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P.M.H.Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.) P. O. Box 7691 Charlottesville, VA 22906-7691
© 1998 P.M.H.Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.)
Perception determines "truth." We invent our own reality
through our own perceptions and others', and by accepting
what appears to be real as real.
History is filled with stories of people who, in "slipping
between the cracks" of their own consciousness (thus
altering how they perceived the world around them)
uncovered different ways to experience reality. What they
accomplished in doing this made an impact on society. You
and I, all of us, have profited again and again because
this happened.
Chester F. Carlson, for example, inventor of the Xerox
duplication process and founder of the Xerox Corporation,
was a devotee of a certain trance medium who channeled
spirit beings. While attending a series of sessions with
the woman, he eventually "received" the photocopy process
from the spirit beings she contacted. After experimenting
with the technique and making a few adjustments, the
Xerox process was born, along with a multi-billion-dollar
company.
George Washington Carver took the peanut, until then used
as hog food, and the exotic and neglected sweet potato, and
turned them into hundreds of products, including cosmetics,
grease, printer's ink, coffee, and peanut butter. Carver
said he got his answers by walking in the woods at four in
the morning. "Nature is the greatest teacher and I learn
from her best when others are asleep," he said. "In the
still hours before sunrise, God tells me of the plans I am
to fulfill."
How did George Washington Carver communicate with God
during the wee hours of morning? He said it himself -
through the assistance of angels and fairies. And he isn't
the only one to make such a claim. Peter and Eileen Caddy
and their colleague Dorothy Maclean give the same credits
in describing the work they accomplished.
This troupe, along with Caddy's three sons, took up
residence near an inlet to the North Sea at Findhorn,
Scotland, for the purpose of setting up a co-creative
link between themselves and nature intelligences - that is
to say, angels (what they later called "devas") and fairies
("nature spirits"). They became willing workers with
nature's own in an attempt to co-create a garden the likes
of which would defy every known rule of convention and
climate. That was 1962. Today, the Findhorn Gardens
regularly draw people from across the globe to tour the
premises and take classes at Cluny Hill College, classes on
how to communicate with angelic forces and helper spirits
while at the same time enhancing one's own sense of
spirituality.
The people I have mentioned came to perceive reality from a
vantage point other than the norm; then they used what they
gained from that experience to benefit others.
Different ways of experiencing reality happen when
individuals expand their consciousness. Whether accidental
or on purpose, that shift in perception also alters the
meaning and the importance of time and space.
NATIVE RUNNERS EXPAND REALITY
Documented cases of native runners, especially those in
North and South America, illustrate this. In Peter
Nabokov's book Indian Running, an anthropologist by the
name of George Laird described what happened to one runner
who lived in the southwestern part of the United States:
"One morning he left his friends at Cotton Wood Island in
Nevada and said he was going to the mouth of the Gila River
in southern Arizona. He didn't want anyone else along, but
when he was out of sight, the others began tracking him.
Beyond the nearby dunes his stride changed. The tracks
looked as if he had just been staggering along, taking
giant steps, his feet touching the ground at long irregular
intervals, leaving prints that became further and further
apart and lighter and lighter in the sand. When they got to
Fort Yuma they learned that he had arrived at sunrise of the
same day he had left them," thus arriving before he
departed. The runner's altered perception enabled him to
accomplish this feat; he did not allow himself to be bound
by normal perceptions of time and space.
Let's not forget the Australian aborigines. Theirs is the
oldest continually existing culture on Earth (around for at
least 50,000 years), and they maintain an understanding of
time and space - of reality - that deserves our attention.
What they call "dreaming" has little to do with sleep or
dreams which occur during sleep. Dreaming for them is
actually more akin to a type of "flow" where one becomes
whatever is focused on and suddenly knows whatever needs to
be known at the moment. Aborigines sometimes use drugs to
achieve this state but, more often than not, drumming,
chanting, rhythmic movements, and certain other sounds and
rituals suffice. In this state of consciousness
participants seem to "merge with" or "enter into" soil,
rocks, animals, sky, or whatever else they focus on -
including the "Inbetween" (what appears to exist between
time and space, as if through a crack in creation).
These people believe reality consists of two space/time
continua, not one - that which can be experienced during
wake time and that during dream time, with dream time
slightly ahead of its counterpart, yet capable of merging
into all time, of what Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary
Snyder calls "everywhen."
To Australian aborigines, wake time is where learning is
acted out and utilized, but dream time is where learning is
first acquired. For them, dream time is the place where all
possibilities and all memory reside. Stories are told of
aborigines who physically appear and disappear as they slip
back and forth from one continuum to the other, from the
here and now to the alternate universes they believe exist
and the everywhen they know awaits them.
Wise ones, be they monks or shamans or healers or mystics,
are like this. They know life extends beyond the boundaries
of perception. Yet perception itself can be flawed.
Yes, it is a fact that individuals and societies have
always organized the cosmos to fit their own
preferred beliefs. This is what defines the relationship
between heresy (independent thinking) and orthodoxy
(mutually accepted bias). But it is also a fact that the
bizarre can intrude upon one's life so dramatically that
one is forced to shift one's awareness of real versus
unreal.
FICTION CAN FORETELL REALITY
Reality shifts (sometimes called coincidences) take on many
guises. Fiction, for example, sometimes foretells reality.
Were the authors of prophetic works inspired by altered
perceptions of reality?
*The popular movie China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda,
depicted a nuclear facility meltdown. Three weeks after the
movie opened, the same kind of disaster actually happened at
Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
*The 1961 novel Strangers in a Strange Land, written by
Robert A. Heinlein, told the story of a global chief
executive who made decisions based on his wife's advice,
advice she obtained from regular consultations with a
San Francisco astrologer. In 1988, media headlines carried
the story that Nancy Reagan frequently consulted a San
Francisco astrologer, and that the advice she passed along
to her husband Ronald Reagan, then President of the United
States, was based on those consultations.
*The novel Futility, an 1898 creation of Morgan Robertson,
detailed the sinking of an unsinkable ship, the largest
vessel afloat. This imaginary ship, named Titan, collided
with an iceberg during April, resulting in a high loss of
life because the ship carried too few lifeboats. Fourteen
years later, with uncanny similarities, the real ship
Titanic re-created what happened in the novel: The two
ships had almost identical names; both ships were
designated unsinkable; both were touted as the largest
ships at sea; both collided with icebergs in April; both
resulted in many deaths due to a shortage of lifeboats.
Plus, both had strikingly similar floor plans and technical
descriptions.
*Radio broadcaster Paul Harvey'y aired a grim tale of
three shipwrecked sailors and one cabin boy, adrift and
facing starvation, who drew lots to see who would forfeit
his life so the others could survive. The contest was
rigged to make certain the cabin boy, Richard Parker, would
lose.
Evidence used at the subsequent court trial that convicted
all three of murder and cannibalism included a story
written by Edgar Allen Poe. Titled The Narrative of Arthur
Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Poe's tale described three
shipwrecked sailors who rigged a drawing of lots, then
killed and ate their cabin boy companion, Richard Parker.
Poe's story, which so accurately described the drama, every
detail as it actually happened - including the victim's
correct name - was written and published 46 years before
the event happened, even before the participants were born.
The astonishing ability of fiction to accurately foreshadow
what physically occurs happens more often than you might
think. It's almost as if on some level, knowingly or
unknowingly , consistently or occasionally, individuals
can tap into or stumble across other dimensions of reality,
as well as knowledge of a predestined or potential future.
Remarkable reality shifts also occur that cannot be
correlated with any sort of imaginings:
*Brad Steiger, in his book The Reality Game and How to Win
It, tells about Charles W. Ingersoll of Cloquet, Minnesota,
who appeared in a travelogue made and copyrighted by Castle
Films in 1948. Ingersoll could be seen leaning over the rim
of the Grand Canyon taking pictures with his 35mm camera.
Yet Ingersoll did not go to the Grand Canyon in 1948. He
had planned to do so, but his plans changed and his first
trip there was made in 1955, when he took with him a newly
purchased camera manufactured the same year of his trip.
A week after his return, he chanced upon the old travelogue
in a store and bought it, discovering to his utter amazement
that the film clearly showed him there in 1948 - holding a
camera that did not exist until 1955. An investigation
verified the incident and the dates, but no explanation was
ever offered as to how Ingersoll could have appeared in a
film showing him at a site seven years before he got there.
*On October 21, 1987, Claude and Ellen Thorlin were sitting
at breakfast. Ellen heard a disembodied voice ask her to
tune in Channel 4 on their television set. Even though that
channel did not receive broadcast transmissions in their
area, Ellen turned the set on. There she saw the face of
their dear friend and colleague, Friedrich Jergenson, a
well-known Swedish documentary filmmaker and the father of
EVP (electronic voice communication with spirits). Ellen
was shocked; Claude snapped a photo that recorded the image
and the time - 1:22 p.m. That time was 22 minutes into
Jergenson's funeral service that was occurring 420 miles
away, a funeral service the Thorlins had been unable to
attend.
*When T.L. of Fort Worth, Texas, was 21 years old, he
borrowed his parents' car for a drive from Darby,
Montana, to Missoula, to visit friends. Staying later than
expected, he found himself speeding back to Darby between
one and two in the morning. At a place where the road wound
around hills paralleling the river channel, the car
headlights suddenly picked up a herd of 20 to 30 horses
sauntering across the highway. With no time to hit his
brakes and no place to pull off the road, TL hoped to
avoid a collision by driving between the animals. Two large
horses stopped directly in front of his path. The inevitable
seemed his fate until, in the flash of an instant, TL
found himself well beyond the herd, driving as if nothing
unusual had happened. To this day he cannot explain how he
missed hitting the horses. "It was as if I and my car were
'transported' to the other side of the herd," he said.
Each of these "coincidences" involved people as real as you
and me, on days that began as ordinary days.
CHANGING OUR AWARENESS
Are these events merely coincidences? Too much
evidence from too many sources contradicts this idea.
Something else is going on here.
The events described in this article underscored moments
when subjective reality overlaid objective reality to
determine experience. And when that happened, the future
easily surfaced. This peculiarity occurred automatically,
without provocation, and regardless of logic. What we call
time -past, present, future - ceased to be sequential for
these people and took on the aspect of simultaneity.
All of the cases - whether involving aboriginal or
present-day societies, fictional or non-fictional themes -
centered on men and women who encountered alternate
versions of time and space. What occurred changed their
perception of the world. It also changed their awareness of
"future."
_______________________________________________________________________________
P.M.H. Atwater adapted this excerpt from her book, Future
Memory: How Those Who See the Future Shed New Light on the
Working of the Human Mind (Birch Lane Press, New York,
1996) especially for FATE. Due out in paperback Fall
1999 through Hampton Roads Publishing.
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