Parallel Walks
Go as though I go with you."Parallel walks" is a common name for an interrelated set of psychosocial phenomena wherein people make note of the unusuala parallelism between the behaviors of people separated in space or time. Often related to situations where otherwise unparanoid people feel like they are being 'watched' or 'shadowed' in their daily lives, the notion of parallel walks carries an extra semantic weight for the sentient peoples of the Manifold Sky. After all, as the knowledge of the Manifold's additional spatial dimensions spreading after the Age of Exploration, it is also increasingly concievable that the notion of parallel walks has an element of physical truth to it.
Historical Basis
It is often suggested that parallel walks are an expansion of the 'anthropic principle' - the notion that certain events must play out in a certain way, or else no one would survive to record it. History is replete with tales of events that seem to coincide apropos of nothing, only for later scientists or historians to come by and point to environmental factors that transcended the then-understood boundaries of the world. For example, the extinction of the Lepidosian culture at Tash Nisen, the final disappearnce of the Feldeans in the Ventral Tesseract, and the hardship of various human Lost Tribes in other places around the same time seem unusual - until someone points out that the Ventral A Volcanic Event caused worldwide declines in game populations and crop yields around that time period.
On the other hand, with the discovery of tesseracts - and, later, the discovery of the Manifold's penteract-like nature with the advent of airship travel - the idea that there might be a physical aspect to the parallel walks phenomena is steadily gaining traction. Though only The Garbage Man has ever been observed to be able to directly perceive and manipulate spaces beyond the three dimensions that most people occupy, the mere fact that the inflection layers and commissure exist and are connected to other places as they are suggest that traversing the hidden fourth and fifth spatial dimensions is physically possible, if non-trivial, for three-dimensional beings.
Observations suggest that some forces, such as gravity, can bleed between cube that occupy the same 'space' in other tesseracts. Indeed, daylight is known to come from beyond the tesseract, creating problems in excluding it when necessary. Even a small bleedthrough of other energy or forces might also be percieved by living senses, albeit not in a way that would be easy to express; this may be behind the sensation of being 'watched,' the idea that a space is 'haunted,' or the ineffible 'stuffiness' that comes from exploring underground spaces even when these are properly ventilated. Whatever the case, these sensations could, all told, provide a causative link between events separated across higher spatial dimensions which would, under classical theories, provide complete isolation in the dimensions sentient beings could percieve.
Variations & Mutation
The belief, or articulation of the belief, in 'parallel walks' is not nearly as universal as those of The Curved Time. Still, many cultures under the Manifold sky have their own interpretations of the feeling of 'eyes on the back of one's head' or the sense of deja vu one might feel in seeing a previously alien culture ariving at the same conclusions as ones own. The Church of the Unexpected is one of the only wide-scale organizations to have an official stance on the phenomena, claiming that such coincidences are obviously the province of Veldrin Vance, the God of Coincidence seeking to test the credulity of his faithful and press order into the cosmos. Some Rostran Esotericists - and, indeed, Epicyclist philosophers in general - hold that these parallelisms are instead the product of 'overlapping cycles,' or 'epicycles,' where the grand cycles as present in different places and times happen to reach the same point all at once. Certain Esotericist ritual sigils are though to allow individuals present at these points to 'jump currents,' joining another cycle while leaving the one they had started in to embrace the auspicious potential of the moment and become figures of historical greatness.
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