Dr. James Hardt on Living Outside of Time
The way he put it to me was simple: if you want to live high, you have to live outside of time. I took that to heart. I was 26 then, renting an apartment in San Francisco, and I sat down in the middle of the living room carpet and gave myself three days to think through every single way I was tied to time. In my mind I held an enormous samurai sword, and each time a connection surfaced, I cut it. Three full days of that, from morning until night.
Others pointed the same direction. Suzuki Roshi used to say that time is the ground of fear. Pick anything you're afraid of and strip away the time dimension, and most of the time the fear has nothing left to stand on. Suppose you're worried about losing your job. Do you have a job right now? Yes. So when would you lose it? Somewhere down the road, at some distant point. Which means the fear you feel this instant is borrowed from the future. Settle fully into the present moment, which is more or less what every major religion asks of people, and your consciousness tends to grow.
At Biocybernaut we strip time out of a person's awareness by every means we can manage. Watches and phones get collected at the door. No clocks hang anywhere in the building. The feedback sessions happen inside soundproof chambers that stay dark and silent, and the interviews take place in the canopy room, in canopy beds, with no windows at all. There is one conference room where daylight comes through, but for the most part we do a decent job of making time disappear as a felt dimension.
During the early years I tracked which professions struggled most with the training. You'd guess correctly that someone committed to personal growth, introspection, or meditation moves through it more easily than, say, an engineer who happens to be an atheist. But one group stood apart in how hard a time they had learning to control alpha: commodities day traders.