By Anna Von Reitz
There are always alternative timelines, but no alternative realities in our experience.
Let me explain.
Alternative timelines arise because at any time we could make other choices.
When we make other choices the reality in which we live must more or less seamlessly move in the direction we choose. This process of choosing and creating a connection that carries us forward to the next stopping point is what creates a timeline in the first place.
If life is a drawing, a timeline is a pencil stroke.
Alternative timelines are better called "potential" timelines, but people have already been calling them "alternative timelines" so we might as well try to avoid more confusion.
Reality, however, is unique in our experience of it, with only one moment called "now" available and only one drawing for each of us, together with all its pencil strokes.
Or, you can think of it in terms of the stopping points, between the pencil strokes, those moments that we collectively call "now".
Picture yourself in a room with many doors opening into and out of it. That single room is where you live and breathe and have your experience of life. That's the single moment called "now".
There are many, many, many moments called "now" albeit, they are experienced only one at a time.
So to our perception, there is only one now and it is unique. The timelines that we use as avenues between each "old now" to each "new now", are the connections between the dots, dots on a purely experiential timeline that are represented by all these separate rooms we create as we shift our attention and intention and flow onward, ever onward, to new experiences.
You can choose door number one, door number two, door number three..... whatever door you like, and you will emerge in another room with doors opening into and out of it. This new room becomes "now" in your experience.
How you got there, the timeline you created as a result of choosing which door to enter or exit, is unique, but the other doors still exist, and the pathways that were not chosen, like Robert Frost's untaken road through the forest, remain in what we call the past.
Ah, but, we have miles to go and promises to keep and life, like an impertinent newsreel. what appears to be "time" keeps us moving perceptually onward.
We aren't allowed to stop in our favorite or most pleasant "now" and are instead obliged to keep moving and choosing--- and experiencing the results.
Instead of thinking about all this as a straight line with a beginning, middle, and end, it's really more profitable to think about our experience as a material being molded, like Silly Putty, and the timelines as various processes you can choose to render different results.
Now we get to the point of considering our infinite possibilities and likely probabilities that create our timelines and our experience of our singular and unique reality.
Some timelines are more likely than others, but all possibilities exist.
We are less likely to turn into a Fairy Princess or Ax Murderer than we are to be a Junior Accountant at a stodgy insurance company -- those other potentialities nonetheless exist, and with the right juxtaposition of unlikely choices, yes, you can wind up in Shambala, or staring at the gleaming bloodied edge of a axehead.
As should now be apparent, all "realities" are the result of alternatives -- choices you made, and apart from your memory of all your various "now" moments and timelines, they don't exist.
Time doesn't exist.
Only your unique memory of your own unique choices and your resulting perceptions exists.
This uniqueness is what makes you "you" instead of someone else. It's the sum total of the learning of each life experience.
As you experience each "now" and track each timeline that brought you to that "now" experience, it all appears to make perfect sense: point A leads to point B and point B leads to point C....
You are born, live as an infant, find your legs, go to school (or not) and the overall experience of life falls into a pattern like the trajectory of a rocket.
Or the building of a fractal structure. Think of a Chambered Nautilus shell. Each new addition to the shell is an exact proportional enlargement of the preceding "chamber". Experientially, the creature creating the shell is always building, building, building.... but the experience of its ever-enlarging shell is exactly the same.
It's only when you view all of this from outside the framework of "time" that the pattern and the beauty of it becomes apparent.
The action-reaction assumptions we all have about life, the timelines we remember and set in the cement of our memory, fade away -- not that we forget, but we reinterpret our experience.
The famous "becoming one with the Universe" happens outside the context of time and linear experience, when we stop being tricked by the illusion of "movement" through "time" and realize that we are the substance being molded and our experience of life is simply the remembered consequence of making choices.
So, your unique and singular reality may be that you are an 80 year-old man with a broken leg in a rehabilitation center in New Jersey, whose 79 year-old wife visits every day and brings you homemade chicken soup, while your 55 year-old son --who faithfully transports his Mother to the care facility each day --avoids looking you in the eye and fidgets nervously in the doorway of your room.
If you hadn't been angry and tried to kick at the neighbor's cat to shoo it away, you wouldn't have slipped and broken your leg.
If you hadn't gone to a Christmas Party and met Imogene Lancaster, you either wouldn't have a wife, or she'd be a different wife with a different son and a different chicken soup recipe.
So the trail of timelines and choices is apparent and appears to be orderly and logical, laid down in the past, immutable, unchangeable, fixed as the North Star....
And yet, as you now see, you and your life are an insurmountable mystery of infinite potential, infinite choices, infinite timelines --all mutable as the memory of water that equally records the experiences of our planet and the cells of your left pinky finger.
Why not make other choices?
A man said to me, "I am always sacrificing myself for others."
I said to him, "Why?"
It's because he considered himself better and stronger than others and more able to bear the stress and loss involved in sacrificing himself.
Another man said, "I am a selfish pimp. I just use and abuse others to make my way in life."
I said to him, "Why?"
It was because he secretly considered himself desperate and weak and didn't know how to make his own way without using others.
As you can see, knowing "why" may be helpful. It may inspire us to try other things and make other choices, but above and beyond the "whys" of the choices we make, looms the much more vital question of "what?"
Both these men didn't really need to know why they were making these choices, they simply needed to make other choices.
They were stuck in ruts and complaining to me about it.
One was stuck being the hero and the other was stuck being the parasite. By their own choosing.
So to the first man, I said, go help someone else be a hero.
To the second man, I said, go help a prostitute get off the street.
Make other choices. Change the dynamic.
And to both of them, I said, think about the kind of world you would like to live in and what kind of life you would like to live.
Tell the truth to yourself about this. Don't borrow your ideas about what you want from the newspapers and television.
Make the effort to envision what you want.
Then, mentally and emotionally, use your power to envision what you want, and go live in that world and be that man.
You can change your experience any time you like. You can even go back in time and take the road less taken, and see where that leads.
Nothing is impossible.
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