How to Skip Every Class and Graduate with Honors

It’s back-to-college time where I live, and students are scrambling to get to class and to return to a reasonable sleep schedule. When I was in college, I was not exactly the most responsible student. I skipped class just short of the permissible number of absences, slept for the first half hour every period, and rarely cracked open a book. Yet somehow, when they called my name to walk across the stage and take hold of my degree, I had graduated summa cum laud (technically magna cum laud, but someone forgot to tell that to my degree).

So what’s my secret? How was I able to spend my free time playing Magic: The Gathering and Super Smash Brothers and still perform so well when it counted?

Science.

Have you ever heard of Rupert Sheldrake? Probably not. He’s kind of a joke in the science community. Sheldrake had this theory about something called morphic resonance. Morphic resonance is this idea that all life forms have a collective pool of knowledge. The more people (or plants, or animals) that know about something, the more likely that a person who has never been taught the thing will know it instinctively.

Sheldrake demonstrated this through an experiment using a group of English-only speakers and three Japanese rhymes. You can read a more detailed account of the story, along with a more scientific explanation of morphic resonance, here. But in simple terms, Sheldrake attempted to teach a group of children three different Japanese rhymes. None of the children spoke Japanese. The scientist found that the easiest rhyme for the children to learn was the one that was most well-known by Japanese schoolchildren. Therefore, it can be assumed that the rhyme was easier to learn because the rhyme is already so present in the morphogenetic field.

“In English, please?” We all share knowledge in one giant pool. Learning to dive into that pool could enable us to learn things we’ve never been taught before.

Now the problem with the morphogenetic field is that it’s hard to connect to. Most people need some kind of boost. This is where a second, more familiar theory comes in: the Many-Worlds Interpretation. If you want a massive scientific treatise on exactly what this theory implies for the world of physics, check this out.

The layman’s understanding of this theory is that whenever you make a decision between two or more things, another universe is spawned where you chose the other options. In that universe, your life goes on as if you’d made the different choice, and making a different choice might wildly change the course of your life.

Together, these theories unlock the secret of how I made it through college.

The technique I’m about to describe to you originated in the Zero Escape video game series, beginning with 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors. There’s also a sequel, Virtue’s Last Reward, and another game set for a 2016 release tentatively called Zero Time Dilemma. In these games, the morphogenetic field theory and the many-worlds interpretation walk hand-in-hand.

“Is he ever gonna explain how he passed college? This is ridiculous.” The moment of truth is here, readers. The secret to my success works as follows:

Every day before you go to class, you make a decision whether or not to go. When you choose not to go to class, a parallel world is formed where you did indeed go to class. Now there is a version of you that knows everything that you were supposed to learn in the class you just skipped. But how do you get that knowledge for yourself?

That’s where morphic resonance comes in. You see, the cool thing about parallel worlds is that they exist side-by-side with our own. That means that when you tap into the morphogenetic field, you don’t only have access to the knowledge of this world. You have access to all the knowledge of every parallel universe that has split off from every decision ever made. That’s a LOT of knowledge for the taking. Normally, accessing this knowledge is not an intentional process. But when it comes to parallel forms of the same person, morphic resonance serves as a sort of shortcut, allowing both versions of yourself to share knowledge.

So here it is, in as simple of terms as I can put it. Skip your classes. Because when you skip, another you goes to class. And because every living thing shares the same pool of knowledge, you’ll still know everything you need to know. Because another you already knows it. You get the best of both worlds.

Feel free to discuss in the comments the implications of this crazy scientific revelation. And be sure to share your college tips with everyone else, so we can create a community of successful graduates to go out into the world.