Einstein Demonstrates Probability Bundles

 

A passage opens, like a long cylinder lined with silver and bronze-colored rods, angling up into the sky. As I speed up through it - shooting up effortlessly - I become aware that I am about to encounter someone who can instruct me on the workings of time and the content of the future. I come out high above the ground and look up at a huge revolving structure, something like a Ferris wheel on its side. At the end of each spoke is a different object, or rather bundle of objects. As the wheel revolves, I notice that the spokes go up and down at all angles, making the general shape of a sphere.

At the hub of the wheel is Einstein. He appears with his wild fluffy hair, in rumpled clothes, as he has appeared in other dreams. From the center, he works an engine that enables him to toss down bundles from the ends of the spokes. As one spoke dips, another rises, producing a seesaw effect. As the bundles fall to earth, Einstein instructs me that this is how the unfolding of events in time actually takes place: not in the serial fashion that is a concession to the limited human mind, but in the releasing of probability bundles, packages of time + energy whose contents will be unfolded over a certain period. The unfolding of events will be influenced by the dropping of subsequent probability bundles.

I woke from this dream excited, with an aha sense of illumination. While Jung said that synchronicity (a word he coined) is "an acausal connecting principle", when it happens we often feel that causation is at work on a level that escapes explanation in terms of the push-pull laws of consensual reality. Einstein's demonstration provides a model of how this may work, raising our imagination to a higher dimension of the multiverse.

I think of Einstein at the wheel of that crazy machine in a dream I recorded twenty years ago whenever I notice a riff of coincidence. When things keep popping up that you know are connected, though there is no causation involved on the physical plane, couldn’t this be the effect of the firing of one of those probability bundles, flung from another world into this one, to burst across our space and time like multidimensional piñatas? The world "quantum" means "bundle" or "packet", so this image may be a clue to how quantum effects are manifested on a human scale.

What I like best about the dream image is that the machine that fires the probability bundles closely resembles something you might find in an amusement park, evoking a game greater than the ones we spend most of our lives playing. Heraclitus said that life in time is governed by a child king at play  moving pieces in a game on another level of reality. Maybe the pieces in play are probability bundles.

Illustrations by Robert Moss: original drawing at top; with AI assistance at bottom

Einstein demonstrates the source of synchronicity

The best explanation of synchronicity I know comes from Albert Einstein. More than an explanation, it is a demonstration, and it came to me in a dream, one of a sequence in which “my” Einstein mentored me on the nature of reality.
    I’m not megalomaniac enough to think that the actual Einstein would bother with someone who knows as little about hard science as I do. Yet the Einstein character who appears in my dream says that he talks to me for two reasons. The first is that dreaming is at the heart of real science, something that will be better understood as we go deeper into the 21st century. The second is that dreaming is the key to time travel, which Dream Einstein says is the most dangerous and most potent thing that humans will ever to get to experiment with; the experiments must be done properly.

    I spend little time and energy questioning whether my Dream Einstein is the individual intellect or spirit of Einstein or a part of me that dresses up like Einstein or some teaching figure in costume. I like the idea that our guides and teachers have access to a cosmic costume department. Whoever my dream Einstein is he talks to me in a stage German accent, sometimes at machine gun speed about things like the physics of time travel and the code of the I Ching, which he once told me is the best model of the universe commonly available and accessible.
    Here is how Einstein demonstrated the source of synchronicity.

    In my dream, a passage opens like a long cylinder lined with silver and bronze-colored rods angling up into the sky. I shoot up effortlessly through this tube. I become aware I’m about to encounter someone who can instruct me on the workings of time and the content of the future.
    I come out high above the ground and look up at a huge revolving structure; something like a Ferris wheel on its side or a giant fun park Tilt-a-Whirl. At the end of each spoke is a different object, a rather bundle of objects. As the wheel revolves, I noticed that the spokes go up and down at all angles making the general shape of a sphere.
    At the hub of the wheel is Einstein. He appears with wild fluffy hair, rumpled clothes as he’s appeared in my other dreams. From the center he works an engine that enables him to toss down bundles from the ends of the spokes. As one spoke dips another rises producing a seesaw effect. As a bundle falls to earth, it explodes like a piñata, scattering its contents over space and time. The source of synchronicity is the firing of a probability bundle, a package whose effects will be observed over a variable period of time but have their origin in a single throw.
     Since Einstein’s demonstration, when I notice a riff of coincidence, things popping up that you know are connected though there is no causation involved in the physical plane, I think of these probability bundles fired from another world into this one to burst across our space and time like multidimensional piñatas. A bundle is also quantum. Quantum means bundle or packet. So the cosmic Tilt-a-Whirl from which bundles are fired may be a model for how quantum effects are manifested on a human scale.
      The idea takes us all the way back to Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who said the deepest logic of our life is a child playing with game pieces on a board beyond this world. The child is divine, and as it plays with the pieces in another reality, events and people are moved on the game board of this world.

Statue of a Franciscan hitting a star-shaped piñata in Acolman, Mexico by Alejandro Linares Garcia, curiously evocative of Einstein's probability bundles.