Time is Running Out

I’ve just had the great pleasure of reading The Timekeeper by Mitch Albom. The book explores how time is man-made. It appears that seconds, minutes, hours, weeks and months only exist in the our minds. We made them up so we can run our modern world.

For many though, time ensnares us. The book tells the story of a man who is facing death wishing that time could slow down. By way of contrast, an angst-ridden teenager wishes that time would speed up. Old Father Time rues the day he started the clock ticking.

Even though our measurement of time is fixed, time-as-we-know it is changing. Indeed, the veil of the illusion of time can part, for those who want to look.

The passage of time is subjective. If you have had a busy weekend with friends, Monday can come around all too soon. If your plane is delayed at the end of a holiday and you've read all your books, time can drag on interminably.

If we watch a clock, time goes slowly. Focus your attention elsewhere and time speeds by. We can utilise this ’soft’ nature of time to our advantage.

A fabulous application is in getting more things done in less time. When we enter the dream state or the meditative state, time slows down and can even be made to stop. If we maintain the meditative state with our eyes open, something magical happens. We get into the zone.

The reason this works is due to the nature of human thought. The ’normal’ human mind can only experience one thought at a time. Think about what you are thinking about and notice how the thought about your thought gets replaced by the new thought you are having about it.

So if when we are being creative, we worry about what people will think about our art in the future, our efficiency drops. If our mind wanders back in time to a conversation we had yesterday, our output suffers. In light eyes-open meditation, we can focus on the task in hand. We also stop our thought-forms leaking out so other people don’t pick them up and think about calling us. This constructs an interruption barrier around us.

By changing the speed and nature of our thoughts, we can take time under our control. As we deepen the level of meditation we enter with our eyes closed, time goes ‘soft’ and allows us to perform some amazing feats of temporal alchemy.

For starters, we can slow time down to get more done in less time.

We can also tap into ‘future memories’ and get the words we are about to write from our future self. The same is true for innovations and inventions.

When time goes ‘soft’, we can see past and future versions of ourselves and others. We can use this strange ability which is nascent in all of us to heal dis-ease the past which instantly heals the present.

It’s also possible to speed time up. So, as humans think about making the trip to Mars, this ability to change the perceived passage of time could allow the astronauts to feel like they get there ‘faster’.

So, as conventional time runs out, timefulness can become the new mindfulness.