Time is an Illusion
How I came to believe that time is a mental construct
In physics, time is defined by its measurement: Time is what a clock reads. -Wikipedia
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Drum roll...
No.
The answer is no. Unequivocally.
If no one is around to hear it—it does NOT make a sound.
I don't care that the National Science Teachers Association disagrees when Googled, with "If sound is vibrations, then the falling tree certainly does make a sound, because... a recorder with a microphone..."
—Nope, afraid not Teacher’s Association. For that, we need: ...If a man finds a tape recording of the sound of a tree falling and he presses play and hears the sound of the recorded tree falling...
Get it?
Perception is everything.
And time?...is the freakiest perception of all.
When did I realize that time is an illusion? That time cannot exist without a mind to “hear it”?
Thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, in a hospital psych ward.
I was in my twenties and at the end of my rope. Because in THIS world, you’re lucky if you're sane by thirty.
And in my twenties—sane, I was not.
I won't get into the why or how, but for whatever reason, thirty years ago, I asked to be admitted to the third-floor psych ward of my local hospital.
Several months of Prozac had done nothing but escalate my instability (because that's what it does). But to say that three months of my life on the ward is something that I will never forget?—is slightly untrue.
Because memory, any memory, from thirty years ago or even yesterday, is simply not an accurate record of anything.
But here's what I remember anyway:
In desperation, after Prozac and whatever other drugs had failed to fix me, I asked for ECTs. ECTs are psychiatric lingo for shock treatment.
There were stories on the ward. That people getting shock treatment were somehow different. You'd see them getting wheeled around in the early hours. Nurses sneaking them from basement elevators to their rooms. Always kept separate. Never allowed to mingle.
They were banned from afternoon group therapy—and EVERYONE had to attend afternoon group therapy. Which was a tortuous affair: a bald-headed psychiatrist telling us, regardless of which weekday, "You're all a bunch of victims!"
But on this one day, there were these two women—these two ECT-ers who had somehow slipped passed the guards and had sneaked into group.
And boy, they stood out like a sore thumb.
While the depressed bunch of us were wilting under the doctor’s therapeutic put-downs, these two ladies—were laughing.
They were looking at each other. Shrugging. And laughing uncontrollably.
Why? Because they simply didn't get it. How did we get here? What's going on with that bald authoritarian saying "victim this...victim that"?!
They were somehow immune to the entire scene!
And they were making me laugh—and therefore needed to be escorted out. Quickly, by two nurses. To restore the somber mood. Which it did.
I’m getting to the time-is-an-illusion thing, hang on.
So shock treatment goes like this:
In the dark, early hours before morning breakfast call, a team of nurses creeps into your bedroom. (Four beds, four men to a room.) And takes your blood pressure and gives you a small cup of mouthwash.
Next, they take a group of us—five or so—down to the cold basement of the hospital.
Like a chain gang, we sit together, waiting for the double doors to open and for the nurse to appear and ask, "Who's next?"
If I'm next, I hop onto a gurney manned by an anesthesiologist, a nurse or two, and a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist is in charge of the box with the dials.
It is never really a bad experience. I especially enjoy the moment when the anesthesiologist asks me to count down from a hundred when within seconds, the wonderful surge of being sucked into unconsciousness swallows me whole.
Then I wake up—to a nurse asking if I’d like apple juice or (I forget the other option).
It takes a while (several treatments) to realize that you are waking up in the same long room as where the “treatment” took place, just way down at the opposite end.
After the apple juice, a nurse wheels you back to your bedroom, where you rest with hopefully no headache. You don’t have to do anything. And you’re not invited to that afternoon group.
Okay, so TIME.
The treatments are Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A series. Over three or more weeks. In my case, they worked. More than once. (But this is not an endorsement!)
The strange side effect of shock treatments—is that they warp time.
Doctors (experts) tell you that it is called "short-term memory loss". But it is much weirder than that.
You find yourself thanking people for things. Thanking a friend for doing you a favor, let's say. But then you realize (or get told) that you have ALREADY thanked him—a dozen times over.
Because something is happening to time itself.
Days blur into days.
You’ve got this vague sense that you've been doing these treatments…but for how long?…and how many times? And you start shrugging things off.
Like those two laughing women.
Life seems suddenly kind of funny. People are taking you here and there. And you, you're just going along for the ride.
Nothing in time makes sense.
In fact, time has dropped out of the equation. Completely.
And what makes it different from an addict baked on drugs, or someone, I imagine, who has taken a hallucinogenic, shamanic journey, is that this time warp lasts for weeks. Weeks!
The mind, whatever that is (scientists say "the brain”, I say expand your horizons), is the interface by which we are integrated into a sort of TIME MATRIX.
You see, without the mind—time simply doesn't work.
It is the mind.
The mind creates the illusion—of seconds, hours, days, weeks, years.
And the illusion is very flimsy if you think it through. Meaning if you think about it, you realize how dependent the time illusion is on outside counting devices. If there were no clocks, calendars, or days and nights, the whole thing would start to unravel.
Time is the illusion—that we have a past and a present. And that we are heading towards a future.
We all know we should live in the moment, but the pervasive sensation is that we are living on a conveyor belt.
But when you spend weeks on end without a mind to metronome the whole thing, when you’re getting regular zaps that literally short-circuit the constructor (or conductor), the nature of the entire game is revealed.
That without the mind connecting disparate things, time unravels into disarray.
In other words, the mind, or consciousness, comes before…the falling tree.
(Look forward to writing more about my experience and perspective on this matter in future articles.)