Biocentrism: life, the universe, and everything
This is part one of a multi-part series
Part #1: The girl who didn’t buy the whole “devil” thing
My mother, who primarily raised me, was a late-blooming hippie. My father, who I saw little of, was a closet atheist born into a devout Lutheran family. There was no mention of religion when I was home beyond Christmas and Easter, which we celebrated on a purely commercial level. My grandparents, who we lived with, never mentioned their beliefs. My mother liked to talk about reincarnation, believing she once lived in Egypt. She dabbled in Buddhism. She also believed in ghosts and was certain our house was haunted.
My only organized religious experiences stemmed from the handful of times I went to church with either my father or his parents. They liked to make you feel guilty for your disbelief. I found the idea of a god and a devil thorny to swallow from the get-go. I was supposed to believe these crazy things to be true with no shred of hard evidence? I questioned it only once in front of my paternal grandmother. When I received a backhand to the side of my head, I knew instantly that I should keep my questions to myself.
I was very young when the deep questions about life, the universe, and everything hit me. I once heard someone say that some of us are struck with an intense drive to know what it all means. I was undoubtedly that girl. I was doing donuts on my tricycle in my garage one day. It was an abnormally cold day in South Florida, and I was wearing my favorite Rainbow Bright shirt with long, red sleeves. I remember pausing mid-donut and realizing that I was alive. I was stuck to this planet, hurdling through space, by an invisible force. What did it mean? Why me? Why was I alive? How could anyone be alive? How could there be space and planets and stars? I was literally paralyzed by my thoughts. I don’t know how long I sat in the middle of that cold garage, mesmerized by my existence, but it felt like a lifetime passed.
All I knew as I began asking these questions is that god and the other baggage that came along with a god seemed. . . inadequate. Good old PBS had instilled inside me a strong inclination towards science, and the scientific method could not prove god. Yet, on the other end of the spectrum - cold, hard facts didn’t seem adequate either. Current theories in science were exciting but were not complete. Many theories left more mystery behind than they began with. The most prominent element that bothered me on both edges of measurement was death.
On religion’s end, save for Eastern thought, when you died, you went to a lofty paradise in the clouds. . . if you were good and believed in god and did what he said. If you failed, you burned for eternity. None of that made sense to me, and it seemed as if it were true; god was simply bored and created humans to play with like some big, cosmic board game. On science’s end, when you died, you ceased to exist. It was over. Entropy ruled, and you could not escape its need to bring equilibrium to the cosmos. She was a cruel mistress with one driving goal: to dismantle order into smooth, even plain, chaos. You cannot unscramble an egg. You cannot “un die”. Neither of these explanations felt right to me. The more I dove into learning about each, the more I felt that neither side had things figured out, each group holding onto past beliefs with little room for new ideas and knowledge to enter and evolve their thinking.
It may seem to those who do not follow science closely that my words contradict the very core of science. Science is about seeking the truth through evidence-based research. Science is about developing new theories and working to prove or disprove them. Unfortunately, in mainstream scientific circles, new emerging theories and research that challenge our old ways of thinking, researching, and understanding the universe are not welcomed into the pool of thought concerning what it means to be here. Just as many religions reject science that could disprove their beliefs, scientists reject new thinking that could disprove the classical view of the universe we hold to be true.
The new theories are not actually new. The thoughts behind them began with ancient philosophers at the dawn of human thinking. The ideas were carried throughout history by our most remarkable minds. Today, a new generation of great minds tests these ideas using our advanced technology, providing results that are hard to dispute.
When I landed on the idea of biocentrism, I instantly felt something click inside me, like a broken circuit being reconnected. Here was a theory that made such sense, filling in the gaps that each end of the spectrum failed to fill. Biocentrism is not a religion. It is a new way of understanding life, the universe, and everything. It is not a crossroad between science and religion. It is a theory beyond our classical scientific understanding of everything. A new way to study the cosmos and a new way to ask questions about who we are, why we are here, and what it all means. Learning about Biocentrism was an emotional journey for me. I assume it felt similar to what some people feel when they have a religious experience, like all the pieces falling into place and the things you believe feel right.
That journey began by reading Dr. Lanza’s book, Biocentrism, which changed my life.
To be continued. . .