Today Angie, one of Julie’s friends, joined us for dinner. When we were talking afterwards she asked me about my experience of time in the cave. I answered that in the beginning I of course had the sense of time. After a couple of months however it slowly faded. When the mind got more tuned with the atmosphere of the cave and I got more and more into my practice time was no issue anymore. It was like it didn’t exist and then a timeless feeling came. Then it did not matter if it was six months, one year, two years or three years.
We were talking a bit more and I said that the calculation of time is made by man. We have made the system of a clock to measure time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades. We decided how much one second is. Now this is what we think but we also could have called ten seconds as one. It is only a calculation, a game of numbers for measuring. Look at how we measure temperature and see the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius. Someone said this is 30 degrees but another person said it is 86 degrees.
Imagine if we could create our environment without time. If time did not exist, then we can just imagine going 50 years back or forward. Time doesn’t really exist. From my point of view it is a certain state of consciousness when you do not have a feeling of time, when time doesn’t bother you. I believe that only thinking about this can help people to reduce their stress and take away lots of pressure.
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Swami Ji,I just can’t imagine time not existing. I’m sitting here at the computer and in the background I hear the oven timer go off and my cell phone ring. I have, at certain points of my life, considered myself lucky on the rare occasion that I forget what day it is and don’t need to know- I consider myself lucky. But I’ve always known when it is day and night and that things were passing.
Wow. I can’t imagine.
ouch! You know there’s a problem when just the thought of someone not knowing what day it is, causes anxiety inside. I got that reaction when I was reading this and I checked my calendar and then I noticed what I was doing. Crazy!
I read something in a quantum physics blog once stating that for the purposes of each particle… time actually doesn’t exist. that everything is happening right now, and right now is the same time as when there was a “right now” five minutes ago.
I can only imagine what the cave must have been like. When you first went in and were still bound by the concept of time, days must have passed really slowly!– this can be terrifying when you associate so heavily with the passage of time. But after awhile, the dimension of time just disappeared. How peaceful and present this must have felt. Did you have to have Purnendu tell you how long it had been? Were you surprised when the 3years and 108 days was up?
The interesting thing is, that the human brain does actually NOT have a feeling of time. The part of the brain that makes us feel emotions works in a timeless manner. An example: Think back of a moment of pure joy that happened for you yesterday. It can be the first sip of coffee you took, seeing a close friend after a long time, the laugh of your kids… Whatever it is – watch what happens in your body. You will feel this emotion (in our example joy) again. The memory of this moment is timeless for your brain and for your emotions. That also works with situations that happened longer ago. Your brain and its “center of emotions” do not make a difference between “now” and “5 years ago”.
The fact that calculation of time is man made, you can specially feel, when you travel to other countries. Then you often realize that people from different cultures have different concepts of time. “Germans are very punctual, Italians are always late and Mexicans don’t care at all”… Of course, in the end you can’t measure everything by the same yardstick 😉