Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe Read Online Free PDF Page B

of water.
    At that moment long ago, other questions came to disturb my wonder, though I did not yet appreciate that those musings were at least as ancient as my species itself. If, indeed, God had made the world, then who made God? This question kept tormenting me long before I would see micrographs of DNA or the tracks of matter and antimatter created in a bubble chamber by the collision of high-energy particles. I felt on both an instinctive and intellectual level that it did not make sense for this place to exist if no one observed it.
    My home life, as I’ve already implied, was less than the Norman Rockwell ideal. My father was a professional gambler who played cards for a living, and none of my three sisters finished high school. The efforts that my older sister and I made to escape beatings at home steeled me to expect a life of confrontation. Because my parents didn’t allow me to hang around the house unless to eat or sleep, I was basically on my own. For play, I took excursions deep into the surrounding forests, following streams and animal tracks. No
swamp or creek bed was too muddy or dangerous. I was sure no one had ever seen or been to those places, and I imagined that so far as almost everyone was concerned, they didn’t exist. But, of course, they did exist. They teemed with as much life as any large city, with snakes, muskrats, raccoons, turtles, and birds.
    My understanding of nature began on those journeys. I rolled logs looking for salamanders and climbed trees to investigate bird nests and holes in trees. As I pondered the larger existential questions about the nature of life, I began to intuit that there was something wrong with the static, objective reality I was being taught in school. The animals I observed had their own perceptions of the world, their own realities. Although it wasn’t the world of human beings—of parking lots and malls—it was just as real to them. What, then, was really going on in this universe?
    Once I found an old tree with knots and dead limbs. There was a giant hole in its trunk, and I couldn’t resist becoming another Jack to this beanstalk. Quietly taking my socks off and slipping them onto my hands, I reached inside the hole to investigate. A great beating of flying feathers startled me as I felt claws and a beak sink into my fingers. As I withdrew my hand, a small screech owl with tufted ears stared back at me. Here was another creature, living in its own world and yet a realm it somehow shared with me. I let the little fellow go, but I went home a slightly changed young boy. My world of home and neighborhood became but one part of a universe inhabited by consciousness—the same and yet seemingly different from mine.
    I was around nine when the inexplicable and elusive quality of life truly gripped me. It had become increasingly clear that there was something fundamentally unexplainable about life, a force that I felt, though I didn’t yet understand. It was on this day that I set out to trap a woodchuck that had its burrow next to Barbara’s house. Her husband Eugene—Mr. O’Donnell—was one of the last blacksmiths in New England, and as I arrived, I noticed that the chimney cap over his shop was rotating round and round, squeak, squeak, rattle, rattle. Then the blacksmith suddenly emerged with his shotgun in
hand and, scarcely giving me a glance, blew it off. The chimney cap’s noise came to a sudden stop. No, I told myself, I didn’t want to be caught by him.
    The hole of the woodchuck was not easy to reach, lying in such close proximity to Mr. O’Donnell’s shop, I remember, that I could hear the bellows that fanned the coals in his forge. I crawled noiselessly through the long grass, occasionally stirring a grasshopper or a butterfly. I dug a hole under a clump of grass and set a new steel trap that I had just purchased at the hardware store. Then I placed dirt from the hole in front and concealed the trap under soil at the edge of the hole, making