In Search of the Real ME

The real ME can be combination of discrete functions. It is neither only THIS nor THAT. Undoubtedly it is many different things.

The limit of "western thinking" is that someone or something is a binary 1 or zero. That is, it is either good or bad. In eastern philosophy people and things can be and are both good and bad at the same time. Schrödinger showed us this fact in his feline thought experiment where the cat could be thought of as being both alive and dead (until we look at it and only one condition remains.)

The Eastern symbol of Yin and Yang depicts this very well. Half the circle is black and half is white. In the larger black portion there is a small white circle. In the white portion there is a small circle of black.

This symbol can stand for male and female, good and evil, right and wrong or any other dual nature concept.

By this philosophy even the most reviled despotic dictator has a bit of "good", truth and redemption in him. Life and reality itself is described in these terms. The ME is by no means exempt from this symbolism.

Not every claimed ME is significant as part of the whole phenomenon. Some examples are mere faulty memory. Some are the results of fantasy in the minds of the claimant. Others are explained by wishful thinking. A few examples escape classification and remain inconclusive since the entire process is an exercise in trying to prove a negative.

Singular examples can be truly unexplained other than by considering the past to be actually fluid and changed mostly without anyone noticing.

In the book The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin in 1971 introduces George Orr who has "effective dreams" which alter reality. He claims the world was destroyed in 1998. He dreams it back into existence while dying in the rubble. See Wikipedia entry {en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven#Plot_summary} Much of the exotic claims people have made to explain the ME are very similar to Le Guin's book from 1971 and the movie version from 1984.

In order to get to the essential nature of the ME we must pass everything through a sieve to "separate the wheat from the chaff." Not all "evidence" holds equal value. For example, if Berenstein was the original spelling of the name of the fictional bear family there is negligible probability anyone would mistakenly see it as Berenstain and this would be a non-controversy. Likewise if the title had originally been "Sex In The City" no one would be claiming it to be "and the City." The controversy only arises when the original version was "odd" and claimants swear it was never that way. This observation itself casts doubt on a change ever having taken place.

Secondarily, evidence becomes tainted with manipulation. Any such evidence must be excluded even it it demonstrates the ME in more than a mind game. The examples just cannot be trusted.

Such is the VW logo with or without a division between the letters. Volkswagen never used or licensed a VW logo without the division line. This doesn't mean other companies didn't manufacture knock-off versions and omit the break. Also the photographs of supposed variant logos are all either manipulated forgeries or of poor exposure quality that a bright spot obscures the division. So far there is no "residue" photos which have been fully vetted that stand up to scrutiny.

Did you know you can still buy a classic WV Beetle from the model year 1984, 85, 86? You just can't license them for use in America. The last of its kind rolled off the assembly line in Puebla, Mexico on July 30, 2003.

The same tainting of evidence applied to the JFK assassination limo. The claims people remember a 4-seat lime are from memories which are today 54 years old or are hearsay from listening to a parent or even a grandparent about "how they recall" what took place. Many photographic recreations and cinematic productions have been made over the years using props and actors available at the time. Photo ops have been created to accompany journalistic writing. And not to be excluded are the camera angles and partial vehicle shots which purport to be the short limo but leave out the front part of the vehicle.

The actual limo resides at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit. It has been upgraded with a permanent hardtop, armor plating and a new engine grille. Yes it is a 3-row, 6-seat limo. None of the popular internet published limo pictures with allege a 4-seat limo survive the vetting process at an evidentiary level.

Many other of the popular ME examples are also tainted with knock-off products and international variations. Flinstones is one of those examples. If Febreze was today Febreeze, I suspect no one would be claiming they remember Febreze, per my earlier suggestion.

Now for Massive Geographic Differences.

If a logo were actually altered by an alleged time traveler that other than the time travel event itself it would be relatively easy to convince a graphic designer in a corporate product development department to make it Froot Loops because the cereal in fact contained no fruit. Besides, Froot Loops has a kind of unique symmetry that goes with the Toucan themed jingles.

A time traveler would have zero mechanisms to move South America 1000 miles east or Australia 100 miles north.

In order to substantiate movement in tectonic plates which float continents around the globe and have two realities we must enlist the concept that there are at least two quantum copies of Earth where the continents are in vastly different locations. We are supposed to assume the veracity of a person who claims he/she remembers the other version from when he/she was in elementary school (when one usually is exposed to Geography.) Interestingly John Tuzo Wilson first introduced the concept of Continental Drift in 1963. Before that time geophysicists could not wrap their heads around the idea that continents actually moved relative to each other. While they do indeed move. It takes millions of years to move a humanly noticeable distance.

This remembrance pre-supposes the person jumped from one quantum Universe to another. We are supposed to accept the notion of a fully formed quantum universe and the idea the claimant exists in both and can move seamlessly between them rather than they were not paying close attention to the teacher and the world maps in 5th Grade. I's be far more willing to accept their explanation of why South America moved 1000 miles if the vetting process of this person revealed a coherent and consistent alternate history which is not in conflict with their alternate geographic configuration.

All such claims of major geographic differences fail the vetting process, so far.

If logo changes and spelling differences are man-made retroactive changes to the past and are consistent with the ME, then geologic differences fail the ME test. Something else in at play including bad memory or outright deception.

Flip-flopping

The idea of Flip-flopping seems to be more of a device to establish credibility or one to convince ones-self of the claim. The failure of this phenomenon as an ME stems from the absolute locality of the Flip-flop. If something were changing Froot Loops boxes it would be happening everywhere all at once (or at least at the speed the change travels.) More than one person would see the differences and the transitions.

Unless several to many people observe a Flip-flop taking place it is more likely the flip-flop experience is a singular personal one. Something no one else can see because it is completely internal. Like a pain. No one else knows you have a one unless you tell them.

Wheat From Chaff

There is some wheat out there. We need to make a distinction. People allegedly dying years ago versus last month or not at all is a very weak example of the ME. It is far too easy and common for such reports to propagate around the Internet and never to be enshrined in ink on paper. The stark example is Nelson Mandela himself. There are multiple published exact dates when he supposedly died. While those publications could actually have published wrong information without malice or conspiracy to do so, his story stands out as an enigma.

And Now This

The indisputable characteristic embodied by the ME is that everyone is only who and what they remember. If you remember life events being a particular way, be prepared to either accept everyone else's take on it or be prepared to accept the inevitable blow-back. While you are trying to preserve your world view, so are they. The simple explanation is either you remember something wrong or something changed things after you experienced it. As with all other situations, chose for yourself what to believe.

Mass Brainwashing

Mass Brainwashing

People who clearly recall some little detail in popular culture differently than can be seen by looking at "evidence" have come up with a spectrum of causes ranging from "I just always thought..." to we are all living in a simulation controlled by superior beings, are being manipulated in everything we see, hear and do while the Mandela Effect are glitches in the matrix we are not supposed to notice but do. To some people the superior ones are the Illuminati while for others it is lizard people from Saturn or Nibiru. Another popular explanation is time travelers who are having a go at us with silly bugger changes.

The alterations of popular culture is the possible way to make anyone aware of the changes being made. In a nutshell, most ordinary people are not known by a sufficient number of other outspoken people for it to ever be known they used to have 6 fingers on each hand but somehow now it's only five. Without photographs there would only be a few people who ever knew.

On the other hand, Bart Simpson is far more real in popular culture than most actual human beings. Millions of people have seen him and know of his antics. They know how many fingers he has on each hand. Five, right? Oh, no, now it is only four. And its every character from the very first show.  His signature saying, "don't have cows, dude," would be remembered by most of them. At least the ones who watched from the early days before he stopped saying it."

The idea that a powerful alien civilization has made this simulated world just for us is more than a little bit Christian in its formation. Very Biblical. Genesis to be exact. Even the one god of genesis say WE when they refer to themselves and the making of the world in six days.

Another suggestion is we were all "natural" flesh and blood creatures until the end of the Mayan Calendar in December 2012 when its end signified that something catastrophic "might have happened" and we all were resurrected in this simulated world. ME and déjà vu are glitches in the software. What was so special about humanity that it warranted being recreated in a cyber world that is exactly as flawed as the old one was? The architects of this simulation decided that all 7 billion people needed to be preserved even though they will appear to suffer and die of environmental and manufactured causes. Or are all those "others" just non-conscious props for the benefit of we who are sentient and conscious as in "Breakfast of Champions?" That is a dangerous supposition that will allow us to minimalize the plight of those others.

This brings us to the concept of us all being brainwashed into thinking we are more than we are and need all the stuf (or stuff) that is being sold. Exactly to what end are we being enslaved by the brainwashing? Automation is making human labor obsolete. Soon there will be few if any people working. Everyone will be given their "daily bread" by the masters just for standing around being submissive. Again very Biblical.

The whole idea of a massive slave population is a bad one at best. Consider 7 billion people all wanting the attention of the Master, dependent for everything. This is why parents expect their children will eventually grow up and move away and many times kick them out after 18 to 20 years and told to get a job.

Next up: Actual Changes of the Past

Three Phases of ME

Thousands of people have the sense that something in their past has changed and only a few other people have any sense of it happening. The phenomenon has been labeled "Mandela Effect" by Fiona Broome.  To them the question becomes: did something alter mine and many other peoples' memories or did the Past actually change. For them there is only those two possibilities.

A third explanation emerges which is equally able to describe and explain the experiences people have with respect to the Effect. Briefly the Mandela Effect is a memory fluke which is derived from the reports that when Nelson died on December 5, 2013, Houghton Estate, Johannesburg, South Africa (Wikipedia) people surfaced who said they thought he had died in prison many years earlier. To them Mr. Mandela never was the President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 and the man who presided over the dismantling of the Apartheid government. While they "clearly remember" him dying in prison, they have no idea who was the President during the years 1994-1999 in South Africa. Basically, they were not paying close enough attention to African politics at the time.

This third explanations requires a large communication portal wherein large numbers of people can read what others say and post their own responses to either agree with or disagree with what is said. The Internets create this great filter through which the information flows. Many hundreds if not thousands of participants add their part to the collective recollections. Without the ability to communicate with large numbers of people who appear to have the same recollection there could be no body of knowledge we now call the Mandela Effect. Each person would casually dismiss their own recall as being faulty with no corroboration from others to validate the error of that memory.

Now that the phenomenon has a name, multiple Youtube channels and a presence on Facebook and Twitter, many more people are able to validate their faulty memories.  The erroneous memories seem to only manifest in pairs. It was THIS way or it was THAT way as in Berenstain and Berenstein Bears, or Fruit Loops vs Froot Loops. In this manner the cause in not likely a merging of quantum realities since many other permutations of the alternate spellings of word choices would have equally probable presence. We should see many different appearances.

Should some time traveling adventurer return to our past and make changes, he or she would be wasting massive amounts of high-energy resources to Punk us here in the early 21st century. Adding a dividing line in the VW logo, a curly F in the Ford logo or the "male arrow" to the other circular Volvo logo, would be playing silly buggers with us here for no apparent reason.

The ability to aggregate opinion via a massive telecomm system facilitates the Mandela Effect. Cartographers have from time to time emphasized and deemphasized the presentation of the spherical planet onto a flat piece of paper. Until an accurate time piece was made which remained accurate during turbulent sea voyages, longitude was a "best guess" by the navigators who were on the exploratory trips around the globe. As their skill improved as well as the accuracy of their clocks, so were their maps.

Ship's Captains commissioned by Kings were not adverse to stretch the extents of their travels with deceptive maps. After all there was no one to challenge their veracity. Recall that Christopher Columbus was not looking for two new continents but a westward route to the India and China. Imagine Queen Isabelle and King Ferdinand saying," But I always thought the world was flat and resting of the back or a turtle. Something must have changed."

So now is it that the person feeling the Mandela Effect is merely being wrong or did someone tamper with his brain?  Next up: Mass brainwashing.

To ME or not to ME

During the previous decade there has arisen an assertion that millions of people have experienced a "memory phenomenon" wherein they remember facts, events, visual presentations which are not substantiated by an historical review of what the vast majority of people both remember and now today see.

Simple differences can be shown in whether or not there is an apostrophe in a brand name, an "s" at the end of a celebrity's name, a word or two different in a title or movie dialog. The most elaborate difference claimed by various persons is whether the Presidential motorcade limousine in which JFK was assassinated has/had two rows of seats or three. The emotional attachment a person has to his experience and his explanation for how it came to be makes much of their testimony suspect.

Even though there IS a physical mechanism for how the past might become altered and for there to be convergences of quantum realities, much of that has been put forth as evidence has little probability of being accurate.  Many claimants say proof of their experiences and recollections are accurate. One only has to cite examples of errors which are not Mandela Effect related to show most of the examples fall in the "not ME" category. One of the hallmarks of a compelling ME example is there is zero physical evidence to point to. If there are such artifacts those artifacts can be attributed to raising the confusion in the first place.

Pic of the album in my vinyl collection

Compelling ME examples are the VW logo, the Volvo logo and the Red hat/bandanna of Springsteen's Born in the USA album. In the latter example the hat is highly unusual since Bruce did not use such a hat in his personal image but did use a red bandanna.
Advertisers have used the phrase "feeling ones oats" to signify the vitality a person will get if they breakfast on their cereal. That phrase has been around a long time and has gained a meaning of its own apart from the original words "fielding ones (wild) oats."  Its meaning and usage is not appropriate for oat cereal products. To most people reading this blog post the "feeling" variant is the only one they ever herd and the reference to springtime reproductive rites is unknown. The change took place was and propagated so widely that the original phrase is mostly unknown. It is highly unlikely that "feeling" would ever be altered to be "fielding."

Here is another phrase to consider. It's a"tough road to hoe."  Why is it a road with a hoe? how many people hoe a road? Well even though common usage had made it a road the phrase is "row to hoe" as in farming or gardening in dense hard-packed soil. Similarly to the previous example in is highly unlikely a road reference would ever become a farming reference.

The English language is a highly volatile and flexible one where nuances can be made with the sweep of a pen, words sound similar and most people do not practice diction to a high degree. Graphic designers love to make unique and memorable messages by altering some small part of the images and text. Therefore, unusual spellings are not that unusual.

If the "real original" name and spelling was Berenstein Bears it would be highly improbable people would gloss over the spelling and come up with Berenstain by accident.  The converse is not equally probable.

A subset of people reporting ME experiences also impute that they are from an alternate timeline of the Earth. Their observation is of such things as continental positioning. In particular South America seems to now be about a thousand miles further east than they remember it being located. Neglecting cartographers' variations the continents do move. South America did diverge from Africa and move westward to where it is today. Tectonic pressures are are now pushing it eastward again. For an alternate timeline explanation to hold true, both variations must have been possible but differently manifest. Internal Earth pressures did likely place the South American continent in each of the reported positions. A spurious event would necessarily have at some date in the multi-million years ago past happened or not happened to result in the position of today. For those people the alternate timeline hypothesis holds at least some water.

The other big geological example is the alleged land mass west of Australia. While some people have a "recollection" of such a place, they have no name for it or and physical description of its character. There is no unemerged sub-sea formation which alternate time references would either create or suppress its rise to dry land in the region. For their supposition to hold any validity we need to elevate their hypothesis from mere alternate timeline to a completely different manifestation of Earth itself.

There is no consistency yet for what the ME actually is:

1. Illusion
2. Wishful-thinking
3. Manipulated memory
4. Erroneous memory
5. A timeline phenomenon
6. Converging realities
7. Alteration of the past
8. Some even more exotic cause

My opinion is #7 by a combination of natural and man-made causation.

Thoughts on Swirl Theory

When you go looking for something and do not find it there are a few possibilities to consider:

1. You are looking in the wrong places
2. You are looking for something that doesn't exist
3. You are looking at the wrong time
4. You haven't been looking long enough.
5. You might have overlooked it and are no longer looking where it is
6. You might have assumed you knew what it looked like and ignored it when found
7. What you are looking for might be on the move

There are a few phenomena that by their nature are difficult to grasp and identify. First one is everything you see, hear, smell, taste or touch is the result of an electrical signal from outside your body. The signal is conveyed up and into your brain. There it registers on your consciousness and is felt to be back out where it is first contacted. You do not "feel" the sensation of a pain in your hand or foot but only in your brain. Your brain transfers the sensation back to where you think it originates. The illusion is extremely difficult to ignore.

An example is everything you see with your eyes is about the size of 2 nickels, its curved and upside down. Your brain receives the tiny image data and projects it out into the world and we call it reality. Your eyes have no color receptors for yellow but your see yellow anyway. Red, green and blue are the three receptor types along with grayscale cells.

You can only think about something if you have it in your memory. If a memory is not in the conscious part of your brain you cannot speak about it to tell anyone it is there. If your memory is ever in anyway altered, you have no way to detect the change unless other people contradict your claim of memory.

The Mandela Effect is real, but it is is not fully understood. It might be an illusion. It might be mass hysteria, confirmation bias or some such thing. It might represent an actual alteration of the past by some poorly understood means. Some alleged examples may not be related at all, while other are.

We have no idea how often any part of the past becomes altered since anytime it changes what we see is always the way it was. The concept of a fluid changing past is explored in the article Swirl Theory on the Vulnerable Geometry blog site. Retroactive Event Modification (REM) phenomena is possible and it doesn't require time travelers or intent to make changes. Physicists say such a phenomenon is possible but cannot say that it is a fact mainly because they have never remembered seeing it happen.

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Excerpt From Internal Crossing

Excerpt From Internal Crossing

The conversation had become quite intense. Jack who was the skeptic kept up his barrage of denial and asserted that everyone who thought there was an instance of altered Past events were deceiving themselves. His take on the Mandela Effect was it was a fiction created by people who wanted there to be "something new under the sun." As far as he was concerned the myriad of people reporting alteration of indelible past events all stemmed from a single "first thought" by an obscure author who posited the idea as part of the plot of a movie or a second rate Sci-Fi Novel.

Robert³ countered with, "there are tens of thousands of people who report their experiences. Not all of them have the same faulty memory of the same thing together. Mostly it is only one or two examples per person. They don't fabricate their memories then go looking for what they might be. They notice an anomaly and it strikes them as being so odd they decide to look it up and see if anyone else agrees. When they find agreement they are stunned by the variety of experience other people have."

Jack said, "therein lies the problem. They look it up and find agreement. The agreement reinforces the delusion and they become believers just like every born-again Christian. Suddenly their eyes are opened and now they are awake and know the truth. It feels real and very strong."

Jack was also relating the phenomenon of Gumaraji the boy Perfect Spiritual Master of the 1970s. He was a 13 year old Korean boy who toured the United States building on the longing of young mostly white boys and girls who were looking for answers their parents' churches could not provide. He bestowed Knowledge and Bliss on the worthy supplicants. They became True Believers in the moments of conversion. Suddenly, everything they knew was wrong. It was like the Firesign Theater skit of the same name.

People were easy to mislead as far as Jack was concerned. But so true, too, was the idea that people were easily able to be lead away from the truth as well as toward it. One could be convinced that what they saw was not what really happened. After all nobody can see both the front and the back of another person at the same time.

"People are so easily mislead." He said, "And they will grasp onto the flimsiest of evidence to support their beliefs." His position was such insignificance as the spelling of a product name or the name of a fictional bear family was anything a time traveling operative would bother himself with was preposterous. "Yeah, let's go back in time and change the name of colorful fruity breakfast cereal. That will get their attention and make'em wonder."

Robert³ continued to attempt to make his case for actual modification of the past happening. His position was that while the name changes and movie dialog tweaks were what people noticed, it was what they failed to notice that was important. In 1971 the San Fernando earthquake damaged a dam that held back millions of acre-feet of water. The water level in the reservoir had been significantly lowered prior to the quake. That decision saved the lives of 92,418 people who otherwise died in the failure. Only a few people remember the events as they once happened because the retroactive event modification phenomenon allowed the water level to be lower and the dam only to be damaged and not significantly failed. As the result of the dam failure and a REM impact, people only remember minimal death and injuries were manifest. People remember the concomitant alteration of the Volvo logo plate from that of a circle to that of the symbol for Male.

No single change is ever manifest when a massive event wave passes over and through history. There are always a multitude of alterations taking place, most of which will go unnoticed. The wider is the public exposure of a place, name, event, person, the more likely there will be many people who realize a change has taken place.

Jack rolled his eyes and said nothing. Robert³ watched as Jack gained the 80 lbs of weight he lost over the most recent two years when a retroactive event modification wave passed through the room. "Jack, I thought you were on a weight loss schedule to lose weight."

"Yeah, Bob, I really tried, but after my wife came back to me I abandoned all hope. My motivation was lost. She never really cared how big I was."

"So you're back together now."

"Yeah. I thought you knew that."

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Mandela Effect

Street Coin Mandela

Mandelas appear in many cultures and even on the ground in our cities and towns. I call them "Street Coins" because that seem to be circular metal plates strewn all about.

Beyond the physical manifestations in the environment, mandalas represent metaphysical phenomenon which fascinate observers throughout the centuries.

Recently the word Mandela has become synonymous with a strange experience people report having with increasing frequency. This context of the word is derived from the name Nelson Mandela, the former President of South Africa. It seems many people upon hearing of his rise to political prominence recalled that he died in prison several years earlier.

The apparent contradiction leaves those people with a conundrum. They certainly heard wrong, misremember what they hold to be a true memory, or the Past somehow changed! This last option is the one which intrigues them the most. The presence of people who remember the way history used to be are not small in number. To them the question becomes: did something alter mine and many other peoples' memories or did the Past actually change. for them there is only those two possibilities. This is the source of the so called  "Mandela Effect" coined by Fiona Broome.
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The Nelson Mandela example is not the only one. There are many alleged altered memories/altered past examples to consider. Berenstain Bears vs Berenstein Bears. Fruit Loops vs Froot Loops. Looney Tunes vs Looney Toons. Many more progressively complicated examples can be found in the Googles.

The the book Internal Crossing, Robert Corbin experiences some of the confusing scenarios and discovers what probably is the cause. His revelations can lead civilization into non-existence.

Also see:

MandelaEffect.com or the mirror site: https://mandelaeffectsite.wordpress.com/

FionaBroome.com

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