Dear Friends,
There are No Coincidences,
No Accidents...Everything happens just as it should...
Be Well.
David
Reality Shifts: What Happens to Those Who Slip Between
the Cracks of Time and Space?
P.M.H. Atwater, L.H.D., New Dawn
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 channelled 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 fulfil.” 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 utilised, 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 organised 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 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 nonfictional themes – centred on men and
women who encountered alternate versions of time and space. What occurred
changed their perception of the world.
Adapted from Future Memory: How Those Who See the
Future Shed New Light on the Working of the Human Mind By P.M.H. Atwater (Birch
Lane Press, New York, 1996).
About the Author
PMH ATWATER, L.H.D., is one of the original
researchers in the field of near-death studies, having begun her work in 1978.
She has published numerous books on her findings. Atwater also conducted the
first major study of the so-called Indigo children, published as Beyond the
Indigo Children in 2005. On divination, she authored three books on Goddess
Runes. For a complete biographical listing and information on how to obtain her
books, DVDs and lectures, please visit her website www.pmhatwater.com.
This article is a feature of New Dawn magazine. To
become a subscriber, please visit New Dawn.
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