> Well I'm glad you broke the ice on that one; I'll share how I got
> my "confirmation" that time does not exist. Well, before that, I had this
> amazing professor, a very unconventional teacher and the best I have ever
> had or ever will, and he also asserted the non-existence of time. It
> wasn't until I read the book "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse, quite possibly
> the most influential book I've ever read, or one of the best and favorite,
> that I really began to consider time as an idea instead of a reality. The
> more I thought about it and tried to look at it differently, the easier it
> became to see time as a human construct that has no relevancy to 'truth'.
> Anyhow...so awhile ago when I was shrooming, I was confronted by the stark
> reality that INDEED, time does not exist. Say what you will, but you can't
> convince me otherwise on this one. Due to that experience, I *know* for
> sure it doesn't.
> I'm sure others on this list could agree that whenever they've been
> in an altered state of mind, commonly intoxicated by alcohol even, and
> tried to pick up a watch and make sense of it, the result is staring at it
> for about 10 min. and then giving up. Time really makes no sense, has no
> *real* impact, and when I had that experience, I discovered that I should
> not even think about time, because everything, and I mean everything always
> did a complete revolution and came back to either the subject of time or
> the book "Siddhartha". It was quite scary, to avoid pondering reality
> because there was none and hours, days, etc. could not be fathomed. Even
> now I can be sitting somewhere and begin to think, "What the hell am I
> doing here?" and it all begins to fall apart again, all-together
> schizophrenic in nature.
> Okay, so I'm losing you now I suppose, but like I think you've
> discussed before, there are many truths, because there are infinite
> perspectives, so nothing is necessarily true, and that means, not
> necessarily real, hence, there's no "reality". Wish I could share the
> other things I discovered with that incident, because they are all relative
> to the topics of this list, like how I invented my very own written
> language, and discovered the root of religion itself, however I find that I
> can't read it anymore. =)
Sounds like you had a really interesting experience. My experience is
different though.
When my partner of the time and I were tripping, we found it an
extremely exhausting experience, and wanted to be reassured, though it was
very interesting, that it would in fact end eventually. My reasoning in
that state was that as long as every time I looked at a clock, it was a
later time, then time was passing, and thus the effects would eventually
wear off, so things were fine. In that condition, I did not have my usual
sense of duration, so was dependent on timepieces for any sense of
proportion. In general, we had a really good and very enlightening time.
The most worrisome moment, though, was when we had ensconced ourselves in
a beanbag in a friend's room, vaguely hoping he would return, and I looked
at the clock, looked at the clock later, and found it had an earlier time.
This had both of us a little scared, until we realized there were two
clocks, a couple minutes off from each other, and I had simply looked at
one and then a moment later at the other.
--Eva