I don’t usually write about these kinds of ideas. My early journals are full of them. Sometimes I wish there was some way of conveying them to a scientist who would be interested in investigating them. That’s a part of my life that I might have done more with if I hadn’t had to spend so much energy and time working to heal the early trauma.
I have a friend who was in a car accident on her birthday. It was a rear-end collision and she lost the baby she was carrying and ended up with PTSD. Some years later, she had a similar accident, again on her birthday. I couldn’t see any way she could have engineered that. Sometimes people repeat an event, each time hoping to get it right, but this is different. In Waking the Tiger, Peter Levine describes a young woman who was in two plane accidents, twenty-five years apart. The second accident happened on the other side of the same hill as the first. (p191) Wondering about these incidents suggested to me the idea that trauma warps the space time continuum.
Recently I watched an interview with Peter Levine, who developed Somatic Experiencing, and Thomas Hübl, a mystic and spiritual teacher who works with collective trauma. Peter tells a story of a conversation he had with Albert Einstein. He said Einstein was really there, though he had died long ago. Having had a similar experience, I had no problem with the idea. Levine was asking about trauma that got passed down from generation to generation. Einstein took him to a pond, carrying a yardstick with pebbles resting on it. He tilted the yardstick so all the pebbles fell into the water, creating many series of concentric ripples. Einstein said that’s how information is supposed to pass through the generations. Indicating the places where the ripples cross, he said if something happens to fix the energy at this point, it distorts the whole pattern of ripples.
Fixed energy might be the description of personal trauma. The event has overwhelmed the capacity of the organism to process it, the process has stopped. When the person is triggered in the present by something that recalls the original event, the person is suddenly back there then, stuck in the past. What the metaphor of frozen ripples is saying is that any unfreezing of any frozen place will help the entire field.
What I understand from this is that the “space-time continuum” is not limited to space and time. The freezing happens because of consciousness, so we have to call it the “space-time-consciousness continuum.” That means that consciousness is a foundation piece of our universe. To me that is totally comforting because it means that the universe is about becoming more conscious, and we do it together. We struggle together, we suffer together, we learn together.