Remembering the Future

One of the things discussed in the tenth dimension forum a few times in the last half a year has now become a media darling, embraced by Oprah and mentioned on countless talk shows and newscasts: “The Secret”. What is it about "The Secret" that agrees with Imagining the Tenth Dimension? It’s that the multiverse holds all the different possible future “you”s that could spring from this moment in time onwards.

Saying “this moment in time onwards” gets tricky though: if time is an illusion (an idea agreed upon as much by cosmologists as it is by mystics), and the multiverse of all possible pasts and futures for our universe and all other universes really exists, then what are we talking about here? The version of you that from your current circumstances has the best good fortune and makes the best choices to live the best life possible (whatever you perceive that optimistic phrase to mean) must already exist in the web of connected possible universes that we are navigating through in the fifth and sixth dimension, as we are each drawing our fourth dimensional line.

What’s the difference between good planning/eye of the tiger/good luck/good choices/holding on to your dreams and The Secret? Clearly, if someone is saying to themselves “all good things are going to come my way” while they are drinking themselves to death, the choices for a “best life possible” coming to that person are limited: the available paths will not open up until they stop destroying their health with whatever bad choices they are making. Does repeating “all good things are going to come my way” cause this person to stop hurting themselves? No guarantees there, I’m afraid. But if it does, we are back to good planning/eye of the tiger being the reason for the person’s future success. The secret of The Secret, then, is that it gives us all a way to believe that our future success is a possibility. This is one of the conclusions reached in Imagining the Tenth Dimension as well.

When the Tenth Dimension forum was launched, one of the very first questions asked was from a person who said they understood the animation, but they didn’t see how this knowledge was going to improve their own crappy life. Here’s part of the answer I provided at the time:

That's a tough one to answer, all right. I deal with this topic several times in the book: the idea that attitude affects outcome is certainly relevant, but it is too easy to toss around, and often easy to dismiss because there are so many other factors to consider. The starving child in Africa would not suddenly flourish if only they would let a smile be their umbrella. The person dying of cancer will tell you they did not actively choose a fifth dimensional path that is resulting in their untimely death. And the person killed without warning in an act of senseless violence may have been able to avoid that event if only they had been in a different place at that moment, but since there was no way for them to see the event coming, how could they have chosen the better path other than by dumb luck?

Critics of The Secret dismiss it as more empty-headed new age nonsense, the latest cash grab to take money from unhappy people looking for a quick fix to their unhappy lives. I think there is something at the core of The Secret though, and it is something most of us can remember from our childhood: there are certain things about your future that are easy to predict, and if you continue to believe they are going to happen they eventually will.

The Secret teaches that positive thoughts about the future are what create your own best future, and negative thoughts create bad outcomes. It also teaches that thought expressed with negative prefixes will get misinterpreted: if you think “I don’t want to be poor”, the universe hears that as “I want to be poor”. This must also mean that if you think “I am not a bad person” the universe hears “I am a bad person”, so it appears we must all be careful with how we mentally voice our goals (in fact, this is sometimes raised as a criticism of The Secret, since it seems to make the Universe rather perverse in its deliberate misinterpretation of our wishes).

The simplicity and purity that a child approaches life with is often underlined as being an admirable trait towards which we should all aspire. But what if you happen to be a child in some war-torn or strife-ridden part of the world who is about to die in some violent and uncontrollable way? You are going to be good at predicting the short term future: unfortunately, the prediction you are making is merely “this is where my life ends”. In that situation, The Secret appears to be useless. A child in that situation feels voiceless, and helpless to change the future.

If you live in times of peace, on the other hand, chances are good that you as a child have every confidence that you're going to live forever. This is not just the illusion of immortality imparted from the inability to imagine one's own death that we're talking about here: most children seem to innately believe that they are going to live on forever, at least in some form. They also believe that the part that lives forever has a voice. Julian Jaynes suggests that the voices we human beings have traditionally heard in our heads were what we used to (and sometimes still do) hear as a god or a spirit or a ghost or an explainable disembodied presence... the voices of the ancestors.

So. Perhaps predicting the future successfully can also be thought of as Remembering the Future. The topic of predicting the end of the world comes up regularly in this discussion – perhaps that is the same thing, that there were those in the past who predicted catastrophe, and on some of those other timelines our own consensual reality didn’t share, those people were right. In An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore says (I’m paraphrasing here) “it was as if a man from the future came back and showed me the bad things that were going to happen unless we did something about it”. That, to my way of thinking, aligns perfectly with the worldview of Imagining the Tenth Dimension.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Next: Death?