Something happened to me last week…
It made me feel like I was not in the right universe…You know…maybe a Looking Glass moment. What was her name???? An Alice moment… On the other side of the mirror, the life may be very similar, but not everything is identical!
How did I come by this thought?
Elon Musk stated last year that: There’s a ‘One in Billions’ Chance Reality Is Not a Simulation” [Source] And if you want to study this more deeply just google ‘parallel universe’ or ‘multiverse’. Here’s an interesting article from Space.com
That still does not answer the question… How did I come by this thought? If it happens more than once then there must be a strange shifting of reality that makes one question which universe they exist in!
A friend commented last week that he found that there was an indicator on his dashboard, next to the gas gauge, that pointed to which side of the car you fill up the tank. Right!? You know this? Right???
Yes. I’ve known this for a long time… Just glance at the gas gauge, look for the indicator, and then you know which side of the gas pump to drive up to.
Then, someone else real close to me commented that they knew nothing about what I was talking about! I know we’ve had this conversation in the past, or in some alternate universe, and we’ve proven the fact that we know the indicator helps us choose which side of the pumps we need to be oriented to… For heaven’s sake! We used this last year on a rental car in Houston!
Twice in a week’s time! This tells me that we are not in the same universe! No siree, Bob!
This alternate universe thought took me down the path of considering all the alternate facts that are being bandied about during the political cycle we are living in. The frustration of knowing things from one perspective, and then seeing them from a different time line…all of it makes for a very confusing thought process.
Consider something as simple as a scripture that states a fact that we assume is correct, then let the pundits, theologians and doubters grab hold of it and in the very next moment it appears there are multiple ways to understand the thought! Everything comes under scrutiny. We attempt to read into what those early writers truly meant, or how can we understand since we were not there, so, we constantly twist the words of others to make sense of their words in light of our current times.
But in reality, it’s part and parcel our own fault – language barriers, culture, lack of continuity between thought, speech and hearing, distance between the speaker and the hearer… We seldom communicate effectively with clarity that an entire audience can comprehend.. And it’s obvious that we never hear with clarity. In between these two actions are the way we use the words in our brain!
For a paper I was researching, I looked up the usage of the word “rest”. It showed up hundreds of times, but I needed a sentence that used the word a particular way. “Rest” can be used in many ways – from ceasing work, or the support for something, or defining the remainder of a group. Boolean logic helped me fine tune the search, but who would have guessed all the ways this simple word can be translated!
We have tools that help us communicate better, and exercises to help us hear better, even processes that help us listen with the intent to understand…but it’s difficult to help all the variety of thinkers out there to comprehend the speaker and the intent… This may be the largest challenge any of us face. It’s not remembering things, its working with the scope of our ability to comprehend the words and then respond accordingly.
So. You will face this and you will realize you’ve had this conversation before with the person your are communicating with. They will not remember having had this conversation, and it may be a memory lapse. But, more than likely, they are living in an alternate universe and moving in between the universes from one sentence…to the next…
At least. That’s the way I’ve felt…