Stepping Out of Time and Space

by Von Braschler, author of Time Shifts

Every now and then, somebody reports somehow stepping out of normal time and space. It doesn't seem to matter where they live, the time of day or year, or their background. Nobody is exactly certain how they appear to sidestep outside normal reality for a short time before returning, because there is not enough empirical evidence from these random occurrences to study, and most people don't like to talk about it.

In Time Shifts, my fourth book about time and time travel, I have included some very intimate real-life accounts of everyday people who have accidentally slipped in time. I also include stories of practiced time travelers with exercises to explore exactly how they do it.

Some of the stories are very personal. I include my own profound experience with time slips, dating back to when I was an adolescent. I had boarded a bus to help pick berries some 20 miles from home. After eating berries all morning and then swimming in the nearby river, I became horribly sick, with pain in my abdomen, but was unable to find anyone to drive me home. So I started walking on a railroad line with the blind faith it would lead to my home. Shortly after I began my walk, I found myself instantly transported to my front door! Which was very fortunate because my appendix was bursting. For a long time, I never tried to explain how I had “walked” home so quickly that day. But I have to recognize that no railroad tracks stopped in front of my home at that point in my life. (A couple years later, however, we moved to a neighboring town where train tracks were located in front of our home.)

Probably most people who experience these very personal time shifts feel awkward and disoriented, with little interest in describing their encounter in any detail. And the details are hard to analyze rationally, as these situation are outside a personal or social frame of reference. People often might dismiss such temporary time slips as some sort of daydream, delusion, vision, or flight of wild imagination.

Nonetheless, there are many anecdotal stories of these experiences.  Some are very well documented and credible with verification and collaboration. Very often, they are called “time slips” because the sensation is that a person slips out of normal time for a short duration. We should accurately call the time of the escape as duration, because it is hard to measure by any sort of clock or watch. The one thing we do know from personal observation of people who experience these time slips is that they have little sense of ordinary time and often remark that they are surprised how much ordinary time in the mundane, physical world has elapsed while they were “gone.”

Time as we commonly measure it in this physical, three-dimensional world, of course, is an arbitrary consensus. We find it culturally convenient to agree to a 60-minute hour and a 24-hour day. The way we measure things in our mundane world gives us a comfort level for when we should meet each other, arrive at work, and eat dinner. We choose to live in a world of materialism where we reduce everything to consensus measurements.

The present instance you experience evolves into the next instance, each one a fresh beginning for the new “now.” We dream of the past, and we dream of the future that awaits our attention. We experience each moment in time as precious and pregnant with potential as we perceive it.

So maybe our ideal of “then” and “later” is arbitrary, as the mathematician Leibnitz said, and time is different in the spirit realm of unmanifest energy than the way people experience time in the manifest world. Maybe in the unfolding universe there is one continuous, endless timeline, with our ability to perceive it dependent on when and where we can focus our attention. Where we stand, we call that instance “now.” That's where the light is best for our observation. That's all we see.

But what about people who seem to experience time shifts? Granted, these incidents seem rare, and they are random. Such experiences are generally disruptive, because they come outside our normal, neat way of organizing a personal view of reality. But does that make the reality beyond these sidesteps any less valid?  

Time Shifts examines the reality experienced by everyday people who looked outside the box without a looking glass. Some are famous accounts that have been well researched and authenticated. Others are encounters of people I have interviewed. Some of the time shift stories in this book are my personal experiences. As a former journalist, I have reported these stories as faithfully as possible, in hopes that you will see a pattern.

This pattern could work for you. Admittedly, it won't be such a big stretch for people who have daydreamed and found themselves miles from home in a different time and place. It won't seem odd for people who have dreamed and felt certain they really were somewhere outside their own memories. It will prove easy for anyone who recalls going through a normal day, but then suddenly slipping into another time and place where things seemed quite real, if only for an instance.

You see, we probably all slip in and out of time and space on a regular basis in our regular lives, without much thought to it. We just shrug it off and tell ourselves how strange that was and nothing to take seriously. Most assuredly, it's something we don't talk about, as a rule.

The basic truth is that our spirit longs to be free to explore. The energetic part of you that is trapped most of the time in a dense physical body, like a shroud, instinctively knows how to get out. And once it gets out, it wants to explore. It longs to experience and grow. It wants to learn and evolve.

My book offers to help you explore and set your spirit free. It explores ways people step outside their physical bodies in accidental time slips and also how practiced mystics have learned steps to consciously leave their physical bodies to explore reality outside normal time and space in altered states of consciousness. They seem able to reach these altered states in lucid dreams, deep meditation, or a trance. These voyages of energy bodies explore the totality of our being as more than simply physical beings. My book also recognizes that we are light beings with emotional bodies, mental bodies, causal bodies, and higher spiritual bodies that connect us naturally to other planes of existence.

Time travel does not seem odd or controversial to serious students of deep meditation in Eastern Spiritual Science. Yogi masters and their students have been practicing it for hundreds of years as disciplined training. It is particularly well known in Samadhi mysticism, familiar to anyone who has studied the more magical and mystic sections of the classic book, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Hindu and Buddhist meditation students alike are undoubtedly aware of this book of ancient wisdom.

Advanced meditation exercises explore reality, consciousness, and transformation. The dedicated yogi with focus and dedication could expect to reach deeper meditation to examine the nature of reality and alternate realities. In these deep, active meditations, one could explore the depth of consciousness and altered states of consciousness. The focused yogi could even expect to transform himself.

Hence, the mystical and magical levels of meditation could take one beyond the ordinary experience of fixed time and space in a restricted physical world with walls and human limitations. Advanced students of yoga can even leave the body and explore new worlds outside ordinary time and space. At least, the experience is that they reach a sense of being outside mundane space-time.

We have many examples of masters who practice these advanced meditation exercises and report traveling to new realms of reality outside our physical world. They report going to other places and times on the earth plane, as well. I share quite a few of these reports in my book.

But Eastern mystics are not the only sizable group of people who experience non-ordinary time and space. Another group of people would be shamanic visionaries.

Shamanism is sometimes considered to be the origin of all organized religions in our world. Shamanism, in fact, is global and found around the world, despite the encroachment of civilization into rural settings where shamanism is still found.

Shamanism unites people with the elements of nature around them, encouraging people to forge symbiotic relationship and a spiritual bond with the earth, sky, animals, plants that share their environment. In this earth-based spirituality, people typically honor and respect the forces of nature from wind to rain and fire. The holy men of Native American groups, often called shamans, serve as visionaries for their community and a link to the past and future. They speak to the ancestors and visit what lies ahead for the people and the land in the future, bringing insights back to their people.  

Time Shifts includes step-by-step exercises taken from Eastern mysticism and shamanic tradition. These exercises direct readers to step outside the limitations of our boxed-in linear approach, five physical senses, and three-dimensional view of reality and begin to explore the looped nature of time as a sort of moving conveyor belt that allows one to explore the past and future with focused awareness, much like a shaman or yogi.      

Such shamanic visionaries and Eastern mystics offer us role models for traveling outside ordinary time and space in altered states of consciousness. This approach allows us to experience time travel that is safe and reliable in programmed voyages of the energy body. Through focused practice we can elevate time shifts beyond accident slips in time to self-directed journeys of discovery and insight.