Does the Past Exist Yet?

By Robert Lanza, MD

Recent discoveries require us to rethink our understanding of history. "The histories of the universe," said renowned physicist Stephen Hawking "depend on what is being measured, contrary to the usual idea that the universe has an objective observer-independent history."

Is it possible we live and die in a world of illusions? Physics tells us that objects exist in a suspended state until observed, when they collapse in to just one outcome. Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet.

In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment, which showed that particles of light "photons" knew -- in advance −- what their distant twins would do in the future. They tested the communication between pairs of photons -- whether to be either a wave or a particle. Researchers stretched the distance one of the photons had to take to reach its detector, so that the other photon would hit its own detector first. The photons taking this path already finished their journeys -− they either collapse into a particle or don't before their twin encounters a scrambling device. Somehow, the particles acted on this information before it happened, and across distances instantaneously as if there was no space or time between them. They decided not to become particles before their twin ever encountered the scrambler. It doesn't matter how we set up the experiment. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how they behave. Experiments consistently confirm these observer-dependent effects.

More recently (Science 315, 966, 2007), scientists in France shot photons into an apparatus, and showed that what they did could retroactively change something that had already happened. As the photons passed a fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave like particles or waves when they hit a beam splitter. Later on - well after the photons passed the fork - the experimenter could randomly switch a second beam splitter on and off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle actually did at the fork in the past. At that moment, the experimenter chose his history.

Of course, we live in the same world. Particles have a range of possible states, and it's not until observed that they take on properties. So until the present is determined, how can there be a past? According to visionary physicist John Wheeler (who coined the word "black hole"), "The quantum principle shows that there is a sense in which what an observer will do in the future defines what happens in the past." Part of the past is locked in when you observe things and the "probability waves collapse." But there's still uncertainty, for instance, as to what's underneath your feet. If you dig a hole, there's a probability you'll find a boulder. Say you hit a boulder, the glacial movements of the past that account for the rock being in exactly that spot will change as described in the Science experiment.

But what about dinosaur fossils? Fossils are really no different than anything else in nature. For instance, the carbon atoms in your body are "fossils" created in the heart of exploding supernova stars. Bottom line: reality begins and ends with the observer. "We are participators," Wheeler said "in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past." Before his death, he stated that when observing light from a quasar, we set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on the light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago.

Like the light from Wheeler's quasar, historical events such as who killed JFK, might also depend on events that haven't occurred yet. There's enough uncertainty that it could be one person in one set of circumstances, or another person in another. Although JFK was assassinated, you only possess fragments of information about the event. But as you investigate, you collapse more and more reality. According to biocentrism, space and time are relative to the individual observer - we each carry them around like turtles with shells.

History is a biological phenomenon − it's the logic of what you, the animal observer experiences. You have multiple possible futures, each with a different history like in the Science experiment. Consider the JFK example: say two gunmen shot at JFK, and there was an equal chance one or the other killed him. This would be a situation much like the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment, in which the cat is both alive and dead − both possibilities exist until you open the box and investigate.

"We must re-think all that we have ever learned about the past, human evolution and the nature of reality, if we are ever to find our true place in the cosmos," says Constance Hilliard, a historian of science at UNT. Choices you haven't made yet might determine which of your childhood friends are still alive, or whether your dog got hit by a car yesterday. In fact, you might even collapse realities that determine whether Noah's Ark sank. "The universe," said John Haldane, "is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than wecan suppose."

Biocentrism (BenBella Books) lays out Lanza's theory of everything.

Conscious Evolution and the Integration of Science and Spirituality

By Barbary Marx Hubbard

We are today living through a crisis that could destroy civilization and our essential life support systems, but we are also living through a deeper phase-change in evolution itself. We are entering the first age of conscious evolution -- the evolution of evolution itself, from unconsciousness to a conscious choice.

This phase-change began noticeably and violently when the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. A signal went through the social body that we now have the power to destroy our world -- self-centered consciousness with this degree of power is not viable in the long run.

We are the first species that faces extinction by its own acts and knows it.

This is just the beginning. Through the advent of evolutionary technologies such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, space travel, the quest for zero-point energy devices and more, the human species is gaining powers it had previously attributed only to gods.

But not only can we destroy our own life support system, we can also catch a glimmer of our potential for a radical transformation of an evolutionary order.

When we imagine ourselves going through this crisis, hard as it may be, and project ourselves forward into the more distant future, even a mere 100 years, we see the emergence of a "universal species" capable of co-evolving with nature and co-creating with spirit. We learn to be in alignment with the drive in nature toward complexity and consciousness -- on this Earth, in our solar system, and eventually in the galaxies beyond.

Out of our many emergencies is coming emergence, and out of competition a greater cooperation, as social networking escalates among those who are innovating and transforming. We appear on the threshold of a nonlinear, exponential connectivity that is highly creative.

The integration of science, spirituality, and technology is happening.

One of the great advances of science itself has been the relatively recent discovery of cosmogenesis, the universe story, as Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry call it: the mysterious, indeed awesome awareness that out of No Thing at All has evolved Everything that was, that is, and will be. We are participants in an evolutionary drama, our own birth narrative. We are becoming the universe in person!

The mystery of the process of creation is beyond human understanding, yet we note through science many recurring patterns. We see how nature has evolved crisis after crisis toward higher consciousness, complexity and order for billions of years, often pressed forward by the crises themselves.

Our new scientifically-based evolutionary universe story has given us the insight that nature and we ourselves are evolving. There is a direction in this process toward more complex order, more awareness, and more freedom to destroy or to evolve.

Many of us are working together toward something we have never seen on any scale before -- a sustainable, evolvable, co-creative society in which each person is encouraged to do and be his or her best. A global mind/heart of coherence and love is arising in the midst of fear, competition and chaos.

An evolutionary spirituality is emerging, experienced as the impulse of evolution, the process of creation, the implicate order, a patterning process coming through our own hearts. It is felt as the sacred core of the evolutionary spiral, the evolving godhead arising, or even incarnating within each of us as our own impulse to co-create. It is the "creator-within" expressing itself uniquely through each person as a new form of "social cosmogenesis." The generating power of universal evolution is guiding us toward a more synergistic, cooperative democracy.

Through the natural evolution of complexity and consciousness, driven by mounting advances in communication, connectivity and spiritual practices, millions of us are gaining the experience of being connected with the Field out of which everything is co-arising, internalized as inner guidance, the quiet voice of God.

It is as though we're undergoing the evolution of our species not as extraordinary beings, but as the new norm. Great avatars, saints, and mystics had paved the way. Pioneering souls of the 21st century are exploring how to become creators, co-evolvers, universal humans.

This emerging human has been called by many names. Teilhard de Chardin called it the Ultra Human, or Homo progressivus, in whom the "flame of expectation burns, attracted toward the future as an organism progressing toward the unknown." Sri Aurobindo, the great Indian evolutionary sage, called this the Gnostic Human, the individual in whom the Consciousness Force itself, the supramental power of universal creativity, incarnates and begins to transform the body/mind into the very cells that evolve beyond the human phase.

Others have called this Homo noeticus, a being of gnosis or deep knowing of the Field out of which we are co-arising. Or Homo divina, as Sister Judy Cauley puts it. Or the universal human, connected through the heart to the whole of life, awakening from within by the core of the spiral of evolution. The implicate order is becoming explicate in us, turning into the essential self, animated by a passionate life-purpose to express our creativity.

There is no reason to assume that the evolution of humanity stops with today's form of Homo sapiens sapiens. We are obviously a young species, immature, incomplete, and actually not viable in our current state of consciousness. The ultimate hope, I believe, is that the evolution of consciousness and freedom is occurring naturally within millions of us, as a sort of spontaneous evolution, an inner punctuated equilibrium amidst the chaos, realizing that as the offspring of universal evolution, we are integral parts of nature, that the evolutionary process is happening within us when we open our eyes to see it, and be it, and do our best to participate in it.

As spirituality, science and technology blend, the evolutionary story becomes in us the sacred way of conscious evolution: a developmental path toward the co-evolution of a universal humanity.