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If we’re going to understand this point of view we have to get over our prejudice, which is all it is, about time being linear.  The fact is that time is not linear.  Here’s a way of looking at it:  survivors of near-death experiences often report having seen every single event that ever happened to them during their lives flash by them in no time at all.  Sometimes they report seeing everything that ever happened to them zip by, but still being able to see each scene discretely, in a few seconds’ time.  Others report seeing each individual event of their entire lives in one, complete take.  In any case, it would seem that we experience the thought forms of our lives twice:  once in linear fashion over a lifetime, and then in a timeless fashion at the moment of death.  

This idea that time can be non-linear is easiest to see in dreams.  Dream time is sequential, but not linear in the same sense in which waking time is linear.  Dream time doesn’t have the same cause-and-effect inexorability that waking time has.  This is because there is less focus in dreams, so everything is more here-and-now.  Unlike waking consciousness, in dreaming we are rarely influenced by past or future events.  We don’t define ourselves in terms of personal history and future so much as we do when we’re awake.   Things happen too fast and too intensely in dreams to dwell upon:   everything is just too vivid and too now.   

When we are awake and confronted by a life-threatening situation, e.g. while we are having an automobile accident or during a big earthquake, time slows way down.  We can see everything that is happening with great clarity, in great detail, as if it were unfolding in slow-motion.  This slow-motion perception of time is closer to the truth.  It is more like dream-time perception and less like our normal, everyday, gloss-over-things-quickly-and-superficially-in-a-hurry perception of time.  However, we are incapable of acting in the normal way in this slow-motion perception of time because we can’t think.  If we are going to act or react in this frame of mind, we can only do so on intent, on our gut-level instinct, not on thought.  Therefore the slow-motion perception is not as useful in performing all the humdrum tasks of everyday life as is normal time perception; but it is the more useful form of perception in the practice of magic, where decisions have to be made faster than normal thinking allows.   

When time slows down enough we lose our sense of separated selfhood altogether and move into altered states of consciousness.  Indeed, we can define “altered state” as the feeling of timelessness.   This can happen due to shock, psychedelic drugs, or even spirits.  Some spirits have the power to temporarily erase our importance (self-pity) so that we experience a state of selfless grace.  Enlightenment is such a state – people who are enlightened can move into and out of timelessness and selflessness at will, by focusing their attention one way or the other.  But even enlightened people don’t exist in a state of nirvana all day long.  They have normal lives to lead too, and altered states are not particularly functional in everyday society.  That’s why our normal time sense evolved:  it is more functional for agriculturalists than the NOW time sense of hunting-gathering.   

Altered states can be inspiring, can give us a glimpse of the goal we are shooting for, but they are always temporary. Normal, everyday life is the battleground, the place where the real work has to be done, the place where it all begins and ends.  The goal of magical training is to bring an awareness of timelessness and selflessness (which are the same thing) into the routines of our everyday lives.  We do this by detaching from the hurried me-me-me with its endless fluster of self-pitying moods from the past and concerns for the future.  

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