New World a-Coming, Ch. 19
From the Bassanda Dictionary of National Biography
Hazzard-Igniti, Ibrahim (PhD University of California, 1928)
1900 - 1942?
Bassanda-born, Berkeley-trained specialist Dr Ibrahim Hazzard-Igniti was a notable and influential early scholar in the area of Rift Theory, that body of knowledge, combining quantum physics, geology, studies of electromagnetism, and esoteric philosophy, which was laboriously developed over the course of most of the 20th century. Modern Rift Theory as currently understood is heavily indebted to his foundational insights. These include:
His “Quantum Drift and Apparent Time Displacement in the Bassandan Rift Valley,” in the 1926 edition of the Journal of Speculative Geographical Metaphysics (Paris), whose brief one-sentence abstract (obviously not authored by the Doctor) references the “complex fourth-dimensional quantum mechanics found at certain tectonic and magnetic nodes in the Bassandan high hills.”
The unpublished and undated manuscript “a Unified Field Theory of Electromagnetic Chronological Transport” which suggests that electromagnetic disruptions called “Rift Accidents” might entail or precipitate time-travel. From that manuscript, the following passage merits quoting at length:
“By the Age of Imperialism, the layers of cultural, spiritual, psychological, and—as a result—cosmological collision would, according to this [Hazzard-Igniti Theorem], have been sufficient to bring about a “Rifting Event”: a shift in the region’s electromagnetic fields, analogous to a shift and/or collision in tectonic plates, sufficient to open up new Rifts and thus new channels for cross-space and -time travel. The risks of such Rifting Events—the very unpredictability of their occurrence and impact made them dangerous zones and events”
Regarding humans’ experience of Rift Events, the “Hazzard-Igniti Principle” (c1929) postulates that “the extension of human longevity is in selective but direct proportion to the preponderance of Rift travel”.
Although not formally trained as a physician, Dr Hazzard-Igniti coined the term “electrical sensitive,” to describe those in the Bassandan orbit—often musicians, artists, poets, dancers, or Iliot shamans—who could invoke, channel, manipulate, and target magnetic/electrical energy.
Theoretically possible within the Hazzard-Igniti Theorems are the controversial additional claims of “Rift Drift”: the idea that Rift travel across distances (from the various portals known to be scattered around the globe...numerous examples of chronological contradiction—what Hazzard-Igniti’ites call “chron cons”, a phenomenon not dissimilar to the kensho-like Huìyǎn or “spontaneous insight” described by the Iliot shamans) might actually be matched by intentional or inadvertent travel across what some argued were slightly variant parallel realities. Thus, travel via Rift might deposit the unwary or intentional adventurer in a different, unexpected location, time period, or even parallel universe--a concept derived from quantum mechanics,
In this model—never formally endorsed by Hazzard-Igniti, but subsequently and passionately argued by his disciples Ambrosius de Colatta and “Ḍrēgana” Ateşleyici, during Bassandan’s “Revolution of Consciousness” in the early ’60s—true spiritual insight was precisely that which could sustain multiple, parallel first-person consciousnesses, across parallel Where-When’s, and operate with compassion and right-action from within them. The Hazzard-Üretici (Eng: “Igniti’ites”) linked such trans-cognitive capacity (“multi-consciousness” in Rift psychological theory) to the Japanese Zen concept of kensho, to Keats’s “negative capability” (the ability to treat as realities simultaneous conflicting imperatives), to Frank Herbert’s concept of the Kwisatz Haderach (the “one who can be many places at once,” in the Dune series); and to the Hazzard-Igniti Theorem’s equation of the Iliot Qaerda-bol’sa (theory of parallel “where-when”).
Around 1938, Hazzard-Igniti suggested that the geopolitical disruptions of mid-century perhaps resulted, as least in part, in some unexplained but exceptionally severe disruption of the earth’s magnetic ley lines—a theoretically possible though catastrophically disruptive scenario. The resulting expansion and debasement of the Rift Portal may even account for the apparent accident through which the electromagnetic locomotive Sleipnir, known colloquially as “The Beast,” carrying the Bassanda National Radio Orchestra as they departed on a later tour in the 1960s, “fell” through—or perhaps unintentionally cracked open—another Rift path to the northern Rio Grande Valley of the American Southwest.
He was arrested by Bassanda Office of State Security in 1941, just prior to the Nazi Anschluss later that year, and was presumed to have been consigned to the Soviet Gulag, presumably to prevent his capture or subornation by the Germans. He had commented, shortly before:
The experience of traveling—voluntarily or involuntarily—via quantum “Rift Echoes” could thus account for the capacity of multi-consciousness to yield integrative rather than dissociative awareness, provided those individuals undergoing such Echoes possessed the psychological training, strength of character, and tribal awareness to weather the attendant perceptually challenges. Rift Echoes might thus explain the capacity of certain individuals to emerge from a “zone” of multiple parallel-universe experiences and -consciousness, into a “nexus” at which various storylines suddenly merged again into a single, integrative timeline, and to act strategically and effectively, even if “intuitively,” within those integrative narrative moments…