Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (24 page)

In this same sense, there is a part of us that is intimately connected to the fish in the pond. We think there is an enclosing wall, a circumference to us. Yet, Bell’s experiment implies that there are cause-effect linkages that transcend our ordinary classical way of thinking. “Men esteem truth remote,” wrote Thoreau, “in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. . . . But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.”

The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but there is some part of it which remains eternal.

—Benedict de Spinoza,
Ethics

 

 

 

H
ow does the biocentric conception of the world change our lives? How can it affect our emotions of love, fear, and grief? How, above all, does it enable us to cope with our apparent mortality and the relationship of the body and our consciousness?

The attachment to life and consequent fear of death is a universal concern, and, in some, an obsession, as the replicants in
Blade Runner
made clear in their less-than-gentle way to all who would listen. Yet once we abandon the random, physical-centered cosmos
and start to see things biocentrically, the verisimilitude of a finite life loosens its grip.

Lucretius the Epicurean taught us two thousand years ago not to fear death. The contemplation of time and the discoveries of modern science lead to the same assertion—that the mind’s awareness is the ultimate reality, paramount and limitless. Does it die, then, with the body?

This is the point at which we leave science for a bit and contemplate what biocentrism suggests and allows, rather than what it can prove. The following is frankly speculative, yet it is more than mere philosophizing, as it follows logically and sensibly from a consciousness-based universe. Those who wish to stick strictly with “Just the facts, ma’am,” are under no compulsion to accept any of these rather provisional conclusions.

As Emerson described it in
The Over Soul
, “The influences of the senses 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 when 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 and a sailing glide, the gigantic electric machine was on its way to my past, back, block by block through the decades, through the metropolitan limits of Boston, until it came to Roxbury. Here, at the foot of the hill where, for me, the universe began, I hoped I might find a set of initials scratched into the sidewalk or 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, 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, bright 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 carrying out experiments, and others in contemplation of black holes and equations—I sat in a vacant city lot agonizing over the open-ended and perverse nature of time. Not that I had never seen the fall of leaf, nor a kind face grow old, but here, perchance, I might come across some hidden passageway that would take me beyond the nature that 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
.

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.

Mr. Bentley’s observation is not so trivial a point. What sort of time is that which separates a man from his past—which separates one now from the next—and yet gives continuity to the thread of consciousness? Eighty is the last “now,” we say, but who knows that time and space—now seen as forms of intuition rather than immutable standalone entities—are not actually “always.” A cat, even when mortally ill, keeps those wide calm eyes focused on the ever-changing kaleidoscope of the here-and-now. There is no thought of death, and hence no fear of it. What comes, comes. We believe in death because we have been told we will die. Also, of course, because most of us strictly associate ourselves with the body, and we know that bodies die, end of story.

Religions may go on and on about the afterlife, but how do we know this is true? Physics may tell us that energy is never ever lost, and that our brains, minds, and hence the feeling of life operate by electrical energy, and therefore this energy like all others simply cannot vanish, period. And while this sounds very intellectually nice and hopeful, how can we be sure that we will still experience the
sense
of life—that mystery neuro-researchers pursue with such futility, like the dream hallway that stretches ever longer the farther along the corridor we run?

The biocentric view of the timeless, spaceless cosmos of consciousness allows for no true death in any real sense. When a body dies, it does so not in the random billiard-ball matrix but in the all-is-still-inescapably-life matrix.

Scientists think that they can say where individuality begins and ends, and we generally reject the multiple universes of
Stargate
,
Star Trek
,
The Matrix
and such as fiction. But it turns out there is more
than a morsel of scientific truth in this popular cultural genre. This can only accelerate during the coming shift in worldview, from the belief that time and space are entities in the universe to one in which time and space belong only to the living.

Our current scientific worldview offers no escape for those afraid of death. But why are you here now, perched seemingly by chance on the cutting edge of all infinity? The answer is simple—the door is
never
closed! The mathematical possibility of your consciousness ending is zero.

Logical, everyday experience puts us in a milieu where defined objects come and go, and everything has a natal moment. Whether pencil or kitten, we see items entering the world and others dissolving or vanishing. Logic is a fabric woven of such beginnings and endings. Conversely, those entities that are timeless by nature, such as love, beauty, consciousness, or the universe as a whole, have always dwelt outside the cold grasp of limitation. So the Great Everything, which we now know to be synonymous with consciousness, could hardly fit within the ephemeral category. Instinct joins with what science we can employ here, to affirm that it is so, even if no argument, alas, can demonstrate immortality to everyone’s satisfaction.

Our inability to remember infinite time is meaningless because memory is a particularly limited and selective circuit within the neural network. Nor by definition could we recall a time of nothingness: no help there either.

Eternity is a fascinating concept, one that doesn’t indicate a perpetual existence in time without end. Eternity doesn’t mean a limitless temporal sequence. Rather, it resides
outside of time
altogether. The Eastern religions have of course argued for millennia that birth and death are equally illusory. (Or at least, their core teachings have done so. For the masses in every religion, there are more peripheral notions; in Eastern sects these include reincarnation.) Because consciousness transcends the body, because
internal
and
external
are fundamentally distinctions of language and practicality alone, we’re left with Being or consciousness as the bedrock components of existence.

The problem many face when pondering such things is not just that language is dualistic by nature and therefore poorly suited for such inquiries, but that there are onion layers of “truth” depending on the level of understanding. Science, philosophy, religion, and metaphysics all deal with the challenges of addressing a wide audience with a huge spectrum of comprehension, education, inclination, and bias.

When a skilled science speaker steps up to a lectern, he already knows who his particular audience is for that day. A physicist giving a popular lecture, especially to youngsters, will avoid all equations, lest the audience’s eyes start to glaze. Terms such as
electron
will need to be briefly defined. If, on the other hand, the audience has a good science background—let’s say it’s a talk for secondary school science teachers—then statements like “electrons orbit an atom’s nucleus” and “Jupiter revolves around the sun” involve already-familiar terms, and no one would be left behind. Yet if the audience is even more sophisticated, composed of physicists and astronomers, both statements would now be false. An electron doesn’t really orbit; it shimmers at a likely distance from the center in a state of probability alone, its position and motion undefined until an observer forces its wave-function to collapse. And Jupiter orbits not the sun but the barycenter, the vacant point in space outside the sun’s surface where the two bodies’ gravities balance like a seesaw. What is correct in one context is wrong in another.

The same holds for science, philosophy, metaphysics, and cosmology. When a person strictly identifies his only existence with his body and is certain the universe is a separate, random, external entity, then saying “Death isn’t real” is not only ludicrous, it’s untrue. His body’s cells will all indeed die. His false and limited sense of being an isolated organism—this will end, too. Claims of an afterlife will be met with an appropriately justifiable skepticism: “What has an afterlife, my rotting corpse? How?”

The next level upward has our individual feeling himself to be a living entity, a spirit perhaps, ensconced in a body; if he’s had spiritual experiences or else religious or philosophical beliefs of
an immortal soul being part and parcel of his essence, then now it makes more sense for him to accept that something goes on even after the body is gone, and he’ll not waver in this view even as his atheistic friends deride him for wishful thinking.

The concept of death has always meant one thing only: an end that has no reprieve or ambiguity. It can only happen to something that has been born or created, something whose nature is bounded and finite. That fine wine glass you inherited from your grandmother can have a death when it falls and shatters into a dozen fragments; it’s gone for keeps. Individual bodies also have natal moments, their cells destined to age and self-destruct after about ninety generations, even if not acted upon by outside forces. Stars die too, albeit after enjoying lifespans usually numbered in the billions of years.

Now comes the biggie, the oldest question of all. Who am I? If I am only my body, then I must die. If I am my consciousness, the sense of experience and sensations, then I cannot die for the simple reason that consciousness may be
expressed
in manifold fashion sequentially, but it is ultimately unconfined. Or if one prefers to pin things down, the “alive” feeling, the sensation of “me” is, so far as science can tell, a sprightly neuro-electrical fountain operating with about 100 watts of energy, the same as a bright light bulb. We even emit the same heat as a bulb, too, which is why a car rapidly gets warmer, even during a cold night, especially when a driver is accompanied by a passenger or two.

Now the truly skeptical might argue that this internal energy merely “goes away” at death and vanishes. But one of the surest axioms of science is that energy can never die, ever. Energy is known with scientific certainty to be deathless; it can neither be created nor destroyed. It merely changes form. Because absolutely everything has an energy-identity, nothing is exempt from this immortality. Staying with the car analogy a bit longer, say you drive up a hill. The gasoline’s energy, stored in its chemical bonds, is released to power the vehicle and let it fight gravity. As it ascends, it uses fuel but gains potential energy. This means that the fight with gravity has yielded a stored form of energy, a coupon that never expires even after a billion
years. The car can cash in this coupon of potential energy at any time, so let’s do it now, by letting the automobile coast down with the engine off. As it does so, it gains speed, which is kinetic energy, the energy of motion. It is using up its gravitational potential energy as it loses altitude but gains kinetic energy. You step on the brakes, which get hot, which is another way of saying its atoms are speeding up—more kinetic energy. Hybrid cars use this braking energy to charge their batteries. In short, energy keeps changing forms, but it never diminishes in the least. Similarly, the essence of who you are, which is energy, can neither diminish nor “go away”—there simply isn’t any “away” in which to go. We inhabit a closed system.