Table of Contents

Foreword

Sample Chapter, "The   Skin of Time"

Sample Chapter, "The Celestial Foundation of Time"

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The process of viewing time as a living reality, as an examinable, identifiable field of awareness, is the foundation of The Reality of Time. Our common experience of time is one that sees time as a means of measurement, a ruler that describes the interval apportionment of our lives. The perception of time as a field, a groundwork for the establishment of sequences of personal reality, and the mechanics that describe a layered dimensional context are simply unknown to us. This book, as an extension of my first published work in this area, Timeshift: The Experience of Dimensional Change, goes deeper into elucidating the many ways of seeing time from its interior. We learn how to view time not as a ruler but as a landscape, a territory of consciousness whereby all of our personal and environmental realities can be understood. We experience time as having movement, shape, and interrelationship to itself as well as to space, motion, and distance.

For those of us for whom reality is based primarily on conceptual frameworks, the study of time and consciousness, as well as the process of cognition itself, is a place of mystery. How can something as ephemeral and abstract as time have a voice, an avenue of self-expression? When one travels down the road of meditation practice, one is treated to the possibility of having knowledge hatch rather than having it be the result of some particular mental application. Time is made known through the context of self-revelation rather than as a course of study engaged in by the intellect. It is, therefore, the journey into the fabric of knowledge that forms the backdrop for this work and the linguistic processes that have been coined to describe its mannerisms. This is a book of scientific etiquette in that it describes the norms, the guises, and the handiwork of time from its own point of view.

The ability to experience time is commonly fostered by two different avenues of awareness. The first is “waking state,” which is the place of inner alertness differentiated from sleeping and dreaming. Here, time is experienced within the context of intervals spent or gained. There is little elasticity to this reality.  The other avenue is an altered or contemplative state that is traditionally gained through the practice of meditation, breath work, or martial arts. Here the sense of time can be suspended for long intervals, producing a feeling of euphoric or absolute freedom from psychological strife.

A third context, spoken of in many spiritual traditions, involves the gaining of lucidity in the sleep state. This practice creates the opportunity for a bridge between the higher mind and the practical mechanics of everyday life. When one enters a prolonged period of wakefulness in the context of sleep, the experimental and imaginative forces of the superconscious can set the groundwork for fundamental research into the nature of intelligence. The combination of intuitional and imaginative faculties, in concert with the template of pure awareness, sets the stage for the self-descriptive component. The language that approximates the recognition of subtle mechanics is voiced through the personal dialogue that the human mind constructs to recognize the symptomatic outpouring of personal reality.

All of these contexts are apt to overlook what I would call the choreography of time, the dance that invokes the mechanical unfoldment of temporal agility. How does time move in the spiral of our personal events? What does it mean to study the sequencing of time, to approach it as one would analyze a great symphony or work of art?

Due to the overriding nature of the higher mental faculties, when one consistently surrenders to their predominance, a permanent sense of objectivity emerges. This state, often referred to as “witnessing,” is produced when the personal mind enters a profound release into self-observance that is often accompanied by a sense of tranquility. When the keenness of contemplative practice is combined with the stabilization of this clear, objective window on the mechanics of the mind, a new reality emerges. In this reality, the structure of thinking probes deeply into the fundamental basis of silence even while the problem-solving and mechanical aspects of intelligence remain functional. This integration provides the opening necessary for creative achievement that inherently offers a high degree of originality.

Artists, musicians, and scientists of great merit often exhibit a high degree of sensitivity, both to their inner world and to the environment. Their capacity to engage in the process of witnessing, combined with an affinity towards imaginative enterprise, produces a surge of visual, auditory, and linguistic experimentation that deeply influences collective consciousness.

The question arises as to how the purely yogic practices, with their emphasis on returning to the inner core of being, interface with the life of the creative spirit, with its inherent restlessness and unwillingness to settle into the habit of silence. When one taps into the heart of any field of knowledge, as one does in these yogic practices, there is a type of “call and response” that brings one to a felt sense of awakening. There is a call, a question that occurs from the psychological level, and a response that is generated from a deeper order of being. At the fundamental layer of human consciousness resides a cushion of pure awareness. Knowledge gained through this steady, refined research takes one into a uniquely languaged voice composed of the very impulses to which one is attuned.

The question arises as to the possibility that a radical change in the construction of time values could knock a person off course from his or her personal reality. From my point of view, time bends, coils, or spins around the apparent options of personal activity and perception that come into play. Through the spin that time provides, an event is indeed altered but its alteration is not something to be feared.  This shift is the natural outcome of a change in the rate, speed, and flow of consciousness. The feeling of “rightness” of a given course of action is always considered in the context of such a change.

There is a type of temporal disorientation that can be evoked when the change in the time flow is faster than the psychological and physiological processes are capable of digesting. This type of temporal break, which I have also experienced, can indeed be frightening. But with practice one can learn to stand in the middle of such a situation and shift just slightly the flow of consciousness so as to bring things into a state of apparent normalcy.

As one’s ability to process time becomes increasingly more rapid, the ability to cognize the significance of these sequences does not always keep up. This is how a gap can be formed between one’s ability to travel or journey into other domains or dimensions of temporal experience but not feel entirely comfortable once the destination has been reached. Temporal acclimatization is brought about through the yogic practices of witnessing, observation, and breathing techniques which keep the psychological and physiological processes stabilized as the temporal references are altered. Constant practice appears to be the key.

The truth is that most human beings find that their desire for self-investigation is usually brought about through some aspect of personal suffering. Our desire for access to heightened states of happiness or at least a degree of equilibrium is the predecessor to much of what we think of as spiritual attainment. The burning desire to enter into union with what one begins to experience as a pure state of inner light or clarity drives one to continue to engage in practices that will bring about such a shift. A type of momentum builds that opens one to lift free of the everyday clatter of activity and enter realms more conducive to the sense of freedom.

The sense of passing opportunity, the process of physical and psychological aging, produces a pressure to gain access to an unlimited experience of time. One is freed from the pursuit of triviality for the more attractive option of open-ended lucidity. When the will for outer achievement is temporarily set aside, time naturally enters a state of suspension. Restlessness is conquered as one engages with heretofore unknown areas of knowledge.

The entry into the silent, expectant world of temporal alteration or suspension occurred very early in my personal life. Contemporary psychological thinking tends to associate such a shift with the need to escape from pain.  In my own case, this may be true, but if so it was the pain of wanting to get to the bottom of the innermost being rather than any acute trauma of environmental origin. The passion for a depth of self-exploration has been with me for as long as I can remember, and without it most assuredly certain breakthroughs between the everyday personality and that of the superconscious would not have come about.

When I was a child, sleep was the venue whereby consciousness could consume itself with the process of knowing and return to the soul’s most familiar abode. There, resting within that state, alert to the process of perception, I was soon able to retrieve information gained through a direct dialogue with the inner voice. Such understanding was often pictorial, colorful, and holographic. It was filled with symbology that was often indecipherable in the immediate context of an immature mind.

With the advent in my twenties of more intensive spiritual practice, the ability to retrieve information not usually accessible through traditional courses of study became more dependable. At first, this took the form of what appeared to be a sort of university of the spirit, in which one could take classes in any area of the arts or sciences. These classes seemed to be populated by others such as myself who wished to understand areas of knowledge that one could not learn from a book. I eventually understood these classroom experiences to be symbolic, a picture that the mind had constructed for hallways of learning that would be comfortable to the personal identity.

It was obvious from the first that one of the ways I could recognize whether I had hit the mark in these investigations was the powerful sense of floating in a timeless, fluid state. Time became elongated, resituated, placed in a context in which any pretense of age, limitation, or boundaries was immediately lost. It soon became clear that it was time itself that was attempting to speak to me about its very nature.  A system of language or structure of thinking was developed that became quite coherent and repeatable.

In the beginning, the ability to retrieve this language was fragmented. Little sound bites would enter my waking consciousness as if brought up from the darkly lit vantage point of a dream. Gradually, this language became more succinct, though clearly different from the usual way that words and phrases would normally present themselves. This novel use of language permitted the mechanics of temporal experience to be intelligible to the conscious mind.

All of this, when described, seems very temperate, even perfunctory, but the actual unfoldment of this dialogue bore a closer resemblance to the dramatic intensity of a great film than to the emotional atmosphere of everyday existence. The surges of feeling, actual heat in the body, remain to this day of great intensity, which I came to learn bore witness to the presence of what yogic thinkers call “shakti, ” or the workings of a higher order of the human nervous system.

Why does it appear that most people fear the unfoldment of a superconscious awareness ? Is the fear based on the need to hold fast to the norms of social and personal convention, or is the reason more involved? My personal feeling is that there is a root apprehension about moving out of the temporal landscape that defines and describes the boundaries of reality. One could say that the two greatest fears human beings possess are of insanity and death. Breaking temporal confines immediately invokes both issues.

For this reason, I have had to personally address the type of terror invoked when one is no longer utilizing the strategies of psychological and/or material reference to keep the mind or heart stable. In this new state of being, one must draw exclusively from the pool of inner silence and attributeless activity that makes it possible for time to stand still. The amazing thing is that when time actually does arrest its propensity to move forward, one discovers it can actually move at great rapidity in any conceivable direction. One learns to travel with the flow or stream of time as it presents itself, intently focused on the area of knowledge or flow of feeling encountered.

My first attempt to articulate the voice or language of time occurred after the shock of a hurricane which swept through my home in Charlotte , North Carolina , in the spring of 1989. I now think it is not surprising that such an event would be an effective internal prompter for the development of an original temporal language . Like physical pain or trauma of an interior sort, the power of natural disaster is an effective vehicle for inspiring self-examination and reawakening. Swept clean of familiar references in the physical landscape—trees, buildings, power lines—the mind was returned to the condition of emptiness that could best bring about a new vantage point for time.

Hurricane Hugo acted as a temporal wall of fire that brought what had been a private, subjective understanding into public recognition. The development of the manuscript for Timeshift: The Experience of Dimensional Change came about through this experience. As the printed words were viewed on the page, something powerful and startling occurred. For the first time the actual description of a purely internal journey came fully into awareness. There was a natural inclination to deny or resist this transition. It was as if something totally intimate, contained, was now fully exposed.

In the over-ten-year period of integration that ensued, I gained the ability to more fully enter into the domain where this avenue of intelligence could be found. It seemed that the willingness to share, to give voice to this material, now made it possible for it to become more coherent, retrievable, and understandable. A profound unification was taking place between that part of my identity that was the writer of such extraordinary material and that part existing in its own psychological constructs separate from any superlative state. This process continues to this day.

I desired to go still further, to bring the reader/participant into a more comprehensive understanding of the challenge and grandeur invoked through breaking the time barriers. Surprisingly, there was also the lingering fear, the concern of my personality structure that it would be exposed, revealed, or hurt. I now think that this emotion is built into the territoriality inherent in human beings to preserve their sense of personal identity as well as their bailiwick of referential time .

The reality is that time exists as a pure template, a backdrop behind the activities and psychological interlays that make up human life. This type of time—free, unfettered, and uncontained by the intricacies of events or emotions—is what can be termed nonreferential  time. In contrast, referential  time is personal, highly subjective, and based on the inner calendar of our deepest apprehensions, memories, and associations. It is inherently unfree, bound continuously by the movement of the mind. Once one gains access to the unmapped territory of unreferenced time, one can begin to perceive how the natural waves or curves in this ocean of silence invoke the possibilities of creation. There is a stillness behind the possibility of choice that opens out into the awareness like a graceful ribbon of perception. Time exists as a                       superimprintable reality, a surface structure of labile movements of history, personal attributes, and relationships, which are composites of a type of universal geography known only to the mind of God.

Time has motion; it is not static, opaque, without life, color, shape, or form. There is white time, grey time, and time without attributes, a cosmic twilight that lives in a state of suspended animation. There is also a colorful time, a painterly time, a time filled with the mosaic of life. These contrasting qualities, time as sparkling or dull, time as empty or teeming with infinite spectroscopy, make up the inner living eye of men and women. When one brings the two together, an alchemical magic appears—there is a feeling that one is floating, collapsed in the bubble of unified perception. One loses the environmental cues that signify orientation, encapsulation, or form. It is here, in this awakened, full, exciting, and sometimes terrifying state of vertigo, that one lives when the nervous system wakes up to an atemporal point of view.

This book is an attempt to reckon with this sometimes brilliant, sometimes subtle, sometimes noisy, sometimes intensely quiet environment, which is the reality of time awake. It is the story of time talking for itself, speaking its own truth. It is also time colored by the history, patterning, and understanding of a subjective nervous system and life experience. If time could speak for itself, this is its opportunity.

To come to terms with this atemporal reality , one needs to come into contact with the Divine, spacious, indescribable presence that lives in each of us. It is this presence that is capable of supercreative acts and can make words, sounds, or visual pictures that take us beyond the mind. To do that requires more than a suspension of disbelief. We are asked to actually suspend time, to enter a higher mind that is silent to the core. When we enter this lightless, colorless, soundless refuge, we leave behind our previous notion of reality. We are left in awe of that which is perpetually creating itself.

Spiritual energy , which pursues the individual rather than the reverse, invokes a delightful animation of spirit that makes it easier to shed the coat of conformity. The inner contest that the mind invokes to stifle this process is the reason why creative acts are born in the first place. The mind desires to curtail the flow of time, to smother it in the jaws of psychological insecurity. It is the job of the heart, enriched by the courage of outrageous acts born of temporal originality, to enter completely into the current. To do this, the pulse, the pace, the stream of time must be realized in the heart. Time must burn through the heart completely before it can make a permanent home.

The loss of the personal “I” naturally occurs when time has broken through the boundaries of the heart, instilling the individual with a quality of fearlessness. Before this absence of fear occurs, there is often an intensification of it. This is because the ego structure rarely will give up without struggle. One comes to accept that when one surrenders to the spiritual presence, nothing can be held back. Cobra-like in its intensity, mirroring all of the different aspects of dimensional perception, the Divine strips us of the notion that time can exist separate from that which is. This is how the creative process operates once it is set free. It is the way of time.

The Reality of Time seeks to elucidate some of the conceptual keys that make it possible to understand a non-timebound awareness. Like Timeshift, it does so by invoking the rapid advance of interior language as it courses through the nervous system without any room for mental censorship. The attempt here is to expose this highly charged creative process as well as the subject of time it seeks to describe. If the reader feels altered, unglued, less opaque through the course of the work, then I feel the book has been a success.