What If the Brain Is Only Part of the Story?

I recently came across an article on Medium by Catherine Churchill titled Reincarnation and the Afterlife. It’s a subject I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about, so naturally, I gave it a read. Most of it covered ground I’d encountered in one form or another over the years. But one reference caught me completely off guard. Someone called Seth.

Seth wasn’t a name that meant much to me. According to the material Churchill discussed, Seth was supposedly a nonphysical personality who communicated through a woman named Jane Roberts beginning in the 1960s. Roberts eventually published several books containing what she described as his teachings. I haven’t read them. But one particular idea attributed to him stopped me in my tracks.

Seth maintained that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. If that’s true, time isn’t the straight line we’ve always assumed it to be.

Well, that’s how I’ve been looking at it for a long time now.

I recently wrote a four-part series called What If Your Brain Is Connected to Something Bigger? It grew out of ideas I’d been developing about consciousness, the brain, and the possibility that time isn’t nearly as straightforward as our clocks and calendars would have us believe. I didn’t arrive at those ideas by reading Seth. Until Churchill’s article, I didn’t even know what he supposedly had to say about the subject. Yet here was something published decades ago that sounded remarkably close to what I’d been considering.

My first thought was something along the lines of, Hmmm, maybe I’m right after all.

I don’t mean Seth confirmed my theory. Two people coming up with similar ideas doesn’t establish that either one has the correct answer. But when you’ve spent years trying to make sense of something, then discover someone else approached it from a similar direction, it’s hard not to get excited.

What stayed with me after I closed Churchill’s article wasn’t Seth, though. It was a question. How many other connections are out there that I haven’t made yet?

To explain why that question grabbed me, I need to back up a little.

My own thinking about time started long before I wrote that series. Over the years, I’ve wondered whether some of the things people report as ghosts might have nothing to do with the dead. If time isn’t linear, is it possible that it overlaps? What if what we think of as 100 years ago is actually happening now, almost like a parallel universe of sorts?

Imagine standing in an old house and seeing a woman walk across a room before disappearing. That’s what most of us would call a typical apparition of someone who has passed. But what if she’s just walking through her house and suddenly sees us as well? Maybe she’s living in 1890, and we’re the ones who don’t belong in her time.

I’ve entertained that possibility for years. It doesn’t account for every reported haunting, and I wouldn’t expect it to. But it raises a question. We think of the past as something that’s gone and the future as something that hasn’t happened yet. What if that’s only how our minds experience them?

That question eventually became tangled up with another subject I’ve spent a considerable amount of time exploring. Consciousness.

While brainstorming one of my books, the two ideas suddenly seemed to fit together. I’d been wondering whether consciousness might exist beyond the physical brain, with the brain acting more like a receiver than the source itself. If that’s so, and time overlaps the way I suspected, the past, present, and future could all exist at once. Just as Seth had supposedly stated.

Could what we experience as the present simply be the portion of a much larger reality we’re currently aware of? I kept turning that over, and it became the core of the theory in my four-part series. I covered it thoroughly there, so I won’t walk through it again here.

Which brings me back to the question Churchill’s article left me with. I’m working through all of these ideas, and it’s clear I’m not the only one who’s had them. How many other people have approached these same questions from different directions? And how many ideas that appear unrelated might actually have something in common if we knew where to look?

Maybe that’s it. Maybe the receiver just made a new connection.

I’ve spent much of my life researching subjects that don’t always fit comfortably into conventional explanations. Paranormal experiences, unusual historical accounts, strange things people have witnessed and struggled to explain. One thing that continues to interest me is how often the same basic questions appear in completely different places. Sometimes the people asking them have never heard of one another. Sometimes they’re separated by centuries.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re all describing the same thing. But I wonder how often we overlook a possible connection because we’re accustomed to keeping subjects in separate categories.

Take consciousness itself. We know an extraordinary amount about the human brain compared with what we knew a century ago. We can observe neural activity, identify areas involved in memory and perception, and see how damage to particular regions affects a person’s experience of the world. Yet we’re still trying to understand why all that physical activity produces the subjective experience of being someone.

I can remember things from childhood in remarkable detail. Our Harvest Gold kitchen, for one, with the gold phone on the wall and that newfangled thing called a dishwasher. Close my eyes and I’m standing in that room as though it were yesterday. What interests me is whether it’s actually my brain storing that memory and how consciousness allows me to experience it again, even fifty years later.

What exactly is that?

I have my own ideas, obviously. I’ve never been convinced that everything we experience as consciousness begins and ends inside our brains. There’s still too much we don’t understand, and I suspect we’ve only scratched the surface.

There’s another aspect of this that keeps coming back to me. We tend to describe things using whatever knowledge and experiences we have available. Someone centuries ago might have explained consciousness in spiritual terms. Today, I might compare it to a computer network or a mainframe because I spent much of my working life around technology. Neither description necessarily tells us what consciousness actually is. It tells us something about how we’re trying to understand it.

And I wonder whether we’re doing something similar with time.

We experience yesterday, today, and tomorrow as separate things, so naturally, that’s how we describe reality. Yesterday is gone, tomorrow hasn’t arrived, and today is where we happen to be. It’s how we organize our lives, and it works perfectly well for most practical purposes. But that doesn’t mean our experience tells us everything about the nature of time.

That’s where my thoughts about consciousness and those old ghost stories begin crossing paths again. If time isn’t quite what we think it is, and consciousness isn’t entirely what we think it is, what other experiences might deserve another look? Dreams? Intuition? Those occasional moments when something feels strangely familiar even though we’re certain we’ve never experienced it before?

I don’t have answers to those questions. But after all these years, I still enjoy asking them.

I’ve always said there are no coincidences, only synchronicities. I realize not everyone looks at the world that way, and that’s fine with me. But I spent years developing an idea and wrote an entire series about it. Then I stumbled across Seth while casually reading someone else’s article.

I didn’t start revising my theory or searching Seth’s books for passages that supported what I’d written. The similarity was interesting enough on its own. What matters more is that other connections might be waiting somewhere. Perhaps they’re in a book I haven’t opened, an old account I’ve never encountered, or an idea someone else is working through right now.

That’s what excites me about subjects like consciousness. Not the prospect of finally declaring that I’ve figured everything out. It’s the possibility that something I’ve never considered might come along tomorrow and make me look at the whole subject differently.

So now I’m wondering what else I haven’t stumbled across yet.