By Jay Weidner on Wake Up World

The mythology of our modern, high-tech culture teaches us that the last frontier for humanity is outer space. Somehow, according to this emerging mythos, the fragile human body is supposed to be able to survive the rigors of travel in outer space over vast distances. The writers of science fiction and Star Trek-style television shows would have us believe that human beings can somehow endure through every kind of radiation and danger to successfully colonize other planets and solar systems.

But this notion is probably never going to happen. As this age ends and the next age begins humanity will lose its interest in conquering space. The last 6,000 years have been spent conquering the space around us. The last frontier of humanity is not the conquering of outer space, of other planets and solar systems. As we approach the end of this era we will realize that the last frontier is time.

Space is defined by the three dimensional reality that surrounds us. It is height, width and depth. We humans possess the most spectacular array of physical and mental abilities ever devised in creation to navigate these three dimensions. These abilities have enabled us to conquer our three-dimensional world.

Now at this critical juncture in history we discover that we have completely conquered the planet’s biosphere. People are living in the coldest environments imaginable and in the hottest tropical jungles. There are few mysteries left concerning the outer physical reality of our planet. Due to oil and cheap energy, we have been able to travel to any place on Earth. As this age of oil ends there will be only one mystery left for us to ponder.

This final mystery is the mystery of time.

Let’s take a look at our perception of time. Much of the way we experience the present moment depends on our experience of time past. The events of the past are distilled and repainted in our memories until their very reality loses its solidity. If we let them cook long enough, images of past events take on a dream like quality. Through this process, our remembrances frequently slide into a fantasy disconnected from anything tangible.

How often have we encountered someone who remembers an incident in a completely opposite manner from the way we remember it? Our minds appear to be constantly rewriting history to make it more agreeable to our present day wishes. Incidents in the past that are disturbing or frightening are frequently glossed over in our memory until they disappear only to be replaced by a memory that is more easily digested by consciousness.

Our view of the future works in a similar but opposite texture. Whereas the past begins to become a dream within our memories, the future is the dream that has not yet arrived. When someone is successful in the material world we like to say that they have “lived their dreams”. This cliché reveals an intrinsic understanding that present and future reality is created from the dream state of the past.

This idea dovetails with the central belief of the Aborigines of Australia. The essential teaching from that tradition is that everything in our world begins in the Dreamtime. From their ancient perspective, every thought, every action emerges from a larger metaphysical landscape that surrounds and pervades our material world. They call this larger reality the Dreamtime. According to this tradition, each living thing first begins in the Dreamtime. After it has become fully developed in the Dreamtime it then concretizes and becomes a part of our three dimensional reality.

This process is recursive in that our future dreams are frequently constructed from the archetypes of ancient dreams. So the past and the future, the material world and the dream world work together to create not only everything that we see, feel and hear but all that we have manifested as human beings. If one looks beyond the veil of linear time, one can easily see that there is a certain control mechanism over this peculiar process. Because reality is so dependent on the dream world, it is possible to shift reality by simply shifting the dream.

Motivational speakers, politicians, television script writers, preachers and many others understand this fundamental concept and use it to re-script reality in their favor. The last thing that they want you to discover is that you have the innate ability to take control of your dreams. They much prefer that you dream their dream, live in their past and help build their future.

Just think about the nature of the media these days. Over the past century, finding new and ever more invasive means of manipulating thoughts, desires and actions have been at the forefront of the research conducted by “psychic engineers”; the advertising agencies, spin doctors, pollsters, pharmaceutical companies, and secret government agencies of our world.

Through the constant barrage of images projected by the media, through the manipulation of food, and the polluting of the atmosphere, much of humanity has become lulled into a hypnotic state and their Dreamtime is occupied with nightmares. This has led us to today, to the present moment, in which our planet and our species are in a state of crisis. To transmute this crisis, this very critical situation in time, we must learn to step outside of linear time and enter the Dreamtime, that subtle realm in which everything becomes possible.

As the word Dreamtime aptly describes, there is little difference between the dream and the time. This very moment will become a dream soon in your memory. Also you are creating the future that is racing towards you – right now.

The dream world, time and four-dimensional space are all the same thing. The fourth dimensional world, often referred to as ‘time’ by physicists, surrounds and permeates our three dimensional reality. Everything that we are is shaped and formed within this topological manifold that flows into and out of our existence. As the stream of time passes we have the ability to alter it’s course. Each moment of our lives offers us the chance to change the course of our dreams and the dreams of those we love.

Understanding this landscape, the ragged mountains and mossy valleys of the wilderness of time, is the frontier that awaits us. When we finally colonize this land and understand its many intricacies and nuances, we will realize that any future is possible. We will no longer need to be slaves to systems that require us to live in someone else’s dream. The powers of the dark sorcerers that rule our world will be overthrown and a new Dreamtime will be created. When we discover how to navigate the river of time, when the topological map of time is finally understood by us, all of the certain dangers that await us will vanish in the blink of an eye during REM sleep.

We are at the crossroads now. There is a choice. One road leads to a mechanistic, toxic, polluted, fascist nightmare from which we may never recover. The other road leads to a revitalized world where we live our dreams in freedom, prosperity and love.

One of the main aims of many ancient spiritual traditions is to provide us with the means to create a conscious break with the almost dictatorial dreams of our past. This is the essence of the teachings of the Buddha for instance. We are slaves to the dreams that we were born into, slaves to a past of which we had nothing to do. Many of these ancient spiritual traditions teach us how to break with the mental slavery that has burdened us for so long.

Humans frequently hurt themselves and others around them defending the imprinted dreams of their past and creating belief systems that make it all right to hurt and destroy people who come from a different past, a different dreamtime.

The way to stop this recurring cycle is to find our way towards a detachment from the heated beliefs and ego-inspired histories and cultures that we were born into. This is not to say that we should reject our traditions. Only that true liberation of ourselves can only begin when we detach ourselves from ingrained spiritual and cultural habits.

Right now we are trapped by time. And this means that we are trapped in a Dreamtime from which escape is nearly impossible. But as long as there is a chance, as long as the odds are not one hundred percent against us – and they are not – we should attempt to make this leap.

If we change the dream we can change the world and ourselves.

The spiritual emergence that is happening right now across the world is the realization that there is only one kind of time. There is no past and there is no future.

There is only NOW.

And we can change the NOW at any time that we like.

First and last image by Joel Robinson

by Sarah Laskow

Awe is not an everyday emotion. You don't wake up awestruck. A satisfying lunch doesn't leave you filled with awe. Even a great day is unlikely to leave you in a state of jaw-dropped, consciousness-opening fear and trembling.

Perhaps that's why, up until about ten years ago, psychology "had surprisingly little to say about awe," wrote Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt in a 2003 paper. The two psychology professors aimed to outline the key qualities of an awe-inspiring encounter.

What they suggested was that awe typically includes feelings of vastness—something larger than a person's self or experience—and accommodation—that a person expand their understanding of the world to include this new information.

Awe might come from seeing a mountain taller than you thought a mountain could be or listening to a symphony that soars and sinks and feels like it's expanding the universe a bit. People can be awe-inspiring, too: think of a political leader whose presence and power overwhelms. The emotion of awe might be negative or positive, depending, Keltner and Haidt suggested, on whether or not accommodation happens: it's terrifying if you cannot understand and incorporate a new experience but enlightening if you do.

The psychologists laid out a research agenda intended to tease out "the similarities and differences between awe and gratitude, admiration, elevation, surprise, fear and perhaps even love." In the years since, they and other researchers have been testing awe—what is it? How does it work? What seems awesome, and why? For the first time, they're starting to understand both what awe does to us and what it might do for us.

Think about awe, about a time you felt it. Consider how you'd describe that experience to another person. Now, how would you show how you felt without words?

When psychologists first started studying awe, one of the unanswered questions was: what do we look like when we're feeling it? Emotions come with facial expressions (smiles for happy, frowns for sad, mouth open for surprise—your basic emoji alphabet). But no one had studied at what an awe-struck face looked like.

Keltner and two colleagues hypothesized that an awe-filled person would widen their eyes and raise their head, eyes, and eyebrows, just a bit. And they were on track. When they asked people to perform awe, they found that people indeed often raised their eyebrows and widened their eyes. They also opened their mouths and dropped their jaws and, sometimes, breathed in. And, the researchers noticed, few people smiled.

Awe was a serious emotion. "Clues suggest that awe’s function may lie in how it makes you think," Michelle Lani Shiota, who collaborated on this research, wrote. In subsequent experiments looking at "the nature of awe," the researchers found that it often occurred when a person had an opportunity to expand their knowledge of the world. When it happened, it turned a person's attention outwards, instead of towards the self.

"Nobody feeling awe is not coming out of their comfort zone," explains Craig Anderson, a doctoral student in Keltner's lab. "The experience of awe is positively coordinated with anxiety. You're experiencing something you’ve never experienced before."

It might be big or small, natural or man-made, but it stops you cold—while other positive emotion arouse the body, people feeling awe are very still—and makes you re-evaluate what you actually know.

In other words, awe is kind of mind-bending, and it alters how a person perceives the world in subtle but meaningful ways. It can, for instance, make time seem to slow down.

When Melanie Rudd, an assistant professor at the University of Houston, was reading about awe, she kept coming across mentions of timelessness and this sense that time is stretched out. Time—or the lack thereof—is one of her interests, and she was intrigued by the idea that feeling awe could manipulate people's perceptions of time. In a series of experiments, she showed that after people felt awe, for short while, they felt "less pressed for time."

Awe also encourages people to account for what they're experiencing. When you're feeling this emotion, "you have this strong motivation to explain what's in front of your eyes," says Piercarlo Valdesolo, an assistant professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College. A couple years back, he and a colleague looked at how people deal with the uncertainty inherent in awe. They found that awe seems to nudge people towards "agentic explanation"—they're less likely to accept that something happened randomly.

Instead, they'll attribute it to an agent, like a god, a supernatural force, or a person. "There's something about awe that seems intimately related to that," says Valdesolo. In their experiments, people in a state of awe were more likely to report belief in supernatural forces, and to believe that a random series of numbers was created by a human. His recent work indicates that awe also makes people more likely to report that science explains all natural events.

"It generally increases this desire to explain what's in front of you," says Valdesolo. "You gravitate towards whatever explanatory framework you prefer."

All this early research indicates that Keltner and Haidt's initial description of awe was accurate: it's a feeling induced by vastness that requires some sort of mental accommodation to overwhelming new information. The next step is understanding why it exists at all.

Emotions, as a rule, have a purpose. "We've evolved these emotions to help us deal with selection pressures across the evolutionary history of the species," explains Anderson. "When people are scared, they freeze or run away. People that behaved like that tended to survive long enough." In the same way, awe should have some sort of reason for existing. "This pattern of expressive behavior and subjective experience is an evolved response to situations where you’re encountering things that are vast, that sort of blow our minds," Anderson says.

So far, it seems, the purpose of awe might have something to do with drawing people together. Rudd's research shows, for instance, that when awe-struck people feel like they have more time, they're more willing to use it to help others. "One of the main reasons that people don’t do those things is that they feel too busy," she says. "If awe can make you feel you’re more rich in time, you’ll be able to give more time away."

A recent study that Keltner's lab collaborated on showed that, even more than other positive emotions, awe promoted generosity. It also improved participants' ethical decision making. A paper still under review indicates that awe can makes people more humble, too.

How does that work, exactly? Anderson's research focuses on curiosity as one possible explanation. People who are prone to feeling awe also score high in curiosity, and it seems like that might be the mechanism by which the emotion creates social benefits. "You're open to meeting new people. Maybe you're a better listener," Anderson says. "Those behaviors fall under the umbrella of 'helping people fold into collectives.'"

"We actually experience awe a lot more frequently than we think," says Rudd. We encounter something in the big wide world, our minds opens as we look for an explanation, and as a result we open up to connecting to other people. "But if you are keeping yourself in your routine of life, it’s going to be hard to experience that feeling of accommodation," she says. "Just going out into newness, you’re going to be more likely to run into something that’s awe-inspiring."