TIME AND AGAIN
July, 2008

An English Heritage sign on a building in Kensington, London read: “Jacob von Hogflume, 1864-1909, Inventor of Time Travel, lived here in 2063.”

I would like to have a conversation with him, but I’m afraid that the speed at which I am moving into the future will be inadequate to have a physical encounter in 2063. Of course the sign is a joke perpetrated by Dave Askwith and Alex Normanton in their book, Signs of Life.

And yet it opens up a worm hole into the concept of a parallel universe or alternate reality that co-exists with our own where paradoxes can be explained and the appearances of ghosts and other non-physical manifestations become plausible. History, as well as the sacred writings of many cultures, is replete with accounts of seers and visionaries who see the future with remarkable clarity. We also have an abundance of accounts of persons who say that they have experienced encounters with persons known to have existed in another time.

In his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, the great German author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe describes riding on horseback to the village of Drusenheim and encountering himself riding toward him. The doppelganger was wearing different clothes but it was clearly Goethe. Eight years later, Goethe found himself returning from Drusenheim attired, quite by accident, in the same garb he had seen earlier. He does not say whether he encountered the Goethe that had perceived him eight years earlier.

These juxtapositions of time are not only fascinating, but push the frontiers of rational thought and compel theories that are on the edge of scientific investigation. Yesterday’s fiction becomes today’s theory and tomorrow’s truth. However, when we get right down to it, we are still using the mind as perceiver and knower.
Years ago I learned the principle of “what you perceive is what you conceive, and what you conceive is what you create.” The universe is created out of the mind of God, but is apprehended by the human mind. The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein used the term “pantheistic solipsism”—we create parallel universes by imagining them. Thus Oz or Narnia or Mordor are real.

It is easy to dismiss paranormal studies as fantasy, time displacement as paradoxical, or the appearances of spiritual entities as psychosis, but if Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is correct, the universe, or multiverse, changes just by observing it.

It is my hope that the Academy will continue to collect data, to theorize and postulate, and share in a collegial forum this credible and incredible world that is within us and beyond us.

Dr. Harry L. Serio