Timeslides

The more I read about, and consider the wonderful ideas presented by Anthony Peake concerning life after death, the more they fit in with the kind of ideas I have pondered over the years. This ‘ITLADian’ paradigm makes more and more sense the deeper into the rabbit hole I dare to venture. With this in mind, here a a couple of ideas that I have been playing about with that supplements the ones presented in Anthony’s wonderful books. 

 

It has occured to me on numerous occasions that our perception of time is dependent on a number of factors, not least of which is how aware we are of the present moment. Zen Buddhists and writers such as Eckhart Tolle suggest that we should attempt to ‘live in the now’, or the present moment, but what is the ‘now’ and how long does it last? Well it seems that the present moment lasts as long as you can remain fully aware of it, after which it slips away with the coming of inevitable distraction. This means that when attempting to remain in this present moment we actually slip in and out of various pieces of these moments that I shall call ‘timeslides’. 

 

These timeslides can be likened to the individual frames of film that create movies, and each one lasts for a period of percieved time determined by our ability to remain focused on it. Once we lose focus, that slide ends and we end up in the gap between frames until we focus on the present moment again. So our life is a stream of linear time made up of these frames of individual moments and our perception of how fast time moves depends on how long we remain focused within each frame. If we spend more ‘time’ in the present moment, then time seems to take longer, whereas if we are less focused and have shorter moments of awareness of the present, time seems to go faster. This is why time ‘flies’ when we are having fun, or doing something we really enjoy, as our attention is drawn out of the internal present moment and into the external activity. When bored, or doing something we hate, as well as when meditating on the present as in mindfulness and Zen, we are more aware of the moment as we are checking for the passage of time often. 

 

When we sleep, or when we are under anaesthesia, we have very few moments of the ‘now’ so time very quickly. As Anthony points out, mental stress causes us to focus very intently on the present moment, which makes our perception of time slow down considerably which, on the approach of death, becomes extreme and profound. 

 

The gaps between frames, are in fact times when we have no awareness of time and in a sense we are living outside of time during these periods. How many times have you been driving on the motorway only to realise that you have been on auto pilot and cannot recall the psat few miles. It’s as if you were not actually consciously present for a time. I wonder if we really are.

 

Anthony suggests that small amount of time before physical death, the Daemon ewinds time back to the start of our life and we beging to live it again, potentially slightly different as guided by the Daemon. I would suggest that perhaps we have a choice as to what part of our ‘movie’ we can insert ourselves into in order to better orchestrate our new life. In movie ‘The Butterfly Effect’ Ashton Kutcher’s character has lived his earlier life suffering from blackouts and is directed by his therapist to write journals of everything that he does and experiences. Later in life he starts to read them and finds his consciousness travels back in time to one of the blackouts, which was a gap in his present moment awareness, and which he now fills. He can then make changes to the way his life continued from that point on. He then comes back to the present and his history catches up with him. I would suggest that perhaps this is similar to what happens when we die. We get to see the life review where we choose the ‘blackout’ (gap between timeslides) in which to insert our selves into. The difference being that we don’t then retun to the present and instead, live out the rest of our altered life.

 

Or something like this?

 

~Shenarah