by Judith Pennington -
In Lewis Carroll’s famous book, Alice in Wonderland, the little girl, Alice, falls asleep and awakens in a new world where she experiences different states of consciousness and bizarre and heroic characters that show her who she is and who she is not.
Reawakening, she knows herself better and (presumably) the best direction for her life—thus finding herself in a new state of awareness in a new reality.
A Journey into the Many Worlds
The plot rings a bell, doesn’t it? And that’s why Lewis Carroll’s story is a classic.
Alice’s journey is like our own lives: we tumble into rabbit holes—“curiouser and curiouser”—and awaken and fall asleep and fall asleep and awaken until one day we stay awake and change our lives and the world for the better.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of many worlds and especially inner worlds, since my work is to guide clients and students into the depths of their subconscious minds to access imagery filled with insights into how to heal and transform their lives, each person, more or less, an Alice.
I am constantly amazed and awed by how easy it is for people to travel across time and space—in the vast infinity of the mind—to get exactly what they need!
Tremendous power and potential rests at the fingertips of the person who realizes it’s all a Wonderland, with the inner landscape projecting outer reality, waking and sleep, in co-creation with others.
Down the Rabbit Hole
As spirit guide Cuba Gooding Jr. said to the newly dead Robin Williams in the movie What Dreams May Come , “The only world is the world in your mind.”
This is also the message of James Twyman’s new book, The Barn Dance: that the Universal Law of Projection, let’s call it, spills over from physical reality into other dimensions that become parallel worlds.
In the book, Twyman revisits the site of a near-fatal accident in which his car swerved dangerously close to the edge of a precipitous cliff above a deep canyon.
Haunted by this brush with death, occurring just after the funeral of his murdered ex-wife, he returns to the cliff three years later and is astonished to find a car identical to his lying at the base of the cliff, rusted over and covered with vines.
It’s a fascinating book filled with revelations best left to you as a reader.
Stepping into the same many-worlds territory as Richard Bach’s novel, One, Twyman’s true story reminds us that life is a creative journey filled with “choice points” that shift us into new directions: in everyday life, certainly, but also into multiple realities existent in parallel worlds.
Twyman wanted to be with his dead wife, so his car went over the cliff and he joined her in a higher reality. But because his overriding impulse was to live and serve, his conscious mind steered out of the skid to continue his life of service.
This begs the question, what are these “choice points” and where can they take us?
Choice Points
When we choose one direction over another, that’s a choice point, and it can take us anywhere—including the New Reality we want to see in our lives and world.
Quantum mechanics tells us that the human mind collapses the quantum wave on a subatomic level to create a new reality by the force of desire, intention and will. Edgar Cayce, the late, great psychic seer, elaborated on this in saying:
“The will of the soul attuned to God may change the circumstances or the environment …in fact, all the forces even in nature itself.” (Reading 3374-1)
These are incredibly important principles. While a look at cable news tells us that the global economy has crashed, joblessness is rising, and climate change is causing Mother Earth to shake and spume herself back into balance, that’s only one reality.
There are an infinite number of other potentialities as I learned during a recent visit to Baton Rouge to see my family in a journey, of sorts, down the rabbit hole.
Heavenly Flight
As if to prove the sameness of past, present and future, my flight to Baton Rouge featured synchronistic meetings with two people whose stories play into all of this, particularly in terms of choice points in our collective future.
On the plane from Newark to Memphis, I sat next to a young man, a three-year meditator of Indian descent, with high degrees of equanimity and compassion.
In talking with him, I learned that his daily meditations keep him cool, calm and collected and that he consciously demonstrates this level-headedness to his colleagues in a major pharmaceutical firm.
People working for the “magic bullet” drug industry gravitate to him to learn how to tap the same reserves of health and healing in themselves.
The people he works with will face a choice point: to continue in the same direction or collapse the quantum wave into a life of meditative self-awareness that will heal and uplift the world.
I met the second young man in the airport waiting room just before we boarded a flight from Memphis to New Orleans.
This meeting was even more interesting, since Jeff Nagy, a doctoral candidate working with the city’s Traumatology Institute, monitors people’s choice points and sees a heartening shift in our collective reality.
Nagy, a resident of New Orleans, interviews people traumatized by Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Oil spill and other natural disasters to find out what helped them survive and thrive.
For children, creative imagination (a form of meditation) appears to be the path to healing. Adults, too, find healing within them. As their hearts break open, they listen inwardly for help and then reach out to others from a deeper level of caring and compassion.
Equally interesting is this: according to Nagy, a new trend is developing. Vast numbers of young people, finding themselves at career choice points, perceive that global finance is too easily rocked by climate change.
Consequently, they are choosing service careers as doctors, nurses, psychotherapists, teachers and philosophers.
In the Swamp
Uplifted by the good news shared by these two people, I arrived in Baton Rouge to a wonderful visit with my two brothers.
One afternoon, I took a walk through their cypress swamp to meditate on this letter to you and stayed open to whatever might come.
It was a rugged trail along a brush-strewn levee bordering a network of sparkling lakes, and near the beginning of the path I encountered a huge tree toppled by Hurricane Gustav.
I could have turned back and walked elsewhere, but chose to move forward.
Stepping up onto the tree trunk, I found my feet snagged in vines and precariously teetered on the rolling log while untangling myself.
Taking a deep breath, I continued my walk. It was a beautiful day, but I found myself thinking about the concept of many worlds rather than what I would say here.
By the end of the path, no compelling ideas for this article had arisen, so I retraced my steps, as in a meditative labyrinth. And sure enough, as I quieted my thoughts, nature spoke to me and inspiration flowed in.
By instinct, I followed a side path leading up to a four-foot-tall mound of earth nearly surrounded by a meandering lake.
Standing on top of the little hill, I enjoyed the view and remembered that there is always higher ground, even in a low-lying swamp, if the mind is quiet and open.
Here was my metaphor for you: while in life we may encounter fire ants, poison ivy and chill winds, in the midst of adversity, if the mind is still we find beauty.
For me that day, beauty appeared in this higher perspective, clumps of tiny starburst wildflowers—white and blue—and, just beyond the beaten path, two curious beavers splashing in a bayou and looking up as if to say, “It’s all good.”
When I again reached the fallen log, I saw a handhold in vines wrapped around a nearby tree and used them to vault over the log with perfect ease.
The Power of Memories
Curiouser and curiouser, the next day my brother spoke of rising above the fray to search for higher ground (we are ever so mind-linked).
This led us to an intriguing conversation about some meditation insights he’d had: most importantly, that ancestral wisdom comes down to us through the millennia in memories held in our cellular DNA and the body’s energy field.
Our ancestors pass away, but the energy of their consciousness lives on in us and we draw on it constantly. In a very real way, and until we change it, we are the people who came before us.
When we concentrate on what was good and beautiful about our families, as well as what is good and beautiful in us and the world, this concentration of consciousness shifts us into a higher vibration that dissipates what is not-love, purifies the inner being and rewires our brains, auric fields and lives to a higher consciousness, which we then pass down to our children and everyone whose lives we touch.
Every Moment is a Choice Point
In this brainstorming session—what we do best—my brother and I realized that whatever we are, energetically, ripples into the future to create our destiny in every moment, meaning that every moment is a choice point.
Research on remote viewing and hypnosis tells us that the energy of who we are echoes back into the past to recondition events which then ripple through memory into the future (our present) to refresh the present and future, so that all of these realities vibrate in harmony, as one.
Talk about many worlds!
Yet this is congruent with the scientific principle of quantum entanglement wherein subatomic particles connected at the beginning of time (and especially in families) interact and share the same experience—forever.
What all of this said to my brother and me is that the mind can free us of the past and free the past as well, so that our choice points and realities are entirely within our conscious control, if this is the level of freedom we desire for self.
The Preponderance of Consciousness
It may seem as if life on Planet Earth is sliding down a slippery slope—or teetering on a fallen log—but the reality is that we are always standing on higher ground. In fact, we are that higher ground.
I mentioned that my visit to Baton Rouge was a trip down a rabbit hole.
Another pleasant surprise came in confirmation of these concepts in a book about mind expansion, Development of the Psychedelic Individual (1974), by Harvard psychologist John Curtis Gowan.
I’d brought the book to Baton Rouge to read, as I’d recently learned that Gowan’s concepts of consciousness inspired the invention of the brain wave biofeedback equipment that I use to teach people to enter deep meditation to find their higher ground.
By no mere coincidence, Gowan agreed with Twyman’s Barn Dance story of parallel realities, writing that, “Whichever body is endowed with the preponderant amount of consciousness at the time” is the part of us that survives and thrives.
Commenting on a passage in the Hindu Bhagavad Gita about how meditation creates in the practitioner the “placidity of mind” that transcends likes and dislikes, brings sorrows to an end and establishes in the intellect the supreme reality, he writes:
“Man’s highest purpose is not to experience the world of the senses as a reactive being, but to design it, thus using his perfected psychedelic (expanded mind) power to become part of the noumenon of the universe, in which he becomes a co-creator and co-designer in partnership with the Spirit of Man which gains individualized consciousness through his perfected life and will.”
There is nothing new in heaven and earth, is there?
It’s just that we awaken and fall asleep, and fall asleep and awaken again, forgetting what we knew before until someone or something reminds us of it.
As Gowan points out, science discovered, Edgar Cayce saw and I experienced in my swamp walk, when the active mind expands into its psychic spirit, we co-creatively climb to a higher reality that helps Spirit lift its own consciousness, through us.
When we collectively choose—body and mind, heart and soul, concentrated in consciousness—to have clean air, water and food, the best health care and education for everyone, and a mentality of peace, justice and reconciliation, we will most certainly get these things.
For my part, I see a OneWorld Spirit arising in every direction. That’s the only world I choose to see.
“There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above water.
I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt. The time for the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word struggle from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
--Hopi elder, Hopi Nation; Oraibi, Arizona
About Author: Judith Pennington, publisher and editor of OneWorld Spirit, is a meditation and consciousness trainer using EEG biofeedback and hypnosis to awaken people to the river of insight and inspiration in the subconscious mind. Visit her primary website, EagleLife.com, to enjoy a free guided meditation, read excerpts from her award-winning book, The Voice of the Soul and explore a full menu of downloadable guided meditations. Visit BrainwaveTraining.com to learn about the art and science of meditation and mind expansion and to attend an event.
