Forward to the Past - 9/1/10

I'm often stuck in the past. As many of you already know, I'm utterly obsessed with the concept of time-travel. It's something that has very much been a part of my consciousness since I was just a young child, and that's not just because I adored Back to the Future growing up (notice the title of this post is a clever inversion of that movie, ehh? I'm hilarious). No, in many respects, I feel that my love and ardent interest in this subject matter is due entirely to the fact that..one day...I am going to be able to travel through time. And not like I am now, stuck only going forward through time at "normal" speed. I mean that some day, I will be able to jump backwards and forwards through the space-time continuum at will and relive moments differently, see the birth of the universe, the age of the dinosaurs, the great flood, and anything else I can imagine. I'll have tea with Galileo, pontificate with Aristotle, listen to the Sermon on the Mount, see a Chicago Cubs game with my father in his youth, party it up on New Years Eve 1999 with infenity, and go back to the days of Atlantis with those who mean the most to me. I will watch the construction of Stonehenge in quiet reverie, witness the creation of the atomic bomb, discover who or what created the Nazca Lines in Peru, and rectify innumerable injustices and obscene horrors throughout our past (what's that old time-traveller adage? Everyone kills Hitler!?) Of course I will alter key events and in so doing change the course of history, but that will merely create alternate dimensions where these events occurred instead of extinguishing our present one. No worries. So how do I go about creating this time-machine, and why in the name of God haven't I already begun this grand adventure? Well, first of all...I'm not a mad scientist, and I barely know how to change my oil let alone craft a time-travelling Delorean. Suffice it to say, I won't be travelling through time with a device. However, I think we all have the capability of moving backwards and forwards through time whenever we want with our minds. And I'm not merely referring to going back into the past in our memories, or fantasizing about our futures. I mean we can LITERALLY travel through time with our consciousness if we were to awaken to that power within us somehow. I'm not here to say HOW, because if I knew, I would be doing that right now as opposed to writing a Sound of Thought update about it. Still, this post does have a point .....and it has to do with my favorite cartoon ever, Futurama. A few weeks ago there was a new episode entitled "The Late Philip J Fry", which was just about the most interesting episode of a CARTOON I have ever seen. In it, Professor Farnsworth invented a time-traveling machine that could only take its occupants forward in time. Fry, Bender, and the Professor got in...and inadvertently overshot their 1-minute destination by a few thousand years. And there, in the year 10,000, civilization was destroyed and all of their friends long since perished. So they decide to keep moving forward through time until they can find a civilization advanced enough to have built a backwards time-machine. Eventually, they accidentally go TOO far into the future, one million years to be exact, and pay witness to the end of life on earth. Since there's no hope of them finding anyone else alive at that point, they resign to go as far into the future as the possibly can, watching the last star burn out and the last photon fade into nothingness while drinking a few beers. But then, as the time machine keeps moving forward, they are suddenly in the midst of a second big bang....and the entire cosmos is recreated in the blink of an eye. As eon after eon passes them by, they watch as ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY repeats itself in the exact same way that it happened beforehand, and so they realize that in order to travel back in time, they must only continue moving forward. Powerful stuff, especially considering it's an animated sitcom. This leads me to a conclusion that has really helped me come to grips with certain regrets in my life. Yes, I often think about going back in time and changing certain things, reliving moments or situations differently to make my present better, but now I truly feel like I don't have to concern myself with this anymore. And not just because my future is so bright and full of possibilities, because cheap platitudes make me sick to my ass. No, I have hope now because the future is literally full of possibilities not just for itself, but for the past as well. I can change my past, I can alter my history, and I can recreate moments in my life in better, more exciting ways, but the only way to get BACK there is to keep moving forward. The endless potentialities that exist with the ability to travel through time will be mine one day, I have absolutely no doubt about that whatsoever. But in order to get to the point where I can, in order to awaken to that power and be able to play with it, either in MoPH or here on earth, I have to keep living and pushing forward until the time travel mechanism in my brain is activated.....whether on my deathbed or due to an inevitable shift in my own consciousness.