huffington Post 

Biocentrism, The New Face of the Cosmos

Five hundred years ago people used to think the earth was flat. Evidence to the contrary was dismissed as absurd: “If the world was really a ball of rock,” some claimed “people at the bottom would fall off.” And before Galileo, it seemed stupid to think that we were whirling around the sun at 67 thousand miles per hour. It would have blown the hair off our head, right? Once again, puzzles of science are forcing a rethink of the world that goes far beyond anything people think is possible. Biocentrism explains how life is not a mere accident of physics, but rather is essential to the existence of the universe.

A string of new scientific experiments suggest the universe is not the dreary play of billiard balls that we’ve been taught since grade school. For all intents and purposes, our view of the world is the same as a chipmunk or a squirrel. The squirrel opens his eyes and the acorn is just miraculously there – he grabs it and scurries up the tree without further thought. We humans aren’t any different: we wake up in the morning and- and voilà! -the world is just magically there. We think there are all these atoms ‘out there’ just bouncing around whether we’re looking at them or not.

However, experiments have routinely shown just the opposite: Particles don’t have real properties if no one is observing. Consider the famous two-hole experiment. When scientists watch a particle pass through two holes in a barrier, the particle behaves like a bullet and goes through one hole or the other. But if you don’t watch, it acts like a wave and can go through both holes at the same time.

Bizarre, right? But these are real experiments that have been carried out so many times that no physicist questions them. In fact, the results have been described as impossible to comprehend. Richard Feynman, the Nobel physicist, once said: “I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will go ‘down the drain’ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.” But biocentrism makes sense of it all for the first time.

Consider the color and brightness of everything you see ‘out there.’ On its own, light doesn’t have any color or brightness at all. The unquestionable reality is that nothing remotely resembling what you see could be present without your consciousness. Consider the weather: We step outside and see a blue sky – but the cells in our brain could easily be changed so we ‘see’ red or green instead. We think it feels hot and humid, but to a tropical frog it would feel cold and dry. In any case, you get the point. This logic applies to virtually everything.

Consider space and time themselves. What are they? Wave your hand through the air. If you take everything away, what’s left? The answer is nothing. So why do we pretend space is a thing? The same thing applies for time – you can’t put it in a bottle like milk. Space and time are not objects. Look at anything – say the print on this page. You can’t see it through the bone that surrounds your brain. No, everything you see and experience right now is an organized whirl of information occurring in your mind. It’s all organized in your head in techicolor. That is, unless you’re colorblind – then your brain weaves objects together without colors. In fact, with a little genetic engineering, you could probably make everything that’s red vibrate or make a noise instead, or even make you want to have sex. Space and time are simply the mind’s tools for putting everything together.

The structure of the universe itself is probably the best argument for biocentrism. It has a long list of traits that make it appear as if everything – from atoms to stars – was tailor-made just for us. For instance, if the Big Bang was just one part in a million more powerful, the cosmos would have blown outward too fast to allow stars and worlds to form. Result: No us. There are over 200 parameters so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random. Tweak any of them and you never existed. None of them are predicted by any theory — they all seem carefully chosen, often with great precision, to allow for existence of life. The only scientific explanation (the so-called ‘Anthropic Principle’) says that we must find these conditions, because if we’re alive, what else could we find? Of course, this isn’t really an explanation unless you claim that there are an infinite number of universes and we just happen to be in the lucky-one. But there is no evidence whatsoever for these other universes anymore than there is for the existence of the Easter Bunny. The only real explanation is biocentrism, which explains how the universe is created by life, not the other way around.

According to biocentrism, space and time are not hard, cold physical objects, but rather forms of animal sense perception. When we speak of time, we inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time. Consider Heisenberg’s famous ‘uncertainty principle.’ If there was really a world out there with particles just bouncing around, then you should be able to measure all their properties. But it turns out you can’t – for instance, a particle’s exact location and momentum cannot be known at the same time. They’re like the man and the women in the cuckoo-clock – when one goes in the other comes out. This uncertainty is built in the fabric of the universe, but no one has a clue why. It only makes sense if we accept the fact that the universe is biocentric.

Consider a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots an arrow and the camera follows its trajectory. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame — you stare at the image of an arrow in mid-flight. The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but it’s going nowhere; its velocity is no longer known. This is the fuzziness described by in the uncertainty principle: sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively being reconstructed inside our heads. Time is simply the summation of the ‘frames’ occurring inside the mind. But change doesn’t mean there is an actual invisible matrix called “time” in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things.

There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We can’t pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is not a thing or object. It is part of our mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects. We think of space as a vast container that has no walls. But this is false. Distances between objects change depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else.

By treating space and time as fundamental and independent things, we pick a completely wrong starting point for understanding the world. In fact, new experiments are starting to confirm that quantum effects apply to the everyday world of human-scale objects.

Biocentrism unlocks the cage we have unwittingly confined ourselves. A new paradigm is usually considered nonsense from within the existing paradigm. But allowing the observer into the equation opens new approaches to understanding everything from the tiny world of the atom to our views of life and death. Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of science as scientists have been attempting to do ever since Einstein. Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to truly understand the world will remain a road to nowhere.

Adapted from “Biocentrism” by Robert Lanza with Bob Berman, published by BenBella Books.

Link to article in Huffington Post 

Do We Have a Soul? A Scientific Answer

Does your cat or dog have a soul? What about a flea?

In the last century, science has undergone several revolutions, with profound implications for answering this ancient spiritual question.

Traditionally, scientists speak of the soul in a materialistic context, treating it as a poetic synonym for the mind. Everything knowable about the “soul” can be learned by studying the functioning of the human brain. In their view, neuroscience is the only branch of scientific study relevant to one’s understanding of the soul. The soul is dismissed as an object of human belief, or reduced to a psychological concept that shapes our cognition and understanding of the observable natural world. The terms “life” and “death” are thus nothing more than the common concepts of “biological life” and “biological death.”

Of course, in most spiritual and religious traditions, a soul is viewed as emphatically more definitive than the scientific concept. It is considered the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing, and is said to be immortal and transcendent of material existence.

The current scientific paradigm doesn’t recognize this spiritual dimension of life. The animating principle in humans and other animals are the laws of physics. As I sit here in my office, surrounded by piles of scientific books and journal articles, I cannot find any reference to the soul or spirit, or any notion of an immaterial, eternal essence that occupies our being. Indeed, a soul has never been seen under an electron microscope, nor spun in the laboratory in a test tube or ultra-centrifuge. According to these books, nothing appears to survive the human body after death.

While neuroscience has made tremendous progress illuminating the functioning of the brain, why we have a subjective experience remains mysterious. The problem of the soul lies exactly here, in understanding the nature of the self, the “I” in existence that feels and lives life. But this isn’t just a problem for biology and cognitive science, but for the whole of Western natural philosophy itself.

What we have to understand is that our current worldview — the world of objectivity and naïve realism — is beginning to show fatal cracks. Of course, this will not surprise many of the philosophers and other readers who, contemplating the works of men such as Plato, Socrates and Kant, and of Buddha and other great spiritual teachers, kept wondering about the relationship between the universe and the mind of man.

Recently, biocentrism and other scientific theories have also started to challenge the traditional, materialistic model of reality. In all directions, the old scientific paradigm leads to insoluble enigmas, to ideas that are ultimately irrational. But our worldview is catching up with the facts, and the old physico-chemical paradigm is rapidly being replaced with one that can address some of the core questions asked in every religion: Is there a soul? Does anything endure the ravages of time?

Life and consciousness are central to this new view of being, reality and the cosmos. Although the current scientific paradigm is based on the belief that the world has an objective observer-independent existence, real experiments have suggested just the opposite. We think life is just the activity of atoms and particles, which spin around for a while and then dissipate into nothingness like a dust funnel. But if we add life to the equation, we can explain some of the major puzzles of modern science, including Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the double-slit experiment, entanglement, and the fine-tuning of the laws that shape the universe as we perceive it.

Importantly, this has a direct bearing on the question of whether humans and other living creatures have souls. As Kant pointed out over 200 years ago, everything we experience — including all the colors, sensations and objects we perceive — are nothing but representations in our mind. Space and time are simply the mind’s tools for putting it all together. Now, to the amusement of idealists, scientists are beginning dimly to recognize that those rules make existence itself possible. Indeed, experiments suggest that particles only exist with real properties if they are observed. One point seems certain: the nature of the universe can’t be divorced from the nature of life itself. If you separate them from each other, reality ceases to exist.

We are more than the sum of our biochemical functions. Even the tiniest flea is an incredibly complex living creature, with mouth-parts adapted to feeding on the blood of your cat or dog. They have long legs that allow them to jump up to 13 inches (200 times their own body length, making them one of the best jumpers of all known animals). They have little eyes and antenna, and possess sensory cells that transmit messages to the brain. In fact, they possess all the structures that coordinate sense perception and experience (they can even be trained to perform amazing tricks).

Whether person or flea, the experimental findings of quantum theory suggest that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality, paramount and limitless. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. From this viewpoint, by virtue of being a living creature, you can never die (see “What Happens When You Die?” and “Is Death the End?”). And the same thing goes for your little dog, too.

Voltaire, the great enlightenment writer and philosopher, once said, “Nobody thinks of giving an immortal soul to a flea.” Now, nearly 300 years later, the mass of accumulated scientific evidence suggests we may have to.

Robert Lanza, M.D. has published extensively in leading scientific journals and has over two dozen medical and scientific books, including “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.” You can learn more about his work atwww.robertlanza.com.

Link to article on Huffington Post

Biocentrism And The Existence Of God

All human knowledge is relational. What is light without dark? Good without evil? Perhaps free will and determinism, order and chaos, something and nothingness, are simply different sides of the same circle of scientific logic. As science has penetrated the atom, we’ve discovered that solid matter consists mainly of empty space. We’ve discovered that inert objects, such as rocks, consist of particles whirling round each other trillions of times a second. Likewise, believers and nonbelievers in God may both be right, just traveling the same circle in opposite directions.

Of course, there have been myriad conceptions of God since the dawn of civilization. There are the Abrahamic conceptions of God, including the monotheistic God of Judaism and the trinitarian God of Christians. In Buddhism, God is almost non-theist. In fact, conceptions of God vary so widely there’s no clear consensus on the definition of God. In short, believers believe God has an incorporeal (immaterial) existence, and that there’s an afterlife. Atheists believe in a strictly corporeal (material) world, and it’s bye-bye when you die.

According to biocentrism, a new “theory of everything,” the material and immaterial worlds are co-relative. Life and consciousness represents one side of the equation, matter and energy the other. They can’t be divorced; split them and the reality is gone. Although the current scientific paradigm is based on the belief that the world has an objective observer-independent existence, a long list of experiments shows the opposite. Consider the double-slit experiment: When scientists watch particles pass through two slits in a barrier, they behave like bullets and go through one slit or the other. But if you don’t watch, they act like waves and go through both slits at the same time. How can a particle change its behavior depending on whether it’s watched or not? Biocentrism maintains reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

We think life is just the activity of atoms and molecules – we live awhile and die. But biocentrism shows that if you add life to the equation, you can explain some of the biggest puzzles of science. For instance, it becomes clear why space and time – and the properties of matter itself – depend on the observer. How can entangled particles be instantaneously connected on opposite sides of the galaxy as if there’s no space or time between them? And how can events in the present affect those in the past? Recently, scientists sent particles into an apparatus and showed they could retroactively change something that had already happened in the past (Science 2007). Biocentrism says these phenomena occur because space and time aren’t just “out there,” but are tools of our mind. Remember you can’t see through the bone surrounding your brain – everything is woven together in your mind.

In the end, life is motion and change, and is only comprehensible through a biological concept of time. Motion is possible through the representation of time. “No concept, no matter what it might be,” said Immanuel Kant, “could render comprehensible the possibility of an alteration … for instance the being and the not-being of one and the same thing in one and the same place.” God, too, lives in action and is a relational concept, both existing and not-existing at the same time. “Discordant opinions,” said Emerson “are reconciled by being seen to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far back as to preclude a still higher vision.”

Those who believe in God believe in an afterlife. Nonbelievers believe death is the end. Biocentrism reinforces the primacy of consciousness found in the work of Kant, as well as Descartes, Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Bergson. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. At death, there’s a break in the continuity of space and time; you can take any point as your new frame of reference and estimate everything relative to it. Like the particles that can pass through two holes at the same time, you can consider yourself both alive and dead, outside of time.

According to nonbelievers, you simply die and rot into the ground. The universe continues to tick along like a clock; and in a few billion years, the sun will expand into a red giant, devouring all the inner planets, including the Earth. In one scenario, the universe will reverse its expansion, growing hotter until everything is crushed out of existence. Some theorists say the universe may bounce back into expansion in a “Big Bounce,” and so on indefinitely. In this view, the Big Bang was simply the beginning of one, say, 20-billion-year cycle time. We might be living in the trillionth universe (or any of an infinite sequential universes). Some say this oscillating model is consistent with the Buddhist worldview. Although speculation, it provides a sense of scale: If it takes a gazillion cycles to be reborn, that’s only 70 years out of what (in terms of human comprehension) is essentially infinity — the mathematical equivalent of materialistic death.

In contrast to the old mechanical worldview, biocentrism maintains that time is a form of animal intuition, not an object that ticks along independent of the observer. Without consciousness, the passage of time is meaningless. From this viewpoint you never die (see “Is Death the End?” and “Does Death Exist?” for development of this idea).

The implications of this were clear with the loss of my friend Bill Caldwell, who died over the holidays of a heart attack after golfing. Bill was CEO of Advanced Cell Technology (where I work), and one of the most decent human beings I’ve known. He struggled against the last day to cure human disease. When the company almost folded, Bill was the only other officer who didn’t jump ship. He refused to give up and believed we could make the world a better place for millions suffering from horrific diseases. Indeed, a few weeks ago we received FDA approval to carry out the world’s first clinical trial to use embryonic stem cells to try to prevent blindness. Accepting responsibility for the hopes of patients, Bill said “We do not intend to let them down.” My regret is that someday patients will benefit from stem cell therapies, but will never know the sacrifices that Bill and his wife, Nancy, made for their well-being.

At the viewing, Nancy leaned over the casket, tears streaming down her face. She was with Bill at every step. When the company couldn’t make payroll, she used her own money to pay the employees. It seems like yesterday I was at their wedding dancing with Nancy under the stars in her flowing gown. As Nancy guarded over Bill’s body, surrounded by majestic floral arrangements, I recalled the words of Loren Eiseley: “There remained in his garden only the dried husk of an old plant among flowers reaching for the sun.” But I knew that God or no God, that somewhere outside of our primitive thinking – of any particular spatio-temporal possibility – that Bill missed yet another golf game, and that he, Nancy, and I were sitting on the beach with a bottle of Champagne celebrating our recent success.

“Biocentrism” (co-authored with astronomer Bob Berman) lays out Lanza’s theory of everything.

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Is There A God Or Is There Nothingness? New Scientific Paradigm

The answer to such deep questions has traditionally been the province of religion, which excels at it. Every thinking person knows an insuperable mystery lies at the final square of the game board. So when we run out of explanations and causes that precede the previous cause, we say “God did it.” In all directions, the current scientific paradigm leads to insoluble enigmas, to ideas that are ultimately irrational. But since World Wars I and II there has been an unprecedented burst of discovery. Although still unbalanced by this sudden growth, our worldview will soon catch up with the facts, and the old physico-chemical paradigm will be replaced with a new biologically-based one that can address some of the core questions asked in every religion.

Growing up during this period, I encountered the opposition to such new ways of thinking. As a boy, I lay awake at night and imagined my life as a scientist, peering at wonders through a microscope. But the reality was far from this dream. My school was separated into three classes of opportunity — A, B and C. I was placed in C-class, a repository for those destined for manual, trade labor. My best friend was in A-class — why him and not me? It was a challenge, especially after an exchange with his mother. “Do you think I could become a scientist?” I asked. “If I tried hard, could I be a doctor?” “Good gracious,” she responded, explaining that she’d never known anyone in the C class to became a doctor, but that I’d make an excellent carpenter or a plumber.

The next day I decided to enter the science fair, which put me in direct competition with the A-class. My friend’s parents took him to museums and created an impressive display for his rocks. My project — animals — included souvenirs from my various excursions: insects, feathers, and bird eggs. It won me second place behind my friend’s project on rocks. Even in fifth grade I was convinced that life — not material and rocks — was the cornerstone of existence. It was a complete reversal of the natural scheme of things taught in our schoolbooks — that is, atoms and physics at the base of the world, followed by chemistry, and then biology and life.

Science fairs were a way to show up those who labeled me for my family’s circumstances. Once, after my sister was suspended, the principal told my mother that she wasn’t fit to be a parent. By trying earnestly, I tried to improve my situation. I applied myself to an ambitious attempt to alter the genetic makeup of white chickens and make them black. My biology teacher said it was impossible; my chemistry teacher was blunter, saying, “Lanza, you’re going to hell.” Before the fair a friend predicted I’d win. “Ha-ha,” the whole class laughed. When I won, the principal had to congratulate my mother in front of the whole school.

During my scientific career, I continued to encounter this kind of intolerance to new ideas. Can you clone a species using eggs from another? Can you generate stem cells without destroying embryos? Of course, scientists are no different from the rest of our species. We evolved in the forest roof to collect fruit and berries, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that this skill set hasn’t served us well in understanding the nature of existence.

We open our eyes, and things appear to be magically hovering “out there” in some invisible matrix. In the nineteenth century, scientists called it the “ether,” followed by the “spacetime” of Einstein, and then “string theory” with new dimensions blowing up in different realms. Indeed, unseen dimensions (up to a 100) are now envisioned everywhere, some curled up like soda straws at every point in space.

When science tries to resolve its conflicts by adding and subtracting dimensions to the Universe like houses on a Monopoly board, we need to examine our dogmas. We believe an external world exists independent of the perceiving subject. Philosophers and physicists from Plato to Hawking have debated this idea. Niels Bohr, the great Nobel physicist, said, “Not so.” When we measure something, we’re forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We’re not “measuring” the world; we’re creating it. At the legendary debates, Einstein presented ingenious ideas supporting the idea of a “real world out there,” but Bohr shot them all down and gradually won over the physics community. But today most people still believe there’s a real world out there.

This something-nothingness issue is ancient, and of course predates biocentrism, which explains why one view and not the other must be correct. Take the seemingly undeniable logic that your kitchen is always there, its contents assuming its familiar forms whether or not you’re in it. At night you leave for the bedroom. Of course the kitchen is still there, unseen, all through the night. Right? But consider: the refrigerator, stove and everything else are composed of a shimmering swarm of matter/energy. Quantum theory, tells us not a single one of those particles actually exists in a definite place. Rather, like Bohr said, they merely exist as a range of probabilities that are unmanifest. In the presence of an observer — that is, when you go back in to get a drink of water — each one’s wave function collapses and it assumes an actual position, a physical reality.

According to the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum physics, there are an infinite number of universes — known as the multiverse — associated with each possible observation. Biocentrism extends this idea, suggesting that life has a non-linear dimensionality that encompasses the multiverse. Experiments show that measurements an observer makes can even influence events that have already happened in the past. Regardless of the choice you make, it’ll be you (the observer) who experience the outcomes and histories that result.

Ideally, our concepts of nature and God should adapt to this evolving scientific knowledge. What happened before the Big Bang? Or if God made the world, then who made God? According to biocentrism, these are ultimately irrational questions, because space and time are simply tools of our understanding and don’t exist in any absolute sense. Before and after are relative concepts tied to us, which includes the totality of existence in the multiverse. Imagine what might be possible, especially if we’re able to recreate information systems to generate any consciousness-based reality fathomable.

“One thing I have learned in a long life,” said Einstein, “[is] that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike — and yet it is the most precious thing we have.” Science, like religion, must work with simple concepts the human mind can comprehend. But if biocentrism is right, nature has much bigger plans for us than just this or that life — plans far beyond anything religion has ever projected to any God. And perhaps, if science is clever enough to see, it will realize that religion may not be too far off with its concrete imagery; and that relative to the supreme creator, we humans are much like the microorganisms we scrutinize under the microscope.

Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza’s theory of everything.

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Why You’re Alive And Can Never Die. The Larger Scientific Picture

Is it just a one-in-gazillion chance that you happen to be alive, now, on top of all time? Or is there a more rational scientific reason? Grade-school math tells us the probability of being on top of infinity is zero. If space and time are tools of the mind, then how can there be a time without consciousness?

The question “Does time exist?” makes people wonder about engaging in such idle speculation. A typical response might be, “The clock ticks. We age and die. Time is the only thing we can be certain of.” Equally inconsonant is whether space exists. “Obviously space exists,” one might answer, “because we live in it. We move through it, drive through it. Miles, kilometers are all units we use to measure it.” Time and space in the concrete sense are easy to think about. Find yourself short of either — late for work, standing in a stalled subway car — and the constraints of time and space are apparent: “It’s crowded and I’m going to miss my meeting.”

Time and space are integral to every moment of our existence. But the idea of them being tools of our mind — our source of comprehension — is an abstraction. To place yourself as the creator of time and space, as biocentrism asks you to do, rather than the subject of it, goes against every bit of common sense. It takes a radical shift of perspective to realize they’re life-created, because the implications are so startling.

If time is an illusion, can consciousness ever truly be extinguished? The fear of death is a universal concern, yet once we abandon the random, physical-centered cosmos and start to see things biocentrically, the verisimilitude of a finite life loosens its grip. The contemplation of time and the discoveries of modern science suggest that the mind is the ultimate reality, paramount and limitless.

“The influences of the senses,” said Emerson, “has in most men overpowered the mind to the degree that the walls of space and time have come to look solid, real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits in the world is the sign of insanity.”

I remember the day I first realized this. From around the corner came the trolley car, scattering sparks above it. There was a grind of metal wheels, the tinkle of a few coins. With a jolt, the gigantic electric machine was on its way to my past, back, block by block through the decades, through the metropolitan limits of Boston, till it came to Roxbury. Here, at the foot of the hill, for me the universe began. I hoped I might find a set of initials scratched into a tree, or perhaps an old, half-rusted toy, which I might put away in a shoe box as evidence of my own immortality.

But when I reached that place I found that the tractors had been there and left. The city, it seemed, had reclaimed some acres of slum; the old house I lived in, and the houses next door where my friends played, and all the yards and trees of the years I grew up in — all those things were gone. And though they had been swept from the world, in my mind they still stood, vivid and heliographing in the sun, superimposed on the current setting. I picked my way through the litter and the remains of some unidentifiable structure.

That spring day — which some of my colleagues spent in the laboratory, and others in contemplation of black holes and equations — I sat in a vacant city lot agonizing over the perverse nature of time. Not that I had never seen the fall of a leaf, nor a kind face grow old; but here, perchance, I might come across some hidden passageway that would take me beyond the nature I knew, to some eternal reality behind the flux of things.

The extent of the dilemma was realized both by Albert Einstein in the “Annalen de Physik” and by Ray Bradbury in his masterwork, “Dandelion Wine.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bentley. “Once I was a pretty little girl just like you, Jane, and you, Alice…”

“You’re joking with us,” giggled Jane. “You weren’t really ten ever, were you, Mrs. Bentley?”

“You run on home!” the woman cried suddenly, for she could not stand their eyes. “I won’t have you laughing.

“And your name’s not really Helen?”

“Of course it’s Helen!”

“Good-by,” said the two girls, giggling away across the lawn under the seas of shade. “Thanks for the ice cream!”

“Once I played hopscotch!” Mrs. Bentley cried after them, but they were gone.

Standing in the rubble of my past, it seemed extraordinary that I, like Mrs. Bentley, was in the present, that my consciousness, like the breeze meandering across the lot, blowing leaves before it, was moving on the edge of time. “My dear,” said Mr. Bentley, “you never will understand time, will you? When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old, and always will be. When you’re 30, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn 70, you are always and forever 70. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in the young now and an old now, but there’s no other now to be seen.”

Mrs. Bentley’s observation isn’t trivial. What sort of time is that which separates us from our past, and yet gives continuity to the thread of consciousness? Even a cat, when mortally ill, keeps its eyes focused on the ever-changing kaleidoscope of the here-and-now. There’s no thought of death. However, we humans believe in death because we’re told we’ll die. Also because we strictly associate ourselves with the body, and we know bodies die. End of story.

Physics tells us that energy is never lost, and that our brains — and hence the feeling of life — operates by electrical energy, and this energy simply can’t vanish. The biocentric view of the timeless, spaceless world allows for no true death in any real sense. Immortality resides outside of time altogether. Eastern religions have argued for millennia that birth and death are equally illusory. Since consciousness transcends the body — “external” is a distinction of language alone — we’re left with consciousness as the bedrock of existence. Death has always meant only one thing: an end with no reprieve. If we’re just our body, then we must die. But if we’re our consciousness, the sense of experience, then we can’t die for the simple reason that consciousness is expressed in manifold fashion and is ultimately unconfined.

As I sat in the vacant lot that spring afternoon, I found myself thinking there’s a better way to understand nature than science has so far. We need to pay closer attention to the processes of knowledge and perception. Scientists propound with much ado the connection of appearances in experience, but don’t see the connection of things in themselves, how they stand in community with others. They think they can say where individuality begins and ends, whether the mind is absolutely destroyed with the body. Yet, when death approaches, even they try to look beyond it.

Mrs. Bentley was right: we’re trapped in the “now.” We think 70 is the last “now,” but who knows that space and time aren’t forms of intuition, and that there are other “nows” if we but knew our mind?

“Biocentrism” (BenBella Books) lays out the full scientific explanation for Lanza’s theory of everything.

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