Greetings all,
Yesterday i heard a speaker (a Jungian psychiatrist)
who said that what we thought we knew about cause
and affect type rationality is up for question now
because
we have to accept we don't understand the basics of
time and space, our context for all C1 experience. Time and space are so elastic that they are not measurable and we don't know why, she said.

She showed us a simple exercise that showed the elastic qualities of time.  She did three timed 2-minute readings:
one from a VHS directions booklet,
a brief biography of a famous person with some emotional effects,  and a guided meditation where we imagined we were in a beach scene she described.
Almost everyone there thought the last one was a small fraction of the length of the first one, and the second one was in-between.

Here at Bruce's we know that once we leave C1, time and space are elastic but I thought it was pretty amazing that now even the rational measuring part of our minds has to admit that too.

Do you think this idea will change peoples' thinking much?

Thanks for any thoughts on that idea, Betson

That isn't exactly new thinking though, its been in the back of our heads for many years in simple things like the saying "A watched pot never boils" and the idea that being busy makes the day go faster. The idea presented may change the thinking of those who's job it is to think these things but I doubt mr joe public will ever really notice.

Well, I for one think there`s something to "Elastic Time" in C1.

I always remember my dad saying to me when I was a lot younger that the older you got, the faster time seemed to go. Not so, I replied. School holidays seemed to last forever and I couldn`t wait for each summer, Christmas, etc., to come round.

Now - how right he was. I am in my sixties and each year seems to last less than the previous one, even though I know an hour now is the same as an hour was all those years ago. If I live to my eighties, or beyond, I`m sure a year will seem like a month or so.

Why do you think the older we become the time seems to pass that much quicker?

roger  :-/

Actually, the truth is an hour right now is not the same length of time as it was 60 years ago.  Time has been speeding up.  The shuman renossance of the earth has simultaneously been increasing as well. I'm guessing they go hand and hand?

Hi Betson

being a book person, you might want to quickly glance at this interview from 1997 I think:

http://www.drredwood.com/interviews/rechtschaffen.shtml

I haven't read the book but I imagine it has some interesting stuff in it. The book review at Amazon doesn't tell much more but you can view the page with a quote from Joseph Campbell abou teternity being here now, which is sort of the same concept. Rechtschaffen is a founder of Omega (the list of founders has gotten shorter over time but he and his wife stay on it).

the Jungian person was speaking of what we know intellectually. it is what we experience on the practical level that makes the difference. How did the experiment (the 2-minute readings) change the way you live?

Roger, when you are 12, one year is 1/12 of your life. When you are 60, one year is 1/60 of your life. (Besides when you are 12, you are in school and possibly wish you weren't!)
When is was about 12, I had a wind-up clock that ticked very loudly. I could guestimate the pasing of one minute by mentally counting to 60 at the pace of that clock ticking, and on occasion I did it without the clock there. I'm not yet 60, but closer to that than to 12, and I think I could learn to count a clock minute again as long as I didn't drink alot of coffee. That part doesn't change.

betson, when I was young, I used to get wicked bad fevers when I got sick. I recall once how having a fever distorted my sense of time. I was supposed to be in bed but I got up for some reason. I recall having a weird experience in which I felt the sequence of events was scrambled, like scrambled eggs. It was as though I experienced things out of order. I think fevers can affect the experience of the space-time continuum. Yeah time and space are elastic. But I couldn't control it. I wouldn't recommend this while driving. No danger for me...I was about 9 then. I don't get bad fevers now (but it sure was trippy way back then when I did).

I side with Lucy.

There is prety good evidence that our ability to sense changes in time is based on the amount of time we have experienced. Thus, you young people (under 40) get more "instants of time" out of a day than old people like me (substantially over 40).

When I was in grad school (last century) I did an experiment to see how this worked. I discovered that there is a rate of mental processing that acts like the "speed of light" (kinda). As we near the maximum rate of awareness, we also tend to distort the time and size of objects that we experience.

It seems that the way we experience the world links distances, the passage of time and the dimensions of objects. That supports the speaker's ideas. However - with respect to mechanical measurements etc, not so. Old machines are about as good as brand new ones. (I gotta remember to tell that to my wife tonight.)

dave

I've noticed the differences in time too.  Yesterday, for example.  For those of us at my workplace, time seemed slow.

I looked up at the clock at what felt like 9:30..was sure that was what it would say, only to discover it was 9:05.  The same thing happened at the end of the day.

One of the ladies was rushing..and I looked at her and said "Its only 2:00."  Her response was "What?  I thought it was going on 3!  It feels later.."

I even had the sensation of "walking in molasses."  So, for us, yesterday's time moved more slowly.  Hope it doesn't pick up the pace today.. ;)

Greetings,

Wow, what fun! :D You all say time is like 'molasses', 'trippy', 'like scrambled eggs', a smaller fraction, etc. I never realized that we 'ate up' time as much as we do.
No, wait, I have heard time was consumed or that a task ate up time. --- We must have an appetite for it somehow!

Dave you say:
"I discovered that there is a rate of mental processing that acts like the "speed of light" (kinda). As we near the maximum rate of awareness, we also tend to distort the time and size of objects that we experience.    It seems that the way we experience the world links distances, the passage of time and the dimensions of objects."
Could you describe that abit more  :)  without having to rewrite your college paper?

Thanks all, Betson

I second Betson's request to Dave.  Your post was intriguing and I'd love to see you expound on it a bit more.  Even if you don't expand on it, thanks for the post.  - Rob

Ummmm - 35 years ago - The experiment was to watch lines move across a computer screen at various rates and to guess the length of the line. A reference was provided. Lines moving quite slowly were generally pretty good, but as the speed increased the guesses become foreshortened - contracted. Eventually things were too fast to perceive properly, channel capacity (entropy rate) was exceeded and everything became chaotic. Taking the portion of the data from the non-chaotic region I got a curve that was a very good fit to the sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) Lorentz contraction. In this case, the speed of light becomes the maximum data transfer rate (bits per sec) and velocity is to corresponding image motion.

Analysis was by casting the data rate in terms of an iterated complexion (or iterated power set if your prefer) which had previously been shown to be a highly acurate model of the rate of the rate of generation of ideas. Then the data set looked like a series of dots more or less linearly ordered, and were tested by least squares analysis to see if the fit was significant, as opposed to a random set. I got a probability of roughly p < .01 as I recall.

Incidently, I don't claim this as a "proof" of anything. It seems to be a good theory, and I'm wiling to suggest that it is valid, but there are other interpretations, including dumb luck. Methodologists (I use Campbell and Stanley when I teach)  would generally call this an "uncontrolled one shot investigation", which means that it suggests a good place to perform a properly controlld experiment.

dave

Thanks, Dave  :D :-[ ;)

OK, I didn't understand your second post, so I'll go back to your first one:
" As we near the maximum rate of awareness, we also tend to distort the time and size of objects that we experience. "

Remember back around the 1980's, there were some sports photos taken and videos rerun in which some super-athletes seemed to show shamanistic shape-shifter or space jumping abilities? Is this related, through their "maximum rate of awareness" in their mental processing?  Could we say then that the major dimensions of time and space become plastic, mold-able, if we can get our awareness (some mental processes) to a maximum rate? To do this would we be asking our Interpretor to practically synchronize with our Observor?

Bets

I don't recall shape shifters, but I see no reason that anything we can logically hook onto our current reality would be impossible. I have experienced images in which it seemed that I could reach over and unfold someone  to get at his internal organs - I declined the experiment, because I wasn't sure about refolding him.

There's a store about a Sufi that comes to mind. He was pursued by the militant fundamentalists of his day and asked a moment to pray before they decapitated him. He went around the corner to the mosque and vanished, neither being found within nor in the surrounding desert.

We also have stories about Christian monks who fly - often to their own embarrasment.

I believe that if we knew how to do it we could simly walk up the sky and transport ourselves to other places. Now THAT is a project the surely guarantees job security! (Of course for a few dollars you can buy a plane ticket right now. How practical these things are remains to be seen.)
PUL
dave

Time is said to be linnear in our physcial reality, but not to exist on the spiritual planes.  Emmanuel Swedenborg, as I recall in his conversations with angels, felt that they did not understand time as we knew it.  In the spiritual world, a soul was going from one state of being to another.  It was more a change of state rather than a linnearly measurable event.  

In our physcial world, time can be measured precisely by machines.   There is,as this quick example showed a subjective component to our conscious awareness of time. We have all experienced this.  "Time flies when you are having fun."  Or the converse, that in suffering, every minute seems interminable.  

I'm not sure what the speaker's point was.  We do have much to learn about quantum mechanics, physics, and the nature of the universe.  Consciousness must be factored into physics at some point.  If we are trying to understand the meaning of our lives, however, pure science and rationality will only take us so far.  Our divine nature, the place of love, grace and the power of thought itself are concepts that can never be fully explained by the rationalility of the scientific method.


M

Right, Doc M,

The speaker's point, which I didn't bring out in my question above, was exactly what you say:
" Consciousness must be factored into physics at some point. "

She was talking to a conventional professional group, not like our community here. Some folks still think linear thinking is their only conscious capacity.

Betson

DocM wrote on Dec 13^th, 2006 at 12:54am:

Our divine nature, the place of love, grace and the power of thought itself are concepts that can never be fully explained by the rationalility of the scientific method. M

I agree that is why the world needs a scientific paradigm that encompasses both a rational approach and an understanding of spirituality.

http://www.synchronizeduniverse.com/

Thanks Dave.  Fascinating experiment - not that I fully comprehend it.  In any case it reminds me of something I read in an article by Bernard Haisch:  

"If you could ride a beam of light as an observer, all of space would shrink to a point, and all of time would collapse to an instant."

Rob

Interesting, Rob - sounds like something Einstein was pondering while riding his bike around Italy.

Dave - I thought he was riding his bike on a beam of light or, maybe, it was in an elevator.  Didn't realize it was Italy.  Have to visit that place sometime.  Rob