"Time is of your own making..."

....its clock ticks in your head.
The moment you stop thought
time too stops dead."


Nice, eh?
The burden of responsibility is relentless...

Those who chase the mystery of Time (like a cat chases it own tail, I might add) are, of course, well acquainted with this piece of poetry.
It was written by Angelus Silesius (one of my favourite Western mystics), in the 17th century.

(And BTW, there is another translation, even more interesting, if you ask me:

"'Tis thou thyself that makest Time.
And like a clock thy senses run:
Do thou but quiet their unrest—
The clock is stopped and Time is gone."

Man Maketh Time

Be sure to read his other gems!)


But the purpose of this thread is a very concrete one: I'd like to hear from people who have interest, and have succeeded, in "stopping time" by means of meditation.

Anyone?







[edit on 22-9-2008 by Vanitas]

reply to post by Vanitas


Nobody, huh?

Well, I don't believe you.
But have it your own way... :-)

reply to post by Vanitas


Thank you for reminding me that time is man-made. Maybe that is why I am always late for a very important date.

reply to post by mapsurfer_


The pleasure was all mine. :-)

You sound like somebody who could use that technique I was inquiring about...
And I know so, because it takes one to know one.

Maybe somebody will take pity on us and reveal their mighty secret? :-)


P.S. On a slightly more serious note... if it's true that you're "always" late, as you said, have you considered the possibility that you may be harbouring some resentment towards the people you're meeting?
It's surprising how often that turns out to be case!
(And again, I am speaking from personal experience.)
Being late is a VERY popular passive-aggressive "punishment".

I have been experimenting with time since the beggining of the year. I tried to percieve time in a diferent way.
Meditation works because it brings awareness, allowing you to percieve more details of the reality we coexist with. Instead I try to bring awareness in to my every-momment of existence. In other words I stop using time as guide for my everyday existence. I stop using a wach, alarm clock, I still need to take the train, get to work at a certain time, etc. It is not that I live in another world, but my perception of time has drasticly changed. I wake up every morning at the same time more or less, I take the train at 7:24 am and most of the times I get there 5- 10 minutes earlier, for me those numbers dont mean too much, by bringing awareness in to my life there is less an obsession with time, if I have to wait 10 minutes, I am not anxious about it, I focus on anything arround me; My purpose becomes to experince reality in a deep and real way, feeling. I take a couple of deep breaths and almost instantly time is meaningless, one thought at this moment can bring the entire universe to a stand still at least for your perception.

The same way if I have lots of things to do by a time deadline I don't accept it (meaning I dont register the time deadline as such). By bringing awareness in to my life, I can actually slow time by getting more done with less effort focusing all your perceptions on the "NOW" and beign at peace with it. Awareness will let you know what needs to be done, at this point what needs to be done becomes your goal.

Your purpose becomes to do what needs to be done, not the time deadline that you need to finish the task by. The task itself becomes such the center of your perception that time at this moment becomes meaningless.

Vanitas
Good OP, thanks for the link it must be 15-20 years since I have read Angelus Silesius, nearly forgot all about him, thanks indeed.

I think on the meditation bit, that to be in a true place of timelessness, where you see the "gap" between the projections is quite difficult to achieve. Usually if you do it is a "private" or "personal" affair.

In addition it also is beyond our three dimensions, and so therefore language can not describe or measure this experience. One of the main constructs of language and meaning "past" and "pre" tense are not frames of reference so it is never an accurate description if attempted.

So maybe that’s the lack of response reason, or maybe they have replied but it has not started yet lol.

I really posted here to recommend a read you would love,
"Winston Churchill's Afternoon Nap" but you probably have it?

Here the Washington correspondent for the London Times presents what is surely among the most detailed and provocative analyses of the profoundly subjective biological nature of the human time-sense. He explores the latest findings about "biological clocks” the factor that made Churchill nap after lunch and goes on to cover a range of ideas about "time" from ancient cultures to current prophets of AI and "human consciousness" like Marvin Minsky, Endel Tulving and their peers, along with philosophers from Plato and Augustine to Sartre and the existentialists. Campbell's insights into music and speech are perceptive as they relate to the human sense, and it should be noted that he has added a new coinage, lifetime, to Einstein's spacetime.

Publishers Weekly

Amazing read, deep as above but good.

Also have you read "Blink" a very popular book recently exploring the fact that people who are very successful tend to make decisions immediately without thinking, not so academic, and mainly looking at "Thin Slicing" behaviour in responses but good as well.

I have found time is most interesting during an "accident" or emergency, and paradoxically the opposite "joy" or "love/Peak" experiences.

I know when I have been in Car accident's that my perception of time was altered drastically and immediately, its almost like "ninja" mode :-) or Yoda like, and it does appear and feel that all consciousness is focused on immediate input only. With the limited experience I have of this level of practice, it is the closest event or "awareness" to deep meditation timelessness. However you have the love feeling and relaxed consciousness not "tight", whilst also being totally in the "now" accident like, but with no fear or accident!

Most I feel have experienced time "slowing" down when in great danger.

Then we have the mundane "love" experience, first date and all that, holidays, great times well time seems to speed up, in all of this of course I mean our perception, not time itself!

When you fall in love and a day goes by in minutes.

Of interest too is the recent phenomenon of mass "time speeding up" meme that is around at the moment, the whole 2012 thing and Calendar, and also the predictions by lots of traditional native people’s prophecies of this change in time now.

This subject reminds me of Keats and his wonderful poem "to see a world/universe in a grain of sand". Personally I think that this fractal nature to reality, the fact that everything is made of one "stuff" as such at a very deep quantum level, non locality etc, so,
Therefore indeed you are correct Time probably is of our own making, or more correctly which bits of time we focus on are what we experience, but are not the true nature of it.


Kind Regards,

Elf.

Lokito and Mischievous Elf, thank you very much for your posts!

It's very, VERY late where I am right now (and I wasn't expecting any replies in this thread), so I just wanted to let you know I'll be back with a comment or two later.

Meanwhile, I hope, many others will enjoy your posts.

reply to post by Vanitas


Ah and it is a beautiful quote. By ceasing thought we are simply living in the Now. The present is all that exists.

I have never stopped time per say. I have had prophetic visions correlating with personal events. I am a strong believer in fate. In fact I'd go so far as to say I know fate exists based on my own experiences. At least I have learned that my visions cannot be stopped. That is the future. You cannot keep it from happening.

As for slowing down time. I have done that, as many have in cases such as an adrenaline rush or extreme panic. What is going on here is the mind is actually accelerating to receive information at an alarming rate. Or at least alarming by basic human standards. It's hard to exactly stop time. You'd have to identify what time is and for anyone who has done that. Time truly does not exist.

Originally posted by RagenCajun
It's hard to exactly stop time. You'd have to identify what time is and for anyone who has done that. Time truly does not exist.

time is life. movement. fluctuation. progression. dynamic. from a non-perspective, time exists and always is working harmoniously and allowing our universe to be. from individual perspectives, to stop time would be to live eternally in a single slice of perception. this can be done since the mind's perception can be manipulated. the bodily/planetary/universal stopping of time would mean nothing. it'd be like if someone put our universe/lives on pause, waited 30 minutes, and then pressed play. would we have any idea that time just stopped? our perception would have remained a seamless and unaltered juicy sequence of life. the only perception of the stopping of time would have to be from a third-person viewer that's looking down on our universe, that's totally separate and unaffected.

to stop physical time would make you a deity.
to stop mental time would make you a master of mind, which would be the first step towards enlightenment.

You seriously need to check out this thread.
It freaks me out. These experiments are blowing my mind. Time dilation is pretty cool to play around with.

i can't stop thinking about it now...

if one can master their own mind, is it possible than to control one's own physical body time as well? not stopping all of time...just the time connected to one's own corporeal body.

it's weird to think about. if you could stop your physical time [for say...an hour], to everyone else you would be motionless and dead. your body would probably crumple to the floor and you would have no heart-beat or breathe. all bodily functions would cease, and the world would declare your death.

would you instantly find yourself in an ambulance or under a sheet, full of life, an hour later, right after you stopped your physical body time?

or would you just die? since your body would be without heart-beat for an hour...no blood circulating to the brain.

to live would mean a soul or some sort of compartmentalized facet of existence, like consciousness, transporting or carrying you to your body an hour later to merge with it. transcendence over flesh.

to die would mean pretty much nothing, except for the fact that you can stop your own time. but you wouldn't really have time to be aware that you are stopping time...now would ya.

*edited for 'not-so-witty' ending.

[edit on 3-10-2008 by banyan]

reply to post by LoKito


Your experiences are remarkably similar to mine, LoKito.

I haven't been using a watch since... I don't even know when.
I do have a clock on my PC, obviously; and I do have a cell phone, but I use it as rarely as possible.
(I've been told I can "afford" dispensing with clocks, because I am "lucky" in that I don't work regular hours. The truth is the opposite, of course: I chose not to work regular hours because I dislike being bound by the usual time-keeping - but that's fodder for another thread.)

And I couldn't agree more with what you're saying about "deadlines".
Whenever I want to do some work - serious work, my best quality work - I try to find that elusive spot that leads into the zone of "timelessnes".
To people who don't know this feeling - or, more likely, simply don't recognise it in this particular description - this may sound as fluff, pretty words (probably made up by a "deadbeat" ).

But it is a real phenomenon. I don't mean to say that time somehow stops - far from it - it's probably just that the creative processes are accelerated by the lack of fear-induced pressure.

Having said that... in the past few years, I've noticed that writing (even simple communication, like this message) has become, to me, a frightfully time-consuming activity. So much so that I - paradoxically - now fear even starting the writing/thinking process because I just know that the next time I do check the clock a totally disproportionate amount of time will have passed. (Like, I have the impression that I've been writing for 3/4 of an hour - and it turns out that three or four have passed.)
What's frightful about this is that nothing in my habits or thinking/working process feels changed.

Only, it must have changed.

Anyway, thank you for reminding me (by your example) that I am - or once was - on the right path.

reply to post by MischeviousElf



I knew, of course - it's common knowledge, after all - that elves were mischievous. But I didn't anticipate them being so kind.

That IS an amazing read - thank you very much! - and I urge everyone to follow the link and bookmark it.

And personally I totally agree that "everything is made of one 'stuff' as such at a very deep quantum level". In fact, I cannot see how it could be any other way.
We are call caught - nay, made within - an all-encompassing net of information exchange and patterns, woven out of the same "stuff".

That net - and that's how I spontaneously feel it (because I think and process that type of information in, let's call it, "haptic imagery", for lack of a better term - or my ignorance of a better term ) - or, more accurately, one's awareness of, and conscious functioning ("intending") within, that net, is, in my experience THE place, probably the only place, where any attempts to alter our everyday experience of "reality" might, and DO, work.
And that, of course, includes, our individual relationship to TIME.

I feel my thoughts trickling away, following a train of associations that just branched out of this unilateral (at the moment) conversation, so I'd better close for now. I'll be back, anyway; it's just a a matter of time.

Thanks again.
This was a most invigorating read!














[edit on 3-10-2008 by Vanitas]

reply to post by RagenCajun


Thanks for actually coming to this thread.

I know I would like to hear more about your experiences.
(But I do understand if you'd rather not describe them in more detail.)

One thing is certain: based on my own experiences, which was later confirmed by certain ancient texts from different cultural/religious traditions, I cannot help but agree that time is not the inexorably winning Goliath that it seems. We DO have "a say" in how fast or slow it is perceived to be - at least to some degree.
And in the end, I suspect, we step directly into our timeless SELVES.

reply to post by cbass


Oh, I know the thread - that's where I "recruited" RagenCajun.
It's a very good one.

You and others who are attracted by this topic might also be interested in the "Time slips" and the "Glitch in the matrix" threads.
Or indeed in my own very first (I think) thread: "Time - looking back?"

reply to post by banyan


Whoa - too many thoughts, too little time, Banyan!
And, isn't it funny, even though I can't stop thinking about it either - so that makes at least two of us - we don't seem to be reaching conclusions any faster.
(Or do we? I suspect Rupert Sheldrake would disagree. :-))

Thanks for such an abundant serving of ideas.
I'll be back.






[edit on 3-10-2008 by Vanitas]

reply to post by Vanitas


I would recommend the movie, "Peaceful Warrior". It is about exactly what you are writing. Timelessness. The moment. As an added bonus, it has about the most amazing old man ever in it and his name is Socrates.

reply to post by Torsten


Thanks for the tip, Torsten.

As a cinemaphile (or an EX-cinemaphile*), I am particularly glad to see films other than the ubiquitous "Matrix" ( ) mentioned.

I think cinema - being the foremost and most influential form of storytelling of this era - had a great potential as a global conscience-transforming force.

Furthermore, I have noticed (as have others, I am sure) that films are/were often a sort of "prefiguration" of events to come. It's as if they somehow catch the Zeitgeist before it crystallises into externally visible events.
In that sense, films like this one can be a source of cautious optimism.


* The EX comes from the fact that, along with reading books and writing, films too have become a sort of a "black hole" for me. Their nominal time of duration means nothing. If I see a film that is any good at all, I am sucked into a rabbit hole, and it takes HOURS before I can return to any kind of "normal" schedule.




[edit on 4-10-2008 by Vanitas]

If I may, I would like to add a little "fuel" to this thread by asking anyone who is more knowledgeable about Angelus Silesius than I am about the actual "techniques" (I know, the term is way too utilitarian) he may have used to arrive at the conclusions he made. (If you read his texts - or just their titles - you'll notice he was extremely concerned with the problem of time.)

Or was it "just" a speculative insight on his part?

Needless to say, comments about other peoples' and cultures' techniques are also welcome. (After all, I only used his name and his poem because he nailed it in such a concise and poetic way.)






[edit on 4-10-2008 by Vanitas]

I like the ideas here but if i'm making time, can I stop?