What if we could slow down time, blow pedals off a flower and watch them gracefully float by or watch a hummingbird wing his gentle way to a flower pot, all in slow motion? What if in that moment in which we do slow down time, if we could even alter the path of things usually moving by so quickly that we are caught off guard - as in Superman stopping a bullet in mid-air?
I think it's a matter of perception and conscious awareness. If we don't know ( as in, forget our former preconceptions) that we can't, maybe we can. I mean, for example, if we don't think that big bully is going to beat us up, then we might not react to him or act as if he's going to, possibly triggering his lower beating-you-up nature, and rather he simply walks past us, smiling. I wonder if our perception or learned expectation of someone leads us to unknowingly act a certain way which actually triggers that person to behave as expected. I wonder, instead, if we expected something better, might we get something better?
In school, I remember my history teacher telling the class that we needed to learn history so we could have an overall understanding of the world today, since tomorrow's news is the continuum of yesterday's history. That seemed to make sense, then.
Today, it makes no sense to me whatsoever and, in fact, may just be why we are still engaged in wars and shootings and strutting around carrying guns in holsters because we all still think it's 1776 or the mid-1880s in the wild west.
Why don't we junk the past. I mean, leave the history book on the shelf, and begin all over again, right now, in this very minute. Let's see if we can literally unhinge the future from the past and give it a fresh new chance by creating a kind of virtual time gap here in the present, which Eckhardt Tolle calls "The Now."
If we can mentally banish the past from our perspective and reaction process for the moment, and look on every single new event with brand new, innocent as a newborn baby's eyes, we may not be so quick to the draw or the battlefield. We just may see things a whole lot differently, even more kindly, more lovingly, more creatively.
Doesn't it seem like time stops when you're playing or creating something? Perhaps your consciousness has shifted into a stream of conscious creativity, surging up from the depths of your being. You have literally entered into a zone of timelessness.
I wonder if we could do it at will, whenever we wanted? What if we extended our consciousness of this present moment and took a deep breath and invited God into the moment and invited God to help us be wiser, more loving and help us make the best responses, so we could create a more beautiful future? Does the past really have to define the future too?
What if every moment was created this way, by slowing down our response to any and all situations and waiting and inviting God into that time gap? It seems kind of revolutionary, but what if this very moment, we stopped thinking about what's going to happen (as we expect it might) in the next moment, and realized that time could be stretched vertically rather than the usual time-line horizontal? I wonder if we could stretch this moment consciously into a kind of spiritual depth, all the way down into the fathomless depths of consciousness, to allow the power of divinity to surge up into our hearts and decision-making? What if we slowed down our minds and invited God's presence into our consciousness as we looked again at any given situation or encounter with fresh eyes, cleansed of our past conditioning?
A scene from Star Trek's "Insurrection" in which time is slowed down has always intrigued me. Captain Picard goes to the Ba'ku planet, where the Federation and their Son'a allies are conducting a cultural survey. The Ba'ku seem at first to be a simple race of only six hundred people, living in one village on their isolated world. But when Picard meets a Ba'ku woman, Anij, with whom he falls in love, he gradually learns that there is more to her people than meets the eye.
She, like most of her fellow Ba'ku, is more than three hundred years old. In a scene in which Captain Picard and Anij are rescuing the children from Son'a invaders who want to take over the planet due to its metaphasic radiation that reverses aging, she gives him a slowing down time demonstration. She intrigues Picard by blowing pedals off a flower which float magically through the air in slow motion. She has learned, in fact her entire race has learned, how to enter into that eternal "Now" to access the creative and healing power of the divine, which isn't in the future, but rather is right here, right now, in the depth of this very moment. The Ba'ku have learned how to stay eternally present, which may also effect their perpetual youthfulness.
This may seem like graduate or doctoral level "mindfulness," and for now it may just be an idle idea. Or, perhaps, it could be an invitation to open our minds even wider to a possible way of thinking about life, a way that may lead us deeper into love with life, each other and even ourselves and thereby increase our own power to invent even better lives and an even better world.
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