Are we truly, 100% in the NOW?
Time itself is very much like the course of a ship in the ocean. When you look at a ship you can see the wake it leaves behind. The wake fades out and that tells us where the ship has been in just the way our past and our memory of the past tells us what we have done.
But as we go back and go back into the past and we can even go back further by using all manner of scientific methods to determine what happened, we eventually reach a point where all records of the past fade away. In just the same way as the wake of the ship.
The most important thing to remember in this illustration of time, and this is important in life…the wake doesn’t drive the ship any more than the tail wags the dog. Any more than your past determines where you will be or where you are going.
One of the real conundrums of life is what is NOW, does NOW exist? Now does not exist. The present is an illusion Everything we have said is in the past. What I just said then, is in the past. There is no current.
There is the past…and there is a future which we are all moving into. Your past does not drive you into the future any more than the wake drives the ship or the tail wags the dog.
Time is a very difficult thing to grapple with and wrestle to the ground.
St Augustine of Hippo was asked ‘What is time?’ and his reply was ‘ I know what time is but when you ask me I don’t’.
Time is fundamental. Time is money Time drags
You have experienced time distortion all your life. Leaving a fast-moving motorway and driving on a slow road, you suddenly feel like everything is moving super slow. That\’s because your brain unconsciously adjusted to the speed you were travelling at. You can make that \”speeding up\” happen at work, so you get more done!
What about the Airport check in.
You wait and wait and wait. It takes three days for them to give someone a ticket to New York and then, you hit the desk and woosh…you are done and through customs…
There is no such thing as Time management. You cannot manage time, you can only manage your effectiveness of that time.
So, What is Time Distortion? It is the slowing down or speeding up our PERCEPTION of time.
Back on that plane again. You have a comfortable seat and you are being attended to excellently and the food and drinks are great. There are a couple of great movies. You may want to make time go a little slower so you can enjoy and relax.
Then again, you could be sitting between two guys who weigh 300lbs each and behind you is some kid who\’s mother thinks he is \’soooo clever\’ because he can kick the back of your chair in time to some song playing on his headphones, which you can hear, again and again so…. You may want that flight to go by faster.
If you are enjoying a meal or night out, you may want that evening to go slower. If the night isnt going well, or it\’s a bad movie or play…you may want to speed things up a little.
In NLP we speak of the Sub-Modalities of things and experiences.
These are the qualities of our thoughts. Size and color of the images Volume and tonality of sound Time, intensity temperature….
When time moves slowly your mind has a way of perceiving certain qualities Likewise when time is moving fast.
Once you can figure out which ones do which, you can speed up and slow down or change YOUR perception of time.
Your unconscious mind filters the differences when time moves fast to when time moves slow. Through meditation or trance one can get ones unconscious mind to make that ability of control available
An alternative to that is: Work on the scale and size of your internal images The larger the images you have the slower they will be Smaller images will be faster
But where are we in time?
If you were at a crossroads with a lot of traffic and one car came from one direction and the other came from another direction and they hit each other. That would be in the past, immediately. You would even describe it using past tense: “That car CAME from that direction and that car CAME from that direction and THEN they HIT each other”
The NOW moment has gone, even though you perceive it as now, its gone.
That event, thought you perceive it as now, has happened, as has EVERYTHING in your life.
There is this moving moment in which we stand, constantly in motion as the earth moves and the universe rearranges itself. Something somewhere is always moving even if you believe you are not.
You stand in this Matrix and look at the past, and you look at the future, and we continue to move into that future. We are ALL on a journey into the future, through time.
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