Effective Time Management, Confidence and Peace of Mind Can Be Yours - Excerpts from Dr. Roland's Newly Revised Majesty and Mystery of Time
Editor
Most people are menaced by time. They resent "down time" and boring time. They fear running out of time. They respond to the pressure of time with more and more frantic activity. They resent deadlines, yet attempt to use time by setting goals and deadlines themselves.
Time drags when they are awaiting some goal. Time’s passing is painful when they await the results of a biopsy or news from the front. As people grow older, they begin to fear death or await it, depending on how adapted they are to their own mortality. Most people resent the ravages of time—especially to their face and body.
They regret time wasted, and they would turn back the clock to make amends or take advantage of what they once squandered.
There is no question but that we humans, in our current condition, are subject to time. Please notice that everything changes in the matrix of time. We always hope that things will change for the better for us, but somehow many things change for the worse. Most things deteriorate. Manners decline, many people grow bitter or hardened, our health begins to fail, our beauty fades, and friends begin to die. Holy days become holidays. Heroes degrade into celebrities. Statesmanship becomes politics. Love is replaced by sex. True happiness degrades into mere pleasure seeking.
It takes courage and energy to buck the trend. But most of us lose our nerve or run out of energy. We then capitulate and give in to the process as inevitable. "Everyone has to die," we say. "So let's just eat, drink and be merry. There's no honor anymore, so let's just try to get our own. Politicians don't listen, one vote doesn't matter, so let's just drop out and forget about voting."
Continued to its conclusion, the process leads to a complete breakdown in the nation and body politic: anarchy, divorce, violence, murder, rape, looting, rioting, war and destruction. In the family, the deterioration leads to hatred, violence, abuse, cruelty and divorce. In the individual it leads to hopelessness, despair, hysteria, anxiety, mental illness, nervous breakdown, sickness, cancer, and death.
The Dark Ages, the French Revolution, Hitler Germany, Stalinist Russia, Mao’s Communist China, and the genocide in Rwanda are examples of how fast and how far nations can deteriorate. The current rate of divorce, violence in the home and neighborhood, divorce and absent fathers shows how the family is changing and deteriorating. The rise in cancer and other wasting diseases shows how the human being is experiencing destructive change.
The fallen human, unless he or she finds salvation, is destined to deteriorate and die: in other words, to physically deteriorate and change for the worse. A decent, morale, clean living mother or father can live a long life and die peaceably in their sleep. A dissolute person will suffer horrible degeneration and probably die a terrible death, perhaps young.
The person without faith, who lives solely by chance, is likely to prematurely become some sort of statistic. The gambler, who lives by chance, will have his life and finances deteriorate. The resentful person, who violates the law of love, will also fall prey to diseases of resentment and deterioration.
Any form of sin leads to change for the worse over time. The better one lives, the longer one may live. And this gives more time to perhaps find salvation. The secret key to salvation--to being saved from sin, deterioration, and death--must be found in this life, during which change for the better is possible.
Thus, looked at from another perspective, the fact that everything changes offers a true hope. Our current human condition--the fallen circumstances we find ourselves in as well as the deteriorating flesh we are encased in--might possibly be able to change for the better in the matrix of time. As we currently are, we are destined for failure, death and oblivion. As we might be, and as we once were before the fall in the Garden, we could live forever.
Thus it is important to use the time you were given on this earth to build character and to search, with a spirit of yearning, for the truth. The point is to search sincerely for the truth, making what you know deep down in your heart more important than anything. Otherwise, if your aim is not true you will miss the mark and be deceived.
The search for the fountain of youth through technology, and the search for youth and longevity through wrinkle removing cream, hair transplants, and Viagra are simply misguided searches.
The victims of the misguided search, who waste their time and money aiming for personal enhancement, are easily duped with dreams and schemes because their intent is not pure. The very process of finding symptom removal without actually being a better person is the kind of false comfort that actually weakens and destroys character. The person who finds a way to live a little longer without also finding the secret of salvation is only forestalling the inevitable end.
Those who find they can't live much longer will embrace death. And there are plenty of demon-led ghouls around who glorify death and dying and teach us to embrace death.
The real truth, that we were not meant to die, is actually threatening to the ego because if it is true, it shows that whatever most people are currently doing is dreadfully missing the boat. Most people have their lives neatly arranged around death--if everyone has to die then it neatly excuses their own deterioration.
Most people cannot comprehend living forever because our earthly mind only knows goals, goal seeking and future directed activity. Our egotistical consciousness is oriented toward reaching for things we want. Because of this forward orientation we are forever thinking of what might happen which leads to nervousness, anxiety, fear, anticipation or dread, or we are dreaming of making things happen, which makes us nervous, ambitious, and narrow minded. Paradoxically, by ever thinking of the future, we actually miss living fully in the reality of the present.
When we are worried about some occurrence, we then set a goal to avoid it. But because this activity is also future directed, it creates tension and nervousness, because of the conflict between the still present and the reaching consciousness.
Living in the forward directed state of consciousness, we become completely goal driven. Our every waking moment is lived in anticipation. Even as we eat dinner, we think of desert. And while eating desert, we think of the after dinner drink. And as we begin to slip away into unconsciousness we dream of a tropical paradise or a Disneyland Heaven.
No sooner do we acquire something than we begin to find it to be a pressure source. We discover its flaws which we resent. We find that we have to pay for its maintenance. Soon, because we resent it, it begins to dominate us. As someone once said: the grass may be greener on the other side of the fence, but it has to be watered, mowed, fertilized and trimmed.
As long as we remain in the future directed state of consciousness, we are subject to everything. Whatever we notice becomes something to reach out for or avoid. We become subject to hypnosis: every word, every sign, and every object has suggestive meaning. Soon thousands or millions of things become a pressure source, a cue or trigger to implement a post hypnotic suggestion.
In hypnosis, the past and future are linked because some long ago event programmed the mind so that a visual, auditory or verbal cue reinstates a fleeting trance and compels the victim to carry out the programming.
In this sense, the person is actually living the past. People, places, and objects menace and excite. They become objects to move toward in order to reinstate the trance state which carries the consciousness back to the past and to remember the promise made in that long ago encounter with some person who made ego appealing emotional suggestions. When such people, places or objects (reminding us of the original motivator and his or her suggestions) trigger the trance that brings to mind the threat, curse, criticism, or dire prediction s/he made, it motivates us with fear and avoidance behavior in an attempt to reverse the suggested curse through some action. It's pure hypnosis.
Thus we become prisoners of time. Instead of the hope of real happiness, fulfillment and joy that time could entail were it being used to carry out the Creator's will, time becomes a prison, as does everything we own because we seek to use time to reach goals-- goals which others tempted us to reach for.
None of us, except the very young and those who, through a change of heart, have found grace, know the sweetness of living in the present. Instead we live under the pressure of time because of goals, reliving the past, and worrying about the future.
God lives in the timeless realm. The soul was meant to live in this timeless realm where it could come to know of God. Prior to learning to meditate properly, we do get little tastes of the timeless realm. For example, as children, we lived and moved and had our being spontaneously. Every morning was a new day, where the past was but a dream, and the future was the very next thing: each new moment to be discovered.
In a sense, there is no past and no future for the innocent child. S/he is happy go lucky and carefree. But soon parents, teachers, daycare providers, and authorities begin to pressure. Other kids tease and are cruel, making the child feel bad about the way he is. Soon he sets a goal of changing in some way to become smart, tall, handsome, or tough.
Some motivator comes along in the form of some admired peer, a teacher, or an entertainment icon who suggests the way to overcome the self conscious inferiority, and soon that becomes the goal. Through ambitious study and through reaching for things that are suggested to bring happiness and fulfillment, the child's consciousness becomes slowly altered to time and goal pressure.
It may take ten, twenty, or thirty years for the spontaneity and life to be lost by the consciousness. But sooner or later, a lifetime of goal reaching destroys innocence and creativity. The aging person begins to experience futility and deadness. Time appears to move faster because every waking moment is spent in goal seeking.
Getting up under pressure of the alarm clock, rushing to get ready, rushing to work, trying to make the next green light, waiting impatiently for the light to turn green, getting angry at the slow driver ahead, anticipating what the boss will say, dreading the staff meeting, worrying about the dental visit, resenting having to take the kids to skating lessons, fretting over finding time to do the income tax, dreaming of Friday, rushing to buy a lottery ticket, and so on.
Some people get a small taste of the blessed present when they go off to the mountains or to the seashore, because they are temporarily apart from all the daily cues that set them off. They might yearn to live this way all the time, but they cannot. Were they to live in a tropical paradise with nothing to do, unless they experienced a change in consciousness, they would become bored.
Otherwise they would languish and begin to deteriorate in the doldrums, like many third world people do. Soon they might start stetting little goals for themselves: some mindless useless endeavor like counting ships, looking for seashells, or resenting their neighbor.
We all need someone to break the spell of hypnosis. Someone to free us from the feeling/suggestion prison of by gone appeals that cast their spell over the present through our continuing reinforcement of them with emotions and reacting to circumstance and as we did in the past. We need someone to break the spell, but instead of becoming a new hypnotist to which we transfer our allegiance--we need someone who will set us free from the prison of the past and the squirrel cage of reliving the past in the present. This liberator must be completely believable and he must have only goodwill and no ulterior motive of enslaving us to Him. May this book awaken to the reality of this sort of love, and encourage you to seek it with all your heart.
This book will give you clues to the secret to life. If you can discover the secret to life you might learn how to live in the moment and in the Presence in the present, and perhaps you might even learn how to live forever. It begins with a change in consciousness.
