The Long Way Home

One of the most fascinating types of timespace anomaly is a sudden loss of orientation due to a seeming change in the environment the subject is quite familiar with. In other words: you're looking for a familiar house (or a road, or some other landmark) - and it suddenly isn't there. Or it is completely changed. The next time you look, it is there again, back to its old self.

It is also one of the easiest targets for self-styled skeptics, who are all too happy to simply wave off such events as evidence of some brain malfunction (usually, and utterly unscientifically, left unidentified), even when there is no evidence that would point to the likelihood of such an event in any given subject. Just because something could happen, it doesn't follow that it did happen.

Such things - as all events, really - should be studied individually, if we ever hope to understand their origins and dynamics.

Here is a real story of such an event. It happened in Tagawa (Fukuoka), Japan, around 1950 - 1955, to the mother of a dear friend of ours, called Seika.

It is perhaps important to note that the person to whom it happened - the mother - is known to be an extremely rational and no-nonsense person, not given to flights of fancy... and that's putting it mildly. No, really.

At the time of this event she was a young schoolgirl, perhaps 10-15 years old (probably while she was still in elementary school, according to Seika).

Here is her story.


Mother visited one of her girl friends, just like many school girls do. Probably before dinner time (or before it got dark), she decided to go home.

She was all too familiar with the area but suddenly she couldn't find a road. It's not that she forgot how to get home - there was no road where there should have been one. I suppose she found herself standing on a country field with no road.

She decided to think she'd been fooled by the 'fox' or 'racoon dog'. She went back to her friend's house and told them what happened. They let her stay there overnight.

The next morning, she found the road and went home. I remember sensing her 'pride' when I heard her talk about it. (That she wasn't fooled - that she was smart enough to go back and wait till the road appeared again.)

Awarded, 2009.

Japanese folklore, rich in "ghosts" and other so-called paranormal phenomena, has a preferred culprit in such cases: kitsune, "the Fox".

But I don't think too much should be read into the attribution of this type of anomaly to "the Fox". I suspect said "fox" is just an umbrella mythic figure that serves as a pop explanation for anything that trascends the ordinary experience of life.
It should be mentioned, however, that its attributed action often seems to be illusion-inducing.
And this could be significant.

Anyway, stories like this one can be found practically all over the world (but it's not often that one can find a reliable almost-first-hand source).
Here is a very interesting story from 1941, which, however, sadly lacks the geographic coordinates one would like to see.

Two points seem to stand out as possibly related: the "squeaking" pillar or whatever it was, and the military airfield that is mentioned in passing. Because of the anonymised nature of the account we can't know where it happened. But could it be that at the time of this event, in 1941, there were some sort of experiments being conducted by the military in the vicinity? After all, this was precisely the time when World War II precipitated the development of the radar and other such devices.

Just something to ponder about.
It is certainly much more rational and "logical" than just dimissing it - dismissing everything and anything that transcends the usual experience of our sorely limited senses - as fancy.


IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS: Moving House

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

The End of Time?

Ye of little patience: another story - another "exclusive", no less :) - is planned for later this week (up until and including Sunday).


Meanwhile, we've been pondering about the nature of time ad nauseam. Naturally, it never leads anywhere; or if it does, there is no way to confirm the validity of such insights. But if you're anything like us here, you know musings about the nature of time are as irresistible as they are (or can be) maddening.


So, why not muse upon it in the company of a book that proposes there is no "time" at all?


It's not a particularly recent one - in fact, it's ten years old - but then good work doesn't have an expiration date. I am referring to Julian Barbour's book The End of Time.

And since you can borrow it from any good library - as I would recommend - this post can't even be construed as advertising. Be warned, however, that once you've read it - and if you're truly interested in the curiosities of what we call "time" - you might be tempted to keep a copy forever.
I know I was. And I did. (Relax: not the library copy!)


Here's Barbour's angle, in a nutshell:

The main aim is to introduce a definite way of thinking about instants of time without having to suppose that they belong to something that flows relentlessly forward. I regard instants of time as real things, identifying them with possible instantaneous arrangements of all the things in the universe. They are configurations of the universe. In themselves, these configurations are perfectly static and timeless. But how and why can something static and timeless be experienced as intensely dynamic and temporal?"

So, it's all instants. Everything is NOW, in Barbour's opinion. Those individual "frames" in the seeming continuum of a lifetime, any lifetime, are the single core, the essence, of what our true four-dimensional experience is.; the rest is memory and/or imagination (and a very creative one, but I digress.)


Yes, I bet you already suspected that much.
But you might want to read about it from a physicist's perspective.
To whet your appetite or get a sense whether you'd like it at all, you can read this illuminating review here.


Or you can watch this Dutch video (23 minutes), about which Barbour says it has done "a remarkably good job of explaining the ideas of The End of Time in a non-technical way".


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AFTERTHOUGHTS

Here are a few "dummy" questions that the interviewer should have asked, in our opinion, but either didn't or they were edited out.

* If there is no place for continuity of any sort, were all things created instantly in all their states and potentialities (and even their non-state opposites)? In other words, is a person created as a newborn, an adult, an old person, all at once?

That's what I get it from this interview, and that's what I've been suspecting for a long while now.
And if this is so, what is it that propels our perception to experience the seeming "arrow" of development always in the same direction, from young to old, from "cause" to "effect"?


But the most essential question, in my opinion, is the following:

* Throughout the programme, Barbour uses - inevitably, of course - time-bound (and time-shaped) language: he "came" to the conclusion, he "will" take a snapshot - and so forth.


Isn't "time" ultimately simply a name for our experience of continuity (illusory or not) between all these discrete instants?


I certainly think so; and if this is so, then the true nature of "time" is really a moot point, however interesting. In other words, if we are never going to experience it in any other way, why should we even care what the true nature of "time" is?


But is it so?
Are we really doomed to experience "time" as we normally do - in a linear fashion? (And the many entries in this very blog seem to attest that we do not experience it linearly at all, ahem, times.)


This sub-question seems to me particularly interesting because it would indicate, regardless of the answer (positive or negative), the sort of mechanism that dictates such perception - and which perhaps could be transcended.


Theoretical physics can be great fun and certainly a great exercise for the abstract mind. But unless it is also useful in a meaningful, existential way, it is mostly an exercise in futility.


Still, it is a great work that makes you think about such things.