Healing with Qualities -
The Essence of Time Therapy
B Y   M A N U E L   S C H O C H

INTRODUCTION
If you have picked up this book the chances are that you have sought help from a psychotherapist, counselor or healer of some kind at some time in your life. You may have tried some of the many "self-help" treatments and therapies now available on the market in an effort to improve the quality of your life or deal with a particular problem. There are many reasons for this, and for those of us who seek psychological help there are three main methods used by professional helpers to help us feel better about our everyday lives, reduce our stress levels and have happier relationships.

One method is to delve into the past to try and unearth the origins of our neuroses, complexes or traumas that lie hidden in the happenings of childhood or infancy, or even further back in past lives. The second is to fill our lives with constructive, creative activities and develop a "positive mental attitude" to help drive out the undesirable elements in our behavior, such as addiction or depression. The third, which is part of the evolution of human consciousness toward seeing "the whole person" as a spiritual as well as a physical, emotional and mental being, is to consciously bring in the power of the soul. The power of the soul influences the brain via the mind, and consequently all aspects of a person's nature. We are at last discovering how to integrate Eastern and Western understandings of the psyche, and there are now various psychotherapeutic approaches that use the wisdom and teachings of Buddhism and the Tao, for example, to develop new ways to help us make peace with our past and free up our potential in the future.

The two main forms I now work with are Time Therapy and Out-of-Body Healing. Out-of-Body Healing involves projecting energy outward away from the body. Time Therapy helps us deal with psychological problems and fears not by analyzing them or by looking to the past for explanations, or by resisting or being against our weaknesses and deep feelings of sadness. Instead, we try to stay with these feelings and learn to observe them without reaction, description or interpretation. When we can do this, we create a relationship to our qualities and the possibility then of real transformation.

Sadness is the key to love and to health. It offers an effective way of helping us deal differently with a range of common problems that affect many of us today including addictions, aggression, depression, mental stress and tension, feelings of frustration, isolation, hurt, rejection and the whole area of relationships. You have to change nothing. In the older forms of therapy the focus is on what is not good in yourself, while in Time Therapy we focus on our potential. Jealousy, fear or anger are yours only if you give them a history. Feelings like these are natural, but if we understand the process of each one it is possible to deal with it instead of just living with it. In order to do this we have to let go of what we call the ego, the sense of self that we call "I".

There is more to us than the mind, as the mystics believed. Time Therapy is based not only on the observation of the mind-body level but also of the aura structure, the energy system, the energy body and soul qualities. The quality aura is consciousness, potential and the future. When this is contacted through simple awareness it permeates the entire aura structure and we become fully human, an expression of the sacred in the ordinary world. We are able to live in a state of happiness, when consciousness - the qualities - are manifested through body, mind and aura.

In this book we will begin with an exploration of whether we can really solve our problems through understanding our past and whether it is even true that the past plays the dominant role we give to it. It is difficult for the mind to deal with these questions as the mind is structured in time, so it cannot really understand, for example, that the future is more important than the past. Intellectually, it is impossible for the mind to grasp this, although in terms of energy it is obvious and understandable. The intellect, which is something that is born then moves from one point in time to the other and finally dies, lacks this understanding. The first thing a child of two or three years old understands in connection to time is the so-called now. The next step in understanding time for a little child of this age is the future. Any understanding of the past occurs at the very end of childhood. This is highly significant. Why do all little children first grasp the so-called now? Having an understanding of only the now means that they cannot abstract toward a future or past.

If we observe ourselves carefully we can see how the movement of energy is always a movement toward something new. In scientific terms, we would call this process evolution. For thousands of years, mystics such as Socrates have said that you have to know yourself. What exactly did they mean by know yourself? If knowing yourself means only to know your history, you are limiting yourself tremendously. If knowing yourself means to only understand your past actions, then you are once again limiting yourself. These options leave no possibility for the movement of growth and flexibility that is necessary for healthy living. It does not take into account your aura or your qualities, which we will explore in more detail later. To begin with, knowing yourself may involve the process of seeing where you came from just so that you can let go of this and move forward.

There is a beautiful paradox here: while fear is always directed toward the future, that which haunts us and which creates a fear of being haunted is derived from the past. Religions (not religious people) and the church establishment have used this to create and maintain their power base by saying that if you are sinful, you will be haunted by your sins. They define what is good or bad and insist that you go to church and obey certain rules so that you may then go to heaven. Traditional psychology, on the other hand, insists that you need to change and understand what went wrong with your past in order to reach self-fulfillment.

Socrates simply encouraged you to know yourself. Knowing yourself in this sense includes the past and all of your potential, which represents the future. In this movement of knowing yourself you are released from being haunted by the past. Analyzing the past and thinking that you are the way you are because of specific incidents in your past merely creates a movement of blaming or of giving away the responsibility for why you are the way you are, which limits your freedom to be. In going down this route you will never know yourself, and you will always be concerned with that which haunts you. It becomes an invented ghost that will be with you for the rest of your life, and if anyone wanted to have power and control over you they could use this aspect of your past as leverage.

Each one of us, even the most enlightened, can always fail. This is beautifully described in the Bible in the description of how Jesus is tempted in the desert. In order for you to change you have to aspire to be different from how you are now. As perfection is an impossible goal to attain, you will therefore always be dogged by what is not right in you. What Socrates meant is that if you see yourself, which really means to have a relationship to yourself, then no one can haunt you or claim responsibility for who you are. For as long as you hold someone else responsible for who you are, whether it is your mother or your father, you have nowhere to go from there; you are simply not in freedom. Freedom does not come through escaping - thinking that it does is a spiritual fantasy, and much of the current new age movement is simply a modern form of escapism. In encouraging indulgence in ideas about past lives, for example, it fulfills a similar role to the Christian church, which encouraged us to escape into beliefs about heaven and hell. True freedom comes through knowing yourself, and this does not involve having to change anything. All that is needed is to see what has been, without reacting to it in any way and in so doing, putting an end to the story there.

As you begin to read and use this book, try to see it not as an intellectual exercise but as an opportunity to learn a new way of thinking, change your perspective, begin to realize your potential and connect with the qualities which are the real essence of your being.

THE BODY IS FORM, THE EGO IS TIME

The Body as Form
When a child is born the first thing it becomes aware of is the body. The first thing you are in touch with and can identify with is your body and how it is: whether it is hot or cold, comfortable or uncomfortable, hungry or full, tired or awake. This is a very simple, natural movement, and you quickly learn that your body plays an important role in your sense of well-being. You discover fairly early on that your body is form and that it has boundaries. In research involving babies and young children between the ages of 18 months to two years of age, it has been observed how they come to realize that the boundary formed by the body is separate from the rest of the world and that there is a distinction between your body and mine. At this point we have our first glimpse of consciousness.

As a direct consequence of this realization, the child sees that the body, which is form, can be carried around by itself and at one moment can be in connection with its mother and in the next on its own again. As all parents will know, by three years old the child becomes stubborn. At this stage in its growth the child experiences how its body can be independent of its mother, and this is simply a natural progression in developing freedom of will. It is a beautiful manifestation of consciousness starting to flower.

Parents usually react to this stubbornness based on a fear of having their authority undermined and a desire to discourage such behavior, but in fact this phase is essential if a child is going to develop a sense of freedom. Between the ages of two and three, the child realizes that not only does it have a physical body that can move independently, that has boundaries, an inside and an outside, but there is also the capacity to reflect, to start to feel. In this way the I or ego is born.

The Ego as Time
Without the ego we could not operate in the world, and from this point on we begin to construct our ego or sense of self based on our experiences and responses in different situations. The child has learned that the body has boundaries that need to be maintained and defended. When we begin to think and feel and to want to have this or that, we try to defend the boundaries of the ego or the I in the same way. This is done through the associative thought processes, which we will come to later, but at this level of existence if the body is form, then the next level, the I or ego, must also be form. It seems obvious. However, the ego has to do with time and not form.

The child, however cannot see this; it does not experience the ego as time but as form instead. As we continue to build up our ego as something that is solid or in form, our behavior becomes conditioned by our sense of who we think we are, our self-perception, our likes and dislikes, our fears and beliefs, our experiences in relationship with others and in the world. In the first type of conditioned behavior there is the familiar fight or flight response. Whenever confronted by danger, or what we perceive as danger, we either fight or escape, or if neither of these is possible, we freeze and become immobile, like a mouse might behave when there is no escape from the jaws of a cat. The brain functions in this way whenever there is even a minor threat; it immediately tries to access one of these responses and it has a tendency to react in this way even with psychological problems, which do not pose any real threat to our safety.

The next type of behavior has to do with learning. Like the human brain, the brain of animals is designed to learn not only according to the Darwinian evolutionary model but also through the out-of-body conscious learning. The hundred monkeys experiment showed that if a group of monkeys was shown how to pick potatoes in a certain way, a few months later the same type of monkey somewhere else in the world would be able to do the same. Learning is often seen as a process of analyzing your mistakes and then doing things differently using these experiences. Real learning, however, involves a movement of being ready to see a mistake and leave it at that or to forget it. Learning has to do with not judging yourself. When a baby tries to stand but keeps falling over, it does not then sit down to analyze what went wrong or whether it tried hard enough; it just keeps trying over and over again.

The moment we start judging our learning, our energy gets diverted into questioning or worrying about our progress. Because the brain cannot make the distinction between reality and a thought, it will then sense that there is a problem and immediately begin to try to solve it, so more energy is absorbed and the brain becomes less vital. At birth, unless the brain is damaged it is totally awake and brilliant, but so much fear is created around how one should learn that children are put under great pressure to learn in what is seen as the right way.

So, to forget means to learn without judging or focusing on one's weaknesses. In paying too much attention and trying to understand our weak points, we simply give them more energy because the brain will become mobilized into thinking that something has to be done and will lose its intelligence. Fixating on our weaknesses causes unnecessary problems and lack of freedom.

Freedom and Insecurity
Where there is no freedom there is insecurity in the negative sense of the word. The opposite of security is not insecurity but freedom. A mind that wants security creates limitation, and the brain is then constantly fighting the limitation. Learning is the movement of always being totally insecure about what will happen next.

The third type of behavior has nothing to do with childhood or culture and is present in the brain from the moment we are born. In religious contexts it is referred to as longing but more usually as simple curiosity. It can best be seen in children. For example, a two-year-old wants to find out more about something by the fireplace. As you know the fireplace can be dangerous you tell the child not to go near it. The child gives you a strange look but continues to move toward it. You mistakenly think that the child is deliberately disobeying you instead of realizing that it is simply curious.

On the level of biological consciousness, curiosity is stronger than love. And the will may be important, but fantasy or curiosity is always the stronger urge. It involves being totally ready to move outward, away from safety, even if it jeopardizes one's own life. Such is the intelligence of evolution; consciousness is not possible without curiosity and learning. Creativity is a symptom or flowering of curiosity, yet the mind prefers to cling to the past or to focus on one's weaknesses in an attempt to find security or stability in the idea of being someone, to have an identity, to be secure in knowing who you are.

Form and Time
If parents then deal with this situation in the same manner as the child is dealing with it, i.e. if you fight the stubbornness, which means fighting the will of the child, inevitably you end up fighting against their sense of freedom and battling with the child's development in terms of its body consciousness and ego consciousness. It will be difficult then for the child to learn that the I is of time. It will instead structure it more and more as form. If we look at the significance of our past experience in shaping who we are now, what happens to you between twelve to seventeen years of age often has more of an impact than the first few years of life. During this stage of puberty there is a possibility for a whole new shift in perspective to begin. If the I at this point cannot shift to a time-based perspective, then the energy of a person will be progressively shunted away in all sorts of other directions. Then I will not be able to realize that it is more than form. It may only have momentary glimpses of timelessness.

For example, as children, we all had moments when we were totally absorbed in our actions. This movement of being totally absorbed in action with total awareness means losing that sense of time - when your body and ego are melting into something beyond duality. It is easy to know when you are immersed in awareness, as the less awareness one has, then the more time (that is, the subjective feeling of time) one experiences. By this I mean living time as opposed to cycle or phase time. Cycle time relates to the twenty-four hours on a clock, whereas living time is what you experience; it is relative time.

We cannot discern our potential if we are constantly concerned with the body/form or absorbing energy in fighting it in some way with the ego/I. When we do this, energy gets absorbed not only in the body but also in the illusion that the I is also form when in fact the I is time. If at the age of seventeen we could see that the I is much more than form, we would then become spiritual. However, if this does not happen at seventeen, then usually we have to wait until the age of fifty. As Jung observed, fifty years of age is when the spiritual or religious impulse returns in all of us. If there is much more to the I than we think, what can we find out by seeing or being aware that it is time and not form?

The Future Becomes the Past
The Buddha taught that if you focus on that which will not survive, on that which will pass away, you are focusing on the wrong thing. Time is the movement of something passing away. The moment you reach the future it becomes the past. The future is the unknown and involves fear, and the moment you are faced with fear you are in the past. So in terms of cause and effect, the future is really the cause. This may be difficult to understand because we have been conditioned to believe in "cause and effect," but it is worth trying to understand it in this way.

The Buddha advised us not to cling to the known or to that which dies because the known is always going to die. Modern psychologists encourage us not to cling to the ego and not to try to understand that which is at any rate always changing. How can you understand something that is constantly changing? How can you hope to solve your problems by looking at that which has created the problem and is the problem? The mind strongly believes that it can change itself through understanding itself. But if the "I" is an illusion based on time, it cannot do this.

Coming back to the question of why it is so difficult to see with the mind that the future is the cause, that the future creates the past, this is because the mind can never be in the future; it is always in the past. It is always with that which has in fact already happened, and therefore it is always the cause of blockage of energy. If you then insist with your will (which is still of the mind) to move into the future, you are effectively instructing the mind to commit suicide.

This is supported by the Eastern religious concepts that claim that you can only become enlightened when you are no longer preoccupied with your past and also by the most important principle in Christianity - the act of forgiveness. What is the movement of forgiveness? It is the movement of absolutely and totally cutting yourself off from the past and leaving it behind you. We do not seem to live like this at all, and Christianity as a religion certainly does not encourage us to do so. We live within the shoulds of Christianity, which again simply absorbs energy.

By now you may be saying fine, I can understand this, but how do I actually deal with this because at the biological level I need the ego. Indeed on the level of biological consciousness that includes the body and part of the thinking apparatus provided by the brain, you do need it. There is also a biopsychological level of consciousness where you also need the I, because it is on this level that your memory functions, and you do need memory; for example, after having learned how to drive a car you need to remember how to do it again the following day. But there is also the level of psychospiritual consciousness, and all the laws are different here. Newton's laws are not wrong just because they were followed by Einstein's theories; for example, they are each valid at different levels of analysis.

So, the mind struggles with how to approach this. It can see that to work with the I is useless, and it can also see that the I is the problem, but it cannot find a way out of the puzzle. For as long as you are connected with the I, and as the I is time, you will not understand what time means. This is because the I cannot examine itself. The same process occurs when you really change, that is, when true transformation takes place. You will not be aware of it until after the event, and even then only upon reflection. If you were to be aware of transforming during the process itself, then half of your available energy would be absorbed in that awareness, limiting the process. So do not expect to be aware of change as it is occurring, as no change is possible if you are constantly observing and watching for it. The I cannot see what time is for as long as it is dominating consciousness; however, it persists in wanting to know how it can facilitate change.

If only there were a simple answer to this, the world would already be a paradise. There are, however, some hints and suggestions to guide you through this process.


©2005, Manuel Schoch