The Speed of Stillness: Flow States, Einstein, and the Strangeness of Time

A Wrong Idea Worth Having

Something strange happens during deep meditation or sustained Odaimoku chanting. Time shifts. The ordinary texture of minutes and seconds dissolves, and when awareness returns to the clock, it is almost always with surprise. An hour has passed that felt like fifteen minutes. Or the reverse: a brief sitting felt immeasurably spacious. Anyone who has practiced seriously knows this territory.

Athletes call it being in the zone. Psychologists call it flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who spent decades studying optimal human experience, described it as a state of complete absorption in which self-consciousness recedes, effort becomes effortless, and time perception distorts in characteristic ways. His 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience brought the concept into wide circulation, though the experience itself is as old as human activity.

Recently I found myself pondering the mechanics of that time distortion — the way deep concentration seems to slow the world around you. And I had what I can only describe as a wrong idea worth having.

The Idea

What if the subjective slowing of time during flow states is connected to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity? The reasoning ran something like this: as concentration deepens, the brain processes faster — neurons firing with greater intensity and speed. Given the extraordinary velocity at which neural events occur, perhaps the world outside simply appears slower by comparison. The faster we think, the slower the world goes. Which would mean that time in the flow state doesn’t merely seem to slow down.

It actually does.

Why It Doesn’t Work — And Why That Matters

The SR framework doesn’t hold up mechanically, and it’s worth understanding why — not to dismiss the intuition, but to find where it actually lands.

It helps to remember what Special Relativity is actually describing. Einstein’s great insight was that space and time are not separate stages on which physical events play out, but a single unified four-dimensional manifold — spacetime. Time dilation occurs when objects move through this manifold at velocities approaching the speed of light; it is a geometric feature of spacetime itself, not a metaphor for processing speed. Neurons firing faster doesn’t move the brain through space at relativistic velocities. The shape of the relationship — faster movement, slower time — is suggestive, but the underlying physics that produces it doesn’t apply. It’s a false cognate: same shape, different substance.

The quantum alternative fares no better. Quantum correlations don’t actually exceed the speed of light — they cannot transmit information faster than light, which is the constraint that matters for SR. Einstein’s limit survives quantum mechanics intact. And the quantum consciousness hypothesis — most associated with the Penrose-Hameroff Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory — remains highly contested, primarily because the brain appears to be too warm and noisy an environment for the coherent quantum states the theory requires. It’s a live hypothesis, but a minority one, and it doesn’t get us past the relativistic ceiling in any case.

So: wrong, but productively wrong. Because the core observation is sound.

Where the Idea Actually Lands

Neuroscience has been quietly developing something called internal clock models of time perception. The basic proposition is that subjective time is partly a function of the rate of neural events — the number of discrete processing moments packed into a given interval of clock time. More events per second means a subjectively longer interval. Fewer events means time seems to compress or vanish.

This is why fear responses and adrenaline states produce the classic slow-motion effect that accident survivors describe. It’s why skilled athletes seem to have more time than ordinary players to make decisions. The processing rate has changed, even though the clock hasn’t. Flow states very likely involve something similar: heightened neural coherence and processing efficiency creating more subjective temporal “granularity” per second of calendar time.

So time doesn’t actually slow down in the relativistic sense. But the subjective experience is not simply an illusion or a mistake. Something real is happening — something that neuroscience is still working to characterize, and that a physicist framing gestured toward without quite reaching.

What Physics Cannot Say

There is something deeper here that neither SR nor internal clock models fully address. The contemplative traditions have always maintained that time itself — as we ordinarily experience it, as a sequential flow from past through present toward future — is not the bedrock reality it appears to be. This is not a mystical claim against physics; it is a phenomenological observation that physics has largely bracketed rather than resolved.

Husserl spent years trying to account for the structure of time-consciousness: how the present moment contains retentions of the just-past and protentions of the about-to-come, how the experience of duration is constituted rather than simply received. More recently, philosopher and contemplative scholar Evan Thompson has explored the overlap between phenomenological accounts of time and what both neuroscience and meditation practice reveal.

What Thompson and others suggest is that ordinary temporal experience is something we construct — actively, continuously, below the threshold of reflective awareness. Deep meditative absorption disrupts that construction process. It doesn’t reveal faster physics. It reveals the constructedness of time itself.

This is also where the four-dimensional framing becomes philosophically useful in a way the SR mechanics alone did not. If spacetime is a unified manifold — if time is one dimension woven together with the three dimensions of space into a single fabric — then the question of what might exist outside or prior to that manifold becomes genuinely pointed. Not as a sci-fi speculation about extra dimensions, but as a serious philosophical and contemplative question: is the four-dimensional spacetime framework the whole of reality, or is it the particular shape that reality takes within the conditions of embodied, conditioned experience?

The Odaimoku and the Unborn-Undying

All of this, I think, points toward something that sustained Odaimoku practice knows from the inside rather than the outside.

The conditions for flow are almost perfectly replicated in deep chanting: rhythmic, repetitive, demanding enough in its full form to require genuine attention, but familiar enough that the analytical mind can release its grip. Body, breath, voice, and intention converge on a single point. The self-referential loop of ordinary cognition — the inner narrator who keeps checking the clock — quiets down. Something else opens.

Csikszentmihalyi’s flow framework is useful for describing the entry conditions and phenomenological features of this opening. It gives contemporary practitioners, especially those suspicious of religious language, a foothold in familiar territory. But at a certain depth, the framework becomes too small for what is actually occurring.

The Odaimoku is not simply a focusing technique that produces an interesting altered state. It is a participatory expression of the Dharma-body — the unborn-undying suchness that is the ground of all appearance, including the appearance of time. The Buddha of the Juryo-hon does not exist in time as we experience it. He manifests within time for the benefit of beings without being constituted by it. In Buddhist technical language, this points toward what is asaṃskṛta — unconditioned, not-constructed — as against everything that is saṃskṛta, conditioned and fabricated. The unborn-undying is precisely what stands prior to the four-dimensional manifold, not as another dimension within it, but as the ground from which all dimensions arise.

A necessary caution: even the phrase “unborn-undying” is itself a construction — a finger pointing at the moon, a raft for crossing the river. The unconditioned cannot be fully captured in conditioned language. The tradition has always known this. What practice offers is not a better concept of the unborn-undying but a direct participatory encounter with what the concept can only point toward.

Which is why the wrong idea was worth having. The instinct that something physically anomalous is happening with time during deep practice — that the shift is not merely subjective, not merely psychological — is pointing in the right direction. Physics just isn’t the right vocabulary for what it’s pointing at.

The vocabulary for that is already present in the practice itself.

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Mark Herrick is a dharma teacher in the Nichiren Buddhist tradition and founder of Myokan-ji TEmple and Two Buddhas Meditation Community.