Last August, , in a talk with Whitley Strieber, I said the mind could travel in time but the body couldn’t. In response, his wife Anne sent me an e-mail link to his description of two instances in which he apparently time-slipped to another century, and was told if he did anything he’d wind up there permanently. I thought, I’d better ask the guys. So, on Wednesday, August 31, 2011, I did.
Similar reports have come to us from time to time — the ladies who slipped into pre-revolution Versailles for one instance. So talk to me about time travel in the body. Or in the mind or however you wish to approach it.
Yes. It is in the anomalies that you will find the cracks in the system you create (or take over prefabricated by others). Generalizations are all well and good, but one heron punctuates a sky.
That’s not spectacularly helpful.
Better questions get better answers.
All right. When people reported seeing other times, what has gone on?
Now you’re closer to it. They see other times. That is, they observe. That is, they receive images.
That is not the same thing as living there. Your body has one place and time to live. Normally it cannot be in two places or two times — if it did, would it disappear from its “real” place while visiting elsewhere?
However — well, let’s sketch some background.
1) Infinite versions of you. You will remember: every coin flip, there is a heads version of your life and a tails version, and both are real, but only the one you are experiencing seems real to you. The others seem theoretical no matter how strongly you believe this. You live in one timeline at a time.
2) Nevertheless, by any conscious decision, any non-conscious choice of circumstance, you may jump timelines, and the new timeline seems the only reality, and all others including the one you jumped from, theoretical.
3) What if you could perch on one but see another (or many others)? This happens, and some people wind up unable to distinguish, or to stabilize their point of view, and may wind up in mental hospitals. Others may become artists or explorers of the soul in one way or another, and they live in a different kind of world.
4) Since all versions of yourself are connected, the fewer your internal barriers, the easier it is to pass notes between the versions — by conscious design or not. Sometimes these notes are by way of, shall we say, psychic video.
5) and finally –. It is one thing to live in a given timeline; it is another to experience one at one remove. Thus Whitley Strieber could see, but not make a move without moving his consciousness to that other timeline. Had he done so, it would have been no more permanent than eating chocolate would have proved fatal, as he was warned/threatened/enticed so many years ago. But it would have been permanent if he had been or become unable to remember where he belonged. So, there was a certain theoretical danger, and a certain added drama, to capture his attention.
How do you distinguish a physical event from a mental? Our answer would be: arbitrarily. Remember that reality — physical reality — is a projection, and you’ll see that “mental or physical” is just one more of those false dichotomies that come from treating a relative distinction as absolute.
We should add — and do — that isn’t only memory from one version of this life to another, as you do continually and totally without remembrance, usually — but also, since you connect to all other parts of your larger being, you may experience things from those other lives, in the way you found yourself marveling at your bathroom sink when you suddenly saw it through Joseph’s 19th-century eyes. Was that physical? Mental? Spiritual?
Thank you. That does put it into a context.