Creativity Blocks #005: Lack of Time

One of the most common complaints you hear nowadays is that there is not enough time.

The world is speeding up – we are being bombarded by TV, news, social media – how is it possible to keep up?

Well it’s a common misconception that the march of time and it’s ticking clock is both fixed and immutable.

You hear people saying things like, “You can’t change the past” and “There are simply not enough hours in the day.”

Both these statements are not necessarily true.

It’s also said that, if you want something done, give it to a busy person. I even heard someone say once that they didn’t have enough time to read a time management book !!

Well there’s two books I recommend highly both that take a different approach, mentioned at the bottom of this blog … but even they don’t really show how time can be bent, managed and stretched.

It’s all in mind

Now this might seem far fetched, or in the realms of Doctor Who or Back to the Future, but scientists are coming to the conclusion that our reality – our space and time – are linked to our consciousness. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that it’s our very consciousness that actually creates our reality and space and time. So all you need to do to change time is to make a change in your consciousness.

A fly and an elephant both perceive time differently to us … and I for one have noticed a difference in peoples’ cognitive reaction time. Have you ever tried to swat a fly only for it to seem to know where you are about to strike? It’s nerve signals don’t have to travel as far as ours so its physiology and neurology means it reacts quicker.

I am sure you have heard about athletes who have been “in the zone” – a sort of timeless place – or perhaps you have had a light bulb moment where in less than a second, you get a flash of inspiration – a whole picture for a new idea. If you were able to MRI scan your brain at this moment, you would see both the right and left hemispheres light up in synchronism. For that split second you were Whole Brain (or even Whole Mind) Thinking. A brain scan would show that your brain was generating alpha and probably even theta waves.

It is now thought our left brain sits in space and time and our right brain everywhere and “every-when” else. By making our left brain go silent and work in harmony with our right, our perception of the speed of time changes.

Now you can access this state while meditating. When I mention this to people, their first reaction is that they don’t have time to meditate. I know it sounds counter-intuitive but I can testify that 20-30 minutes meditation before any creative session will deliver not only the time back by a factor of 3 or 4 but also produce the most sublime output that appears to have come from nowhere.

“But I can’t make my mind go quiet,” is normally the next protest swiftly followed by, “I’d like to meditate but I don’t have time to learn how.”

Well, if you hear yourself saying this, help is now at hand. You don’t need necessarily to enter an ashram for two months. Although, if you did, it might well be time well spent …

Have a listen to this audio track to learn a routine you can use anytime and anywhere – great also for getting back to sleep in the early hours – but not as one client of mind did for listening to while driving !!!

By practicing getting into this state while your eyes are open, you will find time changes its speed … and you will get more done in less time !!!

Create as much time as you need and get more done

Living Timefully

Recommended Reading

If what I’ve written above it just too whacky and you just want to better manage your day and “claw back” time, then read Time Management for Dummies by Clare Evans (no relation).

I also recommend getting hold of a copy of Steven Taylor’s excellent book called Making Time – it explains in some detail how consciousness and time are interrelated and how you can start to control time to your advantage.

Which side are you on?

One of the most amazing feats we can perform is to consciously control which parts of our brain we are using.

Once mastered, you can then put this under ‘unconscious control’ and increase your creativity several fold.

A good example of this is when you learn to ride a bike or drive a car. Once learned, you can do something else and multitask without having to give what is an amazingly complex task a second thought.

Now I should say the the whole left and right brain model is both simplistic and only serves to help us understand that we can be in different states of mind. Our left and right brain functions are caused by our state of consciousness not the generators of it and what is processed by the physical left and right are nowhere near as separate as perhaps currently thought. It is a good approximation thought to help us get our mind around what is one of the most complex structures we currently know of in the Universe – our own brains.

In simplistic terms, however, what happens is that the right brain learns a process and hands it to the left to handle automatically.

To understand how the right and left interact, do the following exercise:

Step 1: Write down the word MAGIC on a piece of paper

Step 2: Then write it down two more times

Step 3: Now write it down backwards

Step 4: Then write it down backwards two more times

Step 5: Notice how when you wrote the new word backwards for the second and third time how much you speeded up, probably copying the word you first wrote. Notice how the third time was even quicker than the second time.

Note that I haven’t purposely written it down backwards in this blog as this would spoil the effect. What is happening is something like this.

Step 1: your right brain decoded the sentence above and sent it to the left to handle

Step 2: the left brain repeated the task twice with a modicum of right brain holistic supervision

Step 3: either your right brain forms a whole picture in your mind’s eye of MAGIC backwards and then tells the left brain to write it OR your right brain gets your left brain to write each letter down and then forms the picture of it backwards – perhaps correcting itself with the position of the A and I and G and M after the first attempt

Step 4: when you repeat it, your left brain either copies what it sees on the page or uses the right brain whole image and processes the whole synthesised word

Now repeat the same exercise with the word POWER but this time do it with your eyes closed to experience the difference.

Now this might all sound a bit trivial and we perform complex actions like this every day without giving them a second thought. Just being able to do this is magical. If you really think about it, being able to comprehend that we are doing it is even more magical – and the beginning of a new level of mind control.

If you would you like to learn more about these techniques, make sure you get a copy of Tom’s new book to find out where ideas really come from and how you can make sure yours actually happen …

The Art and Science of Light Bulb Moments

Related blogs:

Getting in the Zone

Whole Brain Thinking

The Inspirational Breath

Cross Crawling

Mapping your Mind

Food for Thought

Whole Brain Thinking

In the 1960’s, Professor Roger Sperry was amongst the first scientists to discover the left and right sides of the brain performed different functions. His work was primarily based on studying people with mental illness or physical brain damage.

His research won him a Nobel prize.His research papers had great titles that indicate where he was coming from:

“Interhemispheric relationships: the neocortical commissures; syndromes of hemisphere disconnection.”

“Lateral specialization in the surgically separated hemispheres.”

… this was pioneering stuff !!

Nowadays, scientists can temporarily anaestasise sides or parts of the brain while normal and healthy ‘patients’ are awake and then they can study what functions are affected. With MRI scanners, we can see which bits of our brain ‘light up’ when we perform certain tasks or think certain types of thoughts. Neuroscience is truly entering a Golden Age.

In his phenomenal book, The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist describes how a chicken uses its right eye to look for grain while its left eye scans for predators and danger. He also postulates how left and right brain functions have changed over time influenced, as they are, by cultural advances and education – i.e. brain training.

Remarkably, several mystics ‘knew’ about the hemispheric differences years before the advent of brain scanners. It was thought the left brain worked inside space and time and was the ‘generator’ of consciousness. They ‘knew’ the right brain operates as a ‘receiver’ of thought and acts everywhere and ‘everywhen’ else.

It has been discovered recently that the corpus collosum, which connects the two sides of the brain, actually suppresses one side of the brain while the other gets on with its ‘job’.

It’s generally agreed that Whole Brain Thinking is a ‘good thing’ and I can testify that when you do it that 1+1 equals at least three if not more.

In this next blog series as part of the Ultimate Blog Challenge, I’ll be introducing simple techniques we can all do to activate and integrate both sides of our brain.

I’ll be covering:

  • The Inspirational Breath
  • Cross crawling
  • Mind Mapping
  • Food for thought
  • Which side are you on?

To get you started and warm you up, read this blog and listen to the free audio visualisation on Getting in the Zone

So tune in for the next week of blogs if you want to increase your creativity and productivity by leaps and bounds.

If you would you like to learn more about these techniques, make sure you get a copy of Tom’s new book to find out where ideas really come from and how you can make sure yours actually happen …

The Art and Science of Light Bulb Moments

Related blogs:

The Inspirational Breath

Cross Crawling

Mapping your Mind

Food for Thought

Which side are you on?

Getting in the Zone

Over the course of a day, you breathe through different nostrils, The left nostril oxygenates the right brain and the right nostril the left.

Neurons don’t store oxygen, they need to be fed it.

This visualisation is a great way to prepare for any creative project.

It both energises and balances both sides of the brain.

Once you learn the sequence, you can do all or part of it at any time to give you an extra boost throughout the day.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS WHILE DRIVING, FLYING A JUMBO JET OR OPERATING MACHINERY


Getting in The Zone

Before you listen to this visualisation, stare at the infinity image for 30 seconds so it is impressed on your Mind’s Eye.

If you have an iPhone, iPad or MP3 player, you can download it here …

If you would you like to learn more about these techniques, make sure you get a copy of Tom’s new book to find out where ideas really come from and how you can make sure yours actually happen …

The Art and Science of Light Bulb Moments

Related blogs:

Whole Brain Thinking

The Inspirational Breath

Cross Crawling

Mapping your Mind

Food for Thought

Which side are you on?