Dr. Allan Hamilton and Mandala Meditation (QfP_S2-E2)

Note. The video version of this podcast is available here.[https://youtu.be/0y02vs_PIw0]

Dr. Bennett will be presenting at The Science of Consciousness conference (October 11 - 16) in San Diego. [https://tsc2026.org/]

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This episode explores one of the most liberating qualities of the Time Adjustment Protocol (see Quest for Presence, Book 1); it is the reminder not to take life too seriously, except for maintaining practices that lift the spirit or help transcend daily conditions. Beyond that, we’re encouraged to engage life with enjoyment and gentle detachment.

Spiritual traditions have long pointed toward this expansive view of time. The Quest for Presence and its mandala invite us to witness life as it unfolds and to explore layers of time beyond the rigid ticking of the clock.

Our guest, Dr. Allan Hamilton, neurosurgeon and author of Cerebral Entanglements, describes the difference between inner time—our natural, experiential rhythm—and public time, the externally imposed clock. He explains how Western clock‑time emerged from power and control, shaping how society functions and often disconnecting us from presence, playfulness, and perspective.

The conversation emphasizes the importance of reconnecting with natural rhythms and rediscovering childlike immersion, where time is felt rather than measured. The mandala serves as a symbolic map for moving between inner and outer worlds, supporting awareness, flow, acceptance, and synchronicity beyond linear time.

Dr. Hamilton discusses how internal time often conflicts with external time, creating friction that affects wellbeing. Living strictly by the clock can harm health, as seen in experiences like night‑shift work. They contrast this with Indigenous cultures, who lived in harmony with natural cycles and did not treat the world as something to own or exploit. The transcript argues that modern society must recalibrate toward ancient wisdom and natural rhythms.

The conversation also explores how technology and constant busyness have fragmented people’s sense of time. Children, once naturally present and playful, become overscheduled and lose touch with internal rhythms. Stories illustrate how creativity and laughter diminish as people grow older and become more bound to external expectations.

Later, the episode shifts into a guided meditation on four truths:

• Everything is as it is.
• Everything ends.
• Everything influences everything.
• Everything is in the process of becoming.

The meditation encourages presence, acceptance, connection, and awareness of unfolding.

The closing reflection suggests that time—not space—is the final frontier. Shifting from content to process, and from ownership to the preciousness of time, reduces stress and increases coherence. When we witness unfolding rather than divide reality into dualities, things fall into place and reveal their interconnectedness.

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Transcript

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Introduction: Time Adjustment Protocol

SPEAKER_02 0:15

In book one, we introduce the four qualities of a time adjustment protocol. Here they are. One of the most important and most liberating is the reminder not to take anything too seriously. The only exception is maintaining a regular practice that lifts your spirit or helps you transcend the conditions of your happening life. Beyond that, you're invited to engage with life from a place of both enjoyment and gentle detachment. Of course, this isn't a new idea. Spiritual teachers across cultures have been pointing to this expansive view for thousands of years. The purpose of the quest for presence, the mandala, and the accompanying video is simply to encourage us to witness this happening life and to explore the many layers of time that exist beyond the ticking of the oppressive clock. In this next episode, I'll return to the mandala and highlight some of its features, and you can watch that video. But before we go deeper, I'm genuinely excited to introduce you to Dr. Alan Hamilton, who helped set the stage before we go through the mandala. Dr. Hamilton is a neurosurgeon and author, and I love his new book, Cerebral Entanglements. At the same time as setting the stage for the mandala, he brings us back to that essential reminder: don't take it all too seriously. In fact, be like a child and laugh. Allen beautifully illustrates the difference between inner time, our private, natural, experiential sense of time, and public time, the rigid external time of the clock. He shows us how the dominance of the Western clock time and history emerged from power, control, and ego, and how we've all been shaped and constrained by this worldview. When we live only by the clock, it becomes easy to lose presence, to lose playfulness, and our whole purpose here to regain perspective. That's why this distinction between private and public time matters. We need to tune back into our natural rhythms, our inner rhythms, and our own pacing. We need to rediscover those capacities that reconnect us with a deeper, healthier sense of time. In many ways, it's like returning to a childlike state, being so immersed in life that we lose track of time altogether. But most of us aren't monks or yogis living outside society. We still have to function within clock time. So it helps to have a tool that lets us navigate between the two worlds. That's what the mandala from all history offers, a symbolic map of moving inward to outward, private to public, transcendent to every day, from the unbounded to the structured. It supports the growth of our awareness, our ability to flow, to accept, to be present, and to experience that magical synchronicity beyond the limits of linear time. That's why I love this conversation with Alan. He sets the tone perfectly by reminding us of the time adjustment protocol. Lighten up, laugh more, and witness the unfolding of this happening life with curiosity, with ease, and with laughter. I hope you enjoy.

Interview with Dr. Allan Hamilton

SPEAKER_00 4:32

Um, I said I wanted, you know, how how the brain gives value and meaning to our private and public lives, because I was um I deal with a lot of different emotional themes in the book. And one of the things that I was very interested in is what happens to us internally versus what's happening to us out in society, and how do we how do we account for the the the shifting back and forth between our internal mindset and what's going on externally? And I covered everything from grief to uh racial prejudice to uh uh um you know psychopathic murders, music, laughter, time, uh the mind-body connection, and anything that I thought, geez, you know, I've been interested in this all of my life, and I I want people to understand how their brain works. And the reason is we're the first generation that's been able to look at brain imaging and actually see human thought and human emotion. We can see the conscious part and we can also see the subconscious part, and that puts us in a brand new position to try and understand ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 5:44

Okay, so um one of the themes, there are several themes here. Uh the private public is important, but on the private side, our own internal sense of rhythm and timing and the brain mechanisms that subserve our own internal sense of that. I believe you're saying that's in a sense more true and more real. And our feelings about that are more true and more real than anything we can measure about time. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 6:19

That's that's correct. Yep. And I I think one way to look about think about it is let's talk about the flow of time when we're alone and by ourselves. Then let's talk about the flow of time when we think about uh incandescent light, when we think about the graveyard shift 24-7, um, when we think about jet lag, when we think about those are all external notions of time that we live by. But where's the conflict come in? Because internal time comes into conflict and friction with external time. And we we tend to lose out when we when we do that. Whether we're astronauts trying to live on Mars, which by the way, only has a 56-minute difference in the length of daytime. But no matter what, we cannot get astronauts to entrain to a 24-hour, 56-minute long day. They are locked onto 24 hours. So every time we come into contact, there's a some sort of friction until we say, I give up and I'm gonna live by internal time. I'm gonna for now, I'm gonna I'm coming offline and I'm I'm gonna, whether it be meditation, whether it be something that makes us uh puts us into a flow state, we that's when we come off, we come off the clock, so to speak.

SPEAKER_02 7:40

So coming off the clock and health and well-being are completely related.

SPEAKER_00 7:46

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. You you will lose your health if you live by the clock. And that that is um that's uh verified a hundred different ways, whether it be on submarine crews, whether it be graveyard shift, people who work the night shift have much higher incidence of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer. And you go, why? It's because your body just can't take it, it just can't handle it. Um, and so you're in, you know, and if you live a life where you say for 10, 20, 30 years, I'm gonna live on a graveyard shift, your your body's gonna say, Well, I I can't, so we're gonna pay a price here.

SPEAKER_02 8:27

Okay, so earlier you had brought up uh First Nations, indigenous peoples, and the transition that has happened over the past several hundred years with industrialization and the invention of clocks. And you said something I thought that was very important to this is that um the world has sort of gone to hell in the handbasket currently because we are no longer in this space of uh having a different relationship to the planet that the First Nations and all that's tied together with with everything. So do you want to comment on First Nations versus now? And yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_00 9:16

I I think one of the most interesting historical facts, and we're reckoning with history uh at every turn, good and bad. But one of the things that's fascinating to me is that for 10,000 years, the First Nations held the Western hemisphere, and they held it in a pristine, balanced condition. It was it worked, it was it was in equilibrium, it was in harmony. Um, we basically the the the European whites came over 500 years ago, and I'll remind you, we invented the clock so we could create empires, so we could create slave routes, so we create gold roots, so we could figure out trade routes, so we could make colonies, and you and you go, and and in 500 years, we've devastated the world that was basically kept in stewardship by the First Nations. And why? Well, the First Nations never owned it, they never possessed it, they never thought of it that way. They were a part of that world that they lived in. We came in and said, No, we own it, we can use it, we can exploit it, we can deplete it, and and and the results are starting to speak for themselves. Um, and and I think we we need to sort of recalibrate, if you will, back to more of those ancient wisdoms, which was my clock is the natural clock of life around me. It's um, you know, we we invented the clock to conquer and um to conquer ourselves and to conquer other people. That's what what we you know that was the original longitudinal clock that allowed us to navigate around the world um and figure out exactly where we were and what those where our ports were and where our empires lay and where we needed to deliver goods and human beings. And uh it it's um it's it's really sad, but it means it tells me we've got to we've got to recalibrate, we've got to reset because it's certainly um clear to me that we're um going we're going off off the road, we're going off the the guardrails don't seem to be in place anymore. Yeah, what's happening? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 11:31

Yeah, oh there's so many, so two things. One and Ronnie might remember this, but in an earlier episode in season one, Christy said something like uh we we teach time as separation, that that children and schools and upbringing, there's the past separate from the present, separate from the future. And um whereas in truth, going back to First Nations, there's there's just one continuous sense of time that's celestial, that's tied to the planet, that's tied to natural natural cycles. And so technology, which has uh just gone, that's part of what's gone off the rails, has become we've become so fascinated with that, and we've externally, to your point of public versus private, many people now think of their own internal world by reference to technology, social media, their watches, their apps, so that people have lost a sense of this sense of continuity of time that was more whole, right? The whole time, deep time. And I think what I'm hearing you say is that um that has come now since 500 years, that's a lot of generational teaching that we have we have now borne the fruit of and it's reached sort of a peak.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

I think one of the things I write about in the book is uh the uh gr Greenwich meridian. Okay. And for for uh the Greenwich Meridian was established basically so we had a zero, and everything could be measured as hours away from the the Greenwich uh meridian, and it worked for hundreds of years, and then somebody very smart physicist said, you know, it's it's true, but the earth bulges a little bit because of the gravitational pull at the equator. So time isn't quite the same in Greenwich as it is on the equator. So, so, and this was in the 1970s. So somebody said, Well, what do we do? And they go, We have to recalibrate. What are we going to recalibrate? We're going to recalibrate to the vibration of a sessium atom, okay, at absolute zero. Okay. And in order to do that, we need a clock that's the size of a small factory, okay, but that will give us billionths of vibrations per second that we can divide time up. So they had one of these, and then they go, well, you know, now what we found out is the cessium clock that's in Greenwich isn't the same as the cesame clock that's in, you know, Italy and Rome isn't the same as the one in Rio de Janeiro. We now we we we now have 400 of these cesame clocks, and all that happens is you keep going, no, you can divide time better than that, you can divide time better than that. And that's the obsession of how can we divide time? And the answer is it the it's not dividing time, that's the answer, it's unifying time inside internally. And if you think about kids, which you know, I always go back to kids. Um uh, you know, we kids will go, you know, you they'll sit down and suddenly get lost in whatever they're doing, and it and it doesn't take a lot for them to suddenly, and you know, they're suddenly playing and they oh my god, you know, and you go, when did I lose that capacity to play?

SPEAKER_02 15:09

I have to tell you a story. So we're we're on the heels of Halloween, and so I dressed up for Halloween as a painting box. I got in the box and I and I put uh poster board, I'll show a picture here. I put poster, I put poster board on it so that um the kids could come and could um uh essentially, you know, draw on draw on me, right? So here, here, let me let me I didn't know I was gonna talk about this. So here's the picture. And um what happened was wow, yeah, what happened was um I had about I would say between 30 and 40 children who came up and drew on me, you know.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

I'll bet they did.

SPEAKER_02 15:58

Oh, and what happened but the thing that happened to your point that was so amazing was um some of them would walk off after drawing on me and forgot completely about the candy.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:13

So great. It was so great. The trick or street, right? I I was I was tricking them.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Uh uh Ken Richardson tells this Robinson tells this story that I love, which is that if you go into a kindergarten class and you say, uh, how many of you are artists? Put up your hands. He said it'll be about 90 to 95 percent of the class will put their hands up. If you go back in the sixth grade and ask and say, How many of you are artists, it'll be less than 10 percent. So he says, So in six years, you've managed to kill off nearly 90 of the artists that were there, and that is a sad, sad commentary, you know. Um, and and and and and to me, it's part of our killing time because we, you know, if you're not really an artist and you aren't really drawing as well as you should be, then you shouldn't be drawing. Do something more productive. And the answer is expressing yourself. There's nothing more productive, it doesn't matter how you externalize it. Um, Robinson tells this wonderful story of a little girl who wasn't paying much attention in class, I think first grader. And uh suddenly the teacher had assigned a drawing assignment, and the little girl got very serious and her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth, and she's leaning over with the crayons. And the the teacher was sort of you know, curious why why was this child so involved all of a sudden in what she was doing? So she walked over to the little girl and she said, Well, sweetie, what are you doing? What are you to what do you? She said, I'm I'm drawing a picture of God, and she goes, Oh, sweetie, nobody knows what God looks like. And she says, Well, they will in a minute. So to me, that's the disarming, wonderful kind of internal time of kids. They don't know what they can't do or should do, or and they just go and do it. And I and I think uh we were talking earlier, you and I, about laughter. The the average child um under the age of five laughs about between two and four hundred times a day. Some adults don't laugh once a week, they have the social laugh, you know, the laugh by the water cooler, like a back one, not the real one. Not the real laugh, but kids, kids know how to laugh. Um, and they know how to laugh uh from a from about three or four months old. They they they they know how to laugh long before they understand anything else. They know how to laugh, music and laughter.

SPEAKER_02 18:55

Yeah, I want to I want to dive into that. I want to finish up just this part about children, but I want to go to laughter and the idea of uh what we talk about in uh book one, this idea of taking ourselves too seriously as part of the time, it's it's the fundamental part to adjust our time, take taking ourselves too seriously. But before that, um the idea of children yesterday, I lectured, I was mentioning, and when I do this, this is to college students, and um I say, on a scale of one to ten, how present are you right now? Share with your partner, and they do that. Talk a little bit, then on a scale of one to ten, how present have you been this whole semester? You know, and they kind of like, and some of them are like their number is a little bit lower than how they are right now or higher. But then we talk and then we go, how present have you been to your whole life on a scale of one to ten? And they talk. And it's pretty, it's a powerful, it's a simple, it's a very simple exercise that always gets great conversation. But this one girl said to me this, you know, uh after we were talking, she said, I I said this to you earlier is that she said, I'm more present now because I spent my whole childhood going from one soccer game to another. And so that's another piece I wanted us to talk about. It's not just what happens in the school, you know, end of the classroom schedule, ding, go to the next one, ding. But it's also parents kind of having to keep children busy. And and and that's only after they get into college that they maybe they realize, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. Do you have anything to share about about what happens there and maybe even how the brain evolves or or matures uh as we move through childhood?

SPEAKER_00 20:53

That's why summertime scares parents to death because they go, I don't, I don't really have a lot planned for Billy. You know, I'm not I'm worried because so so Billy might actually just be able to do whatever he wants to do, you know, and they and they go, I so they go, no, no, but I've arranged he's going off to camp and then he's gonna work at the ASPCA and I've got him volunteering at church, and you know, that and they go they they feel better as they start to stack more and more stuff. And we are living in this age where we're sort of obsessed with people staying constantly busy, you know, and and that's where you know, I think social media and the cell phones, um, you know, it's it's just like uh I can't have a moment of thought by myself. I have to have something that's constantly punctuating time for me, that's constantly giving me the the rhythm of uh where am I right now? And I think a lot of parents run themselves and their kids ragged. Um, and and they think they're doing a great job of parenting because they say, Well, look, they don't even have a moment to think for themselves, they go into bed exhausted every night. know, and then I have to drag him out of bed in the morning and the whole schedule starts all over again. And you go to me, some of the best times in my life were when, you know, m my parents sort of said, just uh just let the kid do whatever he wants, you know. And then you'd sit tires, you know, and I I I I would love drawing. I I I loved making model ships. I love working with my hands, which is sort of what happened in neurosurgery. But um you know in in a lot of ways I I really look back and thank my parents for having enough faith that they didn't always think they had to pack my schedule. I think I I'm the better for it. I wanted to ask you something Joel which is when you when you ask the kids about um you know like how present are you it occurs to me that if I asked someone myself how present were you or where were you the most present in your life I'd be hard pressed to say it wasn't childhood when I was the most present. You know that if anything I've been less present since I since I started growing up.

SPEAKER_01 23:10

And I think that's one of the big mistakes we think is that growing up means you listen to the clock

Guided Meditation on Mandala

SPEAKER_01 24:13

presence begins the moment we stop trying to change the world and start allowing it to reveal itself let that thought settle in you for a moment take a comfortable seat that your shoulders soften just as it is presence begins the moment we stop trying to change the world and start allowing it to reveal itself in time with time beyond time allow these four radiant truths to gently guide your awareness inward everything is as it is as you breathe in notice this moment exactly as it appears no need to change anything no need to fix or improve just let the breath be the breath let you be you let this moment rest in its own shape feel the steadiness that comes from allowing things to be what they are thinking as it is everything ends with your next exhale notice how each breath completes itself every inhale rises every exhale falls every moment has its own natural closing let this truth soften you endings are not failures they are just part of the rhythm of being alive everything ends everything influences everything and widen your awareness feel how your breath touches your body how your body shapes your presence and how your presence touches the space around you are part of a larger weaving connected responsive and meaningful let yourself feel held in that web of connection everything influences everything everything is in the process of becoming unto itself as the next breath arrives feel how life is always moving you're not stuck nothing is frozen even in stillness something is unfolding sense the quiet creativity of this moment the way each breath opens a doorway creates the conditions for what comes next everything is in the process of becoming unto itself take one more slow breath in a long easy breath out carry these four truths with you gently that things are as they are that all things change that we're all connected and that life this life this happening life is always becoming ready's

Beach Rant (Dr. Bennett on the Beach)

SPEAKER_01 31:12

this idea thought feeling about space versus time and I believe we know by now that they're the same there's a continuum space time continuum I like to think of this idea that space is the final frontier from Star Trek and in our work with the internet and design and learning and teaching people say content is king instead of thinking about space is the final frontier time is the final frontier instead of thinking about content being king think that maybe process is king or queen right process which is the key to this whole idea of what's unfolding so when we move from space to time from content to process and from territory and property to the preciousness of time there's an incredible alleviation of stress and anxiety one of the treasures to wrap this up is the treasure of coherence of things just making sense of things coming together of things falling into place a sense that it all fits when you make this shift from space to time and from this idea that it's only about space power content and design to everything I just talked about my experience is that things do fall into place that it all makes sense that there isn't fragmentation because we're witnessing the unfolding and we are part of the unfolding and we contribute to the unfolding as soon as we get into duality and us versus them black versus white one political perspective versus another political perspective that's when things start to really fall apart but it's all an illusion it really isn't falling apart it's always coming together that's the challenge.