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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Robert Lanza
We must abandon the space and time thing; we know that now. It’s okay to picture parts that way—to say that Alpha Centauri is four light-years away. But we can’t apply that way of thinking to the cosmos as a whole, any more than we can explain how an electron can take neither path A, nor B, nor both, nor neither.
We sit down and try to let this in. What the cosmos is, is a correlative amalgam of nature and the me, the observer. We are a single essence.
If you can grasp and maybe even feel the truth that the mind’s algorithms create all we experience, you’ll know that the same power that makes our hearts beat also animates the world. If so, we’ve found our Grand Unified Theory.
Science seemingly makes death a bit trivial, even anticlimactic. There’s got to be more going on than meets the eye.
Something about the Sun and Moon and Earth forming a straight line in space creates a feeling—what hippies would call a “vibe”—that has no logical correlate, though it almost knocks onlookers backward.
because biocentrism avers that nature and the observer are correlative, direct perception is inherently a valid process, as every observer is already plugged into the essence of the cosmos and does not stand apart from it. He or she feels its truths on some deep level. How could it be otherwise?
Most of us labor under the stubborn illusion
that there is an insensate external world that comprises the vast bulk of reality, along with a separate “little old me” that confronts it.
In reality, nothing is separate, nothing rules anything; it all goes together. This escapes us mostly because of the intellect’s machinery, which creates symbols for things after dividing up reality into a relatively small number of disparate parts.
Our point, again, is that our biocentric conclusions that there is no death, no time, no space, and instead a single living entity, which precludes a stand-apart dead universe abiding separately from life and consciousness, is a science-based reality, but it’s also the conclusion that anyone would arrive at on their own if they merely thought things through, or quietly contemplated what was going on inside their minds.
We are an amalgam, an entity consisting of the outside world and the body/mind.
Ours is a funny old universe, with real things that cannot be seen, like love and neutrinos and dark matter.
if the underlying unity of nature and the observer with all its implications—chief among them the unreality of death—is to gain wider acceptance, it will surely arrive through ongoing scientific verification.
Science’s ever-growing twentieth-century assumption of a dumb, random universe, in which life arose by chance, had the secondary effect of isolating the human psyche from the cosmos.
Our current models can’t help but make us feel isolated from the cosmos, and vulnerable, with ongoing effects on our routine outlooks. Thus, twentieth-century cosmology has proven more than merely incapable of providing any picture of reality that makes sense. It has also fundamentally alienated us from nature. Therefore, yes, science can and does influence us experientially and emotionally, not just intellectually.
truly seeing the reality that we are one with nature and not apart from it, that consciousness is correlative with the cosmos, immediately helps ameliorate our war with the environment. You cannot wage war on yourself.
it will be good to jettison all the conflicting science oddities most people shrug off as due to their not being smart enough to understand physics. We want our science to work, even on the largest-scale issues. Now it can.
this view suggests tantalizing new directions for research, a combining of biology and physics that is long overdue.
