Robert Lanza > Quotes

“Fourth Principle of Biocentrism: Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state”
― robert lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Time if the inner form of animal sense that animates events-the still frames-of the spatial world. The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector. Each weaves a series of still pictures-a series of spatial states-into an order, into the 'current' of life. Motion is created in our minds by running "film cells" together. Remember that everything you perceive-even this page-is actively, repeatedly, being constructed inside your head. It's happening to you right now. Your eyes cannot see through the wall of the cranium; all experience including visual experience is an organized whirl of information in your brain. If your mind could stop its "motor" for a moment, you'd get a freeze frame, just as the movie projector isolated the arrow in one position with no momentum. In fact, time can be defined as the inner summation of spatial states.”
― robert lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“As Emerson wrote in “Experience,” an essay that confronted the facile positivism of his age: “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.” George Berkeley, for whom the campus and town were named, came to a similar conclusion: “The only things we perceive,” he would say, “are our perceptions.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Name the colors, blind the eye” is an old Zen saying, illustrating that the intellect’s habitual ways of branding and labeling creates a terrible experiential loss by displacing the vibrant, living reality with a steady stream of labels. It is the same way with space, which is solely the conceptual mind’s way of clearing its throat, of pausing between identified symbols. At any rate, the subjective truth of this is now supported by actual experiments (as we saw in the quantum theory chapters) that strongly suggest distance (space) has no reality whatsoever for entangled particles, no matter how great their apparent separation.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Nothing is perceived except the perceptions themselves, and nothing exists outside of consciousness. Only one visual reality is extant, and there it is. Right there. The “outside world” is, therefore, located within the brain or mind.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“There are really only two choices. Either the first particle communicates its situation far faster than the speed of light, indeed, with infinite speed, and using a methodology that totally escapes even our most desperate guesses, or else there really is no separation between the pair at all, appearances to the contrary. They are in a real sense in contact, despite a universe of seemingly empty space standing between them.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“is easy to recall from everyday experience that neither electricity nor magnetism have visual properties. So, on its own, it’s not hard to grasp that there is nothing inherently visual, nothing bright or colored about that candle flame. Now let these same invisible electromagnetic waves strike a human retina, and if (and only if) the waves each happen to measure between 400 and 700 nanometers in length from crest to crest, then their energy is just right to deliver a stimulus to the 8 million cone-shaped cells in the retina. Each in turn sends an electrical pulse to a neighbor neuron, and on up the line this goes, at 250 mph, until it reaches the warm, wet occipital lobe of the brain, in the back of the head. There, a cascading complex of neurons fire from the incoming stimuli, and we subjectively perceive this experience as a yellow brightness occurring in a place we have been conditioned to call “the external world.” Other creatures receiving the identical stimulus will experience something altogether different, such as a perception of gray, or even have an entirely dissimilar sensation. The point is, there isn’t a “bright yellow” light “out there” at all. At most, there is an invisible stream of electrical and magnetic pulses. We are totally necessary for the experience of what we’d call a yellow flame. Again, it’s correlative.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“I am reality without beginning . . . I have no part in the illusion of ‘I’ and ‘you,’ ‘this’ and ‘that.’ I am . . . one without a second, bliss without end, the unchanging, eternal truth. I dwell within all beings as . . . the pure consciousness, the ground of all phenomena, internal and external. I am both the enjoyer and that which is enjoyed. In the days of my ignorance, I used to think of these as being separate from myself. Now I know that I am all.”
― Robert Lanza, Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

“This and other experiments prove that the brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that “they” have performed a conscious decision. It means that we go through life thinking that, unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys, a lever-pulling “me” is in charge of the brain’s workings. Libet concluded that the sense of personal free will arises solely from a habitual retrospective perspective of the ongoing flow of brain events.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“if the Big Bang had been one-part-in-a-million more powerful, it would have rushed out too fast for the galaxies and life to develop. If the strong nuclear force were decreased 2 percent, atomic nuclei wouldn’t hold together, and plain-vanilla hydrogen would be the only kind of atom in the universe. If the gravitational force were decreased by a hair, stars (including the Sun) would not ignite.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“The biocentric view of the timeless, spaceless cosmos of consciousness allows for no true death in any real sense. When a body dies, it does so not in the random billiard-ball matrix but in the all-is-still-inescapably-life matrix.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
― Robert Lanza, Observer

“So those who ask science to provide the ultimate answers or to explain the fundamentals of existence are looking in the wrong place—it’s like asking particle physics to evaluate art.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Travel in a rocket at 99 percent the speed of light and you’ll enjoy the consequential sevenfold time dilation: from your perspective nothing has changed; you have aged a decade in ten years’ worth of travel. But upon returning to Earth you’d find that seventy years have passed and none of your old friends are still alive to greet you. (For the famous formula that lets you calculate the slowdown of time at any speed you care to consider, see the Lorentz transformation in Appendix 1.) Then the truth rather than the theory”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Time’s existence cannot be found between the tick and the tock of a clock. It is the language of life and, as such, is most powerfully felt in the context of human experience.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Two and a half thousand years later, Zeno’s arrow paradox finally makes sense. The Eleatic School of philosophy, which Zeno brilliantly defended, was right. So was Werner Heisenberg when he said, “A path comes into existence only when you observe it.” There is neither time nor motion without life. Reality is not “there” with definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into being depending upon the actions of the observer.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“But perhaps we can grant that something happens when the thinking mind takes a vacation. Absence of verbal thought or day-dreaming clearly doesn’t mean torpor and vacuity. Rather, it’s as if the seat of consciousness escapes from its jumpy, nervous, verbal isolation cell and takes residence in some other section of the theater, where the lights shine more brightly and where things feel more direct, more real. On what street is this theater found? Where are the sensations of life?”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“So, given that the vast majority of humans who ever lived are not alive today, it would be an oversight to ignore their insights.”
― Robert Lanza, Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

“The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the human body, but there is some part of it which remains eternal.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Is it not obvious that science only pretends to explain the cosmos on its fundamental level?”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“First Principle of Biocentrism: What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. Second Principle of Biocentrism: Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be separated.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“number of ways things can happen is stupendous. The mind’s potential lies beyond its own comprehension.”
― Robert Lanza, Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Death

“When we observe the words printed in a book, its paper, seemingly a foot away, is not being perceived--the image, the paper, is the perception.”
― Robert Lanza

“Bell's experiment implies that one can instantaneously change the cross-correlation of two sets of widely separated events, a result that is intelligible only if we assume that the mind transcends the transient existence of things in space and time.”
― Robert Lanza, Rethinking Immortality

“Back in 1926, German physicist Max Born demonstrated that quantum waves are waves of probability, not waves of material, as his colleague Schrödinger had theorized. They are statistical predictions. Thus, a wave of probability is nothing but a likely outcome. In fact, outside of that idea, the wave is not there! It’s intangible. As Nobel physicist John Wheeler once said, “No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I am.”
― Robert P. Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Julian said quietly, “It was the love of money, not money itself, that was named the root of evil.”
― Robert Lanza, Observer

“[T]he past exists only as ideas in the mind, which themselves are solely neuroelectrical events occurring strictly in the present moment.
[...] [T]he future is similarly nothing more than a mental construct, an anticipation, a grouping of thoughts. Because thinking itself occurs strictly in the "now" - where is time?”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Wherever the life is, [the world] bursts into appearance around it. —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe