The Time Machine

Almost everyone involved in what someone today annoyingly called the ‘transformational space’ (life coaches, therapists and so on – people who help people change), understands and often teaches this concept.

It’s something I’ve referred to before and is founded on the reality that there is no such thing as linear time.

‘Tomorrow’ never comes and ‘Yesterday’ is just a file copy of ‘Today’.

A file copy in your subconscious mind.

‘All our yesterdays’ are there, we just have to access them.

And we do.

Sometimes deliberately, sometimes randomly, and sometimes they just ‘pop up’ out of nowhere – out of the ‘blue’.

Here’s the thing about memories.

We know that they are memories.

‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ – you and I can ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘smell’ and ‘taste’ what is going on.

And our minds generate the same feelings as we felt ‘then’.

But memories are not actually happening

Even though it may feel like it sometimes.

And sometimes, if we’re watching a movie or a news report, we can also get feelings, sometimes quite strong feelings, about what we see.

But we aren’t ‘there’ – it’s not real.

It may be occupying ‘this moment in time’ in our minds but at the same time it isn’t.

(I can see this is going to get complicated – but bear with me!).

Many people shy away from the idea of hypnosis or hypnotherapy, and so do many conventionally trained hypnotherapists, because they fear going back, or taking people back, to times in their ‘past’ – to memories, that may be ‘upsetting’.

I hear many people on both sides, client and therapist, talking about ‘re-living the past’ and the damage that might cause potentially making existing problems worse.

But when I regress a client, when I ask their subconscious to come up with a scene I just remind them that they will only be ‘viewing it on a screen’, they won’t be ‘there’, it won’t be ‘happening’ again.

Yes, they will recall the feelings and may become emotional, but that’s precisely what they need to do to understand and resolve the ‘current’ problem, whatever that might be.

Unless they have blocks preventing it, which can be circumvented in other ways, most people are able to do this quite easily.

All those yesterdays are filed away neatly in the subconscious, and hypnosis, where I talk directly to the subconscious, is the way of finding them.

Because the conscious mind doesn’t have direct access to the ‘filing system’.

Now take a deep breath and just go along with me for a little because I’m going to talk about doing something similar for the ‘future’.

Imagine for the moment a stack of record cards – each one holding a ‘memory’.

You and I are – today – now – somewhere in the middle of this ‘stack’.

Below us are the records of the past and above us are the records of the future.

The ‘scenes’ to which we can go forward.

If only we can ‘unlock’ them.

Some individuals, Prophets, Clairvoyants and Seers (See-ers) can do this to some extent, but usually only in a general rather than individual sense.

What if, like regressing to our past, you and I could also progress to our future?

Our personal future.

Now some ‘respected’ organs of the Press and the Media would have this as ‘mumbo-jumbo’, ‘woo-woo’ or ‘new age nonsense’. You see they support the idea that humanity has reached the peak of its development when in fact we have hardly ‘started’ on our evolution.

Because you and I can create our future – and not just by carrying on as we are, making random decisions and discovering what ‘happens’.

I have been taught to do this by several different coaches and mentors in different ways, but it all boils down to the same technique.

Joe Vitale calls it the Secret Mirror, Mary Morrissey calls it the Time Machine, Phil Olley and others call it the Magic Wand. Others don’t have a catchy name for it but describe the same thing.

And it’s very similar to the regression technique in that it’s about letting your subconscious have its say.

Without the conscious mind interfering and saying, ‘You can’t do that!’ which is what we are trained to do from very early in our lives.

As children we are told to stop daydreaming, stop imagining and ‘stick to the ‘facts’’; not to be ‘stupid’ and most of all not to ‘rock the boat’ of existing understanding.

To progress as well as to regress effectively you and I must suspend our ‘conscious’ and let our subconscious free.

This is simple but not easy and it will take a lot of practice – and faith.

Go to your stack of memory cards and pick out one ‘above’ you in the pile.

Most people who teach this say 1 year or 3 years ‘ahead’ – any ‘further away’ and the cards become dim and vague – hard to ‘read’.

Pick your card – let’s say this day 3 years from now.

Suspend your conscious thought and let your subconscious tell you what’s written on the card. Who are you, where are you, what are you doing, what do you see, hear, smell, taste? Most of all how do you feel – this day 3 years on?

This is your ‘dream’ in US language, or your ‘vision’ in the English dictionary.

Spend some time reading this card, observing the re-run of this day 3 years ahead – just like you would if it were a memory of the past.

Because this is a memory of the future.

Absorb it, feel it, understand it, live it.

Oh yes, if you don’t ‘like’ what’s written on the card you can always change it by finding out what actions led up to it and changing them.

As always, it’s your choice.

Just change it.

And then let your conscious mind in.

There are two ways to do this.

Joe Vitale and some others propose that you have a conversation with your ‘past self’ (that’s you now in the current year) in a mirror. Mary Morrissey and Phil Olley suggest you role play with someone else (ideally that you don’t know and who is aware of the technique) and tell them all about what you are up to in this ‘future’ time.

As I said, this isn’t easy because our conscious mind puts up very strong resistance.

To make it easier, and to get used to the routine select a shorter period – go down to one year or six months ahead and do it often – once a week if you can.

If you still find it difficult then start with ‘tomorrow’.

Visualise tomorrow, pretend it’s tomorrow today, what are you doing, seeing, hearing, feeling?

But for now, apart from reading my Insight, how is next Wednesday shaping up for you?

See you next week – er, this week, last week?