Thinky Time

Thinky Time: Consciousness as the Sculptor of Time

For this episode we decided that it would be more useful to have two separate supporting blogs, so if you were looking for more on the Doing:Being Spectrum, please visit the Scaling the Spiral: A Field Guide to Doing, Being, and Becoming Blog here.

Time Isn’t Ticking — It’s Breathing

It started as a feeling — a subtle dissonance between the clock and the moment. Something didn’t add up. Entire afternoons would vanish while on autopilot. Then, in a single moment of creative clarity, time would swell open like a lung. What if time wasn’t fixed at all? What if it bent with attention — stretching in awe, dissolving in flow, tightening in boredom? What if time, like breath, followed the rhythm of consciousness?

Thus was born a playful phrase that began to mean something more: Thinky Time. A portal to presence. A state of being where thought meets feeling and time folds in unexpected ways.

Mapping the Modes of Mind

Psychologists might call them System 1 and System 2 — fast and slow thinking. But in lived experience, they’re better felt than named:

In flow, there’s no narrative tracking. No clock ticks. Only the moment unfolding, like the spiral of a fern — alive, precise, and infinite.

The Black Hole Within

As the spiral deepened, a metaphor emerged: awareness as gravity. Just as mass curves spacetime, attention bends time-experience.

We pass through three key zones of consciousness:

We orbit this inner black hole daily. Meditation, dreams, deep creativity — all bring us close. And every time we return, we bring something back. A shift. A trace. A knowing.

Time Tricks the Mind

Time is a storyteller, but not always a reliable one. Consider these well-documented illusions of perception:

• Chronostasis – This is the illusion that the first moment after a sudden eye movement (like glancing at a clock) feels longer than it actually is. You might glance at a clock and swear the second hand froze. Your brain is essentially "backfilling" that blank space with constructed continuity.

• Oddball Effect – When something unexpected or novel appears in a sequence — like a sudden sound or image — it seems to last longer than identical stimuli. A fire alarm, for instance, feels longer than a song lyric, even if both are 3 seconds. The brain stretches time around novelty.

• Kappa Effect – The further apart two visual events are in space, the longer your brain assumes they took in time. For example, two identical flashes spaced apart across a room seem to take longer than the same flashes close together. Space warps time perception.

These tricks are not failures of cognition. They’re hints. Time is constructed, shaped by salience, presence, and meaning. And like all good illusions, they reveal the scaffolding beneath.

From Flies to Planets: How Time Scales

A fly lives in microseconds. A whale moves in oceanic tempo. Children stretch hours into eternities. Elders compress decades into chapters.

We are midpoint mirrors, tracking both ends of the spectrum — fast enough to sense the twitch of thought, slow enough to witness life’s swelling arcs. Neurodivergents often surf these bandwidths more acutely, with hyperfocus, time-blindness, or intuitive perception bridging inner and outer timelines.

Awakening Through Time Dilation

The deeper the presence, the slower the clock seems to move. This is no accident — it’s integration in motion. Healing happens here. Insight happens here. It’s not the ticking that delivers clarity, but the stillness between ticks.

When trauma strikes, time slows. When breakthrough lands, time opens. This is Thinky Time — not idle musing, but the spiral corridor where understanding finds shape.

The Paradox of Thinky Time

You can’t force it. You can’t schedule it. But you can notice it. Honour it. Spiral toward it.

Sometimes you have to think to reach clarity. Other times, clarity thinks you.

“In the spiral of being, time is not a ruler. It’s a mirror — warping itself to show us who we are.”

🧠 Glossary of Terms — Thinky Time Edition

Attention as Record Button – The idea that presence imprints memory. Without conscious awareness, an experience may pass unremembered — like a moment never truly lived.

Black Hole Analogy – A metaphor for time perception through the lens of attention, with waking, hypnagogia, and deep sleep mapped to zones of gravitational pull.

Chronostasis – A perceptual illusion where the first moment after shifting visual focus feels longer than it actually is — often experienced when glancing at a clock and the second hand seems to freeze. It reflects the brain “filling in” the gap between saccades, momentarily suspending time to maintain continuity.

Event Horizon, The (of Consciousness) – The liminal edge-state between waking and sleep, where cognition softens, logic loosens, and symbolic imagery often arises — a fertile threshold for creativity and remembering.

Felt Time – Subjective experience of time, shaped by novelty, focus, and emotional resonance.

Flow – A state of absorbed presence where time dissolves and doing merges with being. Common in creative immersion, athletic performance, or deep focus.

Hypnagogia – The transitional state between waking and sleep, where the edges of consciousness blur and insights, symbols, or visions may surface unexpectedly.

Kappa Effect – A perceptual quirk where stimuli presented at regular time intervals but varying spatial distances are perceived as having different durations — longer distances seem to take more time, revealing how spatial and temporal perception intertwine.

Oddball Effect – A psychological phenomenon where a novel or unexpected stimulus is perceived to last longer than standard, repeated ones — often used in time-dilation experiments. Suggests that salience stretches perceived duration.

Presence Sets the Pace – A core principle: it’s not time that controls experience, but attention. Where presence deepens, time expands. Where presence fades, time contracts.

Scaling Awareness – The recognition that consciousness operates across multiple layers simultaneously — from moment-to-moment tasks to species-level and planetary states — all influencing the flow of time and memory.

Singularity, The – The metaphorical “point of no return” within consciousness — a state of total dissolution (such as deep dreamless sleep) where identity, story, and linear time vanish. Not simply an absence, but a field of pure reset or integration.

Thinky Time is not a place. It’s a rhythm. And it’s always there, just beneath the ticking.

For more visuals, listen-backs, and upcoming explorations, visit:
✨ accidentaltranscendental.com

For this episode we decided that it would be more useful to have two separate supporting blogs,so if you were looking for more on the Doing:Being Spectrum, please visit the Scaling the Spiral: A Field Guide to Doing, Being, and Becoming Blog here.