Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (19 page)

The entrance to the property—which was once a mud hole—now looks like a vineyard with a narrow cobblestone road that disappears 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 surrounded with widow’s walks and capped with copper-domed cupolas that reflect the sun. There are swans and hawks and fox and
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 supposed 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
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 childhood, 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 figured 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 fingers 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 addition 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-Flighted to UMass Medical Center. Because I was a doctor, 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.

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 Dennis’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 physical reality that pass through their own creations of space and time like ghosts through doors. I thought too about the two-slit experiment, 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 on his mind—what car he was going to drive after he got his license. Dennis had led him to believe he was going to get the old Explorer, which had almost 200,000 miles on the odometer. “Dad,” Ben had asked, “you’re not going to give me the ‘Exploder,’ are you?” At Ben’s birthday party last night, Dennis surprised him and gave him the keys to his own car, which has all sorts of options, and even heated seats. He’s out there washing the dirt off it right now.

Our current scientific worldview offers no hope or escape for those scared to death of dying. But biocentrism hints at an alternative. If time is an illusion, if reality is created by our own consciousness, can this consciousness ever truly be extinguished?

I
had just published a scientific paper showing for the first time that it was possible to generate an important type of cell in the eye that could be used to treat blindness. I was on my way to work the following morning—late as usual—and admittedly going a lot faster than the posted fifteen miles per hour as I swung into the entrance of the parking lot. At about that moment, I had a rush of adrenaline as I stepped on my brakes, swerving around a police cruiser that had stopped to question a pedestrian. “What unbelievably awful luck that the car happened to be a cruiser,” I thought, certain I was about to be arrested. I continued into the lot, parking in the far corner and hoping the officer had been too occupied to notice or come after me. With my heart still racing, I hurried into the building. “Thank God,” I thought, as I glanced over my shoulder, “there’s no sign of the officer in pursuit.”

Once safely in my office, I had calmed down and started to work when I heard a knock on my door. It was Young Chung, one of the senior scientists who works for me. “Dr. Lanza,” he said with panic in his voice, “there is a police officer at the reception desk who wants to see you. He has handcuffs and a gun.”

There was a little stir in the lab as I went out to greet the policeman standing there in his uniform. I think my colleagues were fearful he was going to take me away in handcuffs. “Doctor,” he said in a serious voice, “can we speak in your office?”

“It must be really bad,” I thought to myself. But once in my office, he apologized and asked if I had time to speak with him about the breakthrough he had just read about in the
Wall Street Journal
(in fact, he had stopped the pedestrian in the parking lot to ask where the company was located). He explained that he was part of a group of parents who communicate with each other over the Internet about new medical breakthroughs that might help their children. He came on behalf of the group when he learned that I happened to be located in the same city, Worcester, Massachusetts.

It turned out that his teenage son had a severe degenerative eye disease, and that his doctors expected him to become blind in a couple of years. He also told me about a relative in the family who also developed the disease at about the same age—and who is now totally blind. He pointed to a cardboard box on the floor of my office, and said, “Right now, my son can still make out the outline of the box. But the clock is ticking . . .”

By the time he had finished his story, I was nearly in tears. It was particularly difficult to take, especially knowing that I had frozen cells put away that could have helped treat his son. The cells had just been sitting in the freezer in a box for more than nine months. We didn’t have the $20,000 we needed to carry out the animal experiments we needed to show they could work (the amount the military sometimes pays for a hammer). Unfortunately, it would be another year or two before we would have the resources needed to show that the cells—the same human cells that would be used in patients—could rescue visual function in animals that otherwise would have gone blind. Indeed, improvement in visual performance—that is, sharpness of vision—was 100 percent better than untreated controls without any apparent adverse effects. Currently (while this book is being written), we’re involved in a dialogue with the FDA on beginning actual clinical trials in patients with retinal degenerative
diseases, including macular degeneration, which affects more than 30 million people worldwide.

But there is an aspect to these cells that is even more amazing than preventing blindness. In the same petri dishes as these retinal cells, we also see the formation of photoreceptors—that is, the cones and rods we see with—and even miniature “eye-balls” that look like they’re staring at you up the barrel of the microscope. In all of these experiments, we start out with embryonic stem cells—the body’s master cells—which make all kinds of nerve cells spontaneously, almost by default. They are the first types of human body cells they want to make. In fact, some of the neurons I’ve seen growing in the laboratory have thousands of dendritic processes, with which they communicate to their neighbor cells, which are so extensive you would need to take a dozen different photographs to capture the image of a single cell.

From a biocentric viewpoint, these nerve cells are the fundamental units of reality. They are the first thing nature seems to want most to create when left alone. Neurons—not atoms—lie as the bedrock and base of our observer-determined world.

The circuitry of these cells in the brain contains the logic of space and time. They are the neuro-correlate of the mind and connect to the peripheral nervous system and sense organs of the body, including the photoreceptors growing in my petri dishes. Thus, they embrace everything we can ever observe, just like a DVD player sends information to a television screen when someone watches a movie. When we observe the words printed in a book, its paper, seemingly a foot away, is not being perceived—the image, the paper,
is
the perception—and as such, it is contained in the logic of this neurocircuitry. A correlative reality encompasses everything, with only language providing separation between external and internal, between there and here. Is this matrix of neurons and atoms fashioned in an energy field of Mind?

The millennia-old attempt to understand the nature of the cosmos has been a very odd, precarious undertaking. Science is currently our main tool, but help sometimes arrives in unexpected
form. I remember a very ordinary day when everyone else was still asleep or already at the hospital making morning rounds. “It doesn’t matter,” I thought, as I filled my cup with coffee, the steam condensing on the kitchen window. “I’m already late.” I scraped off a patch of ice crystals. Through the clear area, I could see the underlying apparatus of the trees lining the road. The early morning sun slanted down, throwing into gleaming brightness the bare twigs and a little patch of dead leaves. There was a feeling of mystery contained in that scene, a powerful feeling that something was veiled behind it, something that was not accounted for in the scientific journals.

I put on my white lab jacket, and over the protests of my body, set off on my way to the university. As I strolled toward the hospital, I had some curious impulse to detour around the campus pond. Perhaps I was postponing seeing only harsh-etched things, now during the singular magic of morning. The sight of the stainless-steel machines, perhaps, or the stark lights in the operating room, the emergency oxygen cylinders, the blips on the oscilloscope screen. It was this that had brought me to pause at the edge of the pond, in undisturbed quiet and solitude, when at the hospital the bustle of activity and excited voices was in full swing. Thoreau would have approved. He had always considered morning as a cheerful invitation to make his life of simplicity. “Poetry and art,” he wrote, “and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour.”

It was a comforting experience on a cold winter day, to stand there overlooking the pond, and watch the photons dancing on its surface like so many notes from Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. For an instant, my body was beyond being affected by the elements, and my mind merged with the whole of nature as much as it has ever been in my life. It was really a very small episode, as are most meaningful things. But in that unassuming calm I had seen beyond the pads and the cattails. I had felt Nature, naked and unclothed, as she was for Loren Eiseley and Thoreau. I rounded the pond and headed to the hospital. Morning rounds were nearly finished. A dying woman
sat on the bed before me. Outside, a songbird had its trill, sitting on a limb over the pond.