Haven’t you ever wondered, what is time? Why does time pass? One theory is that time exists because thing move around. We experience time because we move around. Another theory is called entropy. This is the second law of thermodynamics, which says that physical things always go from a state of order to a state of decay and disorder. As a result, we see things and people around grow age and die. But that doesn’t mean that this always has to be the case—the wineglass that just shattered may put itself together again, it’s just highly unlikely.
But I believe that time is this: It is a series of individual instants occurring on a moment-to-moment basis. And how we show up in those moments, how we are, what we are thinking, has a lot to do with reality being created. But how does it all work?
Imagine a stream of water being poured into a glass. To your eye, it looks like a constant stream. But looking closer, such as under a microscope, you would see that it’s not a constant stream. You would see billions and billions of water molecules, bumping into one another as they fall into the glass where there are over 1.5 sextillion water molecules in a single drop.
That example of water not being water but being billions of molecules brings up the theory that I like best to explain time and reality—it’s called loop quantum gravity from a cutting-edge physicist, Carlo Rovelli. It’s where events exist as individual time and space particles, and when they come together, we experience reality.
Maybe we can influence the individual time and space particles by just showing up which changes the situation. That’s the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics.
Which makes reality what I call the quantum ballet: every human showing up, every moment each in our unique way, changes reality for all of us. The real question is, if we know this, how can we intentionally use it to experience more of the lives we want?
Here’s how: You need to master what I call “Focused Perception”.
Focused perception is a heightened state of awareness that can happen to a person in a lot of different contexts: including playing a sport, experiencing grave danger, or bringing it on intentionally using the practices I provide in the book. While it is best experienced in a relaxed state, it does not require a meditative state to achieve. For example, people who survive car crashes regularly describe slowed down time—meaning they entered a state of focused perception. But they probably weren’t all that relaxed while the car was crashing.
Here’s how you can practice for yourself:
- Sit comfortably and slowly close your eyes.
- Inhale through your nose and then exhale through your mouth.
- Make your exhaled breath twice as long as your inhale With each
- breath, slowly count down from three to zero in your mind. At zero, sit quietly for a moment.
- Now bring to mind something that you would like to create for yourself, something satisfying and fulfilling.
- Keep this thought in mind, and now become aware that it has already happened.
- Imagine that what you want is accomplished, fully and completely, and there is nothing more to do.
- Don’t ponder the details; just live the experience that it’s done, it’s happened, it’s complete.
- Now imagine amplifying this feeling of certainty out the bottom of your feet.
- Fill the entire earth, every cell of the planet, with this feeling of certainty.
- Now reverse direction and move the feeling of certainty up your spine and out from head in every direction.
- Shoot the feeling upward through the building, the solar system, the galaxy into the center of the universe.
- Now, just let the feeling go. Feel your body resting in the calmness of nothing more to do.
- And when you are ready, slowly open your eyes.
- Keep track of the experience you’ve just shaped with your thoughts.
So how can we use this new knowledge to focus our intentions, our perceptions to in some way shape reality in ways we desire to experience? That is what All the Time in the World is about. And because it is about changing time, it addresses one of the biggest problems facing people today: we are always at the mercy of time. Using the science and the practices in this book, I believe we can change that.
