by Mike Mandel
It’s staggering how quickly time is passing…
Once again, I find myself becoming obsessed with the passage of time.
Today, we are only seven months away from Boxing Day, which means we’re even closer to Christmas.
Which, of course, feels impossible.
I remember being a young boy attending Earl Beatty Public School, where summer holidays seemed to go on forever. I can actually remember being bored because time dragged so slowly, and we’d run out of things to do.
But now, time is flying by—or at least my perception of it has changed since I’ve gotten older. Just a few moments ago, I was an energetic eighteen-year-old, listening to Black Sabbath and singing Alice Cooper songs in a band with my friends.
Now I’m an energetic senior citizen, and George “The Possum” Jones dominates my musical tastes, at least for now.
I can’t say I’m obsessed with time, but a few months back (actually a quarter of a century ago), I was hired by the Ontario Science Centre to create a hypnotic entertainment show all about time.
It was a fun gig, and hypnosis provides an access point to all things chronos, or time-related.
During the show, I regressed a young man to age four, who shyly explained that he wanted to be a fireman when he grew up. Then I progressed him through time to age eighty, with every step making him a year older, resulting in obvious changes.
It was a graphic demonstration of Einstein’s theory of relativity, where time and space are connected on a continuum—at least, that’s how it was presented to the audience.
Then, I got a subject to hold his hands in front of his face, and by pulling them apart, he looked into the distant past through a portal he’d made. It was fascinating to see his astonished expression as he stared into ancient Egypt, watching a wooden ship arrive in Cairo in the shadow of the pyramids.
I ended the show with a demonstration of time distortion as the subjects returned to the audience. They were stunned to find out they’d been onstage for over an hour because most of them felt like it had only been five or ten minutes.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the power of hypnosis.
There are other ways we can use it to access our perception of time.
Someone with chronic pain can experience a full day’s worth of discomfort in only a few minutes. I experienced this myself when I flew from Toronto to Sydney, Australia, sitting on a fractured tailbone from a fall the day before.
Through self-hypnosis, I was able to trance out for long periods, making the twenty-two-hour trip at least bearable.
On another occasion, I used hypnosis to access and change an event from my childhood, completely erasing my altocelarophobia (fear of high ceilings).
It’s been said that man fears only time, and time fears only the pyramids.
With practical knowledge of hypnosis, we can overcome the errors of the past and even program our future to create a life well-lived.
Our next live Architecture of Hypnosis training in Toronto will be in November.
It’s already more than half full, and it would be great to see you there!
