Psychological perception of time

Kaalaya Saha Manasa
Translation of 'Making Time'
by Steve Taylor
Author: Dr. Kirindage K. De Silva
Publisher : S Godage and Brothers (Pvt) Ltd

Reviewed by Lionel Wijesiri

Among the contemporary British authors, Dr. Steve Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology stands high. Taylor's main interest is in transpersonal psychology, which investigates higher states of consciousness and spiritual experiences. His work has been described by critics as ‘an important contribution to the shift in consciousness which is happening on our planet at present’.

Taylor's third book which was published in 2007, Making Time meets with this hypotheses easily. The subject matter of the book relates to the highly subjective issue of how we perceive the passage of time.

Why does time seem to speed up as we get older, racing ahead of us towards an inevitable and final end point? Why do new experiences seem to stretch time, and why does it often fly when we're having fun and drag when we aren't? This eye-opening book gives an astounding insight into why our perception of time changes—and how we can take charge of it in our own lives.

Imagination

Taylor tries to answer the questions by roving through an eclectic range of ideas, some drawn from psychology and psychoanalysis and a few from his own imagination. However, in the end, he doesn't really offer answers so much as ideas.

Given that situation, this book can be rated as a popular paperback rather than a peer-reviewed thesis. In my opinion, that's a very good thing indeed.

And that is also a large part of this book's appeal: its willingness to engage in truly mind-bending theories. My favourite, and one that has been apparent ever since Einstein's work on relativity, is that our sense of time really is illusory: everything has already happened, in a sense, in a way that just because you are concentrating on one page of a book doesn't mean that the other pages don't exist yet.

He also talks about thought-chatter: the annoying thoughts that dart across the front of your brain when you stop doing anything.

These are generally about the past or the future. When you are able to quiet these thoughts (through meditation, for example) you can then enjoy the present and not be limited by the past or the future.

We must be grateful to Dr. Kirindage Kumarasiri de Silva for taking time to translate the book into Sinhala for the benefit of Sri Lankan readers. He is a retired Medical Specialist who lived in England for over 30 years while practising his specialised field of anaesthesia. With retirement in 2011, he opted to return to his motherland.

A translation is not an easy task. Every text is, to some extent, a bafflement to its translator, because every language, like every writer, has characteristics that cannot be “carried across” - which is what “translate” means - into another tongue, another culture.

In this sense, Dr. Kumarasiri de Silva has done quite an excellent job. As a good translator, he has worked hard to retain the breadth and depth of the writer’s perception and, at the same time, bring across the tone, mood and style of the original writing. The book can be recommended to anyone who wants to know a psychologist’s view of why time seems to pass at different speeds and how to control it.