This thought brought me back to Chiang Mai, where my flip-flop moved across the floor by itself. A moving flip-flop was a chaotic, low-probability event — like a fish out of water. If God were minimizing mutual surprise, then unexpected events would only unfold in the explicate order if they minimized surprise for our future selves. According to this algorithm, chaos is a long-term system correction.

For example, when the double-slit experiment was first conducted, it generated a lot of surprise in the scientific community. If reality is minimizing mutual surprise, one would assume that scientists would observe the electrons traveling through the slits as particles, regardless of whether they were being observed. One would expect science to tell us the world is solid and material because that's what everyone believed at the time.

Of course, this is a misunderstanding of the algorithm. The system isn't just minimizing surprise in the present moment — it's minimizing expected surprise, too. If the double-slit experiment hadn't manifested those surprising results, our understanding of modern quantum mechanics wouldn't exist. Without quantum mechanics, we wouldn't have been able to create all kinds of wonderful technology that make up the backbone of our modern society. If the weird and surprising quantum world were not discovered in the past, our future selves wouldn't be able to enjoy so much of the technology we take for granted today. However strange they might seem, our current laws of physics were retrocausally created to minimize the mutual surprise of our future selves.

The dinosaur extinction came to mind as another great example. Around 66 million years ago, a giant asteroid wiped out the 180 million year reign of the dinosaurs. To the untrained eye, this might look like chaos — but it isn't. It's a long-term system correction that minimized the mutual surprise in the future version of the universe. The system needed dinosaurs to exist and then be wiped out. This process made way for all the other animals, humans, and technology that would evolve millions of years later.

"So why have dinosaurs at all?" one might ask. The answer is quite obvious: dinosaurs had to exist for so many observers to experience themselves in the future. Today, we have museums with dinosaur bones that inspire wonder and awe and allow little kids to dream of being archaeologists. We have movies about dinosaurs, giving Hollywood the physical experience of telling their stories. We have scientists studying dinosaurs, classifying them, learning about them. We have animals descended from dinosaurs, and those animals are a part of our ecosystem. Dinosaurs played a pivotal role in the development of our future selves, and that's why they manifested in our past. Their sudden, surprising extinction would only have occurred if it minimized huge amounts of expected future mutual surprise — thereby bringing us right here, to the future version of the universe.

As I pondered this idea, my Akashic records reading with Jiayuh came to mind. Towards the end of the reading, I'd told Jiayuh that my boyfriend had suddenly moved to France a few months earlier, in the same week that my business partner and I had broken up. Both events came out of nowhere, just as everything in my life was going well — like an asteroid hitting my reality and killing two relationships; the two people I spent the most time with. I'd bawled my eyes out in the bathtub over my broken heart, and was still pretty torn up about it months later — even after packing my bag and catching a flight to Thailand to begin my solo nomad adventure.

Jaiyuh responded with words that didn't make sense to me at the time, but now took on a new meaning.

Your records want you to know that those [events] were part of the big plan. The timing, the shifting to give you the opportunity if you should choose to move to the next stages of your journey. And you are. You are riding it.

Just so you know, your records actually show that when you find the right person, that you know is compatible with you, and that will understand you… actually it's very important to understand you in terms of the energy and also the connection that you have with the divine source. That person... you will find inspiration, actually. Your relationship will actually bring in a different level of inspiration. You will also find a sort of partnership — not only emotionally, but you will find a sense of partnership in a spiritual way. Like, you are an individual but you will actually find coherence in energetic space that you both share. So you will actually sense that. You will know that’s the right feeling energetically. Your records just want you to know that.

Oh, I’m just going to tell you what they show me because I thought it’s kinda really Disneyland, like a Disney movie. They show — here’s you, and here’s this guy, and he’s the right one, and when you get together it shows this… this is so Disney movie. It shows the two of you holding hands, close to each other, together. And then there are just sparkles of like, you know, like a Disney movie, right? Tinkerbells and literally, like, a star magic thing sparkling. And then a heart shape like this. And I’m like “Oh God, really? Seriously?” I’m like “Okay, I’ll tell her.” I was resisting but, like, okay fine. I’ll just tell you. So that’s the big finale.

So, Jesse and Sam leaving was always part of the masterplan. I was just so shocked when it happened because the program had already begun in France, and they'd already told Jesse a month ago that he didn't get a spot. According to this algorithm, the only way a surprising, chaotic event like that would manifest is if it somehow minimized surprise for my future self, and the future version of the universe.

So, what is my future self up to? I wondered. Besides hooking up with my charming Disney husband, of course...

And then it hit me: the earlier part of Jiayuh's reading.

At some point in time your soul actually chose to accept this mission that you're going to complete in this lifetime. You actually decided before you became a person here, you had decided that you were going to do this. Your records want you to know that this is part of your mission, in terms of what you are going to be sharing with other people. You have accepted that this is going to be a part of the knowledge that you're going to spread and share when the time is right for you.

My entire life flashed before my eyes. I gasped as a bolt of clarity struck my consciousness, sending shivers down my spine: nothing had gone wrong in my life. Not one single thing was out of place.