In the foreword to St. Paul theosophist Von Braschler’s newest book, 7 Secrets of Time Travel: Mystic Voyages of the Energy Body, author Frank Joseph writes:
“…Von Braschler’s guide to time travel is our handbook to new, unchartered realms of experience and healing. The vehicle he offers is not a relatively crude ‘machine’ but the sublime human soul. In short, he tells us that we do not have to wait for the invention of some promised technology. On the contrary, we have been carrying around within us, since the day we were born, everything we need for visiting the past or future….”
The seven secrets are thus:
- Time, as we know it, is simply an illusion of this earth plane with physical limitations.
- There is personal power in the present moment.
- Time = Energy = Opportunity = Karma
- Timelessness is just beyond time as we know it.
- You can traverse time and merge timelines.
- You can heal and effect real change outside space and time.
- The primal power of the seven rays defines our opportunities.
What Von Braschler does effectively is present the historical perspectives on the concept of time, and then he refocuses the dialogue directly on you, the reader, noting that you have everything you need to explore timelessness and journeys to the past and future. The key, he points out, is a deep meditation that allows you to access heightened consciousness and awareness.
“Your spirit longs to be free and soar outside of the restrictive laws of physics that have no real hold on it, to enter timelessness, where pure energy exists and meaningful change is possible,” he writes.
Time, he notes, “remains the most misunderstood and mystical dimension of our experience of life,” so in a phone interview from his home office in St. Paul, I asked Von Braschler the following:
What is time, from your perspective?
Von Braschler: Time is solar light as it comes down and energizes all life on the planet. If you look back at everyone from Newton to all the way through Einstein, it is really electromagnetic dynamic light that comes down in the form of radiant sunlight, descending upon us, crossing the Now plane. All we really have is now. We have what Einstein liked to call an “instant in time,” and the idea of us having a future or a past is only a conjecture of the mind.
However, outside of this constraint of our physical world, there is another level of existence, which is often called the energy level, the spirit level or the Heavens above, whatever you like. On that level, there is infinite amount of time moving forward and backward — and more importantly to us, a fluidity and a movement in time.
But we can’t readily access that, because we’re limited by the constraints of our laws of physics. The fact is that we live in a manifest world where things are pretty much frozen solid, fixed, including time. My book is an attempt to look at what time is, as far as Now, the Eternal Now, the instant in time. I also wanted to look at what the mystics call accessing timelessness, where you can suspend the sensation of time.
It really works, going beyond the physical limitations in an energy body or a consciousness body to discover the unmanifest world of pure energy and spirit where you can go forward and backward in time. You’re not limited by the fixed constraints of this dense, mundane world of ours.
Many of our Edge readers will know what you’re talking about when you talk about the energy body, but for those who do not, please give us a sense of what it is.
VB: Many civilizations have had this concept. Being a lifelong theosophist and a student of Eastern spiritual science, I have looked into the Hindu concept of the energy body, the subtle body that surround us. In other cultures, they are called the luminous body, the energy that surrounds us, the aura, the subtle bodies.
At the core, there is our physical, dense body, and then just slightly outside there is the etheric body, often called the etheric double, which is your health aura. There is then an astral level just beyond that. These are all just surrounding us like a luminous webbing. And then beyond that we have the mental body, the causal plane, what is often called the belief plane, where you realize individualized consciousness. And then above that there is a Divine plane, which would be like cosmic consciousness, universal consciousness.
These energy bodies surround each of us, and they are energized. They receive the radiant sun, with its dynamic qualities, and they correspond to what spiritual science in the East calls the 7 planes of existence, or the 7 chakras, the 7 auras. They all have a distinct color — and, by the way, color is another way of measuring light. It is a vibrational quotient, vibrational level of light, just as musical notes are. That’s what we’re talking about when you talk about the energy body.
What did you learn about how more ancient shamanic or indigenous cultures traveled in their energy bodies?
VB: Oh, Tim, that’s a good question. There are so many shamanic stories and writings about transcending time and space, and it easily matches with the Hindu mystics that I have studied, mainly the Samadhi mystics and the Bodhisattvas — what they have achieved in going into deep states of meditative trance and then transcending or walking between the worlds, as they often say.
We see in the Native American tradition, for instance, the dreamwalkers or spiritwalkers. In the shamanic tradition, they go into a deep trance with an active out-of-body meditation. They will actually leave, in a consciousness form, their higher consciousness, their energy body. They will leave the physical world and go into the world of pure spirit and energy, the world above, and they will move throughout space and time. What they do is really magnificent.
It’s not like time travel according to H.G. Wells, going to see what women’s dresses look like in the future. It is actually going into the past or the future to see what can we learn to help our people, and they bring back this information as insight.
What was your first personal experience with time travel?
VB: Many people have experienced something like a time shift or an out-of-time sequence moment where they just seem to be somewhere else and, “God, where did the time go?” Mine was when I was 12 years old, living in north Seattle at the time, my home area.
My friends and I decided it would be fun to catch the very buses that took us to school to take out to the berry fields one day, out of town, I don’t know, 6-7 miles. We didn’t really want to pick berries; we wanted to pick a few to eat, but we heard that behind the berry field was a beautiful swimming hole in this river with a tire swing. So, we thought we would take the bus out there and eat a few berries for maybe an hour and then go swimming, and then when it was time to go home in the afternoon, we would catch the bus home.
You know when you get really sick. Sometimes you just know ,deep down inside, that something is really life threatening. I felt this stabbing pain. It wasn’t that I just had too many berries, but everybody thought it was something like that. I asked the bus driver if he would take me home.
He said, “Wait a while, kid, we’ll take everybody home.”
I just didn’t think I could, so I noticed railroad tracks and I knew that the railroad went through my town, and I thought, “Well, I will just….” I was starting to get really sick and dizzy and I felt better when I walked than if I sat down, and so I said, “Well, I’ll just get on this railroad track and start walking toward that direction and the tracks will take me home.”
Well, I didn’t know if there were switchbacks or if the tracks would take me somewhere else. It never occurred to me how close the tracks would actually bring me to home, but I just started walking, and in no time I was home. It’s like I didn’t have the memory of the walking very far. And there I was, standing in front of my house.
I went inside and it’s a good thing, because my appendix was about to burst. I just got home in time. And, doggone it, you know what? The railroad tracks don’t really go anywhere near my home. In fact, they are at the other edge of town. So, the fact that the railroad tracks seemed to take me to my home was impossible and the time lapse could never be explained to me.
For a long time I thought angels carried me, and people said, “Oh, it’s just a strange story. There’s got to be an explanation.” I think a lot of people have these experiences where suddenly they’ll be walking or sitting or doing something and, wow, time has elapsed and they didn’t even realize where they were. That was my first experience.
I liked reading the description of your incident with timelessness with the car going down the hill, too.
VB: I was just so obsessed with this idea that you could actually manipulate or control time through your perception. Time is what we perceive it to be, so if you could actually control that, and to a large degree that is true, you can absolutely stop time by controlling your perception of it.
I was working at a newspaper north of Seattle at that time, driving down a hill in my little Triumph GT6. This thing could turn on a dime. It was a nice, sunny day and I’m coming down this hill, and the road seemed clear. It had rained the night before, but the road seemed very, very dry.
But at the bottom of the hill I saw at the last minute — when I needed to make this hairpin turn to the left — that a puddle of water had accumulated. I was going to hit this big puddle of water and I couldn’t possibly turn. I was going to either slam into the guard rail or go through the guard rail and over the embankment. It just seemed like I had all the time in the world when I stopped time then to analyze all the implications of different things I might try to do. Having never been in this situation, I had to play it out in my mind, but I did this so rapidly.
Now, you only have these rapid thoughts when you’re in a state of higher consciousness, so it seemed that I had actually accessed higher consciousness. That’s a big key to transcending time, I think, because your higher consciousness is able to get outside of the body where I could suspend time. I had all the time in the world to think of what to do. And in the end, I did the right thing, which I would have never otherwise probably thought of. I turned the car and I hit just a glancing blow on the guard rail, and I didn’t crash and I didn’t go over the edge.
I was wandering around kind of dazed after that. Now, that’s kind of how you feel when you come out of a really deep meditation, when you’ve been out of body and you have gone through a hair-raising experience, gone through a time shift. You are pretty dazed. So I’m just wandering around, and a policeman stopped and said, “Did you hit that glancing blow on the guard rail? They were telling me that you just about went over.”
And I said, “Yeah, it was me.”
He said, “Boy, you better be checked out, you better be checked out!”
You present guided meditations to experience this timelessness. For people who have merely meditated to relax or who had a guided meditation to a soothing brook or a meadow or a forest, describe how the meditations in your book compare with the basic meditation that people know about when they think of meditation.
VB: They are different in the sense that they are active meditations, very deep meditations. So I have taken a lot from the Samadhi mystics, the yogis from the Indian tradition. When you are just learning Samadhi techniques, they first teach you how to control your dreams, to learn in your dreams — lucid, often waking, dreams.
The exercises I have are easy to do, but you have to somehow get your head around the idea that you are going to absolutely tune out everything. This is not a light meditation. This is not a contemplative moment. You will absolutely leave the body. The key to it really is going deep within you to that still point deep within you, where Spirit resides, where we access higher consciousness.
Some people who have not gone that deep in meditation might ask what risk might be associated with time travel?
VB: There is always the fear when you first have an out-of-body experience that you will not be able to get back. This is simply the physical side of you, the pro-survival part of you, that often is fearful. It’s the analytical brain trying to hold tight to everything to keep you alive and safe.
What you need to do is find a place to meditate that is absolutely safe and quiet and tranquil and isolated, and put yourself in a very comfortable reclining position — and just know that you will come back. You know that you are going to come back to yourself in the same way that — when you want to go find yourself in the past or find yourself in the future or a scene from the past or a place in the future — you know that you’re going to go there automatically because of the quality of the energy that dynamically allows us to do any of this.
It is the electromagnetic energy. From the sunlight to the Earth’s core and us included, we’re all charged with this. To me, this is karma, the law of attraction. The electromagnetic quality of the energy that drives us will allow us to find ourselves going forward and backward in time and returning to our body just as easily. It is automatic. It is like magnetic attraction.
How many times would you say that you’ve done this yourself?
VB: I do it daily. It happens a lot now because, like anything else, you just get used to it, and it feels right. It’s like riding a bicycle. Now, when I was starting to have time shifts, I would be like walking down the street and I couldn’t remember how I got to the end, which can be very dangerous. They always say don’t meditate driving a car and don’t meditate when walking down the street, you know? These are just things you learn to deal with.
In your personal experience, what intentions do you have now when you go into this deeper meditation with time travel?
VB: You hit on it. You’ve got to have intention. You’ve got to give yourself an idea of what you’re going to do and what you’re going to see or where you’re going to go, as best you can. You visualize it. Visualization is extremely important in meditation, especially out-of-body travel. You picture where it’s going to go. Now that’s beautiful, because you not only create a visualization, a magical component to this, but it also enables you to cease the monkey chatter in your brain.
You don’t have to process words. At the level where you’re going, you’re not going to have the same sensations. You’re not going to be able to verbalize. You’re not going to be able to see. You’re not going to be able to touch or hear, but all of this will be replaced by the most wondrous gift of awareness and a state of higher consciousness as you leave the body. So, the intent of what you’re going to do is extremely important.
So, you return with observations and wisdom?
VB: I think the best you can reliably do — and the best I could train people in a short book to do with exercises — is to go forward in an invisible consciousness body, an energy body, and be the perfect observer, the perfect witness, to what you’ve seen, and bring back this insight. Like the shaman, you bring back this insight to yourself and to your people. That’s why there is really no danger in time travel.
How many experiences like this does it take before you can really get a feel for it?
VB: Well. I’m hardly the expert. I have to confess that I’m neither a Samadhi mystic or a shaman, nor am I a scientist or nuclear physicist, but a journalist and I have my own experiences and a lifetime interest in time and I’ve studied it deeply. But after you’ve done it, I don’t know, 3 or 4 times, I think if you really are conscious of what you’re doing, you will begin to have a sense that you can time shift. The importance is that you time shift in a safe environment and a meditative environment.
Remember when the tsunami hit southern India and Indonesia just a few years back? They worried about moving people, so they picked up Samadhi mystics who were in deep, deep trances. They could not wake them. Some of them were out for three days. They just picked them up and, very carefully and without a lot of commotion, moved them. I mean, they are really, really gone. It’s a very deep meditation.
How does time travel relate to healing?
VB: I talk about becoming an agent of change, and in this world of ours, it’s a fixed world. The minute the music is written or performed, it is there. It is dated. It is not fluid. It does not move forward. Buildings, architecture frozen. Obstacles frozen. Change comes very, very slowly in this world. Nuclear physicist Julian Barber said there is very little change, very little movement, in our world. It is, in fact, a frozen world.
You become an agent of change by getting to time travel. When you can step outside yourself with your energy bodies, your subtle bodies, you enter the world of change. The world of energy is the world of unmanifested energy, with endless possibilities of becoming.
People don’t realize how much Einstein, in writing the Theory of Relativity, was guided by Helena Blavatsky’s book, The Spirit Doctrine. In it, she talks about becoming the great cosmic web of the universe outside us and the energy in the unmanifest world above. It is filled with infinite possibilities. It is a world of becoming. In that world, we can go in our higher consciousness, and in that world, we can effect change.
This has a profound impact for people who want to help others. We all hurt in different ways. The Buddha said that we all suffer, because we’re ignorant. Well, you don’t have to suffer. You don’t have to be ignorant. You can step outside yourself and heal yourself. We can effect change more easily in the fluid world of the world above us.
There are many illnesses that are spiritual in nature, or mental or emotional in nature, and these impact our physical body. These conditions form outside of the physical body, in the astral plane. They happen in the mental plane. Medical science is beginning to see that you have to treat the emotional troubles, the spiritual troubles and mental troubles, in addition to the physical ailments.
It seems like more people today are awakening to the value of being in the present moment. I just keep hearing it over and over in different aspects of life. Do you see this as a harbinger of greater awakening in the time travel and the expanded universe in time?
VB: Yes, and I also see it as a wonderful thing. But I hope people don’t get stuck in the present moment, because there is more. You can go beyond this. You can suspend time and you can really occupy the present moment, the eternal now, and make it last and stretch it. Then you understand you have reached a state of timelessness, which the great mystics have understood for so many centuries. Now, if you can suspend time, if you can stop time, as science says, you have the potential to go faster than the speed of light and actually travel through time. Well, we can’t build a machine to do that, and if we could, the machine and us included would turn to pure energy at that speed. But, we have something in us that can transcend the speed of light. It can travel very quickly and it can operate outside the physical you, and that is your higher consciousness. We all know from our dreams that our higher consciousness can live outside of us.
What role does our exploration of time travel and the experiences of timelessness play in the evolution of the human consciousness?
VB: I think this is a big one. My research took me back to the 17th century German mathematician and theological philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. First of all, he said time is just all in your head, that it doesn’t really exist the way we think it does. It’s not an endless line with a beginning and a middle and an end. It’s not like that at all.
He also said we have to wrap our heads around one little fact: that there are two levels of creation: There is God above and the Spirit world, the world of unmanifest energy and potential; and there is then the world below, where we live. The world below, he said, is a world of illusion and mass confusion. That’s where we live.
What message ultimately do you want to leave with your readers?
VB: That they can take charge of the changes in their life. You can work out your greatest karma, and become a hero in your own life, in your own world, by taking charge of your life, dealing with problems, dealing with change. Things are not as fixed as they seem. We live in a very solid, fixed world, a frozen world, in a sense, by comparison to the world above, the world of unmanifest energy. We now have examples from the East and from the West, mystics and shamans and now physicists, chiming in to say that you can step outside this physical world in a consciousness body and move freely with fluidity backward and forward in time and affect change. We are not totally Earthbound.
What are you working on now?
VB: I want to finish a book I have been writing about healing with your pet, about our psychic-spiritual connections with animals. I did a podcast for 3+ years called Healing with your Pet, and I interviewed a lot of interesting people and have a lot of stories. I have been collecting information about this great symbiotic relationship between people and their pets. People who have pets live longer. Pets live longer. You lower your heart rate when you pet a dog or a cat.
I’d also like to do something with the rays, the seven rays, because they are tied in with the electromagnetic radiation that guides all of life. It colors it, making every day a little different.
For more information on Von Braschler, email vonbraschler@gmail.com or search his name online for video interviews and information on his books.
