The Yoga of Time Travel: How the mind can defeat time

Dr. Fred Alan Wolf - answers questions about his new book to be released this fall.

Dr. Fred Alan Wolf

What prompted you to do a book on time travel?

I have been interested in time travel since I was a child. Perhaps this was an outgrowth of my early interest in magic, perhaps not. However this interest developed, the ideas of traveling through time in the unusual manner of moving (and I use a stream metaphor here) either faster than the "usual flow of time" (imagined to be such that you experience more time than the normal flow or slower (wherein you experience less time than usual) still interests me. As I grew up, I noticed that many events of my life would occur about which I seemed to have the uncanny feeling of déja vu and I would often find myself "knowing" that I already knew those events would occur and that’s why they seemed so familiar. When I write, I realize that I am really time traveling, that the words I write down are not just popping into my mind, but are actually already written down in my mind, and that my mind is really a time machine just going ahead into time, bringing the words from the future, and copying them down.

What is it that fascinates people about time?  Does our society have serious issues with time?  Note for instance, people’s difficulties with being on time, not having enough time, or the aging process itself. Why do you think that is?  Do you have any specific "issues" with time?

About our fascination with time, Saint Augustine remarked "if no one asks me [about time], I know [what it is], but if any person should require me to tell him, I cannot." Perhaps the Saint was referring to how difficult it is to reconcile our common subjective sense of time with our objective and mathematical description of time. Or perhaps our Saint from Hippo was jumping into the future and talking about that peculiar quantum physics paradox called the complementarity principle wherein (from a psychological point of view) you cannot express your knowledge without altering it. Hence it is probably safe to say that no one really understands just what time is as if time had some objective qualities that we could find to compare "it" with. The fact that we can’t "pin time down" as we supposed can do with objective materials like books and apples, continues to both fascinate and bother us.

Our fascination and our inability to "grab hold of time" has both gotten us into a lot of trouble and made technological advance in science, by modeling time as a straight line, possible. About the latter, we are certainly aware of the rapid march of technology and science, so I’ll not say more. About the former, we got into trouble because we needed to make a model of time that fit our desire to control nature and survive in our Western way. This "linear" model has time forever marching on and, through our need to control work and energy, marking time’s passing with clocks. But as we all know, especially those of us in the workforce we are rarely able to work on a clock’s timetable and as a result often find ourselves frustrated and feeling at times inadequate and worried that we simply don’t "have enough time or money" as if time was like apples and coins that one holds in one’s pocket. Even the idea that time is money occupies our worried minds making us think of both as equivalent.

The fact of our aging and encroaching deaths also puts us into "funks" from which many never recover feeling that both time and money are simply lacking in life.
Although our bodies transform continuously as some would simply call advancing decrepitude I don’t see this in this way. Yes as I age (I am in my 70^th year of existence on earth) I certainly feel the effects of this transformation in time so I too have the familiar aches and pains we have all grown up with. But here is what I discovered, my pains aren’t really worse as I age, I have just become more sensitive and conscious concerning them.

As a physicist, have you ever experienced resistance to some of your spiritual ideas about science?  Do you see science becoming more and more open to these ideas?  How does that change the scientific landscape?

It’s surprising how many times people ask me about resistance to my spiritual ideas about science. What’s even more surprising is the fact that I have not actually experienced any resistance either from scientists who I discuss these ideas with or from lay persons who come to hear me speak.

Another surprising thing: science is not closed to spiritual ideas, it just reacts to people who profess that the answer to all questions are found in spiritual belief and science is marching us down a track of spiritual destruction. In today’s science, based as it is on realms of existence well beyond any normal human’s ability to sense, the questions we as scientists ask are continuing to emerge as the same spiritual questions asked by the great ancient minds. Hence science by its open nature of enquiry continues to become more spiritual in the best meaning of that word—as something profoundly sacred and awe inspiring.

In your work you imply that time travel could actually be a vehicle for improving your life. In this sense, could people’s fascination with time travel really be a disguised longing for positive change or spiritual evolution?

Let me answer an unasked question first. Does time travel improve one’s life? Most certainly it does, because time traveling is not a fantasy of science fiction but a matter of scientific fact and as such it has the potential for improving everyone’s life. As we become more aware of just what time travel really is, and we learn that the old model of linear time inevitably marching on no longer holds in our now post-Einsteinian and post-quantum physics world, the question of how and why time travel improves our lives will become more and more evident.

The longing for positive change or spiritual change is really a waking up from an illusion brought on by our belief in linear, ever-increasing, time. From a timeless or spiritual base of understanding, nothing really changes. There is a kind of flow without time’s presence so that each us realizes that we aren’t separate beings limited by space and time, but a One-Being continuous and eternal. This realization comes from my understanding of science as much as it comes from spiritual realization.

You describe in the book how you are a time traveler, that you have time traveled?  How so?  You say that your book is more of a "why" time travel works rather than a "how to." Can you give some "how to" suggestions on how the average person could go about time traveling?

Surprising, but even though my book is a "why book" (I like to think of it as a "why not?" book, ☺) it also will lead people to their own natural realization of time travel in their own everyday lives. Let me give you some examples of how I time travel. First we need to know that time is not just "out there" even though we observe objective processes as if they occur "in time/out there." Thus time is created by mind. The intervals of time actually experienced are marked as punctuations of consciousness. When many such marks occur we count them and mark them as "time’s passing." But if say 100 such focal points of time occur, we would mark them as the same amount of time regardless of how much objective time has passed. If I experience 100 "second" units in one objective second, as when I experience myself moving consciously and rapidly, time around me seems to stand still. People who suffer automobile accidents often have this experience of "time-speeding." On the other hand when I experience 100 "second" units in slow meditation, for example, time around me seems to speed up and I experience "time-slowing" relative to the clock on the wall. I also experience time-slowing which means I age less, even though the clock says I have aged more, when I am creative and writing as I am now writing these answers.

Hence I am able to time travel at different rates into the future. Getting to the past requires using memory and what I do is go back in time to unfavorable situations and attempt to alter them in the direction of something more favorable and desirable for all those I encounter in the memory. I know that the past is not completely fixed and is alterable. Hence changing the past can lead to trouble if it is not done carefully enough.

Finally we can all learn to reverse time, certainly for short intervals, by "letting go" of past fixations that tend to make us automatically predict what’s ahead of us. These "cause/effect" relations project the normal flow of time we tend to objectify and hold as the only way that time can go. Some past fixations, such as good driving habits in our motor vehicles, should not be let go of. We need them to be able to predict that other driver’s behavior, for example. Usually this keeps us safe. But some fixations we have learned through habitual behavior do not help us at all and by letting them go we actually are turning our internal clocks backward in time. For example if you have a bad habit that you continue to support, think of it as something that ages you unnecessarily. Breaking that habit will actually not only stop unnecessary aging but will turn your internal clock backwards, making you younger.

Fred Alan Wolf is a physicist, writer, and lecturer who earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963. A professor of physics for many years, he is the author of many books including Taking the Quantum Leap, Parallel Universes, The Dreaming Universe, The Eagle's Quest, The Spiritual Universe, Mind into Matter and Matter into Feeling. He appeared in the new movie phenomenon, What The #$&! Do We Know!? Dr. Wolf, a.k.a. Captain Quantum, continues to write, lecture throughout the world, and conduct research on the relationship of quantum physics to consciousness. Contact him at questions@fredalanwolf.com