How you know your world just changed

The Many Worlds hypothesis in physics suggests that the universe is constantly splitting, that we are living at any moment in one of uncountable parallel universes. We find ourselves in parallel lives in dreams. Careful reporting of these episodes in a journal over time can provide state-specific evidence of the reality of parallel worlds. Can we catch a moment when the world shifts with our eyes open? For me, this means staying alert for anomalies, like the moment in the movie "The Matrix" when the black cat walks across the room the same way twice and you know that a world simulation is about to change. In Hiruko Murakami's magical novel 1Q84, Aomame realizes there has been a shift in her world when she goes down an emergency staircase from a clogged expressway and notices the cops are wearing different sidearms, heavy pistols instead of stubby revolvers. When did that happen? Starting with this single observation, the anomalies multiply until she - and eventually some others - are looking up at two moons in the sky and it is obvious that they are in a different world (unless they have gone crazy). I noticed an anomaly on my street this week, small in itself but of the kind that may be a marker that the world just changed. One of my everyday synchronicity games is to note unusual license plates. I spotted a plate on a silver Audi: DSB 1914. This drew my attention because "1914" carried me back to the Great War, which has often featured in my dreams and historical interests. I wondered who or what DSB might stand for. Then I noticed something more interesting about the license plate. it was German No doubt about it. To the left DSB 1914 was a panel with the twelve stars of the European Union and a D for Deutschland.

It is very unusual to see a vehicle with European plates in my small rustbelt city in Northeast America. But this bit of Sidewalk Tarot was not the kind of anomaly that sows the thought that the world just changed. That came the next day. Walking my dog along the same block, I came to the silver Audi parked in the same spot. The license plate had changed. It was no longer German. It was an orange New York plate. I was glad I had snapped a photo of the German identity the Audi had worn before the world shifted. I shall be watching the moon very closely.

Art inspired by 1Q84. Seeking artist's identity in the world with one moon.

Making real magic

Real magic is the art of bringing gifts from another world into this world. We do this when we go dreaming and when we remember to bring something back. In dreaming, we go to other realities, that may include places of guidance, initiation, challenge, adventure, healing. When we bring something back from these excursions, and take action in ordinary life to embody guidance and energy, that is a practice of real magic.
    We go dreaming in the night. We do it quite spontaneously. We can do it by setting an intention for our nocturnal adventures. We can do it as lucid dreamers, awakened to the fact that we are dreaming and able to navigate the dreamlands consciously.  We can do it in the way of the shaman, traveling intentionally, conscious and hyper-awake, riding the drum to locales beyond the ordinary, and bringing back gifts.
    We can also walk the roads of everyday life as conscious or lucid dreamers, learning to recognize how the world is speaking to us in signs and symbols, and how a deeper order of events may reveal itself through the play of synchronicity. In night dreams and conscious excursions, we get out there; we go near or far into other orders of reality where the rules of linear time and Newtonian physics do not apply. Through synchronicity, powers of the deeper reality come poking and probing through the walls of our consensual hallucinations to bring us awake. Sometimes they work to confirm or encourage us in a certain line of action; sometimes they intercede to knock us back and discourage us from persisting in the worst of our errors.

     Synchronicity is when the universe gets personal. Navigating by synchronicity is the dreamer’s way of operating 24/7. Though the word “synchronicity” is a modern invention — Jung made it up because he noticed that people have a hard time talking about coincidence — the phenomenon has been recognized, and highly valued, from the most ancient times. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus maintained that the deepest order in our experienced universe is the effect of “a child playing with game pieces” in another reality. As the game pieces fall, we notice the reverberations, in the play of coincidence.
      When we pay attention, we find that we are given signs by the world around us every day. Like a street sign, a synchronistic event may seem to say Stop or Go, Dead End or Fast Lane.  Beyond these signs, we find ourselves moving in a field of symbolic resonance which not only reflects back our inner themes and preoccupations, but provides confirmation or course correction. A symbol is more than a sign: it brings together what we know with what we do not yet know.
    Through the weaving of synchronicity, we are brought awake and alive to a hidden order of events, to the understory of our world and our lives. As in the scene in the movie The Matrix when the black cat crosses the room in the same way twice, riffs of coincidence (for which I have coined the term reincidence) can teach us that consensual reality may be far less solid than we supposed.

    You do not need to travel far to encounter powers of the deeper world or hear oracles speak. You are at the center of the multidimensional universe right now. The doors to the Otherworld open from wherever you are, and the traffic moves both ways. 

Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo by RM

Wrinkles in the veil of reality

Coincidence, especially in the form of reincidence*, provides clues that our default reality might be in process of being re-booted. Think of the moment in the movie The Matrix when the black cat crosses the room in exactly the same way twice. This is a signal that a virtual reality is about to collapse – in this case, to be collapsed by the alien forces that are keeping humans in thrall by caging their minds in an artificial world.
     There is a vast genre of Eastern literature about this kind of thing. In their dastangos, Urdu storytellers - eagerly heard in princely courts and humble markets - preserved an imaginal geography that includes constructed realities known as tilisms. The word tilism, related to the more familiar "talisman" describes a realm of enchantment created by sorcerers that becomes a prison for one who falls into it.
     Any world may prove to be a tilism, a mind trap constructed by Dark Side magic in defiance of "the laws of God and of nature". The vast tilism of Hoshruba, with its multiple layers of illusion and deception, is the realm of Afrasiyab, the Emperor of Enchantment. Its geography is more various and complex than that of the ordinary world. 
     There are tilisms within tilisms, nested worlds created by magic and imagination. Humans live in such places but do not see where they are. It is much easier to fall into a tilism than to get out. The only way to pierce the veils of illusion and overthrow a tilism is to find the tablet that holds the secrets of the tilism, including the conditions for its destruction and the name of the person who will destroy it. The tablet could be concealed anywhere, often inside the tilism itself. **      
    The “real world” of the first Matrix movie is a nightmare reality where insectoid machines suck energy from humans who allow their bodies to lie dormant because their minds are trapped in a techno-tilism. But the “real world” beyond our consensual reality may be a brighter, not a darker, one. The shaman-priests of the Kogi warn that the Aluna, the psychospiritual field around the earth, has been polluted by human thought-forms and hungry ghosts to the point where it is difficult for higher intelligences to reach us.
     Star travelers (not only in C.S.Lewis’s adult fiction, The Cosmic Trilogy) report that Earth is known by sentient beings elsewhere in the galaxy as the Veiled or Cloaked Planet, because we have been wrapped in the fabric of illusion, limiting our access to higher intelligences, and theirs to us.
    Noticing wrinkles and loose threads in the fabric of ordinary reality, we begin to lift the veil. Pull on a few of those loose threads, and the fabric of perceived reality may unravel quickly. In Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia leads to the discovery of an alternate reality that soon replaces the “real" world.

* Reincidence. A term I invented for a recurring series or riff of synchronistic phenomena over time.

**These traditions were largely unknown in the west until an Urdu scholar and novelist named Musharraf Ali Farooqi was stirred by a dream to embark on a fantastic enterprise. He dreamed he was visited by mythic creatures who came galloping right out of the great Urdu story cycle known as The Adventures of Amir Hamza. He made a tremendous contribution to world literature in giving us an elegant 900-page translation of this work, published by The Modern Library. But this was only the start of his labors. Farooqi has since produced the first volume of a projected 24-volume translation of the oceanic Tilism-e Hoshruba. Titled Hoshruba: The Land and the Tilism