Bondi Bend

Time: we know it is linear and very bent. What does it feel like to wormhole through 30 years? Be in the Pacific and the Atlantic simultaneously? And why this is seriously useful?!

Time bending is deeply supportive, radically weird and fundamentally powerful for healing ourselves and the world: we can and do change our past. This is a different reality from modern day perspectives. Try treating it as if it is true and as a real reality.¹

Act 3, Scene 1 of The Rascal, the Mongrel and the Seeker. My Bondi Bend

Now two rivers run their course
Separated for so long
I'm dreaming of a brighter day
When the waters will be one
Treaty, Yothu Yindi

Bondi Pavilion is a minute walk from Sydney’s famous beach and hundreds have made it into the open air performance space. Think small outdoor square, you’re only a few meters from the band. We’re all totally psyched for this benefit concert and something of a unique crowd here for indigenous justice as well as music, there is a lot of shared passion.

I know richness and anthems are coming. I’m not expecting the connections I feel to bend time, warp logic and zap clouds. I don’t know this is enabled with the help of my older self, from 30 years in the future, too.

We're runnin' from the heart o' darkness
And searchin' for the heart o' light…
They're livin' on borrowed time
And the winds of change
Were blowing cold that night
Solid Rock Goanna

Goanna’s up first. Of course they are going to play Solid Rock and we’re all going to feel it through the ground of our beings.

Mandawuy Yunupingu and Yothu Yindi. Yep, Tribal Voice will be on the way. And Midnight Oil is to close the show.

Kev Carmody now. We’re drawing in, guitar and voice, and as his set begins to build so do the clouds. Suddenly, a big storm is boiling up over the Pacific Ocean and threatening the outdoor stage, uncovered sound equipment and performers.

As Yothu Yindi get rolling so does the sky. Darker, greyer, coagulating and circling to enclose us fast: the first rain starts on the headlands to the north.

Beside the freeway in the darkness
Are the monuments to pain…
Where the wreaths of peace are lain
Outside in the rain
Rider in the Rain, Kev Carmody

Midnight Oil now and no way, water is not going to turn the lights off on this show, the sheets of rain around are not going to take us out.

I ‘push’, my understanding at the time, feeling like I’m becoming a part of the clear vortex above. My sense of being on purpose with others extends beyond social cause into visceral connection. I feel as the crowd, us in unison, up and into a cylindrical space all around us through to the top of the atmosphere, holding the clouds away. It’s pouring on the beach, overhead blue, encircled by rain around the pavilion and not a drop on the performance or crowd.

The Oils finish their full set and encore with Beds are Burning. As we depart into the early evening I set aside the weirdness and strangeness, bending the clouds, the portal of dryness that’s been above us. Really?

Life picked me up this morning and thrust me to the world
Like a child I'm hurtled forward
Dreaming things anew, sights I see sound true
All the places, open faces gracing everything I view
In the rain, Midnight Oil

Thirty years later and I’m on the first of a series of buses up the coast of Harris, a day trip to the airport.

I’m half a world away from Australia, on the Western Isles Scotland and watching rain roil up on Toe Head from the Atlantic ocean.

It’s often wet here, nothing usual about this except my context now is radically different. This is my first voluntarily travel, non-medical trip, after a year in time loops, being transported into and as different universes.² I’ve radically reorientated to treating these experiences as simultaneously true, as if they are true, as enhanced awareness and integrating the wildness for my recovery.³

Suddenly I’m simultaneously on the bus and feeling myself at the Bondi Pavilion. It feels like being the walls and open space of this clear dry sky. Like a metaphoric wormhole from my present to The Pacific, a felt sense of the whole crowd and Midnight Oil. Sensually, I’m in a cohesion of space, in the now and then, sensing co-creating light, knowing it’s done and tendril like congruences emanating like fast growing vines, entangling and penetrating into/from me.

To stay with and lean into the strangeness—subtle with physical, re-membering our physical truths, love and what this feels like, the alienness and human-ness—is a deep sense of peace and power. It feels like blue sky clarity on what we’re creating, an island of cohesion.

I remember doing the Time Warp
Drinking those moments when
The blackness would hit me
And the void would be calling

Let's do the Time Warp again
Let's do the Time Warp again
Little Nell

There is power and good here. The “as if it is true” and “it is true” frame lets me feel it’s done—multilayered truth and justice realising—with grace and dignity. This allows human capacity, my and all of ours, to be broader and honoured.

Consciously holding the weird and unusual is important. We’re healing with this: I am and was healing with this. It lets me constantly uncover parts of myself including things that are difficult, sensations and tethers that may otherwise hold me back.

Moreover, we’re at a time of enlightenment. Our social technology, psycho-tech if you like, provides deep and validated frameworks for exploring this consciously, recognising meaning that we might otherwise conceal from ourselves.⁴ From a simple level it’s a shift. Go beyond this too and feel this across time, in unity consciousness too. Be viscerally present with your younger self, changing and supporting your past and now.

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I am deeply indebted to my dear, dear friend Teresa Zimmermann including inspiration for this series title, to write Act 3, to integrate the songs … and so much more.

Pictures: Festina Lentívaldi, (be) Benevolution. Reuse: Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 US except #3 Mandawuy Yunupingu from Wikimedia commons; #5 halo effect ai prompt by @Berno; and, My Old Ass below from the film’s promotional picture.

1. This post is greatly supported by recent shifts the first of which is IPBES in which 147 nations now endorse “spiritual reconnection between humans and nature”: groundbreaking! See We are in a portal for why and an embodied exercise to explore some of this yourself.

Second is The Telepathy Tapes “certain nonverbal autistic children can communicate telepathically, with a rate of accuracy (~95%) that far surpasses anything seen in previous ESP research.” Recommended listening, decide on the evidence for yourself as well as see The year of magic

Chris Cordy

.

Third, doesn’t have to be so serious :-) My Old Ass…

My Old Ass is a beautiful, heart embracing story of 18 year old Eliott meeting her 39 year old self. Thanks and shout out to

Alexander Beiner

here> for this recommendation.

Fourth “poles routinely show us 60% of people have unitative walking up experiences …abundant research makes it very clear that in many instances altered states reveal genuine realities, real realities that are dimensions of this world just rarely seen or felt” Ken Wilber Finding Radical Wholeness. See chapter 7 for a deeper expansion on treating these experience ‘as if they are true’ and as a ‘alternative reality, mystically literal’

Five is more time bending and try it too in Entanglements: Time folded forgiveness.

2. My story of feeling as the whole universe rushing through me is a three Act series.

Act 1, the rascal:
Scene 1 is The rascals immunity
Scene 2 is Rascal visions
Scene 3 is Rascal’s descent
Scene 4 is Boom, crash, bounce?

Act 2, the mongrel:
Scene 1 is The Rascal and the Mongrel
Scene 2 is Western logic
Scene 3 is Unfolding realities
Scene 4 is The red pill

Act 3, the seeker:
Scene 1 is My Bondi bend, this article
Scene 2 coming soon

There is one interlude: That rascal. Got me

3. It took a lot to embrace other realities—the conventional science nerd part of me resists. A logical structure for this, e.g. our quantum selves meeting the universe, is one thing: Karen Barad’s, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (amazon & public library) is a deep research/exploration of such paradigmatically different conceptualisations.

However, a congitive-logical argument for how we are part of co-creating some realities “the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies” is wildly different from feeling part of and as everything. For me this felt sense experience, the entire universe rushing through me, is like fractals of stellar supernovas exploding and whorling in every cell, sensually entangled and interpenetrating as entireness, opening—being opened as the opening, gatewaying; in and as what already is—with timeliness and time as already done and now, simultaneously. Initially that was totally overwhelming and I spent a year on the floor. See the links in footnote 2 for more of the story.

4. Accessible, common and powerful contains more practices and research links. To explore such spaces I use a number of frameworks including cognitively across time with quantum social science and socio-emotionally from the Core, Teresa Zimmermann ‘s beautiful model giving us actionable clarity on peak states like Infinity and Peace at a depth nothing else I know of does. Please reach out email> for more.