What If Time Isn't What We Think It Is?

So today we're talking about time and what time really is,

Timelessness,

How we use it,

How it drives us crazy,

How we can change our entire life by simply changing our perspective of time.

So why do we want to talk about time?

If you Google theories about time,

Oh you can get all kinds of very boring topics about structuring time and the A theory and the B theory and all these different things.

But why do we really want to look at time?

Why would we look at the philosophy of something so seemingly abstract?

There's three big reasons.

The first is this whole idea that there isn't enough time.

We live in a reality where there doesn't seem to be enough time to do anything or we have so much time we're killing time or spending time.

I remember reading a quote a long time ago and it said everybody wants to be immortal but no one knows what to do with a quiet Sunday afternoon.

And today you know we can easily fill our time with Netflix and games and social media and everything.

What are we doing?

What is this time that we're spending wasting killing?

And then on the other end of the spectrum we're so busy we don't have enough time.

And it's such an interesting thing because we use this word time like we know what it is.

Like I don't have enough bread and there's a loaf of bread or there's not a loaf of bread.

Like it's this tangible thing that we can all agree on but what if it's not?

What if the very statement I don't have enough time is actually nonsense?

What if it's meaningless?

Because we don't actually know what time is.

It's not a loaf of bread.

It's a construct in our mind.

So what if it's not what we think it is?

Another reason to look at time is our past tends to haunt us.

We have trauma.

We have experiences.

We have memories.

Sometimes good memories from the past haunt us because that's not our life now.

Maybe we lost someone.

Maybe we wish for the old days.

Or maybe there's great trauma that still affects us today that still drives our choices and our decision-making today and creates fears and all kinds of things.

But what is the past?

What is this place,

This dimension that is controlling us in the present moment?

What is it?

And it's very interesting to look at it and ponder it because maybe if we can change our philosophy about it,

It won't control us the way it has in the past.

And then the third piece that we want to look at are ponderings of the future because our future also can cause incredible anxiety.

We can also have great hope and all kinds of good things but we don't really have to analyze it if it's bringing us great hope and joy.

But what if we have anxiety about the future?

Sometimes we can have anxiety because in the future it won't be as good as it is now.

Or we can have anxiety in the future because we're afraid it's gonna get worse.

What if I'm alone for the rest of my life?

What if I lose all my money?

What if I don't have security?

What if,

What if,

What if,

What if?

And it's all existing in some kind of dimension that does or doesn't even exist and yet we're talking about it like it's real.

You know we did a series of talks all based in David Hawkins book Power Versus Force.

After I discovered that book,

I discovered that book because I was at a talk by Wayne Dyer and Wayne Dyer had discovered it and it was sort of,

I don't know whether it was published or with a small house or something and it was Wayne Dyer that got it published by Hay House and then David Hawkins kind of exploded on the scene and so it was shortly after that that I actually got to see him in person do a talk.

And one of the really interesting things he talked about was how dangerous it is to live in a non-reality.

To have a conversation about something that isn't real.

It's kind of like,

Imagine you say,

Well what if the sky was purple and every five minutes daggers fell from the sky and we were always possibly going to be killed?

Well we would look at that and say but that's nonsense,

Why would we talk about it?

But instead the person's like no no but it could happen so then what should we do?

Okay you know what we should build our houses differently to allow for the possibility of daggers falling from the sky and then we should also maybe we should create new things and then and we can create all this energy and fear and everything based on this possibility of the purple sky and the daggers falling from the sky but none of it's real.

And David Hawkins whole point was we spend an inordinate amount of energy and time in our brain thinking about realities that don't exist.

That are as real as the purple sky and the daggers falling from it.

And so he had this whole theory in this talk that he did all about how you aren't allowed to use the word if.

But what if this happened?

He says don't go there.

What if the sky is purple?

What if tomorrow half the population disappeared like in the Avengers movie or something?

What if what if what if?

He said none of its real and it's like a distraction from this moment.

It's a distraction from actually living and making choices in this moment and none of its real.

So it's a very interesting thing to take that idea and bring it into a discussion of time.

Because if we talk a lot about the past or the future what if they don't even exist?

What if they're figments of our imagination?

What if the moment that moment has passed it no longer exists?

Or what if it does exist?

What if what's happened in the past is very real and solid and I'm supposed to carry it with me my whole life?

And these are some of the ways that they look at theories of time.

Do you believe the past exists?

Do you believe the future exists?

Do you believe that all of it exists all at once?

That we live in an eternal now and the past and the future are all happening right now?

So for this talk this entire discussion is a thought experiment.

It's impossible for us to know what the answer is because our brains were designed to live in this space-time continuum.

If you imagine that we are divine beings,

Oneness,

Part of the great quantum field,

Whatever you want to understand.

And for some reason we decided to live in duality.

We decided to live in this space that I am here and you are wherever you are in the world.

We are in separate space and within that space we are going to live chronologically in time.

So we live in a space-time continuum.

That's what that means.

And our brains are designed to map that for us.

So it's very difficult for us to see beyond our own brains.

This is why time is so curious and that's why we need to kind of look at it almost from the outside and say,

Have we made this up?

Is this just something that I've made up in my mind but it's not actually real?

Kind of like the boogeyman in the closet.

If I think about the fact that there's a boogeyman in my closet,

You know,

When I'm six years old,

The more I think about it the more real it becomes.

And even if it isn't real it will still terrify me.

So our brains create the reality we're experiencing.

And if our brain has made up these concepts of the past and the future,

What do we do with that?

So just going forward in our chat today,

Just to really allow our brains to release the constructs.

The goal of our talk today is to not understand time.

That's not the goal because we can't.

It's not possible.

Nobody understands it.

We don't even understand thoughts.

We don't understand our brain.

We don't understand any of it.

Doesn't mean we can't love life and enjoy being here and all that,

But we really can't understand it.

And so this is this beautiful space that we can live where we just live in the question.

We allow the fact that maybe the past doesn't exist the way I think it does.

Maybe the future doesn't.

Maybe it all does.

So the most important thing to take away from this talk is how do the different philosophies change your life?

If you look at whatever it is that you're struggling with right now in life,

What if we changed how we saw time?

How does that change what I'm struggling with?

Or how does it change how I expand in the light?

How does it change?

That's what matters.

It has to apply to our lives and everybody here will have a very different takeaway about that because some of us are very focused on the future.

Some of us are focused in the past.

Some of us have no idea what to do in the present.

So this is a thought experiment where we're going to ponder all the possible realities and then imagine how differently we might be able to process our lives based on all those different possibilities.

So first let's talk about the past and we have to ask ourselves,

And again I don't know the answers to this.

Nobody does.

So every one of us get to sit here and ponder this and ask ourselves what do we think?

There is no guru who understands this.

There's no expert on time.

We are all humans with brains designed for the space-time continuum.

So each one of our perspectives is really important.

Do you believe that the past exists?

Do you believe that this is the present moment and there was another dimension or another aspect of time that we call in the past that is solid and real?

And it's just a question.

Or do we exist in this present moment and now I exist in this moment,

Now I exist in this moment?

The first time I said now we exist in this moment was a few seconds ago in the past.

Does that still exist now?

Or the only thing is the only thing I carry forward into this moment right now kind of the imprint of that experience or the memory of that experience.

So we could look at our childhood for example or our relationship with our parents.

Does it still exist now?

Or did we simply adapt who we were at the time based on our experiences and what we're carrying today is that adaptation.

So let's say when we were young we lived in a very anxious home.

Maybe there was alcoholism,

Maybe our parents were just anxious,

Maybe there was stress in the home,

Maybe we were living in a war-torn country.

Who knows what was going on?

But for some reason we were stressed out and so in that moment,

In that present moment,

At that time we learned to put up walls to the fear that was all around us.

And those walls are what we experience today.

That moment doesn't exist.

The war is no longer.

Those people don't even live in my house anymore.

But the walls exist.

But the people don't.

Or that scenario no longer exists.

So what if you believe that?

What if we imagine it that way that today the only thing that actually exists are how I've changed because of it.

Well that suddenly brings a lot of power into the moment in terms of healing it.

Because that doesn't exist anymore.

That person isn't abusing me anymore.

That fear no longer is in my vicinity.

So today I can simply look at this interface I've created between my soul and the world around me and say,

Do I need these walls anymore?

There was a time that I needed them and I built them and they served me.

Do I need them today?

So it's really an interesting thing to ponder that,

Like if it's back there.

If we believe that that time was real and it exists and it's solid,

There can be a real habit of us bringing it forward with us.

That we actually never get to be in this present moment because we're actually bringing everything with us that we've ever experienced as if it's happening right now.

That that person is still abusing me.

I am still at war.

I am still there.

It's still here.

And then that actually can be very difficult.

It can be very lovely if they're happy memories.

And again,

I don't have an answer here.

It's just a question.

How does your mind interpret that?

Does it bring it forward or is it just it was happening in that moment in the same way that right now in this moment we are participating in this talk?

And sometimes that past moment ends up having more power than this moment right now.

Because we have all these residual emotions and we have all of these adaptations inside of us.

And then we believe,

If it's real,

That we can't release it.

That we are bound to it.

That this happened and this defines me.

I am a survivor of cancer,

Abuse,

War,

Whatever.

This is now part of me.

It's part of who I am.

And again,

It's not right or wrong.

But we just have to ask ourselves,

How is it affecting my life today?

This belief,

This set of thoughts about the past.

So in the same way,

Let's imagine,

Does the future exist?

You know,

You can imagine there's sort of these three aspects.

Potential past,

What's that all about?

Present,

Which we'll talk about in a minute,

And the future.

Does the future exist?

Some might say it does.

Some might say it exists already.

And it's interesting because I don't know the answer to that either.

Because in my mind,

Sometimes it feels like it does already exist.

It feels like it all exists right now.

And I'm just walking through it.

For example,

I remember when I wanted to buy the train station.

I once bought a train station and renovated it into a wellness center back in 2009.

And it's so funny because I had a vision of a space where we would teach classes and have gatherings and do all these things.

A train station in my town comes for sale.

This old,

No one had used it for a long,

Long time.

But for whatever reason,

It's a long story,

I couldn't buy it at the time or I couldn't get funding or whatever.

Yet I had this vision,

This like flash in my mind,

That of me turning off the lights at the end of an evening.

It was almost like I could feel that there had just been a yoga class.

And I turned around to look into the big room and I turned the light off as I walked out and locked the door.

And it was just this flash.

And that flash let me know that this was going to happen.

That I was right.

That this was in the future.

And for me what that did is it brought me great peace.

Because it would be another year before the stars lined up and that I did end up getting the train station.

So on some level,

Some part of me believes that the future already exists in some way.

I have no idea why or how.

I don't have a map to get to how I even think that.

So that sounds awesome.

I also use it when I'm driving through blizzards in Canada.

Because when it really storms here,

You can't even see out the front window.

You can't even see your own car.

You don't know if you're on the road.

It's the scariest freaking thing you can do is drive in a whiteout where I live.

And I we have driven and I'm like white knuckle driving.

The kids have their heads out the windows trying to see if we're even on the road.

It is terrifying.

And oftentimes I'll sit and I'll pray and I'll think,

So I know maybe tomorrow there's something I'm gonna do.

Do I see myself in this position tomorrow?

Am I at my friend's place?

Is that gonna happen?

Yes,

I see myself there.

And this,

I literally have peace inside thinking,

All right,

Then we must make it home tonight.

It's okay.

And it brings me great peace knowing that I can see what's gonna happen tomorrow.

I believe it's true.

It lands as true.

Okay,

Relax.

We'll get home alive.

It's okay.

So in that way,

Believing that the future is somehow on the road is very peacegiving for me.

But what if it's twisted into a negative and it's like,

I know bad stuff's gonna happen.

I know this isn't gonna go right.

I know,

You know,

I know they're gonna leave.

I know I'm gonna lose the job.

I know it.

I know it.

I can see it.

I can see it.

The same idea that the future is gonna happen could cause us incredible anxiety.

I don't know why I don't have that.

It doesn't,

I don't see the future the same.

I don't see negative things in the future at all.

So whatever that mechanism is inside of me that brings me peace about that,

It doesn't seem to go into the negative disasterizing.

Mind you,

I should correct that because it used to.

Now that I'm thinking about it,

Back when I wrote What If You Could Skip the Cancer,

My first book,

I did.

I did seriously worry about the future.

I'd forgotten about that until right now.

And then I read a quote by Mark Twain and the quote was,

I've been through some terrible things in my life and some of them actually happened.

And I realized that one of the difficulties of having a really active imagination,

And I have a really active imagination,

I don't know whether that's why it goes along with being a writer or doing whatever I do,

That my brain just it just loves that creative process and I can just go into a million corners of things.

Well I'll tell you,

When those horses are turned towards something negative,

Wow can I ever create a horrific situation as well.

Wow isn't that interesting?

See I'd forgotten that I used to do that.

So this brings me to another interesting point that I was going to talk about in a minute,

But perhaps it's next.

What if all time exists right now?

What if the past,

The future,

The present,

All is happening right now?

You know some people have talked about that,

That time is more like a cone,

That everything is just stacked on top of each other and our brain is simply interpreting it in a chronological way.

But of course if we believe that time runs in this chronology,

Then we believe that I can't change the past because it's finished.

So again what I'm saying now is that it's based in a philosophy that says the past is real.

It isn't just a moment in time,

It is a real thing with people,

Time,

Places,

Events happening in the same way there's future events happening,

People,

Things have changed,

You know.

But if they're all happening at the same time,

What if when I make a change in this moment,

The past and the future change as well?

Five minutes ago I would have told you that I've never disasterized because I'd forgotten.

It had been wiped from my memory that I used to do that a lot,

Chronically.

I also used to have brutal migraines a few times a month where I would literally go down for days,

Days that I was completely incapacitated.

That doesn't happen anymore.

What's really interesting is I don't really have any memories of those migraines either anymore.

Let's imagine that all things exist right now.

Our childhood,

Our future,

Our past relationships,

Everything.

They all exist right now.

Imagine that we live in a paradigm and in that paradigm here are my belief systems and based on those belief systems I make these choices.

We all have a system that we're working in right now and we are making choices based on that system,

That belief system,

Our fears,

Everything.

So if you take everything that you are right now,

Stick them all together,

That's who you are right now.

And we make all of our choices based in that whole thing.

We can't cherry-pick things out.

Everything is connected.

It's like when I think of my marriage.

It's really easy to cherry-pick.

Oh I can't believe I didn't do this thing.

But you know what?

At that time my mom was dying.

I was pregnant.

We just bought a farm.

My in-laws lived next door.

I had crappy self-worth.

I was in love for the first time in my life.

There was a million things affecting that choice and they all fit together into one paradigm.

So imagine that right now I am actually viewing my past,

My future,

And my present through my current paradigm.

What happens if I change my current paradigm?

What if I change something?

What if I make a different choice right now?

Because this is what's really interesting about this present moment is this is the only place we can make choice.

This is the only place we can make change.

What's the effect of that?

So what's crazy is I've spent a lot of time,

I have to say since I was divorced,

I got divorced in 2013.

I was married in 1993 and since that time I have spent a lot of time replaying conversations.

One of the things I struggled with in my marriage is I was a real romantic and I really wanted to connect and I wanted to go on dates and I wanted to do all that those kind of things.

But we had a dairy farm and life was hard and we were tired and my husband was very tired and I don't think he was really wired that way.

I think he was seeking something different in marriage which is why we eventually divorced because we were actually just looking for different things.

He's a great guy,

Just we were looking for different things.

But inside the marriage,

Inside the paradigm that I believed in,

My beliefs didn't matter.

My desires didn't matter.

And if I couldn't get him to agree with whatever it was I desired and it had to do with him,

Then I would give up my desires for the sake of the marriage.

That was the paradigm I lived in.

After divorcing,

Dating,

Being alone,

Going celibate,

Having a million experiences and discoveries,

I finally came to a place where actually my desires are my path.

It's really important.

There's kind of no reason to be here if I'm not actually living my soul's journey.

And so I've often gone back and replayed a lot of the experiences in my marriage from this new perspective.

So from this new perspective,

If I had sat down with him and said,

Hey I'd really like to have regular date nights,

Like say every Thursday night that we go on date nights because we had this conversation.

This was a real conversation.

And in the old paradigm he'd say,

I'm pretty tired and I don't know and it's just hard or whatever.

And I'd say,

Oh I know,

I know,

I know,

I get it.

And it would just disappear.

And then I would deep down be very resentful and sad and depressed and probably go eat a pile of chocolate.

Truthfully,

That's exactly what happened.

But in my new paradigm,

I would look at that conversation differently and I would say,

Because I've done this,

I think I swear I've had this conversation with him in my head at least 30 times since the paradigm shifted.

Because the paradigm keeps shifting and honing itself.

It's like we have all these old examples that we can try our new self out in.

We have this interesting place that's very emotionally loaded that we can try out this new paradigm in.

And so I would play this out and I would think and I would say,

Hey I'd love to go on date nights.

And he'd say,

I'm pretty tired.

And in my new paradigm I'd say,

Oh so what would you think of me going on dates with someone else then?

Because I really love romance and I love connection.

Maybe you and I need to shift our relationship.

Maybe we have a you know,

We raise the kids and we farm together and we live together.

But maybe I get the romance somewhere else.

And then he says,

And I play this out and is it real?

Is it not real?

I don't know.

And even the whole concept of what's real,

I don't know what that is either.

But what's really interesting is doing that and having the conversations within my current paradigm diffused all my anger with him.

It diffused any depression or despair or frustration that I ever had.

It doesn't matter anymore.

It's almost like I can fully understand everything that happened within the paradigm that I was living in.

But if I make the change in this current moment,

It's almost like it changes the past.

Or at least it changes my perception of it.

Or it changes my memory of it.

Or I don't know.

Again we don't even understand what thoughts are.

All I know is I'm not going to bring this into a current relationship.

Let's put it that way.

I don't have to relive that pattern anymore because my paradigm has shifted.

So it's a very interesting thing,

Kind of regardless of whether the past exists,

That what if we could change things today and it would shift it in all time.

Because it obviously would shift it in the future because if this is my current paradigm,

I'm not going to go back a paradigm.

So I'm only going to keep stepping forward in my current paradigm or maybe even a better one or a more expansive one.

So I can understand that the future would shift because of the change.

But imagine how we're connected to the past experience also shifts.

So all the times we were controlled by family or relationships or whatever,

Maybe it still happened.

Maybe it's still that chapter is still written.

But there's no there's no emotional charge to it anymore.

So does it still exist?

Does it still exist in the same way in my mind?

Or is it just a TV show I once watched and it really doesn't have any reality in my current time?

It's also interesting to imagine if we believe that all things happen right now,

Past,

Present,

And future.

Let's say we go beyond even this lifetime.

Just for a moment,

Whether we believe it or not,

Doesn't matter.

But whether we have the idea that this soul has actually had many incarnations,

That the soul is going along on its journey and then maybe it just wears this body out and it just takes on a new body and then it goes along and it wears that body out and it goes on to the next body.

Let's just say that's what we understand.

Which many,

Many,

Many faiths and philosophies believe.

This is where the idea of karma comes from.

Then not the punishment stuff that is taught to guilt you and make you feel bad.

But the idea of patterns that are replicating that our soul is having all these different experiences in almost spiral time that we're just revisiting it in a different way from a different perspective.

I don't know about you but every so often that idea because this again this is all a thought experiment.

It doesn't matter if it's real.

It's a thought experiment.

The idea that I could have multiple lifetimes,

Multiple versions of myself existing in this moment is kind of fascinating.

Because sometimes I do have a real slave mentality that I really believe that I don't matter and all that matters is I serve other people,

That they're happy.

I believe that somehow I'll be punished if I don't do it.

Sometimes I believe that I'm Leonardo da Vinci and I'm blissfully happy in my laboratory and the rest of the world doesn't matter at all.

Sometimes I,

You know,

I have all these different aspects of my own experience and a lot of them don't seem to have anything to do with this incarnation.

Like I have wrestled my whole life with huge self-worth issues.

I remember my stepmother saying to me,

How could you have self-worth issues?

You were literally number one son to your parents.

You have always had these gifts.

You have always had friends.

You are always like,

Why do you battle with such brutal self-worth?

And I mean like this is probably my number one thing that tortures me is I don't think I'm good enough and I'm afraid other people aren't gonna like me.

And even my kids are like,

Mom what are you talking about?

I'm like,

I don't know.

And it can own me if I'm not careful.

Where in the world does that come from?

So it's an interesting thing to think about.

Well,

What if there are all these multiple lives right now and maybe I really have had many,

Many lives where I didn't count.

I really wasn't important and who I was didn't matter and I really wasn't liked.

Or maybe I was a real jerk or maybe I was a tyrant.

I don't know.

And again,

It's just an interesting thing.

It allows me to kind of sit in the present moment and say,

Maybe that's not relevant now.

Maybe I don't have to have these thoughts.

So maybe if I do make different choices today,

Maybe that affects that lifetime as well also.

Because again,

All the power is in this moment.

There's no power.

It doesn't matter whether there's past lives,

Future lives.

It doesn't matter.

I have no power in those past moments.

I only have power today.

So true or not,

What shift can I make in my choices today?

What shift can I make in my philosophy today that might change all of that also?

That it no longer has any power over me at all?

Because in this very moment,

I don't really have any self-worth issues.

For whatever reason,

A million tiny dials seem to have turned in my life.

It doesn't bother me anymore.

But maybe it doesn't bother me in the past lives either anymore.

I don't know.

Again,

We have no idea.

The other interesting thing about the future is when you think about the fact that right now,

In this moment,

We have all the power.

And this is really important because if we find ourselves sort of stuck in the past,

The question becomes,

Why?

Why are we stuck in the past?

Why can I not stop thinking about it?

Maybe there's something in the current moment that is very similar and it's triggering us.

It's jumping us in timelines.

It's actually making us relive it.

It almost becomes a discipline to stay in this moment and say,

Okay,

If I'm living in the past,

There must be something in this moment that's triggering it.

And that means in this moment,

I can make a different choice that will change everything.

But sometimes that's really hard.

It means we have to step into conflict.

It means we have to really dig deep inside of us and say,

What is my truth?

Am I willing to lose this relationship over it?

Am I willing to disappoint this person?

And am I am I willing to have this person be upset with me?

And if I am or if I'm not,

Why?

What is the philosophy underneath all that doesn't allow me,

Doesn't allow other people to have their own reactions?

Whether someone likes me or doesn't like me,

It has nothing to do with me.

That's just their response to me.

Not everybody likes strawberry ice cream.

It has nothing to do with the strawberry ice cream.

Everyone just has a different perspective.

So it's a very interesting thing to bring ourselves back into this moment and to actually know how powerful we are.

Because that's another curious thing that we've all been living in a certain paradigm that says we are not powerful.

We are lowly.

We are sinful.

We are full of sexual desire and that we're all messed up and we're small and somebody else needs to tell us what to do.

There's all this expertism that that person knows better,

That priest knows better,

That teacher knows better,

That book knows better,

That everybody else knows better than I do.

What if none of that's true?

What if you are the most powerful person in your life and in this moment I actually can make one of a hundred different choices?

It's not can I make this choice or that choice.

There's a hundred different choices,

A thousand different choices that I could make right now.

And now imagine how this affects what we might call our future,

Ourselves in a future time or whatever we want to imagine or how we personally change in the present even if we don't go into the future.

If in this moment right now,

Okay so right now I'm sitting here and we're talking about time.

This is my current reality.

In this moment I could choose to shut down all of my online businesses and go and work at a local bank.

And I could throw myself into working as a bank teller and maybe becoming a manager and imagine how different my life would be.

Or I could become a barista at a local cafe.

Or I could do none of these things and open an Etsy shop and sell things on Etsy and write my books and do that.

Or I could give up my apartment and my car and maybe buy a van and live in my van and just travel around the world.

All of these choices are possible right now.

All of them plus a billion.

Think about how different my life would be if I made any of those choices.

Or I can continue doing what I'm doing.

But that's how much power we have.

Imagine who I my life in one year if I made any of those choices right now.

My life would change dramatically.

We all have this power in this moment.

And so then suddenly the future changes,

The present changes whatever we want to do.

And the past becomes irrelevant.

And that's what's really interesting about how we perceive the past.

So in say like a Buddhist tradition they would say that the present moment is the only moment.

And now there's this moment.

And now there's this moment.

And now there's this moment.

There's only this moment.

It's a beautiful mantra if you struggle with this to actually just say present moment only moment.

Go for a walk and just present moment only moment.

It's a beautiful walking meditation.

The challenge is that we can't live fully in this moment because we're literally carrying the past with us.

We're carrying it.

Like I can't make that choice because you don't know what I've been through.

Yeah but does it even exist any longer?

You can make any choice you want right now.

Maybe you're not strong enough to make that choice yet.

Maybe you want to climb a mountain in air quotes and you haven't developed the muscles yet.

That's a truth.

Okay well you know what I do want to make this choice so I need to develop my muscles,

My mental muscles,

My emotional muscles,

My finances,

Whatever I need to do.

But it isn't that I can't make the choice.

I just need to develop some things so that it's reasonable.

It's very very interesting.

The more we live in the past or the future the less power we give the present.

And we have all the power right now.

Like it's almost terrifying how powerful we are.

There's the other concept is this whole idea that I don't have enough time.

There's not enough time in the day to get everything I want to get done.

And this is something that I currently live in.

This is a concept or a perspective or however you want to or a philosophy that I currently experiment with all the time because there are a million things I want to do.

A million.

It's all I can do to hold the horses back of my mind.

All the million things.

And so I have to always be sitting and saying okay there's this beautiful mantra in Access Consciousness.

They say there's always enough time to do anything you want to do.

And I repeat that to myself many times a day.

And it's very interesting to imagine this as a reality.

And what's wild is when we repeat it,

It becomes true.

And suddenly something funny happens to time.

And this brings us to Einstein and many scientists who studied time.

Because Einstein used to say that time is not in fixed units.

There's not some universal timekeeping clock that says a minute is this long or a second is this long and it's always the same.

And he said it's relative.

Our experience of time is relative to how well actually how fast we're going.

It's sort of a time-space-velocity question as well.

But it seems to be seems to change based on what we're doing.

If we're dancing,

Time may slow down and we get to experience eternity.

Or maybe we're doing something else and time flies.

But what's crazy is if I say to myself there is enough time for me to get all this done today,

Even though my mathematical self looks at the math and says that's impossible,

My experience of it in this very busy time of my life is that somehow time expands and it all happens.

Everything I ever want to get done in a day somehow gets done.

And so it's very interesting again to just ponder this.

There's no proof of this.

I can't tell you how to do it.

But it's an experiment to play with.

When you find yourself saying I just don't have enough time to say what if I do have enough time?

What if time isn't what we think it is?

What if it's not limited the way we think it is?

What if time is a construct of our mind?

Therefore we can play with it and we can change it and we can change our perspective and you can change what we can do in every little time packet.

What if that's true?

And it's so interesting because this leads me into this whole idea of timelessness.

I remember years ago coming up to the year 2012 and people would always talk about how 2012 was the end of time,

The end of the Mayan calendar,

The end of time.

And I think I remember even at the time and for no good reason I would think it's not that the world is ending but it's the beginning of the end of time.

This concept of time,

This prison of time,

This idea that the past holds us hostage or the future is something we can worry about or even that there's a gap between a thought and manifestation that there's a time gap.

And I always had this thought and I never knew where it came from.

So then of course 2012,

December whatever it was December 21st or 2012 whatever the magical day when the world was supposed to end passed.

And what I experienced since that day,

Was that ten years ago now,

Is that it seems that time has shifted,

That it seems to be almost speeding up and that when you have a thought it manifests so much faster.

Which is of course why we're doing so much work in mindfulness and being aware of our thoughts and being aware of what drives us,

Being aware of why we make the choices we make.

Because the game is speeding up.

Which is really awesome if we're thinking about happy things.

But it also means that it's almost like we can create a perfect storm very quickly.

Where all these sort of negative ideas and fears come together and they create crisis.

Which kind of speeds up our healing process.

If we're living in a comfort zone it's much harder to make choice.

Suddenly when things come to crisis we start to really know what's real and what matters in our life.

We start to make change.

But this idea of the end of the idea of time,

What I interpret this is,

And this is just my interpretation,

Is that we come to live in this sort of timeless space.

Where we really do live in this eternal present.

I love the books called the Teachings of the Masters of the Far East.

It's a series of six books written by Baird Spalding.

He in the 1800s,

He and a bunch of other scientists wanted to go east to find masters,

Gurus,

Spiritual masters.

And he found these people who lived in the Himalayas and they seemed to be live in a timeless state.

According to kind of our tick-tock chronological time,

Some of them have been on earth for 600 years or 200 years or 400 years or whatever.

It was quite irrelevant when they appeared on the planet in this form.

But what's interesting about it,

And this is just my take on it,

I don't know if they said it in the book,

It's sort of interesting when people talk about things and it's like it informs part of your brain that you don't even really understand.

But they would talk about how they just simply existed.

So now imagine that.

Imagine just existing and not worrying about chronological time.

So I exist in this moment.

The Sun comes up,

The Sun goes down.

The Sun goes up,

The Sun goes down.

How many times the Sun has gone up and gone down makes no difference to me in this moment.

I am only in this moment.

My reality,

My consciousness is not following this chronological time.

I'm just here.

So then we ask ourselves,

Would we age?

What is that?

What does that even mean to age?

If time is a construct and we don't actually live in chronological time,

What is aging?

Is that a construct as well?

And I understand there's a million arguments and debates about this,

Well animals do it,

I get it.

But what if we're beyond all that?

What if we're actually able to put to conceptualize an entirely different perspective of time?

So the funny thing is about living in timelessness,

Again this is an experiment that I am in right now.

This is probably my favorite thing to play with in my life.

And there's some little tiny tricks that I just want to share with you that don't seem very interesting or enlightened.

But how I personally play with timelessness is one,

I always repeat there's more than enough time to do anything I need to do.

I only repeat that when I hear myself saying I don't have enough time.

That's sort of the medicine to that question or that statement.

And the other thing I do is that whatever I see in my eyes I do.

So it might be that I walk by my unmade bed and I have the thought,

Oh I should make that bed.

Just make the bed.

Make the bed.

Because what happens if you don't make the bed,

Once again this is all just this is the inner workings of my experiment.

I don't know how it's gonna end up.

But all I know is if I keep walking by the unmade bed it creates something like time in my head.

Like I've now walked by the unmade bed seven times and it it's like it attaches me to the time continuum.

And then it also places it in the future when I will make the bed.

It's now placed me in the continuum.

But if it crosses my eyes and I just do it,

It's like it flatlines out of existence.

And then I walk by that thing that's on the stairs that I want to take upstairs,

Take it upstairs.

It's almost like extreme living in the moment.

I pick up the thing,

I put it away and it disappears from consciousness.

Whatever that thing is disappears off the timeline.

And when I live this way,

Time doesn't exist.

Everything gets done.

It's like the Chinese concept of wu wei,

Where you do nothing and yet everything gets done.

Because when I don't question whether or not I'm gonna do it right now,

It's like I just flow in the doing of things.

I see this and I do it and I see this and I do it.

I have a thought and I go,

Oh I should put that on my list.

And then I'm gonna put this for the class and then I hang up that coat and then I take Storm for a walk and then I do this and then I put that load of laundry in and I just and I flow in this doingness.

But I'm not questioning not now,

Later.

I'm not ever getting caught in that time-space continuum.

I just stay in this moment.

And what's really interesting is the only way I can do it is by slowing my brain down.

I have to slow my mind down first.

Which is really interesting.

When we circle back to the whole Einstein idea that we can bend time because time is relevant to speed.

Time is relevant to what we're doing.

So if I can,

If my mind is going quickly because it's,

Say what my mind does is it said okay I've got to do this and I've got to get ready for the talk and I've got to do this and I've got to take Storm out and I've got to make sure this happens and I've got to go pick up Aaron and I've got to go get the tires changed and I've got to go and my brain's like like that.

I can't slow down to make my bed because I'm actually like my mind is going at an insane speed.

Well what happens to time then?

It disappears because my brain is going so fast.

So I consciously have to slow my brain way down and you suddenly live in this meditative state and it's not a quiet state of doing nothing but you've slowed the brain down and I do this then I do this then I do this then I do this and so far the results of my experiment are that I get hundreds of things done and an hour has passed.

I look at the clock and I go what?

How could I possibly have done all of this in that short amount of time?

This is my experience and I think it's so exciting.

It is so exciting to live in that timeless space.

I'm gonna put my glasses on and if you have any questions I would love to answer them.

How do we shift our paradigm?

Oh it's that Rumi quote that says,

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.

It will not lead you astray.

Rumi.

And it's those little tiny nigglings inside of us that say what about this or I don't like what's happening in my life.

I want to make a change and all we do is say it and all of a sudden a book appears or a friend appears and you end up having a conversation or you end up here on insight timer and somebody says something and you're like oh interesting and we just keep following the breadcrumbs and all of a sudden one day we realize that our paradigm has shifted completely and we don't see the world at all the way we used to see it and we can't even imagine that we once saw it that way.

I think the paradigm shift very gently as long as we kind of stay true to that satya,

That truth within,

Really gently moving forward according to that truth within.

Thank you so much for being here.

I hope you have a wonderful day.