My next category I call Psychological Time.
We have all noticed how time seems to speed up when we are happy and occupied, how it drags when we are bored or unoccupied, how long the nights are when we cannot sleep and how quickly they pass when we can.
Under this heading I would include the strange things time does in our dream world. Scientists tell us dreams occur in the few seconds when we are not fully asleep, or about to wake. And yet we have long and complex adventures in our dreams that seem to take hours, days and sometimes even years.
Our subconscious seems to have a time of its own. Things lurk there for years flowing like underground rivers in a complex cavern system. Some are temporarily blocked, only later to have their channels opened – while streams from other sources flow through and join at different places on the ordinary time-line – all affecting us at any given point in our sleep and in our waking moments, but without reference to Linear Time.
Similarly what I call the Higher Consciousness – that highly evolved part of all of us that is capable of swimming in the ocean of consciousness that links us to all that exists – has no relevance to Linear Time.
To continue the analogy of water in connection with consciousness I would say that our normal everyday consciousness is like water in a bucket on a conveyer belt of Linear Time – limited and constrained –aware neither of the dark streams that run through the subconscious, nor of the great shining expanse of the ocean that leads us, if we dare to swim in it or sail it, towards our God.
Under the heading of Psychological Time I would also include memory. In memory Linear Time is contracted so that an event that took hours or years can be re-experienced by the mind in a few seconds and can crucially affect our decisions that shape our future.
I have already pointed out how many memories are threading through each of our minds in this room at this very moment – affecting how we understand everything we hear. If they could suddenly be made visible – the air would be filled with more activity than a block-buster film that had spent millions of dollars on special effects!
Add into this the possibility that we may have lived before – that reincarnation may be a reality – and that we might have threads of memory from those other lives also weaving through us.
I don’t know for sure if reincarnation exists – but I would like to mention here a few instances when it has seemed to me I have tapped into past times – either by my own memory of a past life – or by accessing the Akashic Records – the records that are purported to exist in another realm of reality which record all that has ever happened. From the Recording Angel in the Biblical Book of Revelations, to the Egyptian god Djehuti (Thoth), most cultures have a belief in celestial records being kept.
I was trying to write a novel about Saint Etheldreda, an Anglo Saxon saint of the 7th century from East Anglia, a woman who became Queen of Northumbria at a most interesting period in British history. I had done a lot of research. So much so that I had become completely bogged down in the details of unfamiliar Anglo Saxon names, battles and events. I found it impossible to find the thread I needed to make a compelling novel about her life. I gave up the idea of writing the book.
My husband at that time was illustrating a walking guide to the ancient track ways of East Anglia and so we were travelling around the area. It was winter and we had not booked anywhere to stay. We went to the hotels we had stayed at in the summer, but they were closed for the winter. We went from village to village and finally settled for a hotel we did not know in a village we had not been to before. We did not even notice its name – but just signed in and went straight to bed.
At 2 am I woke with a jerk. I sat bolt upright, feeling the presence of someone else in the room. And then it was almost as though I was watching a film about Etheldreda’s life. It was incredibly vivid. I knew exactly how I would write the book. It was almost as though I had been there when it all happened.
In the morning we discovered that the hotel was built on the site of a shrine to Etheldreda and her sister. It had been a place of pilgrimage for centuries.
More soon…
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 1
Multi-Dimensional Time: Part 2
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