Distorted time?

[psygnisfive]

Who's experienced slowing (or speeding) of time while on a psychedelic, and what sort of experience was it like? Were you fully lucid and the world was in slow motion, or were you out of it in another universe for apparent eternity? Were you capable of thinking clearly, or were your thoughts erratic and uncontrollable?

[psygnisfive]

::bump:: Aw cmon, anyone?

[The Salvia Kid]

::bump:: Aw cmon, anyone?

It is a very common exp. Maybe a bit more verbosity on the info your want elucidating? Such as your own exp.

[psygnisfive]

I think I was verbose as it was. lol.

[max_freakout]

Psychedelics can alter time in all kinds of ways, i always find on mushrooms that no matter how long i stare at the clock for, the information it shows me just doesnt mean anything

egodeath is commonly experienced as the end of time, or the end of history

[mike ra]

the distortion of time is one of the reasons i love psychedelics. strong trips are like a true distortion in space time.. they allow me to analyze my past, and see a possible future while in a "sustained present".

I read a bunch of material by this guy -dan winter. his work is very psychedelic, without the use of traditional psychedelic drugs. he would state that the whole concept of time, past/present/future/ is one in the same. time is the compression/decompression of energy. the perception of an altered timeline(energy )is simply a change in the compression ratio of the original energy.

psychedelics have the power to quickly change the ratios of the energy we label time.

[max_freakout]

he would state that the whole concept of time, past/present/future/ is one in the same. .

this is a remarkably common experiential insight from salvia

[psygnisfive]

Benjamin Whorf, in his completely incorrect discussion of Hopi metaphysics as implicitly displayed in the Hopi language, suggests the notion of time as not three fold past/present/future but rather two-fold manifest/unmanifest.

His suggestion is that Hopi metaphysics looks at the past and present as things that are manifest, objective, physical, etc. and the "future" (as well as hopes, desires, thoughts, expectations, etc) as unmanifest, subjective, nonphysical, etc. He discusses things like the notion of simultaneity being meaningless in his hypothetical Hopi metaphysics, because in all situations where something is not present at hand, you always need to travel to perceive it, so theres some aspect in which it's not manifest but rather unmanifest, but once you travel to see it becomes manifest. Or something.

Hopi psychology/metaphysics, I would note, is nothing like this. He just was taken in by the features of an "exotic" language without thinking much about what he was suggesting.

[Pablo Rasta]

is that lifted from something?

but yeah, to weigh in with the rest, absolutely. time dilation is so common on my groups trips it's absurd. here's the story you were asking for:

we had a large, suburban house to ourselves for a weekend, my two friends and I, and i had bought an 8th of quality shrooms and they were stuck with poor mans acid: dxm and dramamine. I made tea and they had handfuls of pills. this completely decked out tripping house with all the lights, posters, xbox360 visualizations on a 50 in. flatscreen (r-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s), incense, candles, etc etc etc. but, being sucked up in the moment i totally forgot to "sip" the tea and ended up gulping down most of the first cup in a minute or so.. so my friends face started boiling green at the start of the second cup..


to skip ahead and to get to the point.. all these individual minutes were whole nights in themselves. you guys know how it goes.. but at one point, we all concretely agreed, we were sure of this more than anything else that night.. we were in dorothy's house from the wizard of oz while in the tornado but instead of kansas, we were in the literal sea of time. the house was turning, rocking, swaying as if on the deck of a small ship in a turbulent ocean. it was an amazing 20 minutes of eternity to believe in the front of your mind that you're floating in the sea of time..

i don't know if anyone has experienced this, i mean its just one of those things you can get in your head while tripping, but it seems real and important at the time.

so, final summation: yes, psychedelics can completely distort your sense of time.. and not just in one direction, it will fast then slow and then freeze and then the night will be over.. it can get creative, time.

[psygnisfive]

Are you ever lucid during the distortions? Or do the general qualities of the drugs strip your lucidity?

If you are lucid, I'd love to see if you can perform mental tasks quicker than normal.

What I'd aim to find out is if the distortion of time is a distortion of ones beliefs about the progression of time (i.e. where you believe things are slowed down or sped up, hence the feeling that they are), or a distortion of ones speed of thought (where things really are slowed down or sped up relative to your cognition).

If it's the latter, where your thinking itself is faster, rather than your belief about time being faster, than it's theoretically possible to problem solve, etc. at greater speeds. Understanding how that might work could be a useful thing in designing future smart drugs, akin to Iain M. Banks' "Quicken" from Excession, etc.

[max_freakout]

I remember reading somewhere that in the Hopi language, there is no past or future tense, just the present tense, and this indicates that they perceive time very differently from the way we do

[VictoriaPandora]

I have heard it said that the Hopi language would be more effective in describing quantum physics(and perhaps even some of the nounless realities some of us on this forum try to describe.)

I once read a study of a tribe that told time backwards, the past was future and future was percieved as past. And somehow it all made sense, but now I can't remember the name of the tribe. I wish I could find that article.

I am convinced time is simply a physical universe construct and is mostly irrelevant when one it functioning outside that dimension.

[The Salvia Kid]

And is it not the Hopi who have a 2012 end time calender?

[druidude]

[QUOTE=max_freakout;8979
egodeath is commonly experienced as the end of time, or the end of history[/QUOTE]
Are their 2 sorts of time the psycological time and time by the sun?

THis is a quote from Krishnamurti which may be a parallel

"Time is thought, time is memory, time is experience, knowledge, and as long as we depend on time, which is divisive, therefore conflict, and to see this, to perceive the actuality of this, then only is there an insight into it."


Maybe the end of psycological time is the end of thought, the end of the "self" then we are one with the wave of the timeless the eternal now.

I also seem to remeber that Mckenna talks about the ego being a recent development in human history maybe some parts of the human race such as the hopi have yet to be dominated by egocentric perception therefore their lack of past and future

[VictoriaPandora]

Nah, the mayans have the calender. Neither the hopi or the maya really predict anything more than a change. the end times are some kind of weird ...
mistranslation.

Time isn't linear, according to...

Time is a way to measure the movement of objects in space in the physical universe. That is all it is.

[psygnisfive]

I remember reading somewhere that in the Hopi language, there is no past or future tense, just the present tense, and this indicates that they perceive time very differently from the way we do

Yeah, totally false. There's a non-future tense and a future tense. Whorf chose to reanalyze these as Manifest and Unmanifest, but it's a matter of terminology. They're used as expected.

I have heard it said that the Hopi language would be more effective in describing quantum physics(and perhaps even some of the nounless realities some of us on this forum try to describe.)

Actually the supposition was that they'd have a better time describing General Relativity because of the way Hopi supposedly treats time, but I haven't read any results of tests.

I once read a study of a tribe that told time backwards, the past was future and future was percieved as past. And somehow it all made sense, but now I can't remember the name of the tribe. I wish I could find that article.

It was probably a reference to analogies they make between time and space. Some people find it remarkable that some languages schematize the future as being "behind" and the past as being "in front of", and then say "but ofcourse, it's more logical, because you can see whats in front of you, just like you can remember the past, so the analogy makes more sense!"

They forget that English often does the same thing: Some that's in front of me is "before me", something that's in the past happened "before now". English analogizes the the future as "in front of" as well, even using the same word: The future that is before us, going forward, etc.

It's no miracle for languages to have different metaphorical uses. They're just metaphors, tho, not some deep insight into native philosophy. For such I suggest you read Mohawk Philosophy Lessons (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000128.html) from Language Log.

[max_freakout]

I am convinced time is simply a physical universe construct and is mostly irrelevant when one it functioning outside that dimension.


It seems to me that going outside of time allows you to look back on it from a higher perspective, and by doing that you get a 'truer' view of it.

What do you think is the connection between your own experience of passing time, and the 'physical universe construct' of time, are they the same thing?

[max_freakout]

Are their 2 sorts of time the psycological time and time by the sun?

There seem to be many types of time imo, the time people experience and the 'idea' of time, and of the history of mankind and of the universe, and also even more abstract notions of time like the time that passes in a dream, and eternity



Maybe the end of psycological time is the end of thought, the end of the "self" then we are one with the wave of the timeless the eternal now.

yes the last thought would probably be something like "this is the last thought" unless you die suddenly.



I also seem to remeber that Mckenna talks about the ego being a recent development in human history maybe some parts of the human race such as the hopi have yet to be dominated by egocentric perception therefore their lack of past and future

You can tell from looking at (for example) a dog that they have some idea of what makes their being and their needs separate from that of others, as Mckenna said, you need at least some ego just to know who's mouth to put food into, so for most mammals it is a basic biological necessity for survival. But you could probably argue that worker ants do not possess an ego of 'their own' (or maybe a minute flickering of one), because all their actions are done in service of the community

so ego can be argued to exist 'in degrees' among different species of animal, and it is perhaps an unanswerable question if plants have an ego or not (many gardeners would insist that they do)


But there seems to be some fundamental difference between the simple bare concept of 'selfhood', just basically 'being a distinct entity', compared to the 'ego' that modern humanity possesses. The human ego is a very much more 'solid' structure than that of animals, because humans uniquely have language, specifically we have a language so complex and rich that it has a concept for itself

This self-reflexivity that is unique to human egos is perhaps what Mckenna is referring to, it marks a major psychological distinction between human beings and all other animals, the fact that our knowledge of language has given us the ability to refer to ourselves

[psygnisfive]

I definitely think there are two, perhaps three kinds of time that we can talk about. The first is the time of physics, the time that we use in equations as a variable for whatever quantity we want to say is changing that results in movement, etc. That's probably the most mysterious of the times, because it's apparently fundamental to the physical universe but it's easily the least understood part of the physical universe.

The second kind of time is the subjective experience of change in the world, the experience of seeing things move fast or slow, which is more a matter of the ratio between how fast our thoughts are progressing vs. the external physical time. If your mind runs faster then obviously things will seem to slow since you're able to think more thoughts in the same space of time. This is probably difficult to do given the physical architecture of the brain, as is, but who knows.

The third kind of time is the "feeling" of time, the time that flies when you're having fun, or drags out forever when we're bored. It's probably a psychological phenomena more than anything, sort of like your awareness of your own thoughts, etc. If it _is_ purely psychological it should take the same physical time to think a thought regardless of the experience in psychological time.

The timelessness of psychedelic experiences, I would guess at first blush, is the third kind, where there's no perception of time, despite perception of movement, etc. The movement all seems to occur quite clearly, but to exist in what feels like an eternal now. It's possible that the removal of the sense of flowing time you might get a more objective perspective on things, hence the "insight" from experiencing an eternal now; once you're not tied to a very strong feeling of time, a feeling that pushes your mind hither and tither, you can grasp at the fundamental behavior of real physical time more clearly. Or so it might be.

[psygnisfive]

You can tell from looking at (for example) a dog that they have some idea of what makes their being and their needs separate from that of others, as Mckenna said, you need at least some ego just to know who's mouth to put food into, so for most mammals it is a basic biological necessity for survival. But you could probably argue that worker ants do not possess an ego of 'their own' (or maybe a minute flickering of one), because all their actions are done in service of the community

I'd be careful about describing that sort of behavior as having an ego of any real sort. I mean, you can program a computer to replace it's own batteries simply by rote, which clearly isn't a sense of ego at all, so we need a better test than simply being able to put energy in the right object. Just the same, you can make a very simple purely non-computational robot that seeks or flees from light, sound, etc. but noone would want to say that it's got a sense of self, and a "desire" for or "fear" of light, source, etc.