Nelson Mandela Didn’t Die in Prison, and Why it Matters

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”   – Mark Twain

If you remember seeing media coverage of Nelson Mandela having died in prison in the 1980s, and you’re wondering why he’s just this month been reported dead again, you’re in good company. Mandela is one of the most commonly discussed celebrities who has been seen alive after having been reported dead. When we personally witness disparities between events we remember having happened and what reliable physical evidence suggests has occurred, we might at first feel a sense of dissonance. Fortunately, we need not stay confused, since noticing the differences between our memories and evidence in our current reality allows us to gain valuable direct experience of how malleable reality can truly be. Recent scientific discoveries suggest it’s quite likely that both this so-called “Mandela Effect,” also known as the “Alive Again” phenomena, are not new, as shamans and spiritual teachers from every continent and age of humankind have described for millennia.

The Mechanism Behind the Mandela Effect

We are fortunate to be alive at a time when scientists from several different branches of physics are converging on the idea that we live in a holographic multiverse… AND that everything including you and me have a truly quantum nature. When we put these two big ideas together, we see the mechanism by which we can understand and appreciate how things like intuition, synchronicity, the placebo effect, and spontaneous remission can transpire.

Illustration of Holographic Multiverse from “Quantum Jumps: An Extraordinary Science of Happiness and Prosperity”

Evidence supporting the concept of many parallel universes being interconnected comes from UC Berkeley’s Raphael Bousso, whose view of reality has been gaining support ever since last year’s discovery of the Higgs boson. And there is further good news for those wondering, “Where are these other parallel universes?” Some of the first hard evidence of other universes was found just this year by theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Carnegie Mellon professor Richard Holman, through cosmic background radiation data collected by the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope, which indicates the presence of other external universes to our own at the very moment of the Big Bang.

What Happens in the Quantum Realm Doesn’t Stay in the Quantum Realm

In much the same way that some people prefer that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” many physicists have hoped that the weirdness known to happen in the quantum realm would remain safely confined there. This appears to not be the case, as evidenced in recent ground-breaking laboratory experiments over the past few years. Increasing numbers of studies with macroscopic scale objects, such as diamonds, are consistently and repeatedly demonstrating such distinctly quantum behaviors as entanglement–which Albert Einstein once called, “spooky action at a distance.” 

Other behaviors previously presumed to reside exclusively within the quantum scale including: superposition of states, coherence, and teleportation are also being witnessed on the macroscopic scale. This is happening to the point that a growing consensus is beginning to form amongst physicists, such as those surveyed at a recent conference that you and I and everyone and everything around us exists in a superposition of states.

This means that in one possible reality, you have not made a decision that resulted in your catching a cold, but in another possible reality, you have. We can expect to occasionally experience quantum jumps from one possible reality to another, particularly when we are aware that such leaps are possible. These jumps from one reality to another can be a lot of fun, as some of the world’s quantum jumping experts can attest.

And who, might you ask, are the world’s quantum jumping experts? Such experts include most of the world’s top athletes, medical miracle experiencers, heroes, survivors of close brushes with death, experienced meditators, beneficiaries of the placebo effect, and people experienced with hypnosis and lucid dreaming have experienced leaps to better possible realities. These people often trust intuition, and benefit from a sense of there being a connectedness between themselves and everyone and everything else.

Evidence of Possible Futures & Pasts 

As the saying goes, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” But how can we find evidence demonstrating that alternate histories occur, when typically the only “proof” we have that a change has occurred resides in our own memories? One way to collect such proof is to rapidly document peoples’ experiences immediately following highly memorable historic events like the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger space shuttle explosion, or Princess Diana’s death. Such flashbulb memories provide reference points by which the same people can later be asked about.

Researchers Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch at Emory University investigated flashbulb memories of students immediately following the Challenger space shuttle explosion by collecting handwritten student reactions immediately following the disaster. When they followed up two and a half years later with the very same students, Neisser and Harsch were startled to find that students’ accounts of where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news were different from what they’d initially described. One student said, “That’s my handwriting, but that’s not what happened.” 

Kindness Matters 

Discrepancies between memories also often appear amongst people who were all together for a particular event, but later remember what transpired very differently. Chances are pretty good that you’ve encountered disagreements with people you’d usually consider competent and aware… except for when they insist something happened some way you know for sure couldn’t be true.

If we didn’t live in a holographic multiverse in which we’re all venturing in various directions to experience a multitude of different possible futures and pasts, we wouldn’t find the tremendous divergence between peoples’ memories. As we enter the Quantum Age, it’s time that we stop calling such differences in memory “false recollections,” in favor of “alternate recollections,” indicating respect for the fact that each and every one of us exists in a superimposed state, with access to many possible alternate histories, presents, and futures.

And most importantly, it’s time we truly show respect for one another and our multitudes of alternate histories and recollections.

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Do you remember Nelson Mandela having died before? Take the poll, and share your recollections with alternate histories in the comments below:

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Further details, explanations, research, examples and references about the ideas presented in this article are provided in Quantum Jumps: An Extraordinary Science of Happiness and Prosperity.