RE: LET'S PLAY - A MENTAL GAME OF TIME PERCEPTION
I always love how you like to paint a broader picture and question understandings we are accustomed to ;) Your writings usually makes my thought wander around. Sometimes it goes in a totally different direction than what the post was about.
So, I will just share what I was thinking about while reading your piece. Just a tiny reflection of my thoughts and feelings :)
I like the way we perceive time right now :) Recently I've been terrified by time and aging. Maybe because I am not longer in my comfortable (and young) 20s and my husband turned 34 just yesterday. He was 22 when we met and I just have no idea where did the time go? 12 years of knowing him feel like 12 seconds. However, would I like to slow time down? I guess, I wouldn't if it means that I would freeze in a single moment. Realizing that time is moving and the clock is ticking is a great challenge but as every challenge, it could make your life even more valuable.
I guess I see and agree with your point of us, humans, jumping to the conclusion that our perception of time is a valid and a true perception of time. But the universe has its own timing that our minds hardly assimilate (or at least my mind). So, we tend to think that what we observe now is the entire picture, while it is just a small piece of the big picture.
Personally, I try to find some kind of a balance between being open for possibilities and being reasonable. Sometimes strange things happen and we are not able to explain it thoroughly. Just the other day my husband (a full-time skeptic) froze when we were walking in the park. He said that the day before out of the sudden he remembered a song from a single episode of Star Trek that he hasn't listened for a decade. Then, while we were walking he heard the same song from some other people who were listening to it on their phone. I joked that after trying to meditate every morning for a month now he has finally made a connection to the Mother Ship above us :D
Who knows, this could be exactly the case. Maybe we have some inner sense of future and past time or maybe as Jung says we are connected through our subconsciousness. Who knows, we cannot confirm, neither deny that possibility.
There is some crazy experiments on randomness going on for a decade now. It turns out that maybe there is a chance that human actions or minds could bend randomness. Check it here and here.
Going back to where I started. I think that our science still has a very narrow look at human existence and the universe as a whole. However, we all generalize what we know and try to make some kind of an explanation. Like the minute people you described. But this explanation is wrong because it doesn't have the big picture. Back to death, aging and calendars. I hope we got it all wrong with science and there is much more than just living, breeding, dying and turning into ... nothing.
That was me reflecting on your article in something close to a free write :)
Thank you for this great comment, which once again puts a scoop on top of how one can feel about one's own temporality. To consider the unfrozen moment in life as valuable and to accept the challenge of being neither backwards nor forwards is probably one of the most difficult trainings in human existence. The present is all we have and in skillful spontaneity to achieve an ease of being, a very beautiful anchor. When one has such a long relationship with one's partner as you and your husband, it is beautiful to see how one can tune into one another and resonate with the other without tying him to oneself and without feeling alone in indifferent independence. The other does not seem to be the same anymore and yet he is. But you never see through the other's reality and a piece of strangeness remains, but that's exactly what makes it interesting, isn't it? To invent imaginative models in time lapse or time stretcher and in this contrast to gain a realization that reality are also the stories we weave around each other, an almost tangible thing and then again not.
The coincidences, the song you're talking about and your husband practicing meditation and now having contact with the mother ship, made me smile very much. I believe that the mothership is not extraterrestrial but intraterrestrial. But I do not exclude anything.
Very interesting, the two links you gave me. I looked at it and find the experiment very exciting and promising. Here again the phenomenon of the influencing observer is expressed.
The bigger we draw the picture, the bigger it seems to become. In its infinity we then lose ourselves and hopefully come to ourselves in humility. Only yesterday I listened to Terence McKenna who said: How can we understand singularity (the Big Bang) as coming out of nowhere? How can one describe something so amazing as meaningless? It is probably the greatest of all events. He said that science allows us this one miracle and from there it wants to explain everything without such miraculous influences. The physicists probably come closest to it, because they have to admit that quantum physics has made matter into a mysterious thing again, after everything had fitted so logically before.