Techniques for Influencing Time

[william kent]

"For time unbroken by looks to the clock the only sound was the chafing of an emery board, and the clock itself, as though seizing the advantage, seemed to accomplish its round with surreptitious leaps forward, knocking whole wedges at once from what remained of the hour."

-- William Gaddis, J R

We can get into whether it's really time being influenced or simply our experience of time, but what have you found, if anything, which speeds up, slows down or otherwise alters time in some way?

Inactivity strikes me as one method of slowing it down. An hour can feel like several if you just sit and do nothing. The length and pacing of a film or piece of music can have a similar effect; I remember watching Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising and thinking it must have been on for hours before learning it was only a 90-odd-minute film. Drugs are obviously another one.

There's a Richard Powers (The Overstory) interview I've posted on here before where he talks about humans experiencing time as rapid movements against stable backgrounds which, whether or not it's true, makes a lot of sense to me and would explain why inactivity and a lack of stimulation appears to slow it,

We are phenomenally bad at experiencing, estimating, and conceiving of time. Our brains are shaped to pay attention to rapid movements against stable backgrounds, and we’re almost blind to the slower, broader background drift. The technologies that we have built to defeat time – writing and recording and photographing and filming – can impair our memory (as Socrates feared) and collapse us even more densely into what psychologists call the “specious present,” which seems to get shorter all the time. Plants’ memory and sense of time is utterly alien to us. It’s almost impossible for a person to wrap her head around the idea that there are bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of California that have been slowly dying since before humans invented writing.

Paradoxically, our drive to build machines that perform billions of calculations a second has enabled us, for the first time, to begin to model events on scales of time far outside our own and to translate and visualize the changes that take place in ecosystems at the speed of trees. That’s why Silicon Valley also plays an important a role in The Overstory. If there’s any hope of human survival, it probably lies in our “descendants” teaching us to see, if not to feel, the scales of time our “ancestors” operate in.

 

[woops]

have you heard of this one @version, think it was quite popular in its day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_with_Time

 

[william kent]

I haven't. Any good?

 

[william kent]

For anyone who's seriously meditated, did you feel it altered time or that you ended up outside of time altogether? What does DMT do to time?

 

[catalog]

pandemic definitely made time weird, everyone says so. when you go on holiday sometimes you can lose sense of time. same if you go to a good club.

 

[william kent]

I've always been fascinated by stories of people in Alaska losing track of time and mowing their lawns and stuff at 1am due to the two months or so of constant daylight.

 

[william kent]

"Rachel was looking into the mirror at an angle of 45°, and so had a view of the face turned toward the room and the face on the other side, reflected in the mirror; here were time and reverse-time, co-existing, cancelling one another exactly out. Were there many such reference points, scattered through the world, perhaps only at nodes like this room which housed a transient population of the imperfect, the dissatisfied [...]"

 

[william kent]

That thing on Bergsonian time I've pulled up a few times really made an impression on me,

The conventional, linear depiction of time — at least as old as Newton, with philosophical roots reaching as far back as Aristotle — presents it as a straight line in which each passing moment recedes behind the present, just as each approaching moment arrives from a future stretched out in front of us along the time-line we are travelling. It is surprising how pervasive and apparently convincing this depiction is at first blush — given that it is simply not true to our experience of time at all. For the past exists for us as a whole, not strung out along a line: to retrieve a past moment from six weeks ago, we don’t have to rewind the entire chain of events to get there: we jump immediately to the last days of summer. And we can jump from there to any other past moments, without having to trace out or locate those moments on any linear time-lines. The past is, if you will, omni-present to itself. At least that’s the way it seems to us. But then the question becomes: is this true only of our experience of the past? — or is it true of the past itself?

[…]

In other words, how do you get from phenomenology (or how things appear) to ontology and how things actually are? To be sure, past events co-exist in memory — we can scan the past and access this event or jump to that event, without having to replay the entire succession of moments between them. But how do we get from this psychological experience/recollection of the past to the notion that past events themselves co-exist ontologically? This is where Deleuze draws on Henri Bergson. The past for Bergson is not the repository of a linear series of passing presents, but an a-temporal bloc where each and every past event co-exists with all the others. For Bergson, it is not just in memory that one event can be connected with any other, irrespective of their respective places on a time-line: in the Bergsonian past, past events themselves co-exist, inhabiting a realm that Bergson calls the virtual: the past as a virtual whole […] (or as a bloc) is the condition for actual events to take place in the present, just as — for example — the language-system as a virtual whole (or what the structuralists call a structure, langue) is the condition for actual speech acts to take place in the present. This view of the past as a condition for the actualization of the present connects with the privileging of becoming over being that Deleuze adopts from Friedrich Nietzsche. Being is merely a momentary, subsidiary, and largely illusory suspension (or “contraction”) of becoming, according to this view; becoming is always primary and fundamental. This means not merely that each and every thing has a history — rather, each and every thing simply is its history: apparent being is always the temporary but actual culmination or expression of real becoming; it is the present actualization of antecedent conditions contained in the virtual past. In the terminology of A Thousand Plateaus, the process of actualization is called “stratification.”

-- Excerpt From: Eugene W. Holland. “Deleuze and Guattaris: A Thousand Plateaus.” iBooks.

 

[william kent]

 

[william kent]

The clocks go back at 2am.

 

[woops]

i had a normal sense of time on DMT. i knew who i was and where i was. the effect was strongly visual and narrative. also it affected the voice talking in my head. once in particular it started speaking words out of some old kid's story which compounded the impression of a story being told somewhere, in some ideal realm. on that same trip i saw clearly that a member of this forum accompanying me was half tree and half druid.

 

[woops]

haven't read that book though @version. i remember they had a copy in secondary school library. @constant escape that means high school.

 

[Leo]

when I use my rowing machine, the first 7-8 minutes are a hurdle, seem to take forever. once you get past the 12-minute mark or so, it seems like you hit 20 minutes in the blink of an eye and time flies after that. I think knowing you've got the full haul in front of you at the beginning makes it drag, it's all about context and perspective.

 

[Leo]

oh, and once you become an old geezer and start staring down the barrel of death, the years fly by.

 

[Murphy]

Time Machines played through a massive sound-system in the middle of a stone circle on mid-winter solstice - you are the time lord and time is a flat circle.

Found time slippage with dissociative clients, not good though. They experience temporal flows differently (at times), or maybe that should be termed disrupted. Lots of info out there. You can get close with sleep deprivation. No surprise it's a torture technique. If you can experiment without drugs, 3/4 days is threshold of sorts.

The whole field of time as a concept/aspect of reality is insane generally.

 

[Mr. Tea]

i had a normal sense of time on DMT. i knew who i was and where i was.

"The strange thing about DMT is that it doesn't affect your 'mind' in the ordinary sense." - T McK

 

[woops]

Yesterday I found I was watching Joe Rogan interview Mike Tyson which included this exchange

"Have you heard of Terrence McKenna?"
"No, tell me 'bout Terrence"

 

[Mr. Tea]

I like to think "Hey bro, you ever done DMT?" is Rogan's default opening gambit with every single guest, even if it could somehow be arranged for him to interview McKenna.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Good example of how David Lynch has his finger on the pulse: Doctor Jacoby in Twin Peaks was deliberately modelled on Terrence McKenna, but by the third series has evolved into an Alex Jones clone:

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Familiar experiences pass more quickly - that's why the return trip seems faster than the trip out.