BIOCENTRISM

by Robert Lanza

  impossible things are said to be in a state of superposition.

  Now, superpositions are routine in the real quantum universe,

  but they seem extraordinary because they show, without any doubt,

  that our ways of thinking simply don’t work in all segments of the

  cosmos. This is a very important realization, one that is unique in

  human history and inarguably one of the great revelations of the

  twentieth century.

  The ancient Greeks, who loved logic and enjoyed exploring its

  contradictions, never tired of coming up with conundrums and find-

  ing paradoxes such as the Tortoise and the Hare. Here, you’ll recall,

  we say that the bunny runs twice as fast as the turtle, so we give

  the tortoise a nice one-mile head start in the two-mile race. (Those

  Greeks were far more likely to have used the Stade than the mile, but let’s not be picky.) When the hare has covered that one-mile distance

  to the tortoise, the latter has meanwhile advanced a half-mile ahead,

  because it moves at half the rabbit’s speed. When the hare closes that

  half-mile, the tortoise now moves ahead a quarter-mile more. While

  the quarter-mile is covered, the tortoise advances an additional one-

  eighth mile. Logically, then, the tortoise should never catch the hare.

  The distances will grow ever smaller, but the turtle forever remains

  ahead. We know this must be incorrect, and yet the logic leading to

  the conclusion contains no apparent fault. The Greeks also found a

  logical way to mathematically prove that one plus one equals three,

  and all manner of other wonderful stuff, likely as the result of hav-

  ing excessive leisure time in that wonderful Aegean climate.

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  Or consider this, told to a condemned man: Speak! If you lie, you

  will be hanged. If you tell the truth, you will be put to the sword. So

  the prisoner says: I will be hanged! After much tortured discussion,

  the jailors decide they have no choice but to release him.

  Language is rife with a myriad of contradictions that we merely

  ignore. Ask someone what he or she thinks happens after death, and

  one common reply is, “I think there will just be nothing.”

  Now, that seems to be a valid statement, but as we saw in a pre-

  vious chapter, the verb to be contradicts nothingness. One can’t be nothing. Our frequent encounters with the term be nothing or is nothing have numbed us into imagining that it expresses something valid

  and logical, when in fact it says nothing comprehensible.

  The point to all this is to instill a proper wariness for language

  and logic. Those are tools used for specific purposes, and work well

  for what they are intended to do, such as simple communications

  like please pass the salt. But every tool has uses and also limitations.

  We discover this when we find a nail sticking out of a doorjamb and

  want to punch it back in, but a quick search of the cabinet uncovers

  only a pair of pliers. We really want and need a hammer but are too

  lazy to spend more time looking for it, so we start hammering away

  using the edge of the pliers. This doesn’t work well, and soon we

  have bent the nail instead of driving it in. We have used the wrong

  tool for the job.

  Logic and verbal language are the wrong tools for the job of

  understanding quantum theory. Math works much better (but even

  then merely shows us how it operates, but not why it is as it is). Logic

  also fails when discussing things that have no comparatives. We

  tell a friend how wonderfully deep blue the sky looks on this crisp

  autumn day, but this would of course be meaningless to a person

  born blind. One needs experience or comparisons with the known

  for language and thinking to be productive. One of the authors saw

  a T-shirt imprinted with a standard Ishihara test for color blindness,

  consisting of lots of little pastel-colored dots. My colorblind friend

  saw it only as a random, meaningless pattern, but to everyone else,

  the shirt said, “Fuck the colorblind.”

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  We are the colorblind when it comes to the deepest issues of the

  cosmos. Because the universe in its entirety, the sum of all nature

  and consciousness, has no comparative because there is nothing else

  like it, nor does it exist within any other matrix or context, our logic

  and language lack any meaningful way to apprehend or visualize it

  as a whole.

  This profound limitation should be immediately obvious—as

  when people ask what the expanding universe is expanding into—

  and yet to most people it is not. This is perhaps odd, because nearly

  everyone has experienced language-futility or conceptual-failure, fol-

  lowed by a sense of frustration, such as when realizing that they’re

  utterly unable to conceive of infinity, or eternity, or the cosmos exist-

  ing without having any boundaries of any kind or any center. Our

  intellects come to a standstill at the notion of a cat that is in the state

  of neither being in a room, nor not in the room, nor partially in and

  partially out. We understand that the answer is “something else,”

  and because such quantum experiments are replicable, they must

  have their own internal logic—but not one that jibes with ours.

  Such language-limitation may hold true on every holistic level of

  the cosmos that we may ever care to explore, outside of the mecha-

  nistic and mathematical levels. We have seen that the brain/logic

  mechanisms we humans evolved to use for handling our common

  macroscopic tasks, such as ordering a cheeseburger or asking for

  a raise, fail to work at all when we try to grasp behaviors on the

  level of the very small or in comprehending things on the largest

  scales. And although this is both revelatory and surprising, perhaps

  it makes sense after all. No chemist who studied only the properties

  of chlorine, a poison, and sodium, an element that reacts explosively

  when it meets water, could have possibly guessed the properties that

  would be exhibited when the two combine as sodium chloride—

  table salt. Here suddenly we have a compound that is not only not

  a poison but is indispensable to life. Moreover, sodium chloride not

  only doesn’t react violently when it meets water, it meekly dissolves

  in it! This “larger reality” could not have been inferred from a mere

  study of the nature of its components. Similarly, if the over-arching

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  consciousness constitutes a kind of meta-universe, it too might well

  be expected to have properties unpredictable from any study of its

  components.

  Throughout these discussions of biocentrism, several points

  are invariably reached in which the thinking mind reaches a blank

  wall beyond which lie contradictions or—worse—nothingness. Our

  point here is that this should never be taken as evidence that bio-

  centrism is false, any more than the Big Bang needs to be discredited

  solely because it results in the inconceivable notion of a beginning to time. No one would claim that human birth is impossible simply

  becaus
e no one has the foggiest clue how that new consciousness

  “got there.” Mystery is never disproof. Saying that the biocentric

  thesis produces inconceivable aspects admittedly sounds like a cop-

  out, akin to a structural engineer trying to claim that he cannot

  know whether the proposed building will fall in a stiff wind. Who

  would accept that? But inquiries into the universe as a whole are, as

  we’ve seen, an inherently different enterprise for which our human

  logic system was apparently never designed or intended, just as it

  utterly fails in the quantum realm of the tiny. The balky nail bothers

  us no end, but all we’ve got is the pliers, and we have to make the

  best of it.

  For this reason, the reader is challenged far more than in most

  pursuits to consider, along with the logic and evidence for biocen-

  trism, something oddly intangible, a sort of “reading between the

  lines” to see if perhaps it rings true on some instinctive level. Not

  everyone will feel comfortable seeking knowledge by looking in

  unaccustomed places, turning over stones that normally stay put.

  However, this is far from a novel predicament. While life is full

  of tangible perils and clearly dangerous behavior such as barroom

  brawling and marrying on impulse, few have failed at one time or

  another to shy away from some situation simply because it “didn’t

  feel right.” Conversely, no one has yet explained love—and yet few

  experiences are its equal when it comes to prompting behavior.

  Logic is routinely trumped by instinct.

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  Biocentrism, like everything else, has its logical limits, even as it

  offers far-and-away the best explanation for why things are as they

  are. As such, it could perhaps be viewed as a jumping-off place, not

  an ending of itself, but a portal to yet deeper explanations and explo-

  rations of nature and the universe.

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  A fAll In pArAdIse

  The ten-acre island I live on is breathtaking, with the reflections

  of trees and flowers on the water. When I first bought the prop-

  erty a decade and a half ago, it was overgrown with sumacs

  and thickets that obscured both the water and sun. The little red

  house I lived in was very run-down. I remember a truck driver who

  unloaded some shrubs and trees one day. I was in my work clothes

  and covered with dirt from digging holes. The driver turned to me

  and said, “The guy who owns this house has obviously invested a

  lot of money in plants and landscaping. I don’t know why he doesn’t

  just tear this shit hole down and rebuild a new house.”

  The entrance to the property—which was once a mud hole—

  now looks like a vineyard with a narrow cobblestone road that dis-

  appears across the causeway. Planting hundreds of trees and setting

  thousands of stones was a lot of hard work. From across the pond,

  the compound now glistens white, with three-story towers sur-

  rounded with widow’s walks and capped with copper-domed cupo-

  las that reflect the sun. There are swans and hawks and fox and

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  raccoons that claim the island as home—and even a fat woodchuck

  the size of a dog.

  But I couldn’t have done it without help from Dennis Parker, a

  local firefighter who grew up in town. Some of the trees we planted

  are now more than twenty-five feet high. The wisteria vine—which

  was just a few feet high when it was planted—now smothers the

  thirty-five-foot-long arbor we build for it many years ago. The two

  houses on the property have been connected with a conservatory

  that has become an overgrown tropical rainforest—you’d need a

  machete to pass through the palms and white birds of paradise that

  are pressed against the sixteen-foot ceilings for want of space.

  Dennis lives on the other side of the conservatory. He and his

  eight siblings grew up in the local housing project. He joined the

  Clinton Fire Department in 1976, and as soon as he had enough

  money, put a payment down on a house into which the family moved.

  Make no mistake about it, he is stoic and difficult at times, which

  is why his concern for those around him is so poignant. For more

  than a quarter-century, Captain Parker did all the things expected

  of a firefighter. When a car went through the ice on the pond, he

  dove into the water in his scuba gear and pulled a man out of the

  submerged car (although he was too late). However, most days were

  less dramatic, like when he answered a call at the senior housing

  complex—an elderly woman triggered the fire alarm with spillover

  from the apple pies she was baking. The woman was so embarrassed

  that she sent her daughter over to the fire station with an apple pie

  for Dennis and his team.

  About three years ago, I asked Dennis if he could cut a limb off

  a tree. The branch was almost twenty-five feet off the ground, but

  he was a good sport about it—besides, he was a master at climbing

  ladders to put out fires and, on occasion, rescue cats from trees. It

  was late Friday afternoon, and he started cutting through the branch

  with a chainsaw. “Dennis,” I urged, “please be careful. We’re sup-

  posed to be having fun, and I don’t want to spend the night in the

  emergency room.” We both laughed. A few seconds later, I saw the

  massive branch start to swing. Within seconds it bashed into his

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  head like a ramming-rod, causing immediate hemorrhaging into his

  brain. “Dennis!” I screamed as he tumbled through the air. But the

  only response was a loud and terrifying thump when his body hit

  the ground. The chainsaw was still running, but Dennis was draped

  over the branch like a rag doll, with his tongue hanging out of this

  mouth and his eyes swollen and rolled up into his head.

  Just before he died, the blacksmith I had known from my child-

  hood, who was an orphan growing up, had said to me, “Bobby, you

  pick your friends. Not your family.”

  Dennis was one of the best friends I ever had. And there he was

  with his arms hanging limply over the branch. He had no pulse and

  wasn’t breathing. “Oh God,” I said. “He can’t really be dead.” I fig-

  ured his brain could survive for a couple of minutes without oxygen,

  so rather than administering CPR, I bolted for the house and called

  911.

  Eventually, Dennis started to breathe again and moved a few fin-

  gers on one side. I sat in the front seat of the ambulance as they

  drove him to the hospital. The road was due to be repaved, and

  although he was still delirious, every bump elicited a scream of pain

  like something from the horror movies. It turned out that—in addi-

  tion to fractures throughout his body—the bones in his wrist had

  been shattered by the falling limb, and the guys were restraining

  him by holding his wrists down with all their weight.

  After his jeans were cut off with scissors and he was intubated,

  he was Life-F
lighted to UMass Medical Center. Because I was a doc-

  tor, they allowed me into the emergency room. They were short-

  staffed and, as the night wore on, things became chaotic as other

  Life Flights started to arrive. At one point, the red “danger” alarms

  were going off on the equipment monitoring Dennis’s vital signs, but

  they had to ignore him as they tended another patient who had just

  coded. I heard the nurse call the ICU and plead, “We have two more

  Life Flights on their way,” she said, “and we cannot handle him.” The

  problem, it seemed, was that after waiting more than five hours, they

  still couldn’t get someone from housekeeping to change the dirty

  sheets on the empty bed in the ICU.

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  As Dennis lay in the corner of the emergency room teetering on

  the verge of life and death, I went out to the waiting room to let his

  family know what was going on. It was the first time I had ever seen

  his entire family assembled. As I entered the room, they rushed toward

  me to ask how he was doing. I told them the doctors didn’t know if he

  was going to make it. Before I even finished the sentence, I saw Den-

  nis’s thirteen-year-old son Ben start to sob uncontrollably. His sister—

  one of the strongest people I had ever met—almost collapsed.

  For a few moments, it all seemed surreal, and I felt somehow like

  an omniscient archangel transcending the provincialism of time. I

  had one foot in the present surrounded by tears, and one foot back at

  the biology pond, turning my face toward the radiance of the sun. I

  thought about the little episode with the glowworm, and how every

  person—indeed every creature—consists of multiple spheres of phys-

  ical reality that pass through their own creations of space and time

  like ghosts through doors. I thought too about the two-slit experi-

  ment, with the electron going through both holes at the same time. I

  could not doubt the conclusions of these experiments. In the larger

  scheme of things, Dennis was both alive and dead, outside of time.

  A few weeks ago—almost three years after Dennis fell—his son

  Ben was in a football game (he’s now on the high school football

  team). After Ben scored a touchdown, the parents in the bleachers

  went wild. Ben knew his dad would be proud.

  Ben just turned sixteen years old, and of course he had one thing