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2007-05-28 10:58:07
Your spirit
operates outside time and space. When there is an emergency where danger
is about to approach you faster than you can normally sense, your spirit
will compell you to act quickly without pondering. It directs you through
your instinct and reflexes. Think of a time when you moved out of harm's
way in an instant and the move was so spontaneous it seems that everything
just flowed in the moment. Your awareness of what was happening and your
response happened without hesistation, but so quickly that it was almost
together at the same time.
That is because your spirit can observe things and sense reality beyond
your ordinary rate and range of awareness. Imagine that a dagger is flying
towards you from the side. In ordinary rate of awareness, there is simply
not enough time to notice the dagger coming and to move out of the way.
But in the realm of your spirit’s awareness, time is slowed down
to a crawl and it can fully perceive everything that is happening no matter
how quickly. It sends the message to you and in that moment you experience
the spontaneous and seemingly simultaneous knowing and action. The awareness
comes just before the action but it seems that time slows almost to a
standstill during that moment of thought. Perception and action become
as one.
If you want to consciously perceive faster so that things don’t
seem to happen so quickly, you have to slow time down in your consciousness.
It is not time that slows down but you that slows down. See in your mind’s eye and memory things slowing down. Like a picture frame frozen from a movie in motion. It is the way you experience time slowing down or stopping when you see a beautiful person of your dreams.
It would be an advantage for anyone to stop the world or at least make everything appear to move in slow motion. It would give you time to analyze the situation and the actions of everyone and everything around you. It gives you extra time to determine your actions in a pressure situation. This would would be incredibly useful in business, driving your car in traffic, playing games, military combat, sports and life threatening situations.
Be Fully Alive to This Moment
Perceptive awareness is being fully alert and living fully in the moment. It is seeing the trees bend in the wind and the way the birds circle overhead. It is sensing how the trees feel and what problems and joy the birds are experiencing. It is experiencing the full moment around us and not just our little thoughts. It is clearing the mind of future events and past replayed scenes, so you can experience the entirety of the current moment in time. It is putting yourself in the full frame picture now in front of you in relationship to everything happening around you. It is being fully alive. With that kind of perceptive awareness, a moment can seem to you to last forever.
A master baseball batter is apparently able to slow things down when he’s at the plate. To everyone else, the ball would be rocketing toward the plate at approximately 100 mph, almost faster than the eye can see. But to the focused athlete, the ball seems to slow down just for him, and present itself to him.
This is what many of the best batters have this in common. Somehow, when they need to slow things down to make their big play, they are able to perceive everything happening in slow motion. The ball rolls slowly up to the plate and is easy to see, often appearing larger than life. It’s almost as if the ball is waiting for them to hit it. To everyone else, the ball is racing to the plate at a blistering speed, curving, skinking, and breaking in waysthat make it almost impossible to track, let alone hit.
This is truly time manipulation, since the perception of the person who seems to manage this trick is that time has been stretched longer or made shorter. Since this is the perception of the magician, and becomes the way he acts upon the world, it becomes that person’s own functional reality. It’s really a consciousness shift and an expanded awareness. And yes, it is real magic as we will see.
When playing baseball as a batter, allow yourself to focus consciously on the location and speed of the ball. Clear your mind of all noise and clutter. Get unnecessary thoughts out of your head. Tune out all sound and distraction around you. Simply focus on the baseball being pitched to you. Focus your intent. Imagine hitting it squarely and watching it sail far through the air. Concentrate on your abdomen and visualize projecting energy from this “will center”. You must want to hit the ball and will it to happen. See the ball big and bold. Fixate on the ball. See only the ball and focus your total intent and will on the ball. Did the ball appear to be moving slower than normal? If so, you are well on your way to becoming a master of time manipulation.
For most rapid perception, attention must be at its maximum focus on the area of the thing to be perceived. You must intend to see everything you can in that moment of looking. When you focus only on the thing you are looking at, things surrounding will become dimmer and out of focus while moving in slow motion together with it.
How to Experience Timelessness
To experience
timelessness, you need to focus intently on the moment at hand. You cannot
allow your mind to wander over events of the past or wallow in deep concern
over the future. You must be in the present moment, fully alert and clear
headed. In short, you must be totally involved in the “now”.
You must not fear but be calm and have a heightened state of awareness.
Fear collapses time. You do not want to collapse time, you want to expand
it. Awe is one of the feelings that expands time and slows it down. The
opposite is true, things that move in slow motion likeness create a feeling
of awe. Fear and awe are very similar and yet very different feelings.
Fear causes you to be totally unseeing and blind to the action of the
thing you are afraid of in the moment. Awe causes you to be totally seeing
and taking in the fullness of what you are looking at.
Scientists have shown that mild anxiety can improve performance in some
instances like a 100 meter dash, a musical performance, or even an exam.
But for the most part, a full-blown autonomic response is not adaptive
in most of these circumstances. These are classic instances of what the
Taoists would call getting in your own way.
The ancient Eastern masters from various traditions such as Taoist, Buddhist,
Hindu, Zen, Sufi and many others recognized this feature of the human
nervous system, and so found antidotes to it. These were awareness and
equanimity. They cultivated a calm temperament through meditation and
breathing exercises, which you can think of as strengthening the parasympathetic
response.
As a result, the Eastern masters were able to develop a very strong and
nearly imperturbable presence. Because they were not getting in their
own way, in the face of danger they were pure action, maximally effective.
This cultivation fed into a hyper-aware state of mind, which, interestingly
enough, seems to block out emotion-based responses.
Empathic healers who tranfer energy to others in therapeutic touch reach a level of heightened alertness, which is classified as hyper beta brain activity. This is a state of “superalertness” similar to the keen alertness that Zen masters have been observed to reach in closed-eye meditations. In this state, the healer is acutely focused on one thought or activity, tuning out all peripheral distractions.
You can also heal or comfort yourself in this manner. In this heightened state of consciousness, you can focus on any area of pain or injury and send healing energy to that area in thought forms. Similary, you can use your hands to help or to heal, using your hands to project and conduct that healing energy.
A concentrated
mind is not an attentive mind, but a mind that is in the state of awareness
can concentrate. Consciousness or awareness is never exclusive, it includes
everything. It is not a constricted concentration but a relaxed and free
one. When you get into the calm and unperturbed state of mind of conscious
awareness, you can perceive easily and nothing can happen too quickly
for you. When you are able to slow time down in consciousness, you can
use time as the ultimate weapon. Nothing can stop you but you can stop
anything. Time is the ultimate illusion. All time is mental.
By using the principle of “it is not time that slows down but you
that slows down”, you slow down your actions to slow down the rate
of things moving around you in consciousness. Then once you have that
increased rate of perception, you can start moving faster again with much
greater control and effectiveness. This is the secret of slowing down
in order to go faster. Do not hurry because hurry manifests fear and collapses
time. Only when you are calm are you able to perceive things in slow motion.
Act as if you have all the time to do everything you want.
Every time
you slip up on an action or have a hesitation, it’s because you overlapped
a proper sequence of things and it just cancels out in your mind. Maybe
it’s because you were in a hurry. Your mind can only do one thing
at a time, yet each may be done at the rate of microseconds, giving the
illusion of many things at once. If you actually try to do many things
at once, nothing happens. We’re referring to the conscious awareness
here, although your subconscious can do many things simultaneously. It
is your conscious awareness that uses rapid perception in order to slow
time down.
Time is an illusion, only consciousness is reality. Who is to say that
only a certain amount of things can happen within one second and not more?
There are times when people encounter life threatening situation and in
the moment, their whole life passed in front of them. As their precious
life hung in the balance, for one split second, they took stock of their
life, including their loved ones, unfulfilled dreams and unrealized goals
and made a momentous decision that saved them in virtually no time at
all.
Maybe you experienced moments like this before. It is a state of superconsciousness.
Everything seemed to slow down. Things seemed to appear in slow motion.
You saw your loved ones and they seemed to be frozen in time. You considered
logical arguments and argued them through the steps to completion. All
of this takes a long time normally, but for this one instance when you
are so sharply focused and alert, you play it all our in one magical moment,
a moment that you seemed to control.
You can perceive things in slow motion and still let your thoughts and actions flow at the “same speed”. It is all relativity. To you, time around you slows down but to an outside observer, you become phenomenally precise and in control. When you are able to perceive faster, you also possess the ability to respond faster. Each second of your time becomes stretched and you can have increased rate of movement within it. Your time is increased compared to other people’s. Those watching with normal rate of consciousness will see you moving like flashes of lightning with sudden bolts of speed.
You can also use your mind to increase your own rate of movement to phenomenal levels. Think of yourself moving at extremely high speed that is beyond the ordinary. And act with that mental state. Think speed and you manifest speed. Time manipulation and phenomenally fast movement like all mind powers, require you to be in the right state of consciousness to be of effect.
The best ballplayers, it seems, have learned how to manipulate time whenever it suits them. Perhaps they do this without a great deal of thought or analysis, but they certainly employ all of the key factors of time magicians. They focus their intent, engage their will power, and energize their thought forms. This is personal magic. This is personal power. Everyone can do it. The superstars just do it more easily and more often than the rest of us. We say that they are gifted or superhuman. They are simply focused, intent and willful.
All champions have one thing in common, they have learned to sieze the moment. No matter what situation we are in, there is always a cubic centimeter of chance that appears in the moment for us to accomplish what we want. The trick is to be alert enough to seize the moment and then have enough personal power to execute the appropriate move at the appropriate instance. Impeccable warriors are fully alert and fully aware of the physical world.
Everybody knows that under normal conditions when heroics are not on the line, a person cannot pass a ball through a crowd to a selected teamate who scores, all in less than one second. Under normal circumstances, most people cannot even locate a person in a crowd in less than one second, let alone pass the ball to him. This demonstates over and over again the elasticity of time.
There’s a young swimmer who came out of nowhere at the end of a race to eclipse the field. She always found a way to win, and would “pick her spot” to “make her move.” Still, it seemed uncanny how she could close the big gap between herself and the race lader at the end, when you consider she had to swim nearly twice as fast as she had been swimming throughout the rest of the race.
It’s like the track sprinter who digs down at the end of the race to bolt like a cannon to victory at the end. To the observer, it looks as thought they are running against opponents who are moving in slow motion. How can somebody who’s been running at top speed suddenly double that speed at the end of a race, when they should be the most tired? It’s an obvious display of will power, focused intent, and energized thought power, whereby they conceive of miraculous victory and believe it is possible. And whatever our consciousness can conceive, the body can achieve. Since everything is consciousness, the physical world is only an illusion.
Move Into the "Zone" of Higher Performance
You can cope with daily emergency situations and daily challenges where you need extra time and powers that heightened awareness affords you. You can run faster in less time and slow down events when needed by altering your perception of time and space. Some of the greatest athletes do it. Heroic rescue teams do it. You can do it too.
You can meditate anywhere and reach a state of heightened consciousness and timelessness. Surely, star athletes in action do not stop everything that they are doing to sit down in perfect posture and slowly number their bodies to enter this state. They have learned to do it within the flow of events. They pop in and out of this state, as needed. They do it quickly and almost effortlessly with practice. It becomes a learned behavior. Soon your total self will sense the opportunity or need and shift you to that new, higher level of consciousness. Then everything slows down in front of you, so that you can respond.
If you watch top athletes who gets into this “zone”, as sports people often call it, you will notice that their eyes seem to glaze over or close halfway for a brief time. They might even appear to be going into a trance. That trance, of course, is the altered state of consciousness known to meditators. They go into a state of higher consciousness very briefly. A split second can seem to last much longer to a person in this state because there is no time or normal laws of physics in higher consciousness.
Most people think that specacular atheletes simply try harder when they “turn it on”. Certainly, they do find extra energy and move with greater speed in less time at these moments, almost as though time for them was standing still. These golden moments in an athelete’s life are truly magical. They can see everything happening in slow motion around them. They have all the time in the world to make amazing moves. They can run faster, think faster, and jump higher than anyone else. And all of this comes by slipping momentarily into higher consciousness, a nonphysical reality where time does not exist and the normal laws of physics do not apply. What’s even better, they operate in these golden moments with a higher consciousness that thinks faster and better than the normal, physical consciousness that people use.
Remember that you control time as you experience it. As an agent of change, you control the only real measure of time. This is because time only occurs with change. The theatre of events around us is interpreted by our personal perception of change. Your perception will be somewhat different from mine, although we might agree on many things we observe together. Because of your unique perception, you create your own reality. You also create your own sense of time as an agent of change. Time simply measures change. Beyond that simple function, time is nonexistent. There is really only the “now”.
Since time only operates according to perception of it, you can manipulate time by controlling your perception of it. Your higher consciousness exist in the realm of timelessness. Stay in a state of heightened awareness in order to make your perception of time stand still. It is a matter of personal time perception and a focused intent to stay in the now. There are people who use such time powers to transverse great distances in very little amount of time and cause limited resources to last far longer than normal as though inexhaustible. Such are the miracles that happen when time and space are altered.
Slow Time Down and Stop the World
Sword masters
and ninjas all use this “slowing time down” and “stopping
the world” with the mind technique to accomplish amazing feats of
lightning fast combat which normal perceiving people can hardly even comprehend
how it is humanly possible for themselves to attempt.
We miss ourselves. We are so busy out there in our minds, in the mirror,
on the phone, on the pc, listening to deafening music, overtaking, seeking
power, status, labels. The boy racer feels alive, excited, when he is
near a near death opportunity! Adrenalin pumping, over excited, showing
off, seeking attention, seeking power, seeking approval, fearful. Fight
or flight that we cannot see the signs. We make mistakes, we miss turnings,
we lose or forget things. Because we lose the plot, we lose reign of our
senses.
Only when there’s an accident, a car crash, a thump on the head,
a slap in the face, a comment, a synchronistic moment, a glance from a
beautiful person, song of a sweet bird, the rising or setting of the sun,
a shooting star, ever renewing the rhythm of the waves do we stop for
a second…time slows down…in awe, devotion, speechlessness, thoughtlessness,
our ears perk up. We become aware of something here now. Something beautiful,
fresh, sweet, pristine, shining, glowing, evervessant, ever fresh. Only
at these times, are we awake, truly alive - during the skid / bang / crash
- time slows down.
Mindfulness can be defined as knowing what is happening while it is happening,
no matter what it is. The essence of meditation is training in mindfulness.
It’s direct perception. We see through meditation, what the mind
is doing, moment by moment. Why? Because we are training ourselves to
become present. If we are present, we naturally bring our intelligence
to bear on the moment. Therefore we have no option but to find out what
is happening.
Meditation, then, involves being present with what is here. The observer
consciousness allows you to fully observe what is happening internally
as well. You notice thoughts and feelings as they arise and realize the
causes. It is a self-reflective awareness where you know you are thinking
when thinking happens. When you become mindful, you become more aware
of things both within and without. The way to wisdom and intelligence
is to understand ourselves as human beings. Not through a theory, not
through a concept, but through direct experience.
When you are calm, you are clear seeing. You filter out a lot of noise that affects consciousness. To have a calm mind is to silence and still a lot of vibrations leaving perception to be free and unhindered. You get into the state of observer consciousness, where you are just watching what is going on and seeing it in every moment of its happening. Mindfulness is the systematic training in knowing what is happening, while it is happening.
As the mind becomes tranquil, many things begin to become clear. Things that were not formerly clear to us about ourselves, the world around us, the way we are living, relationships. We become clear about everything. So we need to generate within our minds the conditions for a prelimary mindfulness which is the essence of meditation. As tranquility arises we began gaining insight into the state of our own minds. Insight may arise naturally with tranquility. That is the traditional teaching. We train in tranquility and insight naturally arises.
Insight is the most profound level of learning. It is learning through direct perception which naturally gives rise to understanding. It is not learning through externally acquired information, something imported from outside. It leads to wisdom because it is learning inwardly how we are and what we are as human beings. When your meditation becomes really powerful, it also becomes constant. Life offers many challenges and the serious meditator is very seldom bored.
When you’re looking for something or a solution, take time to pause and enter the stilled state of consciousness. Don’t think of it as wasting time during the work day. With practice, this little exercise takes very little time, as others perceive it. Think of it as a creative way to think through your problems by engaging your higher mind to meditate on work issues. In that state of consciousness, the answer can come to you suddenly.
Remember, even a brief second in an altered state of consciouness can seem like hours, since you are controlling time. You are creating perfect timing of perfecting time manipulation. Time is but an illusion. There is all of the time in the world, if you can focus your intent and control your perception. Make your own reality.
Any activity
where you perform can be expanded and enriched by a heightned state of
awareness that allows you to expand your perception of time and operate
somewhat outside of normal physical limitations.
Slow down only that which you want to, otherwise allow it to proceed at
normal speed. Use rapid perception on whatever you want to, whenever you
want to.
Enoch Tan is the author of
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