If you are trying to achieve a goal, program a skill, make progress in any domain which requires consistent, repeated effort – it is productive to stop thinking of time in terms of “days”.
A day is a human convention that describes the time segment that it takes Earth to make one rotation resulting in the apparent movement of the Sun from east to west across the sky. Many people schedule their life in terms of days: “What I will do today. This is a habit I will do every day. I will do that tomorrow.”
The perception of the time segment of a day, more-so than the movement of the Sun, is created by our need for sleep. We need to undergo a sleep cycle roughly every 24 hours in order to recuperate and neurologically process experience. This is the main thing that creates the perception of a day as discrete chunks that are separate entities from each other. Psychologically, the days are not well linked; the difference between your psychological state when you are about to go to sleep, and then when you wake up, are sometimes vastly different, which creates the sensation of being born out of a type death that has occurred. You wake up with the feeling of “It’s a brand new day!” and this day is seen as a separate unit or quanta from the day before – the two experiences are not well-linked in the psychology.
This will tend to create at least two undesirable phenomena when it comes to achieving goals or programming yourself according to neuroplasticity:
- It is what allows procrastination to enter. In breaking up the concept of time into quantized chunks (which are a virtual), a situation is created where one can say “I’ll do that tomorrow” or “I will do that one day”. There is only so much you can do “in a day” (the time between sleep cycles). By thinking in this way you are simultaneously limiting yourself to thinking of time segments based on roughly 16 hours, while creating an unconscious perception that there is an unlimited number of these discrete time segments in the future, and somehow these time segments are different from each other (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc) – this places the experience of time in the future which causes delay and procrastination.
- It will tend to create randomness and unintended action. The apparent quantization caused by the sleep cycle, the feeling of waking up with the unconscious concept of “It’s a brand new day (completely unconnected to yesterday and what I was doing then)”, can cause you to see days as disparate “worlds” in which you may do whatever. “What should I do today?” can result in tangential actions each day, perhaps seeking for novel experience, that have little connection to what you were doing in the time segment before you slept because time is being artificially broken up into separate units in the psychology.
It was astrology that caused a change in my perception of time. First, I realized that the zodiac itself is a huge cosmic clock – it actually can function quite accurately as a clock with many hands moving at vastly different rates resulting in complex cycles of time. We are familiar with the cycles resulting from the apparent movement of the Sun (days, years), and even the Moon (weeks, months), but expanding awareness to the other planets, as well as the ascendant, gives rise to significant cycles of time based not only on the speed of the various planets’ orbit, but also cycles created by their various conjunctions and alignments. You start to realize that time is occurring on many many different levels simultaneously.
Next, I realized through these various alignments, called “transits” in astronomy and astrology, that everything is always changing, always in flux. Astrologers will typically look at a “snapshot” of the transits for each day – resulting in the perception that each “day” will be unique and different. As an example, perhaps an astrologer reports that on a given Monday, the Moon will make a perfect conjunction with Venus, while on the subsequent Tuesday, another alignment will occur between the Moon and Mercury. This is still an act of quantizing time – splitting it into discrete chunks that are separate from each other. Taking that a step further, it is important to realize that the planets are always moving – everything is always in flux. Alignments are moving in and out of phase smoothly and constantly – it never stops – not even when you sleep.
Again, it is primarily the human need to undergo a periodic sleep cycle, that creates this perception. However, everyone knows that when it is nightime on one side of the Earth, it is daytime on the other side. In otherwords when it comes to goals, and working consistently on something, it can be helpful to remind your unconscious that the world doesn’t stop turning just because you go to sleep. Even as you sleep, the planets are up there inching forward, and someone, somewhere on the face of the Earth, is working and inching forward to their goals.
I call this change of the internal perception of time “being on military time”. The military uses a 24 hour clock because it conducts it operations at any time that it is required. And at any given time, some percentage of their personnel is awake and working. This creates a more functional perception of time as a continuum, than the populist perception of “the workday” or the typical relative structure of the “9-5” daily unit, with its rush hour traffic migrations and lunch breaks.
Because when it comes down to it, the concept of the day is virtual – it doesn’t actually exist. It is an artificial, human created construct which is the result primarily of our need for sleep. Time is actually a continuum, which is constantly in flux, and doesn’t exist as separate bits. The only true time we have is the Now. We can observe the effects of time through the concept of the past, which arises from the psychological phenomenon of memory. We can also use our cerebral cortex to plan and predict, and thus experience the concept of future, but we cannot totally predict or rely on the future – we could die and be removed from this physical dimension and time by then, and we cannot act in the future, we can only act when it is Now.
This becomes relevant in terms of achieving goals, improving yourself, learning something such as a new skill – all of which imply that some sort of change is to take place. Such change takes place incrementally across time. We know through many different biologically adaptive processes such as neuroplasticity (for instance if you wanted to learn and improve on a musical instrument or some skill such as mathematics or learning a new language), or muscular adaptation (exercising and becoming physically conditioned and fit), that the most important parameter is frequency and consistency. When people want to initiate a new habit, skill, or goal they will frequently say “I will do this every day” or “I will do this every three days”. While this can be helpful to structure and plan the frequency which you will do something it can also be detrimental and set you up for failure. I think is the very cause that many find it hard to implement change.
Say instead “I will do this behavior, perform this action, or work on this goal very frequently in the continuum of time – in the Now”. Bring the various behaviors and goals more into the Now. See that, yes, you need to do it across the continuum of time, but you can only do it in the Now. Then you will see that there is only so many things you can pursue in the field of the Now continuum if you are to make significant progress. Instead of filling your “days” with many varied activities, which will result in your efforts being widely spread, see that you are working with a Now continuum and that for each additional activity you add, you are mathematically reducing the frequency in which you can pursue any one activity.
Also, don’t let your sleep cycles disrupt this perception of the Now continuum, where your “days” become discrete unrelated chunks of experience. Many people who have done great things, like Newton or Davinci, achieved their greatest works in a type of flow state where they would fall asleep at their work, and upon waking after their sleep cycle, would resume their work right where they left off. In that state one loses the perception of separate “days” and instead experiences flow in the continuum of time.
For it is precisely the “concept” days that creates the rampancy of going in many varied tangential paths unrelated to your goal. For instance perhaps one has structured their desired practice habits in terms of days. They structure it as “When I wake up first I do this, then I do this, then I do this. At 10am I do my workout. At 11am I do my mediation, etc.” The theory being is that if they hit every activity every day, they will be consistently programming themselves across a wide array of desired activities. This is the most common mentality, and it can work, but it is subject to vulnerabilities.
First, what if the night before you achieved Davinci level flow on a high priority activity, but then you became tired and needed to engage in a sleep cycle? Well, according to your daily schedule, upon waking you must do all the other activities in order before you can resume. See that it is artificially breaking the momentum of any given activity and that this is happening because of the concept of “a day”.
Second, in any given “day”, all manner of phenomena or people may unexpectedly come in and disrupt your algorithm, the artificial “daily” schedule you have created that has removed you from the continuum of time, the flow of the Now. This is what causes people to be thrown off their desired resolutions for change. Someone or something has unexpectedly come in, caused some type of demand for your immediate attention, and disrupted the synthetic routine you created, resulting in “failure” to adhere to your resolution. One frequently hears people express this as “I had a bad day” as if they are chalking up that “day” as a loss and perhaps the next artificial time segment will be better. It needs to be seen as “No, your momentum, your flow, is messing up in the Now, and if you don’t correct it in the Now, it is going to get worse”. This is what causes people to go off track, many miles down roads that their higher self did not intend, sometimes for years.
There is no such thing as days. There is only the continuum time. The cosmic hands are constantly, incessantly, inching forward. You can only act Now -not tomorrow – that is only a concept in your mind. When it comes to your goals, when it comes to change you want to effect – be on military time – do not separate the days. See time as one continual stream that you are acting in, and the more frequently and intensely you engage in a practice, the quicker you will change your reality.
