premonitions and related speculations

In many sci-fi stories there are multiple 'timelines', inspired in part by the Copenhagen 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics. One of the things I've never understood about this is how it make sense to think of it as historic strands. Every point on every line would be an exploding thicket of new 'lines'. Entanglement would prune it, so to speak? It seems like there must be some way to control that, a way that the 'fates' affect the pruning so that the possibilities for what happens are greatly reduced. Maybe it is as if they touch certain desirable possibilities, making them real, and thereby dragging related things into reality and precluding other possibilities.

How to make sense of the glimpses people occasionally have of things that will happen? By glimpses, I'm not talking about lucky guessing, self-fulfilling prophecy, or extrapolation from previous experience. I mean the miraculous experiences that a lot of people have at least at rare junctions in life.

A few weeks ago, a dream suggested to think about what sound is, and how that is different from light, and what experience of the world would be like if images were transmitted only through sound. Objects exist before you can perceive them. Does an object exist before the light has had time to reach you? I don't think it does, or not exactly. It seems to me that what exists is a schrodinger-cat like superposition of possible states of the object, and which one exists in your reality isn't resolved until the light gets to you. If you could somehow get that information ahead of time, sensing the object directly, faster than the speed of light, that would amount to time travel. Furthermore, it seems to me that you wouldn't be 'traveling' along a science-fiction timeline, you'd be reaching forward or backwards into that magical multiverse of different states, and you wouldn't always make contact with the same state at the same point in time, except to the extent that its state is forced by its connection to your own state.

I realize I mostly don't know what I'm talking about here.

I've long felt that this reaching into time can be destructive, it somehow impoverishes our reality if done too much or in the wrong way. And this is a principle reason we don't get more premonitions than we do. It somehow dries up that magic water I mentioned in the other thread. We need to have the patience and self-control not to try to make things concrete that should be left a bit undefined, and the courage not to avoid things that should be allowed to become concrete.

As I experience it, a premonition of a future event comes through the same mechanism as a 'shared dream'. It is direct contact, immediate, like being in two places at once a little bit. It is empathy, and almost literally putting oneself in another person's shoes. It happens somehow out of time, touching related points in time, and the 'shared' experience always comes with at least some hint of the 'timeless' also, and vice versa. Only in that experience do I feel alive.

I also feel fear, almost a kind of horror at all the terrible things that have been wrought, and at what that seems to say about my own worthiness. Its like opening the door to a big-ass closet full of skeletons.

I think that most people are subconsciously terrified of telepathy, to the extent that they're aware of the possibility at all, and this is a principle reason it isn't more common. I think that facing the fear and becoming more comfortable with oneself is highly worthwhile. Blithely disregarding the fear would be foolish though, it is there for a reason.

Going further on this empathy-as-time-travel thought....It feels to me like humanity is different from the rest of nature somehow, as if our spirits came here from somewhere else and sort of grafted themselves onto an animal that was developed to a suitable condition. I think this 'somewhere else' feeling has to do at least in part with time, that in some sense our 'higher selves' that manipulate nature are grounded in a later stage of development than the nature they are manipulating. I also feel like our spirits are refugees from some colossal spiritual fuck-up, though I don't know if that feeling is real, or if its some kind of misunderstanding or collective lie.

If you're a child and the progeny of a rapist, should you be told? Maybe that's one explanation for why we don't know where we came from.

(I realize there's a scientific story about where we came from, in terms of natural selection, but it only describes one important but relatively superficial part of it in my view.)

Standing in that mental door and I feeling who I am seems to be a matter of sincerity, of not hiding. Yet in that space, I can't tell if I'm lying. It is as if my best angel and my worst demon are there together and I can't tell them apart. I'm simultaneously shameful, and preposterously prideful and vain. Yet only by being comfortable with that can I be present for any deeper intuition.

Some religious people think of 'the fall' as being a matter of overreach, trying to take the place of God. Others think of it as being the opposite, failing to recognize our divine nature. I think it is both. Both dynamics are present, and our confusion about time is part of the reason it seems to be a riddle.