Parallel Realities: An Easy Way To Fry Your Brain

Timeline Jumping and the Mandela Effect

Disclaimer: you’re in no way obligated to believe anything in this post unless, of course, you want to. Then, by all means.

I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, Time is never as obedient as you think it should be.

It’s curvy and brain-buckling, changing speeds unexpectedly and never with the right amount of  warning. Time shrinks or expands to fill a space depending upon your mood and the level of engagement you have with what’s going on. That’s why a favorite TV show is over in the blink of an eye, but a dreadful article you have to read for work takes all afternoon.

Time is an enormous tangle of tree roots creating new paths under foot for each step you take. The paths extend eternally and in a quantum number of directions. You can only follow one at a time, unless you have a wide-open consciousness and recognize that you’re a quantum being living in a clay body. And even if could do that, it’d be hard to keep track of where you were, since you’d be existing in multiple realities at once.

Parallel Realities & Nelson Mandela

The parallel reality scenario is a staple of science fiction. It’s a Time Travel/Butterfly Effect/Let’s Kill Hitler/Back to the Future Parts 1 - 3/Flight of the Horse type of story.

Recently, there’s been a new twist on the old tale.

Visionaries from the Future: Science, Spirituality, & Space Opera

by Sara Light-Waller

Photo by Nick Russill, 2005

Quantum Probabilities and the Future

“If we attempt to attribute an objective meaning to the quantum state of a single system, curious paradoxes appear: quantum effects mimic not only instantaneous action-at-a-distance, but also…influence…future actions on past events, even after these events have been irrevocably recorded.” ¹²³ – Asher Peres (1934-2005), quantum physicist.

By this logic, the future can impact the past, which means that just by writing this essay I’m affecting it. Seems strange, doesn’t? But this is not an unheard of theory today. We’re used to thinking of the past influencing the future, usually in a linear fashion. But with the increasingly widespread and popular appeal of quantum physics, and the growing interest in how consciousness affects reality, we begin to consider that Time is not linear and, in fact, may not exist at all. 

This has fascinating implications for the origins of our ideas. They might come from the future, or the past, or from the collective unconscious of humanity as described by Carl Jung (1875-1961). Of course, these are only some common theories, others include: past lives, parallel reality bleedthroughs, extraterrestrial intervention, extra-dimensional influences, and of course, inspiration by a supreme deity.

What does all this have to do with science fiction?

Science Fiction encourages thoughtful expansion. It speculates on what might be, and in a surprising number of cases, predicts with fair accuracy what’s to come. It’s been said that this is simple chance, merely an exercise in speculative potentials.  But if we take quantum mechanics into account, an author’s ideas could come from anywhere, or anywhen.