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Do You Struggle With Time?

posted by Deepak Chopra Aug 7, 2009 5:04 am
Do You Struggle With Time?
10 comments

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).

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10 comments

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Uma Chernoff

Diversity that's a very interesting and intellectually stimulating comment. I'm thinking on it.

Diversity of Metamorphosi

Time is both particular and universal in the same instant.

Without an appreciation of time the cat would not eat, sleep or conform to the same principle in the particular and universal sense of its identity and existence.

Existence is the nature in the idea of no time, since, to appreciate being in the moment of the now, the brain is engaged with a thought process, whilst the dynamic of this process is not dependent upon time, time still exists in those moments the mind functions. Hence, the function of the mind posses a quality, which exists in time, yet, is not dependent upon the construct of time to function in its higher status of definition, consistent with the nature of design.

The function of the mind, defines the function in groups, orders and faiths defining the function of the species, without an appreciation of the common particular and universal sense in which minds operate in time, the construct of time is wasted as a potential in the exponential of all living and dead matter.

Honoring the dead, is the responsibility of the living, unless of course the living are already dead, in which case the dead dominate the living in the context of time, to the detriment and impedance of the living.

Democracy is a false God, dominated by the control and administration of power. Power is particular and universal to the democratic right of each human being; otherwise, power is misused, abused and turned into death, instead of a right common in life.

Nightcat M.

Bless you, Uma! Cats are a perfect example of timelessness. They do as they please, when they please. Ahh, if we could all follow our bliss that well, I bet all the wars and suffering would end. How? Imagine if all the troops on both sides never showed up. No fighters, no war!

Uma Chernoff

Namaste Y'all Of course the escape from time pressure is the continuous returning of attention to this precious gift, the present from which branches all potential; and also it helps to remember that how it seems to fly when we're having fun and drag when we're bored proves our usual perception is illusional and when set goals create pressure delusional would be correct. The reason we are prone to this challenge is that it's the other side of our gift of abstract thought; our ability to shift our imagination along different potentials branching off our time line and choose different avenues of approach. It's also why I like living with nonhuman consciousnesses in the majority, in my case cats, because I feel like just that there are significantly more of them than me creates a weight to anchor here in this only true place of all potential, home in the present.

Ron K.
  • Ron K. says
  • Aug 8, 2009 8:22 AM

Time is an element of measurement of past and future events. Time is actually meaningless in the scope of this life. There are only few things that we can count on: The Sun and Moon will rise and set[ the tides will flow; and the recycle of life through birth and death. Everything that is in-between is a matter of choice. We have the ability to slow down or speed up our own personal time. The animal world has this time thing figured out; why do we struggle with it? Personally; I no longer worry about time; my own personal internal clock tells me when and where I should be; it has made life so much less stressful. One of best things to do to get in sync with your own time is to sit and watch the world around you. There is a natural rhythm to this existence; we just need to get tuned to it. Now hurry up or you will be late for your own death! Namaste

Mary Walsh

Clocks must have been invented by control freaks....in reality time does not exist. There can only ever BE this moment.

Petra Barajas

Time is what you make of it. No one wastes it, but a few might share it with another. In this sharing is the breath of immortality, for we have passed our faith to another who might in turn share it with someone else. Or, barring this, send that someone back to us for a more detailed explanation.

My favorite quote is this: "Why worry about what you can't change? Instead, grasp what you can and run with it into a future bright with the hope of eternity."

Nightcat M.

Time can wait on me. I get there when I get there, or not at all. I truly see time as a man-made invention anyhow, so it doesn't matter to me. There's no set time for death, either we have completed our cycle and move on, or live through the experience.

janine k.

I'm not struggling with time, it's struggling with me. Look, when it happens, it happens. As you get older you notice how unimportant most things are anyway.

Jewels S.

I struggle with this one. I have had moments that I reach a state of mind that I feel free from the pressure but don't know how to get back there. I just keep trying though.

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