What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it?
~ Toni Morrison
When we change our relation to time, everything changes. This is just a statement but it touches on pretty much every aspect of our existence. From how we perceive time, to when we wake up and our idea of ageing, and the massive realisation that Immortality can actually allow us to live in a healthy body forever. But the actual experience of taking Immortality can be quite strange in the beginning. On record, there are many varied experiences from people when initially taking Immortality, and they all make sense when viewing them through the lens of rebuilding cells, increased life force, and changing our relationship with time. Some people have an easy transition while some struggle a bit to make sense of it all, as what is happening cannot be said to have ever happened to us before.
Some people experience this shift in our normal trajectory towards death as strange, almost as though they have taken a drug. But the truth is that this is the only thing we can compare it to, as when we take a drug, we are shifting the place where our consciousness resides, and this alters our state.
People compare the initial effects to a range of mind-altering drugs. That’s because it is the closest analogue we have to compare the experience to. Immortality is literally shifting where our consciousness is assembling in that moment.
When we eat crocodile, we don’t say it tastes like crocodile because we have probably never eaten crocodile, we say it tastes a bit like chicken or fish as this is the closest familiar representation we can align it with.
These slightly altered states we experience initially is the body going through a re-orientation as the mind finds its way towards embracing phenomena quite simply beyond our normal experience and one could even say, totally opposite to our entire life experience.
To not experience a bit of sensory and conceptual derangement would be almost impossible as we are having to relocate ourselves in space without a lot of the concepts of time that help anchor it.
For example, I am 51, it is 4.45am, and it is Sunday June 28th 2020. Now all of these temporal references help tell me what I should be doing as a 51-year old, wide awake, early in the morning on a Sunday. But when we experience the feeling that we could actually live forever, and we will probably see another 10 000 Sundays, and that actually I feel about 25, and we could all rather delete 2020, then a lot of the previous architecture propping up our identity just melts away.
So now, what to do next once these strange feelings in the body (which normally last for between one to 3 days) have passed?
Some people just feel fantastic right from the start, and apart from a flood of memories as they proceed, the whole movie just plays out seamlessly. Some have a bit more of a wild ride.
We are literally breaking the grip of time on ourselves and, like it or not, it is one of the cornerstones of experienced reality. Now this is a good thing as no one wants to be a slave to time but up until now, apart from some Taoist masters and yogis in caves, we have been.
The body is ultimately resilient and adaptative and so we begin to define ourselves as beings in space without the tyranny of time, old age and death forever beckoning us onwards.
This process though can be quite tangible, one woman said she felt she was underwater for a day or two. I felt like I just got spat out of time and got to hover above the whole thing, some people report drowsiness, speediness, tingling in the body. The effects are potentially endless.
The mantra for this time is ‘do not evaluate a work in progress’, just let everything realign and let the body’s own intelligence work out what the new vista rising in front of us looks like. Resist the urge to see any temporary old symptoms as permanent; as in truth, it is just the body throwing them out to clean the slate.
Resist the urge in the beginning to theorise unduly about the nature of time and reality as it is in flux; the car has put on the brakes, turned around, and is going back the other way.
The mind will try and make sense of it all but ultimately it is a sensory experience as the body comes back to life, so any theories about what is happening do not really have much bearing on reality. They also change as one deepens into the experience, kind of like the blisters that form from new shoes, but after a week our foot breaks them in and they are worn with comfort.
So too here, we have to form a new relationship with time, one that allows us to take our time as we literally have mountains of it. This causes deep relaxation in most as they can really settle into the experience knowing that it will not be plucked away from them by the cruel hand of fate.
We are literally carving a new fate for ourselves, one we make and choose every day in each and every decision we make. This is the second, third, fourth and fifth chance at a complete and happy non-ending, healthy life we have dreamed about. A life where we take back the control we had to hand to time, and truly forge the destiny and dreams we were born to live.
Having borrowed immortality from the jellyfish we now create a new reality, a reality unbound by the demon of time. What we do with this gift is our own business, but first we need to travel back a bit through our own memory and reassemble a new model on existence so we can happily live for a thousand years.