Perception of Time

We all manage our lives against time and most would say that we never have enough of this time.  However, the real question I wanted to ask or address in this article, is whether time actually exists, and why we even measure it the way we do.  We have all been indoctrinated through the schooling system and through science, that our globe is spinning while going around the sun at the same time hurtling through space, which results somehow in our days culminating in 24 hours.  Even with all the accumulated science, it is not actually 24 hours, which is why we have an extra day added to our calendar in February each year.  So, even each day is not necessarily equal to 24 hours as we use it to measure our lives.  However, what if our reality is nothing like what we have been taught?  Perhaps we do live on a flat plane, an enclosed system, or a simulation – then the whole 24-hour day that we now use would point to something that was just made up, however, I digress.

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that the earth is a globe and that what we have been taught for 50 years or so is accurate.  I am no scientist; however, I cannot imagine that we could ever stay so perfectly aligned while we are hurtling through space at such great speeds, and that gravity and other forces could ever stay constant for all time.  Based on this simple logic, the way we measure time should not be able to be the constant of 24 hours in a day for a very long period of time, yet we continue to measure it the same.  Don’t get me wrong, within the society of today, we must have some measure of time in order for our work and monetary system to make any sense.  But I wonder why time is so different for each of us even though we all measure it the same way; is there simply a difference in perception?  I would like to provide a couple of examples of how the perception of time can “feel” different.

How many times have we heard the phrase: “time flies when you’re having fun.”  I doubt that most of us truly understand what that phrase means, but to me, it certainly aligns with how we perceive time.  The basic idea is that when we are doing something that we don’t want to do, it seems like an eternity, but when we are doing something that we love to do, the time seems very quick and fleeting.  The odd thing is that the same measure of time remains in every situation that we find ourselves in.  Another example can be taken from sports, where time seems to slow down for the trained athlete. I am a soccer goalkeeper and have been playing this position for a long time, so my mind and body have been conditioned to respond to the actions of others which tend to happen automatically.  But the really cool part of this automatic conditioning and response is that I experience it in super slow motion, like watching a replay in an NFL game.  Did time actually slow down for me, or did my perception of time change?  My experience and those of the clients that I serve, have led me to believe that time is simply something that our brain uses to make sense of this reality.  The brain must utilize our past experience and known values to piece together what we perceive as reality, and this takes time, of course not a tremendous amount of time, but it does not happen instantly.  We may feel like things in our lives happen instantly, but there is no way that our mind can put together an experience on the spot, it has many gaps to fill in to give us an experience.  On that note, we can never completely live in the present, because what we have as experiences took some amount of time to process to be presented to us.  This amount of time is likely to be a portion of a second, but there is still processing time involved.  There have also been many scientific experiments conducted that show without a doubt that our minds can also make decisions up to 7 seconds before an event actually happens.

Just with some of these simple examples, it seems that time is likely nothing like we think it is.  Why then is time measured in a linear fashion which always seems to be moving forward?  My thought is that if we can move forward in time, we should also be able to move back along the same timeline; I am sure that there are technologies that can do this by now, however, I don’t have absolute evidence for that.  I wonder then if our lives are like a movie, where everything is scripted and recorded and plays out as it should, without a definite beginning, ending, and middle? That might help explain why we have such constraints on the measurement of time, how some people always have it good, why some people always have it bad, and it hardly seems that our path can absolutely be altered.  I am not claiming to be a hardcore determinist, but I have often wondered if each life we live is imprinted somewhere in our cosmos, that must be played out as recorded.  Once again, I don’t have solid evidence to convince anyone, nor myself, that this is the way things are. 

The other thing that creates a problem in my belief in time, as we currently measure everything against, is my experience with the spiritual world.  I have had my fair share of out-of-body experiences where time does not make any sense.  I also am a hypnosis practitioner and I have had a large number of clients land in the spiritual world, or at least another plane of existence.  When I try to capture where my clients are, what is like to be there, how long they have been there, or even move them forward or backward in this alternative plane, they struggle with even understanding the questions or the directions.  Every client that finds themselves in this spiritual world explains time the same way – everything happens at the same time including the past, present, and future.  Perhaps being in spirit removes any of the constraints of time that we have to survive while here in this current reality.

Regardless of what time means to each individual, we must utilize our allotted time appropriately in order to become successful in our endeavors.  You must realize that the billionaire and the beggar have the same 24 hours each day, yet their lives are so much different.  What then is the difference between these two people?  I grew up in quite a different time, and this new technological age has completely changed and distracted us from being efficient with the 86, 400 seconds that we are given each day.  I would imagine that you might find you are wasting an enormous amount of time engaging in activities that do not support your goals and dreams.  If you were to honestly track what you spend your time doing each day, you would find out just how much time you are wasting on frivolous things.  How many times have you said that you simply didn’t have enough time to do something that will enhance your life, such as education, exercise, and meditation, yet you will spend hours every day watching television, going to the club, and scrolling through social media?  Stating that you don’t have enough time to spend on improvement is simply not true, it comes down to how you manage your time and your priorities.  I am not saying that you need to quit doing all those things, but you can certainly find ways to shave down those activities to fit in time for things that will advance your life.

Since we are locked into this 24-hour measure of each day, let’s utilize this time properly and not waste what we have been given.  I challenge you to live full and die empty – I don’t know about you but I don’t want to go to the grave well preserved, but completely used up.  What is the point of living an ordinary life anyway?  I cannot imagine that we are here to simply eat, work, consume, and die.

Start living on purpose!!!