We started out on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired after the thinking of the night, was still in bed. For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents and colors of the world struck me individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought; they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves.

T. E. Lawrence

Everything around me became suddenly vivid. I can remember on the particular street down which I walked the houses were painted an ugly shade of green that I would normally prefer to forget immediately. But by virtue of the vividness of this experience the colors all around me were sharpened and were embedded in my experience and that ugly green still remains in my memory.

Rollo May

Often in the heat and excitement of a game a player's perception and coordination will improve dramatically. At times like this I experience a kind of clarity that I've never seen adequately described. Sometimes, for example, time seems to slow way down, in an uncanny way, as if everyone were moving in slow motion. It seems as if I have all the time in the world.

John Brodie
American football player

Our experience of time is a subjective one. What are the circumstances that can allow things to be experienced in vivid detail or can alter the way time flows? Finding myself in an unfamiliar situation and moments of danger, or shock: both have a special power to wake me up. Anyone who has ever been involved in a road accident speaks about time slowing down and can recall the accident in the most minute detail. People who have been close to death, like a man saved from drowning, speak of having seen their whole life flash before them.

When I'm happy and enjoying myself time moves more quickly than when I'm miserable or bored. Young people live in expectation of the future: old people dwell in recollections of their past. As we age we experience time moving faster and faster: birthdays and Christmases seem to come around more and more quickly. In childhood, a day used to stretch out without a horizon.

We live by clock time and organize time rigidly, creating the anxiety of schedules, deadlines and being 'on time' while ignoring the other tempos of life: the rhythms of the body and the nervous system — the rhythms of breathing, heartbeat, digestion, of eating when hungry and sleeping when tired. We have a biological clock which is upset by a long-distance air trip, through our conventional time-consciousness usually has to be given priority: feeling jet-lagged, we still meet our appointments.

Dreams unfold not according to time but as their story requires. The dream alters time to fit its own purposes; it shifts into recent memory, perhaps into childhood, or even further back to where there are images that are not personal at all but timeless and universal. In the world of dreams categories of 'before' and 'after' lose their distinction; we enter a kind of symbolic, timeless world — the world which Jung designates as the collective world of the archetypes. This has long been recognized: from separate cultures with their own independent histories come the same folk tales and legends of the quest for a hidden treasure, or of the man who enters a subterranean world only to emerge the next day and find that several years have passed.

This kind of jumping in time is not only experienced in dreams: it can happen when I am involved imaginatively in a process of speculation on the future or recollection of the past. Taking only a few minutes, I can recall an experience that took years to live through; or in the time it takes me to drive along a road for a mile, in my imagination I can have been to the other side of the world and ten years into the past. Of course, all this assumes that there is someone present to observe this process. Trying to observe 'now' sometimes minutes can pass during which I'm completely absorbed in something before I realize that time has passed and it's another 'now'.

The past is locked up in the present. Therapists report that when patients allow repressed feelings or events to surface into consciousness, they are not simply recalling past feelings but experiencing those past feelings in the present; the patient's face can even take on the appearance of the child who first witnessed the experience.

Jung reports that some of his patients would dream symbolic images that coincided with external events, the events having the same meaning as their dream. In certain moments the inner and outer worlds, the worlds of mind and matter, are only two facets of the same reality, as if in one world 2 + 2 = 4 and in the other 2 x 2 = 4.

Emotions more than anything blur any gap between physical and psychic reality. Anxiety, in particular, is a time-related disturbance of the emotions: the self-created result of living in a way that places too much emphasis on the future. We start worrying about the future almost as soon as we learn about time. What will I get for Christmas? Will I pass my exams? Ultimately we worry because we can't guarantee the future. What will the world be like for my children? Will my country be safe? So, to 'guarantee peace and security,' we arm ourselves with nuclear weapons thereby increasing our anxiety by speculating on the possible outcome if ever we decide to use them.

Time eludes all attempts at single explanation. Our own concepts of past, present and future are not shared by all cultures as a way of relating to experience: some languages have no such words. Just as children don't live in clock time, so some cultures have not made a sharp distinction, as we do, between outer, material events and inner, psychic ones. Instead, life is viewed as a stream of coexisting patterns of events which cluster together to reflect the quality of any moment. Other cultures have viewed time as flowing from a source like a river of life, or as a kind of cosmic breath.

In looking at the different aspects of time, a useful analogy can be made by comparing time itself with the development of the clock. We can look at: time as a line, time as a circle — or a repeating cycle — and time a much faster cycle, that is as a frequency of energy vibration.

Some of the first clocks, made by the Chinese, consisted of a trail of combustible powder ignited at one end so that it crept forward like a slowly burning fuse. This way of measuring time implies the linear flow of time, just as classical physics used a line to represent the flow of time (Newton's 'arrow of time' moving inexorably out of the past and into the future, together with the three dimensions of geometrical space) as a basis for all measurement and description of physical events.

The circular clock face emphasizes the repetitive nature of time — its repeating cycles. The faces of clocks were made round in imitation of the circular pattern of repetition observed in another rhythm of time (the movement of the sun and stars across the sky). The sundial provided the link between the sun's movements and the face of the clock, since the movement of the sun was measured by a shadow cast on a dial. Until the seventeenth century the sundial was more accurate than any mechanical clock; clocks became accurate only with the development of the toothed gearwheel, used in conjunction with a driving energy source (at first a weight, later a spring) and a regulator of rhythm (a pendulum, or later an electro magnet).

Modern clocks use a faster kind of repetition: the energy (the frequency of vibration) of an electrified quartz crystal. Still more precise are Maser clocks (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) in which time is measured in millimicro-seconds (billionths of a second). None of these clocks could exist without the fundamentally rhythmic nature of energy.

One hot day I was walking from the house across the fields to bathe in the Wisconsin River. About half way a strange and wonderful force began to enter into me and permeate my whole being and filled me with light and power. I stopped and stood still and let the force flow. Although I was aware of my surroundings — the forest and the fields and the hot sun — they were only a background to the inner experience: all anxieties and cares of ordinary life dropped away; at the same time I saw myself and my relations with people quite clearly; I saw the pattern of my life, my organism moving as it were along its appointed path. There was time no longer and an understanding of the whole of life seemed possible for me. It was as if for a few moments I had entered into my real life and the outer life, which had seemed so important and took up all my time, was not the real life but something ephemeral, a sort of cinema film with which I was identified. Only the inner something was eternal — I, the real self of me. I AM.

C. S. Nott

Almost everyone has had the kind of experience when everyday life opens out of the trivial into something more profound and important. Such experiences have been reported by mountain climbers, parachutists, divers and astronauts, by artists and musicians, by mathematicians and scientists, by a mother at the birth of her child, by someone overwhelmed by the beauty and scale of natural life — one who gazes out across an ocean or into a starry sky and discovers a relationship to a world with a much slower tempo than his own.

Although these moments are only 'real' in the instant that they happen, certain memories — my own memories of my grandmother's house, a trip to the seaside, going through the gates to school — still have the same kind of integrity. The memories aren't 'childish,' any more than a memory of where I was this time last year is 'adult.' The impressions stand out with their own clarity not related to my physical age in time, but having the timeless quality of something simply observed and remembered.

There is something about this state when it happens, a certain taste and flavor; not only does the world around me change — not only does my sense of the flow of time change — but I myself am somehow more present and alert. My sense of time is almost identical to my sense of self.

The aim of this book is both to explore the idea that my sense of myself in time has the most profound consequences for me and to suggest that a better sense of my relationship to time can bring some sense into a world that, more often than not, appears to be drifting the wrong way.

The first idea that suggests itself is that there are two kinds of time and that these two kinds of time belong to two entirely different qualities of experience. The ordinary psychological state in which I spend most of my life, we call passing-time; the more vivid experience of myself in a kind of timeless world, we call Being.