I have a bad habit. I keep adding things for me to do into my day. They are all good things. Or at least it feels that way to me. I have added classes, writing more books, marketing said books, recording and editing the audio of my books, and now I want to start a new podcast.
How will this be possible?
The first thing I did was say “no” to things that didn’t help me share all the “words” that I want to share and keep me healthy and happy in the process.
Still. I keep adding things to do way past the time I appear to have to do them within.
So I decided that I needed to imagine that time stretches. Imagining that time stretches to fit in all that needs to be done. That means I have to do the exact opposite of what busy-busy says I should do.
Our little mind, the one that doesn’t understand the big R Reality of things (meaning the one we pay the most attention to) says that if I hurry it will get done.
It’s wrong.
As in many things, our little mind doesn’t know what it is talking about. It only “repeats” what it has learned. Sometimes this is a good thing. We stay safe from things because we have learned how gravity works, so we don’t fall off cliffs, or how heat hurts so we don’t put our hand on a hot stove.
But in the more expansive parts of life, it gets in the way. Our little mind filters out what it believes we don’t need to know. It’s only following our instructions. So if we want more in life we have to get that little mind out of the way so we can fall, rise, and expand into what many people call the Infinite Mind.
Not by being busy, but by pausing, listening, and imagining differently.
We are already connected to Infinite Mind after all. We are Its expression. We can feel and understand our connection to this Mind by listening to the still small voice within and imagining.
Yes, imagining that there are infinite possibilities outside of what our five senses tell us. After all, our five senses can only report back what we believe to be real and not what is Infinite Reality.
Throughout time, some of our teachers, gurus, and prophets, have tapped into the Infinite Mind and reported back what they have learned, and put it into words that can be useful in our daily lives. You know, the lives we live in where dishes need to be washed, children looked after, and yet we still need to find room for expressing ourselves out into the world.
So when I started trying to imagine that time stretches, I already had a head start because people like Stephen Hawking described time in a totally different way than my five senses had been taught to see it. How did he do it? He imagined differently. Which means he could describe time like this:
“If we imagine “regular time” as a horizontal line running between “past” in one direction and “future” in the other, then imaginary time would run perpendicular to this line as the imaginary numbers run perpendicular to the real numbers in the complex plane. Imaginary time is not imaginary in the sense that it is unreal or made-up — it simply runs in a direction different from the type of time we experience. In essence, imaginary time is a way of looking at the time dimension as if it were a dimension of space: you can move forward and backward along imaginary time, just like you can move right and left in space.”
The Twilight Zone mentions imagination as a dimension. Isn’t that an excellent way to see it? Yes, we do have the ability to live differently because we can practice living in the dimension of imagination.
What good will that do in the real world, you may ask.
That’s where the magic of perception comes into play, because what we perceive to be reality magnifies. When we shift our thinking, we change the outside world. When we imagine time stretching, we have stepped into a dimension where time stretches. It will show up in our daily life, if we let it. If we don’t allow that rational mind to take over and try to tell us it can’t happen. It can, and it does.
I’m going to keep on imagining the stretching of time, for you, and for me, not so we can fill it with empty things, or waste it. But because we have things to do that will benefit all of the people that touch our lives.
I m a g i n e that!
“You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day – unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour.” – Zen Proverb
BECA LEWIS coaches, teaches, writes blogs and books, plays with art, and is addicted to reading. She lives in Ohio with her husband and has kids and grandkids scattered across the country.
