I have heard of the Mandela Effect several times; but until yesterday I did not really get what was being proposed - in its full and astonishing scope.
Vox Day describes the ME as 'supernatural gaslighting' - meaning a demonic activity. In this particular instance the assertion is that everybody who is informed and competent knows that the Bible talks of the Lion laying down with the Lamb - but when somebody nowadays looks-up this reference in a Bible, he finds that it is the Wolf which lays down with the Lamb.
The basic idea is that supernatural evil has operated to change the Bibles of the world (this happening at a certain point in recent history), has changed what is written in them; so that now our memory conflicts with the 'evidence'.
And this was done as a Satanic PSYOP; in order to have a disorientating psychological effect - so that people will no longer trust their memories, or their own judgment, and will easily be manipulated by The System (which is itself controlled by the devil).
(Aside: This proposed mechanism - of a spirit literally re-writing history - reminds me of an ability of the evil god Ruin in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy. Ruin can affect any writing, unless it is inscribed on certain types of metal.)
The Mandela Effect is therefore is a specific (asserted) instance of a large and vital issue of these times about which I have blogged many times recently; which is whether to believe our inner memories or 'external evidence', to believe our own experience or external authority, to believe what we have worked-out for ourselves or to accept the interpretations of 'experts' - And, for Christians, whether to build our fundamental faith on The Church; or from our personal knowledge-of and relationship-with God and Jesus Christ.
The difficulty I have with the Mandela Effect is that I am not very sure of my own memory in any of the famously-cited instances.
For example - the example which gave the name was that apparently many people remember being told that Nelson Mandela died in jail - before he was released and became President; but I don't have any such memory of him dying in jail.
So, for me to accept that this was an instance of memory conflicting with 'evidence' - would, in fact, merely be an instance of my preferring one form of external evidence over another.
And, although I certainly agree that everything I have ever heard was about the Lion laying down with the Lion, and never about a Wolf - I do not have any specific memory of words in the Bible where this was supposedly written in the past; because I think I got all the remembered Lion and Lamb examples secondhand.
One aspect of some instances of the Mandela Effect is that it attributes to the demonic power the ability to affect-remotely and to re-write already existing books from a certain time-point - and indeed ancient manuscripts. But this is something that I do not accept: I do not believe that Satan can physically tamper-with all the Bibles of the world.
But I do believe that Satan can do something of this kind with electronic media and communications; i.e. that demonic spirits can (in some sense) inhabit and interact with these and with computers; and I believe that fact this lies behind the push to put everything online, and to induce us to live virtually via the internet.
So much so; that nowadays rewriting electronic media would appear almost exactly the same as having re-written all the Bibles of the world.
As small instances; e-books I have in the past purchased through Kindle have periodically been changed - without informing me or asking permission; simply via my reading device being connected to the internet.
And it is easy to make a program to search for and change specific words, so that when one views the page of an online newspaper, the text has already been modified as instructed.
All that is needed is to imagine scaling-up this kind of intervention by intelligent spirits with evil purpose that dwelt within the electronic media.
...Although, if so, then there would almost certainly also be some good spirits, angels, that were able to do something similar but with opposite intent to the demons.
Yet it may be that (as Rudolf Steiner intuited) the world of electricity is in a profound sense a demonically-created medium or sub-nature; that may therefore be more conducive to evil than good.
If so, unless I was myself physically to check an old Bible, and communicate my findings verbally and face to face, or by snail mail; then any electronic communication could (in principle) be intercepted and changed. Everything we found on the internet might (theoretically) have been thus tampered-with.
This would look exactly as-if all the Bibles in the world had been re-written.
In conclusion, I accept that the Mandela Effect may, in this modified sense, be a Real Thing; and that it represents yet another challenge for spiritual discernment; in which - to pass the test - we need to believe and live-by that which comes from within and from direct knowledge of the divine; instead of being credulously manipulated by external public media - which nowadays includes everything recently-produced, and anything accessed via the internet, computers, or other electronic phenomena.
