The New Year brings with it an inevitable sense of time. You feel a year older; life seems to be passing you by. You don’t have to feel this way, however. According to Mircea Eliade and Deepak Chopra, your body has the power to reverse the passage of time simply by shifting its perception of human potential.
Recreating a New World with Sacred Time
In his book, The Sacred and the Profane:The Nature of Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), theologian and writer, Mircea Eliade suggests that sacred time is often experienced as a circular or spiral event – like the torus – that is both “reversible and recoverable.”
He also indicates that this eternal, mythical time is accessible to man through his acceptance of the “transhuman quality ” of life. Awareness is the key, specifically awareness of the divine potential within man.
For example, Eliade refers to the dual meaning of the word “world” in North American Aboriginal languages. “A year has gone by” is often expressed as “the world has passed by,” an association that reveals the intimate connections between the world and cosmic time.
This language holds the key to sacred time: the world dies on the last day of the year, but is reborn on New Year’s day. Each end is also a beginning and so time never stops.
Similarly, the Persian (now Iranian) New Year is marked by rituals that signify the “end of the world” and the rebirth of a new order. Cultures in South-East Asia take part in similar rituals – festivals that mark the banishment of the old and the re-creation of the new. These festivals are more than celebrations; they are literally reproductions of the “works of the gods” – to re-create a new world as the gods did. In essence, man becomes a “contemporary of the gods” by accomplishing “divine works.”
Evolution Makes Time Your Friend
Fast forward fifty years to 2010. Deepak Chopra in his book Re-inventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul:How to Create a New You ( New York: Harmony Books, 2009), sends a similar message to the 21st century. Aging, he claims, is the “body’s greatest flaw”; yet, man can reverse this passage of time by shifting his view of the body as an object subject to time to a process capable of reversal and renewal.
A shift in attitude can produce a “new agenda for the body” because “awareness can change any energy pattern at will.”
Evolution and entropy are both energy patterns vying for dominance in the human body. Whichever one you subscribe to will become your reality. The key to evolution is making time your ally by living in a way that banishes the limitations of time. This includes not only conscious time management but an implicit belief in the hidden potential within you. Your desire to release this potential is the source of your evolution.
Why? Evolution is triggered when you are energized. As long as you take in more energy than you give off, you are stopping time. This means that as long as your body is alive, it refuses to cool down and die.
As long as you are charged with the energy of reinvention and renewal, you are stopping time. Time only runs out when energy runs out.
How You Can Stop Time
According to Chopra, the surest way to aging is believing you don`t have enough time. Deadlines, stress, chaos, unpredictability, and accidents disrupt your sense of timelessness. Such disorders are part of life; however, you can minimize their damaging effects (and minimize the effects of aging in the process) by laying a foundation of order that allows you to re-tune and recharge your body after each disruption.
Such a foundation includes maintaining a regular schedule and environment for personal and work routines, along with:
- setting aside time each day to re-tune and renew the body;
- eliminating chaotic influences at work and at home;
- avoiding high-risk situations;
- staying within your comfort zone;
- releasing anxiety and repressed anger without hurting others or losing control; and
- becoming emotionally resilient.
The most important part of this foundation is something contemporary man seems to find challenging – living as if you have all the time in the world. It is only by living with this sense of timelessness that you become the god that creates what Eliade calls the “works of the gods.”
