Can I Stop Time With Meditation? – Dialectic Two Step

Question:

How can I stop time through meditation? There is an exercise in meditation is able to control the mind giving an effect that time stops for a few seconds. Getting to this state is something I’ve always wanted.

Response:

Does that imply that time is in the mind. Interesting!

What would that mean? Time is subjective? If time stops in your mind, how does that affect others?

What about clocks? If you were somehow to achieve this pause in time personally, would anyone else be affected? Or would it mean that you paused on the timeline and then resumed without affecting others? Or would others proceed on without you, causing your mind and body to be out of phase?

But let’s set aside the skeptical angle and talk about what desire for this rather unique, I’d say miraculous, state.  When we have a strong desire for something, we can often set ourselves up for disappointment.  The greater the desire, the greater the disappointment. When we desire things that are realistic – for instance to have a 5 minute nap in the afternoon every once and a while – it’s likely that we can find contentment every once and a while. Harder less realistic goals feel like they might provide a bigger happiness payout, but they occur less frequently, and like all other things they are short lived.  When our goals defy the basic rules of the universe, I suspect we are guaranteed to fail.

Sounds like this desire to achieve the effect of stopping time could leads us down the path of suffering (or at least a headache).

What benefit would achieving this state offer us? I’d ask that question first.

One of the great ironies of the Mahayana school of Buddhism is the ideal of the Bodhisattva.  The vow of the Bodhisattva, to save all beings, is exactly this kind of desire, absolutely impossible.  Perhaps your desire is rooted here. If it is, I encourage you to examine it rationally first, and then after you’ve exhausted the impossible, like Sherlock Holmes advises, what’s left over is what you are looking for. That is where liberation is likely hiding out.

Dialectic Two-Step  is an ongoing series of my thoughts on questions that come my way.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two. - Octavio

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The post Can I Stop Time With Meditation? – Dialectic Two Step written by Andrew Furst appeared on Andrew Furst.