As someone who has personally known the author of Seven Secrets of Time Travel: Mystic Voyages of the Energy Body for more than twenty years, I can vouch for Von Braschler’s really profound comprehension of practical spirituality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his latest book, which is not some New Age, airy-fairy attempt at wish-fulfilment.
Rather, from his grasp of classical philosophy and science, he has developed a convincing methodology for transcending time, not via a device or machine, but through the agency of human consciousness. It is not some futuristic technology, but present-day technique, Von Braschler demonstrates, that allows us to cross the time barrier.
His conclusions are drawn from a lifetime of complimentary research, beginning as a faculty member at New York’s Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, where he led workshops throughout North America and Britain. A lifetime member of the Theosophical Society, he is today its regional head in the Upper Midwest of the US, and the author of Chakra Reading & Color Healing (2005), A Magical Journal: A Personal Journey Through the Seasons (2003), Conversations with the Dream Mentor (2003), and Perfect Timing: Mastering Time Perception for Personal Excellence (2002).
A former newspaper and magazine editor, Von Braschler hosted his own weekly radio program, “Healing with Your Pet: Our Psychic, Spiritual Connection.” But it is his present effort that readers may find the most immediately engaging of all his singular achievements.
I began by asking him an obvious question…
Frank Joseph (FJ): What is time? Or, more to the point, what is your definition of time?
Von Braschler (VB): Time is always now. As light intersects us each in turn, we experience an instant. This is our now. It energises you and fills you with opportunity of the moment. You are experiencing a different now than I am – miles away, as the sunlight strikes us at a different instant. Electromagnetic radiation that descends upon the earth from the heavens above in the form of light rays defines time. In truth, then, we only experience solar time on this physical earth plane in our mundane existence.
While most people think of time as linear and progressing like a never-ending movie that unfolds in front of us, what we experience is an instant or a series of individual snapshots. The 17th-century rational philosopher Leibniz said that time doesn’t really exist, but is a conceptional order that our minds place on existence. Furthermore, there are two levels of creation – God above and our physical world of illusion below. Time and space as we conceive them are illusion. With guides such as Leibniz, Kant, Einstein and Barbour, we might say today that we live in the manifest or material realm that is fixed, frozen, and limited by laws of physics that allow little change or progress.
On the other hand, the unmanifest realm of creation above us is unlimited in potential as filled with spirit and energy. The only way I know to leave the restrictions of the manifest level of creation and rise to the unmanifest level is by leaving our physical body in a consciousness body that can transcend time and space as we ordinarily experience things.
FJ: How and why did you become interested in time travel?
VB: I’ve always been fascinated by time, timelessness and time travel. It always occurred to me that each one of us experiences time differently and that most people have a funny idea how to control time or stretch time. We try to cheat time by burning the candle at both ends, getting less sleep, or better managing our time. Sadly, we are two-dimensional thinkers who live in a little box and cannot see outside our little compartment to a level of existence where multiple dimensions and multiple realities exist just beyond us.
Personally, I have on occasion experienced timelessness where time seems to stand still or stretch at will in crisis situations where I had to get outside myself. For most people, these glimpses into expanded reality occur during an accident. These sorts of experiences piqued my interest in time and space and our potential to overcome our normal human condition. My first book was simply about the power in the present moment.
Other books explored expanded human consciousness and ways to overcome the limits of our manifest world. Now I’m fully engaged in exploring the limits of time and space. Most people are introduced to this sort of exploration in their dreams. I’m interested in doing it with my eyes wide open.
FJ: Since the publication of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine in 1895, people interested in the subject have generally assumed that some kind of advanced technology will perhaps make time travel possible. How is your approach different?
VB: Einstein pretty well convinced most of us that the universal speed limit was the speed of light and that matter such as our physical form would turn into pure energy if we were to reach the speed of light in attempts to time travel. And that’s how fast you would need to travel to move backward or forward in time.
Time travel, therefore, remains the realm of energy (spirit). My approach to time travel accepts Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and focuses on leaving the limitations of the physical body in a consciousness body. This is your higher consciousness, that part of you that cannot be measured physically, but can exist and experience a broader reality outside your physical encasement. It is your spirit body or energy body. So my approach follows the reliable example of Native American dream walkers and Hindu Samadhi mystics who enter a state of higher consciousness and leave the body. In this way, they prove that a person’s higher self can transcend time and space.
There are other shamanic and mystic traditions that transcend time and space in the same way, entering a very deep and active meditation with the focused intent to leave the body and go somewhere far away. Many other people have demonstrated prophetic dreams that prove an ability to transcend time and space out of body in higher consciousness, as well. This is a practical approach to time travel that is available to all us, without the amazing contraption of H.G. Wells.
FJ: You write about the human “energy body.” What is it?
VB: I believe in the Hindu and Theosophical model of the subtle energy bodies that surround and complete our dense, physical body of the material plane. Our subtle energy bodies include our astral plane or etheric double, our mental body, our causal body, our Buddha plane of individualised consciousness, our spiritual plane of energised conscious awareness, and our divine plane. So in order to move beyond the material plane at our physical core, we need to move with these subtle energy bodies that correspond to planes above the material plane.
We commonly refer to these subtle bodies that surround our dense core as our energy body. It allows us to enter the planes of existence outside the physical restraints of our material world in a world of pure energy and spirit where change is more readily possible and can be realised in a flash. Now these planes are not normally visible to the physical eye, but can be seen by clairvoyants and anyone trained in aura reading. They have soft, pastel colouring that relate to the light energy vibrational rate of the various planes they represent. Another way to appreciate their very real existence is to put your hands out from the physical body at different intervals to feel their vibrational warmth and tingle.
FJ: You mention “timelessness,” but how can anything be outside or without time?
VB: I consider timelessness my fourth secret of time. Timelessness is just beyond time, as we commonly know it. We experience timelessness during deep meditation when time, as we commonly experience it, seems to stand still. We also experience it to a degree in profound, lucid dreams where you seem to live an entire lifetime in a flash with seemingly no time elapsing. This is where most people stop. It is like the eternal present moment that is pregnant with potential. It exists outside time and outside space as we normally experience life in our mundane, earthbound plane of manifest creation.
We travel outside ordinary space and time of this world in a state of heightened consciousness as our higher self – a spirit body of pure energy. Most meditation ends with timelessness. Here you can listen to universal intelligence with your heightened awareness. It also can be a departure point for time travel, if you focus your higher consciousness on leaving the body and going somewhere else in time and space outside the room where you are meditating or dreaming.
FJ: Indian mystics and Friedrich Nietzsche have written about the Eternal Now. How does it figure into your own research?
VB: Ah, yes – the Eternal Now. My research has included the mystic East, as well as the West, both of which acknowledge it. The Eternal Now is the power of the present moment. We can embrace it by focusing our attention on the present moment and the potential that it holds for us. In truth, earthbound creatures only have the present moment or the now. Everything else is conjecture inside our little pocket calculator brains that attempt to run our lives by analysing and projecting everything in ways that make us feel comfortable about ourselves and where we think we are going. So our little brains are clogged, generally speaking, with worries about yesterday and concerns about tomorrow – moments that are not available to us, but only idle reflections on moments past and worries about an uncertain future beyond our immediate grasp.
The Eternal Now is the universal truth of the power in the present moment. Everything is happening now, and potential change agents like us need to gain traction in the present moment to become heroes in our own lives.
FJ: Many people today have a sense that time is speeding up. Are they somehow deluded, or experiencing a real phenomenon? If so, why is time speeding up?
VB: It would seem so. Aside from the trajectory of the earth clipping a second or so off our annual clocks each year, there is a common human perception today that things are speeding up. Just about every philosopher and scientist who has ever seriously considered the meaning of time, however, has noted the importance of personal perception. There was Kant who said time and space are forms that the human mind projects on external things. Einstein said that the time interval between two events depends on the observer’s reference frame and that very reference body has its own particular time.
Always remember, though, that time is measured in change. When change occurs, time has elapsed. We are living in an age of much change. As energised agents of change, we are fully aware of this. As energised agents of change, we find our own place on the wheel of life and make time spin with our attention. Fully engaged, we perceive time moving rapidly with changes that involve us.
FJ: You state that travelling into the future is possible, but how can we move into a state or condition that does not yet exist?
VB: Time is not really a linear progression, with us standing fixed at one point. This is the illusion of physical existence on this mud ball world of ours. In truth, time outside our inflexible, manifest world is fluid and looped. The unmanifested world of spirit and energy above us is fluid and flush with potential to move forward and backward at will. The trick is simply having enough conscious awareness to move forward and backward in time.
With the right focused intent, a person in a state of heightened consciousness can leave the physical constraints of this manifest world and travel freely backward or forward in time. That involves your higher mind that can exist and function outside the physical body and independent of the brain or lower mind. Mystics and shamans have demonstrated this amazing potential to transcend time and space.
FJ: Are there any real benefits to time travel, other than satisfying one’s curiosity?
VB: Goodness, yes! Shamans experience reality outside normal time to bring back helpful insights to their people about dangers ahead or examination of past events that produced current situations. Eastern mystics visit worlds beyond worlds to understand the nature of cosmology and the potential of the human condition. On a personal level, one can go back into the past to better understand how you got to the point where you are today.
There we more easily heal. There we can deal with buried recovery issues. We can gain better understanding. We suffer because we do not understand. But whether we go forward or backward in time for personal or broader reasons, we always go in an invisible conscious body or energy body without arms, legs, or vocal chords. We go as witnesses to bring back insight, much like the shaman.
FJ: If we are able to move into the past or future, can we change history or alter what would otherwise occur? Is this what you mean by “an energised change agent”?
VB: This is always a tricky question and probably one of the reasons why esoteric exercises have often been withheld from the masses. Are you ready to go forward or backward in time as a perfect witness for your own spiritual evolution and the betterment of your people? It’s an ethical concern. Fortunately, we do not time travel with the physical form necessary for us to interact outside our normal time. We travel in spirit body. The information that we retrieve, if we are able to fully comprehend it and recapitulate it upon return to normal consciousness represents tendencies of how things will turn out. There is not total certainty.
In the case of personal information when you time travel for personal reasons, you become a witness to your own life. That life is totally yours to perfect. The greater concern would be for insights gathered outside personal observation and how it might affect the free will of others to determine their own destiny. I’m not totally concerned about that either, however, since free will of other people took them to the future you might have glimpsed. The future has already happened. We are just peeking into it.
FJ: How does the ancient concept of karma appear into your work?
VB: Quite a lot. Karma is a key component of my third secret of time, timelessness and time travel. I say that time=energy=karma=opportunity. Remember the story of the hero in The Bhagavad-Gita? Like Job in the Bible, he argues with a manifestation of God that his actions in a battle might have unforeseen, dire consequences and incur karma. His battle represents the life struggle that all of us live. The Lord tells him to get in the battle and take action, choosing the right action as best he can without concern for how things might turn out. It’s really about opportunity.
People can be energised agents of change, but need to seize the opportunity. The moment at hand, the instant when light strikes you and energises you, is your opportunity to make a difference. We should not fear karma to the point we are reluctant to act, but recognise it as nature’s huge balancing act. It is nature’s unerring balancing act to measure cause and effect. Karma, as it affects all living things in orderly universe, acts as a moral law to restore order, balance, harmony, and opportunity for right action.
FJ: Have you personally experienced any time travels you’re able to share with us?
VB: Yes, I have. In a state of heightened consciousness, I have gone back and reviewed past lives pretty vividly. I know that all of it was very real, because I have been able to find people from past lives as a result of going back. This has helped me understand who I am in terms of my overall mission in life and what I’m all about. I have gone out of body and experienced timelessness, which has been great in “stretching” time when needed. I drove all across Montana one early morning in a blizzard on an empty tank of gas. (It does seem that during life-threatening situations our spirit evacuates the physical body and begins to function on its own, as others in emergency situations will attest.)
I also remember an incident when I was wounded and trying to walk miles to my home without any concrete sense of direction and instantly found myself standing in front of my front door. All of that seemed pretty amazing then, but makes a little more sense to me now.
FJ: What is the most important point you would like our readers to come away with after acquainting themselves with the Seven Secrets of Time Travel?
VB: You can affect real change as an energised being who absorbs and processes electromagnetic radiation in the form of light rays that descend on us as waves. This energising process and the instant when light intersects you gives you a divine gift and the opportunity to make meaningful changes.
We are part of the greater electromagnetic field and dynamic in that we can transform this light energy. We are light beings encased in physical forms that can be transcended in higher consciousness as pure energy that is unrestricted outside the laws of physics once outside the physical body.
We can realise dimensions and realities beyond the mundane world of the flesh as pure energy travelling at the speed of light beyond ordinary time and space. Eastern mystics and shamans have demonstrated this is possible; and exercises in Seven Secrets of Time Travel explain how to practice this on your own.
Seven Secrets of Time Travel: Mystic Voyages of the Energy Body (Destiny Books, 2012) is available from all good bookstores & online retailers.
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