#1 - Mandela effect decoded (MED) entrance exam
Greetings to each and all. You have reached John Lash on Mandela Effect Decoded. And now let's see if I can reach you. This talk is the first that I'm presenting through the medium of the Internet that comes directly from this YouTube channel created in February of 2017. Some of you may know that there is a considerable amount of material from yours truly, both written and spoken material, circulating around on the internet. Well, that's fine, and you can make of it what you will. But this channel and the material to be released to this channel represents a new departure for me. So bear with me if I sound just a little bit tense. I'm quite excited, but I am tense, and I am, you could say, in a state of suspense. A certain state of suspense. That is in part due to the nature of the subject matter of this initial talk. Also due to the fact that I am addressing the public at large, all of you out there who hear these words, in a different way than I have done in the past.
The difference is mainly due to the fact that I'm coming to your attention on a wave of interest that already exists. I'm coming to your attention with a topic that is already widely known across the world, many people would say. Who knows, to date, how many people have been impacted by the Mandela effect. I think it's fair to say that it is a phenomenon, a baffling phenomenon, propagating itself on the planetary scale. It may not have reached all corners of the planet and all languages and all cultures. No, I wouldn't say that. As a matter of fact, the consideration of which areas of the world today the Mandela effect does reach and which it doesn't is an interesting one. That's a subject that I intend to discuss in the course of this investigation. That topic, the target audience of the Mandela Effect, you might say, is one of several topics that come up in the process of considering how the effect is operating in the world and how it is propagating itself in the human mind. Additional to that are the more intimate questions and topics concerning well, the origin of the effect, what's causing it, and what is the ultimate purpose of it, if there is one. Does it have something to teach? What can be learned from the study of this effect. And these are the essential questions to be explored as I develop the Gnostic investigation, as I call it, over the next month. But for now, let's get directly to the entrance exam. This talk consists largely of an oral or spoken version of the written text that you find linked in the description.
That text along with the other material I will be producing on the Mandela Effect can be found on metahistory.org. The links will always be provided in the description as the material is released on this YouTube channel and there is also a related Facebook page which gives you the opportunity to follow the development of this investigation. So here goes. Exam requirements. Well, it's pretty simple. The exam requires, or invites, if you prefer, you to write a three-sentence paragraph stating your present idea of 1. who Nelson Mandela was, 2. what he accomplished in life, and 3. how he came to be regarded by the world at large. Write from your current knowledge at the moment of taking the exam. Do not research Nelson Mandela by looking at internet material, YouTube clips, or consulting any books. Do not ask anyone about him. Do not look over entries that are already posted in the comment section below or on the Facebook page that is linked to this exam, as those comments will appear and accumulate over time. Simply state what you know about him at this moment, right now, apart from any research and free of external input. By entering the exam you give permission to have your entry, that is a paragraph of three sentences, cited in the investigation of the Mandela effect underway.
You will not be identified by name or email or by any other reference. Your entry will be valuable purely for the purposes of research. Understood? By proposing an exam, I may risk coming across a little bit stiff and stuffy, as if I were a schoolmaster. Be not concerned, I will not be scoring your entries like a teacher or professor would. There is no authoritarian attitude here, no intention to judge anyone. But you may wonder why propose an exam if there will be no grades for it? In that case, without knowing your score, or even having a score, how can any of you pass the exam? Good question. You will know the result of the exam due to the effect produced in your mind when you hear the purpose of it.
Reflect on that statement for a moment. It asserts that the result of the exam arises in your own mind once you learn what its purpose is. Take the exam first, and the reason I invite you to take it will be revealed after you have submitted your entry. Yes, there is a risk involved, the risk of learning something about how your mind works, which may have escaped you up to this moment. Imagine that. Here, speaking purely off the cuff, I might interject a pithy little Gnostic comment. You have your mind, the faculty of intelligence, to use at liberty, without actually knowing how it works. Did you ever think of that? The human animal is endowed with mind, intellect, reasoning, the capacity for observation and analysis. These are the faculties that we are going to use in the course of the investigation into the Mandela effect. But it's perhaps worth noting at the outset, even before the investigation begins, that your mind is something you have had all your life and you have worked your mind without necessarily knowing how your mind works.
But now there is an opportunity to learn how your mind works. An opportunity that arises in intimate connection with the operations of the Mandela Effect. Back to the text. Anyone may take the exam, regardless of what you think about the Mandela Effect. You do not have to believe the effect is genuine. You might consider it a psy-op, or dismiss it as an epidemic case of misremembering, whatever. The work of Satan or CERN, right? Whatever. The exam is an exercise to test your intelligence, designed to show you something about how you view the world, about your mindset, regardless of how you view the Mandela effect. That is the challenge here. Consider it as an opportunity to measure your IQ, but not in the ordinary sense of that term. Call it instead your PsyQ. Psi, which may be spelled P-S-Y or P-S-I, is an abbreviation used in numerous ways, all referring to the genres of psychic phenomena and psychological study.
All interests, themes, and activities denoted by Psy relate in some way or another to how the psyche works. The well-known compound term PSYOP denotes an operation that works upon the human mind and emotions with the intent of distorting reality and programming behavior. It is a tactic of trickery and deception. If you are targeted by a PSYOP, you will be tricked, conned, confused, duped, misled, and misdirected in ways that advance the agenda of those who aim to deliberately deceive you.
Well, no big news there. Just about everyone today knows what a psyop is, right? And you can cite an example or two, I'm sure. Goodness knows, they abound in this day and age. But how can you measure your innate capacity to direct a Psy-op? How good are you at it? It takes a certain kind of intelligence, special savvy, and observational acumen to see how a PSYOP is working on you, even indeed to see if it is there in the first place. Your PsyQ is the IQ of your capacity to detect that you are being PsyOPT’D and fathom how it is being done. This entrance exam is a simple exercise designed to test your PsyQ and reveal how vulnerable you are to being duped and misled. Calling this exercise an entrance exam uses a play on words. The double entendre cues your attention to a particular state of mind or mental entrainment. The exam is designed to produce insight about how you hold narratives of the world. It does so by engaging your probative faculty, the sense for truth that can be verified.
Probative, an adjective, that means having the quality or function of proving or demonstrating something, affording proof or evidence. For instance, it places the probative burden on the defendant. An entrance is a way to get into something, to access a subject or a location. Yes, but entrance used as a verb and trance describes a state of mind, the condition of being in a trance, mentally captivated, under a spell. The exam is designed to show you if you are entranced or not. Now no one can fail the exam. There is no wrong answer. The way you answer shows your intellectual capacity to detect if you are in a trance. That capacity in turn determines how well you will do in following this investigation intended to decode the Mandela effect. Think of the exam as a benevolent trick played on your mind to free your mind, rather like a Zen koan. It reveals your mindset for the purpose of freeing your mind, or at least presenting you with the option to free your mind.
The choice to do so is, of course, entirely yours. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So what's in a name? The Mandela Effect was named by self-styled paranormal consultant Fiona Broome sometime in 2010. As the story goes, Broom was attending the Dragon Con Convention, an event that occurs annually since 1987 in Atlanta, Georgia. The convention is a gathering of professionals and fans involved in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and comic books. At some point in the events of the day, when Broome found herself chatting with other participants, the subject of Nelson Mandela came up, more or less at random.
She was surprised to discover that some of the people in the conversation, including herself, were convinced that Mandela had died in the 1980s in prison, while others insisted fervently that he was still alive. Curious if this discrepancy of recall was a case of widely held false memories, or perhaps a paranormal phenomenon worth investigating, Broome began looking for other similar anomalies. She founded MandelaEffect.com to document such cases. So it appears that the name given to this baffling phenomenon of mnemonic anomaly is arbitrary. Or is it? The death of Nelson Mandela presents the inceptive case of the phenomenon named after him. It also establishes a category of the effect comprised of what might be called the alive again instances. These instances now include various celebrities, comedians, a world-famous preacher or evangelist, and sundry others.
Although Mandela's case belongs in this category, due to being the first instance of the effect to be named, it stands alone, sui generis, in a class by itself. To my knowledge, no one so far has asked if the naming of the effect might somehow be relevant to how it works or even to its purpose. Many investigators beside myself are pondering long and hard on the purpose of the Mandela effect, if it has one. Everyone impacted by it is bound to wonder about this as well, but to my knowledge no one has inquired if labeling the effect with the name Mandela might itself be indicative of how the effect works, if it might signify something about the nature of this phenomenon. If the name is arbitrary, arising from a random topic in a conversation, then that would not be the case. Clearly not. But what if it is so? What's in a name? What specifically is in the name Nelson Mandela? Well, Nelson means son of Neil, and Neil is an ancient Gaelic Celtic word meaning champion, a man's name meaning champion. There's a clue to be examined later in this investigation.
As for Mandela, it means both almond and shock in German. Now hold those associations in mind. I'll return to them in the breakdown, which is the first level of the four stage investigation. Added note: to be absolutely precise, and I shall be as precise as I can, in the course of this investigation, the German word is Mandel, that is the German word for almond and chalk. Mandel without the A. So the inceptive case of the effect concerns different memories of the death of a known individual. His death. The difference in memories of the date of his death is central to the initial recognition of the effect, right? It's the occasion for the discovery of the effect, right? True, obviously, everyone knows that by now. But what about his life? Is the life of Nelson Mandela as well as his death relevant to the effect named after him? Do the facts of his life reveal something about the effect? What could they possibly reveal? What are the facts of his life? What is his life story? Is there something in his life story that relates to the origin and or purpose of the effect?
Considering these questions, you can see how the entrance exam or the entrance exam is designed. It concerns the narrative of a man's life that you hold in your mind or your mindset. That is the narrative that you hold right now, unedited, in just the way you construct that narrative based on what you know about the man, the essential facts of his life, and how it has come to be viewed by the world at large. That narrative, in a paragraph consisting of three sentences is what you submit to enter this exam. Assuming that the name is arbitrary, it could as well have been the Elvis effect, right? If the initial case of conflicting memories had concerned the death of Elvis Presley. Or how about Audrey Hepburn, the actress known worldwide for her roles in My Fair Lady, Breakfast at Tiffany's and other films and plays. She was born in 1929 of exotic Austrian-Dutch lineage. Toward the end of her life she was involved in humanitarian causes, acting as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF.
How much do you know about the last years of this woman's life? Did she die in 1993 of stomach cancer? Or a little earlier during her second marriage, late in the 1980s? If there had been confusion about the year of her death prompting a discussion among Fiona Broome and others at the Dragon Con conference in 2010, well, the Mandela effect might have been named the Hepburn effect. But it was not so named, and not by chance either. I assure you of that, but don't take my word on faith. Sign on to this examination, follow the investigation with me, and find out for yourself. As it now stands, the name Mandela is a cue that looks like this, person, reference, death. In other words, I'm adding this comment, what is relevant about Mandela is his death, the death of that person. The effect comes to be recognized when people differ in their memories of the death of that person. Hence the cue looks that way. I use the forward pointing arrow shape symbol to indicate the inference of the clue or cue. I shall have quite a lot to say about cuing and cluing in the investigation ahead.
Attention goes to the death of the person, but that could be misdirection. The cue can also look like this. Person reference life. The exam I propose follows that cue. Hey, look over here instead. Consider how Mandela lived, rather than just when he died. Whatever may be assumed at the outset of this investigation about the Mandela effect, it's fair to say that this phenomenon presents a signal or signaling process. It captures human attention at the level of everyday observation. The sign reading Home Depot now reads The Home Depot. What you used to hear as, it's a wonderful day in the neighborhood, is now it’s a wonderful day in this neighborhood. The brand name Depends is now Depend, and so on through hundreds of incidences. In short, the effect depends on immediate noticing of trivial details of everyday life which reveal inexplicable changes, and these changes in turn depend on holding memories of what existed before the change occurred.
Thus, the effect impacts observation and memory with a double whammy. It is a two-phase signal. Whatever its origin and purpose, the signal coming into the world now, and into your mind and your field of attention and into your memory, through the Mandela Effect, is propagating massively through the human psyche. A signal points to something, like a lighthouse does, or it may encode a message, as Morse code does. What would happen if it were possible to decode the Mandela Effect and discover its true nature, both as a signal emanating from a specific source and a message presented in a cryptic manner that requires your closest attention, so that it can teach you something.
Stick around and let's find out. And may your attention be rewarded by the truth.