A student asked me the other day after yoga class if it was possible to have no thoughts. He said that it seemed to him that his mind was always thinking no matter what he was doing. "I can be doing just about anything, even deep meditation, and the subtlest thoughts will be there," he said. I asked him if he had thoughts when he was sleeping without dreaming. "Well," he said, "I don't think so." I then asked him if time seems to go by fast when he is in non-dreaming sleep, and he said it did. I said, "The same is true when a person is under anesthesia. You can be put out and wake up hours later and it seems like no time has passed at all." He nodded and said, "Yes, I see what you mean."
There is no time when there are no thoughts. Time and thoughts are inherently linked like birds and feathers. Once a person is born, time begins because thoughts begin. Thoughts are a product of the mechanical mind and with maturation of the brain thoughts become more and more pervasive. Thinking is an inheritant characteristic of the mind. The way to stop time is to stop thinking. This doesn't mean that the process of aging, decomposition or the expansion of the universe will stop. The processes of aging and movement will continue, but without time. This is so, because time, whether it is clock time or psychological time, is only a concept of the thinking mind.
If you are truly in deep meditation, with no thoughts, there is no time; there can't be. But, if you are meditating on thoughts or the breath or something having to do with the process of thinking, time is relevant and will appear to be present. For example, if you start your meditation at 9:00 AM and focus on breathing for an hour, it will seem like an hour has gone by because it has - in both psychological and clock time. It will be l0:00 AM. But, if you focus on nothing in particular and go into a very deep meditation, one hour will go by very quickly, as though time has stood still. That's because during the deep meditation there is no time. Yet, when you look at the clock, one hour has passed. The clock's hands continue to move even when there is no time.
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I have experienced no thought states in meditation along with time. I have never experienced any no thought states without the transition of time taking place. Even in the no thought states which I experienced there was transition of time, both in those states and time was also passing outside of those states but at a completely different rate of transit.
In states of dreamless sleep, I have found that after such states there was an immediate sense that time had moved on and left me standing in a certain place and that I had to key in and get with it to be functional. That is like an experience where a man is on an escalator and then he jumps into a stationary booth. The escalator keeps moving but the man is now outside of the flow of the escalator’s time. When the man goes back onto the escalator which he must, because he has no choice, he will have to situate himself so that he does not fall down, meaning that he has to key himself into its time.
Now even while he was in the booth there was time there because the materials of the booth and those of his body even were engaged in time even though at a different rate.
Stepping out of time means to step out of one type of time but to do so one has to step into another type of time. One cannot escape from this. Even from the evidence provided by physics, everything, even down in the atoms are under a time constraint. Physics has found no evidence of any location which is not involved in some vibrational speed.
But in my meditations I have not found such a place. In dreamless sleep, I have found that time passed but in a totally different way as it was moving in super-slow motion.
In other dimensions, I have found that time passes in a completely different way but it is still present there in another operational way. In no thought experiences, I found that time is there but it detached from the time I used to know in the various phases of thought production.
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