Hot tub time machines

Humans are hot tub time machines.

I don’t know anything about anything, especially about what’s happening Now. As Socrates deferred, “All I know is that I know nothing.” 

However, I recently opened a line of communication with someone who might know something about what’s happening: my future self, who’s already been through it and taken some lumps. 

To be fair, it’s less a conversation and more one-way dispatch. But that dude, bless his quantum heart, still talks to me.

The first time it happened, I was about to do something incredibly negligent. Then out of nowhere, I felt a presence. A vibrational frequency that hit like my own, transmitting a wordless message: Wake up, you’re about to mess up. 

And in those moments, I felt on a soul level that the version of me sending that message was the one who did mess up—and paid the price—but found a way to reach across the multiverse to do me a solid.

I felt deep gratitude for the future, negligent version of me—stuck with the fallout of his own bad call, yet still taking the time to send a blast to the past and skool me.

If what I was experiencing was real, it added a whole new dimension to the expression “look out for yourself.”

Wordplay notwithstanding, it was still a big if. But it happened again—once when I was about to do something incredibly stupid, and another time when I was about to do something incredibly heartless. And I suspect my future selves have sent other messages I’ve picked up on without consciously realizing it.

Even after experiencing this phenomenon several times, I still couldn’t rule out the possibility that it was all a figment of my vivid imagination. But the thought kept nagging at me: could humans truly pull off some kind of time travel?

So I turned to my spiritual exemplar, Marcus Aurelius. Like a drill sergeant in a toga, Marcus hammers home the same message again and again in the Meditations: watch your train of thought, because you become what you think. Was it wise, then, to think so much about the past and future? After all, life happens in the here and now, and only the present moment is real.

But it hit me that this wasn’t just about time. It was about consciousness itself, the foundational fabric of reality. As physicist Max Planck succinctly summarized, "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Consciousness exists outside of time and space, which points to why it’s the fundamental field “we cannot get behind.” Our ability to recall the past and envision the future reveals its timeless nature. Because things unfold in “no time” and “no space,” everything’s happening Now, everywhere, all at once—just like in the movie where the main character engages with different versions of herself across the multiverse.

And hey, if Hollywood says it’s real, I’m sold.

It occurred to me that since humans are basically water warmed inside flesh bags to a toasty 98.6 degrees—and consciousness flows through us like a timeless current through spaceless circuitry—that makes us all organic hot tub time machines.

Then it hit me: I hadn’t been doing my part.

While future versions of me had been looking out for the version of me that’s sharing this three-dimensional experience with you, I hadn’t done jack for past me.

So now, whenever I do something really negligent, stupid, or heartless—which still happens all the time despite my future selves’ interventions—I take a moment to pay it forward by walking it back. I keep it simple. Use as few words as possible. Focus on the feeling I want to convey. I visualize a specific version of me, in a specific place and time. And I send my message to myself with love from the bottom of my heart.

I suspect humans have been doing this kind of thing unconsciously for millennia. But when we do it with intention, we elevate it to a whole new dimension.

I’m not 100 percent sure the messages are getting through—but on a soul level, I feel like most of them are. And while I don’t pretend that I can reshape the present moment, which is as it is, sometimes I feel the past shift so hard it moves the future.