“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
Seneca
The famous novel by Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray ends with the attempt of Dorian Gray to destroy the painting, the ugly portrait of his decomposed soul, by stabbing it with a knife. Surprisingly, when thrusting the image, the protagonist kills himself. The reader usually questions why the writer decided to kill the hero as in the last chapters Dorian strives to improve his personality, to vanquish his sins and malicious intentions.
However, this end may also be analyzed through the other simple question: why by stabbing the portrait, Dorian has lost his life? And what if this, at first sight, mystical act has a rational explanation? The renowned theory Biocentrism proposed by American scientist and professor Robert Lanz gives a new view on the understanding of life and death. It sees biology as the central driving science and explains that life creates the reality and the universe in general.
According to the first out of seven core principles of biocentrism “what we observe is dependent on the observer and what we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness”.
Basically, the human mind is the only place where reality exists and through which it exists. This is to say that the reality exists only because someone perceives and observes it.
The elementary particles do not exist in the exact place and time and do not behave in a certain way. They are everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In the absence of the observer, nothing is real. The noted scientific double slit experiment done by Thomas Young, which was repeated in numerous laboratories around the world, gives the same result. It shows that the crucial factor which defines whether the particle will behave as a wave or as a particle is the observer himself. The experiment proves not only that the human may change the reality, but also that the surrounding reality might be illusory, as it might have two properties: the property of the wave and of the particle. The sixth and the seventh principles claim that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools for measurement of abstract and exact things. We carry space and time with us like the snails and they change under influence of our consciousness.
At the death, the stream of consciousness breaks. Therefore, death is an illusion created by our minds, as we believe that it is related to a physical shell. Robert Lanz doesn’t say that the person sinks into the eternity of time, but rather continues existing outside the time. There are myriads of other universes parallel to our universe. In these universes, your life might go according to another scenario.
The approach that the universe may exist without us, as its great observer, is impossible. The whole universe was designed so that the life has to appear in it. For the universe to start existing and to take the shape, there should be someone who can observe it. Everything occurs in our consciousness, that is why none of the scientists were successful with their theories, they skipped this critical fact. The theories created by them are also born in the mind and understood by the consciousness.
Professor Lanz is sure that only by placing biology before physics which studies the universe and chemistry which studies the life, the scientists have a chance to generate a “theory of everything”.
Does biocentrism narrow the whole universe down to the space within our brain?
Let’s take as an example the following situation. We sit in our office and work on the computer on a bright sunny day. In our thoughts, we envisage the living room in our house, how the rays of the sun warm up the beige sofa next to the window, and grandmothers’ jade crystal vase shimmers on the coffee table. In fact, that room is projected only in our mind, as now it’s only a stream or concentration of atoms and molecules in its infinite probability of combination and interaction. Nothing has shape or color until we enter that room physically. The photons of light hit our eyes trigger a cascade of signals to create an image in our brain. The light itself does not carry any color; the atoms in our hands do not carry the weight to feel the objects. It’s our brain that projects and casts forms of everything.
It’s interesting that we have been given all information to understand the universe in early grades at school when our biology classes started. The principles of sight, hearing, touch and the overall mechanism of the brain are generally all that we need to realize our being and existence of the universe.
There is a parallel between biocentrism and Sanatana Dharma. This form of religion defines two types of energies that form the universe: The Superior energy and the Inferior energy. Everything that we see, hear, touch or feel relates to the Inferior energy. The Superior energy accumulates through the meditation. As a result, the practitioners do not see the world through tangible and materialistic objects; they only see consciousness everywhere from a small pebble to the high mountains. Because everything is, at the root, just a poor consciousness and nothing else.
One of the memorable scenes from the movie Matrix is when Neo comes to Oracle and sees how a little boy bends the spoon back and forth with the power of his stare. The boy utters a very simple comment: “There is no spoon”. This manipulation is an example that the reality is not about focusing on an object and trying to change it. Because the object does not exist you cannot change it. You have to change yourself as it’s all only in your head.
And this is what happens to Dorian Gray. Since he accepts the portrait as a real projection of his soul, he makes it material. That is why by piercing the picture he stabs himself. He simply obeys the principles of biocentrism. However, we must not forget that in fact, Dorian Gray is a fictional hero represented through the certain combination of the letters. He can revive and die infinite time by any reader who, while reading, creates the image of this person in the head over and over again.
Text: Leyli Salayeva
Photo: Press-materials
