Limes with Orange

Okay, here's the deal. Sometimes I'm intrigued by things that I'm not sure I believe in; I may want to believe in them, but the sceptic in me is, well, sceptical.

When I went to hear Robert Sawyer talk, he said that time travel was one of the big sci-fi concepts that would never be feasible. His excuse was partly the grandfather paradox and partly that things like the Holocaust would never have happened if someone could go back in time to prevent it. Well, the grandfather paradox is an oversimplified analogy that I'll never buy as a scientific explanation. As for the second point, changing history would be a tricky business. How do we know that some time traveller didn't attempt to change something and just made everything worse instead of better?

My point? I have a hard time accepting in my logical brain that time travel will ever be reality, but I'll defend the notion of it because it appeals to me and I want to believe in it.

So why am I rambling on about scepticism and beliefs? Because I was just reading about the Dream Manifestation Wizard that claims to offer an exact scientific method to manifesting all of your dreams. My very first reaction was Holy New Age-ness, Batman. But then I read a little bit more and thought a little bit more and was intrigued.

While I was listening to the audio clip, I remembered the sports psychology seminars that I used to take when I was competing with my horse in Three Day Events. Visualizing yourself in each phase of the competition, imagining how it would feel to do everything to the best of your ability, picturing yourself clearing every fence or executing the perfect 20 metre circle. I am a firm believer in everything I learned in those seminars and wasn't that really just another way of manifesting dreams?

And then I thought of my cousin, who said that she thought about exactly what she wanted in a romantic partner and "put it out into the universe." She's currently with the person who truly manifests all of those qualities that she wanted. Mind you, she forgot to specify that she was looking for a man. But she and her girlfriend are very happy!

So I decided to be open to what the website had to say. And wouldn't you know it, they paraphrased my guru, R. Buckminster Fuller, saying that 99.9% of all science in the 20th century was invisible to our five senses. (For those of you in the peanut gallery, the exact quote is: "Now in 1969, 99.9 per cent of the accelerating accelerations of the physical environment changes effecting all humanity’s evolution are transpiring in the realms of the electromagnetic spectrum realities which are undetectable directly by the human senses." From Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.)

Then the website went on to talk about paradigm shifts, which I recently jotted a note about in my faithful notebook that travels everywhere with me... how one of my fundamental themes as a filmmaker is new perspectives and paradigm shifts. Now that little coincidence may not seem like much to you, but I'm rather fascinated by the synchronicity of all this. So yes, I am intrigued by the Quantum Method to manifest my life dreams. I wonder what magic this Wizard might work for me.

Labels: math and science, philosophy