BIOCENTRISM

by Robert Lanza

  us to intuit that space and time belong solely to animal-sense perception, because the implications are so startling.

  Yet we all instinctively know that space and time are not things—

  the kind of objects that we can see, feel, taste, touch, or smell. There

  is a peculiar intangibility about them. We cannot pick them up

  and put them on a shelf, like shells or stones found at the shore. A

  physicist cannot bring back space or time to the laboratory in a vial,

  like an entomologist collects insects to be examined and classified.

  There is something oddly different about them. And that is because

  space and time are neither physical nor fundamentally real. They

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  are conceptual, which means that space and time are of a uniquely

  subjective nature . They are modes of interpretation and understanding.

  They are part of the mental logic of the animal organism, the soft-

  ware that molds sensations into multidimensional objects.

  Along with time, space is the other human construct, as if every

  conceivable object is displayed within a vast container that has no

  walls. Unfortunately, the actual tangible perception of no-space is

  often confined to experiments that produce “changes of conscious-

  ness,” where the subject reports all separate objects to lose their real-

  ity as individual, separate items.

  For the moment, confined to logic alone, we still should be able

  to see that the appearance of a myriad of separate objects existing

  within a matrix of space requires that each item first be learned and

  identified as separate, and the pattern imprinted on the mind.

  When we gaze upon known objects, say a set of dishes and sil-

  verware on a table, we cognize each as individual, and separated by

  empty space—it is a long-standing mental habit to do so. No par-

  ticular joy or transcendent experience occurs; the forks and spoons

  are not marvelous in any way. These are items blocked out by the

  thinking mind, within boundaries of color, shape, or utility. The

  fork’s tines are seen as specific separate items solely because they

  have been named. By contrast, the fork’s curved section between

  handle and tine has no name, and therefore exists as no real separate

  cognized entity for us.

  Consider those rarer occasions when the logical mind is left

  behind by a wholly new visual experience that catches it off guard,

  so to speak, such as the riotously changing patterns of the Northern

  Lights, as seen from one of the great aurora places of the world, cen-

  tral Alaska. Now everyone gapes and gasps with delight. The patterns

  have no individual names, and at any rate keep mutating. None are

  perceived as separate entities because they exist outside our normal

  boxy system of categorization. In cognizing the phenomenon, space,

  too, vanishes—because an object and its surroundings go together.

  The entire kaleidoscopic show is a wondrous new entity where space

  does not play any defining role. Such an all-encompassing perception

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  is therefore not unknown in the non-psychedelically-drugged world; it

  merely requires a more direct perception rather than cognition employ-

  ing habitual conceptions that are decidedly learned and not inherent.

  Because human language and ideation decides where the

  boundaries of one object end and another begins, we’ll occasion-

  ally take complex visual phenomena or events with multiple colors

  and patterns—a sunset, say—and, unable to break it further into

  parts, brand one’s entire field of vision with a single label. A sparrow

  or an enlightened person may be swept away by the ineffable gran-

  deur of this ever-mutating crepuscular play of shape and color, while

  the intellectual will simply brand it with a word—and then perhaps

  continue with a stream of mind-babble about other sunsets or what

  poets say about them or whatever. Another example might be the

  tirelessly changing patterns in a summer cloud or the countless

  rivulets and clusters of moving drops in a raging waterfall. There’s

  plenty of space there, but we have not been conditioned to observe

  a waterfall closely and separate the various watery components, and

  name or identify the liquidy streams, drops, or other elements and

  conceive of the space between them, even as they rapidly change.

  Too much work. So, instead, the entire phenomenon gets a single

  label of cloud or waterfall and the normal mental categorization of objects separated by spaces is “given a bye.” As a result, we tend

  to view it cleanly, staring at what we’re seeing rather than cogniz-

  ing a flow of mental symbols. The Niagara experience, which would

  probably be fun no matter what, gains an extra notch of exhilaration

  simply because our habitual mental cages are now temporarily built

  of less dense material. Helping things along in this case is the sound

  track of undifferentiated “roar,” which doesn’t lend itself to a lot of

  ideation, either.

  “Name the colors, blind the eye” is an old Zen saying, illustrat-

  ing that the intellect’s habitual ways of branding and labeling creates

  a terrible experiential loss by displacing the vibrant, living reality

  with a steady stream of labels. It is the same way with space, which

  is solely the conceptual mind’s way of clearing its throat, of pausing

  between identified symbols.

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  At any rate, the subjective truth of this is now supported by

  actual experiments (as we saw in the quantum theory chapters) that

  strongly suggest distance (space) has no reality whatsoever for entan-

  gled particles, no matter how great their apparent separation.

  The eternal seas of space and Time?

  Einstein’s relativity, too, has shown that space is not a constant,

  not absolute, and therefore not inherently substantive. By this, we

  mean that extremely high speed travel makes intervening space

  essentially shrink to nothingness. Thus, when we step out under

  the stars, we may marvel at how far away they are, and at how vast

  are the spaces within the universe, but it has been shown repeat-

  edly, for a full century now, that this seeming separation between

  ourselves and anything else is subject to point of view and therefore

  has no inherent bedrock reality. This doesn’t by itself totally negate space but merely makes it tentative. If we lived on a world with a

  very strong gravitational field or traveled outbound at a high speed,

  those stars would lie at an entirely different distance. To use real

  figures, if we headed toward the star Sirius at 99 percent of light’s

  speed of 186,282.4 miles per second, we would find that it was

  barely more than one light-year away, and not the 8.6 light-years

  our friends back on Earth measure it to be. If we crossed a living

  room twenty-one feet in length going at that speed, every instru-

  ment and perception would show that it was actually now three feet

  in length. Here’s the amazing thing: the living room, and the inter-

  vening space from Earth to Sirius, is now
not artificially shrunk by

  some illusion. The star is that far away. The living room is only three feet across. And if we could move at 99.9999999 percent of lightspeed, which is perfectly allowable by the laws of physics, the living

  room would now be 1/22,361th its original size or just a hundredth

  of an inch across—barely larger than the period at the end of this

  sentence. All items, furniture, or people in the room would be like-

  wise Lilliputian, and yet we’d notice nothing amiss. Space would

  have changed to nearly nothing. Where, then, is that supposedly

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  trustworthy gridwork within which we place our habitually estab-

  lished “things”?

  Actually, the first clues that space may be more curious and

  iffy than anyone had imagined came in the nineteenth century,

  when physicists assumed, just as most still do, that space and time

  have an external, independent existence that is independent of

  consciousness.

  This takes us to the man most associated with the contempla-

  tion of space. As we’ll see, the genius of Einstein has a dimension

  that goes beyond his relativity theories of 1905 and 1915. For the

  extraordinary timing of history placed him, at the start of his career,

  at a time when the foundations of Western natural philosophy were

  on the verge of crisis and confusion. Quantum theory was still years

  off in the future, and there was a surprising lack of understand-

  ing of the interaction between the observer and the phenomenon

  observed.

  The generation to which Einstein belonged had been taught that

  there existed an objective physical world that unfolded itself accord-

  ing to laws independent of life. “The belief in an external world inde-

  pendent of the perceiving subject,” Einstein later wrote, “is the basis

  of all natural science.” The universe was viewed as a great machine

  set in motion at the beginning of time, with wheels and cogs that

  turned according to immutable laws independent of us. “Everything

  is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which

  we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the

  star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a

  mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

  Of course, this notion is not, as science has subsequently dis-

  covered, in agreement with the experimental findings of quantum

  theory. Reality—according to the most stringent interpretation

  of the scientific data—is created by or at least correlative with the

  observer. It is in this light that natural philosophy needs now to be

  reinterpreted, with science placing a new emphasis on those special

  properties of life that make it fundamental to material reality. Yet

  even back then in the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant, ahead of

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  his time, said that “we must rid ourselves of the notion that space

  and time are actual qualities in things in themselves . . . all bodies,

  together with the space in which they are, must be considered noth-

  ing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our

  thoughts.”

  Biocentrism, of course, shows that space is a projection from

  inside our minds, where experience begins. It is a tool of life, the

  form of outer sense that allows an organism to coordinate sensory

  information, and to make judgments regarding the quality and inten-

  sity of what is being perceived. Space is not a physical phenomenon

  per se—and should not be studied in the same way as chemicals

  and moving particles. We animal organisms use this form of percep-

  tion to organize our sensations into outer experience. In biological

  terms, the interpretation of sensory input in the brain depends on

  the neural pathway it takes from the body. For instance, all informa-

  tion arriving on the optic nerve is interpreted as light, whereas the

  localization of a sensation to a particular part of the body depends

  on the particular pathway it takes to the central nervous system.

  “Space,” said Einstein, refusing to let metaphysical thinking inter-

  fere with his equations, “is what we measure with a measuring rod.”

  But, once again, this definition should emphasize the we. For what is space if not for the observer? Space is not merely a container without

  walls. It is pertinent to ask what would be left if all objects and life

  were removed. Where would space be then? What would define its

  borders? It is inconceivable to think of anything existing in the phys-

  ical world without any substance or end. It is metaphysical vacuity

  for science to ascribe independent reality to truly empty space.

  Yet another way of appreciating the vacuity of space (yes, that’s

  a joke) is the modern finding that seeming emptiness seethes with

  almost unimaginable energy, which manifests as virtual particles of

  physical matter, jumping in and out of reality like trained fleas. The

  seemingly empty matrix upon which the storybook of reality is set

  is actually a living, animated “field,” a powerful entity that is any-

  thing but empty. Sometimes called Z-point energy, it starts to show

  itself when the all-pervasive kinetic energies around us have quieted

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  to a stop at the temperature of absolute zero, at -459.67°F. Z-point

  or vacuum energy has been experimentally confirmed since 1949

  via the Casimir effect, which causes closely spaced metal plates to

  become powerfully pressed together by the waves of vacuum energy

  outside them. (The tiny space between the plates stifles the energy

  waves by leaving them insufficient “breathing room” to push back

  against the force.)

  So we have multiple illusions and processes that routinely impart

  a false view of space. Shall we count the ways? (1) Empty space is not

  empty. (2) Distances between objects can and do mutate depending

  on a multitude of conditions, so that no bedrock distance exists any-

  where, between anything and anything else. (3) Quantum theory

  casts serious doubt about whether even distant individual items are

  truly separated at all. (4) We “see” separations between objects only

  because we have been conditioned and trained, through language

  and convention, to draw boundaries.

  Ever since the remotest of times, philosophers have been

  intrigued by object and background, like those illusions in which

  one can see either a fancy wine glass or two profiled faces looking at

  each other. It is the same way with space, objects, and the observer.

  Now, space and time illusions are certainly harmless. A problem

  only arises because, by treating space as something physical, exist-

  ing in itself, science imparts a completely wrong starting point for

  investigations into the nature of reality, or in the current obsession

  with trying to create a Grand Unified Theory that truly explains the

  cosmos.

  early space probes: The Nineteenth-Century pioneers

  “It seems,” wrote Hume, “that men are carried by a natural instinct
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  or prepossession to repose faith in their senses, and that without

  any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always

  suppose an external universe which depends not on our percep-

  tion but would exist though we and every creature were absent or

  annihilated.”

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  The physical qualities that the physicists had bestowed upon

  space, of course, could not possibly be found. But that didn’t stop

  them from trying. The most famous attempt was the Michelson–

  Morley experiment, designed in 1887 to resolve any doubt about the

  existence of the “ether.” When Einstein was very young, scientists

  thought this ether pervaded and defined space. The ancient Greeks

  had detested the notion of nothingness: being excellent and obses-

  sive logicians, they were fully aware of the contradiction built into

  the idea of being nothing. Being, the verb to be, patently contradicts nothing and putting the two together was like saying you were going

  to walk not walk. Even before the nineteenth century, scientists, too,

  believed that something had to exist between the planets, or else

  light would have no substance through which to fly. Although ear-

  lier attempts to demonstrate the presence of this supposed ether had proved unsuccessful, Albert Michelson argued that if the Earth was

  streaming through the ether, then a beam of light traveling through

  the medium in the same direction should reflect back faster than a

  similar beam of light at right angles to the direction of Earth’s flight.

  With the help of Edward Morley, Michelson made the test, with

  the apparatus attached to a firm concrete platform floating atop a

  generous pool of liquid mercury. The multiple-mirror device could

  be readily rotated without introducing unwanted tilt. The results

  were incontrovertible: the light that traveled back and forth across

  the “ether stream” accomplished the journey in exactly the same time

  as light traveling the same distance up and down the “ether stream.”

  It seemed as if the Earth had stalled in its orbit round the Sun, as if

  to preserve Ptolemy’s natural Greek philosophy. But to renounce the

  whole Copernican theory was unthinkable. To assume that the ether

  was carried along with the Earth also made no sense at all and had