Ephemera

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Reality change? Possible evidence of brane shift.

Every once in a while, I discover that I've managed to jump into an alternate reality. Cosmologists posit the existence of branes, planes of reality that contain universes. Branes can be extremely close, yet (in most cases), completely separate from our level of reality. Some believe that the universe is just one of many in a multiverse that is composed of universes embedded in these branes that could be as close to us as pages in a book. I think the people who came up with the word "brane" got it from the word "membrane".

What evidence do I have of brane shift?

I have memories of how things were in the brane I inhabited earlier. We all do. The difference, I suppose, is that most people assume that the brane (or reality) they have memories of is the same one they happen to be living in, the only difference being that their memories were formed at an earlier stage in the brane's evolution. If something is different from the way they have remembered it, they will usually adduce this to a false memory. Normally, I would to, but I am a little obsessive about certain memories. It occurs to me that it might be possible to trace fault lines between the branes by disparities we discover when comparing certain memories against reality.

For instance, in the world I am from, I have a book about the Amitabha Buddha. I also have this book in this universe. Both are about a specific Buddha. Both have green covers. Both were printed in 1974. The main difference between the two is in that my old copy, there is a section in the beginning about a specific practice, that of observing one's thoughts and fields as "ornaments of the reality field". This is a very vivid memory for me, because I thought that phrase was funny: "ornaments of the reality field". In my old reality, I re-read that section five or six times to make sure I understood the meaning.

Over the last year or so, it has become a part of my mental discipline to apply what I learned in that section of the book, because I found it quite helpful in getting through difficult periods. This morning, I felt compelled to pick up this book again and re-read the section, and despite thumbing through the book for two hours, I couldn't find the section.

Now that it's evening and I have more time, I'm going to go through the book exhaustively. There are two other possible books that I could have confused with this book, e.g. I could have conflated the passage with the visual image of the green book. I doubt that I will find that passage in another book, however, because I have purposefully had this little green book by my bedside for the past year and a half-- specifically, because it had this important passage in it. If this passage still exists in any book I own, I think it will be only found in that green book. The question is, will I find it in this brane?