The same road seems longer on the way out than on the way back. Everyone has noticed it, and almost nobody has asked why. That small everyday fact is a door: behind it there are two entirely different ways of living time — the linear time of the clock and of our plans, and another time, which the Greeks called kairòs, in which the present opens and everything becomes possible. Learning to step from the first into the second is one of the powerful, once-secret keys of the Mesmerismus® of Prof. Dr. Marco Paret, described in his book L’energia segreta della mente^[1], and anyone can learn it easily when guided. What the two times are, why the mind builds the first one, and how to step out of it — with the exercise Dr. Paret gives in the book.

Why does the way back seem shorter?

Because on the way out you are looking for information: every corner is new, the attention is awake, and the mind records a great deal. On the way back the road is already familiar; vigilance drops, the search for the new stops, and the mind records less — so the same distance feels shorter^[1]. Psychology has measured exactly this, and calls it the return-trip effect^[2]. The lesson is simple and a little uncomfortable: the sense of time is not given by the clock. It is built by our own mental structure, which “conceptualises” reality — it fixes the elements that vary and follows them — and out of that it manufactures our sensation of duration, for purposes of survival and attention^[1]. It is like a film camera: the more frames it takes, the longer the scene seems when played back.

And here is the other half of the lesson. Habit is born in an instant. Live the same days on the same tracks, and at the end of your life you will find that you have seen the world through a window — and have not lived it^[1]. The adult perception of time, always shorter, is the fruit of a life that records less and less.

What are the two ways of living time?

Man has two fundamental ways of living reality, Dr. Paret writes: in programming mode, or in connection with reality itself^[1]. The first is linear time — chronos, the time of the clock, of the calendar and of our programmes. It is born from programming: I decided yesterday what I would do today, and today I measure reality against that plan. It is useful, and it is also a cage: in it we live between a past that has already happened and a future that has not, and the present shrinks to a thin line between the two.

The second is kairòs, the time of opportunity. In Greek it named the right moment, the point where an action succeeds because it happens exactly now; Hippocrates wrote that chronos is the time in which — in the instant — there is kairòs^[3], and the philosophers of the last century recovered the word to say what the clock cannot^[4]. Kairòs is an intuitive time, in connection and reintegration with one’s own being. It is not a static state, as when the mind freezes; it is the opposite, an opening — a time of opportunities to be seized, which corresponds to a higher understanding of the present moment^[1].

Dr. Paret’s example makes it concrete. A strike stops you from leaving. If you look at reality from the point of view of your mental programme, you feel disappointment; you get angry, or you try to force the situation. If you are in kairòs, you are living a moment in which reality is what it is and everything is possible: whatever you decide to do, the choice is based on what is present now, not on yesterday’s programme. It is as if your brain were born in that instant and discovered the world — and found itself in accord with a wider rhythm^[1].

What is presence, and what does it have to do with time?

A simple definition, again from the book: presence is the state in which you are not held prisoner by the movement between past and future, but rooted in the present^[1]. It is felt in the body before it is understood: the breath drops, the muscles let go of a tension they were holding for the future, a calm settles, and the physiological rhythms slow. That is why the School speaks of magnetic presence and teaches it first: the operator who is present is already outside linear time, and the person in front of him feels it before any word.

What stands between you and presence is what Dr. Paret calls the Ego — our autopilot, and also our filter on reality. The more we go beyond it, the more real our perceptions become and the more intense the experience; and the higher the level of the experience, the more the sense of time expands^[1]. There is a resemblance with relativity: the faster you go, the more time slows. In the same way, the higher the level of consciousness, the more time slows, up to what the tradition calls the timeless moment^[1]. It is like a child in a new afternoon: it can seem immense to him, because he sees, touches, smells and records what the adult already filters^[1].

What does science say about the sense of time?

Modern research describes the same fact from the other side. The brain has no clock; the sense of duration is a construction, assembled from attention, memory and the body‘s own signals^[5]. The anterior insula, which integrates the feeling of the body from within, appears to lay down the “moments” out of which our sense of passing time is built^[6]; emotion and arousal stretch or compress it^[7]; and states of complete absorption make it dissolve altogether^[8]. When Dr. Paret writes that dilating bodily presence makes time slow down, he is describing, from the inside, what the laboratory measures from the outside.

There are two levels here, as in everything the School teaches. The neurological level: the felt body, the autonomic state that the polyvagal theory describes as the ground of safety and attention^[9][10]. And the energetic level, which the tradition has always described through what is felt — a fullness, a warmth, a widening — and which the fluidist current, that is, the researchers who hold that a real energy circulates in and between people, has never stopped investigating^[11]. To anyone who practises, the two arrive together.

How to step out of linear time: the metronome exercise

The exercise is the one Dr. Paret gives in the book, and it is disarmingly simple^[1]. Set a metronome at one beat per second. Sit, and listen to it. Then, without changing anything outside, begin to dilate your bodily presence: feel the feet on the floor, the weight in the chair, the breath, the two hands, the whole body at once. Keep the attention wide and quiet. What to observe: as presence grows, the beats seem to slow down — the same second becomes longer, because consciousness is receiving a greater quantity of the moment^[1]. What counts is the quality of the attention, not the number of minutes. Do it for a few minutes a day; the first time, the slowing is already perceptible.

The related practice is the mental void, in which the commentary of the mind is allowed to fall silent, and the practice of the gaze, which brings the same widening into the relationship with another person. Presence, gathered in oneself, becomes something the other perceives — and from there begin fascination, the magnetic passes and the whole of non-verbal hypnosis.

Why does the School teach this?

Because kairòs is the time in which the magnetic work happens. An operator who lives in linear time is measuring the other person against a programme; an operator in kairòs is meeting what is present, and that is what the other person’s system answers to. The old magnetisers knew it under other names, and the tradition kept it — through Pythagoras and the Greek schools, through Dante and the hermetic tradition, down to Mesmer, Donato, Di Pisa and Master Virgilio Torrizzano, who initiated Prof. Dr. Paret^[1][12]. For those who look further, beyond the ordinary, there is a more mysterious side to this teaching, kept in the School’s symbolic work.

The exercise can be done alone. Its deeper form — kairòs held while working with another person — is learned live, in the Mesmerismus® training, like swimming: by doing it, next to someone who already knows how. What the training builds together with it is a powerful triad — unstoppable confidence, self-esteem, security — because it works on the essence; and you will change intimately, inside, through this practice. The demonstrations are on our YouTube channel.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is kairòs the same as mindfulness?

They are neighbours. Mindfulness observes the present; kairòs acts in it. In Dr. Paret’s teaching the point is not only to notice the moment but to choose from it, so that the action is based on what is now and not on yesterday’s programme.

Can I lose track of time and become unreliable?

The two times coexist. Linear time keeps its use — appointments, plans, measures — and the practice does not remove it. What changes is where you live: from the thin line between past and future to the width of the present, from which the plans are made better.

How long before I feel the difference?

With the metronome, the first slowing is felt in a few minutes, the first time. Living from kairòs in ordinary life is a matter of practice, and of guidance.

Is this a therapy?

It is an art of self-knowledge, communication and presence. It is not a medical treatment and does not replace medical or psychological care, and in our School it is taught only to people who promise to use it for the good — the power of a practice makes the quality of the person using it even more important.

In the Mesmerismus® of Prof. Dr. Marco Paret this heritage is taught as an art of self-knowledge, communication, wellbeing and personal growth. It is not a medical treatment and makes no therapeutic claims.

Notes and References

1. Paret, M. (2009). L’energia segreta della mente. Chapter «Il tempo»: the road that seems shorter on the way back; the mental structure that “conceptualises” and builds the sense of time; linear time versus kairòs; the strike example; the Ego as autopilot and filter; the resemblance with relativity; the metronome experiment. An earlier redaction of the same material is in Paret, M., Oltre la trance.
2. van de Ven, N., van Rijswijk, L. & Roy, M. M. (2011). «The return trip effect: why the return trip often seems to take less time». Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(5), 827–832. The study documents the phenomenon (the return feels about 20% shorter) and discusses the explanation: the authors give weight to expectations about the length of the trip, alongside familiarity. Dr. Paret’s reading — novelty, vigilance, quantity of information recorded — is the book’s own, and the image of the film camera in this paragraph is the page’s illustration, not the book’s.
3. Hippocrates, Precepts, 1: «Time is that in which there is opportunity (kairòs), and opportunity that in which there is not much time».
4. Smith, J. E. (1969). «Time, times, and the “right time”: chronos and kairos». The Monist, 53(1), 1–13.
5. Wittmann, M. (2013). «The inner sense of time: how the brain creates a representation of duration». Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14(3), 217–223. Wittmann reviews the several “internal clock” models and stresses the plurality of processes involved: there is no single sense organ for time, as the eye is for light, and no consensus on one central mechanism producing the experience of duration.
6. Craig, A. D. (2009). «Emotional moments across time: a possible neural basis for time perception in the anterior insula». Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 364(1525), 1933–1942. Craig presents this as a model: he proposes that the anterior insula, integrating interoceptive signals, may provide a basis for the “moments” of our temporal experience.
7. Droit-Volet, S. & Meck, W. H. (2007). «How emotions colour our perception of time». Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11(12), 504–513.
8. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York, Harper & Row — the transformation of time in absorbed states.
9. Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. New York, Norton.
10. On the open debate: Grossman, P. et al. (2026). «Why the polyvagal theory is untenable». Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 23(1), 100–112; and, in the same issue, Porges, S. W. (2026). «When a critique becomes untenable», 113–128. The two papers are the two sides of a live scientific controversy about the physiological model; for the School the polyvagal reading of safety, presence and attention remains a fixed point of reference, and the discussion is reported here as a discussion.
11. Méheust, B. (1999). Somnambulisme et médiumnité, 2 vols. Le Plessis-Robinson, Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond.
12. Paret, M. (2011). Training Manual: Mesmerismus – Fascination – Presence. ISI-CNV, Université Européenne.

The clock measures one time; the present offers another. Kairòs is the time in which reality is what it is and everything is possible, and presence is the way in. It is built with the body, a few minutes a day, and it is the ground on which the whole magnetic work stands — learned live, and still being taught.