The Mandela Effect has been with us longer than we thought

What are your earliest Mandela Effect memories?

The Mandela Effect demonstrates that facts and histories can change, and not everyone remembers things the same way. I’ve received emails from people writing, “I’ve noticed these changes for years, but only just now found out thousands of other people are noticing the same changes,” which gets me wondering how long the Mandela Effect has been around.

Different people pay attention to different things, so we’ll not all be equally impressed by the same changes in history, and sometimes it takes a while before we notice something strange is going on–and has been going on for a long time. There is a tendency once we start noticing something–such as that history sometimes changes–we start seeing examples of it more often. I’ve also noticed that being with others who also notice reality shifting tends to increase our awareness of it. What’s changed since the Mandela Effect became a popular meme is that collectively we now have a mental “File” to label such incidents with, other than ‘we must have been mistaken; that’s so weird.’ Now people like George Clooney and Julia Roberts and Gwen Stefani DO have something to refer to other than “that’s so weird,” when they notice, as they recently did, that the ending of the song, “We are the champions” by Queen has changed. 

My preferred explanation for all this is that we are observing quantum phenomena on the macroscopic scale, and there is no ‘von Neumann cut’ where we can start disregarding quantum effects. Quantum discontinuities can (and do) occur at every level.

Bigger than Mandela

One of the main reasons the “Mandela Effect” is grabbing peoples’ attention is that it is bigger than Mandela. The “Mandela Effect” shows those of us who’ve experienced it that facts change, and histories change. Not everyone remembers things the same way, and sometimes we also notice things change from what we remembered, and then change back again–sometimes flip-flopping more than once or twice.

No Return to Classical Reality

We can look to quantum physics for an explanation as to what is going on when we find more examples of the Mandela Effect. Rather than there being some imaginary line of demarcation where quantum weirdness no longer occurs, some physicists now suggest that quantum logic might hold true at all levels. Rather than ignoring such troublesome quantum phenomena as superposition of states and entanglement by sweeping them under the von Neumann cut, we instead need to consider the possibility that sometimes we will see macroscopic evidence of quantum phenomena in our daily lives.

No Conspiracy Required

The existence of alternate pasts was predicted by scientists such as Stephen Hawking, who has sought evidence of vibratory signatures of many possible ‘big bangs,’ for example. If and when you ever personally experience the presence of multiple possible pasts, such as some college students witnessed first-hand when looking at their own hand-written journal notes about where they were and what they were doing when the Challenger space shuttle exploded–then you might reconsider the notion of a news media or government conspiracy.

CERN came along after the fact, from the standpoint that first nations peoples have long described oral histories about how these same sorts of things (so-called “Mandela Effect”) have been happening since the dawn of time. We can see evidence of the Mandela Effect in years before we heard of it, when we remember times such as I recall having happened to me back in the 1970s, when I wanted to hear a song that I’d been hearing a lot on the radio. I couldn’t find the song any more, and it was as if it had completely disappeared without a trace. Then, many months later, I did hear the song being announced by a radio station as ‘likely to be a big hit’ as they bragged they were amongst one of the first stations able to play it. I heard this and thought to myself, “What!?! This song was being played almost nonstop by many stations earlier this year!” So if you’ve ever seen a movie or TV show or heard a song or read a book before it came out, you’ve had an earlier experience with the Mandela Effect. 

Quantum Mechanics Forbids a Single History

Thomas Kuhn wrote that a paradigm defines “the practices that define a scientific discipline at a certain point in time.”  When we notice that there is a strong possibility we are witnessing macroscopic signs of quantum phenomena as some of us recognize that we’ve been experiencing ‘glitches’ and shifts in reality for years, it becomes clear that rather than a conspiracy, we’re dealing with a radical re-visioning of reality. Thomas Kuhn described how there are four basic ways that a new paradigm influences the scientific process, because paradigms dictate: what is studied and researched, what types of questions are asked, the exact structure of the questions asked, and how research results are interpreted. Thanks to the work of physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog suggesting back in 2006 that we might live in a “top down” universe which prohibits single histories, people are increasingly becoming more familiar with the idea that we exist in a superposition of states–such as in a holographic multiverse, where we can sometimes experience various other possible realities. Nature magazine reported Thomas Hertog stating,

“Quantum mechanics forbids a single history.”

Finding Early Historical Examples

We can find early examples of the Mandela Effect easily enough, by searching through books, newspapers, magazines and research papers with keywords such as “misremembered,” “collective misremembering,” “famously misremembered,” and “historical misremembering.” We can ask elders what kinds of “mis-rememberings” were common in their youth, to hear such examples as differences in historical dates or names, or differences in what people at the same event had heard someone say, for example. We can thus find such examples as a change in dialogue in the 1942 movie Casablanca to “Play it again, Sam,” a phrase which currently is not spoken in the film.

Mandela Effect’s Invitation to Us

The Mandela Effect is inviting us to enter into a new Quantum Age, which also happens to be a new age of awareness of our true identity as Consciousness. People have an opportunity now to become aware that we are not our bodies nor our thoughts nor our feelings–but rather, our true selves and true identities are the observers of our bodies, thoughts and feelings. And as we become aware of this to the point we increasingly observe evidence of this (through witnessing alternate realities and alternate histories), we gain the ability to recognize the primacy of consciousness as creator of experience. I strongly recommend everyone develop a habit of asking, “How good can it get?” in every situation, in order to help ensure best possible experiences–for truly this remarkably unlikely universe can become even more fine-tuned than we’ve yet experienced.

You can see the YouTube summary of this blog post here: https://youtu.be/bMsStumSrRE

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