After the death of an old friend, Albert Einstein said: “Besso left this strange world a little ahead of me. But that doesn’t mean anything. People like us know that the distinction between past, present, and future is just a stubborn, everlasting illusion.” Doctor and scientist Robert Lanza is sure that Einstein was right: death is just an illusion.
We are used to believing that our world is some kind of objective reality, independent of the observer. We think that life is just the activity of carbon and a mixture of molecules: we live for a while and then decay in the earth. We believe in death because we have been taught so, and also because we associate ourselves with the physical body and know that bodies die. And there is no continuation.
In the view of Robert Lanza, the author of the theory of biocentrism, death cannot be the final event, as we used to think. “It’s amazing, but if you equate life and consciousness, you can explain some of the biggest mysteries of science,” the scientist said. “For example, it becomes clear why space, time, and even the properties of matter itself depend on the observer. And until we comprehend the universe in our own heads, attempts to understand reality will remain a road to nowhere.
Take, for example, the weather. We see the blue sky, but a change in the brain cells can change the perception, and the sky will appear green or red. With the help of genetic engineering, we could, say, make everything red vibrate, make noise or be sexually attractive — in the way it is perceived by some birds.
We think it is light now, but if we change the neural connections, everything around will appear dark. And where we are hot and humid, the tropical frog is cold and dry. This logic applies to just about everything. Following many philosophers, Lanza concludes that what we see cannot exist without our consciousness.
Strictly speaking, our eyes are not portals to the outside world. Everything that we now see and feel, even our body, is a stream of information that arises in our mind. According to biocentrism, space and time are not rigid, cold objects, as is commonly believed, but simply tools that bring everything together.
Lanza suggests recalling the following experiment. When the electrons pass through two slits in the barrier under the supervision of scientists, they behave like bullets and fly through the first or second slit. But, if you don’t look at them while passing through the barrier, they act like waves and can pass through both slits at the same time. It turns out that the smallest particle can change its behavior depending on whether they look at it or not? According to bioethicists, the answer is obvious: reality is a process that includes our consciousness.
There is no death in the eternal, immeasurable world. And immortality does not mean eternal existence in time — it is outside of time in general
We can take another example from quantum physics and recall the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If there is a world in which particles are spinning, we should be able to objectively measure all their properties, but this is impossible. For example, one cannot simultaneously determine the exact location of a particle and its momentum.
But why is the mere fact of measurement important for the particle we decide to measure? And how can pairs of particles at opposite ends of a galaxy be interconnected, as if space and time didn’t exist? Moreover, they are so interconnected that when one particle from a pair changes, the other particle changes in a similar way, regardless of where it is located. Again, for bioethicists, the answer is simple: because space and time are just tools of our mind.
There is no death in the eternal, immeasurable world. And immortality does not mean eternal existence in time — it is outside of time in general.
Our linear way of thinking and notions of time is also inconsistent with an interesting series of experiments. In 2002, scientists proved that photons knew ahead of time what their distant «twins» would do in the future. The researchers tested the connection between pairs of photons. They let one of them finish his journey — he had to «decide» whether to behave like a wave or a particle. And for the second photon, the scientists increased the distance it had to travel to reach its own detector. A scrambler was placed in its path to prevent it from turning into a particle.
Somehow, the first photon «knew» what the researcher was going to do — as if there was no space or time between them. The photon did not decide whether to become a particle or a wave until its twin also encountered a scrambler on its way. “Experiments consistently confirm that the effects depend on the observer. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how particles behave,” Lanza emphasizes.
But that’s not all. In a 2007 experiment in France, scientists fired photons at a craft to demonstrate something amazing: their actions can retroactively change what… has already happened in the past. As the photons passed through the fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave as particles or waves when they hit the beam splitter. Long after the photons had passed the fork, the experimenter could randomly switch the second beam splitter on and off.
Life is an adventure that goes beyond our usual linear thinking. When we die, it’s not by chance
It turned out that the spontaneous decision of the observer at the current moment determined how the particle behaved at the fork some time ago. In other words, at this point the experimenter chose the past.
Critics argue that these experiments refer only to the world of quanta and microscopic particles. However, Lanza countered by a 2009 Nature paper that quantum behavior extends to the everyday realm. Various experiments also show that quantum reality goes beyond the «microscopic world».
We usually dismiss the concept of multiple universes as fiction, but it turns out it could be a scientifically proven reality. One of the principles of quantum physics is that observations cannot be absolutely predicted, but rather a series of possible observations with different probabilities.
One of the main interpretations of the «many worlds» theory is that each of these possible observations corresponds to a separate universe («multiverse»). In this case, we are dealing with an infinite number of universes, and everything that can happen happens in one of them. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. And death in these scenarios is no longer an immutable «reality».
Life is an adventure that goes beyond our usual linear thinking. When we die, it is not by chance, but in a matrix of inevitable life cycle. Life is not linear. According to Robert Lanza, she is like a perennial flower that sprouts again and again and begins to bloom in one of the worlds of our multiverse.
About the author: Robert Lanza, MD, author of the biocentrism theory.