Biocentrism Quotes

“Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.”
― Paul Watson

“[A] life full of goals and end-points is like trying to abate one's hunger by eating merely the two precise ends of a banana. The concrete reality of the banana is, on the contrary, all that lies between the two ends, the journey as it were[.] Furthermore, when the time and space between destinations are cut out, all destinations tend to become ever more similar.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[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

“[S]pace and time are neither physical nor fundamentally real. They are conceptual, which means that space and time are of a uniquely subjective nature. They are modes of interpretation and understanding.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“In truth, there can be no break between the observer and the observed. If the two are split, the reality is gone.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Just as we cannot properly perceive what's going on in the universe without incorporating the essence of perception itself, that is, consciousness, so too we cannot adequately discuss and understand the cosmos unless we have some notion of the nature and limitations of the tools used for discussion and understanding, namely language and the rational mind.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“No chemist who studied only the properties of chlorine, a poison, and sodium, an element that reacts explosively when it meets water, could have possibly guessed the properties that would be exhibited when the two combine as sodium chloride - table salt. [...] This "larger reality" could not have been inferred from a mere study of the nature of its components. Similarly, if the over-arching consciousness constitutes a kind of meta-universe, it too might well be expected to have properties unpredictable from any study of its components.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“When someone dismissively answers “Of course a tree makes a sound if no one’s nearby,” they are merely demonstrating their inability to ponder an event nobody attended. They’re finding it too difficult to take themselves out of the equation. They somehow continue to imagine themselves present when they are absent.”
― Robert Lanza

“In truth, there can be no between the observer and the observed. If the two are split, the reality is gone.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“[I]n the years that have passed, I have come to believe that the questions cannot all be solved by a science of behavior. What is consciousness? Why does it exist? Leaving these unanswered is almost like building and launching a rocket to nowhere - full of noise and real accomplishment, but exposing a vacuum right smack in its raison d'être.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“Sights, tactile experiences, odors - all these sensations are experienced inside the mind alone. None are "out there" except by the convention of language. Everything we observe is the direct interaction of energy and mind. Anything that we do not observe directly exists only as potential - or more mathematically speaking - as a haze of probability.”
― Robert Lanza, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe

“But the idea of a purposeless world is horrifying because it is incomplete. Purpose is a pre-eminently human attribute. To say that the world has no purpose is to say that it is not human[.] For what is not human appears to be inhuman only when man sets himself over against nature, for then the inhumanity of nature seems to deny man, and its purposelessness to deny his purposes. But to say that nature is not human and has no purpose is not to say what it has instead. The human body as a whole is not a hand, but it does not for this reason deny the hand.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“It is obviously the purest anthropomorphism to assume that the absence of a human quality in bird, cloud, or star is the presence of a total blank, or to assume that what is not conscious is merely unconscious. Nature is not necessarily arranged in accordance with the system of mutually exclusive alternatives which characterize our language and logic.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[S]exual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation of from nature, especially when the reals of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[C]ultures in which the individual feels isolated from nature are also cultures wherein men feel squeamish about the sexual relationship, often regarding it as degrading and evil - especially for those dedicated to the life of the spirit.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at his capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways. Still more will this be so if he learns to explore, or feel deeply into, his negative states of feeling - his loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression, or fear - without trying to escape from them.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[O]ur feelings are not fixed, unrelated states, but slowly or rapidly swinging motions such that a perpetuity of joy would be as meaningless as the notion of swinging only to the right.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman

“[I]n nature being and nothing, or solid and space, constitute a relationship as inseparable as back and front. In the same way, the formally static character of our words for feelings conceals the fact (or better, the event) that our feelings are directions rather than states, and that in the realm of direction there is no North without South.”
― Alan W. Watts, Nature, Man and Woman