Trapped in Time

The Ancestral Mind: Reclaim the Power
by Gregg Jacobs, Ph.D.

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Another critical way in which the Thinking Mind's abstract reasoning has distanced us from ourselves is in making time a commodity to be analyzed and abstracted, squeezed and rationed out.

Thoreau once described time as "the stream I go fishing in." No doubt our unique ability to move forward in time mentally and foresee events that have not yet occurred is one of the great benefits of the TM, for it enabled us to anticipate and plan for our future needs. This cognitive time travel, however, came at a price, for too frequently we don't just plan for the future but come to live in it. From our earliest awareness we're taught to believe that what counts most in our lives will occur "when we grow up" or "when we have children" or "when we get that promotion" or "when we retire." We are trained not to seek satisfaction in the present moment but to strive for and expect that happiness to unfold at some future date.

If you objectively observe your thoughts while you are driving, working, playing with your children, or eating dinner, you'll likely be amazed at how much of your mental life involves thoughts about the future. We spend far too large a portion of our lives missing the moment because we keep a never-ending mental list of what will happen in an hour, tomorrow, the coming week, or next year. The Thinking Mind, by constantly pulling us out of the moment, has all but eliminated "now."

Ironically, despite the linear rationality we associate with it, the Thinking Mind's orientation toward the future has made us more fearful than children or even animals. Our ability to project ourselves forward has created new "predators" that are cognitive, rather than biological, threats, and include everything from tomorrow's deadline or next week's court hearing, to even our eventual death. This constant worrying leads to a maladaptive mental state: namely, chronic anxiety.

Preindustrial societies measured time very differently, and time itself had very different meanings. The main divisions of the day were first light, midday, and sunset, and if you were off by an hour or two in your estimation of what constituted "midday," it didn't matter, because nothing happened on that tight a schedule. As late as the nineteenth century Tolstoy could describe Russian peasants showing up to catch a train, unaware of which day it was due to arrive, much less which hour. They simply came to the station, and waited.

In the Western world mechanized timekeeping put an end to that informality and flexibility. By the time of the Middle Ages monks had already begun to use devices like the sundial and the hourglass to mark their schedules for prayers. Later, the tolling of bells in church towers regulated activities for all within hearing. With the development of commercial centers, large clocks on town halls in public squares enabled townspeople to measure time in even more discrete units. When the pocket watch, and later the wristwatch, came along, the dictates of time became personal and internalized. We were all dancing to the same rhythm, no matter where we were.

Time is now our unquestioned master. How many times a day do you look at your watch-fifty, one hundred? Most of what we do-when we arise from bed, go to work, eat lunch, meet with people, get the kids off the bus, watch television shows, go to bed-is based on clock-time. Later in this book, when we explore the scientific literature of sleep, rest, and reverie, we will see that this is not the natural, healthful rhythm the human mind incorporated as it evolved through the eons.

Our unnatural preoccupation with time typically leaves us with a "busy complex," in which we constantly feel that we must be productive rather than allow ourselves to be absorbed in the present. We're losing time! Time's a-wastin'! We have become a culture in which "doing" something, anything, is celebrated. In essence, we're no longer human beings, but have become human doings.

This goal of keeping busy in order to appear productive is a phenomenon of the last three hundred years-the blinking of an eye, in evolutionary time-and the rise of industrial capitalism. This process became even more pronounced in the second half of the twentieth century. Consider what's happened to the pace of office work in just the last generation. Back when "snail mail" was the standard means of correspondence, you might have to wait a week, or as long as a month, before the post office delivered a response to a letter. When the fax machine entered the picture, you might receive an answer later the same day. With direct service lines on e-mail, you can get a response in "real time"-a reply appears on your screen before you can turn away from your computer.

Such speed can be a real benefit when you want to move ahead with a project as quickly as possible. What's lost in this process, however, is the give-and-take of the natural flow of work. In the past, you dealt with a problem, sent off a document or a proposal, then turned to other tasks while you waited for a response. In the meantime, you might also have lunch with a friend, or take the afternoon off to see your child in a school play.

Now, there's no waiting; the ball is immediately back in your court. This means, of course, that everything demands your prompt attention, even though you have far more things to take care of than could ever be dealt with "at once." Making matters worse, you have no choice but to go along with this pace because your competition-as well as your boss and all your colleagues-are all running just as fast. In practical terms working in "real time" means working ALL the time, because it means that everything has to be done NOW.

E-mail has also begun to encroach on our home lives-not to mention the cell phones and pagers we carry with us everywhere. The situation has become so bad that theaters now have to remind patrons to turn off cell phones before the show begins, much like saloons in the Wild West insisted that patrons check their guns at the door. Restaurants and trains have attempted to set aside special "phone free" areas, but the din of ringing tones and too-loud conversations is still everywhere.

Traveling, even on business, used to be a chance to "get away from the office," to have a breath of fresh air and enjoy a change of scene. Now, thanks to laptops and any number of communication devices, you take the office with you. Which means you never really get away, even to use the time for creative reflection on work. While on the road you are expected not only to do this special "traveling" work-whether meetings or presentations or research-but also to maintain all your usual connections electronically, and thereby do your standard office work as well!

At times it begins to feel as if there's no peace to be found anywhere: Television sets follow you from the airport lounge onto the plane, and even onto the bus that takes you to your rental car. Television programming accosts you in the doctor's waiting room and the auto repair shop. Go shopping, and you're blasted with messages from loudspeakers located above the merchandise. Drive home with your purchases, and the radio exhorts you to go back and buy more.

Think about your day today, which probably involves a mental or written list of activities without a break until you go to bed. We over-schedule ourselves with the demands of work, family, home, and community. Leisure, once a normal part of life, is now a luxury, and yet another scheduled activity. Our society is one in which it no longer suffices to tell a child to "go outside and play." Our children have play dates, lessons, and tightly scheduled events one after the other. In the context of such rigidly organized activities, a parent might now look askance at a child who is simply wandering around the backyard, "playing pretend." Instead, our children now sit for hours in darkened rooms, bombarding their Thinking Minds with electronic stimulation. We're depriving them of the calming companionship of their Ancestral Mind.

The modern world seems determined not merely to compress public time, but to eliminate any opportunities for personal time and personal reflection, as if silence and independent thought were subversive activities that needed to be suppressed. And as for having the time and space for quiet awareness of your existence beyond the thinking part of ourselves? We've virtually forgotten what that means altogether. In the Western world we've never even formulated a name for this concept, much less bothered to understand the physiology that explains why it is so important for our health.

Before the tyranny of the Thinking Mind took over, we had time to witness the silent drama of a clear night sky, when the mere sight of stars could send us reeling. We had time to respond when the sound of wind rustling through leaves was an invitation to dream, even in the middle of the afternoon. Work was always demanding, but at least it followed the natural rhythms of life. A cycle of planting was followed by one of harvesting, with plenty of feast days in between. Weddings and other celebrations would last for days.5 And everything was done in close proximity to one's children, one's birthplace, and one's home, with time for recreation and socializing. It wasn't until the eighteenth century that this model changed, and our attitudes about time and labor began the movement toward what they are today. In England, during the early days of industrialization when the modern concepts of work were being invented, villagers had to be forced off the land in order to coerce them into the factories, for no one wanted to cut himself off from the rhythm of life and adapt to the rhythm of a machine. Charged as it is with promoting our well-being, the Ancestral Mind recognized the danger of that way of life.

© 2003 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Gregg D. Jacobs, Ph.D., is assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, senior research scientist at Harvard's Mind/Body Medical Institute, a research scientist at the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at Harvard Medical School, and the author of Say Goodnight to Insomnia.