The Times, they are A-Changing

"Fantasy is the golden shine which lies over the existence and which rises over the greyness of everyday life."

— Wladimir Lindenberg

Would you like to heal without investing too much time? Would you like to recover during your daily routine? Would you like to transform during your nights? Would you like to change, deepen, expand, and center your life? Would you like to live in rhythm with yourself and with all there is?

The earth and the stars have always set our rhythm. We call the period the earth requires for turning around itself "day" and "night," or nychthemeron. For all the other smaller divisions, the cosmos does not have any standards for us. So it seems that the Sumerians have already dissected time in hours some five thousand years ago. It was probably somewhere in the middle of the fourteenth century that the hour became an official quantity. The seconds counter was added only with the rise of industrialization in the eighteenth century. Therefore, today a day counts 24 hours or 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds.

What an abundance of time! What do you do with it? Do you let it slip away? Do you fill it up? Do you shape it? Do you take your time so it is really yours?

The phenomenon of time remains one of the best-kept secrets of the world. The ancient Greeks even gave time divine faces; it was often something holy, so it was something healing. "Time heals all wounds" is another vernacular expression we all know. Time, as such, can nearly be denominated as an archetype — an unconscious pattern of ideas that structures us from inside and straightens our lives in a way. The nature of this archetype is unconscious and can only be experienced in its effect and in its symbolic meaning.

This archetype is subject to the changing times. Today we are living in a very special space-time. In past centuries, not only the zeitgeist changed but also our understanding of time, our time structure, and its contents changed. Life is not the same as it was centuries ago. Time appears quicker and shorter, but it is perhaps more efficient and goal-oriented too. We think that we have less time at our disposal, although we have much more free time during the day and in the overall picture of our lives.

All these changes also have an influence on our everyday lives and often drive us to live hastily. This modified world creates and nourishes many chronic diseases. They are symptoms — cries for help of today's time.

The phenomenon of time has shaped time in the way we regard it right now. Billions of years ago, space-time exploded into life. Very many years later we - the human race - gave them divine faces. We drove on their carriages through the rhythms of day and night. In the course of time, the gods of time were dethroned and murdered; time itself became their butcher. While digitalization increased, time was cut up — and then it went on to cut up us. We call this condition "burnout" — the flame of time almost expired.

In modern times, we have fallen out of the rhythms of time and life. We are living in a time where rituals have started to break up; it is a time of decomposition of both individual and social healing and nourishing time structures. Not only do we have shift work, with its dissolution of rhythms, but we also have inventions that are apparently neutral to time, such as the light bulb, the airplane, medicine, and so on. All of these deeply influence how we experience time. If you search for more examples, you will definitely find them. Just look around.

When the times are changing, it's time to change ourselves, as well.

Time as an archetype has two sides: one, where it runs out and decomposes, and two, where it deepens and completes us. In business life, "time is money." Simultaneously, procedures come into our collective consciousness that can stop time, as inspired awareness, and open the gates to now or the flow into creativity. Thus, we can be liberated from the entanglements of time until only the essence of time remains — the moment that is open, fulfilled, and creative here and now.

Our body, with its trillions of pieces of wisdom, is still swinging in the rhythms of the world, which have surrounded it naturally, and time still accompanies it despite all modernity. The recurring rhythms of day and night have caused us, as living creatures, to develop a multitude of inner clocks; these inner clocks have to be synchronized repeatedly in today's modern world. Recovery will be affected in harmony with these rhythms.

Therefore, in this book we connect with the rhythms of day and night and draw from their symbolic depth. Every day and every night, we dispose of profound symbolic and healing insight. Every dawn shines through our confidence, and every sunset floods our farewell. Every night shelters us, and every day enlightens us. In the light of the sun and in the sparkling of the stars, the cells of our bodies are stimulated to live in the rhythm. With every sunray, we internalize warmth and light; with every starry sky, we absorb the dark width of apparent endlessness. We swing in resonance with it.

In the following explanations and exercises, we will awaken these old rhythms anew. As the suggested practices are often exercises of imagination, you can even do them if you are not in the forest or in the sunshine. You can imagine being in an airplane between two time zones, in a high-rise building, or even in a cellar.

Inside you will find access. Your inner wisdom knows the sunrise, the zenith, the setting sun, and the night. Elicit these pictures, and nourish them, and then they will nourish you. Yes, they will satiate and fulfill you.

We are linking the natural rhythms with various trainings that are mostly exercises of imagination. In our realm of fantasy, we are creators of our lives where we can reign and rule and develop our creativity to the fullest extent. So we can make the source of time divine again and bind ourselves to it in order to find ourselves a home in the time. "Our true home is the current moment," expressed Thich Nhat Hanh, a well-known Buddhist monk.

Just as if the whole evolution of this universe seems to be revealed in this very moment, imagine its subtle information in a drop of water, in every molecule, and in every atom swinging across the entire cosmos.

In this drop, which you...