C H A P T E l

ON E

..

Th e AN C I E N T A R T of
TI M E C H E A T I N G

The Supreme Lord said: uTime I am, the great destroyer

of the worlds; even without you, will all the people here,
all the fighters who took positions on opposite sides,
be engaged in destroying.
-Bhagavad Gita 11.32

oga practitioners have known about time travel since

ancient times, and many still practice it today. Yoga is a
system of practice that is part art, part philosophy, and

part science. It is a hands-on method for ennobling one's life,

finding purpose in it, and going beyond the everyday illusions
that inundate us all. According to traditional Indian philosophy,
the yoga system is divided into two principal parts- hatha yoga
and raja yoga-with many minor divisions within each . 1 Hatha

yoga deals principally with physiology, with a view to establish

ing health and training the mind and body. Raj a yoga is a means
to control the mind itself by following a rigorous method laid
down by adepts long ago. The word yoga shows up in several
contexts in Hindu thought and has a number of meanings. Yoga
is the name of one of the six original systems of Hindu philoso
phy, which provides the philosophical basis for yoga as pre
sented by the ancient sage Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. In the

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Sutras, Patanjali sets forth ashtanga yoga (literally, the eight

limbed practice ) , which is now generally referred to as raj a
yoga. Again, the most famous Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita,
talks about karma yoga, bhakti yoga, and jnana yoga- three
pathways for attaining enlightenment. The Gita also speaks of
kriya yoga, as do the Yoga Sutras. When you compare them, you
find they complement each other, leading adepts to say that hatha
is kriya is raja.
Yoga as both a practice and a system implies a concept of
time summed up in the Sanskrit word samsara. Samsara signifies
conditioned existence, boundedness-the yoking of spirit to spa
tial and temporal confinement. As Georg Feuerstein, a noted
scholar and teacher of yoga philosophy, points out, "Above all . . .
Samsara is time. "2 Feuerstein explains that the literal meaning
of samsara is flowing together-a perpetual flux of things and
events producing consequences of causal relationships. As the
late Gilda Radner used to remind us on the television show
" S aturday Night Live, " this flowing together can produce unex
pected and undesired consequences-if it isn't one thing or
another, " it 's always something. " This flowing together of things
and events has a counterpart in quantum physics, and it is vital to
how the mind " creates" time and the appearance of objective
events. We will look at this in detail in the upcoming chapters,
particularly chapters 8 and 9.
But samsara also refers to something that the Western mind,
with its " linear" view of time, does not consider. This is the idea
of the wheel of existence-that the soul experiences endless
rounds of birth, life, death, and rebirth, set in motion by causal
links created in past lives . It turns out that, from a quantum
physics point of view, these cycles can be experienced by the
time traveler through recognition of the role played by the ego
mind to " anchor" experience-literally bind it into time pro
viding an active focal point or ego.
Samsara is also a term for maya, or illusion-the persistent
beliefs that bind us to space and time so we participate in the flow
of these perpetual cycles rather than escaping from them. This

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view of life taught by ancient adepts, too, resonates with findings

in quantum physics, as we shall see in chapter 8.
Many ancient hymns tell us that time-the past, present, and
future-is the progenitor of the cosmos and that time itself is the
child of consciousness. Contained within this ancient wisdom is
a secret: that it is possible through technique to cheat time-in
other words, to travel through time, and even to reach the shores
of timelessness. Again, quantum physics agrees, and it tells us
how we can draw a map of these shores so the traveler sees what
they may look like. I find it striking that modern physics posits
the existence of a timeless, spaceless realm of existence without
which much of modern physics would make little sense, nor
would it connect with reality as we perceive it.
Well and good, you may say, but what does this have to do
with time travel? Digging deeper into these ancient texts, we find
that they say time and space are products of the mind and do
not exist independent of it. The principles of quantum physics,
remarkably, tell us the same thing. This is an extraordinary key.
The trick to going outside the confines of space and time is to
reach beyond their source-the mind itself. Paradoxically, we need
a theoretical picture created by the mind to understand what it
means to reach beyond the mind. We also need a form of practice.
To make time travel real, not j ust a theoretical exercise,
requires a way of slipping around the corner, peeking under the
screen, so to speak, where our usual motion picture of reality is
projected. The ancient Vedas referred to this behind-the-scenes
look at creation as kala-vancana, literally, " time-cheating. "3 It is
possible, they say, to escape the space-time illusion of samsara
the projections of the mind itself, which turns out be our own
memory in disguise-and cheat time, that is, travel through time.
In the coming chapters, we will examine how we think of time
and how quantum physics and consciousness are related. But
first let's look more closely at what one of the ancient Indian
texts has to say.

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TH E B HA GAVAD G I TA
In the early part of the first millennium

BCE,

Indian philosophers

found evidence for the beginnings of what we today call the

perennial philosophy. It can be stated in three sentences:
1 . An infinite, unchanging reality exists hidden behind the
illusion of ceaseless change.
2. This infinite, unchanging reality lies at the core of every
being and is the substratum of the personality.
3 . Life has one main purpose: to experience this one reality
to discover God while living on earth.
One of the ancient texts in which these principles are set
forth and discussed is the Bhagavad Gita.4 The spiritual wisdom
of the Gita is delivered in the midst of the most terrible of all
possible human situations: warfare-literally, on the battlefield
itself. On the eve of combat, the prince Arjuna loses his nerve
and in desperation turns to his charioteer, Krishna, asking him
what to do. But Krishna is no ordinary horse-and-cart driver; he
is a direct incarnation of God, and he responds to Arjuna in
seven hundred stanzas of sublime instruction that includes a
divine mystical revelation.5 He explains to Arjuna the nature of
the soul and the nature of the timeless, spaceless, changeless infi
nite reality and explains that they are not different.
The Gita does not lead the reader from one stage of spiritual
development to another, but starts with the conclusion. Krishna
says right away that the immortal soul is unchanging and always
p resent and-important for our purpose-that the passing
moments of time are illusionary. The soul wears the body as a
garment-to be discarded when it becomes worn. Thus the soul
travels from body to body, casting aside the old bodies to take on
new ones. Just as death is certain for the living, rebirth is certain
for the dead. But, Krishna reassures Arjuna, the soul is eternal,
not subject to life and death. Arjuna will not be able to perceive

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