Thank you for yet another amazing in-depth essay! Your thinking is 100% aligned with my own, which scares me. (HA HA!)
Some quick, random, disorderly, off-the-cuff thoughts...
* An interesting quote from Timothy Morton, who's a big influence on James Madden: "It is extremely healthy to know not only that there are monstrous beings, but that there are beings that are not purely thinkable, whose being is not directly correlated with whatever thinking is." (from "Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World")
* Re. "remembering the future:" when I first saw the woman whom I would eventually marry, I blurted out "Oh good!" I **remembered her**! My immediate thought was "Great, she's finally here!" We've now been happily married for over forty years.
* By coincidence, I was just reading the book "The Art of the Wandjina" by I.M. Crawford. While visiting a site in the Australian outback in which there were rock paintings of Wandjinas, Crawford's Aboriginal guide decided to touch up and repair one of them, after which he proudly addressed the painting as if it were alive: "I made you very good now—I don't know how I did it. Very good!... You must be very glad, because I made your eyes like new. That eye, you know, like this my eye... I made them new for you people. My eye has life, and your eye has life too, because I made it new."
* During a "fungus-enabled" visit with the "teaching entities," I asked them about UFOs, and they suggested I study Tibetan Buddhist Cosmology. I was unfamiliar with the topic, and had no interest in it at the time, but as I learned about it I began to see their point: there are many realms and levels of beings. If a being wants to interact with one in a different realm, it has to manifest in such a way as to make itself perceptible. And so on...
I’m reminded of the story of the blind men and the elephant. This is usually treated as a parable of different teachers or religions having only fragments of a larger truth, but what if it’s about reality itself? The Wikipedia entry quotes Rumi as saying:
“The eye of the Sea is one thing and the foam another. Let the foam go, and gaze with the eye of the Sea. Day and night foam-flecks are flung from the sea: oh amazing! You behold the foam but not the Sea. We are like boats dashing together; our eyes are darkened, yet we are in clear water.”
The Flatland framework hits so well with what I've been documenting for a couple years now and calling "Liminals". I keep arriving at the same conclusion: they feel like "3D shadows" of higher-dimensional entities.
When you describe the sphere passing through Flatland appearing to materialize and vanish, that's exactly what I'm tracking. These objects appear during precise transitional windows - moving from lucid dreams or projections back to waking consciousness - performing impossible actions that violate our physics while feeling completely coherent within their own framework.
The crystallizing memory pattern matches my experience too. Your synthesis of the Long Self with hyperobject theory gives me language for what I've been circling: there are no discrete events in my timeline but rather ongoing multi-dimensional intersections I can only document sequentially.
We're learning to see past our perceptual interface, perhaps the phenomenon isn't hiding.
Another great article. I’m really enjoying your work, you’re taking the deep dives but keeping your head on straight.
I don’t think the future self necessarily warns or sends messages to you. If that were the case, our present selves would also be sending messages to our past selves, and we don’t really experience that. Also it creates a paradox. If future me warned me to not slip on the banana peel, because I will break my leg, and I heed the warnings, then nothing happened to warn me about in the first place.
I believe that precognition is an extraordinary spike in savant-like pattern recognition and probability processing, to produce very accurate forecasts about the future based on very little evidence or data.
We exist in a system, and there’s repetition in systems. If you pay attention there are patterns everywhere, and they absolutely point to things. I just don’t think most people take the time to notice or calibrate themselves.
I truly am enjoying your work! For many many years I have helped folks integrate these experiences and normalized them. Along with being able to see the future. It has been natural for me to always see the future for myself and others. I saw the pandemic 15 years ago. This current administration many years ago, the birth and death of loved one. It is natural. Consciousness can and does expand and it is not localized. It is so refreshing reading your words how other realities are filtered through human consciousness - as this can take many years or decades to make sense of. Which I absolutely love helping folks integrate and and normalize these very natural experiences that most of our well-ancestors spoke about. Please keep writing!
Meredith, this wonderful piece landed with exquisite timing for me! I’ve been sitting with elders and indigenous healers this week, as I have many times over the years, listening to teachings about time, presence, and survival that don’t move linearly — and then last night, almost improbably, I opened Dan Brown’s latest novel (gifted to me by a Lakota/Dakota/Nakota elder sister) to a chapter where the protagonist is presenting Dean Radin’s findings on presentiment.
What moved me wasn’t just the overlap of names or ideas, but the convergence across domains that don’t usually speak to one another so directly: indigenous cosmologies, noetic science, contemporary fiction, and lived relational experience, all pointing toward time as something we participate in, not simply pass through. And so your framing of “memories from the future” brilliantly articulated something I’ve been feeling and experiencing for decades, that recognition often arrives as resonance before it arrives as explanation. Thank you for holding this with such rigour and care, and for inviting dialogue rather than closure!
Hello, Helen 🌞 could you please tell me which Dan Brown title that is? I have loved them all before Secret of Secrets. When I started that, I got physically ill toward the beginning when he was describing the psychopath who loved to kill. Maybe I should have skipped lightly through and past that if the rest was great . . . Thanks, deb
Oh, what about the heptapods in Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" (the basis for the movie "Arrival"), who had "developed a simultaneous mode of awareness?" The story's narrator, Dr. Louise Banks, immerses herself in the alien language, only to find that it's changed the way she perceives reality: "After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn't arrive in order or land contiguously... occasionally... I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century-long ember burning outside time. I perceive—during those glimpses—that entire epoch as a simultaneity." Perhaps this can be tied in to the notion of the "block universe," or the writings of physicist Julian Barbour?
My favorite bit was when the military came for her, in the course of the conversation, she re-translated a sentence from a language I don't remember. The word was "war", which she then proposed that what it actually meant was, "a need for more camels " ☀️
I do remember that the third time I watched it I was so disappointed that they had cut out one of the most beautiful last scenes in which she passes on to the Chinese man a message from his deceased wife . . .
It's no coincidence that the Trickster is often exiled and/or imprisoned in many mythologies, otherwise they'd be mucking up all the progress! No need for a middleman.
You are brilliant. Truly. Such an articulate summation of all the best current research, synthesized and applied to the vexing UFO conundrum. Thank you.
This is a rich and fascinating piece of writing, thank you. My own 'liminal/contact' experiences have some overlap, but also some differences, with what you are describing. Plenty of food for thought as a result, as well as the pointers to further reading.
One problem with the "dimensional" analogy is that, by making time a single dimension, it removes choice. It represents time as static: for each point along its dimension, it is what it is, from the beginning of time, to the end of time.
An even more complex analogy is a 5-dimensional model: three of space/matter, one of time, and one of choice. It spreads out past and future into innumerable possible pasts and futures, connected by choices. It could be "gated," with passage from one timeline to another only at key points, each representing a "decision point."
Like Dickens' A Christmas Carol, where old Scrooge gets to see his fate played out, and "repent his ways."
It is probably even more complex, a 6-dimensional model, where multiple decisions can be made concurrently, exploring different paths: a decision-point where I become, say, an artist, or a musician, or an engineer, and a wastrel, all taken concurrently in different "timelines" where I become each of these things, with entirely different decision-trees branching out from each path, each branch interacting with other beings' timelines in a combinatorial dimensionality.
The idea of the Long Self is so utterly fascinating and exciting. For whatever reason, this makes perfect sense to me and seems entirely plausible:
"[Her] four-dimensional consciousness was intersecting with the phenomenon at multiple points along her timeline. What appeared as separate encounters might be a single four-dimensional event that her three-dimensional awareness could only process in sequential slices."
What leaves me a little nonplussed, however, is the indication that the other beings were surprised by humans' perceptual or cognitive idiosyncrasies. I guess I was inclined to assume that these beings know more about what's going on than we do. Even if their own consciousness is not stuck in a lower-dimensional groove the ways ours is, wouldn't they have seen enough by now to not be confused by our confusion?
"The beings appeared genuinely puzzled by [her] questions about 'when.'"
Surely this wasn't their first rodeo. One wonders what meaning "first rodeo" could even have for them given they seem to have a more panoramic or instantaneous view of reality's unfolding. How could they not be aware of how humans would tend to process the encounter, especially in the presence of telepathic contact? How could they not have developed protocols for attempting to respond to us in the midst of our confusion?
It would be one thing if they simply struggled to convey a 4D understanding to a 3D human consciousness. But if the other beings were themselves confused by the differences in our perception even this late into the game (haven't Star People been here for ages?), it seems to me that's really something. Are they looking through a glass darkly just as we are, if from the other side? Are they as fascinated and uncertain about us as we are about them? Or was the sense that they were confused only a reflection of the human experiencer's confusion--psychological projection, but with a twist of fairy glamour?
Or is it still early days for them too? Even though from our perspective contact has been happening for decades or millennia, and even though our first sense of the 4D is as a hyperreality that the 3D can only access in successive slices, this wouldn't necessarily imply that there is no development or "hypertemporality" in the 4D space. Is it possible they've still just barely met us for the first time in the 4D, such that any given experiencer could almost be their "first time," even though it seems that they've already been here a long time by now?
I obviously don't know. I skipped down here to leave this comment after reading only half the essay because I found that detail of their puzzlement so puzzling. But I'll go back and read the rest and see what other thoughts it stirs up.
That is an important and obvious question! My feeling is that those particular beings are seeing darkly in their own way. I also feel that we are more than 4D…. There are parallel entities that don’t understand what love is, but we do.
1.) "And they reveal something terrifying: the maze knew you were coming because your future self is already at the center, looking back."
I am a lifelong experiencer and I don't see this at all. It sounds good as a hypothesis, but to present it as something definite about the contact experience? Not so much. It doesn't reflect my experiences. I don't even know why that would be terrifying if it were true.
2.) It sure did take you a long time to admit that Mack's "sessions" were hypnosis sessions. Could that be because, contrary to the alien abduction cottage industry built on it and the sci fi cliche that accompanies it, hypnosis is a proven terrible tool for memory retrieval? Excellent for behavior modification and fantasy world-building. Not so great for actually telling what's what in the past. And that's just for normal memories. Now add "missing time" with unprovable beings in unprovable events and you've got a Mad Lib-style fill-in-the-blank game happening between hypnotist and hypnotized. If your statement, "The way experiencers’ memories behaved opposite to how false memories typically behave: crystallizing and becoming more detailed over time rather than fading and fragmenting," is true... well... perhaps it's no secret why. They're being created on the fly through hypnosis.
Now, I have heard that Mack came to realize the problem with hypnosis--which, frankly, with his credentials, he already should have--and was looking for alternative ways to get at memories. But he never got there. And so, unfortunately, all of those narratives are highly, highly suspect. The veracity of them is for his experiencer subjects, real and alleged, to sort out for themselves. But as evidence for the rest of us to latch onto? Sorry, no.
If we're going to put old thinking to rest let's begin with what's already dead: hypnosis.
Thank you for yet another amazing in-depth essay! Your thinking is 100% aligned with my own, which scares me. (HA HA!)
Some quick, random, disorderly, off-the-cuff thoughts...
* An interesting quote from Timothy Morton, who's a big influence on James Madden: "It is extremely healthy to know not only that there are monstrous beings, but that there are beings that are not purely thinkable, whose being is not directly correlated with whatever thinking is." (from "Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World")
* Re. "remembering the future:" when I first saw the woman whom I would eventually marry, I blurted out "Oh good!" I **remembered her**! My immediate thought was "Great, she's finally here!" We've now been happily married for over forty years.
* By coincidence, I was just reading the book "The Art of the Wandjina" by I.M. Crawford. While visiting a site in the Australian outback in which there were rock paintings of Wandjinas, Crawford's Aboriginal guide decided to touch up and repair one of them, after which he proudly addressed the painting as if it were alive: "I made you very good now—I don't know how I did it. Very good!... You must be very glad, because I made your eyes like new. That eye, you know, like this my eye... I made them new for you people. My eye has life, and your eye has life too, because I made it new."
* During a "fungus-enabled" visit with the "teaching entities," I asked them about UFOs, and they suggested I study Tibetan Buddhist Cosmology. I was unfamiliar with the topic, and had no interest in it at the time, but as I learned about it I began to see their point: there are many realms and levels of beings. If a being wants to interact with one in a different realm, it has to manifest in such a way as to make itself perceptible. And so on...
Again, thanks! Please keep 'em coming!
I’m reminded of the story of the blind men and the elephant. This is usually treated as a parable of different teachers or religions having only fragments of a larger truth, but what if it’s about reality itself? The Wikipedia entry quotes Rumi as saying:
“The eye of the Sea is one thing and the foam another. Let the foam go, and gaze with the eye of the Sea. Day and night foam-flecks are flung from the sea: oh amazing! You behold the foam but not the Sea. We are like boats dashing together; our eyes are darkened, yet we are in clear water.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
The Flatland framework hits so well with what I've been documenting for a couple years now and calling "Liminals". I keep arriving at the same conclusion: they feel like "3D shadows" of higher-dimensional entities.
When you describe the sphere passing through Flatland appearing to materialize and vanish, that's exactly what I'm tracking. These objects appear during precise transitional windows - moving from lucid dreams or projections back to waking consciousness - performing impossible actions that violate our physics while feeling completely coherent within their own framework.
The crystallizing memory pattern matches my experience too. Your synthesis of the Long Self with hyperobject theory gives me language for what I've been circling: there are no discrete events in my timeline but rather ongoing multi-dimensional intersections I can only document sequentially.
We're learning to see past our perceptual interface, perhaps the phenomenon isn't hiding.
Another great article. I’m really enjoying your work, you’re taking the deep dives but keeping your head on straight.
I don’t think the future self necessarily warns or sends messages to you. If that were the case, our present selves would also be sending messages to our past selves, and we don’t really experience that. Also it creates a paradox. If future me warned me to not slip on the banana peel, because I will break my leg, and I heed the warnings, then nothing happened to warn me about in the first place.
I believe that precognition is an extraordinary spike in savant-like pattern recognition and probability processing, to produce very accurate forecasts about the future based on very little evidence or data.
We exist in a system, and there’s repetition in systems. If you pay attention there are patterns everywhere, and they absolutely point to things. I just don’t think most people take the time to notice or calibrate themselves.
I truly am enjoying your work! For many many years I have helped folks integrate these experiences and normalized them. Along with being able to see the future. It has been natural for me to always see the future for myself and others. I saw the pandemic 15 years ago. This current administration many years ago, the birth and death of loved one. It is natural. Consciousness can and does expand and it is not localized. It is so refreshing reading your words how other realities are filtered through human consciousness - as this can take many years or decades to make sense of. Which I absolutely love helping folks integrate and and normalize these very natural experiences that most of our well-ancestors spoke about. Please keep writing!
Meredith, this wonderful piece landed with exquisite timing for me! I’ve been sitting with elders and indigenous healers this week, as I have many times over the years, listening to teachings about time, presence, and survival that don’t move linearly — and then last night, almost improbably, I opened Dan Brown’s latest novel (gifted to me by a Lakota/Dakota/Nakota elder sister) to a chapter where the protagonist is presenting Dean Radin’s findings on presentiment.
What moved me wasn’t just the overlap of names or ideas, but the convergence across domains that don’t usually speak to one another so directly: indigenous cosmologies, noetic science, contemporary fiction, and lived relational experience, all pointing toward time as something we participate in, not simply pass through. And so your framing of “memories from the future” brilliantly articulated something I’ve been feeling and experiencing for decades, that recognition often arrives as resonance before it arrives as explanation. Thank you for holding this with such rigour and care, and for inviting dialogue rather than closure!
Hello, Helen 🌞 could you please tell me which Dan Brown title that is? I have loved them all before Secret of Secrets. When I started that, I got physically ill toward the beginning when he was describing the psychopath who loved to kill. Maybe I should have skipped lightly through and past that if the rest was great . . . Thanks, deb
Oh, what about the heptapods in Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" (the basis for the movie "Arrival"), who had "developed a simultaneous mode of awareness?" The story's narrator, Dr. Louise Banks, immerses herself in the alien language, only to find that it's changed the way she perceives reality: "After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn't arrive in order or land contiguously... occasionally... I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century-long ember burning outside time. I perceive—during those glimpses—that entire epoch as a simultaneity." Perhaps this can be tied in to the notion of the "block universe," or the writings of physicist Julian Barbour?
I Loved Arrival!! Thank you for the book title!
My favorite bit was when the military came for her, in the course of the conversation, she re-translated a sentence from a language I don't remember. The word was "war", which she then proposed that what it actually meant was, "a need for more camels " ☀️
Louise Banks: "before you commit to him, ask him the Sanskrit word for 'war' and its translation."
Later...
Colonel Weber: "'Gavisti (गविष्टि).' He says it means an argument. What do you say it means?"
Louise Banks: "A desire for more cows."
I loved Arrival too! Beautiful and heart-rending. I always tear up at the "who is this child?" scene.
Oh, that's not coming back to me 😢
I do remember that the third time I watched it I was so disappointed that they had cut out one of the most beautiful last scenes in which she passes on to the Chinese man a message from his deceased wife . . .
Yes, an important turning point in the movie! ""In war, there are no winners, only widows."
It's no coincidence that the Trickster is often exiled and/or imprisoned in many mythologies, otherwise they'd be mucking up all the progress! No need for a middleman.
Brava!!!
and thank you for pulling all this together
You're a much better writer than Bernard Kastrup, by the way.
You are brilliant. Truly. Such an articulate summation of all the best current research, synthesized and applied to the vexing UFO conundrum. Thank you.
This is a rich and fascinating piece of writing, thank you. My own 'liminal/contact' experiences have some overlap, but also some differences, with what you are describing. Plenty of food for thought as a result, as well as the pointers to further reading.
Again, wonderful post!
One problem with the "dimensional" analogy is that, by making time a single dimension, it removes choice. It represents time as static: for each point along its dimension, it is what it is, from the beginning of time, to the end of time.
An even more complex analogy is a 5-dimensional model: three of space/matter, one of time, and one of choice. It spreads out past and future into innumerable possible pasts and futures, connected by choices. It could be "gated," with passage from one timeline to another only at key points, each representing a "decision point."
Like Dickens' A Christmas Carol, where old Scrooge gets to see his fate played out, and "repent his ways."
It is probably even more complex, a 6-dimensional model, where multiple decisions can be made concurrently, exploring different paths: a decision-point where I become, say, an artist, or a musician, or an engineer, and a wastrel, all taken concurrently in different "timelines" where I become each of these things, with entirely different decision-trees branching out from each path, each branch interacting with other beings' timelines in a combinatorial dimensionality.
Perhaps the Long Self is similar to what Dzogchen Rinpoche is referring to as our "stored consciouness" in his book, Meditation for Modern Madness.
The idea of the Long Self is so utterly fascinating and exciting. For whatever reason, this makes perfect sense to me and seems entirely plausible:
"[Her] four-dimensional consciousness was intersecting with the phenomenon at multiple points along her timeline. What appeared as separate encounters might be a single four-dimensional event that her three-dimensional awareness could only process in sequential slices."
What leaves me a little nonplussed, however, is the indication that the other beings were surprised by humans' perceptual or cognitive idiosyncrasies. I guess I was inclined to assume that these beings know more about what's going on than we do. Even if their own consciousness is not stuck in a lower-dimensional groove the ways ours is, wouldn't they have seen enough by now to not be confused by our confusion?
"The beings appeared genuinely puzzled by [her] questions about 'when.'"
Surely this wasn't their first rodeo. One wonders what meaning "first rodeo" could even have for them given they seem to have a more panoramic or instantaneous view of reality's unfolding. How could they not be aware of how humans would tend to process the encounter, especially in the presence of telepathic contact? How could they not have developed protocols for attempting to respond to us in the midst of our confusion?
It would be one thing if they simply struggled to convey a 4D understanding to a 3D human consciousness. But if the other beings were themselves confused by the differences in our perception even this late into the game (haven't Star People been here for ages?), it seems to me that's really something. Are they looking through a glass darkly just as we are, if from the other side? Are they as fascinated and uncertain about us as we are about them? Or was the sense that they were confused only a reflection of the human experiencer's confusion--psychological projection, but with a twist of fairy glamour?
Or is it still early days for them too? Even though from our perspective contact has been happening for decades or millennia, and even though our first sense of the 4D is as a hyperreality that the 3D can only access in successive slices, this wouldn't necessarily imply that there is no development or "hypertemporality" in the 4D space. Is it possible they've still just barely met us for the first time in the 4D, such that any given experiencer could almost be their "first time," even though it seems that they've already been here a long time by now?
I obviously don't know. I skipped down here to leave this comment after reading only half the essay because I found that detail of their puzzlement so puzzling. But I'll go back and read the rest and see what other thoughts it stirs up.
That is an important and obvious question! My feeling is that those particular beings are seeing darkly in their own way. I also feel that we are more than 4D…. There are parallel entities that don’t understand what love is, but we do.
Well, maybe one day we'll be able to know if they feel love . . . 😊
I have two issues with this:
1.) "And they reveal something terrifying: the maze knew you were coming because your future self is already at the center, looking back."
I am a lifelong experiencer and I don't see this at all. It sounds good as a hypothesis, but to present it as something definite about the contact experience? Not so much. It doesn't reflect my experiences. I don't even know why that would be terrifying if it were true.
2.) It sure did take you a long time to admit that Mack's "sessions" were hypnosis sessions. Could that be because, contrary to the alien abduction cottage industry built on it and the sci fi cliche that accompanies it, hypnosis is a proven terrible tool for memory retrieval? Excellent for behavior modification and fantasy world-building. Not so great for actually telling what's what in the past. And that's just for normal memories. Now add "missing time" with unprovable beings in unprovable events and you've got a Mad Lib-style fill-in-the-blank game happening between hypnotist and hypnotized. If your statement, "The way experiencers’ memories behaved opposite to how false memories typically behave: crystallizing and becoming more detailed over time rather than fading and fragmenting," is true... well... perhaps it's no secret why. They're being created on the fly through hypnosis.
Now, I have heard that Mack came to realize the problem with hypnosis--which, frankly, with his credentials, he already should have--and was looking for alternative ways to get at memories. But he never got there. And so, unfortunately, all of those narratives are highly, highly suspect. The veracity of them is for his experiencer subjects, real and alleged, to sort out for themselves. But as evidence for the rest of us to latch onto? Sorry, no.
If we're going to put old thinking to rest let's begin with what's already dead: hypnosis.