by Robert Lanza
“No, they’d kill me if they knew where I was. They think I’m
playing out in my treehouse.”
He insisted upon introducing me to a “Harvard doctor.” I hesi-
tated. After all, he was just the janitor, and I didn’t want him to get
into trouble.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said with a little grin.
He took me into a room crammed with sophisticated equipment.
A “doctor” looking through an instrument with strange, manipula-
tive probes was about to insert an electrode into the nerve cell of a
caterpillar (although I didn’t know it at the time, the “doctor” was
actually a graduate student, Josh Sanes, who is now a member of
the National Academy of Sciences and Director of the Center for
Brain Science at Harvard University). Beside him, a small centrifuge
loaded with samples was going round and round. My friend whis-
pered something over the doctor’s shoulder. The whining sound of
the motor drowned out what he said. The doctor smiled at me with
a curious gentle glance.
“I’ll stop back later,” my newfound friend said.
From that moment on, everything was a dream come true. The
doctor and I talked all afternoon. And then I looked at the clock.
“Oh, no!” I said. “It’s late. I must go!”
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b i o C e N T r i s m
I hurried home and went straight to my treehouse. That eve-
ning, the call of my mother penetrated the woods, sounding like the
whistle of a locomotive: “Rob—by! Time for dinner!”
No one had any idea that evening—including me—that I had
met one of the greatest scientists in the world. In the 1950s, Kuf-
fler had perfected an idea that combined several medical disciplines,
fusing elements of physiology, biochemistry, histology, anatomy, and
electron microscopy into a single group. His new name for the field:
“Neurobiology.”
Harvard’s Department of Neurobiology was created in 1966 with
Kuffler as its chairman. As a medical student, I eventually ended up
using his From Neurons to Brain as a textbook.
I could not have predicted it, but in the months ahead Dr. Kuf-
fler would help me enter the world of science. I returned many
times, chatting with the scientists in his lab as they probed the neu-
rons of caterpillars. In fact, I recently came across a letter Josh Sanes
sent to the Jackson Laboratories at the time: “If you check your
records, you will find that Bob ordered four mice from the labo-
ratories a few months ago. That bankrupted him for a month. At
present, he is faced with a choice between going to his prom or buy-
ing a few dozen more eggs.” Although I ultimately decided to go to
the prom, I became so intrigued by the importance of the “sensory-
motor system”—of consciousness and animal sense perception—
that I went back to Harvard to work with the famed psychologist
B.F. Skinner several years later.
Oh, and by the way, I won the science fair with my chicken proj-
ect. And the principal had to congratulate my mother in front of the
whole school.
Like Emerson and Thoreau—two of the greatest American Tran-
scendentalists—my youth was spent exploring the forested woods
of Massachusetts, which teemed with life. More important, I found
that for each life, there was a universe, its own universe. Witnessing my fellow creatures, I began to see that each appeared to generate a
sphere of existence, and realized that our perceptions may be unique
but perhaps not special.
L i g H T s a N d a C T i o N !
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One of my earliest memories of boyhood was venturing beyond
the mown boundary of our backyard into the wild, overgrown
region bordering the woods. Today, the world’s population is twice
what it was then, but even now many kids undoubtedly still know
where the known world ends and the wild, slightly spooky and
dangerous, untamed universe begins. One day, after crossing that
boundary from the orderly to the feral, and after working my way
through the thickets, I came to an old, gnarled apple tree smothered
in vines. I squeezed my way into the hidden clearing underneath it.
It seemed wonderful, on the one hand, that I had discovered a place
that no other human being knew existed; on the other hand, I was
confused about how such a place could exist if I hadn’t discovered
it. I was raised as a Catholic, so I thought I had found a special place
on God’s stage—and from some celestial vantage point, I was being
scrutinized and watched by the Supreme Creator, perhaps almost as
narrowly as I, as a medical student with a microscope, would one
day scrutinize the tiny creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop
of water.
At that moment long ago, other questions came to disturb my
wonder, though I did not yet appreciate that those musings were
at least as ancient as my species itself. If, indeed, God had made
the world, then who made God? This question kept tormenting me
long before I would see micrographs of DNA or the tracks of mat-
ter and antimatter created in a bubble chamber by the collision of
high-energy particles. I felt on both an instinctive and intellectual
level that it did not make sense for this place to exist if no one
observed it.
My home life, as I’ve already implied, was less than the Norman
Rockwell ideal. My father was a professional gambler who played
cards for a living, and none of my three sisters finished high school.
The efforts that my older sister and I made to escape beatings at
home steeled me to expect a life of confrontation. Because my par-
ents didn’t allow me to hang around the house unless to eat or sleep,
I was basically on my own. For play, I took excursions deep into
the surrounding forests, following streams and animal tracks. No
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swamp or creek bed was too muddy or dangerous. I was sure no
one had ever seen or been to those places, and I imagined that so far
as almost everyone was concerned, they didn’t exist. But, of course,
they did exist. They teemed with as much life as any large city, with
snakes, muskrats, raccoons, turtles, and birds.
My understanding of nature began on those journeys. I rolled
logs looking for salamanders and climbed trees to investigate bird
nests and holes in trees. As I pondered the larger existential ques-
tions about the nature of life, I began to intuit that there was some-
thing wrong with the static, objective reality I was being taught in
school. The animals I observed had their own perceptions of the
world, their own realities. Although it wasn’t the world of human
beings—of parking lots and malls—it was just as real to them.
What, then, was really going on in this universe?
Once I found an old tree with knots and dead limbs. There was
a giant hole in its trunk, and I couldn’t resist becoming another Jack
to this beanstalk. Quietly taking my socks off and slipping them
onto my hands, I reached inside the hole to investigate. A gr
eat beat-
ing of flying feathers startled me as I felt claws and a beak sink into
my fingers. As I withdrew my hand, a small screech owl with tufted
ears stared back at me. Here was another creature, living in its own
world and yet a realm it somehow shared with me. I let the little fel-
low go, but I went home a slightly changed young boy. My world of
home and neighborhood became but one part of a universe inhab-
ited by consciousness—the same and yet seemingly different from
mine.
I was around nine when the inexplicable and elusive quality of
life truly gripped me. It had become increasingly clear that there was
something fundamentally unexplainable about life, a force that I felt,
though I didn’t yet understand. It was on this day that I set out to
trap a woodchuck that had its burrow next to Barbara’s house. Her
husband Eugene—Mr. O’Donnell—was one of the last blacksmiths
in New England, and as I arrived, I noticed that the chimney cap
over his shop was rotating round and round, squeak, squeak, rattle,
rattle. Then the blacksmith suddenly emerged with his shotgun in
L i g H T s a N d a C T i o N !
3 1
hand and, scarcely giving me a glance, blew it off. The chimney cap’s
noise came to a sudden stop. No, I told myself, I didn’t want to be
caught by him.
The hole of the woodchuck was not easy to reach, lying in such
close proximity to Mr. O’Donnell’s shop, I remember, that I could
hear the bellows that fanned the coals in his forge. I crawled noise-
lessly through the long grass, occasionally stirring a grasshopper or
a butterfly. I dug a hole under a clump of grass and set a new steel
trap that I had just purchased at the hardware store. Then I placed
dirt from the hole in front and concealed the trap under soil at the
edge of the hole, making certain that there were no stones or roots
to obstruct the functioning of the metal device. Lastly, I took a stake
and, rock in hand, pounded it again and again, driving it into the
ground. This was my mistake. I was still so engaged, I didn’t notice
anyone approaching, so I was thoroughly startled to hear:
“What are you doing?”
I looked up to see Mr. O’Donnell standing there, his eyes care-
fully inspecting the ground, slowly and inquiringly, until he spotted
the trap. I said nothing, trying to restrain myself from crying.
“Give me that trap, child,” said Mr. O’Donnell, “and come with
me.”
I was much too afraid of him to refuse compliance. I did as I was
told, and followed him into the shop, a strange new world crammed
with all manner of tools and chimes of different shapes and sounds
hanging from the ceiling. Against the wall was his forge, opening into
the center of the room. Starting the bellows, Mr. O’Donnell tossed
the trap over the coals and a tiny fire appeared underneath, getting
hotter and hotter, until, with a sudden puff, it burst into flame.
“This thing can injure dogs and even children!” said Mr.
O’Donnell, poking the coals with a toasting fork. When the trap was
red hot, he took it from the forge, and pounded it into a little square
with his hammer.
For some little time he said nothing while the metal cooled; I
meanwhile was thoroughly engaged in looking round, and eyeing all
the metal figurines, chimes and weather vanes. Proudly displayed
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on one shelf sat a sculpted mask of a Roman warrior. At length, Mr.
O’Donnell patted me upon the shoulder, and then held up a few
sketches of a dragonfly.
“I tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give you fifty cents for every drag-
onfly you catch.”
I said that would be fun, and when I parted I was so excited I
forgot about the woodchuck and the trap.
The next day, freshly wakened, I set off to the fields with a mar-
malade jar and a butterfly net. The air was alive with insects, the
flowers with bees and butterflies. But I didn’t see any dragonflies. As
I floated through the last of the meadows, the long and fuzzy spikes
of a cattail attracted my attention. A huge dragonfly was humming
round and round; and when at last I caught it, I hopped-skipped-
and-jumped all the way back to Mr. O’Donnell’s shop, a place so
recently transformed from its so recent existence as a haunted struc-
ture of terror and mystery.
Taking a magnifying glass, Mr. O’Donnell held the jar up to the
light and made a careful study of the dragonfly. He fished out a num-
ber of rods and bars that lined the wall. Next, with a little pound-
ing, he wrought a splendorous figurine that was the perfect physical
image of the insect. Though he was working in metal, it had about it
a beauty as airy and insubstantial as the delicate creature. But he did
not capture all of it. What I wanted to know, even then, was how it
felt to be that dragonfly and to perceive its world.
As long as I live, I will never forget that day. And though Mr.
O’Donnell is gone now, there still remains in his shop that little
iron dragonfly—now covered with dust—to remind me that there
is something more elusive to life than the succession of shapes and
forms we see frozen into matter.
5
where Is the unIverse?
Many of the later chapters will use discussions of space and
time, and especially quantum theory, to help make the case
for biocentrism. First, however, simple logic must be used to
answer a most basic question: where is the universe located? It is
here that we will need to deviate from conventional thinking and
shared assumptions, some of which are inherent in language itself.
All of us are taught since earliest childhood that the universe
can be fundamentally divided into two entities—ourselves, and that
which is outside of us. This seems logical and apparent. What is
“me” is commonly defined by what I can control. I can move my
fingers but I cannot wiggle your toes. The dichotomy, then, is based
largely on manipulation. The dividing line between self and nonself
is generally taken to be the skin, strongly implying that I am this
body and nothing else.
Of course, when a chunk of the body has vanished, as some
unfortunate double amputees have experienced, one still feels one-
self to be just as “present” and “here” as before, and not subjectively
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diminished in the least. This logic could be carried forth easily
enough until one arrives at solely the brain itself perceiving itself as
“me”—because if a human head could be maintained with an arti-
ficial heart and the rest, it too would reply “Here!” if its name were
shouted at roll call.
The central concept of René Descartes, who brought philosophy
forward into its modern era, was the primacy of consciousness; that
all knowledge, all truths and principles of being must begin with
the individual sensation of mind and self. Thus, we come to the<
br />
old adage Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. In addition to
Descartes and Kant, there were of course a great many other phi-
losophers who argued along these lines—Leibniz, Berkeley, Scho-
penhauer, and Bergson to name a few. But that former pair, surely
among the very greatest of all time, mark the epochs of modern
philosophical history. All start with “self.”
Much has been written about this sense of self, and entire reli-
gions (three of the four branches of Buddhism, Zen, and the main-
stream Advaita Veda¯nta sect of Hinduism, for example) are dedicated
to proving that a separate independent self, isolated from the vast
bulk of the cosmos, is a fundamentally illusory sensation. It suffices
to say that introspection would in all cases conclude that thinking
itself—as Descartes put it so simply—is normally synonymous with
the “I” feeling.
The obverse side of this coin is experienced when thinking
stops. Many people have had moments, when watching a baby or
a pet or something in nature, when they feel a rush of ineffable joy,
of being taken “out of oneself” and essentially becoming the object
observed. On January 26, 1976, the New York Times Magazine pub-
lished an entire article on this phenomenon, along with a survey
showing that at least 25 percent of the population have had at least
one experience that they described as “a sense of the unity of every-
thing,” and “a sense that all the universe is alive.” Fully 40 percent
of the 600 respondents additionally reported it as “a conviction that
love is at the center of everything” and said it entailed “a feeling of
deep and profound peace.”
w H e r e i s T H e U N i v e r s e ?
3 5
Well, very lovely, but those who have never “been there,” which
appear to be the majority of the populace, who stand on the outside
of that nightclub looking in, might well shrug it off and attribute
it to wishful thinking or hallucination. A survey may be scientifi-
cally sound, but the conclusions mean little by themselves. We need
much more than this in attempting to understand the sense of self.
But perhaps we can grant that something happens when the
thinking mind takes a vacation. Absence of verbal thought or day-
dreaming clearly doesn’t mean torpor and vacuity. Rather, it’s as if