The Invisible River — Part III – Branching Timelines, Recapitulation & Reversal of Time
Here is the final interview in the series leading up to the Invisible River intensive event with Isaac Boatright in the greater Eugene OR area. Hugh and Isaac suddenly reappear after technical difficulties to complete the conversation that was synchronistically cut off around the topic of timelines and branching. And oddly enough they are both wearing different shirts. Are these the two that we knew from the original interview and timeline…it’s up to you to discern and learn from the final conversation on THE INVISIBLE RIVER.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Whoa, and we’re back.
This is the variant of Hugh T. Alkemi, back from the future to complete the interview about branching timelines and time travel with Isaac Boatright.
Welcome back.
Isaac Boatright:
Yeah.
We were talking about Branching and how that’s done.
It’s done in a trance from the totality of your being.
As much as possible, it’s not an idle fantasy version. There’s nothing wrong with fantasizing, but in this case it’s a dreaming awake.
It’s really an exploration of what it is about that other timeline that calls to you by going into that timeline and dreaming that you’re living it.
If someone is always longing for a missed connection—the beautiful woman they never spoke to, the beautiful man they never approached—they can go back and talk to them.
It’s not about creating something positive or negative.
It’s about trying it out and seeing what happens.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Right.
Because there’s energy there for us.
Obviously we think about it, we consider it, or it comes to mind when the topic is presented.
Okay, I think I’m catching the hang of this.
It would be like those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books.
You could turn to one page or another page depending on the choice you made.
So we’re using imagination and other creative, astral, projective, and psychic abilities in addition to meditation and breathing techniques you’re going to guide us through.
Again, to go back to quantum mechanics, there’s a kind of blinking going on.
If you want to believe in parallel timelines, then the previous Hugh T. Alkemi and the previous Isaac Boatright are on separate timelines because we’re both wearing different shirts this time around.
Those people and their energies are feeling our energies, and it creates a collective of power.
Is that how that’s working?
Isaac Boatright:
That is a good way to look at it.
When I think about my experiences with Branching, I also want to clarify something.
I call it Branching because I think of one’s life as the trunk of a tree.
Then there’s a branch—a different decision, a different possibility.
You have the thick trunk, which is where we’re doing the practice from.
And then there’s that alternate branch that we can actually follow and embody.
It’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too kind of thing.
You really get to explore the ramifications of a different choice.
These meditations are so much more than meditations when you do them from the heart and the belly rather than only from the head.
You do them with your dreaming body.
That might sound intimidating, but it isn’t difficult.
It’s unfamiliar to people whose only experience is psychological talking processes.
But it’s actually very natural for human beings.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Right. Okay.
It is doable.
That goes to some of our cultural myths and stories.
The Marvel films, especially the Loki series, talk about a main timeline and branching timelines.
It’s one of the better modern metaphors for helping people understand these ideas.
Are you familiar with those?
Isaac Boatright:
Not really.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any of those.
I saw the ones with Groot.
The raccoon too.
Those were fun.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Rocket Raccoon.
Yeah, those were fun.
As a teaching mechanism for understanding dreams, I sometimes have students watch Loki because it deals directly with variants, branching realities, and alternate outcomes.
The idea of nested dreams, nested realities, and parallel lives begins to make sense when you start looking at dreams as having energy, attractivity, and influence.
Isaac Boatright:
I think dreams are even deeper than those kinds of quantifiers.
But I understand what you’re pointing toward.
Something important here is that when you change your own energy and awareness, everyone else changes too.
The world has to change as well.
If I do a lot of recapitulation, people relate to me differently because I’m different in their experience.
If I disentangle myself from a negative enmeshment and then meet that person later, the old hooks are no longer there.
They can’t project in the same way.
I don’t react in the same way.
If I change myself deeply through recapitulation, my entire family field changes.
The genetic resonance changes.
People often begin this work for selfish reasons, and that’s perfectly fine.
But the work is never only about us.
We’re in other people’s dreams and they’re in ours.
We’re dreaming together.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Absolutely.
Let’s be practical and practice something.
Let’s talk about emotional resonance. How changing our relationship to a memory, to a story we’re telling ourselves, can actually change the way we move through the present.
You started touching on that already with the idea that the hooks aren’t there anymore.
Can you speak a little bit more about that?
Maybe even from the somatic perspective. A lot of people have visceral experiences. The body keeps the score, as they say.
Earlier in our conversations offline, we were talking about people who have experienced severe trauma, assault, or violence, and how years later there can still be an enormous emotional charge around those experiences.
How do these things interplay, and how might practices like recapitulation benefit people who are looking for healing and freedom?
Isaac Boatright:
Yeah.
A close example for me would be when I used to work in downtown Eugene at a health food store.
Sometimes I had to deal with people who became aggressive or violent.
I remember one particular incident where a man became very angry with me.
He was cursing at me and directing a lot of hostility my way.
It really threw me off balance.
Afterward, I had to look closely at why that interaction affected me so strongly.
There was a residue left behind.
A nasty feeling.
There was a kind of predatory quality in the encounter that stayed with me long afterward.
Later that same day, I recapitulated the experience.
One of the beautiful things about recapitulation is that you can work with the distant past, but you can also work with something that happened this morning.
You can recapitulate your entire life.
You can work through specific themes.
Difficult relationships.
Experiences of violence.
Sexual experiences.
Grief.
Anything.
So I recapitulated that interaction.
I gave back all of the energy that belonged to him and reclaimed all of the energy that belonged to me.
A couple of weeks later, I encountered him again.
I helped him in the store.
And he didn’t recognize me.
More surprisingly, I didn’t recognize him either until he was leaving.
The energetic charge had changed so completely that the whole encounter felt different.
If I hadn’t done that work, I probably would have tensed up the moment he walked in.
I would have anticipated conflict.
And in doing so, I might have unconsciously participated in creating another difficult interaction.
Instead, the pattern wasn’t there.
It had been completed.
That’s one of the strange and beautiful effects of recapitulation.
Sometimes people will come up to me and remind me of things we’ve done together in the past, and it feels like they’re describing someone else.
Not because I’ve forgotten.
But because I’m no longer energetically inhabiting that version of myself in the same way.
The memories remain.
The identification loosens.
And that creates freedom.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
That brings me back to something we discussed in Part Two.
The Eagle.
The Eagle’s Gift.
The idea that the Eagle consumes experience, but awareness itself can become free.
It almost sounds like your encounter with that man became invisible to the Eagle.
The emotional charge wasn’t there anymore.
You weren’t identifying with the event.
Is that a reasonable way to think about it?
Isaac Boatright:
Yes.
That’s exactly right.
The event still happened.
Nothing is denied.
But it becomes complete in itself.
It doesn’t continue generating copies of itself.
It doesn’t keep reproducing.
It no longer requires your energy to sustain it.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Interesting.
So the result is freedom.
Isaac Boatright:
Freedom is the result.
What you do with that freedom is up to you.
One thing I eventually learned was to give recovered energy a direction.
After a recapitulation session, I might consciously make an intention for the energy I’ve reclaimed.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
I’ve mostly worked with broad intentions like healing, wholeness, and presence.
Isaac Boatright:
And that’s enough.
You don’t have to do anything more than that.
But it can be interesting to experiment with.
I actually learned that idea from another teacher who wrote extensively about recapitulation.
The practice itself is simple.
The depth comes from repetition and sincerity.
And honestly, I think it’s best learned in person.
We can talk about it endlessly.
We can write about it.
But this is fundamentally a sorcery maneuver.
There’s a transmission aspect to it.
After doing it for more than thirty years, I can share things through direct experience that are difficult to communicate through words alone.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
I completely agree.
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about learning in person is that there are levels being communicated beyond language.
Even if someone isn’t consciously perceiving another person’s energy, they’re still receiving information.
One of the most memorable recapitulation sessions we ever did together involved something incredibly ordinary.
Ice cream.
Isaac Boatright:
Yes.
That was when we were working with the black walnut trees here.
Two twin trees.
We stood with our backs against them and took turns giving each other themes.
Then we’d recapitulate each theme for several minutes.
The ice cream session became surprisingly profound.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
It really did.
At first I thought it was a silly topic.
I was just thinking about ice cream I’d eaten recently.
Then suddenly I found myself revisiting one of the earliest stories from my childhood.
My grandmother and my aunt had secretly given me ice cream for the first time.
Apparently I wasn’t supposed to have any.
The story had been told to me so many times throughout my life that it had accumulated a tremendous amount of energy.
As I followed the thread backward, it connected to family dynamics, secrecy, belonging, pleasure, and even some of the first experiences I had around being told not to tell the truth about something.
There were all these hidden pieces of myself wrapped up inside that memory.
It surprised me.
Isaac Boatright:
That’s one of the reasons the practice can be so powerful.
A seemingly ordinary memory can become a doorway into much deeper layers of experience.
Reversal of Time
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Speaking of doorways, let’s go back in time.
Or perhaps reverse time.
Let’s talk about the reversal practice.
I’ve noticed for years that my relationship with time is different from most people around me.
Maybe that’s because of mystical practice.
Maybe it’s because of dreaming.
Maybe it’s because of choices I’ve made about how I live.
But I often feel like I’m inhabiting a different relationship to time than many of the people around me.
Part of what interests me about this practice is that it seems capable of loosening the grip that conditioning has on our perception.
Isaac Boatright:
Absolutely.
One thing people often say is that time moves faster as they get older.
I don’t really experience that.
I find things remain fresh.
Even things I do repeatedly.
A core idea behind The Invisible River is learning to face the oncoming time.
The reversal practice helps create a different relationship with time itself.
Much of what we call time is really a chain of associations.
One thing leads to another.
A leads to B.
B leads to C.
But if you reverse those associations and allow yourself to dwell within them, a different kind of energy begins to emerge.
Imagine water flowing upward into the faucet rather than downward through the drain.
Imagine causality reversing itself.
Not intellectually.
Experientially.
By holding those reversed perceptions in awareness, something shifts.
You enter a different kind of space.
Years ago I practiced this daily for extended periods.
Eighteen minutes a day for sixty days at a time.
The result was a strange richness.
An unusual energetic atmosphere.
It felt fertile.
Almost as if hidden capacities were becoming available.
It invited a greater dimensionality of awareness.
It’s difficult to explain.
People really need to experience it directly.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Hopefully people will.
The internet is a big place and people can learn many techniques online.
But ultimately there is something uniquely powerful about gathering together.
When people practice together, the experience becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
So let’s bring this home.
How can people attend?
Where can they find you?
And when is this all happening?
Isaac Boatright:
Thank you for encouraging me to teach again.
I’ve spent the last several years focused primarily on inner work and working with a small number of people.
This feels like a return.
The Invisible River will take place the last Sunday and Monday of June.
June 28th and 29th.
Two full days.
Eight hours each day.
My partner Anna will also be present in a supportive role.
We’ll gather here at our home in Cottage Grove, Oregon.
There will be lunch breaks.
Don’t worry.
The workshop is designed for human beings to succeed.
Tuition operates on a sliding scale from $200 to $600.
And if someone genuinely needs scholarship assistance, I encourage them to reach out.
The best way to contact me is through my website:
IsaacBoatright.com
That’s I-S-A-A-C B-O-A-T-R-I-G-H-T dot com.
Use the contact form there and I’ll get back to you.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
And Cottage Grove is very easy to reach.
About half an hour south of Eugene and conveniently located near Interstate 5.
What airport would you recommend?
Isaac Boatright:
The Eugene Airport is probably the easiest.
Portland is another option if people don’t mind a longer drive.
Medford can work too depending on flight availability.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Wonderful.
I hope the people who are meant to attend feel the call.
I’ll certainly be there.
Not as an instructor.
Probably sitting in the back making jokes and trying to behave myself.
Isaac Boatright:
We’ll see about that.
Hugh T. Alkemi:
Well, thank you, Maestro Temini Isaac Boatright.
Thank you for sharing your time, your experience, and your wisdom with us.
For those interested in The Invisible River, visit IsaacBoatright.com or find me through MushroomShaman.com.
Until next time, this is Hugh T. Alkemi.
Be well.
Live well.