Time, as Colin Wilson says, ‘is an invention of the left brain.’47 It is a very helpful invention, which aids us in our mastery of the world. But if we try to understand reality through it, it leads to a muddle.

‘The mind,’ Madame Blavatsky said, ‘is the slayer of the real,’ an insight with which

means is that our intellect – or left-brain consciousness – is useless when we try to grasp the nature of reality.

Bergson argued that the brain is an ‘organ for survival’, and that its function was essentially eliminative. Its job is to filter out stimuli and information that isn’t essential to dealing with the necessities of existence, and stop it from reaching consciousness; this means 90% of reality. (We know now that it is the left brain that performs this

The left brain’s penchant to break up the whole presented by the right, in order to manipulate reality, can be seen in its approach to time. Most research suggests that the left brain is obsessed with time – ‘stupidly’ so – while the right brain is cheerfully oblivious of it.46 This obsession

Exactly why we have two brains remains a mystery, but research in split-brain psychology – when the commissure connecting the hemispheres is severed – arrived at a remarkable conclusion: that ‘we’ are literally two people. The person I know as ‘I’, my verbal ego, lives in the left brain. Next door in the right cerebral hemisphere lives a stranger,

interesting thing that Hall discovered is that after spending some time with the Hopi, his own time sense began to change. Hall writes of going on a long ride to help a friend bring his horses from New Mexico to Arizona. They could travel only fifteen miles

Hopi have no word for time, and that their verbs have no tenses. Like the participants in the rituals that evoke Eliade’s ‘sacred time’, the Hopi live in an ‘eternal present’, ‘indifferent to western science, technology and philosophy.’

It is a breakthrough by the vertical dimension of eternity, into the horizontal dimension of everyday life, the ‘living time’ about which Maurice Nicoll, a student of Ouspensky, wrote an important book.32