Teleporting Thoughts
July 17th 2020
Where do we go when we have memories? Where do thoughts begin? When we’re still in the room but see the house we grew up in?
I was 15 years younger. How can I possibly see the red carpet. The folds of the curtains creating shadow shapes of faces on the ceiling. The half-a-meter-thick TV on the wall with a built-in video player, flashing images of Mr Bean driving a small lime green Mini Cooper.
Where am I seeing those thoughts? I’ve tried circling my eyes in my head attempting to pinpoint the wall of my mind where the image is projected.
I look to the top left corner. Or maybe it’s the bottom right. It follows where I look like the purple remanence of a sun spot on the burgundy canvas of my eyelids.
If I try to focus too intensely on the mind image, it disappears and I’m back in the room. I can only see the flickering blue candle, the guitar in the corner. It’s gone, like sand falling through a hand.
It’s as if I look too close, I’m too…’here’. I enter ‘the now’ and I can’t be anywhere else.
Does too much focus cause thoughts to scatter? Like a wild deer dashing into the foliage, eye contact cuts a cord and the mind balloon drifts away. As if thoughts have power only from our periphery. As if they’re the ones watching us. Like little angels and devils whispering from our shoulders, enticing our attention. Does that mean we’re not in control?
When we’re in, indulging, sinking into the bath water of our minds - our thoughts teleport us. For the tiniest moment, entering a space like a strobe light, we’re flashed back to a moment in the past.
But clearly, my physical body isn’t going anywhere. Yet, part of me goes somewhere enough for me to describe a memory to you. The part of me which is intangible, ageless and unchanging. Does this suggest how my fundamental essence is timeless?
I might be 26 sat in my home recording studio in Brighton, but I’m also my 10 year old anxiously standing at the top of a steep hill with a skateboard under my foot. Why on earth am I there?
I don’t literally return to my 10 year old - but to a feeling. A familiar frequency. A particular outlook on life which I’ve felt before, a certain version of myself.
In Einstein’s breakthrough discovery, quantum entanglement, which he describes as ‘spooky activity at a distance’, he noticed how two independent particles with a relationship respond in real time, no matter how far away from each other they are. One spins, and 10,000 miles away, the other instantaneously spins too.
And generally in quantum mechanics, he realised particles responded differently when people were and weren’t observing. This shatters the foundations of objectivity and determinism in science. And maybe it holds the keys to our mysterious and elusive memories. Maybe they’re the ones driving when we’re not watching.
Maybe I am my 10 year old self, and my 50 year old self, right here in my 26 year old body. Perhaps memories suggest how the unfolding of our lives isn’t a linear timeline, instead we access portals dispersed across our minds like constellations of stars. I am all of me, everyone I have been and will be right here in this moment.
When I was travelling, I experienced what I’ve come to call ‘mirrored thoughts’.
Our van had broken down in France. It was a December morning. Hazy fog drifted along the edges of the icy lake I was running around as my breath reached ahead of me in a white cloud. Suddenly I was catapulted to my younger self - decades earlier where I was also on the edge of a lake near where I grew up. I remember my child self feeling the moment poignantly - but for no particular reason. Blue dragonflies hovered and insects emanated circular ripples on the water as they skated on the surface. I was back there - 12 years earlier, a thousand kilometers away.
I realised that I was communicating with my younger self in that moment.
I didn’t say much. It was more of a ‘hiya’, a gentle greeting.
But I felt I had connected the dots. I realised why my younger self felt so present by the water that day. I was receiving a message - from my older self.
Since that day, I’ve experienced mirrored thoughts again. Interestingly, I’ve had moments I believe to be messages from my future self. It seems the running thread is entering moments of ultra presence - where my senses are alert and my surroundings are in high definition. It’s as if I’m creating the portals which will be my future memories.
Recently, I had a mirrored thought from the future, with a message. A quiet whisper saying ‘you’re so young, you’re so young. You’re doing great, keep going’.
What I’ve begun doing now, is sending positive messages back to my past self too, rather than simply greeting.
I tell my 10 year old self at the top of the hill that everything is going to be okay and that I am brave. I’m filling my personal galaxy timeline with my own support system.
Maybe it’s impossible to know if we are thinking our thoughts, or they are thinking us. But what I’ve come to know, is whether my past or future self, it’s all the same timeless me.