Traveling Beyond Time and Space (and the Nature of Reality)
The following blog post was originally written as part of my June 5th, 2024 Newsletter.
I've spent a significant portion of the last month traveling beyond time and space. While many of my travels occurred during meditations and dream time episodes, half of them actually took place on the planet in my every day waking life. I'm not talking about alien encounters or bizarre time slips though, I'm talking about the power of perspective.
Each individual on the face of the planet lives in their own reality, including you. This reality is shaped by the timeline and unique combination of your life's experiences, how you feel about those experiences, what you've learned, and who you have allowed to influence you, all meshed together with your spirit's unique soul signature.
Boiled down, reality is really just a perspective.
What is Reality?
Your perspective (a.k.a. your reality) is in constant motion, subtly (and sometimes intensely) changing every second of your life whether you're awake or sleeping, meaning that there are not just 8 billion different perspectives/realities on this planet, there are an infinite number of them.
In waking life, we gain new perspectives not only by experiencing ourselves, but by putting ourselves in each other's shoes as we exercise empathy or try to learn and understand why someone did what they did or said what they said.
The dream space expands perspective as well, pulling us through a myriad of different scenarios, breaking down the information we ingested from the days prior and sorting through our memory banks to make sense of it, store it and find a useful application for that knowledge. Dreams like to bring together the past, present and potentially future moments of our lives in a mix-and-match simulator designed to aid us in this life on earth by... widening our perspective.
Even the deep, cosmic meditations that place me into my eagle-body and send me off into the far recesses of the universe do the same thing: bring me perspective.
The power of perspective not only allows us to empathize with others, heal parts of our past selves or anticipate how we might move through future situations, the power of perspective is the universe in constant motion.
As a facet of the universe, you, in your human existence, are consistently exploring and traveling outside of defined space and linear time.
Throughout the day, not only does your mind wander across the realms of nostalgic history, revisiting past moments, it also jumps ahead to the future, detecting and working through potential challenges, incoming scenarios and other changes that may affect your life, branding you a time traveler. And, as you encounter others in your waking life, you might find yourself empathetically stepping into someone else's memory agreeing that, "it must have been so hilarious!" or "I can imagine that was extremely difficult." Your dreams, of course, can bring you an even wider variety of potential perspectives, some even off-planet or across dimensions...
Did you know you've been a time and space traveler your whole life?!
That's what I want you to know today and I want you to know that because it's important: expanding your experiential knowledge by traveling beyond space and time is crucial to the human experience.
A Different Perspective
As Brandon and I were driving to the gym on Monday I found our conversation taking an emotional turn. I was trying to describe what it's like to have a dynamically changing landscape for relationships. I am constantly in motion when it comes to friendships and connections and along with being almost entirely estranged from my birth family, I don't have any friendships that have survived longer than I've been here in Minnesota (7 years). Half of my most valuable friendships are on Whatsapp with people across the world that I've never met in person.
To me, this feels normal. I'm constantly in motion and changing my own ways, hobbies, interests, and lifestyle so it makes sense that when my sphere on the Venn Diagram moves away from the intersecting portion of a friend's, that we go our separate ways. Sometimes, though, I don't have an articulate way to describe the rhyme or reason for the drift and I find myself emotionally leaving the friendship or relationship without being able to verbalize why.
This was the emotional crux of our conversation in the car that was now just sitting in the gym parking lot. Though I can hold space for myself and understand that this is just a part of who I am, sometimes I feel really guilty about it, a hold over from a guilty consciousness I held in childhood. Every time I feel myself drifting out of a friendship I feel like I'm letting someone down. As I tried to explain my experience I could tell that it wasn't landing for Brandon. Finally I just asked, "does any of this make sense to you?"
"Honestly," he said. "No."
As he explained that he was trying to empathize and hear me out, he really couldn't understand my position. My head reeled as I tried to process what it might be like to not understand my experience and I realized I don't understand his. He's an incredibly grounded person with friends he made in kindergarten that he still hangs out with weekly and his only experience with any sort of deep family estrangement has been through my personal experience.
"But that doesn't mean your experience is wrong or that you need to feel guilty about it. We're just different."
It hit me. Right. We're just different.
So different in this area of our lives that we truly can't understand each other's perspective.
It was absolutely fascinating.
We sat there looking at each other until I let out a small giggle which descended into some laughter. We got our bags and headed into the gym.
This is why he's my life partner, I thought. I can always talk to him and even though we might not understand each other, I can always learn something new.
I realized that he has many things in common with his friends, not just one or two. This means their friendships have a variety of intersection points which has allowed them to develop a bond over a much longer period of time and across many different areas of their lives.
Many of my friendships, however, have only had one or two points of intersection and when I move out of that space, I lose the sense of connection. And that's ok. Some people come into our lives only for short periods of time. It's nothing to feel guilty about.
The lesson I'm choosing to take away from Brandon's perspective though isn't about how I might form deeper friendships (though some of that information is certainly useful), I learned that I truly want to develop deeper friendships.
I'm coming up on the culmination of a major, personal life lesson here. In my personal history, I've learned a lot about the importance of boundaries and honesty through failed friendships and through Brandon I've learned that long-term friendships are not only possible but that they can thrive!
Together, by revisiting my own friendship lessons across time and by observing what is possible from Brandon's perspective, I can now implement a new approach to forming and maintaining friendships. I want to co-shape my future friendships for relevance and longevity. This isn't about picking the ideal friend, this about sharing my passions and hobbies, being honest about my boundaries, and communicating when I'm moving on from something so that we can find a new or different activity together.
Healing Changes Perspectives
I'm constantly changing and this last month has brought me through many internal changes. Every morning when I wake from my dreams I recall what I can and ask myself how it applies to my waking life. What have my travels beyond time and space taught me today and how can I apply that to shift my perspective for the better? Then, every evening before I settle into bed I review my day and all of the information and encounters I had that have influenced my perspective, keeping the parts that lift me up and letting go of the ones that I know are not in my highest good. I've also been paying extra attention to my cosmic meditations and to the people I encounter, friend or acquaintance, and what they can teach me.
I could have allowed the car conversation to drown me in frustration as I clung to my individual belief that something is wrong with me and that the friendship that's on it's way out is my fault and I should feel guilty about it. Instead, I acknowledged (with the help of Brandon's perspective) that I have the power to change my approach to friendships and that there are many other possibilities out there.
I travel beyond space and time not only to widen my perspective but to heal my soul with the information, experiences, acknowledgements and questions I encounter.
I travel because I am consciously changing my life for the better.
Healing is the action we take after acknowledging that we want to live a better life but only you can truly heal yourself.
The information and experiences gained by traveling beyond time and space (through waking-life empathy, dreams, meditations, reviewing and making sense of the past, etc.) can help you shift your own perspective to better encompass of life of healing and the path of your highest good.
As you fall asleep tonight, think about your travels today. Who did you empathize with? Did you travel back in time with others as they described their stories and scenarios? What did you learn?
Then, allow yourself to dream and ask yourself what new perspective you encountered in the morning. What parts of that perspective would be beneficial to you in your highest good today and what parts have shown you the old things that you can let go?
It's all a matter of perspective.
Meg🐝
