Once we start realising that the Mandela Effect is real and that it's happening to all of us, all the time, the next question is: What the .... ?? How is this happening? What's causing it?
One possible cause of the Mandela Effect is changes being made in the past, and this is the one I want to take some time to explain here.
A helping hand
Think of time as a steam, like a river, flowing down a certain path. You cannot be in this river and at the same time make changes to the flow of the river. Even if you were to make changes from outside this river to re-direct its course, the river would self-correct, and sooner rather than later return to its original path. It would take many very careful adjustments to shift the timestream into a new path permanently.
This makes the process of changing the timestream very difficult, very unlikely - unless it be done by something far greater than what humans can conceive of.
Let's assume, for a moment, that such a far greater something exists. It's not a stretch: it would be very arrogant to assume that humans are the be-all and end-all in the universe. And lets assume, furthermore, that this far greater something is far more aware than us, can handle far more complex mathematics, and loves far deeper. Again this is not a stretch: any species, any group which cannot at some point in its development outgrow savagery, war, abuse and the like would eventually destroy itself, and never get to a place of great being, great power and great awareness.
Any such something, looking at our world in the original timestream, looking at our wars and our systematic abuse and destruction of our world, of each other, of ourselves, of our children, would not hesitate to help.
Changes across history
In our original timestream, the one many of us who are aware of the Mandela Effect remember, our world was a dark, very difficult place. We lived in a timestream where almost everything was motivated from fear, and from those things that come out of fear: anger, hatred, greed, intolerance, cowardice, disgust, bitterness, racism, sexism, and so on.
This is the timestream that is being changed, shifted, moment by moment.
In order to shift this timestream, to bring us to a place where we can live in a better world, changes are being made to our history: both our personal history, and the history of our world itself. Just as events in our own childhood have a strong effect on the kind of people we grow up to be as adults, the events in the childhood of our species have had a strong effect on the kind of creatures humans have become. Our history is littered with war, invasion, destruction, starvation, slavery, exploitation and more, and humanity still carries the trauma from this history. We are scarred, stunted in our development, burdened by unconscious memories, of events that ended long before we were born. All the problems in our current society, to a large extent, are a consequence of the horror in our past.
Because of this, is not possible to take our world, within our original timestream, and simply pick it up and carry it over to a place where everything is beautiful. The difference would be too great, the dissociation too strong, it would break the minds of all of us living in this world. We, as a product of our past, and ingrained as strongly in our world and what we think we know of it as we are, would not be able to exist in a world that is too wildly different from what we know. (We know this. It's been confusing and difficult for many of us dealing with the ME changes as is.)
This is why the changes are happening slowly, gradually. One little step at a time, one change here, another there, often so far back into the past that none of us in the present even notice that it happened. With each adjustment, the path of our timestream changes. The changes are made very subtly. Perhaps a thousand years ago, one country leader never insulted another, because they were distracted by their mistress. Perhaps an insecure, narcissistic prince was not the first but the third son to be born to a royal house, and so never became king. Perhaps a messenger took a leak, was delayed by five minutes on his journey, and was never captured. Perhaps a barren woman suddenly gave birth to a brilliant child. Perhaps a king fell in love with a beautiful girl, and when the nation's religion did not allow him to marry her, he changed the religion.
Such primary adjustments seem small, but made in the right place in history, made in those places in the timestream where the course of the river can be adjusted, they can have far reaching consequences. A hundred years war may never happen. A country may never divide. A reign of terror may be replaced by a reign of peace and stability. A cure to a deadly illness may be invented decades of centuries sooner. A dark cabal may never find power.
And the path of our timestream shifts. Everything that happens after, happens based in the new event, rather than in the original way. And just like a river whose path is re-directed by a carefully placed rock, a little trench, a dam, the original path eventually disappears. The original timestream fades out, and soon the new timestream is the only one left. Until the next change is made, and this timestream too is shifted.
Propagating effects
As adjustments across history change our timestream, they create ripples, secondary and tertiary changes. While the initial change happens instantly, and shifts our timestream into a new path, it may take a while for the ripples of this change to propagate forwards through time. Any important will have huge consequences across history, but it may take a while before these consequences propagate through and we start seeing them show up in our current history books and memories. If something were to happen to prevent WW1, WW2 likely also wouldn't happen as a consequence. Yet, even if suddenly most people would insist there never was a WW1, WW2 would likely still be there for a while, until the ripples of the initial change propagate through and make the secondary and tertiary changes.
Just as the initial adjustments, the propagating effects are managed very carefully. If, from one day to the next, WW1 and WW2 never happened, people would have a lot of trouble adjusting. There would be fear, panic, chaos, people would break, and time itself would have trouble making such a sudden turn. Nature prefers things to change smoothly and along a curve. So in this case, we would be more likely to see the casualties of WW1 dropping off steadily, as the initial change propagates through. We might read a textbook, and find several smaller countries now never participated in WW1. We might see a documentary, a little further down the road, referring to it as European War 1, rather than World War 1. As those changes, in turn, propagate through time, we might see the casualties of WW2 start to drop off, the atrocities start to lessen, the starting date be a year later or the end date a year sooner.
As these waves of change move through our world, they shift and nudge us closer and closer to the new path of our timestream, the one caused by the initial adjustment across history, until eventually history is consistent within itself.
Of course, most of these changes we will never notice, as they happen far in the past, sometimes before written records existed, and as history across the board is written by the victors, and hardly complete, or accurate. What we will notice, is the smaller changes, the ways in which the secondary and tertiary changes affect things in our every day life. We notice the way a logo changes, because the artist now never was traumatised by war, and created different art. We notice the way a name is spelled different, because someone's ancestor was living under different circumstances at the time when they chose their name.
And even these small changes happen very harmoniously, very organically, to cause the least amount of chaos and struggle. They follow the path of least resistance down the timestream, and so even when all of our history is massively different, what we see in today's world may still look fairly similar.
Implications
All of this means that all those people who insist that the way the world is now, is exactly how it's always been ... are right. The timestream we are all in now, is based on the changed events. Even if a new island appears on a map today, as a result of changes made to the movements of the tectonic plates a million or more years ago, that island will have always been there, and you will be able to talk to people who's ancestors have lived there for hundreds of years.
And it means that those of us who remember that it used to be different ... are also right. We are processing with a slightly expanded awareness, and in some cases - definitely not all - we remember the original timestream rather than the current one. Often, as we become aware of a change and tune into our current timestream, we remember both version simultaneously.
And even those of us who remember different versions of the same thing, are often right. There have been many changes to the timestream by now. We've looped through and re-started the river we are in a hundred times over by now, and will do so many more times before we are through.
The final timestream
We've only just started to change - and yet, changes have been happening across the past million years of our timestream. The movements of tectonic plates are being nudged hundreds of thousands of years ago, and yet, we've only started seeing the Mandela Effect since roughly 2015. Or 2010. Or 2009. Or 2012. Or in the 1980s. This itself is in flux at the moment.
There will be many more changes. Between 2022-2015, our world will look so different that we will no longer consider war a reasonable solution to any problem, and we will no longer allow any child to go hungry, any sick person to go uncared for, any group to be struggling just to survive.
At the moment, this seems impossible to many. But what we consider possible, is based on our past experiences, both in our personal life and in the history of our world. As that history changes, as wars fade out of existence, as controlling groups within world governments never take root, as continents connect and trade is established and civilisations develop earlier, healthier, more stably, who we are will change, and what we consider possible will change, and even our dreams and hopes for the future will change.
As our timestream shifts away from that dark place we originally came from, more and more of the ripples will propagate, and the changes we see in our everyday life will become more significant and more clear. Those of us who do not have the stability or maturity or awareness to handle these greater effects, will continue to see some small changes in logos and names, and eventually get bored and stop paying attention to the whole thing. Those who are fascinated and curious, will start to see the larger trends, and the direction our timestream is changing towards.
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To my best understanding, this is why we are seeing the Mandela Effect. This is what is happening underneath, and how, and why.
There is nothing to be afraid of. There is nothing to prepare for, to worry about, to reach, to resist, to control. Things will continue to shift for many years to come, the processes have already been set in motion, giant waves are already building, and all that we can control is how much we are aware of the changes as they happen, and how much we grow and change and enjoy and love in the process.
Things are going to get really amazing, really fast. Maybe as fast as yesterday.