Quantum Jumping

I don't know why I thought that my ideas about parallel universes were original or wouldn't be used by someone else to make themselves a shitload of money.  The funny part is that Google told me about the website, so it must have been something I wrote in one of my emails or attachments.

It's an old sci-fi concept, really.  I remember being a little kid and seeing the episode of Star Trek called "Mirror Mirror," in which four members of the Enterprise crew (Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura) are transported to a parallel universe in which the Federation is a malevolent, tyrannical empire and Kirk and his counterparts are vicious, brutal members of an equally brutal universe.  In Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode "The Parralel," he explored a story of an astronaut who disappears from the radar only to reappear on a parallel Earth where everything is just a little bit different from his Earth.  In sci-fi literature, parallel universes have been utilized for decades as the basis for multi-volume series.

I don't even want to validate this dude by reprinting his name one more time on the internet in this blog, but he basically agrees with me that there are an infinite number of versions of each of us out there in the multiverse, the product of every potential decision we could have made.  The version of yourself you are currently experiencing is the result of the decisions you've made, but all those other possible decisions were gateways to other universes, and there is where those decisions played out to make you a different person than the person reading this text.  So, if you decided to kiss that girl you were talking to at that party back in 1990, you might have ended up marrying her, and there's a universe containing a you and her that did get married.  Or maybe instead of putting off finishing that novel you've been writing for twenty years, you finished it, published it and became a world-famous author.  This guy agrees with me that there's a universe out there where you did.

This guy believes that these other versions of me are connected to me, available for consultation.  His method supposedly connects one to their more successful doppelgangers, enables transferal of abilities they possess in their universes.  His website offers testimonials about successful practitioners of his methods, people with no artistic skill contacting their parallel Earth Picasso or Hemingway equivalent and becoming internationally recognized artists (with the caveat at the bottom "Please note that these results are not typical").  It sounds awesome, and I'd love it to be true.

But I guess I'm haunted by my theory, that all those other versions of myself are directly connected to me, that all those positions in time and space are available to me because those other people ARE me.  I've always seen the human brain as a quantum engine with which you make your way through time and space with.  Really developed humans can guide themselves through reality with great ease, and I think that all that amounts to is mapping your course through all of those potential realities.  While I have to hand it to this Quantum Jumping guy for getting his theory out into the Combined Consciousness, I think it's wrong to stop at any point with this concept and call it fully baked.  We understand so little that to stop with such an idea at the point where he has kind of contradicts the concept of quantum potential.

Pathetic Nostalgia

I'm finding myself looking back too much lately.  It usually means that I'm not happy with how it's going in the present.  Not an easy place to be.  Finding any good in the world now is a challenge, what with totalitarian rule becoming more likely, IQs dropping off and the concept of a job with benefits becoming a thing of the past.  Struggling in a competitive job market with workers more skilled than myself, in an area where the cost of living is ridiculous thanks to inflated housing prices, food prices and gas over $4 a gallon just wears on the soul.  A wife monitoring my response to this challenge ain't helping either, with one hand seemingly on the button for the ejection seat.

What to do?  I've felt like I've been on the wrong path for a while now, trudging along, failing to achieve any kind of gains in my career since I've met the wife but sustaining myself financially, though barely.  Seems like the only way to get to the next level is to make changes to myself that would fool no one, least of all myself. 

So in this pause, I look back, listening to old songs from the 80's and 70's, a time when the world seemed a less cruel and oppressive place.  ELO, Saga, Hot Chocolate, Black Sabbath, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin--all songs written during times when the psychic pressure of the world allowed some beauty to get through the cracks.  Now the world just seems a relentless drive ahead of itself, towards the part of the construction where the bridge isn't finished yet.  Days like this make me want to just go home, tell the wife that if she's looking for financial stability, she should look elsewhere, rent a van, throw my stuff in it, throw my life into my brother's attic, drive my car to another part of the country and start over again.

But it's a moment that passes as quickly as the old songs in my headphones.  I know I can't give up.  But I can take it a little easier on myself, enjoy an expensive beer and a nice vinyl copy of some old album on the turntable while the wife makes dinner in the kitchen, the dog sleeps on the couch and the cats circle my feet for attention.