INTRODUCTION
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
meditational 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 objective, clear 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 the 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 learn to 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 seen to 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 from 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 of 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 time of 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 a 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, non-describable 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.
--Janet Iris Sussman
