Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe (6 page)

What, then, do we make of all this? First, that we are truly free to enjoy the unfolding of life, including our own lives, unencumbered by the acquired, often guilt-ridden sense of control, and the obsessive need to avoid messing up. We can relax, because we’ll automatically perform anyway.

Second, and more to the point of this book and chapter, modern knowledge of the brain shows that what appears “out there” is actually occurring within our own minds, with visual and tactile experiences located not in some external disconnected location that we have grown accustomed to regarding as being distant from ourselves. Looking around, we see only our own mind or, perhaps, it’s better put that there is no true disconnect between external and internal. Instead, we can label all cognition as an amalgam of our experiential selves and whatever energy field may pervade the cosmos. To avoid such awkward phrasing, we’ll allude to it by simply calling it
awareness
or
consciousness
. With this in mind (no pun intended), we’ll see how any “theory of everything” must incorporate this biocentrism—or else be a train on a track to nowhere.

To sum up:

First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

T
ime’s existence cannot be found between the tick and the tock of a clock. It is the language of life and, as such, is most powerfully felt in the context of human experience.

My father had just pushed her aside. Then he struck Bubbles again.

My father was an old-school Italian with archaic ideas about child-rearing, so it is difficult now for me to write a record of this episode from so long ago. The indignity Bubbles suffered that day (not an isolated event) was so shameful that, four decades later, I still remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday.

The affection I shared with Beverly—“Bubbles”—was a strong one, for being my older sister, she had always felt that it was her job to protect me. It touches me painfully even now to look back into the days of my childhood.

I can remember the morning of what was as cold a New England day as you would ever want to feel at your toes’ ends. I was standing at the school bus stop at my usual time, with my little mittens and
lunchbox, when one of the older neighborhood boys pushed me to the ground. What exactly happened I can’t recall. I don’t profess to have been wholly innocent. But there I was on the sidewalk—helpless, looking up. “Let me go,” I sobbed. “Let me up.”

I was still on the ground—and very cold and hurt—when, lifting my eyes, I saw Bubbles running up the street. When she reached the bus stop, she gave this older boy a look that I could see created instant fear for his own safety. I feel indebted to her for that alone. “You touch my little brother ever again,” she said, “and I’ll punch your face in.”

I had always been a favorite of hers, I suppose; in fact, the earliest remembrance I have of my childhood was with her, in her playdoctor’s office. “You’re a little unwell,” she said, handing me a cup of sand. “It’s medicine. Drink this and you’ll feel better.” This I did, and as I started to drink it, Bubbles cried out “No!” and then gave a gasp, as if she were swallowing it herself. (Afterward, it occurred to me that it was only make-believe, and that I ought not have done this, but at the time it all seemed quite real.)

It is difficult for me to believe that it was me, and not her, who went on to become the doctor. She was very bright and tried so hard to do her very, very best—an “A” student, I recollect. All the teachers loved her. But that was not enough. By the tenth grade, she had dropped out of school, and had entered on a course of destruction with drugs. I can only understand that this happened because of the poor conditions at home. The ill that was done to her had little remission and occurred in a cyclic, almost mindless manner. She was beaten, ran away, and was punished again.

How well I recall Bubbles hiding under the porch, wondering what she was going to do next. I remember the terror that hung about the place; I shiver at my father’s voice upstairs, penetrating through the walls; I can see the tears running down her face. I sometimes wonder, when I think about it, that nobody intervened on her behalf. Not the school, not the police, not even the court-appointed social worker could do anything about it, apparently.

Sometime later, Bubbles moved out of the house—although I am conscious of some confusion in my mind about the exact events—I learned that she was pregnant. I only recollect that through some loose-fitting dress, I felt the baby moving in her body; when all the relatives refused to go to her wedding, I told her: “It’s okay! It’s okay!” and held her hand.

The birth of “Little Bubbles” was a happy occasion, an oasis in this life in the desert. There were many faces that I knew among those who visited her in the hospital room. There was my mother, my sister, and even my father looking on. Bubbles was so kind-hearted and had such a pleasant manner that I should not have been surprised at seeing them all there. How happy she was, and when I sat down by her side on the bed, she asked me—her little brother—if I would be the godfather to her child.

All this, though, was a short event, and stands like a wildflower along an asphalt road. I wondered on that occasion what cost she might pay for this happiness; I saw it materialize at a later date when her problems reappeared, when her lithium treatments failed. Little by little, her mind began to deteriorate. Her speech made less and less sense, and her actions took on a more bizarre quality. I had seen enough of medicine then to have gained the capacity to stand beside myself, aloof from the consequences of disease, but it was a matter of some emotion to me, even then, to see her child taken away. I have a deep remembrance of her in the hospital, utterly without hope, restrained and sedated with drugs. As I went away from the hospital that day, I mingled my memories of her with tears.

Bubbles knew of no place anywhere so comforting as the house of our childhood during the rare times of peace, no place half so shady as its green apple trees. They had been planted there more than fifty years ago by my friend Barbara’s dad. On one occasion, long after my parents had sold the house, the new owners saw Bubbles sitting on the sidewalk with her elbows on her knees. The bedroom windows were all open to let in the blossom-scented breeze. Wild roses still dangled from the old trellis on the side of the house.

“Excuse me, ma’am, you okay?”

“Yes,” said Bubbles. “I’ll be all right. Is she—is my mother—home?”

“Your mother doesn’t live here anymore,” said the new owner.

“Why are you telling me that? It’s a lie.”

After some squabbling, the new owners called the police, who took Bubbles to the station and notified my mother to fetch her, that she might be taken to the clinic for her shots.

Despite all that had happened to her, Bubbles was still a very pretty woman, who often drew whistles from the boys in town. But whether she was afraid of the dark or simply got lost, it was not uncommon for her to disappear for a day or two. She was found sleeping in the park once, quite distressed, her hair hanging down in her face. Her clothes were torn, of which she knew as little as we did. But I recall that she was pregnant around a year or two later, and I can only understand that someone may have taken advantage of her again. How well I remember her looking at me in silence and embarrassment, holding the baby in her arms. The infant’s hair was as red as a maple’s in autumn. He had a very cute face and, I thought, did not look like anyone we knew.

I am uncertain whether I was glad or sorry when at times Bubbles lost even the memory of where she lived. So it was when she was found one night wandering naked in a nearby park. A guard delivered Bubbles to the door of my father’s condominium, announcing, “Your daughter, Mr. Lanza.” My father took her inside and warmed her some coffee in a kettle and supplied her needs graciously. Perhaps this story would have had a different ending if only he had showered her with this kind of affection forty years ago.

This tale of Bubbles and her relation to me is one that has a thousand variations, told by very many families, of mental illness, delusion, tragedy, interspersed with joyous times. At the twilight of life, reached too quickly by us all, we reflect on our loved ones and it always carries an aura of the unreal, a dream-like nature. “Did that really happen?” we wonder when a particular image comes to mind, especially of a dear one who has long departed. We feel as if
we are in a waking reverie, a hall of mirrors, where youth and old age, dream and wakefulness, tragedy and elation, flicker as rapidly as frames of an old silent movie.

It is precisely here that the priest or philosopher steps in to offer counsel or, as they might call it, hope. Hope, however, is a terrible word; it combines fear with a kind of rooting for one possibility over another, like a gambler watching a spinning roulette wheel whose outcome determines whether or not he will be able to pay his mortgage.

This, unfortunately, is precisely what science’s prevailing mechanistic mindset comes up with: hope. If life—yours, mine, and Bubbles’s (who is still alive today, under assisted care)—originally began because of random molecular collisions in a matrix of a dead and stupid universe, then watch out. We’re as likely to be screwed as pampered. The dice can and do roll any which way, and we should take whatever good times we’ve had and shut up.

Truly random events offer neither excitement nor creativity. Not much, at any rate. With life, however, there is a flowering, unfolding, and experiencing that we can’t even wrap our logical minds around. When the whip-poor-will sings his melody in the moonlight, and it is answered by your own heart beating a bit faster in awed appreciation, who in their right mind would say that it was all conjured by imbecilic billiard balls slamming each other by the laws of chance? No observant person would be able to utter such a thing, which is why it always strikes me as slightly amazing that any scientist can aver, with a straight face, that they stand there at the lectern—a conscious, functioning organism with trillions of perfectly functioning parts—as the sole result of falling dice. Our least gesture affirms the magic of life’s design.

The plays of experience, even seemingly sad and odd ones like that of my sister Bubbles, are never random, nor ultimately scary. Rather, they may be conceived as adventures. Or perhaps as interludes in a melody so vast and eternal that human ears cannot appreciate the tonal range of the symphony.

In any event, they are certainly not finite. That which is born must die, and we will leave for a later chapter whether the nature of
the cosmos is of a finite item with dates of manufacture and expiration, like cupcakes, or whether it is eternal. Accepting the biocentric view means you have cast your lot not just with life itself but with consciousness, which knows neither beginning nor end.

I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, “But how can it be like that?” because you will go “down the drain” into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped.

—Nobel physicist Richard Feynman

 

 

 

Q
uantum mechanics describes the tiny world of the atom and its constituents, and their behavior, with stunning if probabilistic accuracy. It is used to design and build much of the technology that drives modern society, such as lasers and advanced computers. But quantum mechanics in many ways threatens not
only our essential and absolute notions of space and time but all Newtonian-type conceptions of order and secure prediction.

It is worthwhile to consider here the old maxim of Sherlock Holmes, that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” In this chapter, we will sift through the evidence of quantum theory as deliberately as Holmes might without being thrown off the trail by the prejudices of three hundred years of science. The reason scientists go “down the drain into a blind alley,” is that they refuse to accept the immediate and obvious implications of the experiments. Biocentrism is the only humanly comprehensible explanation for how the world can be like that, and we are unlikely to shed any tears when we leave the conventional ways of thinking. As Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg put it, “It’s an unpleasant thing to bring people into the basic laws of physics.”

In order to account for why space and time are relative to the observer, Einstein assigned tortuous mathematical properties to the changing warpages of space-time, an invisible, intangible entity that cannot be seen or touched. Although this was indeed successful in showing how objects move, especially in extreme conditions of strong gravity or fast motion, it resulted in many people assuming that space-time is an actual entity, like cheddar cheese, rather than a mathematical figment that serves the specific purpose of letting us calculate motion. Space-time, of course, was hardly the first time that mathematical tools have been confused with tangible reality: the square root of minus one and the symbol for infinity are just two of the many mathematically indispensable entities that exist only conceptually—neither has an analog in the physical universe.

This dichotomy between conceptual and physical reality continued with a vengeance with the advent of quantum mechanics. Despite the central role of the observer in this theory—extending it from space and time to the very properties of matter itself—some scientists still dismiss the observer as an inconvenience, a non-entity.

In the quantum world, even Einstein’s updated version of Newton’s clock—the solar system as predictable if complex timekeeper—fails to work. The very concept that independent events can happen in separate non-linked locations—a cherished notion often called
locality
—fails to hold at the atomic level and below, and there’s increasing evidence it extends fully into the macroscopic as well. In Einstein’s theory, events in
space-time
can be measured in relation to each other, but quantum mechanics calls greater attention to the nature of measurement itself, one that threatens the very bedrock of objectivity.