Chapter 9
Clock Time and Experienced Time Are Not the Same
A woman’s heart stopped on an operating table in Atlanta. By the monitors, she was clinically dead for several minutes. When the surgeons brought her back, she described what had happened to her on the other side in exacting detail. She spoke of a panoramic life review. She described conversations with deceased loved ones. She recalled being shown things she could not have seen from the table. Her account took twenty minutes to tell. The clock said she had been gone for less than four.1
This is a common feature of near-death experience reports. People who come close to death often say that time slowed, stopped, or fell away entirely. They describe what felt like hours packed into a few heartbeats. They remember entire lifetimes replayed in a flash. And when they return, the clock on the wall says almost no time has passed at all.2
That mismatch between felt time and measured time is the subject of this chapter. It matters because it touches the heart of this book’s argument. If God meets the dying soul in a real encounter at the threshold of death, then someone will ask: How can all of that fit in a few seconds of dying? The life review alone, in which a person relives every major moment of an entire lifetime, should take hours. The conversation with the being of light, in which a real offer is extended and a real choice is made, should take longer still. How does all of that fit inside a window that the doctors measure in minutes?
The answer turns out to be straightforward. Clock time and experienced time are not the same thing. They never have been. And near death, the gap between them blows wide open.
Kenneth Ring, one of the early pioneers of near-death research, noted the time problem in his 1980 study. Experiencers almost universally described a sense of timelessness. Many said that time did not seem to exist where they were. Others reported that they felt they had “all the time in the world.” The events they described did not feel rushed. They felt unhurried, spacious, even eternal.3
Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist who conducted a landmark prospective study of 344 cardiac-arrest survivors, reported the same pattern. Many patients described a rich and lengthy experience during a period when their brains showed no measurable activity. Van Lommel called this one of the most puzzling features of the near-death experience. The subjective depth of the experience had no clear connection to how long the patient had been clinically dead.4
Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, confirmed these findings across decades of careful study. Experiencers did not merely report that time felt “different.” They reported that it seemed to vanish. The ordinary tick of seconds was replaced by something that did not follow our usual rules.5
One cardiac-arrest survivor told researchers that during the minutes his heart had stopped, he lived through what felt like an entire day. He met deceased relatives. He was shown scenes from his childhood. He felt surrounded by a warmth he could not describe. When the team revived him, he was confused that only a few minutes had passed. He had lived through hours of experience inside a handful of seconds.6
Another experiencer, a woman in van Lommel’s Dutch study, described watching her own resuscitation from above the table. She saw the doctors working. She heard their words. At the same time, she also saw a panoramic review of her whole life. Both things seemed to happen at once. She felt no sense of hurry. Everything unfolded at a pace that felt natural, though the clock said it lasted less than two minutes.7
These are not isolated reports from a fringe literature. They appear in every major study, across cultures, across decades of research. The experience of timelessness is one of the most consistent features of the NDE. It appears alongside the light, the life review, and the sense of overwhelming love.8
The NDE data is striking, but it is not, in principle, surprising. We already know that felt time diverges from clock time in everyday life. Fear stretches seconds into slow motion. Athletes in the zone report that the game seems to slow down around them. A car accident unfolds in what feels like an eternity. The impact lasts a fraction of a second.9
Psychologists have documented this effect in controlled settings. When people are shown a series of images, some neutral and some frightening, they judge the frightening ones to have lasted longer. The display times are identical. But the emotional weight of the experience changes how long it feels.10
The same thing happens at the other end of the spectrum. Flow states, in which a person is deeply absorbed in a task, make hours vanish. A musician finishes a performance and is stunned that ninety minutes have passed. A writer looks up from the page and finds that the sun has set. Time bends under the weight of attention.11
Soldiers in combat have described this too. In the space of a few seconds, they report seeing details with astonishing clarity. They notice the pattern on a leaf, the color of the sky, the expression on a face. It is as if the brain, sensing danger, shifts into a higher gear and packs more experience into each passing moment.12
All of this points to the same conclusion. Our inner sense of time is flexible. It bends under the weight of emotion, attention, and altered states of awareness. The clock keeps ticking at the same rate, but the self does not.
Now extend the line. If mild fear stretches a second, and a car accident stretches it further, what might the most intense experience a human being can undergo do to the sense of time? Death, the ultimate threshold, stands at the far end of that scale. If the soul survives the body, as Chapter 6 argued, then at death it is freed from the brain’s internal clock altogether. The time anomalies reported in NDEs are what we should expect.
The brevity of dying, then, is no objection to the encounter this book describes. A few seconds on the cardiac monitor can hold a long, unhurried meeting with the God who has come to find us.
The Jesuit philosopher Ladislaus Boros reached the same conclusion from a different angle. In The Mystery of Death, he argued that time works on three levels. The first is clock time, the uniform tick of seconds that is the same for everyone. The second is personal time, our inner sense of duration, which bends under the weight of what we are feeling and doing. Boros noticed what the NDE researchers would later confirm: that “decisions of profound significance compress time and turn it into a kind of thick black line.” The third level is what he called spiritual duration, the mode of time that belongs to the soul when it is freed from the body. At that third level, Boros wrote, “the spiritual movement of being is liberated from the alien element of non-personal temporality.” The soul is no longer swept along by the clock. It can “realize fully the whole continuity of its being, all at once, in one and the same act.”30
That is a striking claim. And it fits everything we have seen. If the soul set free from the body enters a mode of time that is no longer tied to the clock, then the question “How can all of that fit in a few seconds?” loses its force. The few seconds belong to the clock. The encounter belongs to the soul. And the soul, on Boros’s account, has all the room it needs. Chapter 11 will develop Boros’s hypothesis in full. For now, the key point is that the NDE evidence, the ordinary-life evidence, and the philosophy of time converge on the same conclusion. Clock time is not the only kind of time there is.
The time question has a second dimension. It concerns not the dying person but God. If the encounter at the threshold of death involves a genuine meeting, a real conversation, a true give-and-take between the soul and its Maker, then God must be the kind of being who can engage in real-time interaction. He must be able to listen and respond. He must be able to wait and draw near. He must be able to pursue.
That raises a question that has occupied theologians for centuries: Is God inside time, or outside it?13
The classical tradition, running from Augustine through Boethius to Aquinas, taught that God is timeless. He does not experience one moment after another. He sees all of time at once, in what Boethius called the totum simul, the simultaneous whole.14 On this view, God does not wait for anything. He does not respond to anything in sequence. He simply is, all at once, in an eternal now.
That picture has deep roots and deserves respect. But a growing number of philosophers have argued in recent decades that it cannot be right, at least not in its strict form. A God who is entirely outside time cannot act in time. He cannot respond to a cry while it is being cried. He cannot pursue a soul across the arc of a dying moment.15
Nicholas Wolterstorff made this point with memorable clarity. God, he argued, is described throughout Scripture as one who acts, redeems, remembers, and responds. All of those actions involve change. If God changes, he is not outside time. He has a history. The Scriptures describe him as responding to his people’s cries. And as Wolterstorff observed, one can respond to a cry only while it is being cried.16
The Bible itself uses strikingly temporal language about God. The Lord “was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Gen 6:6, ESV). He “relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people” (Exod 32:14, ESV). He negotiated with Abraham in a real conversation, back and forth, about the fate of Sodom (Gen 18:22–33). He declares through Isaiah, “I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning” (Isa 46:9–10, ESV). That last verse is sometimes cited as proof of timelessness, but it need not mean that. God can know the end from the beginning precisely because he is sovereign over time, not because he is absent from it. A God who declares the future from a position within time, because he knows his own plan and has the power to bring it about, is no less great than one who stands outside time altogether.17
Ryan Mullins, in The End of the Timeless God, presses the point still further. He argues that theologians should abandon the divine-timelessness program because it is unworkable. The problems are not minor. They touch the Incarnation, the doctrine of creation, and God’s relationship to his creatures. Mullins calls instead for building models of divine temporality and exploring their consequences for Christian theology.19
William Lane Craig has offered what may be the most influential recent model. Craig argues that time is dynamic, not static. The present is real. The past is gone. The future has not yet arrived. If that is true, then there are tensed facts about the world: it is now Tuesday, it was Monday, it will be Wednesday. An omniscient God must know these facts. But a timeless God cannot know what time it is now, because for such a being there is no “now.” Craig concludes that God, at least since the creation of the world, must be in time.20
The full case for what theologians call dynamic divine temporality, the view that God experiences real succession without being trapped in creaturely time, is developed in Appendix F of this book. I will not reproduce that case here. What matters for this chapter is the payoff.
If God is genuinely temporal, then time in the spiritual realm is real, but it need not track our clocks. The intermediate state, the conscious waiting between death and the final judgment that Chapter 8 described, is not a place where earthly seconds tick by. It is a realm where time belongs to God. Its pace may be very different from anything we know.22
This means that the question “How long does a soul wait in Hades?” may be the wrong kind of question. It assumes that the clocks in the waiting place run at the same speed as ours. But if time in the spiritual realm is God’s to shape, then what matters is not the duration but the reality of the encounter. The pursuit is real. The waiting is real. The deadline at the judgment is real. But the clock speed is God’s to determine.23
Peter seems to gesture toward this when he writes, “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Pet 3:8, ESV). The verse is not giving a conversion formula. It is making a deeper point. God’s relationship to time is not ours. What feels like an age to us may be a moment to him. What feels like a moment to us may hold an eternity’s worth of meeting.24
For this book’s argument, the practical result is this. The three stages of the offer, at the deathbed, in the intermediate state, and at the judgment, do not need to fit our sense of how long things should take. They are real encounters between a temporal God and a conscious soul. But they happen in God’s time, not ours. The subjective continuity of the soul’s meeting with the one God is what holds the whole offer together. One pursuit, three movements, one relentless love.
This also means that the three stages are not three separate trials. They are one continuous pursuit, experienced from the inside as a single arc. God meets the soul at the deathbed. If that meeting is refused, the soul enters the intermediate state, the waiting place that Chapter 8 described as a felt dwelling in the presence or absence of God. If the soul still refuses, the pursuit continues. And at the final judgment, the veil lifts entirely. The same God who met the soul at the threshold of death meets it again in His full, unveiled glory. That is the last appeal, and the true deadline (Chapter 27). Time in the spiritual realm makes this continuity possible. It is one meeting, stretched across as much time as love requires.
A reader may wonder about another New Testament image of death: sleep. Paul writes that those who have “fallen asleep” in Christ will be raised (1 Thess 4:14, ESV). He tells the Corinthians that some believers have “fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15:18, ESV). Does this mean the dead are unconscious?25
Almost certainly not. “Sleep” is a common biblical metaphor for death, drawn from the outward appearance of the body. The dead look like they are sleeping. But the consistent New Testament picture, as Chapter 8 develops in full, is that the person is conscious after death. Paul himself says that to depart is to “be with Christ, which is far better” (Phil 1:23, ESV). Jesus tells the thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43, ESV). The souls under the altar cry out to God (Rev 6:9–10). These are not descriptions of an unconscious state.26
The sleep language, then, is about the body, not the soul. It tells us what death looks like from the outside, not what the dead person experiences from the inside. And what the dead person experiences, this book argues, is a real encounter with the God who has come to find them.27
There is one more biblical thread worth pulling. Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes, “He has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” (Eccl 3:11, ESV). The Hebrew word is ‘olam (עולם), meaning everlasting time, the distant horizon, eternity.28
Solomon’s point is that human beings carry within themselves a sense of something beyond the present moment. We feel the pull of the eternal even while we live inside the tick of seconds. We know, deep down, that we are made for more than the clock allows. The frustration of time, the feeling that it is never enough, that it moves too fast, that something important is always slipping away, is not a defect. It is a sign. God planted it there.
The verse also carries a note of humility. God has put eternity in the heart, “yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” We sense the eternal, but we cannot see the whole picture. We reach for it, but we cannot grasp it. That tension, the ache for a fullness we cannot yet see, may be part of what drives every human life and part of what is finally resolved in the encounter at the threshold.
That sense may be part of what opens up in the dying moment. When the brain’s clock falls silent, the deeper sense of time that God has written into the soul takes over. The ‘olam in the heart is no longer drowned out by the ticking. It fills the whole horizon. And the soul finds that it has room for an unhurried meeting with its Maker.29
I am speculating here, not reporting Scripture. The text says God has placed eternity in the heart. I am asking what that might mean for the dying soul freed from the body’s clock. The suggestion is offered as a possibility, not a doctrine. But it is a possibility that fits everything else we have seen: the time anomalies in the NDE data, the flexibility of felt time in ordinary life, and the picture of a God who takes all the time love needs.
This chapter has made two connected claims. First, the brevity of dying is no barrier to an extended encounter. Felt time and clock time come apart in ordinary life. They come apart far more near death. A few seconds on the cardiac monitor can hold a long, unhurried meeting with God. Second, the God who meets the dying soul is a temporal God. He can pursue, wait, respond, and meet each soul in sequence. He does this across the deathbed, through the intermediate state, and at the judgment. The full case for his temporality is made in Appendix F.
What we have not yet explored is what the encounter feels like. What does it mean to stand before the being of light? To see your whole life replayed? To hear an offer that cuts through every defense? That is the territory of Boros’s hypothesis (Chapter 11) and the dynamics of the encounter (Chapter 13).
But one thing is already clear. The objection that keeps many people from hoping, the objection that dying is too quick for a real encounter, rests on a false assumption. It assumes that clock time is the only kind of time there is. The near-death evidence says otherwise. The philosophy of time says otherwise. And the God of the Bible, who grieves, who responds, who takes all the time love needs, says otherwise too.
This chapter has cleared the ground. The time is enough. The God is real. What happens next is the meeting itself.
↑ 1. The composite account here draws on patterns documented across multiple NDE studies. For the time-anomaly phenomenon in cardiac-arrest patients, see Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 30–45; Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (New York: HarperOne, 2013), 161–75; and Michael B. Sabom, Light & Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), chs. 3–4. Sabom’s Atlanta Study includes the case of Pam Reynolds, whose NDE occurred during hypothermic cardiac arrest with continuous EEG monitoring confirming electrocerebral silence—among the most extensively documented cases of rich conscious experience during a period when the brain showed no measurable activity.
↑ 2. Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021), 93–109. See also Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), ch. 2. Long reports that the NDERF survey asked, “Did you have any sense of altered space or time?” and 60.5 percent responded yes. When asked specifically, “Did time seem to speed up?” 33 percent answered, “Everything seemed to be happening all at once.”
↑ 3. Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980), 96–98.
↑ 4. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 167–79. Van Lommel’s prospective study appeared in The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–45.
↑ 5. Greyson, After, 93–97.
↑ 6. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 55–72. Long’s NDERF database, one of the largest collections of NDE accounts, shows the time-distortion pattern appearing across thousands of reports. In his subsequent study, Long, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), ch. 2, the pattern is confirmed across an even larger dataset. One experiencer reported, “I saw my whole life in just a few seconds”; another described receiving “complete knowledge of all my life events in vivid picture form and memory at the same moment.”
↑ 7. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 30–45. Van Lommel notes that patients frequently describe simultaneous experiences, as if the linear sequence of time had been replaced by a different mode of awareness.
↑ 8. Ring, Life at Death, 96–98; Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 68–73; Greyson, After, 93–109; van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, 30–45; Sabom, Light & Death, chs. 3–6; Long, God and the Afterlife, chs. 1–2. For the remarkable cross-cultural consistency of these core features, including altered time perception, see J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023), chs. 1–2, who draws on the NDERF database of over 5,000 accounts translated from 23 languages to show that the core NDE elements remain stable across cultures and religious traditions.
↑ 9. David Eagleman, “Human Time Perception and Its Illusions,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 18 (2008): 131–36.
↑ 10. Sylvie Droit-Volet and Warren H. Meck, “How Emotions Colour Our Perception of Time,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007): 504–13.
↑ 11. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 66–70.
↑ 12. Eagleman, “Human Time Perception,” 133–34. See also David Eagleman et al., “Does Time Really Slow Down During a Frightening Event?” PLoS ONE 2, no. 12 (2007): e1295, for the experimental test of the “slow-motion” effect using free-fall.
↑ 13. For a lucid overview of the contemporary landscape, see Natalja Deng, God and Time, Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), secs. 3–4; and Gregory E. Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 9–28.
↑ 14. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 5.6.4. See William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 29–30, and Paul Helm, Eternal God: A Study of God without Time, 1st ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), chs. 1–3.
↑ 15. Craig summarizes the two main arguments for divine temporality in Time and Eternity, 78–110: the argument from God’s real relation to the world, and the argument from God’s knowledge of tensed facts. Both are treated in full in Appendix F.
↑ 16. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Unqualified Divine Temporality,” in God and Time: Four Views, ed. Gregory E. Ganssle (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 187–213, esp. 201–10. See also Garrett J. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (Aldershot: Routledge, 2004), ch. 8.
↑ 17. On the theological significance of God’s emotional and temporal language in the Old Testament, see R. T. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker: An Exploration of God’s Temporality, Routledge Studies in Analytic and Systematic Theology (London: Routledge, 2024), ch. 5; and Wolterstorff, “Unqualified Divine Temporality,” 191–93, who argues that these passages describe real changes in God that require temporal location.
↑ 18. Richard A. Holland Jr., God, Time, and the Incarnation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 82. Holland identifies three indicators of temporal sequence in the divine life: the Incarnation event itself, the earthly life of Christ, and the completed work of the atonement. See 80–88.
↑ 19. R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For the Incarnation argument, see ch. 7. For Mullins’s summary verdict, see Deng, God and Time, sec. 5.
↑ 20. Craig, Time and Eternity, 98–110. Craig’s argument from tensed facts proceeds: (1) God is omniscient; (2) if time is dynamic, there are tensed facts; (3) an omniscient being must know tensed facts; (4) a timeless being cannot know what is happening now; (5) therefore, if time is dynamic, God is temporal. Craig accepts the A-theory and concludes that God is temporal since creation. See also Craig’s contribution in Ganssle, God and Time: Four Views, 145–52.
↑ 21. Holland, God, Time, and the Incarnation, 187–88, addresses the “trapped in time” worry by analogy: God cannot violate the moral law but is not “subject to” it, because it flows from his character. Similarly, temporal succession may flow from God’s own nature rather than being imposed on him. See also Mullins, From Divine Timemaker, who argues that as timemaker God is the ground of time, not its prisoner.
↑ 22. This picture is compatible with what Craig calls “metaphysical time” or “ontological time,” which is not identical with physical (clock) time. See DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 8; and Craig, Time and Eternity, ch. 5. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 192–95, presses the point from the side of anthropology: even if God in himself were atemporal, why should we think that humans share that timelessness when they die? Cooper asks whether nonphysical beings could experience “no boredom, no memory, no communication, and no hope or anticipation,” noting that all these mental states require simultaneity and succession. They are essentially temporal. The soul freed from the body is freed from the clock, not from time itself.
↑ 23. Mullins, From Divine Timemaker, argues that a temporal God is not “trapped” in time but is the ground of time’s existence.
↑ 24. The verse echoes Psalm 90:4: “For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night” (ESV). Both texts affirm that God’s experience of time is qualitatively different from ours without denying that he is in time at all.
↑ 25. The “soul sleep” position, held by some Adventist and conditionalist theologians, interprets the sleep language as indicating unconsciousness between death and resurrection. For a careful refusal of this reading, see John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 121–54. Cooper demonstrates that in the intertestamental literature, sleep metaphors regularly coexist with affirmations of a conscious intermediate state; for example, 2 Esdras 7:32 describes the dead as “asleep” yet in “chambers” that shall “give up the souls,” and 2 Baruch 36:11 says the wicked both “sleep” and experience suffering. Cooper concludes that “reference to the dead as asleep does not necessarily indicate belief in literal unconsciousness or nonexistence, nor is it incompatible with belief in a conscious and active intermediate state.” For the theological anthropology underlying the soul’s capacity to survive death, see Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020), chs. 5–7.
↑ 26. For the full biblical case for conscious existence between death and resurrection, see Chapter 8. The key texts (2 Cor 5:1–10; Phil 1:21–23; Rev 6:9–10; Luke 23:43) converge on a conscious, personal state. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chs. 4–7, for the definitive treatment of how the Old Testament notion of survival in Sheol develops through the intertestamental period into the New Testament revelation of fellowship with Christ between death and resurrection. See also James K. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation after Death (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021), 52–53, where Beilby observes that the postmortem-opportunity model is compatible with a range of views on personal eschatology; on the separate-intermediate-states model, the opportunity could occur during the intermediate state itself or at the day of judgment.
↑ 27. The body-not-soul reading of the sleep metaphor is standard among both Reformed and Wesleyan theologians. See Anthony Hoekema, The Bible and the Future (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1979), 92–96. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 78–85, surveys the intertestamental evidence and concludes that “perhaps bodies sleep whereas souls do not,” noting that ancient peoples often thought of dreams as occasions of commerce with the divine or spiritual realm, so that “it is much too hasty to leap from the mention of death as ‘sleep’ to the conclusion that the deceased were thought to be utterly unconscious or literally nonexistent.” Jerry L. Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 3, surveys the landscape and notes that both the Reformed confessions and N. T. Wright affirm a conscious intermediate state; the dead person continues as a real, aware self while the body is “asleep” in the sense of “dead.”
↑ 28. The term ‘olam (עולם) ranges in meaning from “long duration” to “eternity.” In Eccl 3:11 it suggests a sense of the timeless planted within the human heart. See HALOT, s.v. “עולם.”
↑ 29. I am speculating here, not reporting Scripture. The text says God has placed eternity in the heart. I am asking what that might mean for the dying soul freed from the body’s clock. The suggestion is offered as a possibility, not a doctrine.
↑ 30. Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death, trans. Gregory Bainbridge (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965), III.2. Boros identifies three levels of temporality: (1) the sub-personal or clock level, a “regular, uniform succession” that is the same for everyone; (2) the personal level, where inner duration varies with the weight of what is being lived—“decisions of profound significance compress time and turn it into a kind of thick black line”; and (3) the spiritual level, at which the soul “is no longer swept along by an alien succession” and can realize “the whole continuity of its being, all at once, in one and the same act.” See also the commentary by Cynthia Bourgeault in the same volume. For the full development of Boros’s hypothesis, see Chapter 11.