by Don Lewis
This discussion of Time Magic is based on a series of videos that aired between July 17 and July 27, 2010, as part of Rev. Don’s Vlog, a daily video blog that I do. It is one of the more interesting subjects that we have tackled on the Vlog, so I thought that it might make a good subject for an essay.
Time Magic basically is Magic dealing with time: dealing with the passage of time: dealing with movement forward or backward in time. And one of the principles that Time Magic is founded on is that Time is essentially illusory in nature, or at least is more illusory than we give it credit for. It’s a standard principle in metaphysics that Time in the Spirit World either does not exist or is very different than Time in the Physical World –but it’s also a principle of metaphysics that the Physical World Is only an aspect of the Spiritual World. Therefore although Time seems very concrete to us, it is not in reality. Those of you who have taken our Degree Courses will know that the first thing we talk about in our Chapter on Magic is that the Physical World, though it seems very concrete, is actually very fluid. And this is one of the reasons that Magic can work – because things that seem very solid are actually very malleable. Time is the same way. It seems very solid, it seems very inescapable – and it also can be very malleable. Time Magic is not as well developed an art as certain other forms of Magic, and so there is a lot of room for growth in Time Magic.
Time Magic is the art of manipulating Time in a Magical manner. It can be either speeding Time up, slowing Time down, or moving through Time. It can go either forward or backward, and in theory it can go sideways as well –although normally when we talk about going sideways in Time we use the term “Probabilities.” Those of you who have studied our Third Degree materials will know what I mean by this. Most people who practice Time Magic tend to focus on one or another area of it, and it’s a relatively new art form, I believe. I don’t really know anyone who’s written much about it historically, but there are certainly people doing it today. And they are doing it often in what I would consider a fairly experimental manner. Time Magic I would consider to be certainly a metaphysical art form which is in its dawning phase. Time Magic can include things like slowing down Time when you need to get more rest, or you need more time to work on something: speeding up Time if you’re on a trip and you need to make it go faster. My old friend Rosemary Fletcher, who is one of the better psychics I’ve ever known often talked about “Folding Time” when she was on a trip, and needed to get there faster – she would “fold” the time so that she would arrive sooner. Time Magic can also be going forwards or backwards in Time, which is more what you’d expect to see in science fiction, but it can be done and it is done to a certain extent. It isn’t how you see it in science fiction however. And in fact none of this, or any aspect of Magic at all, is really all that close to what you see in film, or in many cases what you read about in fiction books. People who practice Magic, which I assume is probably the larger portion of the people watching this, know that as a general rule when Magic comes to pass in your life, it will come about in ways that are very natural, in ways that are very subtle, so that if you didn’t know you had done the Magic you would perceive the outcome as a perfectly normal event – and this is the same with Time Magic. As a general rule if you do Time Magic you will probably be the only one who is aware that it has happened. And for that matter, as with ordinary Magic, you will read in our materials that everybody does Magic constantly – unconsciously. What we talk about by “learning Magic” is only actually learning how to do consciously what is really a natural process. And it’s the same with Time Magic. We all do it unconsciously. The example that was given to me when I was learning this was, for example, where you might wake up on a Thursday morning thinking that it’s Friday. And you go through most of the day thinking its Friday. And you meet other people who think it should be Friday. But it’s really Thursday. And I was told that this usually means that people are repeating their Thursday, and this is why they think it should be Friday – because in the normal course of events it would have been. And this is a kind of unconscious Time Magic. It happens from the level of the Soul, the level of the Higher Self. When we learn to do this consciously, then it happens from our conscious level. I have had occasions of changing things in past time, we write about several of these in the Third Degree materials. And when you do Time Magic that’s intended to affect something in the past it can be done in several different ways, it can manifest in several different ways. If you’re doing for example a kind of healing of events that are intended to address the spiritual or emotional outcome of those events, you could address them on that level – and an argument could be made that if anything actually happens in the past it’s within a different Probability but it still affects you here. And then there’s where you actually try to change an event. This can in fact be done, however it something that you need to do very cautiously. Because in this sense it is a little bit like what you see in movies because you do kind of have to ask yourself “Well, gee, if I change this, what else changes?” And it can change things that you don’t expect. As a general rule I don’t think that there are a lot of people who do a lot of Time Magic for this reason.
Time Magic, like any kind of Magic, works because the world that we think is so very solid really is not – it’s very fluid, it’s very malleable, it reacts to thought, to emotion, and to physical action. Time, like space, is illusory in many ways. We do not have a perfect understanding of this – I do not think anyone CLAIMS to have a perfect understanding of this, at least in the metaphysical world. However, we do know that it [time] reacts, and that t is not the static thing that it sometimes appears to be. The reason that this is an issue and why it makes it [Time Magic] more difficult, is that we base our lives on the idea that the Universe is a solid, fixed entity: that ‘A’ will always lead to ‘B’, ‘B’ will always lead to ‘C’. In the Magical world that is not necessarily true. When you start working with Magic, and even more with something like Time Magic, ‘A’ can sometimes lead straight to ‘C’ – or it can lead to ‘M’, or ‘F’, or ‘G’. And if you are not exceptionally well grounded, this can be very bad for you – because the illusion of Time, the illusion of Reality, is how we order our experiences in such a way that we can make sense of them and understand them and in such a way that we can use this world to lead useful physical lives. When we cut those threads we sometimes lose that ability. I’ve known a number of people, some of whom were aware of it, some of whom were not, who had really lost their connection to reality by working with certain sorts of Magic – because it revealed to them the illusory nature of reality, and ‘A’ stopped leading to ‘B’ for them. This is what makes Time Magic in particular so very dangerous. It’s not because you may “disturb the Space/Time Continuum”, or the “Timeline”, or other things that you might see in science fiction. It’s because you can disturb your own understanding of reality considerably. If you are going to do this sort of thing you need to be extremely well grounded – or it can really cut you lose. Traditional Qabalah at one time was restricted to people over the age of forty who had children. The reason for this was that people who had loved ones and responsibilities and dependents found it much harder to become ungrounded than people who did not. And although I don’t particularly feel that that prohibition is a necessary one, I do understand the reason for it, and I would recommend to people practicing Magic in general that they really make an effort to stay grounded. If you read our materials and our exercises you will see that we really emphasize grounding. If you lose your groundedness you lose your place in reality – and in the Magical community we see a lot of people who’ve done that. It is very important if you are going to do this level of Magic – and this series is not going to be talking about ‘how to’ particularly, although we’ll talk a little bit about that. But f you do try to do things like Time Magic, it’s imperative that you also work really hard to stay grounded, and that even as you try to look through the illusion of Time that you also remember that that illusion has a very important purpose and you don’t just cut it out. So – that’s my caveat on Time Magic. And to continue our conversation – it [Time Magic] really can be a very effective tool. I myself primarily use it in order to try to get more rest than my actual physical life allows by manipulating particularly those periods of time when I am able to rest. Now, I once had a Priestess of our Tradition – the Correllian Tradition – remark to me when I had made the comment that there were not enough hours in the day to get done the things I needed to do that [since] I wrote about Time Magic I ought to know how to change that. And you know – it doesn’t really work that way. There are things you can do, but it [Time Magic] does not give you a perfect mastery of time any more than the practice of Magic gives you a perfect mastery of space. It [Time Magic] does give you additional tools. To this day I do not have enough hours in the day to get done the things I need to get done – even though I do definitely feel that I Magically extend to some extent the hours that I am working with. I have also known people who do the opposite, who shorten their hours, particularly if they are traveling or doing other unpleasant business. When I was taught these things I was taught specifically that it was not a good idea to shorten time – because we only have so much of it no matter what we do, and therefore we should not take away from it but only add to it. And generally speaking that’s what I have done. I am particularly fond of a technique called “Psychological Time”, and we discuss this in our Third Degree materials. Psychological Time basically involves extending the duration of a certain activity such as rest, or sleep – but it could theoretically be any activity. I particularly tend to use it for rest, because there have been many times in my life where I have not had the opportunity to get enough of that, and so I alter it metaphysically. We could argue whether that is actually affecting time or affecting our perception of time – but to be perfectly honest I don’t really know that that matters, because both would be forms of Time Magic. I will leave the details of Psychological Time to those who are studying Third Degree, where we talk about how to do it. But what I will say – and I say this in Third Degree – is that many of the details of this are things that people are still learning, still studying. And you know, we often in the metaphysical world act as if we are trying to rediscover things that people knew long ago – and many people actually think that that’s what’s going on. The truth is we are blazing new trails all the time. Time Magic for the most part is a very new metaphysical trail. Not that nobody has ever done it, but in terms of knowledge of it there’s not really that much. And a great deal of it is in effect a metaphysical frontier. So there’s only so much to say about it because there’s only so much that people have done so far. It’s one of those things that I expect to see continue to expand during my lifetime, and I’m actually very curious to see what people do with it.
Now let us talk a little bit about how Time Magic is done. I mentioned in an earlier installment my good friend Rosemary Fletcher, who is now in Spirit. But Rosemary is one of the best psychics I have ever known, she also is one of the widest ranging psychics I have ever known – a very kind, very nice person and also immensely talented. One of the things she did was Time Magic. And her Time Magic was very different from my Time Magic. When she did Time Magic she used a technique that she described as “folding” time. Now it does involve some of the same idea, but she perceived Time as being not unlike a fabric. And when she wanted to move through it more quickly than ordinary physical existence would allow, she “folded” it. You might say she created a pocket in Time and moved through it. She did this particularly for long driving trips. Now, interestingly, Rosemary also felt that that time that was folded must eventually unfold, and she experienced this in the following way: she would often “fold” a long trip, which would then become shorter, and she would do this two or three times, and the fourth or maybe the fifth trip would suddenly become much longer than she expected. And she attributed this to the “folded” time unfolding. And it would often happen unexpectedly. Now, I’m not sure that that is… I have not found it to be the case in my Time Magic. However because she believed it, of course it became true. And plus she was extremely talented – perhaps she knew better than I, I don’t really know. But I don’t normally find that the Time Magic I do undoes itself in any way. When I do Time Magic I perceive it as passing through a barrier. I’m not going to go into a lot of details about how the barrier is dealt with or how it’s conceived, although we do talk about this in much greater detail in our Third Degree book. But by the time you get to Third Degree you should have a good basis for it, whereas people watching this video do not necessarily and I do not want to give you a technique that might be dangerous to you. But I perceive it as a barrier and pass through it, and in passing through it I charge what I want to happen. And I have found – as I say, I don’t find that it “unfolds”. But then I’m not folding it either – I’m passing through it. I have however sometimes felt – and this also is a difference in my Time Magic versus Rosemary’s, Rosemary was frequently trying to shorten Time, I almost always am trying o lengthen it. And that has to do with the way I live my life – I find myself almost always with too much to do and too little time, and so I create more time. And I sometimes think that just because in the physical world that time doesn’t always chronologically show doesn’t mean that it’s not accruing. And so sometimes I feel that I am significantly older than I am [chronologically] because I have lived parts of my life at double speed. And that is a possible side-effect of Time Magic – but as I say, Time Magic is in its infancy, and it seems to affect different people different ways. My cousin Krystel, who some of you know, is almost always taken for being years younger than she is – and she had done just as much Time Magic as I have, yet it affects her differently. Understanding the affects is something that we are still working with. And as I say, I don’t know anyone that I would call really an expert in Time Magic, in the sense of being able to answer all these questions, because it is an art that’s in its infancy. And, as I say, for me, it is basically a matter of moving through barriers – or maybe it’s better to say, of objectifying Time in the form of a barrier and moving through it. I also have a wide range of techniques that I use that involve creating a “Room in Time”. Creating a Room in Time basically is programming what you want to happen in a certain period in time. Again I’m not going to give the step by step instructions for it because I think it’s something one needs to work up to. But I’ve found it very effective. And it also is something that you have to have built the “muscles” for. One of the things we talk about in our Degree materials is the fact that psychic and Magical work is very much like a muscle. It’s like a physical muscle – the more you do with it, the stronger it gets. The more you do, the more you can do. And it really does react very much like building a muscle. The same is true for Time Magic – if you haven’t built the muscle you won’t be able to do it, or it will really hurt. If you have built the muscle it becomes much easier. I think this probably pretty much concludes what I want to say in Vlog format about Time Magic . Now we have written about it much more extensively in our Third Degree materials, and those who are members of the Order of World Walkers work with it a great deal more. But I think for the purpose of explaining what it is I think we have pretty much exhausted the topic. But I do want to say that I think it’s extremely important, with arts such as Time Magic but also many others that are really kind of still in their infancy, that we really understand that we are not recapturing ancient knowledge but are building new knowledge. And that we in fact need to build it. And we do this experientially. Magic is not a science, Magic is an art. Although we sometimes describe it as a science it really is an art – it’s very subjective, it’s very individual. And only through individual experience and sharing that experience among ourselves are we really going to learn more about it [Magic]. And we really need to be doing that. We need not only to be learning the Traditional arts, we need to be expanding them. We are not playing dress-up in other people’s clothes; we are building our own world. One of the things that I find most exciting about being the Head of a Tradition is the fact that some of our Priesthood are in fact on the frontiers of the metaphysical arts and are in fact expanding them – and I really would like to see more of that. Time Magic is certainly an area that needs expansion. But as I say, it’s extremely important to pursue it in a very grounded manner because it can extremely ungrounding to a person. And so, I think that concludes our discussion of Time Magic.