The Misperception Of Time

~Dr. Michael Mason

Have you ever waited for an elevator and noticed how some people stand impatiently and it never arrives fast enough? Other people stand patiently, and the elevator seems to appear in no time.

Why does time appear to move so slowly in some circumstances and so fast in others? Shouldn’t time be the most objective and reliable experience in life? There’s never more or less than exactly sixty minutes in every hour. Why does time seem to pass much quicker as we age?

The answer to time passing slower or faster for different people in different situations all depends on perception. All is perception, and much of that is mis-perception.

Time means nothing without movement and movement cannot happen without space to move in. Time and space are so interrelated that scientists call it the space-time continuum.

In Kabbalah, the mystical teachings of Judaism, we are taught about a dimension of no time, space, or motion. Try to imagine that for a moment. The logic circuits of your brain might feel like they are short-circuiting. It seems impossible to imagine. For most people, it’s hard to imagine something we’ve never experienced during our lives and maybe never will. Unless we learn how to perceive outside of our logical, analytical brain. We must use a different perception sense than our physical perception senses of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. This is part of our sixth sense, or even beyond it. It is a higher consciousness sense I call our Infinite Heart. Infinite Heart perception is the key to perceiving and understanding who we really are, who and what we are meant be. That is our divine essence, and it is eternal, all-loving, and is what we were “created in God’s image,” really means.

THE DIVINE DICHOTOMY

The dictionary definition of dichotomy is a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different. It’s a fancy word for contradiction. Let’s take the example of someone who was born color blind. If someone never saw color, how could we describe it to them? This is a dichotomy of color sight versus black and white sight.

Then we have the time dichotomy which is linear time and eternity. Some people refer to eternity as infinite or unending time. Another definition is a state to which time has no application, or timelessness. This second definition is what we’ll use here.

Linear time is an illusion of human perception or a misperception. Most of life as we know it is a conglomeration of misperceptions. Before we delve into the illusory misperception of time let’s look at the easier to understand illusion of solid matter that’s been scientifically proven.

Eastern mystics refer to life as a Maya, a Sanskrit word meaning illusion. Kabbala also refers to physical life as illusion. Now, even quantum physics agrees that most of the universe is empty space including all the space between subatomic particles in so called solid matter. The illusion of solidity is a result of the extremely limited human senses. The best example of the lack of solidity of matter is that the tiny neutrino is so small it can travel through a light year of solid lead (six trillion miles) and never once collide with a single atom of lead.

Einstein referred to human’s misperception of separation from other parts of the universe as “a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.” We can say the same about our misperception of time.

Two perennial questions of philosophy, metaphysics, and religion are, how did the universe begin? When did it all start? These can both be called defective questions. A defective question is a question where the premise or the basic assumption is misperceived. The assumption of the question, “how did the universe begin?” is that there was a beginning. What if there wasn’t? The way I like to answer these defective questions is when you attempt to answer certain metaphysical questions in a particular time frame, you frame yourself. When you frame yourself, you box yourself in. Your potential for Infinite Heart perception gets short circuited by the boundaries of the box.

Irvin Laszlo writes in his book The Immutable Laws of the Akashic Field: Universal Truths for a Better Life and a Better World that the Greek philosopher Parmenides “held that existence is fundamentally being: becoming is a secondary and possibly illusory phenomenon.” We could say that being exists in no time and becoming can only happen in linear time.

Another astounding statement regarding our misperception of this temporary physical existence as real comes from A Course in Miracles. The Course begins, “nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists.” This is essentially saying anything that changed was never real to begin with. Linear time is all about change, so it too does not exist.

This is all completely counterintuitive to our life experiences. And that’s fine. It’s as it should be. We could not operate in this dimension if we deny linear time. It’s a sublime construct that allows our spiritual essence to have a temporary physical experience.

Another way to escape the confines of linear time is to imagine time as a line like this:

When we are on the position called the present, we are at the point of right now and we misperceive the past being over, and the future yet to be. Now notice your perception of the timeline from where you are above the page. The Past, the Present, and the Future are all right there at the same time!

Another profound misperception of time is that the past is unchangeable. The truth is that only the events of the past never change, but our perception of those events can change drastically. Here is the most memorable example of this from my own life:

After growing up in California and then spending ninth grade in a boarding school in Switzerland, I moved to Israel in 1969 where I lived for six years from age fifteen to twenty-one. After high school, like everyone, I was drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces. I volunteered for the paratroopers. During basic training I had some issues that caused my commander, Yaki, to kick me out of his platoon. How unfair, I thought at the time. I am a victim of his ridiculous prejudice against Americans. Or maybe he’s just jealous. I felt awful and resentful. Eight months later, during the Yom Kippur War I was in the Sinai. The worst ambush in that war against the Egyptians in the Sinai took place in what became known as the Battle at the Chinese Ranch. Yaki’s platoon was decimated by Egyptian tanks that were dug in and waiting in ambush in the dead of night. You can imagine after the war when I found out about this how my perception of victimization by Yaki kicking me out of his platoon, transformed. Now I realized that he possibly saved my life.

THE DIVINE PLAN

Understanding our misperception of time helps us have faith in, and align our lives with the divine plan. It’s said that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Think how often the best laid plans of our ego-mind that thinks it knows what’s best for us, completely fall apart. We learn to have faith that there is always a reason, a lesson, a growth opportunity, or some unknowable in the present, benefit, that might take days, months, years of linear time, or maybe even until the next lifetime to come to pass.

Divine infinite energy intelligence, (some call it God) is omniscient, which means all-knowing. This intelligence, which we are connected to and a part of, perceives all time at the same time. Our eternal soul is not separate from divine intelligence. The challenge we face is that most of us are unconscious of this connection, so we can’t perceive it. How then do we become more conscious? One way is by becoming aware of…

THE ADVERSARY

The Adversary is the negative energy whose job is to wreak havoc. The adversary wants us to forever misperceive time, so we never evolve, never raise our consciousness. It wants us to perceive only separation. Separation of one minute from the next. One hour from the next. One day, week, month, year, etc. from the next. It wants us to worry about the future and have regrets about many past events. This way it keeps us separated from the present moment. Only in the present moment can we have bliss. Only in the present now can we have gratitude and appreciation for all the good in our lives. Eckhart Tolle writes brilliantly about this in his book The Power of Now. He calls it the eternal now.

Just as we are one with Divine Infinite Energy Intelligence, we are also part of the adversary energy. All is energy. Is energy good or bad? It depends. A strong electric current is energy that can either bring light or bring death by electrocution. What’s the difference? The difference is resistance. The filament of the light bulb is the resistor that causes light. Our resistance to the adversary reveals our loving light. Thank God for The Adversary. Without it, we would have no free will. It’s what gives us a choice.

What does the Adversary and resistance and All Is Energy have to do with our misperception of time? Without time, the Adversary couldn’t try to influence us. Energy wouldn’t be, you wouldn’t be reading these words because they never could have been written. Everything happens in time. So, we’ve come full circle and now the time has come to conclude this writing.

Take upon yourself the challenge to perceive with your Infinite Heart that whenever something doesn’t go the way your ego-mind thinks things should happen, there’s a better way. There’s the Divine Plan and when we put faith in the Divine Plan, in time that better way will be revealed.