Time Does It to Matter
I.
A friend of mine has done a great deal of trance-channelling, most often of a disincarnate being (one who has never been incarnated). He/It/They call themselves Ariel, Great Lion of God, and we’ve been in touch with them for several decades, learning a lot about consciousness and spirituality in general, and a whole lot more in specifics. (As you can imagine one would with a direct line to, well, God, really; I mean what would YOU ask if you were on that line? Over the last 35 years of baffling, chaotic life on this planet?)
The information we’ve gathered is probably the subject of a book, or several books, if I weren’t so lazy/blocked/overinformed/intimidated, etc. What brings me to this forum now is what I just found out about time. Or Time. And Space. And Expectations. And Physical Matter.
Once in California, my friend decided to channel in a public place — the beach — without telling anybody, just so Ariel could experience a day at the beach asitwere. (In those days, Ariel was curious about conscious life in a body, and occasionally asked us to show him around.) We took my dog Bette, and a blanket, and were sitting there sunning ourselves, when I suggested that Ariel take a run along the shore to see what that felt like. He agreed, jumped to his feet and took off. The dog automatically followed, uncharacteristically NOT coursing back and forth in the path of the human (?) runner, just staying alongside. (The dog was a German Shepherd — it’s what they DO: they take care of a situation.) I sat still, holding the Ground, trying to be patient and not worry. After about fifteen minutes, they both returned, Bette gasping and panting, Ariel not winded in the slightest. He spoke normally, said he enjoyed the run and would probably like to do a lot of it if he/they/it had its own body. I put a mental bookmark in the incident, told my friend about it when she came back to the body. We said to ourselves, “Hm,” and went on with life. We were used to puzzling things happening around and about this odd endeavor.
II.
Fast forward to September 2021: Today as I was reluctantly doing my daily pedal on my stationary bike, I was listening to a podcast from RadioLab entitled “In the Running”. The podcast tells the story of a woman who is phenomenally successful at “ultra running”, which is foot races in excess, FAR excess, of mere marathons: fifty miles, a hundred miles, cross-country running in exotic terrain, in absurdly challenging weather.
This woman, whose name is Diane Van Deren, had been subject to severe grand mal seizures all her life, probably because of one massive seizure she had had as an infant. Over her life, her seizures increased in frequency and intensity and she found after years of various treatments short of surgery, that one thing that could interrupt a seizure was throwing on her running shoes and literally heading for the hills — the foothills of the Rockies behind her house. She would experience an aura, foretelling a seizure, and for quite a while it was enough warning to give her time to get the shoes on and head out; she could outrun her seizures. She would return home unscathed, to the great relief of her family.
Eventually, the length of the auras shortened to the point where Diane didn’t have time to get out on the run, and once again her seizures came back with a vengeance: they were MORE frequent, MORE intense. She taught her three children how to drive very early in their lives, in case Mommy had a seizure while she was driving; her parents and husband and friends tried to make sure she was accompanied everywhere she went, whatever she was doing, so she could be taken care of while she was seizing.
It was an awful way to live, and her medical team said it was probably time to investigate surgery. Clearly one part of her brain was malfunctioning, and they might be able to remove it and possibly give Diane a life without seizures; they just didn’t know where in her brain the dead or injured segment resided. To establish that, she agreed to be hospitalized and wired up (sixty-four different electrodes and their particular wires were glued to her head), with a video camera on her 24/7, and a medic with her throughout. Her seizures were frequent enough that they were all pretty sure they could get a record of a seizure within a day or two. Sure enough, they got it. (There’s an audio of that seizure with the interviewer narrating the video part — it’s pretty gruesome.) And they found the defective part of the brain; it was in (as I recall from one listening) the rear right side, in the temporal lobe. (I’m not sure of the details of where and what in all this; I just remember that the senses of time and place were what was on the table.)
Then came the decision to do the surgery or not; the risks are evident, but Diane was fed up with her life as it had been and told them to go ahead, she was happy, even, to take the risks, possibly die in the attempt to get relief from the seizures.
When they opened up her skull, the offending segment of the brain was obvious: it was a kiwi- or golfball-sized area, a sickly gray color. What is already known about that part of the brain (among other things) is that it is where memory and sense of time (temporal cognition) reside; they had no idea whether or how much those functions would be affected if they removed such a large piece of Diane’s brain. With her advance permission to take it out no matter what, the surgeons removed it and hoped for the best.
Diane’s recovery was also pretty gruesome: she had debilitating headaches for days and days, plus the usual aftereffects of such dramatic surgery. She did NOT, however, experience any more seizures; not in the subsequent days, weeks or months, not one. What she found she had lost was, increasingly, her short-term memory, and an allegiance to time. She would be late picking up the kids from school, or even remembering that they needed picking up. She could see someone in the morning, see that person later in the day and not even remember who it was, or that they had met a few hours earlier.
She took up running again; she had missed it, and she found she could win just about any race she entered. It didn’t matter how long the race was, the nature of the terrain it covered, not even the prevailing weather. (One race in Canada, through the Yukon, started when the temperature was forty-three degrees below zero; her running shoes froze on her feet.) She won them all.
The RadioLab interviewer asked her why she was so successful, what was it that gave her the advantage over the other runners? She replied that it was probably that she had no sense of time or distance; she had lost the ability to read a map, for example. She often got lost in a race because of it: she carried with her a pink ribbon, and when the trail forked and she had a choice of which path to take, she’d leave the ribbon at the fork, and go ahead in one arbitrary direction. Either one. If after a couple of hours (!) of running, she felt she had taken the wrong fork, she’d turn around and go back to the pink ribbon, pick it up, and go off on the road not taken, having added several hours to her own private race. And winning it.
As for her loss of temporal sense, while racing she lived entirely in the moment, with no idea whatsoever of where she was in the race, or how tired her body SHOULD be feeling. She thinks that the psychological difference is the entire handicap. She also doesn’t seem to care if she wins or not; since there was no particular effort in the execution, then there isn’t any particular sense of triumph. Or failure if she should lose, which she doesn’t.
****
I’ve drawn some tentative conclusions from these two tales:
- Time and Space really do a number on our idea of the physical world we live and strive in.
- We are barely able to conceive of Time and Space beyond our clocks and maps; they are, we’re told, the same thing, in the cosmic scheme, but we can begin to grok it with examples like these.
- We really do THINK ourselves into and out of success and failure, merely by our expectations.
- It is likely that the release of the grip of our IDEA that Time/Space limits our existence, our physical competence is due to Grace.
- Grace, said the poet Denise Levertov, is easy:
The Avowal
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
