"Time is but the Stream I Go A-fishing In"

After a few more sessions of sitting, I began to notice something I thought was funny. I don't let myself look at a clock or timer while I'm meditating, doing so would only feed into my thinking about how much longer I have to go. However, there seems to be a pattern. What I guess are the first few minutes of my sitting feel like they take absolutely forever, but after that initial period the rest of it flies by before I have time to realize it.

It made me wonder, why does time go by so much faster when I'm meditating?

The "obvious" answer is that it doesn't. Time is time. I can't speed it up, slow it down, or stop it. The second hand on a clock is consistent. Uniform. Unchanging (unless the battery is dying... hehe). So then what changes? What makes time feel like it goes by faster or slower depending on what's going on? The only answer I can come up with is perception. My perception, to be specific.

We all perceive things differently. Talk to 10 witnesses at the scene of a crime, and they'll all tell you something slightly different. Our mind instinctively takes reality and packages it away in a way that makes the most sense to us. We could think the same color is a different shade, my hot could be your cold, etc. My reality is very personal, and not consistent of all that much reality when you think about it.

Here is the inherent flaw of perception. Any time you filter reality through anything, it's not reality anymore. There have been plenty of days at work when I felt like the shift was ddrraaggggiinngg on to no end, only to have someone else comment on how quickly it was going by.

Usually I find that time seems to go by more quickly when I'm distracted by something. A busy night goes by much faster than a slow one. I can easily get wrapped up in a good movie or playing a game and not realize that hours have gone by. So why does the same thing happen when I meditate? I'm not distracting myself in meditation, actually the opposite. I remove all of the distractions that I can control.

Thoughts, actions, everything "takes up" time. Or rather, numbs us to the passing of time. We don't notice time slipping past us while we're totally engrossed in things. So what happens when you take the thoughts away? We measure time the way we measure everything else, in relation to other things. In that state of deep meditation, when thoughts begin to float away and you're truly able to sit in the moment without floating away with them, do we not notice time passing because we have nothing to base it on? Does it exist at all? Do we exist in it?

Consider my mind thoroughly fucked.


PS: Happy Thanksgiving, to any and all Thanksgiving celebrators out there!