by Robert Lanza
November 19,
2011
from
PsychologyToday Website
Life is
an adventure
that transcends
our ordinary
linear way of
thinking...
After the death of his old friend, Albert Einstein said,
"Now Besso has
departed from this strange world a little ahead of me.
That means nothing.
People like us… know that the distinction between past, present
and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
New evidence continues to
suggest that Einstein was right:
death is an illusion...
Our classical way of
thinking is based on the belief that the world has an objective
observer-independent existence.
But a long list of
experiments shows just the opposite.
We think life is just
the activity of carbon and an admixture of molecules - we live
awhile and then rot into the ground.
We believe in death because we've been taught we die.
Also, of course,
because we associate ourselves with our body and we know bodies
die.
End of story...
But
biocentrism - a new theory of
everything - tells us death may not be the terminal event we think.
Amazingly, if you add life and consciousness to the equation, you
can explain some of the biggest puzzles of science.
For instance, it becomes
clear why space and time - and even the properties of matter itself
- depend on the observer. It also becomes clear why the laws,
forces, and constants of the universe appear to be exquisitely
fine-tuned for the existence of life.
Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to
understand reality will remain a
road to nowhere.
Consider the weather 'outside':
You see a blue sky,
but the cells in your brain could be changed so the sky looks
green or red.
In fact, with a
little genetic engineering we could probably make everything
that is red vibrate or make a noise, or even make you want to
have sex like with some birds.
You think its bright
out, but your brain circuits could be changed so it looks dark
out. You think it feels hot and humid, but to a tropical frog it
would feel cold and dry.
This logic applies to
virtually everything...
Bottom line:
What you see could
not be present without your consciousness...
In truth,
you can't see
anything through the bone that surrounds your brain.
Your eyes are not
portals to the world.
Everything you see
and experience right now - even your body - is a whirl of
information occurring in your mind.
According to biocentrism,
space and time aren't the hard, cold objects we think. Wave your
hand through the air - if you take everything away, what's left?
Nothing...
The same thing applies
for time.
Space and time are
simply the tools for putting everything together.
Consider the famous
two-slit experiment.
When scientists watch
a particle pass through two slits in a barrier, the particle
behaves like a bullet and goes through one slit or the other.
But if you don't
watch, it acts like a wave and can go through both slits at the
same time.
So how can a particle
change its behavior depending on whether you watch it or not?
The answer is simple:
reality is a process
that involves your consciousness.
Or consider Heisenberg's
famous
uncertainty principle.
If there is really a
world out there with particles just bouncing around, then we
should be able to measure all their properties.
But you can't...
For instance, a
particle's exact location and momentum can't be known at the same
time.
So,
Why should it matter
to a particle what you decide to measure?
And how can pairs of
entangled particles be instantaneously connected on opposite
sides of the galaxy as if space and time don't exist?
Again, the answer is
simple:
because they're not
just 'out there' - space and time are simply tools of our mind.
Death doesn't exist in a
timeless, spaceless world.
Immortality doesn't
mean a perpetual existence in time, but resides outside
of time altogether.
Our linear way of thinking about time is also inconsistent with
another series of experiments.
In 2002, scientists
showed that particles of light "photons" knew - in advance - what
their distant twins would do in the future.
They tested the
communication between pairs of photons.
They let one photon
finish its journey - it had to decide whether
to be either a wave or a particle.
Researchers stretched
the distance the other photon took to reach its own detector.
However, they could add a scrambler to prevent it from
collapsing into a particle.
Somehow, the first
particle knew what the researcher was going to do before it
happened - and across distances instantaneously as if there were
no space or time between them.
They decide not to
become particles before their twin even encounters the
scrambler. It doesn't matter how we set up the experiment. Our
mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how
they behave.
Experiments consistently
confirm these observer-dependent effects.
Bizarre...? Consider another experiment that was published in the
prestigious scientific journal Science (Jacques et al, 315,
966, 2007).
Scientists in France
shot photons into an apparatus, and showed that what they did
could retroactively change something that had already happened
in the past.
As the photons passed
a fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave
like particles or waves when they hit a beam splitter.
Later on - well after
the photons passed the fork - the experimenter could randomly
switch a second beam splitter on and off. It turns out that what
the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle
actually did at the fork in the past.
At that moment, the
experimenter chose his past.
Of course, we live in the
same world.
But 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 including us) has no basis in
reason and is being challenged in laboratories around the world.
From 1997 to 2017,
experiments have consistently shown that quantum behavior extends
into the everyday realm.
For example, physicist
Nicolas Gisin sent entangled particles zooming along optical
fibers until they were seven miles apart. But whatever action they
took, the communication between them happened instantaneously
("spooky action at a distance," as Einstein put it).
Today no one doubts the
connectedness between bits of light or matter. They're intimately
linked in a manner suggesting there's no space between them, and no
time influencing their behavior.
In fact, in 2012,
researchers published a paper in Nature (Yin et al, 488, 185)
extending this distance to unprecedented lengths - they achieved
quantum teleportation across Qinghai Lake in China, a distance
roughly equivalent to the distance between New York City and
Philadelphia.
Other experiments with
huge molecules called 'Buckyballs'
also show that quantum reality extends beyond the microscopic world.
And in 2005,
KHCO3
crystals exhibited entanglement ridges one-half inch
high, quantum behavior nudging into the ordinary world of
human-scale objects.
We generally reject the multiple universes of Star Trek as
fiction, but it turns out there is more than a morsel of
scientific truth to this popular genre.
One well-known aspect of
quantum physics is that
observations can't be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a
range of possible observations each with a different probability.
One mainstream
explanation, the "many-worlds" interpretation, states that each of
these possible observations corresponds to a different universe (the
'multiverse').
There are an infinite
number of universes and everything that could possibly happen
occurs in some universe.
Death does not
exist in any real sense in these scenarios.
All possible
universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in
any of them.
Life is an adventure that
transcends our ordinary linear way of thinking.
When we die, we do so
not in the random billiard-ball-matrix but in the
inescapable-life-matrix.
Life has a non-linear
dimensionality - it's like a perennial flower that returns to bloom
in the multiverse.
"The influences of
the senses," said Ralph Waldo 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."
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