The week has only just begun — and it’s already Friday. The year passes faster than it used to. You get the feeling that life has started moving at a different speed, and a person can’t keep up with living through what is happening to them.
In this conversation with Tatyana Tsvetkova, I look at how the flow of time works and whether it has sped up, why people feel that life has started passing more quickly, why each person has their own flow of time, and how this is connected with self-perception, spiritual development, goals and the sense of life.
Has time sped up?
– This comes up a lot: people say that time has sped up. I’d like to hear your opinion. It seems to me that it isn’t time that has sped up. Everyone says that before, when our parents were young, time seemed to move more slowly. But I have the feeling it isn’t about time. Do you feel that time has changed?
– There are people who now say that time has sped up. And the answer to this question is very important for understanding how I can manage to do everything in this life. How should I set goals? How should I choose what to do at all, how to live through things? After all, if time has sped up, then the systems for perceiving everything that happens in the world, in terms of causes and effects, have changed. It’s important to approach this question from different sides in order to fully understand the picture and decide for yourself how to be in it.
For example, from the point of view of whether a person’s ability to perceive themselves at a specific moment in time has changed over the last hundred years.
If you perceive yourself at a specific moment in time, then time as such does not exist.
This is a very important point. Over the last hundred years this ability hasn’t changed enormously, but it has changed, for example, over the last five hundred years or the last three thousand years. Three thousand years ago, people could perceive themselves differently at every moment. They lived not just in a different flow of time — they lived in a different knowledge of themselves.
If you and I compare time as a kind of materialistic story — what clocks show — then time has not changed. It is an illusion of change.
Of course, something changes physically, but it is some micro-change that is pointless to discuss at all.
How the perception of time changes
But if we talk about how a person experiences life, then there is a difference. For example, in Egyptian times people did not remember their past lives, but they knew that past lives had existed. Does that change your notion of time? Of course it does. If you are completely, absolutely certain that you had past lives — just as you are absolutely certain that you were born from your mother’s womb and not from a test tube. I mean that you weren’t grown somewhere or cloned, for example. At least you have that certainty.
– By the way, it’s interesting: there are already children like that now. How will it be for them?
– Look, I don’t know whether such children have been born yet — I think not yet. There are no complete births like that now; these projects are being discussed, they exist somewhere.
– Not cloned, but there are already so many children born…
– Yes, but that’s IVF. That’s a different path altogether. I’m talking specifically about the womb right now; let’s look at that. You are certain that this event happened that way, although in fact you have no confirmation of it whatsoever.
– And I never will.
– And you will never find that confirmation. Look, you can’t find it. Even if someone is shown a video, nowadays a video is no confirmation of anything. How would you even confirm it? Did a video camera do a genetic analysis of your whole system to establish that it’s you? No such system exists, yet you are certain of it. And whatever I say now, your certainty won’t change. A doubt may take root in you, but the certainty won’t change. And the doubt won’t even take root.
And people back then were certain that a person had past lives. And that there are causes and effects from before that act on you from behind. A person knew that past lives exist and knew that there would be future lives.
Today a huge number of people on planet Earth belong to different religions and teachings, and they believe, for example, that incarnation exists. But if you really question people, the majority believe in incarnation with a social belief, a belief of the brain, and not the way one believes that you and I have two eyes. They believe differently.
If you ask a blind person, “Do you believe that red and green exist?” they’ll say, “I believe it, but I believe it with my brain, not because I’ve seen it in reality.” And accordingly, people who reason about incarnations mostly don’t truly believe in them on the basis of reality. Whereas the people who lived at that time believed in it with certainty. Unconditionally.
The time between death and birth
And before that there was a time when people lived, knew and remembered their past lives and relied on them. Did time flow differently for them? Of course it flowed differently for them — at the very least because of the following. If a person knows there are past lives, then there is also a time between death and birth. And in the time between death and birth, what kind of time is there?
– None.
– There is some, but it isn’t physical. That’s very important. Look, it isn’t physical. On the one hand, it is physical: if you and I observe the time spans of incarnations, it is physical. But for a spiritual being living through a specific period between death and birth, time is not physical. Suppose we also called it by the word “time.” Suppose.
I, for example, use this a lot in my videos, in meditations, in practices, everywhere, and I say: there is a timeless state. Right now I see us at the same time in the spiritual world — outside time. There is such a notion — outside time. There are spaces that are separated from time. It’s infinity in all directions; there are no thousands of years there. And at the same time, I see you and your movement in time. In what time? On the one hand, in the time of the spiritual world’s development; on the other, in the time of humanity’s existence within, for example, an incarnated planet, the current planet Earth. But these are all different zones of perception.
And however much I describe it, how can I convey it to you? Language can’t even describe it. What’s more, what would I rely on in describing it? I could rely on vision and say: “Tanya, look, we’re sitting outside time.” You’d say: “Can you explain what that means?” But I see our presence outside time very clearly. I see very clearly the spiritual being of a person existing outside time.
– So it turns out that time has sped up for people because…
– Look, I’m not talking about “sped up”; we’ll get to that. When I see you outside time, I see something, define it as “outside time,” and then express it, explain it to you in certain words.
So if a person lives with the understanding that there was a time between death and birth and that their spiritual being perceived what was happening differently — what kind of flow is that? How does a spiritual being, for example, wait for incarnation or, on the contrary, not want to incarnate? After all, in a huge number of incarnated people on planet Earth, the spiritual being lives in darkness. Everyone thinks the spiritual being is some kind of structure with super perception, and that they have connected with it.
But actually, your task is to work in this world so that your spiritual being gains sight and does not remain in darkness in the time between death and birth.
And that doesn’t interest people much at all, because they are interested in the present time — what will happen there.
Each person has their own flow of time
And the spiritual being lives in a certain understanding of what is happening. When I say it lives in darkness, it means that there are spiritual systems that perceive the flow of life of the spiritual world differently. And that blows your mind.
If the spiritual being and the spiritual system perceive themselves differently in the spiritual world, then, Tanya, every person here perceives time differently. Absolutely differently.
And however much you and I try to convey this, it can only be studied, discussed, spent dozens of hours on, compared. And we will see more and more that there are no patterns. We will drift further and further into a full stream of utterly meaningless materialistic or social comparisons.
Because, once again, ordinary time hasn’t sped up. There are laws by which clocks work. There is a reason for expensive, fancy watches. Why do many watches cost five hundred thousand dollars? They have a tourbillon or some other special mechanisms that can work, relatively speaking, forever. It’s relative — just as, relatively speaking, a stone won’t disappear: everything will disappear, all minerals will transform, everything will change completely. But at least from the point of view of human perception, they work forever, relatively speaking.
And many watches need to be kept in a certain condition. You have to wear them, for example. Or there’s a special mechanism in a cabinet that winds them. Or everyone knows that if you wear certain watches, you need to adjust them periodically, because they start falling behind by a few seconds. That’s just something banal, just nonsense.
A person can’t make out their own mood toward their wife, their husband or their child, and you are telling them about some second the watch lost over three hundred and sixty-five days. They couldn’t care less about that second.
Humanity can’t predict tsunamis or the weather in advance, can’t predict earthquakes. Nobody can do anything — it’s just probability. Probability, just probability. You would think everything is already laid out for you and your, I don’t know, artificial intelligence should flash it right up: in ten minutes it will rain or it won’t. But there is only probability. People don’t even fully understand how the notion of a “seventy-five percent chance of rain” works, don’t understand what that number even means.
And then you can open it and see that those seventy-five percent turn out to apply only from ten to eleven. And in general it’s a probability, and in general it’s for a certain area. And it passed by. And then — bam, it rains all day. You say: “But it said something else.” That’s it, everything has already changed, everything has become different.
Why it feels like life is passing faster
So what are we saying about the flow of time? It turns out that a person perceives time in their own way.
And if a person, Tanya, perceives time in their own way, if each person has their own flow of time, then the question you need to ask yourself is: what am I perceiving?
Like what you said — look, it’s interesting, really cool. Today you said a cool phrase: “It’s Friday already, and everything went by so fast.”
– You know, it feels like every so often I collect myself, try to understand what I’m feeling, enter some state of awareness. Then the rush starts — twenty projects, three children and so on. And it’s as if I come to my senses: oh! Today, for example, it’s already Friday. And I thought Monday had only just started. And it’s as if during all that time I haven’t been aware of myself and haven’t asked at all where I am, what I am.
– And do you know what I caught myself feeling this Tuesday? It’s been a very long time since I wanted the week not to end so much.
– Listen, I caught myself feeling the same thing, can you imagine?
– Because usually I’m now in a space where I feel I’ve stopped tracking days, weeks and time altogether. And socially, because of some of my psychophysical reactions, I even suffer a little from this: here’s another Saturday, and here’s another Saturday. I understand why this happens: I live in freedom of decision-making, in freedom of action. And it’s as if I’ve merged; there’s no difference for me at all.
But here I caught myself wanting a little more time, because right now I’m developing a great many different systems, I’m involved in a great many projects, and I’ve come to need that physical time. I have a computer, I run requests, I try to buy time in every system. ChatGPT has Codex — I have Codex 5.5, the Pro version, that is, the top plan. I click the Fast button — that’s the maximum speed. I don’t care how the tokens are spent there. I ask: “Can I speed it up somehow even more?” And it says: “No.” That is, I can’t speed it up.
It’s not about speed
I would be ready to pay Codex thousands of dollars right now — maybe not tens of thousands, though maybe. But thousands, Tanya, honestly, I’m ready to pay very quickly to speed up what for me? Precisely physical time. Although, honestly, I don’t understand why I need it. Look, it makes no difference to me when I solve my task: now or in three months. I can’t say I’m rushing anywhere, because in my life I’m not rushing anywhere. But for some reason I would like to speed it up, because there is a certain social construct.
On the one hand, I have no dependence on wanting to earn a lot of money or release some project by a certain date. I do a great many such projects, simply life projects. It’s a project of my life, not my life being the life of this project. I manage it completely. It’s simply the flow of my life, my destiny, and not that I need this project in order to, I don’t know, buy tomatoes.
There are some things where I understand: a person comes to work and has to sit down today because they need to survive. I have things like that too. I do many projects precisely out of life necessity. I don’t know whether I’m against it or for it, but I do them because of that quality. And here the quality is different. And this is an example of a collision with time, when a certain paradox arises in perceiving what is happening.
It’s very important to see for yourself what you want and why, in order to balance yourself, and sometimes to tell yourself: “Well, if that’s how it is, let it work however it wants.”
And I understand that what I want from Codex is not a token problem. I want a bit more from Codex than it can do on its own. It’s not about speed. I want what it can’t do yet, not speed, you see? It’s not a question of tokens. I simply want to buy a bit more capability with money. I know, for example, that some people — those who create these systems — have access to that. And I would like to get a little of that access, to do certain things, not to speed up the creating.
And by the way, that is a big difference between what AGI is and how people understand it. If you start understanding what AGI is from this side, then everything changes. So, about the people who are really creating AGI: 99.999999% of the market’s discussion of what they are doing is illusory. People don’t understand what they are doing. People don’t understand what they want to arrive at.
It’s like with me: some of the things I’m developing now, I can’t explain to anyone. And for the first time I became glad about something, because I got the opportunity to do something myself, alone. It’s like with plants: I do something myself, alone.
And the less I ask anyone, the more I am in harmony.
This, by the way, is very interesting. It’s probably very interesting in your story too: it’s like when you get clients who trust you completely, don’t ask questions, and you merge with the work and receive the full scope of everything. And you also see that it’s not that people don’t care — they are in complete harmony that you are there for them. And then you are also in complete harmony that you have such a client or such a project, and that is not the point at all. And then the magic happens. Like with a man and a woman looking at each other — that magic happens.
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Original video · Russian audio