My Grandmother and the Fortune Teller - An exploration of destiny, the human soul, reincarnation, time travel, faith, and other brain candy Gobstoppers
By Greg Evans
ALBANY, NY - My grandmother once went to a fortune teller. She was curious, but like most, skeptical about what she was going to hear and how accurate. The lady even looked like a fortune teller, like a gypsy from another time. The fortune teller told her about four or five things that would occur over the course of her life.
She thought it was interesting but thought little of it after that. One day, one of the fortune teller’s predictions came true. It was like a bell ringing in her mind. She explained that the fortune teller told her she was going to marry a bald salesman.
As it turned out, she did meet and marry a bald salesman. It was after she married him, that she recalled the fortune teller’s visions. Throughout the years, one by one, the other events she mentioned, came true, though I can no longer recall what they were. The fact that the fortune teller’s predictions were coming true shattered her skepticism that such intuition was merely a money-making hoax. “The last one was frightening,” she said.
The fortune teller warned her was that she would die by drowning.
Because of that warning, and the fact that all the other predictions came true, my grandmother never swam anywhere alone. Thankfully, she didn’t drown, and instead died quietly in her sleep in her own home at 101 years old. It was the only prediction by this psychic that didn’t come true. That is a true story by way.
Because of this story I don’t necessarily believe that there is a fate and everyone’s blueprint is predefined, per say. The psychic saw the path her life would have taken had she made specific decisions, but that can be changed. There is no final destination energy. But it is still puzzling, even unsettling that she could see a potential future.
Is everything that happens, supposed to happen, unless you learn about it and then deviate from the plan? Some might argue that that is a blueprint. But I see it more like a choose-your-own-adventure book and that is essentially how it is, with far greater consequences, good and bad.
How does that change the world as you see it? I wish I could remember the other events that occurred in real life that the fortune teller predicted but they have since been blown away in the winds of time.
When it comes to fortune telling stories, we often scoff and think of the cartoon Robin Hood when Robin and Little John are fooling the Sheriff of Nottingham by playing with a fake crystal ball and fireflies. Gypsies telling fortunes may seem farfetched to many people, however, for those who have experienced something they can’t explain after communicating with a fortune teller, time no longer seems as straightforward as we like to believe.
In 1877, on a farm in the rural town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a person by the name of Edgar Cayce was born. From his early childhood, it was evident that Cayce had some sort of psychic abilities. In some eras he could have been accused of being a warlock or wizard like Abramelin The Mage, or Ammon Jerro. As a child he was said to have communicated with his late grandfather and played with spirit children as if they were from the neighborhood. When questioned he explained that they were from the “other side.”
It wasn’t just his ability to seemingly communicate with spirits, there was significantly more depth to his capabilities that gradually would become apparent, for example, he held a unique ability to memorize the pages of a book by using it as a pillow and sleeping with his head on it.
While Cayce was viewed as a local oddity, he claimed all he really wanted to do was use his abilities to help people, particularly other children.
As a young man Edgar Cayce worked as a traveling salesman and was introduced to hypnotism by a traveling hypnotist named Hart. Hart teaches him how to speak normally under hypnosis. Over time, as Cayce grew older he learned how to harness his ability by going into a hypnotic sleep-state that allowed his mind to connect with time and space that encompassed both the past and future as one great picture. Time was no longer broken up into years, decades, millenniums, but it was all connected. While in this state of universal consciousness, people could ask him questions and he could essentially tap into the universe and give them an answer. People would ask questions such as “What is my purpose in the world?”, “How can I get over the illness that I have?”, “What are the secrets of the universe?”, “Who built the pyramids of Giza and what were they used for?”, etc.
These sessions that he held were called, “readings.” Once when someone asked Cayce what to do to become more psychic, he responded, “Become more spiritual.” Cayce was incredibly spiritual and read the Bible in its entirety once a year for every year of his life, beginning at a young age until he died in 1945.
What is interesting is that through the readings of Edgar Cayce, with the help of Plato and his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, we can surmise that Atlantis was actually in Egypt. And not just in Egypt, but The Pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx were probably once a part of the great civilization of Atlantis, made up of islands and channels in the, then, Tethys Sea that have long since disappeared and turned to dust from the ravages of desert conditions.
The founders of Atlantis, Plato said, were half god and half human. With the oral tradition of storytelling, the people being described may have worn masks, like the Aztecs during celebration and this was then interpreted as the people being half god and half person.
The Sphinx is a representation of this cultural inflection. Supposedly, the story of Atlantis was a tale told by an Egyptian priest to an Athenian lawgiver named Solon, who then told it to Plato’s grandfather. Plato’s grandfather relayed it to him. How the story mutated with each telling is obviously unknown, but we can assume it varied from the first teller down to Plato.
People may argue that it isn’t possible that Giza was part of Atlantis because Atlantis was supposedly in the Atlantic Ocean. It is a valid argument, however, if you read through some of Edgar Cayce’s 1,200 readings that references ancient Egypt, you will notice that he says, “The Nile entered into the Atlantic Ocean.” Modern-day satellite imaging technology and on-site archeological studies have indicated that the Nile of present-day had altered its course and once flowed across the Sahara, through Africa and into the Atlantic Ocean. Another question is where the ocean coastline started all of those thousands of years ago?
When you think about it, Giza was in front of the Pillars of Hercules, which is said to be in the Strait of Gibraltar, but in fact, back then, Giza or Atlantis being the Mega metropolis we all imagine, it essentially did stand before the Pillars of Hercules before reaching the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, and because of the changing stories from oral traditions, the distance may have been somewhat misinterpreted, or, Atlantis’ harbor was at the mouth of the Nile ebbing into the Atlantic and thus, the harbor would have only been a short distance from the Pillars of Hercules. This is an extreme hypothesis and hard to believe holds any water but, you never know.
A problem we do face when analyzing Cayce’s readings is that he talks of Atlantis existing over 12,000 years ago before the ice melted when the ocean was 300 feet lower, being somewhere between the Gulf of Mexico and the Strait of Gibraltar in a place called Bimini. Cayce said that Bimini was one of the mountaintops of ancient Atlantis. There are a lot of islands in the Atlantic and Caribbean between the Gulf of Mexico and the European and African coastline. Were they taller mountains? He goes on to talk about how the Atlanteans accidentally destroyed Atlantis with their own advanced technology and the people had to flee. Some went to the Yucatan Peninsula, and others made their way to Egypt and wherever else. Supposedly they brought with them, their technological inventions, their religions, and a transcribed account of their history. Cayce also said that the Atlanteans were aware of the demise of their civilization and hid identical records of their existence in three locations, Egypt, the Yucatan, and Bimini (now under the waves.)
Who is to say that is not exactly what happened? However, as mysterious as that is, it doesn’t align with the behavior of humans and human nature hasn’t changed for probably a million years. Humans forever have told their stories on monuments, walls, pottery and other artwork, eventually in books, sculptures, and mesmerizing architecture, so why were the Atlanteans trying to hide theirs. That doesn’t make the nut.
If they were the most technologically superior civilization that existed and from all accounts, nothing was greater than them, would they really be hiding or building great monuments and keeping records to showoff their prowess as every other culture has?
In this case, I am wondering about Edgar Cayce’s vision, and in no way and I trying to bring him down in anyway, I am just trying to understand. My question isn’t necessarily of the validity of his vision, but maybe the person transcribing his vision was writing down what they were interpreting.
Or, it is possible he was seeing visions in his head and somehow misinterpreted them to his transcriber. It is true that he wasn’t one hundred percent accurate on his predictions for example, he predicted in the 1930s that Los Angeles and San Francisco would be destroyed before New York, which also wasn’t destroyed and there are other predictions that failed to come true but there is no doubt that he has a unique set of skills that proved time and time again to be in the correct ballpark.
But the fact that the destruction of the cities didn’t come true plays back to my grandmother not drowning because she deviated from the plan. Maybe the plan had shown those cities devastated, but specific choices were made that thwarted that. That makes more sense than anything else, in my opinion.
Another aspect of this mental time travel is that he couldn’t remember his predictions when he woke up. It was almost as if he dreamt it all. This has always fascinated me because I have wondered before about the way dreams almost seem like time portals. And then when we wake up, if we are lucky, we can only remember bits of pieces of these elaborate dreams, some of which may have occurred in the past, intertwined with current emotions and experiences that somehow play a roll in our dreams. Again, I am only postulating.
Cayce said about dreams, that the best interpreter of any dream is the dreamer and that the dream’s personal messages require intimate knowledge of the dreamer. There isn’t much meat on that bone to work with, but at the same time, that opens up the door to possibilities, for example, being able to use dreams as time portals. Somehow, maybe through the electrical charges in the brain, it is able to tap into the main circuit board being the universe and universal connectivity of everything. Einstein knew the universe was interconnected. All mass and energy within the universe are interwoven and impact each other through the concept of spacetime warping, better known as “connectedness.”
Dreams are strange occurrences that some people look forward to and for others, they are scary and give people reasons for insomnia. In ancient Rome and Greece, dreams were considered to harbor prophetic powers. Other civilizations believed dreams were what connected the mortal world with that of the gods. Those are both very rational suppositions.
There have been many people interested in dreams who kept popular dream journals, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jack Kerouac, Franz Kafka, Mary Shelley, Myoe (Buddhist monk 1173-1232), Vladimir Nabokov, and Federico Fellini among others. The journals were approached in their own unique way from being realistically descriptive to the more abstract.
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams is probably the most famous book written about dreams. The book, published in 1899, attempted to explain his theory of a dynamic unconscious that he believed operated in every human mind. He was fascinated by the workings of the unconscious and the impactful role it had in the lives of all people. I find it interesting that he isolates the study to human lives, because I had three dogs in my life and all three used to experience incredible dreams that often left them running, twitching, and barking in their unconscious. Freud defined the interpretation of dreams as “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”
One aspect of Freud’s book that is different from the others is that he does analyze his own dreams, but also many dreams of his patients. His personal dreams explore his life going back to his childhood, detailing his marriage to Marhta Bernay, the loss of his father, and the crumbling of the political infrastructure of Vienna with the rise of antisemitism and the nazi party.
Film director, Frederico Fellini’s, The Book of Dreams, is a collection of his dreams and nightmares that spans 30 years from 1960 to 1990. The book was published in his handwriting in its original form and accompanied by colorful illustrations. Many of them are somewhat abstract providing readers with an incredible insight into the filmmaker’s mind and unconscious thought process.
On June 16, 1816, at some time between 2 am and 3 am, 21-year-old Mary Shelley had a dream, or rather nightmare about a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who builds a grotesque monster from dismembered corpses. The creature, who is initially gentle and kind, is soon rejected by its creator and goes in search of friendship. When it can’t find companionship, the monster gradually becomes more and more brutal. As the storm raged outside of the Geneva, Switzerland villa where she was staying with her husband and several friends, the horror story that would become famous began to develop in her mind. But it wasn’t by accident that this happened. Her friend, Lord Byron, suggested earlier in the evening that the friends all compose a ghost story. That night she dreamt of the foundation of a storyline that would one day become famous and the one she said, “haunted my midnight pillow,” on that stormy night in Geneva. Not all dreams are trips through mysterious time portals, as many of you know after having crazy nightmares of falling off curbs and seemingly falling 100 feet to the pavement when you wake up, or being chased by a shark and right before it eats you, you wake up or you are being chased through a hilly field getting shot at by some faceless attacker and while standing over you right about to deliver the coup de grace, you wake up.
So many dreams, if you are aware of them, are trips into the past, visiting familiar places we haven’t seen in decades and faces that we nearly forgot about, faces of people who are no longer with us in the mortal world and when you wake up, you felt as if it was all happening here and now, right before your eyes. So is the power of the mind.
When we travel back in time in our sleep we are tapping into our memory. What is memory? How is it a portal back in time? According to the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, memory is the ongoing process of information retention over time. Because it makes up the very framework through which we make sense of and take action within the present. It is an integral part of human cognition since it allows individuals to recall and draw upon past events to frame their understanding of and behavior within the present. Memory also allows people to make sense of the present when trying to assess the possibilities of what may occur in the future. Going back in time to predict what time has yet to show us. It sounds like a science fiction novel.
It then begins to get a bit more complicated. Memory operates according to a “dual-process,” where more unconscious more routine thought, (known as System 1) interacts with more conscious, more problem-based, thought processes (known as System 2). Then, within these levels are processes “encoding” which is information gathering, “storage,” how we hold onto the information we have gathered, “retrieval and recall,” how to go into your memory and get at that information.
Scientists realized, even back in the 1800s, that going back into the past to recall a memory does not always produce an accurate recollection.
They say that retrieval is subject to error. In Marcel Proust’s seminal work, In Search of Lost Time, he says, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” When you are trying to put together and remember something from the past the memory is reconstructing the past in the form of a memory.Reconstructing is an interesting word, like putting puzzle pieces back together. Flickers of the past that we are trying to recall to create a larger picture. Think of it like pixels on a television screen. We have to be able to harness electricity and an energy in the universe, maybe magnetic fields somehow or the swirling orbits of atoms, that we don’t see, that generates the flashes that we use to reconstruct that memory. There is a story of a 42-year-old surgeon named Tony Cicoria who, in 1994, was struck by lightning one day and then, almost overnight, became an accomplished pianist. Today this is called “sudden savant syndrome.” The orthopedic surgeon had been talking on a pay phone with his mother. There was a bit of rain that was falling, but it wasn’t a thunderstorm. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning shot out of the sky struck him, knocking him backwards. This is where it gets weird. In his words, “I was flying forwards. Bewildered. I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, ‘Oh shit, I’m dead.’ I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman – she had been standing waiting to use the phone right behind me – position herself over my body and gave it CPR. I floated up stairs – my consciousness came with me; I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be okay. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light…an enormous feeling of well-being and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. No emotion associated with these…pure thought, pure ecstasy. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up…there was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, ‘This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had’ – SLAM! I was back.”
After a few weeks of recovery, Dr. Cicoria returned to work but realized he had a few issues with memory recall. He occasionally forgot the names of surgical procedures or rare diseases. Soon he realized that he had a strange and insatiable desire to listen to classical piano music. As a child he had had several piano lessons but it wasn’t anything that really interested him before. He developed a desire to play music and began ordering sheet music. Even though he could barely read music, he quickly taught himself to play, and Chopin was the fuel that drove him. “It (Chopin’s music) had a powerful presence.” Rapidly he progressed as a pianist in a very short time and when attending a musical retreat, he mesmerized the audience with a performance that was considered “supernatural genius – an astounding feat for someone with virtually no musical background who had taught himself to play at forty-two.”
Dr. Cicoria’s story was told by legendary Neurologist Oliver Sacks for PBS who explained that looking at him from a neurological vantage point, I felt his brain must be very different now from what it was before his lightning strike or in the days immediately following this, when neurological tests showed nothing grossly amiss. Changes were presumably occurring in the weeks afterward, when his brain was reorganizing – preparing, as it were, for musicophilia. He then concludes his thoughts with his was a lucky strike, and the music, however it had come, was a blessing, a grace – not to be questioned.
What I found so compelling about this story was not that he was able to become a musical piano-playing savant, but how after being jolted by the extreme electrical charge, he was able to vividly travel back into the past, if only fleeting pictures zipping by, and somewhat into the future (experiencing feelings of peace that his children would be ok).
Dreams seem to play multiple rolls in our lives from tapping into emotions we might be feeling and turning them into nightmares or traveling back in the past like Edgar Cayce seemed to do. Obviously, he was still lying there in front of the transcriber so it is safe to say he saw visions of the past and future as opposed to physically transporting there but would it not be possible for the soul to do just that while the body is in a meditative sleep-mode? What is the human soul?
According to Britannica, the “soul,” in religion and philosophy, is the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being, that which confers individuality and humanity, often considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self. The soul is further defined as that part of the individual which partakes of divinity and often is considered to survive the death of the body.
Just like we, today in present times, have a belief that our soul continues on, after we die, even prehistoric peoples believed there was an aspect of energy distinct from the body. The ancient Egyptians and Chinese believed in a dual soul. The Egyptians believed in ka and ba. Ka, “the breath,” survived death and stayed beside the body. Ba, “the spiritual,” left the mortal world and traveled to the land of the dead.
The Chinese believed in a “sensitive soul” that would dissipate with death into blackness. Then there was the hun, which survives death and lives on as the energy that ancestors then worshipped.
The Jewish people believe in a soul, however, theirs doesn’t leave the body.
Christianity took their belief somewhat from the Greeks where there was a type of dichotomy between the body and soul. Christians believe in the soul’s immortality and that it was created by God and infused into the body at conception. The Greeks though didn’t have just one concept, but instead, it depended on the era and which school of philosophy you are referencing. The Platonists believed the soul was an immaterial and incorporeal substance, resembling the gods, yet part of the mortal world. Then you have Aristotle’s school of thought that explored the soul more like the Hebrews did where it did not separate from the body. The last was the Epicurean belief that the soul was made up of the same substances as the body, therefore, both the body and soul ended at death.
Hinduism also sees the soul or atman as eternal and lives on after the body dies. It will then be reborn into a new body through reincarnation based on one’s actions (or Karma) in the previous life. The goal is to achieve “Moksha,” freeing oneself from the cycle of rebirth when you connect the unity of your atman with the universal consciousness. I find this to be a very well thought out structure, but how does anyone know about Moksha? And if they do, they are holding a whole lot of other secrets about the world and the universe.
Buddhism, unlike other religions, doesn’t believe in an eternal or everlasting soul. However, they sometimes refer to an energy being reborn, but not a soul. Some could argue that the soul is an energy.
Along with different religions, many great thinkers throughout history, it seems, had their opinions on the human soul. We will start with, in my opinion, the most complicated writer to understand, whose work is like calculus in word form, Mr. Immanuel Kant. When I was in college, back in 1998-99, I enrolled in a philosophy course at NYU as an elective. Why I chose to take that course instead of maybe a journalism class is still a mystery to me.
I didn’t even know anybody in the class. One of the other electives I tried taking was Latin. I believe I lasted less than a week in that class. From what I can remember, the entire semester in this philosophy class was supposed to be a study of Immanuel Kant’s book, Critique of Pure Reason.
I still shutter when I think back to those nights in Manhattan trying to read through these tangled paragraphs of a priori and whatever else he was talking about. I honestly did not understand a single sentence of that book. My take on the class was that Kant thought he was smarter than everyone else and I found him to be rather cynical and somewhat of judgmental fellow. My perspective was that if I bumped into him at a party he would be the loud one, talking over everyone and the “know-it-all,” in the room.
So, when I read about Kant’s concept of the soul, I was amused. He believed the soul was defined by reason. The mind must reach the conclusion that the soul exists because such a conclusion was necessary for the development of ethics and religion.
Sure enough, that conclusion rubs me the wrong way. Kant seems to think that the soul is a manmade creation done so to manipulate the population to live as civilized human beings and not blood-thirsty animals.
From my observation at the mall last week, humans don’t care about ethics and religion as a form of embracing these ethics, instead, they are dead set on hedonism. Maybe I am the cynical one and Kant was right all along.
French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, Rene Descartes, commonly referred to as the Father of Modern Philosophy, and known for his popular quip, “I think, therefore I am!” Believed that humans were made up of a combination of the body and the soul, each a distinct substance acting on the other.
William James didn’t believe a soul actually existed but was instead a collection of psychic phenomena.
Philosopher Benedict de Spinoza conceptualized that the body and soul formed two aspects of a single reality.
Pythagoras believed the soul was divine and existed before birth and continues on after death. Maybe his is the most plausible…?
If reincarnation or a soul infused into a body at conception occurs, is the soul the personality, and did it create the behaviors people have or did the brain do all that heavy lifting? If somebody has an accident and they hit their head very hard, their personality can change. Does that mean their soul changes too?
Then you have the question arise, how do parents influence the direction of their child’s life, either good or bad? This is important because it helps with the argument that the soul and body are two separate energies or substances. The soul might be eternal or only around for this one life but it seems in some cases, it brings life but then is just along for the ride.
Would Tiger Woods have become a legendary golfer on his own without his father’s influence? What about a kid that grows up to be a drug dealer like their mother or father? This is where the cyclical rebirth in which karma plays a role becomes tedious for me because if you can’t remember that you made bad decisions before, and you are in a miserable, broken environment with zero positive influence, and you do bad things, how can the next life repair that without being aware of how far off the rails their previous life went?
What becomes of the poor reincarnated soul that was one Adolph Hitler, or does a soul that inhabited a body that participated in such grotesque evil no longer get the opportunity to be reborn? This is where you can vex over such dismal destinations as purgatory, hell, and Camden, New Jersey.
Reincarnation is a hard concept to wrap your mind around. You are always told that you only get one life so live it the best way you can. One story that will definitely mess with you is that of Barbro Karlen. Karlen was born in Sweden in 1954 and from an early age, she felt she was different. Even as a small child, she would have vivid dreams as if she was living in another life. For her, it was so realistic that she would become scared and wake up trembling. Many of her dreams were horrible nightmares that she claimed to experience for as long as she could remember.
At the age of two, Karlen one day told her mother and father that they weren’t her parents and that her name wasn’t Barbro, it was Anne. Her mother attributed the statement to her daughter’s lively memory, but as time passed, Karlen continued to have crazy dreams and felt like she was almost living two separate lives. Eventually, she realized that her real name was Anne Frank, not Barbro Karlen. By the time her daughter turned six, her parents were wondering if maybe she was insane and decided to take her to a psychiatrist.
While at the psychiatrist, Karlen acted normal and didn’t tell him of her thoughts or experiences. The psychiatrist concluded that she was just a regular girl and informed her parents that they didn’t have to worry about anything. Years would go by.
One day in school, she learned about the diary written by Anne Frank, a little girl that died in a concentration camp during World War II. This troubled her and she stopped telling people that she was a girl with the same name.
When she was 10-year-old, her parents took her on a trip throughout Europe which made a stop in Amsterdam. One of the sites the family decided to visit was the house of Anne Frank. Karlen’s parents decided to hail a cab, but she turned to them and said, “We don’t need a cab, I know exactly where we are, and how to get to the house.” This statement confused her parents because they’d never been to Amsterdam before.
“How do you know this? We have never been here before?” they said. Barbro looked at them and said, “Let me show you the way.” The family walked along streets, crossing at intersections and going around corners and then Barbro said, “It’s just around the next corner.”
Sure enough, there was Anne Frank’s house. As you can imagine, the parents were startled by this. As they entered the house, Barbro said, “They have changed the steps outside.”
Once inside the house a heavy, suffocating fear came over her. She became terrified and her hands were even cold and clammy. Her mother grew concerned that she was getting sick and asked her if she wanted to go outside but she said no.
Once in the room, Barbro pointed at the wall and said, “There used to be pictures there.” Her parents looked at her puzzled because there were no evidence of pictures there. Her mother questioned her and she said, “There were once pictures there. I know there were.” Her mother approached one of the workers and asked him if there had once been pictures on the wall. The man said that there once had been pictures on the wall but they removed them because people were stealing them.
It was around this time that her mother finally came to the realization that her daughter was telling the truth. Her father never did accept the fact that his daughter was the reincarnation of Anne Frank.
Whether or not it is a true story, and if reincarnation is something that actually exists in this or some other universe is open to interpretation. I don’t know if I believe in reincarnation or not. I’ll have to let you know. I do think there is a soul and that all living creatures have one, but I don’t understand what it is or its purpose. And even if there is not reason for a soul existing, that is fine too, but I would like to know that it is there, just because.
The History Channel did an episode on reincarnation during Season 5, Episode 7, titled, Shocking Evidence of Reincarnation – Ancient Mysteries. They began the program with the Egyptians, one of the more mysterious ancient civilizations whose artifacts and pyramids we are well familiar with, but who we know so little about. Thousands of years ago different Egyptians had different beliefs on what occurred after the body died. Some believed the soul lived on and journeyed off to some other world, and others believed the soul returned to earth and was reincarnated in a new physical body. They mention a housewife from Colorado who claims to have lived in a foreign land hundreds of years ago. It becomes muddled when people start making farfetched claims about themselves without any way to back it up as Barbro Karlen was able to do.
They touch on the phenomena of déjà vu. It is that strange experience where you are in a location or doing something and you feel as if you have been there before or done that act. Déjà vu can be triggered by a variety of circumstances from being tired, stressed out, feeling edgy, to hearing a familiar sound, or being someone who often remembers their dreams.
It has also been associated with people who travel often and those who watch a lot of films or television. Some scientists suggest it is nothing more than a brain hiccup or glitch where two streams of thought collide.
Others question whether it might be due to some form of past or future time travel whether through dreams, reincarnation, or by some other means. There are so many mysteries when it comes to time. But what makes anything seem possible is the fact that we are able to capture, save, and store the past in memories, in video clips, and in photographs. The fact that you can sit and stare at photographs or video clips of people and homes that no longer exist in the world puzzles me to no end. I travel into the past all the time browsing through the family picture albums that I have. Is it not so bizarre that real life, can be captured in an image that can last forever? If we can visually secure the past on a piece of paper, there must be a way to visually tap into the past, only we haven’t yet been able to figure that part out. Just writing that line gives me déjà vu because I have thought about it a million times throughout my life.
History Channel also talks about the person you decide to, for example, marry or spend the rest of your life with. Was it someone that you knew in a past life? What would the odds be that over the span of eternity, you happen to run into the same person and miraculously become partners? The odds for me that that would happen are not good and I wouldn’t put a wager down on that horse, but it is an interesting concept to play with. The anomaly is when divorce becomes a factor.
Going back to Edgar Cayce again, Cayce did state during one of his readings describing how he was reborn in Nebraska in the year 2,100 AD. As many religions hint at, the soul or energy was reborn at another time. The year was 1936, Cayce by this point was well-known for his abilities and lived in the coastal state of Nebraska in a city “covered” by the sea. Was it just a coastal city, like New York, or Long Beach. Is that what he meant by this, or was he actually living in a city constructed under the waves, maybe in a giant bubble?
In this futuristic time, Cayce also mentioned that scientists took him on a metal flying ship and visited different places where Cayce had once lived and worked including Kentucky, New York, Alabama, Michigan, and Virginia and they even discovered collected records of his work as Edgar Cayce created some 160 years earlier. Cayce and the scientists then returned to Nebraska to study the records. It reminds me of when we discover ancient writings like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Mayan Codex and try to understand how those people thought and what they might have been saying in their writings.
Skeptics argue that Cayce’s readings were faked. Mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner wrote that he believed the verified claims and transcriptions of Cayce’s readings could be traced back to books he had read from authors including Helena Blavatsky, Carl Jung, and others. The readings, Gardner explained, were bits and pieces of what he had read coupled with his imagination.
Whether or not you believe Cayce could see the past and future, dreaming of the past as vividly as we do is, more or less, traveling back into time. When you read some of Plato’s work and Edgar Cayce’s readings, many of them come across as somewhat cryptic and open for interpretation.
I don’t believe that was the author’s intention, but I instead, believe over time ways and forms of communicating change.
It is fascinating that in past, people wondered what the future was going to be like. They would be completely astounded by the way we live and it is so ordinary to us. We wonder what the future is going to be like, a mesmerizing future that to those people will be ordinary and they will wonder what it was like in the past, in today’s world.
They will most likely learn about the large-scale events, the people whose names will live on forever like Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, people from our time who did their part to change the world.
Throughout history, one could argue, that certain people were born at the right time in history for what they were going to bring to the world, such as Einstein, Curie, Gates, Nightingale, Shakespeare, Jesus Christ, even the paleolithic neandertal genius who first discovered how to make fire. Who was that person and what would they have done today if they were alive.
Inc.com published a piece in 2016 titled, Timing Has a Lot More to Do With Success Than You Think. Early in the article they talk about how in the 1970s, Bill Gates and Paul Allen read a cover story in Popular Mechanics and had the foresight to see and believe that in the not-so-distant future computers would be on everybody’s desktop. They were right, of course, and they not only changed the world, they became two of the wealthiest people in the world for a while. What if the ancient person who discovered fire had been alive around the time of Gates and Allen, could that person have been ingenious enough to recognize the importance of the early stages of the internet and computers? They were born in a different time and did different things to change the course of the world. That person who discovered fire and the ability to stay warm and cook for the first time was born at exactly the right time in history.
Inc.com interviewed one of Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, Andy Bechtolsheim, the very first investor in Google and the first employee at Sun Microsystems, as well as the founder of numerous other ventures all of which became successful, and they asked him what the secret was to this success. He responded that timing is one of the most important drivers of success.
It is not just timing of course, it is also recognizing opportunities, taking action, and managing your risk tolerance to allow yourself to take bold steps, but you can’t do it without being in the right place at the right time.
But one thing you can take from this is not a suitcase full of regret, what could I have been, but instead, the realization that it will happen again, and this time you better be ready for it. If you imagined you could have been the next Beatles or Judy Garland, nothing is stopping you from taking action while you are still alive. Maybe you are in the right place at the right time for something else, you just haven’t acted.
There is a statistic published by Microsoft on September 20, 2022, that stated that there are around 137,000 startups created every day. Of that number, more than 120,000 of them will fail. Of the ones that succeed, for a while, even fewer will eventually go public. The right company, at the right time, with the right product, and the right investors all comes down to timing. It might be pushing the limits a bit by saying it “all” comes down to timing, but it does, doesn’t it? Timing impacts us every second of every day we are alive, and potentially every second after we are long gone and our souls are left to travel, reincarnate, or dissipate.
But even then, time wouldn’t stop or go away. Even if the earth was no longer around, incinerated by a swelling sun, time would continue to march on.
The fact that humans were able to come into existence must have been perfect timing in the sense of the perfect cauldron of substances, minerals, vitamins, mysterious energies that miraculously created the human being and not just humans, but life on earth in general and even those creations that aren’t alive, like beautiful sunsets, white sandy beaches adorned with palms and colorful flowers looking out on an endless China blue sea. The marble of earth itself is miraculous in its perfect timing. The earth is believed to have been formed approximately 4.6 billion years ago according to the Geological Survey of Ireland. It was formed by particles colliding in a large cloud of mysterious material and with the help of gravity, pulling together all of these materials, dust and gas, and whatever other pixie dust may have been glittering past, former larger and larger clumps and, voila (vwah-lah), you have the early stages of earth, an odd name choice in my opinion, meaning “the ground.” In Old English, maybe a variation of the Latin equivalent “Terra,” but the only planet in our solar system, in present times, not named after a Roman or Greek deity. But it sort of was, once.
The modern ancients (an oxymoron if there ever was one), called earth Gaia or Gaea (Greek mythological goddess of all life), and Tellus Mater or Terra (Roman mother of earth or mother earth).
What is interesting here is that I believe that Gaia or Gaea, is where Christians eventually came up with the concept of God, and Genesis may be loosely based on Hesiod’s Theogony, which talks about how after the “Chaos,” most likely the Big Bang, Gaia (Earth) was formed and would be the eternal seat of the immortals.
From this Big Bang, eventually Eros (god of love was created), Gaia brought forth her equal, Uranus (Sky or Heaven), to “cover her on every side.” Gaia also bore the Ourea(Mountains), and Pontus (Sea), “without sweet union of love,” (The world according to Hesiod, metaphorically-speaking is essentially a Virgin Birth without a father inseminating the wife, just like the birth of Jesus from Mary). The early writers of the Bible and the Book of Genesis had to have had access to the work of Hesiod, and I bet if you went back in time, it would have been stories passed down orally.
This is how people misinterpreted the name Gaia as being God, but it stuck. Gaia sounds like God when you say it quickly. It is just too similar to be a coincidence and as Joe Kenda, the Homicide Hunter will tell you, there is no such thing as a coincidence.
Shakespeare made an immortal name for himself by taking stories and making them his own with his incredible grasp of language and human nature. The Book of Genesis, as well, was taken from a much earlier story and the writers made it their own with their grasp of language and poetry.
In Ovid’s The Metamorphoses or Transformations, written in Rome in 8 AD, it is interesting to note that in Book 1: Chaos and Creations, Ovid writes, “Before land was and sea –before air and sky arched over all, all Nature was all Chaos. This idea of everything coming out of Chaos echoes Hesiod. Was Hesiod the first to create this idea, that became the foundation of the modern religions of Christianity and Judaism, or did he hear the story from somewhere else? Maybe the Hittites? Hesiod was born in 776 in Cyme, Aeolis (modern-day Turkey), and was actively working between 750 and 650 BC. He was also a contemporary of Homer.
Christianity is said to have taken root as the Abrahamic monotheistic religion we know about today in the 1st century AD. It is safe to say the early writings of what would become the Holy Bible stemmed from the stories made popular by Hesiod some 800 years earlier. There are about 2.38 billion followers of the religion which consists of around 31% of the world’s population. I, myself, am a practicing Christian – a believer in Jesus and God, and I also have no problem knowing that parts of the the religion were founded based on the miraculous stories passed through the ages from one person to the next. That to me provides far more evidence for the validity of a high-power creation. It is not just in the beauty and good that surrounds us, but goes far deeper and farther back.
For Jesus to become immortal, he had to have been born in the perfect time in history, with the right personality, technology (or lack thereof), and all other stars aligning just right, and he was. The fact that Jesus came of age during the tumultuous reign of Tiberius is important. Timing here, played a huge role in Jesus becoming a bigger-than-life figure. I am not saying that to antagonize pious Christians, I am only trying to understand for myself, how timing has played a significant role in the lives of important humans and there is no larger a figure in history than Jesus, in my opinion.
At the age of 55, Tiberius would take over as emperor when Augustus died in 14 AD. Tiberius from the start, felt like an outsider. He felt inferior, lacked self-confidence and charisma which made Augustus so popular.
He had a strained relationship with the senate and always suspected people were plotting against him. He was an older man exhibiting many character flaws that don’t measure up to an emperor and now you have a young charismatic, self-confident, potentially handsome man, named Jesus who is going around telling people he is the Son of God, the true King of the Israelites and to follow him.
He was going so far as to start a new religion that worshipped only one God and abhorred the practices of sacrifice to appease the gods. In the eyes of Tiberius, if ever there was a coup in motion, it was Jesus and his new-found Christian faith which was growing in popularity. Something had to be done about it. And for that Jesus was hammered to a cross.
Was that is universal destiny? Had he gone to a fortune teller back then, and was told, “If you stay on this path you won’t see age 34.” Would he have continued on with his message. I believe he would have. But the course of his life could have deviated had he made one or two different decisions, now knowing the final curtain call.