When it first dawned in American politics, the shadow was shocking. Values were turned upside down. The AIDS crisis? Ignore it. They deserve what they got. The deficit? Doesn't matter as long as the rich get what they want. Huge unemployment and falling incomes among the working class? Feed them crank social issues so they have someone to hate. Palin breathes this noxious atmosphere like the clear air of Alaska and thrives on it.

Now, however, Palin brings a smile. When she quit her job as governor, it was obvious that someone had whispered in her ear, "You're fading. Soon you'll be a nobody. Grab the money while you can." And so she did, earning a hefty advance, much of which, fittingly, goes to paying off lawsuits related to her ethical violations while in office. The shadow that seemed so dangerous a year ago has been defanged, reduced to spiteful backbiting against the McCain campaign, the very people who gave Pain her spot in the limelight to begin with.

I hope the left will take a deep breath and stop treating Palin like a diabolical force. The American character has always had a large dose of orneriness in it, and the more ornery you were, the farther west you moved. Alaska has a reputation for being an icebox for malcontents. Palin came straight from the source, and countless Americans root for her. In hard times, being the bellyacher-in-chief is a valid role. Hence the rise of Glenn Beck.

But nobody is being fooled. A recent Gallup poll showed that 67% of responders don't want Palin to run for President. Fear of Palin is ill-advised on two counts. First, fear is what the shadow wants. Without it, the shadow has no power. Second, the left needs to learn how to win graciously. The current upheaval in American society, which has been an enormous threat on many fronts, called forth a president and a constituency that knows how to handle crisis. The voices of sanity are prevailing. The solutions that have emerged on all fronts -- economic, social, and international -- represent the best in the American character.

But you can't expect everyone to join the party. As long as we know that Palin is fooling nobody all of the time, the darker side can be tolerated. The shadow is always with us. Today it's on a book tour.

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Let's see how far this bold statement can take us.

There's no doubt that you possess hidden powers. You have mastered levels of nature you aren't aware of. When you reach for a piece of chocolate, your desire is carried out by your arm automatically. Yet away from your awareness, the motor cortex in your brain sent electro-chemical signals to your arm muscles. You aren't aware of this level of nature, but it obeys you nonetheless.

Going to an inner level, brain and muscle cannot do anything without thousands of chemical reactions taking place in every cell each second. These also obey your command to reach for a piece of chocolate. Since cells operate by creating new proteins and enzymes, we can say that you literally create whatever is needed to carry out your desires. There is no gap between what you want and what your body does. (When there is a gap, some disorder or disease process has created damage in the chain of command.) The quantum world, where atoms interact to form the building blocks of life, is open to consciousness.

Once we get to this ultra-subtle level of nature, more is coming into being than just particles and waves, although that is primarily what quantum physics studies. Time and space also come into being. Are they under the mind's command, also? We speak casually about people who rewrite the past to suit themselves. What if that is literally true?

In the laboratory, isolated experiments have shown that photons can travel from point A to point B without crossing the space in between: this is a rudimentary form of teleportation. In the same vein, when an observer performs the classic experiment that determines whether light will act as a wave or a particle (we discussed this in Part 1 of this post), the so-called observer effect can be delayed. A beam of light can wait until a second observer, using a second piece of equipment, makes a later observation. Then and only then does it "decide" to be a wave or particle.

Without going into complications, what is happening is a rudimentary way of changing the past. By delaying what will be observed, an action in the future is able to change an action in the past. History is literally rewritten. Of course, in both these cases, whether we are talking about teleportation or changing the past, the experiments are isolated and very tiny. Yet speculative thinking carries us to exciting possibilities.

In science fiction time travel is common, but in real life it supposedly can't exist. Why not? Because time travel runs into paradoxes. Here's a familiar one: if you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, you wouldn't be born. Since you were never born, you can't travel back in time to kill anybody, thereby negating your ability to not be born. A paradox. But in the rich spiritual tradition of India, there's a way out. One could rise to a level of consciousness that escapes the limitations of time. This so-called state of enlightenment exists in everyone, potentially. If any person is able to master time, by implication there must be a way to explain how it works.

The observer effect gives us a clue. Simply by looking at light in the laboratory, and doing nothing else, an observer can determine whether the light is a wave or particle. There's nothing special about light being shone in a lab. Ordinary light is affected by the observer effect. In fact, everything you are looking at right now depends upon you to exist.

This includes not just objects and events but time itself. Time didn't create you; you created time. Other sentient beings would perceive time in totally different ways. Why, then, do two people agree when they look at their watches? Because as life forms, we are set up to repeat the perceptions of our ancestors. Our brains are the depository of all the realities that have been experienced over two billion years. DNA makes us who we are, in terms of brain activity. However, our every action alters DNA at the same time.

In this case, we cannot tell the dancer from the dance, to paraphrase the poet W.B. Yeats. His famous line even implies the observer effect: "O brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?" Sitting here in the present, you and I aren't aware of being the masters of time, but if we knew our consciousness deeply enough, we would see it. After all, before the advent of microscopes, no one would have believe that thinking "I want some chocolate" depends upon mastery of quantum reactions.

The latest Nobel Prize in physics was given for the basic discovery of how photons can carry information through fiber optic cables. That represents the state of current knowledge. The late Herms Romijn, a brilliant Dutch neurologist, surmised that photons also carry consciousness. They interface everyday reality with the quantum world and beyond to the realm of intelligence, information, and awareness.

You aren't aware that you create the scent of a rose by smelling it, or that what you decide today can alter something you did yesterday. None of us were raised to think that way. But as speculative thinkers, backed up by thousands of years of spiritual insight and the most current experimental evidence, we believe that thinking can be changed. It must. As long as we remain prisoners of materialism, destined to obey random events and subatomic interactions over which we have no power, the true nature of mind will be distorted. More importantly, we will postpone the day when we can master every level of nature through no more than the wisp of a thought and the power of an intention.

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We cannot shortchange the shift in consciousness that Obama's election stands for and that his Presidency continues to inspire in millions of people. For the first time in American history, more than a quarter of the electorate in 2008 was non-white. For Hispanics and blacks, who are grossly underrepresented in state and national legislatures, there's been a psychological turning point. For the first time, they can say "He's my President" in the same way the white majority takes for granted.

The left isn't famous for ideological compromise, and if Obama followed that example, he would be awash in failure. Instead, he has steered through Congress more stimulus for education than Bill Clinton managed in eight years. He has revamped the bailout to make it more democratic. I find myself agreeing with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who said on one of the Sunday news shows that Pres. Obama may not walk on water, but he's turned into the best swimmer in politics. If his ambitions for health care reform turn out to come anywhere near his stated goals, that will prove the point beyond a doubt.

Finally, the left is forever caught between a sense of vaunted moral righteousness and the reality that such an attitude will never win votes or pass legislation. FDR, JFK, and Bill Clinton are considerable heroes to realists and grave disappointments to arch idealists. I'm glad that idealism exists and keeps the pressure on Obama, as Hans Morgenthau did on FDR and Adlai Stevenson on JFK (there were many others, of course). Yet does he really need prompting on this front? I can't imagine a President with a clearer moral sense, a higher standard of policy, or a broader perspective about the direction of the country's future.

So let's settle back and enjoy the fruits of the most idealistic election since 1932, or if you prefer, 1960. A dose of calm and a little perspective are the right prescription, even if the anxious neurosis of being a leftist is incurable.

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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)

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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.

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

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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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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

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