Last month, I spent a week in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Northern Carolina for a spiritual retreat. Every day started with a group meditation and the rest of the day involved triad exercises that invited us into our inner worlds. During that week, something extraordinary happened: I forgot about time completely! That is: I didn’t consult my phone to see what time it was, I didn’t feel the day racing me, I didn’t experience my usual scarcity based thoughts (“there isn’t enough time”, “I’m running out of time”, “I need more time”), nor did I feel that very familiar, almost instinctive helplessness toward this formidable force.
The absence of this mental cacophony, and the release of bodily tensions and emotional pressures that accompany it, made this time experience stand out for me. I couldn’t tell if the days were short or long; neither feels correct because time simply wasn’t part of the experience at all. My mind felt unburdened, my heart lighter, and my body fluid and entirely with me. It was a breakthrough: the possibility for me to have a profoundly different relationship with time, away from what I had assumed was inevitable.
In this article, I unpack this time-warping experience from various perspectives. I start by sharing empirical physics findings that shattered my previously held mental views on time. Then, I explore the retreat’s elements, from the air frequency to the neurobiological processes, while drawing parallels with quantum physics experiments and findings. I also reflect on ancient civilizations and their relationship to time, which unexpectedly rekindled memories of my own elders and ancestors in Northern Africa. By the end of this inquiry, I realized that my sincere efforts to comprehend time resulted in an unexpected paradox: the closer I examined time, the more it evaporated underneath my inquiry. It shriveled into a mere mental construct; a conceptual artifact we may have created long ago to structure our lives but forgot it was a simple means to an end. I concluded that feeling time is the issue, and that feeling time is a direct symptom of living life at the surface. Time seems to dissolve entirely the moment I live my life at its depth and in full presence.
Cracking my mind open…
I started this journey by taking the course “Texture of Time” given how urgent my relationship to time feels and the prominent role it plays in my life. Almost immediately, I discovered that time is nothing like what I had assumed. It is not this rigid, linear clock that endlessly ticks forward without waiting for anything or anyone! Instead, time is relative, elastic, and profoundly subjective.
In physics, the phenomenon of time dilation is well-established: clocks slow down based on one’s velocity (Capra, 1975, pp. 99-100). The twin paradox quantifies this further; one brother returns from space younger than the one on earth (Capra, 1975, pp. 101–108). Special relativity revealed long ago that at the speed of light, time vanishes altogether and “no meaning can be attached to ideas of futurity, pastness, and presentness” (Fraser, 1982, p. 31). The life of a photon must be nice because it never regrets its past or worry about its future as such things are not part of its experience. That time is malleable to the point of extinction by physics standards was a true mental breakthrough for me.
That said, time dilation and nullification occur at speeds far beyond my human reach: as a human, I’ll never travel at the speed of light (Fraser, 1982, p. 39). Still, can I influence my relationship with time at everyday human speeds? That remains to be seen but at this early stage of the journey, I can honestly say that these tangible physics findings cracked my mind open and lowered my surprisingly strong psychological defenses. I was now open to other relationship status between time and I.
Dropping into timelessness
At the retreat, most of the day was spent within a compassionate group (typically triad) being witnessed, held, and supported while one of us traveled inward responding to carefully crafted exercises. These exercises encouraged us to revisit some specific memory and examine it from within. With our eyes closed, while breathing deeply, each one of us let the memory unfold through mind, active imagination, bodily sensations, heartfelt emotions, and subtle energies, verbalizing them as they surfaced. Every time it was my turn, I remember being so completely absorbed in the depth of the process that thoughts of time were simply not possible: there was no room for concepts! It felt as if I had seamlessly slipped into a deeper and mysterious dimension of life; one where time did not seem to dwell in and was nowhere to be found.
Past and future embracing the present
I parallel this experience to the model of implicate vs. explicate order of reality (at least metaphorically, but perhaps even literally): the implicate order represents a state of being, fully immersed in one’s inner world, while the explicate order pertains to the outer world of matter, form, and chronological progression (Welch, 2010, p. 49). These could be understood as two coexisting states of life. When we operate in the explicate, linear time state of ordinary life, we inevitably trade off access to the implicate state of timelessness (and vice versa). During the retreat, I seemed to access and be in this implicate dimension where time felt absent, irrelevant, or simply not a feature of the experience.
Further, it appears that slipping into this implicate order may also open the gate to a quantum field of information available from past, present and future times (Welch, 2010, pp. 50–53). During the retreat, revisiting the past occurred effortlessly, which surfaced further remembrances, unique reflections, and produced signs of spontaneous healing: tears, trembling, tingling, energy releases, temperature changes, etc. as if every cell was participating in this organic process of knowing. Witnessing healing in the present by engaging with the past felt nothing short of miraculous.
This is not new in quantum physics as various time delayed choice experiments demonstrated that selections made in the present could determine or alter what is true of the past, suggesting that we “are free to determine what is the case that has been” (Fraser, 1982, p. 82). In other words, even quantum physics has now observed and concluded that one can indeed change the past in the present time as well as change the present by engaging with echoes from the future (Fraser, 1982, pp. 80-86). No longer a hypothesis, nor a metaphor, physics admits that time is a shapeshifter. Via gateways to the implicate order hidden within, one can shape and reshape reality in past, present, and future.
Trying to be with these revelations felt quite unsettling as I tried to reconcile them with my solid, linear everyday experience. To find some grounding, I turn to a neurobiological model that ties quantum physics to concrete biology.
My brain as a set of quantum computers
From a neurobiological perspective, the Penrose–Hameroff model suggests that consciousness arises from quantum activity within the brain’s tubulins; protein units acting like miniature quantum processors capable of entering superposition and undergoing a collapse known as “objective reduction” (Welch, 2010, pp. 17–24). In circumstances where these tubulins are in high coherence, they can orchestrate a collapse and the brain seems to use this collapse to access, process, and integrate information from the quantum field and give rise to new experiences that may not have been possible otherwise. In contrast, when coherence falters (e.g. during stress or illness) the reduction becomes random and un-orchestrated. Instead of an organized cascade of resonant insights, a shallower experience may take place.
In my ordinary daily life, my mind often replays the past or projects into the future. Though I don’t have an EEG to confirm this, I suspect my brain operates at low coherence. In those moments, I speculate that my tubulins take longer to orchestrate a collapse and may not manage to at all. Perhaps my system undergoes a series of default collapses under its own gravitational threshold (Welch, 2010, pp. 18–19).
At the retreat, however, my coherence felt exceptionally high: clear, unfragmented, and intensely present. Under such conditions, tubulins enter superposition much more quickly (Welch, 2010, p. 21, graph D), and quantum collapse becomes continuously orchestrated rather than left to random forces. This may be why the retreat effortlessly surfaced subconscious material, profound insights, new and surprising meanings; access to this quantum field appears to open the gates to all of that and more.
What emerged from the understanding of this neurobiology model was a renewed sense of commitment regarding my daily moments in time. It would be both a gift and a responsibility to myself to attend to my experience as much as possible and access this fantastic field of endless possibilities. Leaving my experience unobserved by being lost in thought feels like a terrible waste. It’s as if I am walking in place, not going anywhere or evolving in any way, constantly wasting potential.
But which quantum collapse?
A modern physics insight that has always boggled my mind is the sheer intensity of activity at the quantum level. Subatomic particles (of which all of me is made of) exist in a ceaseless dynamism: they appear and disappear, revisit the past and ventur into the future, entangle across vast distances while instantaneously exchanging information, etc. (Welch, 2010, pp. 33, 51–53). Yet at the larger scale where we experience our lives through our senses, this dynamism seems to cancel out entirely. This curious dichotomy always puzzled me. In addition, the double-slit experiment suggests that within this choreography, all possibilities coexist until I observe them (welch, 2010, pp. 11–16). And if left unobserved, they remain in superposition: an open field of potentiality where everything is possible. When observed, however, they collapse into one probabilistic outcome (Copenhagen interpretation) or into all outcomes at once (many-worlds interpretation) with my awareness tuned into one particular branch (Carroll, 2010, pp. 147-153).
But which particular probability outcome do I actually collapse? Does my moment-by-moment quantum arrangement influence the specific branch I end up perceiving and living in? In other words, do I impact my reality through my inner frequency?
Frequency in nature and quantum collapse
The atmosphere at the Blue Ridge Mountains carried a unique and unmistakable quality to it: a deep silence and peace seemed to permeate the air. In our parlance, we call this “good vibes”. But why would we use the word “vibration”?
Einstein–Marić’s iconic equation, E = mc², tells us that anything with non-zero mass emits energy, including mountains, trees, people, and even the molecular structure of the air. Planck’s law, E = hf, goes further by linking energy to frequency (Welch, 2010, p. 13); suggesting that everything and everyone is radiating a quantifiable personal frequency. This could explain why the air felt so light in the truest sense: the sum frequency of the environment is what made it so, if only we had instruments sensitive enough to measure it.
Nature, of course, already knows this. The Borneo tree-hole frog sings until it discovers the precise pitch that resonates with the cavity of a tree, turning it into a natural amplifier for its mating call (Welch, n.d., p. 5). This frog did not study quantum physics to understand it has a frequency and so did the tree. It did not take a course on resonance where it knew to align its pitch with that of another body. It seems nature knows and operates in frequencies, and these mountains generously imparted theirs on us at the retreat.
The environment’s collective frequency had a real tangible impact on our very own: our bodies, psyches, thoughts, and even quantum arrangement I suspect. This leads me to believe that my outer and inner environments may conjure a unique collapse of the wave function: I could be collapsing a very specific probability outcome, or, in the many-worlds interpretation, choosing to live in the one outcome I attracted by my frequency of being. If this is so, it would be an empowering conclusion: I co-create my reality by the choices I make of my inner and outer atmospheres.
Hope as I return to (ab)normality
The density of time (Welch, 2010, p. 119) felt strikingly slower at the retreat, and our collective entrainment only cohered us more. By day seven, we were all moving in near–slow motion yet very alert. Thus returning to the so-called normal pace of modern life felt extremely jarring to my nervous systems: the contrast could not have been more dramatic.
Once home I noticed myself slipping back into my old habits of time. My calendar, with its endless meetings and notifications, kept pulling me back up to the familiar surface living I referenced at the beginning of my journey. It felt a bit sad at first, but I knew I now had a rich scientific, philosophical, and experiential framework in which I could deal with it. And that was hopeful.
How did the wise live time?
Reading about Indigenous cultures’ perceptions of time was eye-opening to me. For example, time was considered cyclical for the Maya (Pete, 1994, pp. 204–206) and I could embody living in cyclical time: feeling more natural, grounding, and forgiving. In contrast, embodying our modern linear calendar usually feels like an endless marathon: always running and always forward without any natural inflection point or built-in introspection cycle.
Reading how ancient civilizations moved through time recalled lost memories of mine during our family’s visits to the high Atlas Mountains in Algeria (my ancestral land). These are remote mountain villages and so inhabited mostly by elders; younger generations often leaving these hard conditions for the more comfortable cities. There is no running water, only intermittent electricity, and at best one phone landline per village. People live in mud-brick homes. Doors have no locks and walls have no clocks. Technology is nearly absent except for an old dusty radio with a trembling antenna that captures a handful of channels on a good day.
What always stood out to me during those visits was the uniquely striking silence in the air. Cars stop a mile away because the roads narrow and dissolve into dirt. All one can hear are sounds of nature: the wind, the animals (mainly chickens, cows, and donkeys) and the occasional sweep of a twig broom. The air feels light (just like at the retreat), as if stripped of any hurry. People rise at the sound of their roosters and go by their day as if guided by an inner compass, fully attuned to the land, the surrounding natural elements, their own animals, each another, and the simple task before them. There is no modern-day distractions (notifications, news, phone calls), which creates an unusual fluidity in everything they do. And because many of them are illiterate, their minds seem to be unburdened by the constant thinking and worry that we might consider normal nowadays. The more I watch them, the more I realize they are being as much as doing. Their faces show no tension about past or future, and no confusion about the present. They seem fully immersed, peaceful, at ease. When they speak, they take their time because they have plenty of it. If you were to ask them about time, they would look at you with gentle confusion. “What about it?” I imagine they would reply, puzzled by such a question. Time is not something they live by. In their depth of living, time fades into insignificance.
The nature of reality and time
Throughout this journey, my perception of science’s precision and solidity in explaining and predicting the world has profoundly evolved in me. I began to realize that many of the seemingly concrete and eternal laws of physics were born from highly peculiar conditions (gases trapped in sealed boxes and imaginary cats suspended between life and death). Much of this does not mirror lived experience as we know it. Our equations tell us that photons do not experience time but, in the absence of measurement, one needs to be a photon or ask one to confirm this since our equations at the extreme speed of light may not be precise or even correct. At the same time, we continue to treat the experimenter as irrelevant, and we neatly sidestep the implications of faster-than-light entanglement, as though a century of double-slit experiments had taught us nothing about the inseparability of consciousness and measurement.
All of this reminded me that science is always evolving, always correcting itself, and that we must keep an open mind towards even the most fantastical ideas. And above all, the timeless field I dropped into at the retreat revealed that the fantastical can, in fact, be real: time is indeed a mystery, capable of reversing itself, visiting its cousins (past and future), disappearing into oblivion, and becoming a doorway into a field of immense potentials. I wonder what other unfathomable surprises are awaiting us lest we take a moment away from our busyness and distractions to attend to them. As science plays catch-up, we should decide to play shotgun to a fun and marvelous adventure into the depths of this life and find out.
Befriending time, forgetting time…
Our western world view is heavily mechanistic and highly dissecting in its way of knowing the world. That is why we ended up with time as a cold, unfeeling, ticking machine. If we lived by the knowledge that the world is instead alive and infinitely connected, we may have ended with time as a living inner clock instead: organically malleable, friendly, and living to our own tempo (not vice versa). It’s like the creation of money: we invented it as a means for practical living and thriving, but ended up completely wrapped up in its creation, obsessed with its accumulation, and slowly drained the very life it was supposed to support and enhance in the first place. Time doesn’t exist in the natural world: it’s a concept we devised to organize our lives, only to become ensnared by the schizophrenic quest to preserve, control, save, and kill it all at once.
Through this exploration, the more I tried to understand time and develop a kinder relationship with it, the more it became elusive, intangible, and unimportant. I came to see for myself that time becomes part of the equation of life only when I lived at the surface. The deeper I dove into every moment of life, with my full presence, embodying its depth, and delighting in its mystery the less time becomes of any relevance to me. Just like my elders would say: “Time? What about it?!”
I now conclude that time was never meant to be fully grasped, managed, hoarded, lived, or even felt! It may be an embedded symptom of this life letting us know we are not living the way we were meant to: at the depths. Through a life well lived, time takes care of itself: generally slipping out of the foreground and vanishing altogether from our reality.
References:
- Capra, F. (1975). The Dao of Physics. Shambhala Publications.
- Carroll, S. (2010). From Eternity to Here. Penguin Publishing Group.
- Fraser, J.T. (1982). The Genesis and Evolution of Time. The University of Massachusetts Press.
- Pete, D. (1994). Blackfoot physics. Wider Books.
- Welch, K. (2010). A Fractal Topology of Time. Fox Finding Press.
- Welch, K. (n.d.). Modern physics for the curious. [Unpublished manuscript].