(My family over a decade before my brother Christian was born. That’s me as a baby.)
My dad passed away in December of 2007, a few months after my mom died of cancer. He endured a ten year struggle with MPD, what they now call Dissociative Identity Disorder with partially connected personality states. He had some repressed traumatic childhood memories that came up and while exploring them, a whole range of personalities emerged. He was very intelligent with high dissociative ability allowing him to create multiple personalities. He could do anything and do it very well because he had entire mental personality constructs dedicated to those skills.
For the first time, I’m beginning to think of my dad’s life experience from the lens of Thomas Campbell’s Large Consciousness System (LCS) and its many data streams. Or what Bashar describes as the multiverse of nearly infinite realities we select for, moment by moment. What if there’s a version of my dad in the vast multiverse that didn’t pass away at all, but worked through healing his trauma and was able to connect with the tools he needed to understand his own conscious experience? He was into some esoteric stuff like numerology, but only the Bible Code flavor. I do think he restrained himself within Christianity due to his love for my mom and her dedication to her faith. His Christian faith always seemed a bit “because I support your mom” to me.
What if he had explored Thomas Campbell’s work, without restriction? What if he had tools to understand these very distinct personalities he could connect to and switch between? What if what psychological professionals called his “high dissociative ability” was actually the ability to connect between multiple data streams, switch between them, and channel them into this reality? A data stream, as I understand the concept, is essentially like the feed in the movie the Matrix. It feeds our consciousness the reality experience we’re having. Dreams are alternative data streams. NPM (non-physical matter reality) has nearly infinite data streams (what some call the Akashic record) of possible futures and unrealized (as in didn’t collapse into PMR, physical matter reality) pasts. Imagination can tap into data streams as well, including ones provided by the LCS.
As I’ve been thinking about multiple simultaneous realities lately (see this post), I’m just now wondering, could this explain one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life?
When I worked for Dave Ramsey, my small team of four developers (including me) worked on a big special project called Town Hall for Hope in 2009. As the WMDs (web marketing developers) we moved fast and blew stuff up. We were responsible for a website that hosted over a million people tuning into a special live streamed event (which was a big deal back then) and then right after the event, swapping out the entire site for a new site build. We were there late into the night, and we pulled it off without a hitch! I’ll remember what happened the next morning for the rest of my life.
(Here’s an internet archive snapshot of the after-event website we launched.)
I’m driving into work and about to make a left onto the street where the office is and the song California Dreaming by the Mamas and the Papas comes on the radio. That was my dad’s song as he often dreamt of California while living in the cold of East Rutherford New Jersey before he moved his whole life to the West to surf Huntington Beach. I turned it up. I was overwhelmed (literally, tears started pouring down my face) as I waited at that red turn light signal. I felt my dad’s presence like nothing I’d ever felt before. I heard my dad’s “voice” in my mind’s ear say something like, “You see that? That’s my boy! That’s my little Lukie. Look at what he just accomplished! Look how many people he brought hope to, impossible deadlines and his little team made it happen! That’s my boy!” I could feel his beaming, smiling face. The swelling of pride and love was palpable.
As I wiped my eyes and tried to find a parking space to collect myself, I remember thinking, “What the heck was that?!?” It felt like my dad broke through all the rules of death, time, and space, defying God himself if need be, to punch through to the land of the living to speak to me as an eternal spirit who was also still fully my dad.
It was a powerful experience I’ll never forget.
Now, I wonder, in the multiverse of possible realities, is there a version of my dad happily living out his life, having tapped deeply into the esoteric tools of channeling multiple data streams enough to find and connect with the version of me that exists here and now? Was that part of my experience to prime my subconscious to be open to the possibility of multiple realties?
I may never know. What I do know is what I experienced. It was a “direct experience.” How it gets interpreted via memories and words and whatever stories or meaning making that comes from it is fully open to interpretation and reinterpretation, but it was “real” as in my own consciousness, the one thing I can’t deny does exist, experienced it.
It’s very possible it was just a natural reemergence of sorrow, having lost my dad less than a year and a half prior to the experience. If you’ve lost a loved one, you know what I mean. A song on the radio, a TV show, a movie, a special place… all of them can trigger new depths of the grieving process. And yet, this felt very different than all those other experiences.
This was one of the most real experiences I’ve ever felt.
What do you think about this stuff? Does it weird you out to talk about it? I’m personally enjoying leaning in to ask questions about the nature of reality and my own conscious experience.