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| © RobertLanza, Biocentrism |
Is Death An Illusion? Evidence Suggests Death Isn't the End
Aug 14, 2012 | Robert Lanza MD
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 recent 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 recently 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. A couple years ago,
researchers published a paper in
Nature (Jost
et al,
459, 683, 2009) showing that quantum behavior extends into the everyday
realm. Pairs of vibrating ions were coaxed to entangle so their physical
properties remained bound together when separated by large distances
("spooky action at a distance," as Einstein put it). Other experiments
with huge molecules called 'Buckyballs' also show that quantum reality
extends beyond the microscopic world. And in 2005, KHC03 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."
