DC: And you know I’ve had some confrontations with Richard Dawkins and I don’t mind saying that I found him extremely arrogant and you know attacking a straw man that really doesn’t exist as God. But totally not in a way even caring to look at the mystery of consciousness which remains a mystery. Even Dr. Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained is in a sense explained away. Nobody really addresses the mystery of consciousness and the fact that people constantly look for consciousness as a kind of biophenomenon or as a phenomenon byproduct of the brain just so because we can map out what we’re thinking with correlations in certain parts of the brain doesn’t really explain consciousness.

RL: As a matter of fact you’re absolutely right. The book is called Consciousness Explained and many people say, they nickname it Consciousness Ignored.

DC: (laughs)

RL: (laughs) He’s missing the very central core of what consciousness is all about.

DC: Yeah. So you know what is striking to me is that your expertise is in the world of biology but you’re also and you’re, you’re expertise is such that you’re pioneering some of the most amazing technologies of the future but you do take the stand that consciousness comes first and everything is constructed. Why is it so difficult for people to imagine that when a honeybee looks at a flower it doesn’t see the same flower as you and I see because it’s sensing ultraviolet and not the usual wavelengths that you and I see? That a chameleon’s eyeballs swivel on two different axis and I can’t even remotely imagine what this room would look like to a chameleon. Or the fact that whales communicate through infrasonic and dogs here things that we don’t hear because the instrument is different. In the Vedanta we say that the fault of the instrument is not a reflection of the user of the instrument. You’re the user of the instrument and you know you can manipulate the instrument any way you want as you just said change the weather if you want.

RL: Yea well we were actually evolved as monkeys in the forest trees that collect fruit and berries. We were never really designed to understand the universe. You know in that sense the world, the way we see it is very much like a chipmunk or squirrel. The squirrel opens his eyes and the acorn is just miraculously there and he grabs it and he scurries up the tree without any further thought, but we humans are really the same. We wake up in the morning and voila the world is just magically there but again new experiments are showing very consistently that not a single particle exists with real properties if no one is observing it. Reality is a process that involves our consciousness but it requires that you think about what is going in. People don’t stop and think. You can’t see anything out there through the bone around your brain and clearly that is completely reconstructed in your brain and as a physician you know well that people for instance like remember the movie A Beautiful Mind, people with schizophrenia they see people and things that are just as real. Your mind absolutely has the capacity to reconstruct and create a reality just as real as anything you are experiencing right now. Even in dreams that proves the capacity. So again everything you see now again has to be reconstructed in your mind.

DC: I’m speaking to Dr. Robert Lanza and we’ve been talking about his extraordinary book Biocentrism and we’ll come back right after this and thank you for staying on for the second half of the show.

DC: We’ve been talking about some of his research but now we’re actually continuing our conversation on biocentrism. Basically what you’re saying is that our brain which is encased in a bony skull has no experience of a so-called outside world. The brain cells respond to things like pH, electrolytes, our body temperate, hormones, and so forth and ultimately all this activity is translated into ionic shifts across neural cell membranes and somehow mysteriously gives us the experience of color and sound and shape and texture and smell, not in the neurons but in our consciousness. But it’s really not clear how information that is processed of internal states by the brain is translated into sound, sight, taste, and smell which gives us the experience of the outside world. Am I summarizing this accurately?

RL: Yes, I think the whole issue here is that, that space and time are tools of the mind that are ways of us putting things together. So when you talk about the objects you see and indeed that would include the brain and neurons you’re already dealing with a reconstruction engineered by your mind. So everything that you experience in space and time is simply your way of understanding how everything is put together. So again even when you talk about a neuron or a brain cell you’re already now in the external spatial-temporal world.

DC: That’s right.

RL: So everything all the way from the Big Bang to the edges of the universe all that is simply an extrapolation the spatial-temporal logic of consciousness. So if you were to say that I’m standing here in a room on this continent on this earth going around the sun. If continue extrapolating that logic to its ultimate extreme you end up with the known universe. It’s very much like a globe of the Earth. You could sit here and look at this globe and say these are all the possible places I could visit out there doesn’t mean that you could actually go there it just means that that is an extrapolation of the entire whole.

DC: So let’s go a little bit further for our listeners because believe it or not we’ve been having conversations like this for awhile now but never with this clarity that you are giving it and so our listeners are pretty sophisticated. Let’s take it a little bit further. Now we know from mathematics and from the world of quantum mechanics is that as we go a little bit deeper into the sub-atomic world what we call electrons for example are really probability clouds that are hovering around a nucleus which is also a probability cloud. Although difficult to conceptualize this, this probability cloud defines the statistical likelihood of a space time event. We want to call it a sub-atomic particle that as you said earlier: Until we look for it, it’s not there. It only exists as a potential. Am I correct?

RL: You’re absolutely correct. Actually there was some debate in physics in the early days that these probability waves were waves of material. But it actually just turns out that they’re statistical predictions. So for instance I’m sure everything listening is familiar with the famous two-hole experiment. If you look at an electron going through the two holes if you watch it behaves like a particle and goes through one hole or the other. If you don’t look at it, it acts like a probability wave and can go through both holes at the same time. The reason that is so is because it’s not being observed there is no reality. You have not laid down the threads of consciousness as to where it’s going to appear. It can be expressed statistically as to certain probabilities but it isn’t real until it’s observed.

DC: So you know here’s something I do sometimes with my audience and um you know I’m for the first time beginning to get even more clarity as I speak to you. So, and again I might be extrapolating a little bit too much here because what I’m about to say violates everything neuroscientists say. So I ask a person to, to ask them a simple question like what did you have for dinner last night and they might say I had spaghetti and meatballs. So then I say where was that information before I asked you the question? And they of course say: It was in my neurons. I say now listen, are you seeing an image of spaghetti and meatballs and who you were with last night when you had this dinner at the fancy restaurant in Manhattan and they of course are now reliving the full experience. I say where was this information and they will say it was in my neurons. I say well if I went into your neurons do you think I’ll find the pictures of spaghetti and meatballs or you know are those synaptic networks coded for spaghetti and meatballs? I slowly lead them to the point where I say that that information, that memory existed as potential memory in their consciousness and when they had the intention it was almost like a measurement. A photon went off in their neurons and it gave them the experience of they were reliving that experience and then in a moment I’ll say let’s switch from there and go back to your house to when you were a teenager or a child. Do you see that now? And they’ll immediately see that and it’s almost like a quantum leap. You know localizing another space-time event in your brain through intention is almost like the real me exists as a possibility field for potential space-time events that localize of course as experience through my brain but that real me is not in the brain, it’s not, it’s transcendent. It’s a field of possibilities, it proliferates in uncertainty, it has observer effect, it localizes in space-time events. It takes quantum leaps of imagination. You know I can move from last night’s dinner to my childhood in an instant without going through all the intervening. That consciousness seems to be what this unified field that scientists are looking for. Would you relate to that or agree with that or disagree with that?

RL: No, no, absolutely. You’re absolutely correct. I think it’s a very different concept for people to fathom and to understand but let me add some teeth to this. There have been some very real experiments that have been carried out. There was an experiment that was published in one of the most prestigious journals in the world, Science last year in February. And what they actually did in this experiment is they put a particle into an apparatus and they had it go and make a choice along the way and then at the end they did something right now in the present that actually changed what that particle did in the past so the actions right now in the present, in the same universe you and I live in actually changed an event that actually happened retroactively in the past. And it’s not just you and I thinking this, I believe that if I have it correct that even Steven Hawking has now reevaluated his thinking and I think it was in an issue of Discover magazine is saying now that the present does actually impact the past.

DC: Yes.

RL: So I think we’re gaining momentum here.

DC: I know. I read a statement of Stephen Hawking where he said that God not only plays dice with the universe, he frequently throws the dice where you will not find it.

RL: (laughs)

DC: (laughs)

DC: The ultimate uncertainty principle.

RL: Exactly. And that’s the other thing, the ultimate uncertainty principle, as you know Eisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle, if there was really a world out there with particles bouncing around then we should be able to measure all of their properties. But you can’t so for instance if you try to measure a particles exact location and it’s momentum, they can’t be known at the same time. It’s sort of like the man and the woman in the cuckoo clock. When one goes in, the other comes out. This uncertainty is built into the very fabric of the universe and no one has a clue why and the only way this makes sense is to accept the fact that the universe is biocentric and with consciousness as it’s foundation.

DC: Yeah. You know I was reading again in your book where you draw the analogy. An arrow is going through the air and somebody takes a picture of it and now you know you have it’s location but you have no idea where it is going and you know the Buddhists also talk about this you know that objects in space and impermanence in time is the same phenomenon. If I go to the ocean right now and I take a picture of the sunset and the seagull is flying and I come and show you the picture and you say let’s go see it, there’s nothing to see because what I took as a picture was a measurement that created a space-time event of something that’s slowing, something ineffable that’s in a sense transcendent and is flowing continuously as space-time events and every space-time event whether it’s a subjective experience or an objective experience is in fact a measurement in consciousness of consciousness.

RL: Absolutely. Everything we perceive is actively being reconstructed in our head. So time for instance is simply the summation of these frames that occur in our minds. That doesn’t mean that there’s this invisible matrix out there called time. It’s simply our way of understanding things.

DC: So tell us what made you write this book Biocentrism? How long have you been thinking about this?

RL: Well ever since a child I knew there was something with the static billiard ball view of the world and when I was taking advanced physics at U Penn the material started to reach a new level of absurdity so at that point I tried to put this all together. I mean again for almost a century now science has not been able to reconcile its foundations relativity almost contradicts quantum theory. So again despite all these immense efforts of all of the greatest minds around there’s been no resolution. So clearly the foundation there’s a problem there. I think the answer of course is that space and time are not these hard external objects. Again we’re, scientists have been building from one side of nature (physics) without considering the other side (life in consciousness). Neither side exists without the other. They cannot be divorced from one another or else there is no reality. I think it’s science and physics are just starting to learn from all these experiments. These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways that no physicist really questions the end point. I think that these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality.

DC: And yet there are some very brilliant scientists out there both in the field of physics and neuroscience who are so in a way steeped in this world of reductionist science that they would not agree. They would say that one of these days we’re going to find consciousness as a bi-product of the brain. It’s a secretion of the brain just like you know hydrochloric acid is a secretion of your stomach or bile is a secretion of your gall bladder. And how many of your colleagues, I mean you’re such a respected scientist in your work of stem cells. How many of your colleagues actually get what you’re saying?

RL: Well, this is the problem. Scientists have been trained to operate within the existing paradigm and throughout history whenever there is a new paradigm, any of the conclusions don’t make any sense. They’re nonsense outside of that paradigm. So short of them fully understanding how it all goes together in a systematic way it just simply doesn’t make any sense. Now you have obviously given this an enormous amount of thought and figured out the critical principles so I think that you know initially you know certainly for the physicists the reaction has been sort of like a priest’s reaction to stem cell research. And actually you can’t tell a group of scientists that their whole life has been a joke without them getting defensive. (laughs)

DC: (laughs) So, um but there are scientists that you know of that agree with your point of view because I do know a lot of them.

RL: Well even the great physicist Steven Wiman said that consciousness cannot be explained by the laws of physics and I mean he’s one of the greatest physicists recognized. Certainly John Wheeler agrees with this perspective and many others.

DC: Roger Penrose I would say agrees with this perspective.

RL: Absolutely, but I think with any kind of a paradigm shift it takes time. I think you know you, my hats off to you, you have started the movement correctly and that’s how it has to start. Presumably, eventually this will catch on and people will realize that you can’t keep brushing these experiments under the rug. That they’ve got to start now doing what science is designed to do, to try to understand everything with a single theory that really doesn’t contradict itself like the current paradigm.

DC: I just wanted to remind our listeners about a few things. If you’re enjoying this program tell your friends about it. This program is also available on your iPhone so if you have an iPhone app that you can listen to this program. I just had a friend that just came back from Geneva and he was listening to this while hiking the Alps on his iPhone. And so you can do that. You can also go to intent.com and listen to all the archives. The program is repeated all day Saturday until Sunday morning. You have many opportunities to listen to this and there are some very difficult concepts here. You might want to come back again to listen to this conversation. Dr. Lanza if I arrange at some point for a video shoot of a conversation that you and I can have on exactly this topic and on your book Biocentrism somewhere in New York and then we put it on YouTube and offer it to some of the major networks, would you be open to it sir?

RL: Absolutely, I’d be honored.

DC: Now because I think this conversation needs to be heard by a lot of people. We’re still very much frozen in the old paradigm of reductionist, materialistic science. And you know your work and the work of many others is slowly beginning I would say to overthrow the superstition of materialism which has frozen us in a very obsolete worldview. Notwithstanding the remarkable things you can do with stem cells and other things because they’re in fact stem cells being pluripotential cells remind me of you know they’re like consciousness here in a cell saying tell me where to go.

RL: (laughs) It’s very funny you know when we grow our embryonic stem cells or these pluripotent cells in this petri dish, the first thing they want to do is form neurons and want to assemble actually into an eye. I’m sure it’s coincidence but it’s interesting that organs with the perception of the first and almost the default mechanism of these cells.

DC: Well it’s been wonderful having you sir and I hope we can do that filming sometime. Perhaps for PBS or any of the other outlets that we have access to and I’ll be in touch with you.

RL: Great. That would be a great pleasure.

DC: My very special guest has been Dr. Robert Lanza, considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He’s he’s currently chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology and adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. His book is Biocentrism and what Dr. Lanza is essentially saying is, is that the physical world exists in our consciousness, that our bodies exist in our consciousness, that space-time exists in our consciousness. That even when we think of the brain, that exists in our consciousness. That this consciousness is transcendent. It has no beginning in time, no ending in time, no edges in space. It’s our ultimate identity. The whole universe arises and subsides in this consciousness. The world is our projection as we interact with our own self we project and that projection appears as our relationships, as our situation, as the circumstances of our life, as New York City and as the whole universe. This is what the Eastern wisdom traditions have taught for decades and not only decades but centuries of time. Saying that the whole purpose of our life is to expand our consciousness until we can experience ourselves as infinite being and in that experience is our enlightenment because we transcend the fear of death. That all our fears come from a limited perspective where we identify ourselves with our physical bodies which is our projection or even our mind which is our projection. Or even our thoughts which are a projection, our relationships which are a projection. Those are all part of the scenery. You’re not the scenery, you are the seer in which the scenery comes and goes.