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We live in an age where massive amounts of money are spent for research into the brain and almost nothing into researching the mind. This represents a huge demotion. In prior centuries the mind was exalted. It was the mind that perceived beauty, experienced love, and reached for God. Can the brain really do all those things on its own? Neuroscience says yes, but that's a leap of faith. Why would a neuron have any interest in beauty, love, and God to begin with? Its whole life is spent exchanging chemical and electrical signals with other neurons. On the fringes of speculative thinking, the mind is coming back into its own.

Instead of trying to rehabilitate the mind, we think it's more fruitful, and far bolder, to put the mind at the very center of reality. Nothing exists except in your own awareness. If you can't see, hear, touch, taste, and smell a thing, if you can't even think about it, the thing cannot exist. Yet even without a world of things, consciousness does exist, and it has enormous untapped potential. That was proven decades ago when physicists discovered the observer effect. Technically, the observer effect applies to light. Light can act like a wave or a particle, but not both at the same time. It defies ordinary logic, but Einstein and his colleagues discovered that light "decides" whether to act like a wave or particle depending on the observer.

Until it is observed, light exists in suspended animation, so to speak. It doesn't take the form of particle or wave until an observer tries to measure it. After that, there's no turning back. Whatever the observer sees is reality. This implies that observation is a creative act, and quantum physics has lived with that fact for two generations or more. Only for ordinary people, the observer effect hasn't had much to do with their lives.

Or has it?

Children who are raised under a disapproving eye, who are made to feel bad, worthless, and unlovable, are very likely to grow up to feel that way permanently. Isn't a judgmental parent a kind of observer, creating the very flaws he sees? On the other hand, children raised under a loving eye have a far greater chance of loving themselves and developing the good qualities seen in them. You can come up with many examples of how the observer effect might influence daily life.

But what if we are missing the forest for the trees? What if consciousness is creating much more than we suppose. It could be creating something as basic as time and space. At the quantum level, Nature isn't bound by either one. Not only is time relative, but certain phenomena travel faster than the speed of light, needing no time at all to cover billions of light years in distances. That, too, is well known in modern physics. But few thinkers have applied the same effect to the mind.

Here things get tricky. Let's say you are an observer. You watch an event unfold such as the action of light deciding whether to be a wave or a particle. Since your brain is composed of quantum interactions, it isn't a stable observer. Waves are watching waves, particles are observing particles. Which implies that your brain only "decides" to be a brain at the moment you perceive anything. This quirky notion drops us immediately into the quantum soup, where nothing is stable at all.

To get out of the soup, we need to know why time and space look so stable. I don't expect the room I'm sitting in to collapse a minute from now, and I don't expect my car to shoot off at the speed of light, even though photons and subatomic particles are the basis for my car and my room. The reason we have a stable sense of time and space isn't because they are "real," in the sense that time and space don't need an observer. They absolutely do, for without a mind, nothing exists but randomness and chaos at every level.

The mystery of how time and space become real is tied to the mystery of mind. Some cosmologists, looking at the evolution of the universe, can't tolerate randomness. They don't believe that the explosion of the Big Bang could create the complexity of DNA, any more than a hurricane blowing through a junkyard could create a 747 jetliner. It has been proposed that the visible universe is matched to our own minds. The events we observe that lead to our existence here on planet Earth are precisely the events that can be observed by the human mind. One can imagine life forms on other planets that see an entirely different universe, the one that led to their existence.

Calling an idea tricky doesn't make it absurd. This so-called "anthropic principle" rests upon an irrefutable basis: Nobody can observe anything that the mind isn't set up for. Silicone crystals may be vibrating in a language that sings and makes up poetry, but we have no means of eavesdropping since our minds can't conceive of minerals leading complex social and artistic lives. Now let's go a step further.

Instead of hogging the limelight by saying that the mind must be human, what if we posit that life is in charge of the universe? This was certainly true before the rise of science. The creation emanated from a living God, and since God was everywhere, life was everywhere. Science traditionally considered this a matter of faith rather than reason. They could point to atoms and molecules, amino acids and enzymes, proteins and primitive life forms, all the way from blue-green algae to human DNA. Isn't it obvious, they say, that life developed from non-life over billions of years?

Actually, no, The tracks of evolution are just that, footprints to show that something or someone has passed here. A radio playing Mozart is just such a footprint. It proves that Mozart once lived, but you can't tear apart the radio and find Mozart inside. You and I are the children of evolution, but only part of our evolution is visible; the rest, the most mysterious part, is invisible. Therein lies the answer to how we became masters of space and time.

(To be continued)

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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Why does bad news make us sad? Why does getting a raise make us want to celebrate? Not many people have thought about these questions. They seem too simple, yet in a way they are deeply mysterious. In fact, the right answer can set your body free, while the wrong answer can prove to be an inescapable trap.

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by Robert Lanza and Deepak Chopra

Can decisions we make now change the past? Modern physics tells us that particles possess a range of possible states, and that it's not until the actual act of observation that they take on real physical properties. Until this occurs there cannot be a past. Even eminent physicists Stephen Hawking and John Wheeler (one of Einstein's last collaborators) agree it can be no other way.

According to a new scientific theory, the past is simply the framework of events that defines our existence (Biocentrism, BenBella, 2009). Much of it is still fluid and unwritten, and has yet to be determined. In fact, two years ago, a team of French scientists published a landmark experiment in the prestigious journal Science showing that what they did -- now, in the present -- could retroactively change an event that had already happened in the past.

When you walk through the woods and observe things, the 'probability waves collapse' and the past is locked in. For instance, when you look down at the ground, there is a certain degree of physical uncertainty as to what is underneath. If you dig a hole for a tree, there is a range of probability that there will be a pebble either here or there. Of course, the probability of finding a diamond is much less than finding sand. But all those probabilities exist, and at any given time you either experience hitting a boulder or loose soil. Say you hit a boulder, the precise glacial movements of the past that account for the rock being in exactly that spot in your yard will change as described in the Science experiment.

Some will ask "But what about dinosaurs -- how can there be fossils?" Of course, once fossils are observed, part of the past has been determined. But dinosaur fossils are really no different than anything else you observe in nature. For instance, the carbon atoms in your body are 'fossils' created in the heart of exploding supernova stars.
The sum of the matter is this: physical reality begins and ends with the observer. We cannot go beyond the observer with our concepts of space and time. Without such an animal observer, space and time, and the evolutionary events thought to fill them, are altogether impossible.

As humans, we take the mind for granted. We are pleased with such books as Newton's Principia, or Darwin's Origin of Species. But they instill in us a complacency. Darwin spoke of the possibility that life emerged from inorganic matter in some "warm little pond." Trying to trace life down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it arose spontaneously from nonliving matter wants for the rigor of the quantum theorist.

In 1953, Stanley Miller mixed together some gases in an effort to mimic the geophysical environment of the primitive earth. He then subjected them to electrical sparks, corresponding to the lightning present on the primitive earth. After about a week the fluid turned brown and was found to contain amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Subsequent experiments by Miller and others have also succeeded in producing more complex organic molecules, including nucleic acids, which act to store and translate genetic information in living organisms.

While it is true, a rich variety of organic molecules can be synthesized in any one of many different ways, and it can probably be done in your bathtub, the experiments do not fail to have an animal subject. Our intercourse with the molecules is such as is necessary for them to exist as real objects. Half of the experiment is the scientist, who does not recognize that their consciousness renders possible the space, indeed, the very reality of the reaction vessel itself. It cannot be otherwise than important to remember that the Universe does not run mechanistically like a clock, and that physical reality extends no further than the animal observer.

"We are participators," Wheeler once said "in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past." Before his death last year, he stated that when observing light from a distant quasar that's bent around a foreground galaxy, we set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on the light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago.

Choices we make now really do change the past.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

Robert Lanza, MD is a leading scientist and author of Biocentrism a book that lays out his theory of everything.

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We've all been conditioned to look upon time as our enemy. This belief is wrong, but it's so deeply ingrained that if affects even the most gifted people.

Years ago, I was riding in a car with a woman who had been labeled by the media as one of the most beautiful women in the world. She had everything, since talent and wealth were also hers, but her health tended to be fragile.

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by Robert Lanza and Deepak Chopra

The universe evolves backward in time, not the other way around as we were taught in school. "The histories of the universe," concedes Stephen Hawking, the famed physicist "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history."
Life is not just a collection of atoms -- proteins and molecules spinning like planets around the sun. It is true that the laws of chemistry can tackle the rudimentary biology of living systems, but there is more to us than the sum of our biochemical functions. Conversely, physical existence cannot be divorced from the animal life that coordinates experience. We are connected not only by intertwined consciousness, but by a pattern that is a template for the universe itself.
Quantum physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended physical state until observed, when they collapse to just one outcome -- we don't know what happens until we investigate, and our investigation influences that reality. Whether or not certain events may have happened some time ago, may not actually be determined until some time in your future -- it may actually be contingent upon actions that have not yet taken place.
Bizarre? Maybe you don't believe this is real. Consider an experiment that was published in Science a couple of years ago. Scientists in France shot particles of light "photons" into a measuring apparatus, and showed that what they did -- now, in the present -- 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 electronically. 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 reality.
Of course, we live in the same world. No physicist challenges the fact that particles do not exist with definite physical properties until they are observed. Every particle has a range of possible physical states, but it's not until the actual act of observation that it takes on defined properties. So until the present is determined, how can there be a past?
According to eminent physicist John Wheeler, one of Albert Einstein's last collaborators, "The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what an observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past."
It was only with the advent of quantum physics that scientists began to consider again the old question of the possibility of comprehending the world as a form of mind. Since that time, physicists have analyzed and revised their equations in a vain attempt to arrive at a statement of natural laws that in no way depends on the circumstances of the observer. It seems only natural that the daily circuit of, say, moon round earth, though satiable only by a mind, was independent of any perception whatever. But this was to prove an illusion.
In these days of experiment and disconnected theory, one point seems certain: the nature of the universe cannot be divorced from the nature of life itself. Indeed, the quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist, and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality. If we do not look at it, the moon is gone. In this world, only an act of observation can confer shape and form to reality -- to a dandelion in a meadow, or a seed pod, or the sun or wind or rain. Anyway, it's amazing, and even your dog can do it too.
According to biocentrism, space and time are not the hard objects we think (Lanza and Berman, Biocentrism, BenBella, 2009). Wave your hand through the air. If you take everything away, what's left? The answer, of course, is nothing. The same thing applies for time -- you can't put it in a marmalade jar. Look at anything -- say this page. You can't see it through the bone that surrounds your brain. Everything you see and experience right now is a whirl of information occurring in your mind. Space and time are simply the mind's tools for putting everything together. We carry them around with us like turtles with shells. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, they are not "real and insurmountable."
In the end, even Einstein admitted, "Now Besso" (one of his oldest friends) "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."
(To be continued)
Robert Lanza, MD is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is the author of Biocentrism-Consciousness-Understanding-Nature-Universe

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

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