Exercise: About Time

This exercise helps you take yourself out of the span of linear time. It enables you to break time down, much the same as you would do if you were to photograph a moving picture of an event and then cut that movie into single frames, still pictures you could hang in front of you and study.

First, imagine a recent event, it can be a significant negative event like a quarrel with a loved one, or it can be a significant positive event, like earning an honor or winning a prize. It can also be a commonplace event, like sitting on a porch swing and watching the sun go down. The span of time the event covers can be anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours; it even can be a series of linked events occurring over a span of days or months.

The important thing is to be able to visualize whatever event you chose as if it were a movie. Sit down, relax, close your eyes if that makes it easier for you to imagine things, and watch the movie. Watch it from start to finish, the pain and the pleasure, and the tedium.

Now, when the movie is over, imagine yourself going back to the projector and taking the reel of film out and then placing it into one of those machines film editors use. You know the kind. You slide the film into it, so that it runs by in a lighted viewer on your desk. There is a big crank you can crank to look at the entire film as it goes through. You can crank it fast; you can slow it down; you can stop it on a single frame, so that that frame appears to you as a photographic slide would appear in a viewer. You can even run the film backward by reversing the crank, so that you can go back to just the picture you want.

Now find a single frame from this movie, and stop the crank so you can study it alone. It can be a picture of you at a moment of heightened emotion. It can be a photograph of somebody else. It can be a photograph of conflict between you and somebody else. It can even be a photograph of the location itself without anybody in it.

Now that you've chosen a single frame, just sit back and look at it a few minutes. Don't think about it. Don't try to force memories to bloom it into context. Simply look at the single image that came from the movie that was a part of your life. If it is a person, study the expression on the face. If it is several people in "action," try to see the signals each person is giving the other[s], through gestures or body language. If it is a scene, simply view the scene as if you were seeing it for the first time, as if nothing significant has ever happened there.

After a minute or two of "viewing" your chosen still-frame, notice how time, the ticking of seconds and minutes and hours that were necessary to string together your movie, has disappeared. The expression on the face you are studying takes you back instantly to the time you saw that face when the "movie" was made. The expression is in fact happening "now," not only for you as you "view" it, but even for the person you are viewing, even if the event you've been replaying happened long ago, even if the person you are viewing has long since passed beyond this life. It is as if the experience of the single frame had never ended, as if it is eternal.

What do I mean by this? I can't really explain it, but I am fairly certain you will understand if you are doing this exercise. Your single frame has come away from time and stands before you, as if it always had been, always shall be. It has come away from the necessary progression of frames that led to it and will lead away from it. You can, if you wish, cut that frame from the time-linear movie, hang it on your wall, splice it into another motion picture that comes to a different ending, or that explains this frame by coming from a different beginning. The single frame stands alone, and as you gaze at it, the notion of time for you disappears.

Doing this exercise does not imply that you will necessarily gain any special insight from stopping the movie and viewing the frame. You might. Insight often comes at the points within your experience when notions of time fall away. You might understand the person you are studying with a deeper wisdom than you were able to muster when the frame first whizzed past in its happening. You might remember the scene you are viewing with a deeper intensity. You might be caused to contemplate details or moods in an entirely different way.

But then again, none of this needs to happen. You also don't need to penetrate the frame and run the sequence back magically to a place you didn't have a chance to be, a place that led without you to the frame you have chosen to study and that now, without time, you have an opportunity to contemplate. None of this needs to happen, but it might.

What could happen as you allow the process to work in its own way is that by freezing the frame, you will come to sense down deep how unnecessary it is to factor time into the experience of a moment.

A sense of time was necessary in order to catalogue that frame and string it into the motion picture of a memory. A sense of time may be necessary for you to be able to find that moment, and later, when you are finished with it, to set that moment back into its place. But that is all time was really needed for. It is simply a card catalogue for the indexing of moments. Like books picked from the shelves of a library, the moments live a life by themselves.

The importance of this exercise is to help you learn to appreciate the timelessness of moments. Then, when you do, you will be able to use the freezing of frames to facilitate the gaining of insight.

Time is mutable. Its apparent motion, its duration, its relation to this moment. Play with it. You'll learn a lot. Excerpted from Journey to Alternity.

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