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All past generations, a scientist once observed, have lived and died in a world of illusions.
Prophetically, this was said before Einstein’s relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and the discovery of atoms and DNA. We, in the twenty-first century, are no different. We wake up in the morning and think we’re just magically here.
Yet, when we examine the stuff we’re made of with our matter-microscopes, scientists have discovered that the particles seem to spring into existence with real properties only when we observe them.
The world, it turns out, isn’t the hard, cold place we imagine waking up to in the morning. We think we’re made up of dead, little balls of material bouncing around like billiard balls on a pool table.
Werner Heisenberg, the Nobel laureate whose uncertainty principle showed this wasn’t the case, once commented,
Scientists once thought that the experimental results of quantum theory (such as matter existing simultaneously in different states) were confined to subatomic objects.
This spared us from having to accept the logical conclusion that living beings, such as you and me and Schrodinger’s cat, could be both alive and dead at the same time.
But alas! Now scientists at the University of Vienna have carried out an experiment (Nature Communications 2, 263, 2011 - Quantum Interference of Large Organic Molecules) showing that this quantum weirdness enters the larger world.
Markus Arndt and his colleagues
studied mammoth organic molecules composed of over 400 atoms, and
confirmed that this strange quantum duality (matter
existing as both particle and waves of probability)
extends into the human-scale world we live in.
But our mind stands at the door by which
we entered and gives us the memories by which we go about our day.
Everything is ordered and predictable. We’re like cuckoo birds who
appear through a door each morning. We fancy too the clockwork set
in motion at the beginning of time.
But since that time, there has been a remarkable and unprecedented burst of discovery, including the two-slit experiment, quantum entanglement, and the observation that all the laws, forces, and constants of the universe seem to be fine-tuned for life.
Biocentrism takes things the next
step, bringing our worldview up to date with the facts. Space and
time aren’t only relative to the observer, but are merely the mind’s
tools for putting everything together - they are the language of
consciousness.
A few blotches of light appeared somewhere in my mind. As I concentrated, I noticed that I could turn them into very vivid, three-dimensional structures. And without much more effort, I was able to make them move in time, and even swirl in kaleidoscopic fashion.
This confirmed what I already knew as a
doctor - whether in dreams or schizophrenia (or drug use), that
the mind has the capacity to create spatio-temporal realities as
flesh-and-blood as the one you’re experiencing right now.
As John Wheeler, the great physicist who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” once put it,
It’s here at last, where we approach the imagined border of ourselves, the wooded boundary where in the old fairy tale the fox and the hare say goodnight to each other.
At death, we all know, there is a break in consciousness, and so too, a break in the continuity in the connection of times and places.
Without space and time, Newtonian
conceptions of order and secure prediction have no meaning. In
reality you can take any time, past or future, as your new frame of
reference, and estimate all other events relative to it.
On stairs that, like Emerson said, can be intercalated anywhere,
We think that the past is past and the
future the future. But as Einstein realized, this simply isn’t the
case.
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