How to Rewind Time

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

It can be a good thing to learn from the past. (“Must remember to look behind when backing up car.”) It can be a good thing to look around the room and mentally rewind everything you see to its source. (“Where did that bag of Tostitos come from and would I want to see how they were made?”) The past is embedded everywhere.

The novelist William Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”

But what if the past wasn’t serving you – would you be able to unlearn it? Let’s see.

As part of pre-production for a documentary series we’re working on, I recently went to see a researcher named John D. Riley. At his Zero Point Research lab, I sat in front of a Lifestream Generator, a device pumping out millions of volts of DC electrical energy. If you’ve ever seen a Tesla coil, you’ll get an idea of what this is like. He told me that as the energy passed through me I’d experience where I was emotionally blocked. Well, I sure was feeling something around my neck and left shoulder – it jerked up and back, pulled by an unseen force. In that very second, an indelible image burst on the movie screen in my mind. I saw my 40-year-old father pulling my arm as I, at age 10, tried to run away. Was this some of my past somehow embedded in me, now released? Faulkner had it right. The past wasn’t even past. I was carrying some of it around in my shoulder.

Lots of people wanting to heal themselves are looking to reprogram the embedded past. Go to a yoga class and see if twisting your torso will release mental crud and create more space. Maybe a hypno-therapist can rewire your mind. Maybe an acupuncturist can get life force flowing in a more balanced pattern. Stored memory is powerful, whether it involves language, images, or even body postures. Manipulating it might be the key to healing on both the macro and micro levels… perhaps right down to the level of individual cells.

That’s the focus of some promising research at Children’s Hospital Boston that suggests we will be able to press reset on a cell’s developmental clock. If disease scarred your heart or damaged your nerves or knocked out your immune system, scientists could reboot. In successful experiments, they’ve already reverted ordinary skin cells to their embryonic state. Called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) these cells can become whatever kind of cell required – blood cells, brain cells, lung cells or heart cells. That means the body would have a chance to start over. The cell’s “memory” of being sick would be erased.

Emotionally positive memories play a role in healing, but even negative memories have their usefulness. If you happen to remember that snakes with a triangular head are poisonous, you might think to back away when you see one. Still, the prospect of rewinding time, being able to reprogram ourselves, or rebooting a sick cell makes me believe that we have a shot of taking charge of our past in order to shape the future.

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