Sunday, September 09, 2007

escaping from time





So I wonder what is time? Mainly psychological time. Physical time is lot easier to understand – since its artificially created. Physical time is a function of motion. Time is distance traveled by an object from point A to point B. In a clock 1 second is the distance travelled by the seconds-hand around the circumference of the clock once.

So its easy to understand the artificiality of this. But what about psychological time? It appears to me that there are a few widgets in the head that get activated in the head depending on the energy levels of the organism. One widget could be the “hurry-up” widget which suddenly gives us this feeling of panic that we are running late. Then suddenly there is this awareness of time. Before this widget was activated time did not exist for us. Then there could be “bored” widget. When suddenly once feels that time is not moving. It appears that comes when,say, we are waiting. Waiting for someone, waiting for some boring movie or person to get over. Waiting for a terrible moment to get over. Then again our perception of time gets to fore.
The other experiences of time seem to be variations of the same. When ur having fun and then suddenly when the fun is over a perception of time comes up – how quickly the time has passed. Its almost as if at that moment we compare the physical time elapsed to that if the psychological time – which when we are having fun is absent.

Time other than the physical time seem to not exist. So we try to compare this artificial measure with a measure that is psychological one. For eg if we look at the clock and watch the clock for 5 minutes at different times of the day and at different moods we can see that we do not have an equivalent measure of physical time in terms of psychological time – 5 minutes means so much in my head.
Krishnamurthy I remember him saying that absence of thought is absence of time. So when you are having fun, its pure fun and no thought. Psychological time comes up when there is thought. No thought or watching the movements of time in our internal psyche seems to be the only escape from time.

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