Time is coiled upon itself like a giant spring, compressed down into a single moment, and everything is happening and contained in that single moment. Everything.

Most of us experience time as a linear progression, a sequence of events through which our consciousness moves exclusively in one direction. You may balk at how limiting this is, but it’s actually a helpful tool or framework that allows you to experience your life in a certain way, but it’s just one way time can be configured, perceived and used. It’s one possible user interface for the substrate of the thing we call time.

Some people have moments when this common linear user interface stops working. There are many different ways this temporary lapse in normal time configuration can happen. In fact, this happens all the time to everyone, but usually your mind will automatically apply a Continuity Patch. This patch smooths out the contours of that momentary disruption, blurs it out a bit, making it easy for your conscious awareness to skip over those instances to maintain a continuous experience of time-as-forward-motion.

Another concept we need to touch on is other timelines, or you might think of them as parallel universes. Some of these are dramatically different from our own, but some are so similar, you might wonder what’s the point of having an entire parallel universe to express such trivial variations.

Sometimes there are overlaps or bleedthroughs from other lives.

The most common intrusions come from past lives and parallel lives. The two we’ll address here are overlaps and bleedthroughs.

Overlaps are when you suddenly become aware of a past or parallel life. It may be in the form of suddenly having vivid memories of these lives, of these past selves, or it may be something more immediate, like you may experience moments where you are living both lives simultaneously.

As an example, I was sunbathing on my balcony on a warm spring morning in my current life and riding a train from the east coast to Pasadena with my friends in the late 1920s. I was living and experiencing both of these fully and simultaneously — not sitting on my balcony and remembering the train ride from a past life. This happened for an hour or so, and then my awareness consolidated back to my current life.

In an overlap, your awareness is affected, but not your body or your physical environment.

A bleedthrough is more consequential, more of an actual intrusion. Some examples of bleedthrough include:

Being partially hacked by a past or parallel self. I say hacked, but you may feel more familiar with the concept as possession. Other selves can temporarily take over and act through your current persona. They can make you feel their feelings, they can patch in their preferences, fears, priorities. Because they are your other selves, you may not even register these intrusions as coming from outside yourself, because even though they are not you, they also feel familiar enough so that your inner security system doesn’t get tripped.

These kinds of intrusions usually happen in short, intense bursts — after which you’re often left wondering what just happened? It’s a very uncanny me, but not me kind of feeling.

Another form of bleedthrough is physical. You could start experiencing illness, pain or other physical symptoms that actually originate in and belong to a past or parallel incarnation. A lot of times these are negative experiences, but occasionally something beneficial will bleedthrough, like a useful skill or ability, or a slight change in appearance or even biological age.

What are the dangers?

Overlapping isn’t inherently dangerous, but it can lead to a maladaptive fascination that causes life derailment. You can imbue these experiences with an urgency and significance that’s just not there. You might convince yourself you’re supposed to follow these threads and do something or solve something, or that these other lives hold the key to your wellbeing or spiritual development. And so you take one step in that direction and the momentum sucks you into the proverbial rabbit hole.

Experiences of overlap are really interesting, but also…no big deal. Too often, you can become obsessed with discovering more or figuring it out — as though there is a valuable prize at the end of the puzzle. There isn’t a prize, nor likely even any puzzle. It’s all too common to have this extraordinary experience of overlap and then make up a story around it out of whole cloth, giving it meaning and significance that just isn’t there.

Bleedthrough is another matter entirely, and these experiences can be really confusing and destabilizing. They can happen spontaneously, but they can also happen because of something you’ve done (inadvertently or intentionally) to open yourself to it. They can also happen through the intent of your Other Life Self, pushing out into your lifestream. Your other selves have different motivations for doing this — most of the ones I’ve seen are parasitic.

You instinctively feel bound to these other selves, but are you? What do you owe these other selves? Well, nothing, really. You are not obligated to offer them room and board if they pop in uninvited, with all their problematic baggage, no less! They have (or had) their lives, their own designated realm to explore and cultivate — it’s rather greedy for them to muscle into yours.

But it can be devilishly hard to establish and maintain your sovereignty and authority when dealing with intrusions because these are your other selves, and you naturally feel a familiarity, affinity and deep empathy for them.

Generally speaking only the less developed selves will impose on you in this way, which is why these situations tend toward the parasitic.

These other selves have strong unresolved pain, longing, fear or some kind of powerful emotional imprint that they bleed over. The mechanism is akin to a kind of reverse chemical osmosis. But it only works if you offer them a semipermeable boundary.

More evolved selves who have something to offer can certainly interact with you, but they wouldn’t do it in a way that compromises your sovereignty or boundaries. They wouldn’t employ the bleedthrough method in the first place.

In all of this, one key factor always comes into play: knowing what’s you and what’s not you.

If you’ve incorporated a daily practice of clearing away the fragments and debris in your energetic space, and hone your ability to recognize and amplify your unique signature frequency, it will be a lot easier to detect an intrusion. Once you detect it, you need to refrain from leaning into it — out of fascination, out of a need to be distracted from your own life, out of a sense of loyalty or obligation to another self. You lean in, and this immediately puts you off balance.

This all sounds like one great big warning, doesn’t it? Well, it’s meant to be. Yet, can I confide something here? I interact with my past, future and other selves all the time. There are ways and reasons to do this, but it needs to be undertaken from a place of authority, clarity and unshakable equilibrium.