Do You Struggle With Time?

The element of time pressure alters behavior, attitudes, and physiological responses. So subjective time can be an incredibly powerful force. It’s no accident that the word deadline contains the word dead. A deadline implies a threat: “If you don’t meet this limit, you’re finished.” The threat may be subtle or blatant, but it is almost always present. If it were not, we would not feel anxious under time pressure.

Some people are much more sensitive to time pressure than others. All of us, however, feel the pressure of a serious, threatening deadline over which we have no control – death itself. If you believe that you have been allotted a certain span of time for your existence, the deadline of death will exert a lot of stress.

How much better not to feel any time pressure, to blossom fully despite the fact that death exists. The attitude that life is a blossoming, not a race, can be achieved. But to do that, you can’t believe that time is running out. Sending that message to your body’s cells is the same, ultimately, as programming them to age and die.

Yet the fact is that linear time is moving inexorably forward, and to overcome that, we must find a place where a different kind of time, or no time, can be experienced and internalized.

To a skeptic, this proposition must sound purely subjective, but quantum events that defy linear time take place within our cells continually. DNA’s intelligence operates simultaneously in the past, present, and future. From the past it takes the blueprint of life, applying to the present only the tiniest fraction of the information needed for cellular function, and reserving for the future the information that will be relevant years from now.

The images imprinted on our quantum mechanical body are as complex as you are. In short, these images are you. You live out your stored images, manufacturing your own version of time, and in the process you program the kind of body required by your version of time.

Adapted from Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1998).

Read more: Deepak Chopra's Tips, Spirit, death, images, time

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Janice L.

10:15PM PST on Dec 29, 2010

I like the idea that life is a blossoming, not a race.

send a green star

Anastasia Z.

12:27PM PDT on Oct 17, 2010

A very interestnig and contructive idea. I also think that time can be subjective.

Jess No Fwd Plz K.

7:38AM PDT on Oct 16, 2010

This article regarding time and rushing about brings to my mind the idea of "bucket lists". Even though it may initially seem as though a bucket list brings into consciousness that we will not be around forever, for me it brings a harried state of mind that I have to hurry up before it is too late. There is only the present moment to create reality.

Uma C.

11:46AM PDT on Oct 15, 2010

Virginia are you the one who is flooding the commentary with these adds? I just had to delete all my comments in my in box to save myself from having to look at them again. If you are not doing this, using this site for shameless advertising there is no reason to apologize and whoever you are that is doing it STOP NOW!!!

Manuela C.

7:39AM PDT on Oct 15, 2010

Thanks for the post!

7:36AM PDT on Oct 15, 2010

Sidda Lin, sidkfwe: your disgusting abuse of this format is absolutely shameless. It only shows you to be of such ultimate poverty consciousness and desperation that you will seize any format to make your sales at. I suppose neither of you will have the pride and courage to reply to this but your adds don't belong in this space. It's as if you went into a temple for higher learning and having no vision of expanding your consciousness and only utter contempt for the efforts that maintain this place.Please take your shameless ignorant selves elsewhere.

chiari l.

7:15AM PDT on Oct 15, 2010

thanks

Nada A.

5:25AM PDT on Oct 15, 2010

What is it "time"?

Past Member .

3:52AM PDT on Oct 15, 2010

I'm going to live forever! For the present everything is o.k.! )))

10:42PM PDT on Oct 14, 2010

Thanks for reminding me to read this book again, DC! Just brilliant the way you put things in perspective! Thankyou :)