In fact, all of us are walking parallel worlds! We just normally try to force our personalities to identify and act as if they were one single entity. There is always something that is closer to our momentary identity and simultaneously a dreaming process that is further away from our identity and which expresses itself in incongruent, incomplete body signals and experiences.
The idea of double signals reveals that I can have one body signal that is related to my identity and simultaneously another, separate signal, that is related to my more unknown, secondary process. The concept of process structure reveals that I have a primary process that I identify with and a secondary process that is beyond that identity. Of course, the idea of parallel worlds is fundamental to Process Work as a whole. It was as if there were a thousand playful elves all around and I was now going to meet them all! In any case, I suddenly began to see consensus reality as if it were a closed fan that, when spread open, revealed layer upon layer of parallel worlds that were always there, but unseen. In other words, we are both alive and dead, awake and asleep! We need second attention as the Yaqui shaman Don Juan described, to stop our ordinary world and to focus upon, and open up to, the many parallel worlds. That doesn’t mean that the other states do not exist, it just means that we are not focusing upon them. To say it very simply, the moment we call something “a” or “b” we have marginalized all of its other possible states (c,d,e, etc). Yet, in each and every experience there is a multitude of other experiences lying in wait, though in Arny’s interpretation, we choose one and marginalize the others. In everyday terms, Arny explained this idea of “many worlds” by saying that when we begin to focus on something we see its most probable state, the one that fits into our culture and consensus reality. I can relate, Irwin! Hugh Everett interpreted the collapse of the wave function with his many worlds theory in which he postulates that these parallel worlds do not actually collapse but that you slip into, or participate in, one of the states while the others continue to exist simultaneously. Referring to the famous “collapse of the wave function” in quantum physics in which something exists in many states but then collapses into one state when observed (I would never dare, or attempt, to truly explain this – please see the reference), Irwin Schroedinger, one of the parents of quantum mechanics, apparently agonized over the mind-twisting thought that his cat could be both alive and dead before it is observed. This is the stuff the universe is actually made of!” Imagine that! Modern quantum physics became an ally rather than a dreaded science that I would never understand! And when he began to talk about parallel worlds in this way, it was as if consensus reality and modern scientific thinking suddenly opened their arms to me and said, “What you have been feeling and thinking all along is natural. But, Arny explained it in easy to understand terms that relate to our psychologies and experiences. Now, quantum physics is about as far from my early artsy education in dance and theater as possible and I must admit it scared the hell out of me. You can imagine the relief I felt many years later when Arny began to discuss and teach about the concept of parallel worlds in quantum physics. In any case, why couldn’t I be an ordinary kid growing up without all these unruly thoughts?! The Many Worlds of Quantum Physics So, what was going on with me? Why all of the extra stuff in my head? Perhaps as I imagined, everyone had similar experiences but I was, for some reason, a bit more aware of them. They went to school or to their job, went home, ate, went to sleep, and got up again. Wasn’t that what everyone else did? People went to work.
I tried to put these questions aside and simply do my life. They especially preoccupied me as a teenager when just about everything about the world stopped making any real sense! Why can’t the world just stay still for a moment? Why can’t my experiences be simple and clear? Am I dead or alive? Awake or asleep? Is this happening now or in the past? Am I a reincarnation from an earlier time or is it a reincarnation of me? Questions like these preoccupied me as a child.
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