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July 15th, 2009 by Sean Timelessness

I’ve been trancing out before falling asleep lately, in an attempt to get back into OBEs. I haven’t escaped my body yet, but I’ve consistently hit a timeless state of mind.

I can’t pinpoint when I enter the state, but snapping back to reality is very distinct. I wake up with a sense of panic, completely oblivious to how long I’ve been in the state. The time is… lost. There is no sense for how long I’ve been laying there, stuck in this loop of non-awareness.

It’s not like dreaming, because I still have a sense of time while dreaming. My sense might be wrong (a five minute dream can feel like an hour), but the sense is there. Even with deep sleep, when I’m not in R.E.M., I still wake up with a sense of time. It’s not like an OBE, where everything might be blurry, but I still have a sense of time. This trance state is without this sense.

The reason this intrigues me so much is because the next question is: where am I while in this state? Which of course is a leading question. If I can be in a state of non-awareness, is it such a large jump to reason that death is just perpetual non-awareness?

Let’s say I’m a devout religious person who believes in life after death, heaven, hell, etc… I still can’t deny that this non-awareness state exists (because I’ve experienced it). So now I have an experience of non-existence. I have felt what not-existing feels like. How can I sit here and rationalize the existence of life after death when I’ve experienced death after death? Sure, life after death might exist, but what necessity is there for it? Not-existing already exists.

Thoughts?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Consciousness, Belief Systems, Dream Phenomenon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

### 14 Responses to “Timelessness”

1. mrj Says:
   July 16th, 2009 at 1:43 am

   If time is a function of the mind, (not a new idea), and you can “perceive” time when in an OBE state, does that mean that OBE’s are a product of the mind? If so, then it doesn’t explain accounts of people having OBE’s while dead. Unless of course, it is a memory of the experience that could happen before death. But THAT doesn’t explain some accurate perceptions of peoples experience. Of course I could just shove “remove viewing” or “precognition” in there, but I don’t think its a satisfactory answer.

   What are you able to do in this trance? Can you focus on anything?

2. Mr. Tallyman Says:
   July 16th, 2009 at 3:24 am

   I believe it was E. Allen Poe who said, “Sleep, those little slices of death.. oh, how I loathe them..”

   Obviously moping about your mortality won’t get you anywhere but sad, so, try to think of yourself as a point of view within an ongoing system.

   If this seems illogical, imagine where timelessness would take you in the blink of an eye.. one million years? ten billion years? onto ingoogleplex? (one with a hundred zeros)

   I imagine your ego would resurface again at some point..

   If this takes your exact atoms comming together, then it will take a long ass time.. but how would you even know that it took any time?

3. deusxmachina Says:
   July 16th, 2009 at 10:22 pm

   While you may have experienced non-existence, you have yet to experience that state of mind without a state-change back to your normal state. So while staying in a permanent state of non-awareness is technically possible, your experience thus far proves otherwise.

   You may throw a ball into the air 1000 times, and it is quite true that it may not come down the 1001st time. But evidence suggests otherwise. Furthermore, all events in the universe are the product of oscillations (wavefunctions), all derived from periodic behavior. The only exception to this is of course heat death of the universe. But that is only relevant if the universe is a closed system. The universe as we know it may be an oscillator in and of itself. The conversion of order into entropy may be no more permanent than the conversion of potential energy to kinetic energy in a pendulum.

4. deusxmachina Says:
   July 16th, 2009 at 10:26 pm

   Furthermore (I just thought of this as I clicked submit)….

   If you were to quickly glance at a pendulum at its equilibrium position, and witness swinging up to its high energy position, your first thought would be that it just defied entropy. But if you are only looking at it from the time it is at its low point, you have no idea about the history of it beforehand, and thus a typical periodic oscillation looks unnatural.

5. bobelly Says:
   July 19th, 2009 at 12:14 am

   Sean do you genuinely believe you can find the “truth” in this lifetime? How about you just enjoy life as it is?

6. Sean Says:
   July 19th, 2009 at 7:47 am

   @bobelly - Why is it one or the other? I enjoy life, and I search for truth. Will I “finish” in this lifetime? I don’t know if it’s possible to finish. I don’t have anything else going on, so I might as well do my best :-).

7. bobelly Says:
   July 19th, 2009 at 7:00 pm

   True. I think this blog is one-sided. I guess I am only seeing the completely-serious-student-searching-for-truth side of Sean.

8. floslib Says:
   July 20th, 2009 at 1:07 pm

   I’ve had this timeless experience trying to have an OBE as well, though I’ve never actually managed to have one. That said, I’ve found this experience to be very relaxing in hindsight, though quite jarring upon first coming out of it.

   Honestly though, I think there’s a lot to look at here. First, you have to consider that OBE’s happen. Now, it’s possible that people actually leave their body, or it’s possible that they hallucinate, and for the ones who provide accurate descriptions of events or strange environments, have some kind of psychic perception. If this is the case, then it’s more likely we can say this life is it.

   If OBE’s happen as advertised though, I’d say that makes a stronger case for an afterlife. After all, you have a conscious soul/spirit/awareness wandering through the ether with no body if that’s the case. In which case, it’s the timeless feeling with no awareness that’s a product of our mind.

   My slant is that I do believe in an afterlife, but obviously I don’t know any better than anyone else still living.

9. Scott Gil R Says:
   July 26th, 2009 at 7:26 pm

   I’m going to go ahead and add a whole new dimension to this.

   The thing is, the non-existence spent in the trance state is only a perception of the conscious mind after the trance state. You know how there are different sides of the brain that have different functions? The conscious is the rationalized and structural side (present most when awake of course.) If during the trance, things are so timeless and strange, the conscious mind may have a difficult time interpretting that and just sees it as blankness. It’s like having a dream that you can’t fully remember! That memory is in your mind, and you often know that you spent a long time in a dream. But your conscious may only retain fragments or even nothing of it.

   Or let’s also just say your right, and during the trance you experienced non-existence. If someone was to measure your brainwaves, they would still be functioning just in a very low delta-wave state. They only fully stop when you are dead. I’m just saying…death is still a mystery.

10. AngelsFall Says:
    July 28th, 2009 at 2:12 pm

    I’m not sure if i experience the same kind of “timelessness” that you do, Sean, but I experience a similar state that I’m trying to avoid… I feel like I drifted off but I can’t remember thinking about anything, it’s like time was just sapped from my existence and I have no recollection of what happened… but there is always some part of you that is present during the “nonexistence,” at least in my experience. There is still some kind of ego connection between that state and my normal trance state.

    I agree with those who say that the ego will eventually resurface, although I believe in it due to the many worlds hypothesis and offshoots of it rather than just waiting for entropy to spontaneously reverse.

11. f3licks Says:
    July 29th, 2009 at 1:24 am

    I’ve never experienced something as intense as that, but I do have days where I feel like a rock being skipped over water, just touching down for so long, then coming back, and so on and so forth.

12. shantoruk Says:
    July 30th, 2009 at 6:05 pm

    Somebody needs to write a user manual for the brain.

    Chapter 2: funny stuff your brain does…

13. Psikillion Says:
    August 20th, 2009 at 1:24 pm

    IMHO being unaware of something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

    Example: Melissa was born permanently deaf, she is unaware of the existence of sounds. However, she learns in Kindergarten that sounds do in fact exist even though she cannot hear them.

    The only way you could understand what it would be like if something or someone did not exist is to imagine what the world would be like without him/her/it. Melissa would have no problems learning if sounds did not exist.

    You would have to have never been born in order for the world to know what it is like for you to not exist. Even then there is still a problem, YOU DO EXIST. (for emphasis purposes I put caps, and would like to add that I am not yelling or angry at you)

    You are connected with everyone and everything in the universe, and the same goes to everyone and everything else in the universe. You reading this post is affecting other people’s lives even if it is the smallest, most insignificant thing. Some may call it Chaos Theory, I call it family because in some small way all of us are connected.

    Just some thoughts

    ~Psikillion

14. Ravlor Says:
    August 20th, 2009 at 7:30 pm

    When you are in this state, try having a computer or pen and paper in front of you. Or perhaps the best way is to record yourself in this state. There might be something that takes your body. I saw a documentary about a man in Sweden (I am too from Sweden(For the record: Sweden is the land between Norway and Finland)) that claimed he, when he made it so, became “possessed” by a spirit from another dimension. This may sound a bit stupid but it was really interesting and very… I dont know, it felt real. It wasnt this cheesy “Haunted Houses”-thing, it was different. That man had the same sensation you describe; No sense of time at all. So please try it out and contact me if something interesting happend.

    Ravlor

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