This past month I was fortunate to be able to talk with physicist Tom Campbell during a special live broadcast of International Mandela Effect Conference (IMEC) Open Tables. Tom reviewed ten examples of the Mandela Effect, and remembered things differently for five of them. Toward the end of our conversation, Tom discussed four factors that he considers to be involved in the Mandela Effect phenomena. Tom said, “I thought about it a little, because I knew that's what you guys were about, and I found four different things that contribute to it. So I don't think it's just one thing, I think there are several things that lead us to this.”
You can view this part of our mini-conference with Tom Campbell in its entirety in Tom Campbell's Big TOE, Virtual Reality, and the Mandela Effect, or starting at about time marker 1:19 to start at this part of the conversation.
(1) Observers have Individual Subjective Realities
The first thing Tom mentioned is that reality is only in the mind of the observer. Tom states:
“Well, every observer has his own reality because it's his interpretation of the data that he gets. So for one there is not a reality ‘back then' that existed, there is no ‘master reality,' that exists. It only exists in the minds of the players, and the players all have a somewhat different reality, because they interpret the data they get. So there isn't a reality that is kind of the right answer to what it was. So that's one thing. So just looking from a perspective of consciousness, there is no ‘the reality that was.' It doesn't exist–never has existed. It's a bunch of individual realities. And now we can look at it and see what we in general, most of us you know, saw or heard. So there's that idea that there is no right answer to what it was; we all have our own reality.”
I love how Tom starts contemplating the Mandela Effect with this notion of Subjective Reality (in contrast to Objective Reality), since this is a view of the quantum paradigm that I feel is at the heart and core of both quantum physics and reality itself. Physicist George Weissmann and I wrote about this in our paper, The Quantum Paradigm and Challenging the Objectivity Assumption. The really BIG idea here that is paradigm-shifting in the extreme is that quantum physics shows us quite clearly that there may be no such thing as objectivity, or ‘one true reality.'
(2) Pattern Matching in Consciousness
This next factor that Tom Campbell considers as involved in people experiencing the Mandela Effect has to do with the way consciousness operates with attributes of perception, and how we perceive and remember, with pattern matching. Tom elaborates:
“We perceive things and remember things in our memory. This is just kind of the fundamentals of the way consciousness works, we work with pattern matching. That's kind of the fundamental way we do things. We work on pattern matching, and what happens is we'll get a new image, we'll go into our data bank to find a pattern that fits it. Now if we can find an exact fit, oh great, we'll put that out. But if we can't find an exact fit, we'll pull out anything that even fits a little bit. If it fits sort of well, we'll pull that out, and that what it'll be.”
Tom then shares his experience with people frequently calling his wife a similar, yet incorrect name, that starts with the same letters. Tom's wife's name is Pamela, yet frequently when they go out and meet people, even after she's introduced herself as Pamela, a few minutes later, someone will say, “Oh, Patricia.” So Tom is pointing out that we might be fooling ourselves with some examples of what we think are Mandela Effects, that actually have more to do with the fallibility of our minds and memories.
In the more than 20 years of research I've been conducting in this field of the Mandela Effect and reality shifts, I've been careful to winnow out cases in which this kind of mental error occurs. I've also referenced this past year the work of Tony Jinks and his book, Disappearing Object Phenomenon: An Investigation, since he made a comparison of experiencers of personal Mandela Effects (or DOP, or reality shifts), and found no statistically significant differences in mental functioning and processes of experiencers versus non-experiencers.
While I've witnessed cases of what Tom calls pattern-matching, and what researchers like Elizabeth Loftus refer to as false memories, I have been careful to include first-hand reality shift reports in the hundreds of pages in the Your Stories section of the realityshifters website where experiencers are certain they are not simply mis-remembering. Elizabeth Loftus was surprised to learn that she was ‘mis-remembering' some things when she appeared on the Mandela Monthly show with Moneybags73 and the Ripon Rabbit in July 2020.
(3) Collective Consciousness
The third factor that Tom Campbell considers as involved in people experiencing the Mandela Effect has to do with the way collective consciousness operates with attributes of perception, where we are part of a group or community.
“Another thing we should think about that's in this thing too is there's a thing called collective consciousness. Collective consciousness is any group of people who have a connection who feel they have a connection together. They basically form a collective consciousness. So you have have a collective consciousness where you work with all the people you work with, there's a collective consciousness that goes with that. Or if you do child care, there's a collective consciousness that goes with that. You have a collective consciousness with your nation; you have one with humanity. You know, Carl Jung called these archetypes. They're basically collective consciousness pieces that you identify with and you connect. Well, the collective consciousness is just the vector sum of all the consciousness that are in the membership that are in the group. So you get stuff out of that collective consciousness, and you take it on. So you know you become more like that. Now you affect the whole, but you only affect the whole a little bit, because you're one person and there's maybe 10,000 in your collective, so you don't affect the whole that much, but the whole affects you more. So you work for IBM and after you've been there 4 or 5 years, guess what? You start wearing blue shirts, you start dressing like they do, you start talking like they do, you start having the same interests that they do, because it's part of the collective consciousness.”
This is really interesting, since it helps to clarify how sometimes we might see someone start to remember something as a Mandela Effect, and then within a few minutes we might witness them “take the download” or succumb to the “Mr. Smith Effect” where suddenly they say that actually, it seems to them that what they remember is whatever matches the current historical records. Sometimes, we might even notice the influence of the collective consciousness groups we belong to if we start remembering something more than one way. It can feel like we remember both, yet know that's impossible, since we must have only had one previous timeline of choices and events.
(4) Paranormal Likes to Open Our Minds
This fourth factor involves the way the Cosmos engages with us in order to get our attention and open our mind to new and expanded possibilities. Tom incorporates the idea of the fundamental consciousness, or Larger Consciousness System (LCS) here:
“Sometimes the LCS can change things up on us just to get our attention and open our mind. It likes to do that. For instance, crop circles. You know you have crop circles and overnight, one night… totally dark, maybe a few lights running around, no sound. And the next morning, you've got 34 acres covered with a very complex design that isn't just straight lines. It's all kinds of curves and things that would probably take a surveying crew of 20 people like three weeks to lay it out with their transoms if they were trying to do it. So the system does things like that just as a wake up calls: ‘Hey! Think out of the box! Reality is not just this little thing you think it is. Open your mind.' You know there's more going on here than you're aware of. Well again we jump to conclusions and make up the first thing comes to our mind, ‘Oh, aliens did it–you know, the aliens must be doing those things.' Well, not necessarily. You know the Larger Consciousness System triggers lots of people with paranormal experiences, just to open their minds. I got triggered to open my mind with an ability to debug software. I know a lady who a week after her mother died, she got a phone call from her mother–the phone rang, she picks up the phone and it's Mom, telling her that ‘I'm okay. I just wanted to let you know everything's fine,' and of course she was freaked out, so she took the phone and slammed it down onto the receiver, because she thought somebody was messing with her, and what a cruel joke it was. And then she realized that wasn't the case at all–she just hung up on her mother who was trying to get in touch with her. So people have these kinds of things. The system goes out of its way to help us see bigger pictures, because only when we see bigger pictures do we start becoming seekers and start learning and growing. So the system does that all over, so part of the Mandela Effect that was my fourth one is that the system often plays these sorts of games just to rattle us a little bit–to get us to open our mind, and think out of the box, instead of just being stuck in this little materialist groove. And it just does that to individuals and it does that like in crop circles to whole populations and it does other things as well. So a lot of the extraterrestrial things that people see you know, with spaceships landing in their yard and chatting with aliens and so on–all the system has to do to create that is put that data in their data stream. That's it. And then it's there, it's real. They interpret it, and it wakes them up and after that, they're different people. They start researching. They start wanting to understand things. So that's part of the Mandela Effect.”
This concept of getting our attention is something I discuss in my book, Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World, and it is thoroughly covered in the book Contact Modalities: The Keys to the Universe by Grant Cameron and Desta Barnabe. Clearly, one of the biggest messages I've gotten when asking the Cosmos, “Why do these things such as reality shifts happen?” is the simple two word answer: “Be Cause.” This is a time of Great Awakening, where we can step into our larger consciousness ‘shoes' with some truly wonderful reality shifting and quantum jumping capabilities.
How good CAN it get?
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Cameron, Grant and Barnabe, Desta. Contact Modalities: The Keys to the Universe. 2020.
Campbell, Thomas W. My Big TOE: Awakening. Lightning Strike Books. 2003.
Jinks, Tony. Disappearing Object Phenomenon: An Investigation. McFarland & Co. 2016.
Larson, Cynthia. Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World. 2012.
Weissmann, George, and Cynthia Sue Larson. “The quantum paradigm and challenging the objectivity assumption.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2017): 281-297.
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You can watch the companion video to this blog here:
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Cynthia Sue Larson is the best-selling author of six books, including Quantum Jumps. Cynthia has a degree in physics from UC Berkeley, an MBA degree, a Doctor of Divinity, and a second degree black belt in Kuk Sool Won. Cynthia is the founder of RealityShifters, and is president of the International Mandela Effect Conference. Cynthia hosts “Living the Quantum Dream” on the DreamVisions7 radio network, and has been featured in numerous shows including Gaia, the History Channel, Coast to Coast AM, One World with Deepak Chopra, and BBC. Cynthia reminds us to ask in every situation, “How good can it get?” Subscribe to her free monthly ezine at:
