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Does Your Mind Time Travel?

Thought and perception not only transcend intersections of time — but may even alter them

Mitch Horowitz
15 min readJun 6, 2023

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Which reality are you living from right now? A unidimensional model of existence no longer covers the bases of time and physicality as we understand them in the 21st century. What’s more, we possess concrete, replicable data suggesting the time-mutability of the psyche itself. Hence, it stands to reason that thought and perception not only transcend intersections of time — but may even alter them.

These observations coalesce with insights ventured by earlier generations of idealistic philosophers and mystics. But what do they mean for us personally?

In 1954, mystic Neville Goddard (1905–1972) observed that forgiveness is revision. In an exercise he called “the pruning shears of revision,” the teacher prescribed mentally re-experiencing a regrettable event — whether bad news, a painful episode, a personal confrontation — in the manner in which you wish it had occurred. The popular visionary once said that he believed this method was the insight for which he would be most widely remembered.

I am dedicated to Neville’s ideas but have sometimes looked askance at this exercise. Not infrequently, passions associated with personal friction are too great for me to “revise” a scene…

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Mitch Horowitz
Mitch Horowitz

Written by Mitch Horowitz

"Treats esoteric ideas & movements with an even-handed intellectual studiousness"-Washington Post | PEN Award-winning historian | Censored in China

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