Parallel Lives

I know what you’re thinking. How could she have lived in Vietnam at the time of the war, when the war began after she was born in 1961?

Good question. If time runs in a straight line, it’s natural to assume that multiple lives occur in a similar format, i.e., one after the other. But what if they don’t? Time is cyclical, not linear, therefore it’s entirely plausible for multiple lives to follow the same principle. I mentioned this in an earlier post: if you picture Time as a big wheel, then you can stand in the twenty-first century on one side and look straight across the circle at a life in the tenth century. Or the thirtieth century, since who knows the wheel’s circumference?

You might say, that doesn’t explain overlapping lives. And you could be right. My “previous life in Vietnam” scenario may well have been a simple imagining inspired by a piece of music. It could also be a hint of a life in an alternate Vietnam, situated in another world in another dimension that mirrors this one. I’m just playing with possibilities here; I am not a physicist. I don’t even play one on TV! I do, however, believe there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

Like the one about parallel dimensions. If we live in the third dimension, what do the first two look like, and how many more are there? (Personally, I think the first two must be flat and boring, as indicated by the terms “one-dimensional thinking” and “two-dimensional character”.) Some theories suggest a whole whack of dimensions, co-existing at the same time on various planes, occurring in no particular order and housing who knows what sort of sapient energies.

Then there’s the “big Ru, little Ru” theory; the one that suggests the Ru in this life is a single facet of a multi-faceted Ru situated elsewhere, and that other facets of the greater Ru presently exist in a handful of other dimensions, living different lives in different conditions, all at the same time.

Blows your mind a little bit, eh? It sure blew mine. It took a while to get my head around it, and I’m still unsure exactly how I feel about being one of a bunch of Rus all connected to a mother Ru. It seems Type A-ish for a single entity to be so eager for experience that it divides itself into splinters and sends them out to grab all the gusto at once. First, if Time is infinite, then what’s the rush? Second, despite its glossy brochure, the multi-function device at the office can’t perform more than one task at a time (and neither can the human brain, by the way), so I question the ability of a greater Ru to live multiple lives at once through a squad of smaller Rus ... except it could explain how I lived in both Vietnam and Canada in the same span of years!