The Way it looks and the Way it really is!

REVISED ON 3/13/2012 AT 11:56 am CDT

A writer named Robert Lanza takes the cosmology of space, the pathology of cognition and surmises within that context along with many other factors, like Schrödinger’s Cat, that the world is not as we believe it to be. He calls this his theory of Biocentrism.

At the end of this essay is a part taken from Wikipedia giving a cursory explanation of Biocentrism. The theory is essentially as follows:

Those things observed by us to be outside of us are not controlled by the confines of space and time as we believe them to be. Starting with the fact they are movement captured by us as stationary material in the instant of time we make our observation of them, they are as we observe and appear to us to be no more than the observation we make of them.

Although occupying the cosmology of what constitutes all of that in existence; add to that the separate universe from which we are observing that existence; we  can draw this conclusion:  that which we observe is not necessarily bound by either the time or space limited universe we currently occupy. That time/space universe limits what we see but does not limit the reality of what is.

From there Lanza asserts the control we can exercise over what we observe by observing it with the particular characteristics in which we make our observation of it we thereby seem to create it. All we do is generate it into this dimension, we have no proof one way of the other of it existing elsewhere.

Deepak Chopra a kind of Renaissance Transcendentalist and New Wave Thinker, speaks of our power over the objects outside of us much in the same way, however for other reasons. He takes what he believes to be the extrinsic properties of them and us and speaks of what we can evoke from between and within the communion of both.

In many ways this is not unlike the existential existence derived by the encounter between Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Much of the same thought permeates writing on Buddhism and premises in foundation from beliefs of other Eastern Systems of Philosophy and Thought.

The bottom line is this: boiled out, so much of this is the same, not simple, but uniform in its basics. It is the same whether looked at through Western eyes or Eastern eyes, from whatever spiritual discipline; the same conclusions are reached when all is reduced down to the essentials.

The technically adept West believes this is all there is. The rest is poppycock. Science, Religion, Philosophy, it is all time limited material, serially evolved and or projected! All of the rules discovered about it with all of those yet to be discovered, absolutely determine it and by determining formulate it absolutely as this: Everything we know occupies space passing through time from a start to a finish.

But then there is the East, the reverse or mirror image of the West in so much of this. The concepts of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, etc. see things quite differently. I can only speak with a small amount of authority having studied Buddhism.

I was educated and trained in the Western tradition. I found Buddhism as an important subject of study after a lifetime of an existential search of “What’s it all About?” I could not find a complete answer in the Western Traditions.

I put what I learned into book form the title of which is From AA to AD, A Wistful Travelogue available at Amazon. Click on the title to go there. It is from the conclusions I made in writing this and other material, including a memoir that preceded the book, in which I concluded it all boiled down to the same thing.

There is more that we can see, there is more than we can see. Living this life is a period given to discovering all we can see or what does not appear on the face of things.

The forgoing is purposeful and fits the theme of my overall topic “There is more that the eye can see” in this respect:

Appearance allows us to see our way in the world one way, that way being tied up with things of the world. Such things like: How Much Money do Have? What will I be remembered for? All of these have to do with what I acquired in the world. This is appearance generated in and by a space/time limited dimension. Like its dimension it has no more basis in reality more than any thing else in the dimension. Ii is illusion just like all the rest of this dimension. Therefore, in the end, it has no value to us. The value of it is in the way and why it happened on our journey through. The lessons from it are more the essential value than the occurrence itself.

Looking at the essentials of life we see the value of our lives. Values can be many things, such as: Who have I helped? What have I done for others? For what kind of good have I used my talents?

One such Essential is what I see at the end of my road. In my case I see me struck down by the horrible disease with which I am afflicted. Carrying me to this Essential awakening is the background I have had, the talents I gained professionally, the family I nurtured, and failed to nurture, the method for living successfully as I learned in AA. The negatives and the positives of my past life’s experience brought me to my moment of truth asking what am I to do about this intrusion Dementia has been to my life. Terrible as it is can I convert that make it matter? Undertaking to Make it matter has been the fulfillment my life was yearning for.

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ROBERT LANZA:

THEORY

Lanza argues that the primacy of consciousness features in the work of Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Bergson.^[7] He sees this as supporting the central claim that what we call space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than external physical objects.^[8] 

Lanza argues that biocentrism offers insight into several major puzzles of science, including Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the double-slit experiment, and the fine tuning of the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe as we perceive it.^[2]According to a Discover magazine article adapted from Lanza's book, “biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do sinceEinstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago.”^[9]

Lanza's theory of biocentrism has seven principles:^[10]

1.     What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind.

2.     Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.

3.     The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

4.     Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

5.     The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The "universe" is simply the complete spatial-temporal logic of the self.

6.     Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

7.     Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life.