THE FROG HANDLED MUG: Chapter Fourteen

Nothing exists in isolation including everything in this story. In the dream that started my journey Julia was wearing a T-shirt that had ‘Shifted 2069’ printed on each sleeve. It meant nothing to me at the time. I didn’t wonder about it. I didn’t think about it. I should have known better. Everything about a dream is significant, maybe not in the moment, but when it is revisited details tend to pop out. I’ve written down all of my dreams since that first life changer appeared. It was about six months after the first that I saw it lying on the table next to David Cawley. I suspect he communicates to me in this way. He arranges his living space for me to see clues. Why he doesn’t just spit it out I have not figured out. It was a book. It was written by David Cawley, and so I guess by me as well…sort of. Its title was merely a span of time…1900-2075. The subtitle read, The History of the Shift. What the hell is the Shift, and if it began in 1900 why haven’t I heard of it?

I Googled The Shift and for the next several days I astounded myself. At the time, 2010, it was just a small fringe group of people that had any conscious awareness of it. Why did it take a hundred years for these guys to become aware of it? Why didn’t I know about it? It is probably why the people of France and Europe didn’t know they were involved in the Renaissance until they were well into it. The people alive at the beginning of the Renaissance were long dead by the end of it. Three hundred years is a long time. I don’t even know when it was given a name, but I am sure it wasn’t dubbed the Renaissance by the people alive at the beginning of it.

According to David’s title this shift thing spans one hundred seventy five years. We are already two thirds of the way into it and virtually no one has heard of it yet. There was a lot to go through, much of heavily laced with current beliefs. What I got from my reading was this. We are in the midst of a reality rule change just as my baseball dream portended. So I did know, but I thought I was the only one. I guess I’m not so special after all. The past hundred and ten years have been special, however. We grew wings and we left the planet, but basic flight is based on classical physics that had been around since before Newton and Descartes. Certainty was dethroned in favor of probability at the beginning of the twentieth century when quantum physics was born. Everything changed after that. Everything grew increasingly connected by way of an invisible electronic web. I know what is going on in Egypt sometimes faster than the Egyptians do. So, like those in the Renaissance I exist in a great change, but unlike the Renaissance, which was a cultural change, the Shift is about a reality change. Who, but God, could evoke such a change?

Just as David Cawley is me and not me, I think the rule changer is God and not God. It’s that free will thing. Increasingly my universe is filling with paradox, and is infinitely more complex than I had heretofore imagined. But why change things now? What is it about the past hundred thousand years of human existence that requires a change in how we relate to our reality? I spent hours pondering that question and it dawned on me that doing the same thing for 100,000 years might get a wee bit boring. I’m not kidding. That’s what I came up with and here’s why. If it is true that I have countless selves dispersed throughout time, and that those countless selves each create probables, and the probables who are real in their own right create their own probables, and so on, then what the hell else could there be left to experience under the current games rules. I’d want to play a different game and I suppose God would also. But, what is the new rule?

Rose chooses a personal God, a hands-on kind of God. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s her choice and it serves her. My God is diffuse, non-religious and woven into the fabric of all that exists. She is me and not me, just as I am her and not her. I am autonomous and yet inextricably connected to all that is. I felt that when Alexander created a probable during his illness and I experienced myself as everything. Somehow I feel responsible for spreading the word. Jung’s words again pop into my mind. He wrote in Mysterium Coniunctionis, “The wise man who is not heeded is counted a fool, and the fool who proclaims the general folly first and loudest passes for a prophet and Fuhrer, and sometimes it is luckily the other way round as well, or else mankind would long since have perished of stupidity.” I don’t know if I am wise or a fool, but I’m sure as hell not going to jump on any podium. I have enough problems without the world judging me as either wise or foolish. I’ll leave that target on the backs of the politicians.

David Cawley the younger is doing well after a year of weekly visits. For lack of a better word, his mother is flabbergasted by the change in him. By reducing the times she opposed him she found that there were fewer incidents where she felt a need to oppose him. In other words they stopped butting heads because she stopped judging his opposition. His mother began seeing young David Cawley not as a tabula rasa that she was responsible for molding into an image she felt would be best suited to the world, but rather as a young person that had a clear idea of his own wants and desires. So things are settling down with the two of them. I have a plan for young David Cawley which requires keeping contact with him for many years. I plan on having him give a message to his future son…my future self. It’s weird, I know, but this reality is becoming weirder by the day.

My world in general has become a more dangerous place to live. The year 2010 was particularly onerous, especially regarding Islamic terrorism. I read the Koran to get some insight into interpretations people place on Mohammed’s words. I found that it is just as easy to put a spin on the Koran as it is for the Bible. People will believe what it is they want to believe, and, as I am quickly learning, what is primary is the individual’s belief driven perception. Although it appears so there is no ‘The Reality’ that is simply perceived differently by each individual. Anyway there is one Sura in the Koran that caught my attention. It is the 18th. I found it telling regarding my search for the real me, the me that is David Cawley and Dr. Smythe and all the others that have appeared to me over the past two years. It helped me to trust all that I create, especially those things that I have considered counter productive to my development as a human being.

The story involves Moses and the guiding angel, Khidr. The two are traveling together and come upon a small village. To Moses’ horror, Khidr sinks all the boats in the bay. Moses regards this as an evil, but later learns that there were robbers about that were ready to steal all the boats. By sinking them Khidr saved them for the villagers, who quickly repaired them. Khidr then attacks a young man and kills him. This evil again shocks Moses, who later learns that the man was about to murder his parents and that it was better for him to die at the hands of Khidr than to become his parent’s murderer. The last straw is when Khidr has a wall collapse in the village. As per his habit, Moses is again shocked at this evil. Only later is it discovered that the collapsed wall unearthed a hidden treasure for two orphans. Khidr is forced to leave Moses as he cannot see through the hidden reasoning behind the momentary acts of apparent evil. Here Khidr has the larger viewpoint of the Self, the dandelion of Sarah and the magnet of my dream. Moses is stuck in the smaller view of the ego, the view most of us take in coming to our judgments of good and bad. What the story intimates, but does not explicitly say is that both Moses and Khidr represent aspects of each individual. In 2010 we still agree with Moses’ perspective, but that is changing. Somehow we are being forced to see through the apparent evil by placing it before us. And so my hunt continues.

I’ve pondered many things since my dream era began. Hierarchies are one of them. Why was I so enamored of hierarchies? I see everything as connected now, and no longer believe that one individual is any further along than any other. Hierarchies are another one of those things that didn’t make any sense to me in light of my being many mes in one. You know how it goes. Jon is good and Sally is better, but Paul is the best. Lou is bad. Sue is worse, but Mary is the worst. Father Tim is holy. Cardinal Bernard is holier, but the Dali Lama is the holiest. These types of comparisons are based in part on my understanding of who I am and why I am here. It is unavoidable under the old rules. They are mostly ethical comparisons based on subtle and not so subtle religious beliefs, but more importantly they are rooted in my assumptions that who I see in the mirror represents the totality of who I am. Not any more.

That you are holier than me is also based on my old conception of time and my limited understanding of soul. Because of my old understanding of time I believed I had to be better in the next moment than I was in the present moment. The difficulty with this thinking is that I was infrequently satisfied with who I am in the present moment. I focused on the goal and ignored the process of getting there, which threw me right out of the present moment. I found in doing that I lost my power.

It was my idea of one soul, one self that pushed me to compare. Nelson Mandela, in his inaugural address as the first black President of South Africa, said that our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. In looking back I had locked myself in such a small windowless box for so long that I forgot that I have the key to unlock it. But, again, that forgetting may have been part of the rule that is now changing. Plato, in his great work, “The Republic,” asked: “Will not a man who has seen nothing but the shadows of reality, not feel fear when exposed to the light?” I have thought small for so long it seems like the height of hubris to say “I AM BIG!” I feel like ducking when I say it.

Young Cawley is a cornucopia of ‘what-ifs.’ He makes me think of all my own what ifs that have popped into my mind since the dream era. What if, as consciousness experiencing itself as matter, there is no holy purpose to life other than the mere experience of it. What if the me that I see in the mirror is just one manifestation of a larger me? Just as the me that I was at five is still a part of the me that I am at sixty-five, the me I see in the mirror is but a part and yet the whole at the same time of a larger gestalt called soul. It’s not my soul. I am soul. I am sinner and saint; beggar and rich, beautiful and ugly, and powerful and weak.

What if everything is spiritual, but not by way of the old definition. The heroin addict shooting-up in an alley is on equal footing with the Dali Lama. No hierarchies. The healer is no more spiritual than the leper she heals. There is nothing I need to be other than who I am now. I don’t need fixing and neither does my neighbor. Move, change, experience, but accept without judgment who I am in each moment. I am already the holiest. Old habits die hard. I look around when I write this waiting for the ceiling to fall on me. These are all thorny nuts to swallow, but I seem to be cramming them down my throat.

That’s my little ‘catch-up.’ Now it’s back to the present.