This short segment from Then and Now is a favourite of mine:
Ken: Okay, so what was my question before? Why the hell and god realms appear as such large periods of time. Anybody? Peri?
Peri: Well, when I'm suffering, time passes very, very slowly.
Ken: Well, what about the god realm? You have to go a little bit further; you're in the right direction, but it's not quite about suffering. Who do the Gods think about?
Peri: No one but themselves.
Ken: Right. This is the point. When your attention is focused on yourself, the more highly developed or more explicit the sense of yourself is, the more slowly time passes, subjectively speaking.
So, when you have a headache, it seems to last forever. Depression: time really slows down, everything drags by. So when you're preoccupied with a sense of self, then time seems to pass very, very slowly.
What if you're having fun? What if you're completely engaged in something? How quickly does time pass?
Student: Fast.
Ken: Time flies. Very, very quickly. So when you're not feeling any separation, there is no sense of time. So the relationship between time and sense of self is very close. And that's what those large numbers are referring to.
I'm trying to show you how to read this text.
