A Tribute to Linear Time and Armoring
Building Blocks for Humanity’s Learning and Evolving
By Dorothea Fuckert, MD
Certified Life Between Lives® Hypnotherapist, Germany
Recently I came to view linear time and human armoring in a much more positive light than during earlier decades of my life. Although they are closely linked to suffering, I can see now, even gratefully, that they are actually building blocks for humanity’s learning and evolving.
Some spiritual teachers and people in esoteric circles dare to say without hesitation that time is an illusion. It is the same misunderstanding to think that the body is an illusion as it doesn’t differentiate the dimensions and mixes it up with the question of identification or non-identification. Linear time is real in our material 4-D world. It is relative in Einstein’s special and general relativity theories. It might be retrograde, two-directional, all-present or non-existent in higher dimensions. Also, we can, of course, differ ‘chronos’ (measurable linear time) from ‘chairos’ (subjective perception and experience of time).
However, in the macrocosmic and microcosmic universe sequences, cycles of becoming and passing away, growth and decay are obvious facts. Days and seasons, high and low tides of the oceans come and go. A baby develops within a chronological time span into an adult. A tree grows taller, may live hundreds of years: a natural phenomenon which can be told as a story to further generations, or observed in the annual rings of the tree or measured by the C14 radiocarbon method. Eventually the tree dies, crumbles into pieces and dissolves into the ground. Mountain ranges and deserts build and vanish over eons of time. Unimaginable huge cosmic cycles were known thousands of years ago in the Veda of the Hindu tradition, for instance the ‘precession’ (circling of the earth’s axis within about 25.000 earth years) and the galactic year (movement of our galaxy around its center within 230 millions of earth years). Primordial energy (quantum energy of the holofield) enclosed in the material substance of anorganic and organic life is continuously changing from one momentary state to another one, pulsating in specific sequences and rhythms. We can easily perceive this in our breathing movements. This physical universe requires the space-time continuum.
Linear (chronological) time is in a steady flow and moves from the present to the future. The present becomes past; the future becomes present. Time perception is the awareness of successive states of consciousness. It is a combination of the perception of duration and of differences between past, present and future. It’s a matter of fact in history that we humans developed an increasing consciousness about time. Meanwhile it became a major problem as it can put a lot of pressure on people, in combination with other stress factors to a disease-causing degree. Therefore slow movement makes a lot of sense. Many people long to step out of the stress and quit the linear time perception. However, recognition and awareness of sequential time has a special purpose for humans. Almost all cultures oriented themselves by certain ways of observing and measuring time phases, related to changes in climate, flora, fauna and cosmic (planetary and sidereal) cycles. Perception of linear time cares for a certain relation and order of things, serves for orientation and learning. This is its purpose.
Subjective time can be observed through phenomena such as heartbeats or actions happening within a time span and be measured by certain technical equipment. Anxious or fearful people, including small children, experience greater “time dilation”, a kind of slow motion, in response to threatening stimuli. Science assumes a slowing in temporal perception as a possible evolutionary advantage because it has an alerting function and enhances the ability to make quick decisions in moments critical to survival. Studies found also that perception of linear time is non-existent in the first year of life and increases the older we become, as it is learnt. It is a neuronal phenomenon not only in humans, but also in animals, differing from species to species though.
In humans, time perception varies to a certain (minor) degree correlating to different inner states. Emotions come and go; a wave of fear or sadness flows and ebbs. The common sayings “time heals all wounds” and “time is the great healer” are true, under the premise that we learn from our experience. Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response”. This insight helped him to survive several concentration camps. He became a world known psychiatrist, founder and teacher of his ‘Logotherapy’ and a bestselling author. By his statement he meant that the space between two consecutive moments of experience offers a choice. I would rather say a “variety of possible subconscious or conscious reactions”, as this choice is often not free. A stimulus (from inside or outside) activates the sensory system followed by a rather complex neurophysiologic-hormonal reaction. The brain interprets it within parts of a second. If it is taken as a threat, the reptilian brain triggers fight, flight or freeze responses, our most primitive, biologically inherited defense mechanisms.
Imagine a person in a powerful position yelling at us as child or we get a cold look from someone close. There is a range of possible reactions depending on our current emotional-mental-physical state of being, chronological age, developmental stage and overall Soul maturity. Both stimuli may trigger fear, anger or shock as long as we perceive or interpret the stimulus as threat. Between the temporally sequential moments of similar stimuli, we learn as a child to activate other, best possible survival strategies such as dissociation and splitting off, or contracting muscles, holding our breath and numbing the emotions. If this process becomes permanent, we call it ‘armoring’: a protection system for our still fragile personality structure against overwhelming fear, pain and powerlessness. The disadvantage is that it “protects” us also against positive emotions like joy, love, trust, etc. and prevents deeper bonding and full opening to life.
From neurophysiology we know that we establish positively and negatively affecting neuronal networks from conception and birth on. Through learning, we can build new networks. They don’t replace the former ones but complement them. “Cells that wire together, fire together” (Hebb). New positively affecting neuronal connectivity needs a repetitive stimulation at certain time intervals. Research and psychology of learning use the term ‘spaced retrieval’ or ‘spaced repetition’.
From childhood on, we may react in the same way for many years till adulthood. We may close and distract ourselves or try to please and defer to the other person. In adolescence and adulthood, we may internalize all the threatening stimuli, take them over and later treat other people, even our own children, in a same or similarly threatening way. These patterns are based on armoring, manifested in the physical, emotional and mental system (negatively affecting neuronal networks). Ignoring, denying, overcompensating and/or acting out the armor produce our human ‘Shadows’. However, meanwhile I think that the armoring has an evolutionary purpose. The unresolved fight, flight, freeze responses to overwhelming threats induce an armoring process in us which causes chronic suffering on the emotional, mental, physical, social and spiritual level. This again may serve as a conserving store for all kinds of fears, pain, unresolved themes and developmental tasks from a number of former lives. The suffering may increase over the course of an incarnation and finally urges us to seek relief, healing, integration, transformation and letting go of the past.
Our true choice is to develop insight from painful experience. In this process time sequences (“spaces” between stimuli and responses) for self-exploration and learning are essential building blocks. “With the passage of time” we may learn more helpful ways to handle fear, pain and heal our wounds. We may develop – by ourselves or by help of others, including therapy and new positive experiences – the willingness to open ourselves, to communicate honestly, find constructive solutions for given problems. The more we learn, grow and mature – during one life as well as through the series of incarnations – the more we will evolve. We can self-explore the armor itself and its correlating states of consciousness. Over time we may find ways to heal our underlying hurts. Through recalling the Soul as our true essence, our ‘Greater Self’, through experiencing our immortal existence and reconnecting to the higher-dimensional heavenly realm, we find a deeper, more holistic perspective on the evolutionary purpose of the history of human suffering.
By that we may come to understand armoring as our actual Soul light, contracted, solidified and causing the basic human fears, specific in each chakra. Finally, we may find the inherited qualities condensed here in order to recognize and appreciate them as disguised Divine gifts. In each of our seven chakras at least twelve of them are slumbering, “waiting” to be lived as human virtues. While our Soul inherits 100+ of these potentials, we unfold just a certain combination of them in one incarnation. It can mathematically be calculated that the statistical probability of two humans having the same combination of gifts in a lifetime is zero. So we can objectively say that each human being is an individual Soul light, a uniquely gifted Divine spark.
Patience is one of the twelve Divine potentials in our crown chakra. The herein condensed Soul light is causing the specific basic human fear (misinterpretation) of hollowness, being separate and disconnected from the Source; the shadow (armor) in our crown chakra is arrogance, grandiosity, self-inflation, impatience, aloneness, nihilism. Healing may happen through reconnecting with the universe, with the Divine intelligence and all-love, through humility, seeing the beauty in all light and dark aspects of humanity and Earthly life. I elaborate on our 100+ Divine potentials in my soon to be published second book.
As multi-dimensional immortal beings, our Souls are timeless, of course. They exist in no-time or all-time in higher-dimensional realities. However, we agreed to go through linear time for the whole range of possible experience on Earth, including extreme polarities of lights and darks, pleasant and unpleasant feelings, pleasure and pain, ease and unease, health and illness, anxiety and love. I believe deep inside that the ultimate evolutionary goal is to retrieve Divinity in us and that this “self-rediscovery” is the actual plan of the highest intelligent, loving source, God, of which we are part. We are called to grow “into his true image”, through space-time, armoring, suffering, healing, ascending into the highest possible Divine energetic frequencies which is actually a descent from heaven “down” to Earth. For unfolding and living our inherent Divinity, we have as much time as it needs or as we want to take.
A turning point may happen, a kind of quantum leap, when after having learned all we had intended to learn, our linear time perception may have accelerated to such a degree that it turns into an awareness of now-time or all-time. This would mean that we jumped beyond the 4-dimensional reality up into the 5th, 6th or whatever higher dimensional state. In this current life on Earth, we can already expand beyond space-time in hilarious moments, in self-forgetful playing or being fully absorbed. In deep trance we are in timelessness of course, especially in LBL. When we are deeply heart-centered, live our Soul-Self, unfold our Divine essence, guided by our spirit helpers, and so fulfill our chosen life purpose, we are in the timelessness of the 5th dimension. This may be experienced in total surrender, in the flow of love, deep truth, bliss and amazement about the beauty of all creation.
A fully developed spiritual heart means unconditional love for the “me”, the “you”, the “we” and the “all”. It doesn’t need time and space any longer. The old armor is dissolved; the chronic suffering healed. However, this state requires full acceptance of the human condition with all its polarities, suffering, violence, injustice etc. It breaks our heart open without the need to approve it. Linear time and suffering through armoring are the building blocks. We may learn quickly within a few incarnations or prefer to extend our maturing over many incarnations. There is a wide space between fight, flight and freeze responses, from being a victim or a perpetrator till Divine all-love. We had to learn self-protection, self-care, self-love which means a strong, healthy sense of Self; understanding, empathy, compassion, accepting and (self-) forgiving the misdeeds and dark sides of humanity. Also, this is not only an individual but a collective process. Therefore it may take a long stretch of time till we have learned and become a true “image of God”. It’s easier to be patient if we look at human evolution from a high cosmic perspective which includes long chronological cycles.
At the end of this article I want to remind of the appearance of “Time masters” in some of Dr. Michael Newton’s LBL sessions on which he elaborated with several case studies in Destiny of Souls. My focus on time here was different though.
The universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.
–Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time. ♥
Dorothea Fuckert is an LBL Facilitator in Waldbrunn, Baden-Wuttemberg, Germany, with other locations in Austria, Switzerland, France, Czech Republic, and Spain