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 10 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-bye," 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.
Follow Robert Lanza, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertLanza
Robert Lanza, M.D.: Does the Past Exist Yet? Evidence Suggests Your Past Isn't Set in Stone
Biocentrism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert Lanza » Blog Archive » Biocentrism: How Life and ...
'Biocentrism': How life creates the universe - Technology ...
Biocentrism Demystified: A Response to Deepak Chopra and Robert ...
Energy doesn't vanish, but it's constantly changing form. The energy used in our brains will dissipate, and the brain structures built and activated by it will be broken down, after we die.
Conservation of energy cannot be extrapolated to conservation of thought or memory.
They're not. They exist independently of the mind.
See? By refuting his initial premise, I save myself the trouble of reading the entire article.
The main page
http://leb.net/~mira/works/prophet/prophet.html
But I can offer this on life and death and be completely truthful about it:
I am as certain that there are things going on that we really don't have a clue about when it comes to death as I am that i am typing right now and here's how.
I can't tell the whole story because there is a word or character limit on these posts.
I once basically came face to face (and trust me when I say I wasn't intoxicated at the time) with a 'spiritual entity' you might call it and it wasn't a happy one. I have never been and don't believe I ever will be so scared in my entire life (I was about 19 or 20 then and I'm 50 now) and I nearly broke my neck getting out of that house. If I could tell the whole story it would have more of an impact and you couldn't help but believe me but I'm telling you as sure as I'm sitting here that it was real and the most frightening experience I've ever had, and I've had plenty of them in my lifetime.
There can also be very disturbing repercussions for those who do.
Much more happens in this realm than our ordinary awareness comprehends.
www.bennettgraham.com -Minneapolis, MN
The old hotel that stood for decades, has since been replaced by a hi-rise. That hi-rise, once newly built on the same site as the old hotel. Yet it, itself is now, no longer new but decades (at least three) old. Other places I remember, some vaguely, now, are no longer existent. I tried to find them on the latest Google map. They are gone, like they never were. My High School closed it's doors years ago. I don't know what is there now, but the building, apparently still stands.
Life goes on...and on. Yet I ponder the mysteries of time and space. The older I get, the more mysterious it seems. Where does time go? What is time, really? No one, including science, really knows the answer. I wonder if they'll ever find out?
Science is concerned with the empirical and is about objective 'truth', forever incomplete as long as there are scientists.
But is there such a thing as 'subjective' truth, non-empirical but valid nonetheless, consciously albeit subjectively. If there is, it is highly filtered by our occasion and experience of self and what is external to this self but capable of being experienced of itself.
. I went through a phase recently of seriously shedding tears over people like Princess Diana, James Dean, JFK, and other tragic cases of people shot down in their prime and the complete arbritrariness of it all, the way tragedy and death could happened to any of us at any time.
And strggling to reconcile that with one's own past and childhood and "the 1970s" or whatever saying to myself "where the hell did that go and where is it now? In my mind only? One has shared realities with people from your past and that somehow makes it more tanagible--but is it?
IT makes everything meaningless in a way.
Another topic I have been immersed in that is related (believe it or not )to the points in your article is the Intelligent Intuitive life of plants.
I tell a story of a woman I did not know very well who was tragically killed when I was very young. I have held this woman's spirit with me since the event of her demise. I have recounted the little I knew of her in countless anecdotes about this or that. Her face and the rest of her physical presence remain with me, as do the sounds, smells, and sights of that past time period.
There is another story I sometimes tell, about a little boy (me) and a little girl who sat for hours playing with an unspoken powerful warming and nurturing love between and around them that gave them both a comforting (beyond their years) knowledge that the world before them was a wonderful place -- just apply love. I was roughly five or six years old. Again, I barely knew or spoke to this little girl, yet our brief encounter on that day remains and continues to inform life and
so can anyone prove that they ever did exist?
Actually, most humans do not believe that but instead believe in some form of non-physical immortal soul, and associate themselves with that (at least on the level of belief). This is why so many people became so upset when a woman in a persistent vegetative state (i.e., she was brain-dead, the neo-cortical structures of her brain that make cognition and a sense of self or personhood possible had been destroyed) was removed from life support. These people associate human selves (themselves, the "ourselves" to which Lanza refers) with something other than, beyond, or transcendent of the body.
The radical position is not that consciousness is ubiquitous and eternal. The radical position is that human phenomenal consciousness ("the sense of experience" to which Lanza refers) is to the human brain as digestion is to the human digestive system. (Notice that no one ever suggests that digestion existed before the Big Bang, is ubiquitous, and continues after someone has died and been cremated.) What most people identify with is not the body or brain but the phenomenon of consciousness ("the sense of experience"). And accepting that this may indeed come to an utter end is difficult if not impossible for most people. Thus, attempts to modernize religion such as Lanza's continue.
As for why we know that consciousness is a function of a living body, not a part of the energy in that body ... When you eat a hamburger, you do not become a cow.
Two years ago I lost my best friend of nearly 20 years to a brain tumor. Before his death, I had no idea how to think about death without involving fear. It was that moment that he stopped breathing that I realized that it was just his breath, just his body, that had died. I knew right then that there was NO WAY that AYDEN had died. His energy was still around me and I still feel him all the time. Now I know that death and fear do not go hand in hand, and although it can go hand in hand with sadness, I feel comforted by articles like this one.