At Memorial Day parties last weekend, I saw many faces I’d known from a half-century ago when I first moved here. All were in their 70’s or beyond. No doubt, some must be contemplating their mortality. So it would seem a good time to offer a very different view of the cosmos, the no-death model, which has a scientific basis despite having not yet generated much awareness.
Some readers may have read one of the Biocentrism books I co-authored with Robert Lanza, MD, who gained fame 20 years ago as one of the pioneers in cloning. Those titles have now seen wide printings in many countries, and have supplied me with most of my retirement income, which is perhaps TMI. Though I wrote most of those three books (I’d recommend the middle one, Beyond Biocentrism), it was Lanza who coined the biocentrism term and pushed for its wider promulgation. The central idea is not new, but goes back thousands of years. Which is that the universe is basically a conscious essence, and that “our” awareness, experiences and perceptions are not something that sprang up by unlikely good fortune on planet Earth thanks to the mysterious arising of life, but actually manifests as a universal property that pervades the cosmos.
Sounds farfetched, granted. Yet the genius originators of quantum mechanics, such as Werner Heisenberg a century ago, all came to this conclusion through scientific experiments. There’s no space here to properly explain the famous double slit experiment, but look it up if you have time and you’ll see how it proves that our awareness changes the physical world.
In short, science shows that consciousness is not separate from nature. Instead, they are correlative. In recent years this has caused a rather sudden explosive increase in scientifically investigating consciousness, culminating in the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics, whose three recipients did work supporting the growing consensus that consciousness is fundamental to everything.
Okay, so how does this affect our sense of mortality? Well, if true, then we are basically not these bodies but a parade of experiences and sensations, one after another without end, that constitute our lives and our true selves. This notion also lies at the core of Buddhism and Hinduism, so it’s nice that one aspect of science and metaphysics are in agreement.
That is, if you buy into the whole thing, which is admittedly not easy for the logical mind. So with that caveat, acknowledging that this is an almost impossible leap for the intellect, whose dualistic operating system (the word “fire” not being actual fire, for example) let’s bring it all down to a possibly easier route by stating it in terms of a model for our lives. Just a model. For now, merely consider it, since its basis is scientific rather than purely speculative.
Let’s say Heisenberg and his crew were right and consciousness is eternal, fundamental and everywhere. In that case, maybe when an animal is forming and the fetus’ brain undergoes its architectural connections as per its genetic code, the brain’s structure is designed by nature to use consciousness in the most efficient, appropriate and enjoyable way for that particular organism. Dogs, for example, will spend much of their time savoring and examining smells. We humans don’t do that. We do different things with our attention spans. The point is, the brain’s purpose (following this model) is to appropriately focus and filter the universal consciousness. We couldn’t handle experiencing all of it, which would amount to being everywhere at once, although such blissful, know-everything reality has been manifested by saints, mystics, and anyone who has experienced the states known as Enlightenment, Satori, Nirvana and other labels. But that state of knowing everything at once is not practical or useful for a human wanting to perform a job, find a mate, order favorite dishes from menus and so on. So our awareness is limited by natural design.
The point here is that when our bodies die, we’ve assumed that the death of the brain means the end of consciousness and the termination of all experience. But in this model, the brain’s dissolution is merely the cessation of the filter, the consciousness limiter. We would then be released into experiencing what those quantum originators insisted was the fundamental essence of the cosmos, which is eternal, unlimited awareness.
Now, for those to whom this sounds wacky, I respect your skepticism. And I expect it will only increase if I told you that I buy into that model not just because of that recent physics Nobel Prize, or the fact that the renowned physicist John Wheeler said that, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” No, beyond the science, I actually had that Satori experience (in my pre-psychedelic adolescence) so I’ve seen it firsthand. Plus, decades later my mom came to me ten minutes after I got a phone call from the hospital that she had died. She was always the closest person in my life, and while a devout atheist, she now showed me her present post-death state and conveyed the ecstatic reality she was now in. She did that wordlessly, as a gift. So I buy into that model via five separate avenues.
I’m way outside our usual astronomy here, and promise I won’t again stray in future columns. It’s just that in my 54 years living here, I’m sensing that some of us could use some cheerleading when it comes to facing the ancient mortality issue, and perhaps this can be of help.
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