Making Time
Steve Taylor, Icon Books
“When you are courting a nice girl” said Albert Einstein “an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.”
I think most of us can relate to that kind of relativity. In this intriguing book, Steve Taylor proposes his own “theory of relativity”, one that explains our own inner experience of time. He convincingly demonstrates that summers really were long when you were a child, and that weekends really do roll around much quicker these days. Monday mornings arrive even quicker, of course!
Our experience of time is based on five “laws” -
1 – time passes more quickly as we get older.
2 – time passes more slowly when we’re exposed to new experiences, such as going on holiday.
3 – time passes more quickly in states of absorption and concentration.
4 – time passes more slowly in states of non-absorption.
5 – time passes more slowly, and sometimes even stops, at those moments when our everyday conscious ego “chatter” has quietened down.
This last point is particularly interesting from our point of view, since hypnosis is all about letting the conscious mind take a back seat for a while. Taylor reports some fascinating experiments by the psychologist Gordana Vitaliano, who gave complex mathematical tasks, typically requiring ten minutes or more to perform, to people who had been hypnotised. They were able to complete these tasks in about fifteen seconds.
Our own experience certainly bears out this slowing-down effect. Clients often feel as if they’ve been in a relaxed hypnotic state for far longer than they actually have. We should point out that we never give people difficult sums to do, though!
In support of his theory, the author uses copious real-life examples and some mind-bending insights from modern physics, which seem to suggest that time as we commonly think of it is just an illusion.
Personally, I could have done without the section on precognition. It may well be the case, as Taylor suggests, that there’s nothing in modern scientific theory that prevents such phenomena, but reports of psychics and clairvoyants aren’t really credible evidence, in my opinion. Others may feel differently, of course.
That aside, this is an eminently readable, sensible, interesting and thought-provoking book. Most importantly, it shows you how to take back some control of your sense of time, through meditation (or self-hypnosis, if you prefer), and through paying attention to the moment – more on that subject here.
Monday morning needn’t come around so quickly ever again!
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