Between Worlds: Parallel Ways of Knowing

Most of us spend our days moving from one thing to the next, doing our best to keep up, rarely stopping long enough to notice how narrowly we’re often living. There are days when I realize I’ve been living almost entirely in my head – thinking, planning, responding – while my body quietly waits to be noticed.

In ordinary consciousness, the body is often treated as a vehicle for the mind. We move it from place to place, ask it to perform, expect it to cooperate. Time moves relentlessly forward. Even moments of rest are shaped by productivity – resting in order to work better, slowing down so we can speed up again. This way of living is not wrong. It is necessary. But it is not complete.

And yet, there are moments when something shifts. Time seems to step back. Attention deepens. The familiar world loosens its hold, as if another way of experiencing is suddenly close at hand—an alternate layer of reality coming into focus.

Physicists speak of parallel universes: realities that may exist alongside our own, unseen yet coexisting. Whether or not we take the science literally, the metaphor is useful. It points to the possibility that reality is layered, and that our everyday way of perceiving the world is only one mode among many.

This recognition does not come from being taken somewhere else. It comes through a lived process, one that allows us to directly experience what has been present all along. It is not reached through explanation or belief, but through direct encounter.

In these parallel ways of knowing, time does not behave as we expect. Experiences arise that feel older than our biography. The body remembers things the mind never learned. This is not regression or fantasy; it is participation in a deeper field of human experience.

Ritual Postures offer entry into this recognition by allowing the body to become the bridge. The posture itself acts as a stabilizing structure, holding us at the threshold between worlds. It keeps us grounded enough to remain present, while allowing perception to shift beyond habitual patterns. Breath anchors the experience, preventing us from drifting into story or dissociation.

This is why two people can enter the same posture and have different, yet connected, experiences, and both feel authentic. The posture opens the door; the body knows how to walk through it in its own way.

As attention drops out of its familiar loops and into the body, sensation becomes more vivid. Thought loosens its grip. Another way of knowing emerges—one that does not need to be analyzed to be trusted.

People often say, “It felt like I was somewhere else.” But this is not a distant place. It is more like stepping sideways into a neighboring reality—one that runs alongside everyday life. In this parallel experience, meaning does not need to be sought; it arrives. Insight is not interpreted; it is embodied.

When we release a posture, we do not leave this parallel world behind. Something lingers—a quiet spaciousness, a deeper listening, a sense that the world is wider than we were taught. The world itself has not changed, but our relationship to it has. And that may be the most important crossing of all.