It's time to raise the blinds, unlock the windows, and see what's poised out there in a mind-bending new way.  Ready to re-fold the origami of reality?  Let's do that together, in a few easy steps.  I'm Prof. Oddfellow, of the School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity.

There's a preliminary question that's going to figure into what we'll accomplish here.  But it's an uncomfortable one for sure.  Is your life based on a true story?  It sounds like a silly question.  Yet have you ever experienced "imposter syndrome" and feared being exposed as incompetent, a fraud, or a liar?  Like me, have you ever not liked the image you saw in a mirror?  Or has a portrait not seemed, well, photorealistic?  Have you ever felt aimless or purposeless?  Have you ever made decisions based upon superstitions or delusions or information that later proved to be unreliable?  Have you ever been labeled with words that don't fit you?  Have you ever "lost the plot," and has that plot ever seemed invented or controlled by others who have made you superfluous?  For it has been said that life is a fiction in which not all of us are significant characters.  Whether or not we're the hero, we seek to make sense of experience by shaping coherent narratives, further proving that every life is a fiction and every story-making mind its imaginative author.  We retell the stories differently according to our audiences and recollections and insights, and our stories become shaped by time, space, and understanding.  At least we're in control of the narrative, right, and aren't merely listening to tales from an automatic brain?  We're conscious entities and not zombies, right?  Well, let's not see ourselves as zombies but rather put an entirely different spin on things — a spin that will help us to see what's outside our window in a whole new twilight.

We'll let our eyes travel over the landscape, past that towering gothic cathedral that surely couldn't have been constructed in the 1300s — I mean, what are we to make of that incomprehensible accomplishment?  Was it put there by aliens, or, as so many are positing, is it a remnant of a more highly-civilized and advanced culture whose entire history has been suppressed or obliterated?  We daren't dwell at that cathedral, lest a rabbit hole of mysteries keep us investigating forever, though we might mention it again in a bit, alongside those marble columned, massive-domed, Greek and Roman temples that surely can't have been built as government buildings in the 1800s, when there were just donkey carts on dirt roads.  

No, let's keep traveling all the way to the deserts of Utah where lie such wonders as Monument Valley and Arches National Park and Bryce Canyon, with mountain peaks looking for all the world more like petrified architecture than natural formations.  Are these areas the remains of former cities, their citadels forming the monuments of Monument Valley, their bridges and spires forming the skylines of Arches National Park and Bryce Canyon?  Well, in these confusing times, so often the best way to penetrate the fogs of perplexity, disinformation, and illusion is to flip any perspective backwards and upside down.  The idea is to invert a riddle to discover the solution, to rearrange a lie to find a truth, and to consider a radically different vantage point so as to see with fresh eyes.  

Let's do that even with the canyons of Utah, whose architectural outcroppings would ordinarily suggest lost cities of a forgotten past — such loss being a depressing concept for those of us who shiver at the thought of entire cultures being utterly forgotten.  Let's flip the timeline itself, which we can do since even Big Science agrees with the wisdom traditions that linear time is an illusion.  Instead of seeing the rocky spires and arches as lost to the so-called past, let's see them as emerging from the so-called future, as if a giant sculptor were forming a city of clay, and we're witnessing the partially-formed lumps that are yet to be intricately carved into towers, aqueducts, and pantheons.  Instead of experiencing a profound loss, we can thrill to the excitement of finding a future reality or higher dimension emerging into ours.  Same with those inexplicably massive marble monuments they're calling capitol buildings and those cathedrals they're calling churches — yes, they could easily be understood as artifacts of a civilization wiped from the historical record, but they might also be bits of the future poking through holes in the fabric of space-time.  

Now let's carry this concept a bit further and wonder whether we ourselves might also be relics popping into this plane of existence from the future.  That might mean that our lives are fictional merely because no past story can tell our biography, since that's looking the wrong direction.  What if we don't belong to the historical record but rather are the stuff of prophecy?  Let only soothsayers speak of us!  Let others throw the dice and shuffle the Tarot cards in wonderment over our next move.  Let those with second sight see us with their third eyes for our true selves.  Let the crystal gazers commune with us, and let the others consider us ghosts.  Those who are intrigued to understand us may toss the runes or fine-tune their Tesla spirit radios.  If they won't bother to see our auras with a Kirlian camera, were they ever going to see us in the first place?  Let us answer the earnest swing of a pendulum or the sincere intonation of an invocation, but otherwise leave them in their befogged slumbers.  Compassionate as we may be for this waypoint in the timeline's past, we who follow the path of service-to-others are but visitors who don't truly belong amongst those caught up in service-to-self bewilderment.  We the people of the future, let us observe and assist only when directly asked, but even then with no attachment to any outcome.

Coming to you via my crystal ball from Colorado's Garden of the Gods — a spectacle of anomalies you'll now see in a whole new way — I've been Prof. Oddfellow.  See me in glorious monochrome in the long-running series Prof. Oddfellow's Penetralia and Grave Mood Rings, on cable stations across the United States, Roku, Youtube, and MysteryArts.com.

Photo credits: Kirk K., Anna Irene, Cindy