My fascination with time began with early exposure to science fiction media: the film The Time Machine based on H.G. Wells classic novel, the TV series The Time Tunnel and the book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle. This was the beginning of a life-long inquiry into the nature of time. Over the decades, I have continued to follow the time-travel genre, watching virtually every entry on these Ranker lists: films, TV series. I studied the physics of time at the graduate level, then delved into metaphysics to fill in the gaps left by conventional science. Certain practices, such as intentional dreaming, eventually led to some paranormal experiences. This third installment of Metaphysical Musings is about some of my findings and experiences.
Most people never question the mass belief that time is linear, that it flows unidirectionally from past to future; that the past is unalterable, the present dependent on the past via cause and effect, and the future uncertain because there are too many variables to predict it with certainty from past causes — or if they know about quantum physics, because the future is not entirely predictable, even in principle — although they tend to expend great effort to manipulate whatever variables they can control to their advantage.
Unless, of course, they have been influenced by the time-travel genre or by science to open their minds to other possibilities. But it seems to me that even such people seldom apply such mind-opening influences to everyday experience, perhaps because they feel there is no point without a time-travel machine or some type of artifact, as is usually suggested. And even though about 40% of people have experienced déjà vu, such “glitches in the matrix” tend to be shrugged off and daily routines resumed as if nothing extraordinary had just happened.
These days, the superhero genre frequently overlaps the time-travel genre. Several recent Marvel superhero films have featured prominent time-travel or multiverse themes (the two being closely related).
The Master of the Mystic Arts, Doctor Strange, uses his amulet to travel in time. It has the power to reverse time and to alter the past, and as such was an important plot element in the Infinity War saga. Timeline/multiverse themes have spilled over into Spiderman films and return in the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. (Could these media projects and others like them be a soft disclosure operation revealing the truth about time, albeit with a subtle misdirection implying the need for artifacts?)
A century after their discovery, the shocking implications of relativity and quantum physics have reached mass awareness, thanks in part to films like the ones mentioned above. The implications are so bizarre that scientists still struggle to grasp them. For example, quantum physics tells us that particles have speed and position, but that both cannot be measured simultaneously; therefore knowledge of one implies uncertainty of the other, in principle. This further implies that the outcomes of particle interactions cannot be predicted in advance; only the probabilities of various possibilities can be calculated. Einstein himself resisted this probabilistic feature of quantum physics throughout his life:
“God does not play dice with the universe.” — Albert Einstein
But Einstein’s objections are moot if future outcomes of particle interactions are probabilistic only because of the absence of conscious intent. Indeed, parapsychologists, in meticulous and exhaustive experiments, have demonstrated that the statistics of radioactive decay, for example, can be skewed by conscious intent.
Strikingly, a particular probable outcome of a particle interaction is actualized only when observed by a conscious human. This, in turn, invites speculation about the possibility of parallel realities, each one experienced by a different variant of the observer. All such parallel realities would constitute a hypothetical multiverse.
What if consciousness is the most fundamental reality, as some physicists believe, and all else is subject to it? What if pure consciousness trumps all technology? What if humans, by virtue of being conscious, have unlimited potential? What if the greatest deception of the “elite” has been to convince us that we are no more than accidents of nature, the result of random reactions in a primordial chemical soup, subject to the vagaries of fate, victims of arbitrary and merciless forces beyond our control and doomed to lose our struggle against entropy when the Universe succumbs to heat death, or alternatively, collapses into a singularity?
What if we have the innate ability to chart our own course through the multiverse, without the aid of artifacts, through pure conscious intent alone? What if we actually do this all the time, but our course is predetermined by implanted and mostly subconscious programs rather than by our own free will — programs that are all but invisible to us because we never question the fundamental beliefs that shape our reality?
What binds us to our current timeline is our state of being, which is determined by the sum total of our beliefs, thoughts and emotions. If we wish to be free, we must assert sovereignty over our state of being, so that it becomes intentional rather than reactive to circumstance.
The first step toward freedom is to become aware of our inner state. We must heed the words that were inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, which Neo noticed over the Oracle’s kitchen door in The Matrix film:
We must thoroughly examine our beliefs, especially the ones we take for granted without question. We must look beneath our persona, our mask, our idealized self-image, to reveal the dark corners of our psyche that we are often in denial of but which nevertheless project outward onto the world and to which the world responds accordingly. Reality is a mirror. Can we recognize our own reflection, and take responsibility for our projections?
Having the courage to face even the worst in ourselves, we discover that these fragments of consciousness, stunted in their development because we have disowned them and denied them our nurturing life force, are not the whole truth of our being. Beneath them at the core of our being, all but obscured by our judgements, is the source of our life force: our soul, our connection to our Source and to all of existence. This connection transcends all separation, including the illusory separation imposed by time and space. By accepting and embracing the totality of our being, we can become whole and free.
Physical reality is not a work-in-progress. It is a construct, a creation already complete in potential form. What is in progress is our experience of various parts of the construct that match our state of being, which at first is reactive to circumstance but then, as we learn and grow from our experiences, becomes intentional and sovereign. We ourselves are the work-in-progress.
So long as we condemn any part of creation, then or now, here or there, potential or actualized, them or us, we will continue to suffer the agonies of separation, just as we do when we reject parts of our own psyche. For if the ultimate truth of our being is oneness, then all rejection is self-rejection. Peace comes to those who recognize All That Is as good, because freedom to choose from the full range of possible experience is the point of creation. Without creation there is no doing, only being — being without the option of experiencing itself, which is also a state of agony.
So the construct provides a context for a particularly intense kind of experience. In our corner of creation, the experience is one of total amnesia and descent into the darkest depths of separation, where we have become the prey of predators that harvest us like sheep. But we have the capacity to free ourselves by claiming our inherent power, bestowed upon us by our Creator. Once we claim our power, we will see that the predators have served a role as worthy adversaries intended to spur our evolution in consciousness. There is no need to fear them or even resent them, any more than we would resent a tiger for being a tiger.
How to claim our power, practically speaking? There are as many paths of development as there are individuals. My own path has been focused on dreaming practice, inner work and inner assertions, which I may eventually elaborate on. For now I will describe a profound experience I had with time which left me with a permanently altered perception of reality, in the hope that even if you are not a dreamer yourself, your might consider that such experiences, and greater, are available to you on whatever path works for you.
I was having a non-lucid dream and as was often the case for me, I was heavily engaged in an emotional drama. The drama had a full context, including an historical context. I was arguing with someone about something negative that had happened in the very recent past, specifically about who was to blame for it. They were not taking responsibility and I was trying to set them straight, but they were being evasive to the point of absurdity, which upset me.
At a certain moment, I became lucid. I was aware that I was dreaming, and as I evaluated the situation I was in, I experienced a huge shock: the recent event about which I was arguing, that I had accepted without question as having actually happened, had in fact not happened, not even in the dream world.
The emotional drama I was involved in had needed a context. It had needed a physical setting. It had needed an antagonist. And it had needed a past event with a negative consequence which, belonging to the past, could not be undone; only blame could be dispensed.
The entire context had been "dreamt up" by some amazingly proficient part of my subconscious and seemed utterly real. I had to focus very acutely to discern with certainty that my dream memory of the earlier event was indeed fabricated. I had not actually had an earlier dream in which the past event had occurred as a dream event.
Several days or weeks later, while awake, I was driving to another state to meet with my mentor. I got hungry and knew I was approaching a shopping center which had a Whole Foods store where I could grab some lunch at their salad bar. As I exited the highway and pulled into the parking lot, spaced out and on autopilot, I experienced a jolt of awareness that my ex-girlfriend was in the Whole Foods store. It was a certain knowing, but I really had no reason to accept it as such, because she would normally be at work in the other state at that time of day. I hadn't seen her or talked with her for many months; for all I knew, we might never connect again.
I walked into the store, headed for the salad bar, and walked right past my ex. I was stunned and felt like I was in a dream. She apparently didn't see me, so when I recovered I caught up with her and we talked for about half an hour in her car (which was located far from the entrance to the parking lot where I had had the premonition, and it was hidden behind many other cars, so I couldn't have subconsciously noticed it). That was the beginning of a gradual reconnection, which eventually became a very close and enduring friendship and which completely altered the course of my life for the better.
But what happened next was even more stunning. While driving later that day, I thought about how, from the time I woke up that morning to drive to another state, if I had made the slightest change to anything I did, or if any of many stop lights had lasted a few seconds longer, I would have missed out on a pivotal life event. As I was pondering this, I remembered the dream described above and then I suddenly became lucid. Yes, lucid while awake!
Then came biggest shock of all, literally like an electric shock, very jarring to my psyche. I suddenly realized that I had not actually driven through many stoplights to get to the Whole Foods store that day. That was only a context for the significant event of reconnecting with my ex, a context that I had accepted as real without question.
A door had opened into an entirely new way of perceiving and experiencing reality.
Over the years, I have had several other premonitions that played out in precise detail. They were qualitatively different from ordinary intuitions or “gut feelings.” All of them involved pivotal life experiences: one was very enriching but the other three were rather unpleasant. I tried to avoid the unpleasant ones, but could not. I felt locked-in to a particular timeline. But as difficult as those experiences were, in retrospect they were for best.
The metaphysical teachings I had studied for many years turned out to be true: the present moment is the point of power and alternate probable futures and pasts fan out from that point, providing a context for the now-moment. But we mistake the context for cause and effect, this misdirection being a feature (not a bug) of the construct, which has been referred to as the “camouflage reality”. Moreover, there are adjacent now-moments on alternate timelines accessible to us by an act of will, without need of the props typically used by superheroes and scientists.
The word “human” is composed of hu, a word meaning “divine” and man, from manus meaning “hand”. We are divine manipulators who, while immersed in the construct, have developed our ability to manipulate the material world to such an extent — far beyond any other creature — that we have lost touch with our divine inheritance: we have the ability to shape our reality through conscious intent alone.
It is not easy to let go of the way of doing that we have become accustomed to and successful at, as experienced souls in the game of life. We are conditioned to strive, to struggle, to overcome circumstance through sustained effort. We may even judge against those who seem to prosper without effort or sacrifice.
Time to drop such beliefs and follow the example of the Buddha, who stopped everything he was doing and sat under a tree while he tuned his being like a fine instrument. Our beings are like Stradivarius violins, exquisitely designed to produce heavenly music, but with strings slack. As each string is tightened and tuned to resonance with the others, the intended beauty and power of the instrument is revealed to all with ears to listen.
But the Buddha also advocated the middle path, the path of balance: if the strings are too loose they cannot sing but if they are too tight they will break. Most of us, due to our immersion in the construct where we’ve become expert manipulators in order to survive and prosper, are far out of balance toward doing and consequently have lost touch with our being, and with it our connectedness to the greater part of ourselves. As such, not only have we lost mobility in time, but much is hidden from us — we are easily deceived and mislead. So it behooves us to recover our sense of being so that our doings may flow from it rather than from a substitute, implanted program. And that is best done by stopping the world, being still and feeling one’s own presence until a greater presence is felt.
When we resume our doings, now as sovereign beings, we can practice what Castaneda called controlled folly and catch ourselves when we take events too seriously. Whatever circumstance we find ourselves in, we can center ourselves and, like Doctor Strange, survey the infinity of alternatives that surround us, already created and accessible simply by adjusting our state of being. Drop judgements and resentments, disengage from drama, regret not the past, fear not the future, laugh — for laughter dispels fear. To the extent that we integrate the various fragments of our psyche, realigning counter-currents, a unified state of being is achieved that has the power to bend reality in our favor.
The mass consensus reality we collectively share will bend to our favor when enough of us align our conscious intent to traverse to a timeline where goodness prevails. Large numbers of us are not needed to reach critical mass, because each additional contributor exponentially increases the power of our joint vibration to trigger a mass awakening. The time has come for the Family of Light to shine brightly. It will be our finest hour.
There is a peace that passeth understanding; it abides in the heart of those who live in the Eternal. There is a power which maketh all things new; it lives and moves in those who know the Self as one. May that peace brood over us, that power uplift us, till we stand where the One Initiator is invoked, till we see His Star shine forth.
— Alice Bailey
What a fabulous post, so rich and full. I am particularly grateful for the reminder that rejecting anyone else is rejecting the self and that much of our work is to uncover and accept all aspects of our own psyche. Also that we "divine hand" humans have all power, if we can just remember that we do and choose to use it. Thank you!!
intention intention intention. it is such a balance to be able to listen, know and feel how we interface with the field, let it hold us as we hold it. knowing what your intentions are at any given moment can be a good bridge towards being
being able to be is taught as almost impossible, and yet is so insanely simple that most don't feel how it is always within us