QUESTION:
A question from J.W. She writes: "I have heard that as one ages, time seems to go faster and faster. I find this true for myself to some extent. What are the dynamics of this phenomenon?"
COSMIC AWARENESS:
This Awareness indicates that it has to do with the concept of relativity; that relativity is essentially a matter of comparison and when an entity has lived three years and weeks go by, those weeks seem to be quite long, compared to the entity who has lived 60 years and experiences weeks passing.
This Awareness indicates that if you are three years old, and a year goes by, the comparison of that year to your lifetime is one-fourth as long as you have lived. If a year goes by when you are 60 years of age, it is 1/60th as long as you have lived. Therefore, as you age and grow older and older, a year passes more quickly in comparison to your lifelong existence, and if seems to go faster because you are comparing it to something that is a basic part of part of your existence: the length of time in which you have existed.
This Awareness indicates time is perceived either by synchronized measured instruments, or by feeling. If it is perceived by an instrument, entities will see that it goes about the same speed all the time, so that a year takes so many days, each day takes so many seconds to pass, and there is no speeding up or slowing down of these time periods.
But if time is perceived by feeling, then entities will see that it is perceived in such a way that seems to go slow when you are anxious for something to occur, when you are looking forward to its passage, and seems to go very quickly when you want it to slow down, when you want to stop time and to savor the significance of a moment.
Thus, when Christmas for a child is still two weeks away, the child sees time as creeping by, inch by inch, very slowly, but when two weeks is given as the time before a death row inmate is to be executed, each day seems to fly by so quickly, and the entity would like to stop the clock, to slow things down, but cannot do so, for time relentlessly flies toward that fatal date.
It is a matter of perception. If you are anxious to get on with time, it goes slow. If you wish it to stop, to wait, it speeds up. It is a matter of subjectivity.
BRAIN BIOLOGY AND TIME SPEEDING UP (More on the Effects of Duration)
FOLLOW-UP QUESTION:
So, does that mean, Awareness, that there is nothing biologically occurring within the brain that makes time appear to speed up with age?
COSMIC AWARENESS:
This Awareness indicates that there can be biological things occurring within the brain that effects the subjectivity of the brain so that the entity perceives time as going faster or slowly, but whatever occurs in the brain of an entity does not speed up time or slow town time in behalf of the rest of humanity or other observing beings or of any mechanical measurement.
This Awareness indicates that the ultimate measure of time as perceived and used by science has to do with the speed of light. There has been some scientific evidence to suggest that time is speeding up in regard to the speed of light. Again, it is a comparison. If light in its speed through the universe slows down even a fraction of a matter of a few miles per second, then, in a scientific sense, time would appear to be speeding up.
This Awareness indicates that it is simply a matter of comparison; how you measure time. This Awareness indicates if you step outside the realm of comparison and step into consciousness, where there is no comparison, then of course, time ceases to exist, because you cannot compare one moment to the next. If you are simply in the void, in the space between all things; if you have no lineage in comparison to time here and time there, or this duration in connection with another duration; if you are simply in the void of pure consciousness, then time does not exist. There is no such thing as time. You are only Here and Now, and you don’t even know what Now is, or how long Now is, or how brief Now is. Now, in pure consciousness, can mean a billion or ten billion years, or it can mean a billionth of a second, or ten billionths of a second or less. It means nothing. It is a matter of subjectivity and it is a matter of whether you can compare it mentally.
In other words, time exists only in connection with a mind that makes comparisons, and if there are no minds to compare, then time would not exist in a real sense. It is when the mind compares these actions to one another that a duration is recognized, and that recognition of a duration allows the mind to create the concept of time.
AS A HUMAN COLLECTIVE: IS TIME SPEEDING UP?
FOLLOW-UP QUESTION:
Awareness, you mentioned that individually, we subjectively perceive time. Do we also as a human collective perceive time, and is that perception of time speeding up?
COSMIC AWARENESS:
This Awareness indicates that indeed this is correct; that the main reason why time appears collectively to be speeding up is because your moments are saturated with more and more incidents. When one is in a situation in which there is nothing happening; for example, suppose you were at a service station on a highway, where no vehicles travel, and you spend your day waiting for a car to come to stop and seek gasoline, or some food, and perhaps cars only come by once every two weeks or somewhere in that average; you would feel that time really goes slow. You would feel that nothing is happening. There is nothing occurring and you can watch the hours of the clock and they drag by every day with nothing of any significance occurring. Each minute can seem to be an eternity.
This Awareness indicates that visualize yourself now, wherein the highway that took the traffic elsewhere has been disrupted and an accident has created an explosion and taken out several lanes of traffic, and all that superhighway traffic is now detoured to go around, and it must go around on the road on which your service station sits. Now you are flooded with traffic. It is bumper to bumper, minute after minute, one car after another coming in, getting gas and food, people talking to you, hurrying back into their vehicles and back onto the highway, everyone honking, everyone shouting, every one expecting fast service. Now things seem to go so much faster. You don’t have to look at the clock, you don’t have time to wonder what time it is. You just try to keep up with the demands placed upon you.
This Awareness indicates that as more and more demands are put within each moment, time seems to speed up, because you have so little opportunity to look at time. You spend all of your moments jumping from one thing to another, trying to keep everything together, trying to keep things from falling apart. Thus, the day goes by, you are tired, you feel that the demands have been extremely taxing, and it may seem, when you look back, to have been a long day, but at the same time, you also recognize that you can’t remember the whole day. Things occurred, you remember high points, or certain incidents, but you don’t recall what happened throughout the entire day.
And if it occurs again the next day, and the next, and the next, before long you are so saturated with so much input, you don’t know what happened from one day to the next. You can’t remember when that large truck with all the horses came in, if it was yesterday or if it was the day before, or the day before that, because there was so much input on all of those days and you are so saturated that it seems that time just flew by.
You can’t keep it altogether in your consciousness, and if weeks pass in this scenario, or months pass, you may find that after several years of this, when you stop to realize how long you have worked here, have lived here, have repeated these daily scenarios, you will see that time has flown by, even though you were simply filled from morning to night each day with input that you could not digest, could not handle, could not totally grasp, and time flies when you are extremely busy.
If you are dreading the work, and concerned about getting away from it, time will tend to slow down for you, as long as you concentrate on time and how long you have to continue this work. As long as you focus on getting off work, time will slow down. This Awareness indicates however, if you really get into the flow of the action, then time tends to speed up, and you forget time altogether.
This Awareness indicates that time appears to go slowest when you are bored and have nothing to do. It appears to go fastest when you are busy and have so much to do and are concerned about getting it done.
FOLLOW-UP QUESTION:
So time is very much a perceived thing, and therefore, we can control our perception of time, and therefore control time. Is that right?
COSMIC AWARENESS:
This is in the affirmative, although the concept of controlling time by altering your perceptions would be that which would require an enormous amount of understanding and discipline. This Awareness indicates even though you may perceive the nature of time to control it; to make it stop, to make it go, would require a certain amount of deep understanding, as well as strong discipline in controlling your consciousness.
This Awareness indicates that if you are trying to control time with your mind, and you want time to speed up, you would have some difficulty without certain mental discipline in speeding time, while still thinking about the movement of time, because when you are thinking about time, it tends to be there all the time, to be there in your consciousness, and this would make it drag rather than go faster, unless you were trying to slow down time. Then of course, it would go faster, the more you think of it. In other words, your emotions play a good part in the speed or slowing of time. The entity who can hardly contain herself, waiting for the return of her lover, will experience time as moving very slowly. The entity who dreads the dental appointment or the court trial, may find time going exceedingly fast toward that date. The stronger your emotions in regard to wanting time to speed or slow, the more it effects that speed or slowness of time.
