10/06/2024
Today, on the occasion of my 72nd birthday, I offer one theory on Immortality.
My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
-Emily Dickinson
In his autobiographical book, In My Time Of Dying, (2024), Sebastian Junger ponders our question of immortality and offers his' (and other’s) near death experiences and relates them to theories proposed by experiments from quantum physics. His conclusion is both thought provoking and reassuring.
But before we get to his conclusion, allow me to share a personal epiphany that took place on September 26, 2005.
We had a member of the household, a male cat we called “Blue Kitty”, that was sick and on the verge of death. He had quarantined himself in a corner of the basement refusing to eat or drink. On the morning of 9/26/05, he climbed upstairs and jumped up to his favorite perch in our kitchen. Rett was glad, and surprised, to see him and she picked him up in her arms. As she held him, he “passed away.” He obviously desired to die in the warmth of her arms.
photo of Blue Kitty
It was a rainy morning, and as I dug a grave for him, filled with sadness, a thought occurred to me that all living creatures have an essence that is eternal, and that due to the laws of quantum physics, that essence lives in a state of either matter or energy-an eternal body/mind presence. After burying Blue Kitty, I entered this simple sketch in my diary- a model of the “infinite matrix of consciousness”.
The bold line represents Blue Kitty's consciousness
THEORY: All life creates an essence that is like a thread on an infinite matrix, and like the double helix of our DNA, it carries inFORMation that is eternal.
Biocentrism
The theory of biocentrism was proposed by Robert Lanza in 2007 and explains that life and biology are the central pieces to being, reality and the cosmos. It explains how life creates the universe rather than the other way around. It posits that reality is a construct of the conscious mind, rather than an objective independent entity. It also claims that all species have inherent value, and that humans are not “superior” to other species in a moral or ethical sense.
Quantum physics teaches us that the only thing we can perceive are our perceptions. In other words, consciousness is the matrix upon which the cosmos is apprehended. Color, sound, temperature, and the like exist only as perceptions in our head, not as absolute essences. In the broadest sense, we cannot be sure of an outside universe at all.
Stephen Hawking:
“…our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the outside world. We form mental concepts of our home, trees, other people, the electricity that flows from wall sockets, atoms, molecules, and other universes. These mental concepts are the only reality we can know. There is no model-independent test of reality. It follows that a well-constructed model creates a reality of its own.”
According to Hawking, if a complete theory of the universe exists, “it will be a model that creates itself.”
Back to Junger’s book, the précis from Amazon:
For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet, the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.
This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?
Junger:
There is a theory that at every moment, all possibilities in our lives are followed, and that an almost infinite multiplicity of universes extends out from each of us eternally. (The one thing the universe has plenty of is space-time, and presumably there would be no problem accommodating such extravagance.)
Evan Harris Walker from his book, The Physics of Consciousness
Space, time, matter, and energy, -- the very stuff of objective reality, as it turns out--depend on the perceptual participation of the observer. ... Our consciousness, our mind, and the will of God are the same mind. ... Our knowledge of how quantum mechanics works with state vector collapse on observation ties in with a quantum mechanical picture of consciousness, consciousness arising out of the very observer-dependent processes that go on in the brain as they do in the laboratories of physicists, in the hearts of atoms, and in the cores of stars. And with an observer in the brain, this consciousness selects the things that happen in the external world.
Immortality?
Theory: All species contribute individually to an infinite matrix of consciousness poetically stated by William Blake in Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
CPW
P.S. Serendipitously, the following song popped up this week while I was listening to Pandora while I was driving in my truck. Enjoy!
Commentaires