How to Slow Down The Passage of Time [Food for the Psychedelic Mind]

Have you ever noticed that the years pass more quickly as you grow older? Have you ever wondered whether you can slow down this accelerating passage of time? I suggest that you can.

Within the final section of The Drug Users Bible I present a chapter titled Food for the Psychedelic Mind. Within this, I document the following proposition.

PSYCHEDEIC MUSINGS: TIME DEFLATION
Many people use trip time to muse about the nature of self-aware consciousness and what is commonly referred to as reality. I am no different and I always make an effort to engage such contemplation, via one thread or another. In the prior segment of this book I provide a number of potential avenues for exploration, chosen more or less at random. One I don’t refer to is time-deflation, upon which I will pontificate here as a further example, as hypothesized via my own deliberations.

The Dictionary of Obscures Sorrows defines a word for the impression that time accelerates as you get older: zenosyne. This is a common manifestation of the human condition. It can be field tested quite easily; for example, by asking a number of randomly selected elderly persons whether their last 10 years appeared to pass more slowly or more quickly than their 10th to 20th years.

Why does this happen? Can I do anything about it? These are questions I have contemplated often, whilst tripping with a number of different psychedelics. I have reached some theoretical and tentative conclusions.

To explore this I would first invite you to consider how your experience of life is constructed. With respect to this I will refer again to Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit model as further developed by Robert Anton Wilson. In a nutshell, you project your reality based upon previously made imprints on your individual psyche. On an ongoing basis your imprints are created via sensory inputs (sights, sounds, etc), with the strongest being made during the imprint vulnerability stages of your life (largely childhood). The overall structure frames your personal interpretation of everything around you, whatever that may be.

At a superficial level I would exemplify this using a simple but well known optical illusion:

[Source: Jastrow, J. (1899), via Wikimedia Commons]​

What do you see in the first instance? Some people see a rabbit and others see a duck; in each case this is based upon instant comparison of immediate sensory input versus existing imprints from earlier life experiences. This idea embraces all five senses, not just vision, and it applies similarly to thought. All this occurs sub-consciously.

Behind the scenes your brain is hallucinating and projecting your conscious reality by virtue of a pattern recognition process (current input / already existing imprints).

Having digested and embedded this concept, let us consider the boundary between conscious and sub-conscious.

I contend that repetition breeds subconscious. If you do something often enough you will stop thinking about it and it will become auto-pilot (subconscious) as its existing imprints strengthen. Driving a car is a good example of this.

I walk to a swimming pool on most evenings, yet I cannot tell you anything particular to last night’s walk. However, if you beam me to Timbuktu for a 1k walk I will recall every sight, sound, and smell from that specific walk long into the future. The latter walk will create a sequence of new imprinting whilst the former walk won’t. In Terence Mckenna’s terms it is perhaps a form of habit v novelty, and I should also cite a potential connection to Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance.

My proposition is that fresh imprints are the reference points around which we build our future perception of past time. A lengthy period of habitual tedium and thus no or little imprinting will retrospectively have passed quickly; having been consigned largely to the subconscious. Conversely, frequent exposure to novel or partially novel events during a period will invoke a commensurate level of new imprinting, forging conscious awareness and influencing longer-term perspective; and will thus, retrospectively, have passed more slowly.

If we take this idea into a six month timeframe and compare a period of habit with a period of regular novelty, the retrospective human perception of the latter will be that the time passed much more slowly than the former. This is certainly how it has always worked out during my own investigation and testing.

Over a lifetime it is inevitable that the older you become the less novelty you will encounter and the more habit you will embrace. This is fundamental to the perceived acceleration of time (zenosyne). It follows from this that the intentional introduction of novel episodes at purposely chosen intervals will decelerate time and will extend your life experience, at least retrospectively. Try it.

It’s also worth pointing out the obvious: unless you are a regular long term psychonaut, psychedelic trips themselves are likely to constitute novel episodes. This too is a phenomenon I have personally observed.

Convinced? Probably not, but I invite you to take some of these ideas and strands and consider them for yourself, perhaps whilst tripping. You might be surprised at where it leads.

Finally, Roman philosopher, Seneca, considered that the worthiest use of time was spending it on philosophy and in particular on itself; vis-à-vis considering time, its properties and how to best use it. Whether or not I am abbreviating him with absolute accuracy, this certainly provides further food for the psychedelic mind.


FOOTNOTE: You can download a free-of-charge copy of the PDF version of the entire book from any of the cloud host links on the following page: DOWNLOAD THE PDF ~ The Drug Users Bible

 

You just reminded of the test paper back in my school days, when one of the questions was, "If you were told that you only had a few hours to live, where would you spend your final hours".
One of my classmates got a detention for his reply. "Just go to school like normal, where every hour feels like an eternity".
60 years later, I can see some logic in his reply.

 

When I was young and lived in an old house in the jungle of the big island of Hawaii--I and my mates lived outside of time. No tv--no radio--no clocks--no newspapers --no mail--no work. Occasional forays to camp on a beach--acid trips now and again--.play cards, garden, relax, visit others that lived simply in the jungle. There were no hours, no days, no months until moving back to civilization on Oahu to replenish my money supply. Get a few more grand roofing and then ---do what I wanted and go where I wanted, be who I wanted, and again ---do what I wanted. That's how I was "lucky" enough to have lived in those wonderful, care free, timeless days.