Chapter 14
On the difference between the time of clocks and the time of consciousness
Condensed Edition
You already know what I'm about to say. You know it from your own body.
Think of a car accident. The car ahead of you brakes. Your foot hits the pedal. And then time does something strange. The gap between brake and impact stretches. You see the wheel turn. You see the other driver's face. You notice, of all things, the color of the coffee cup in the console. Afterward, people ask how long it lasted. A second, maybe two. But from inside, it felt like a full minute.1
Or think of the other direction. You sit down to read. You look up and two hours are gone. It felt like twenty minutes. The clock moved; you didn't notice.
These aren't tricks your brain plays on you. They are features of how consciousness works. And they matter for the question this book is asking. If the moment of death can hold an encounter with Christ, the encounter has to fit inside a very short window of clinical time. Does it? The answer depends on what we mean by "time" and whose time we're measuring.
Philosophers have noticed the gap between clock-time and experienced time for centuries. The distinction is older than clocks.
Augustine saw it first, or at least saw it most clearly. In Book XI of his Confessions, he asked the question that still haunts the philosophy of time: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I do not know."2 His answer was startling. Past, present, and future don't exist as separate realities "out there." What exists is the soul's own threefold activity. Memoria holds the past. Attentio grasps the present. Expectatio reaches toward the future.3 Time, for Augustine, lives in the soul. The soul doesn't ride along on a river of external time. The soul generates its experience of time from within.
Apply that to the dying. A dying person's brain is shutting down. The external clock is losing its grip. But the soul's memoria, attentio, and expectatio don't depend on the brain for their existence. If they are capacities of the soul itself, then they go on working even when the body's clock fails. The soul can still remember, attend, and anticipate. It simply does so in its own time now, not in the body's.
Plain Words. Three terms appear in this chapter that are worth defining up front. Durée (doo-RAY) is Henri Bergson's French word for the inner, lived flow of time, as opposed to clock-time. The specious present is William James's term for the short span of time the mind treats as "now." The A-theory of time holds that past, present, and future are really different from each other. B-theory holds that all moments are equally real and "now" is just a label. These terms will come up again in the chapters ahead. For the detailed case, see Appendix H.
Henri Bergson, writing in 1889, sharpened the point. In Time and Free Will, he drew a hard line between two kinds of time. One he called durée, or duration: the qualitative, flowing experience of time as it's actually lived. The other he called spatialized clock-time: the projection of lived time onto a number line, measured in equal units, ticked off by machines.4 Duration is rich. It varies. A moment of grief swells. A moment of joy passes like a breath. Clock-time is flat. Every second is the same as every other second. The two are not the same thing.
Bergson's insight matters here. If the soul lives in durée while the body's brain helps generate the connection to clock-time, then what happens when the brain stops? The soul doesn't stop experiencing. It simply experiences time without the clock's constraint.
William James, writing a year later in The Principles of Psychology (1890), added another layer. He coined the term "specious present" for the small window of time the mind treats as "right now." The present isn't a knife-edge instant. It's a short duration, maybe a few seconds, within which consciousness feels flow and change.5 And the width of that window varies. Under stress, it stretches. In boredom, it shrinks. In deep focus, it seems to vanish.
The point is simple but powerful. These aren't fringe thinkers. Augustine, Bergson, and James are among the most influential minds in Western philosophy. And they all agree: the time of consciousness is not the same as the time of clocks.
Modern psychology has confirmed what the philosophers suspected. Subjective time-perception changes under a wide range of conditions, and the changes are measurable.
Under extreme stress, time slows. Accident survivors routinely report that events unfolded "in slow motion." A study by David Eagleman and his colleagues at Baylor tested this directly. They dropped participants from a 150-foot tower while they tried to read a rapidly flashing display. The display was too fast for normal perception. Time didn't literally slow down, Eagleman concluded, but the richness of memory encoding during the event made it feel longer afterward.6
In deep meditation, practitioners report time seeming to stop. An hour sits feel like ten minutes. Experienced meditators describe moments when the flow of time seems to pause entirely.7
In flow states, the kind described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, hours vanish. A musician, a surgeon, a writer absorbed in their work loses track of time so completely that they're startled when the clock tells them how much has passed.8
Intense pain stretches time. Intense joy compresses it. Psychedelic substances routinely produce radical time distortion, with subjects reporting experiences that seem to last hours within a few minutes of clock-time.9 Marc Wittmann, a psychologist specializing in time-perception, has cataloged these variations in Felt Time (2016). His conclusion: the brain actively constructs our experience of duration. Change the brain's state, and you change the experience of time.10
None of this is controversial. Time-perception variation is mainstream cognitive science. What's unusual about the NDE data isn't the kind of phenomenon. It's the degree.
One more observation from the clinical side. Anesthesiologists have long known that patients sometimes report awareness during surgery despite being under general anesthesia. Their reports are often fragmentary. But when they include a time dimension, the reported duration almost never matches the clock. The brain under chemical suppression processes time differently.29 If chemical suppression alters temporal processing, we should expect the radical suppression of dying to alter it even more.
The near-death-experience literature, which Chapter 10 surveyed in detail, reports time-perception changes that go far beyond anything seen in ordinary psychology. NDErs don't just report that time "felt a little different." They report that time stopped, reversed, expanded to the point of seeming infinite, or operated in a completely different mode.11
Howard Storm, an art professor who had an NDE during a medical crisis in Paris in 1985, described an experience that felt like hours. It included extended dialogue, detailed instruction, and a complete life review. Clinically, the event lasted minutes.12 George Ritchie, a U.S. Army private who had an NDE in 1943 during a bout of double pneumonia, described an encounter with Christ that included a guided tour of multiple realms. It felt, to him, like it took a very long time. He was clinically dead for approximately nine minutes.13
The life-review element is the clearest window into time-dilation during NDEs. Many NDErs describe reliving every moment of their lives. They feel the emotions of people they affected. They do all of this within what appears to the outside observer to be a few seconds.14 Pim van Lommel, the Dutch cardiologist who led the largest prospective NDE study (published in The Lancet in 2001), made an important observation. NDErs consistently distinguish between what they experienced during the event and what they thought about it afterward. The experience felt lived, not remembered.15
That distinction matters. If the time-extension were just a trick of memory, we'd expect NDErs to be confused about when the "stretching" happened. They aren't. They know the difference between living through something and thinking back on it. And what they report is living through it.
Key Argument. NDE temporal anomalies are extreme cases of a broader phenomenon that psychology has long documented. The kind of time-variation (subjective duration differing from clock-time) is ordinary. The degree (minutes of clinical time holding subjective hours or longer) is extraordinary. The context (occurring consistently in the dying) is unique. This pattern is the empirical anchor for the book's central claim: the moment of death holds far more time than the clock can measure.
The pattern holds across cultures, ages, and belief systems. Children report it. Atheists report it. People who had never heard of NDEs before their own experience report it.16 The consistency makes it very hard to explain away as cultural expectation or wishful thinking.
This is the question skeptics press hardest. Maybe the NDEr only thinks the experience lasted a long time. Maybe it was a compressed burst of neural activity that got reconstructed afterward as extended duration. Maybe the brain, in its final moments, simply stamps a "this was long" tag onto a brief experience.
I think the extended time is real. Here's why.
First, the phenomenological evidence. NDErs don't describe their experiences the way people describe compressed memories. They describe them the way people describe lived events. They use sequential language. They report one thing happening, then another thing, then another. Storm describes a conversation, a journey, an arrival, a lesson, a return. The narrative structure is too rich and too ordered for post-hoc compression to explain.17
Second, the veridical anchor. As Chapter 8 showed, some NDEs include verifiable observations of events the experiencer could not have seen from where their body lay. Pam Reynolds, during a hypothermic cardiac-arrest surgery in 1991, accurately described the bone saw used to open her skull and overheard surgical conversation, all while her brain showed a flat-line EEG.18 If the veridical content of the experience is real, then the consciousness producing it is real. And if the consciousness is real, there's no reason to dismiss its temporal character as illusion.
Third, the theological ground. If God's relation to time is not strictly bound to the clock (as Chapter 13 argued), then the dying soul may enter a different temporal mode. Not an illusion. A genuine shift. The soul moves from brain-constrained clock-time into something closer to its native experience of duration.
The philosopher William Lane Craig puts this in terms of epistemic standing. In Time and Eternity, Craig argues that our experience of tense is what epistemologists call "properly basic." It is trustworthy unless someone gives us a good reason to doubt it.19 When you feel that something is happening right now, that feeling carries its own authority. You don't need to prove that the present is real. Someone who says it's an illusion needs to prove that.
The same logic applies here. If a dying person says the encounter lasted hours, the burden of proof falls on the skeptic. We trust people's reports of their own experience unless we have a specific reason not to. And the NDE literature has given us no such reason. The reports are consistent, detailed, and cross-culturally stable.
The strongest skeptical response is the "dying brain" hypothesis. On this view, all of it is an illusion. The brain, starved of oxygen, fires randomly. The result is a vivid but meaningless hallucination. Time-dilation is part of the package, but it means nothing because the entire experience means nothing.20
The dying-brain hypothesis has real force. It deserves respect. But it faces three problems that this book has been building toward.
It cannot explain the veridical cases. Reynolds's bone-saw description didn't come from a dying brain generating random noise. It came from accurate perception of a real event, during a period when the brain was measurably inactive.21
It cannot easily explain the cross-cultural consistency. Random neural firing should produce random experiences. NDE experiences follow a strikingly consistent structure across cultures and centuries.22
And it cannot explain the life-transforming after-effects. People who come back from NDEs don't behave like people recovering from hallucinations. They behave like people who have been genuinely changed by something real. Bruce Greyson's longitudinal research documents lasting personality changes, reduced fear of death, increased compassion, and deepened spiritual commitment years and decades after the event.23
Primary Source. Ladislaus Boros, writing in 1962, anticipated the question of how a non-temporal transition could hold real temporal content:
"The soul has at its disposal a real 'moment of time'—real, though altogether sui generis—for making in death its completely personal decision. This one moment is sufficient for the posing of a whole series of acts, for, in the moment of death, the soul attains to a new intensification of its temporal quality, and this enables it to realize in one flash its whole continuity of being." — Boros, The Mystery of Death, I.6
Boros wrote this a generation before the modern NDE literature existed. The convergence with what NDE researchers later documented is striking.
Notice what Boros is claiming. He isn't saying the soul gets a bonus second or two. He's saying the soul reaches "a new intensification of its temporal quality." The moment of death, for Boros, is not a moment in the ordinary sense. It is a moment that opens from within. The soul's temporal capacity increases precisely when the body's temporal capacity fails. That claim, arrived at through philosophical reasoning in 1962, matches the empirical NDE data with remarkable precision.
Boros calls the soul's condition before death one of "ontological indigence." In ordinary life, the soul can't fully possess itself. It's hemmed in by the body, by habit, by distraction. Death strips all of that away. And with the stripping comes a kind of temporal freedom the soul has never had before.30 The NDE literature's consistent report of expanded time maps onto Boros's philosophical prediction almost exactly.
How should we picture what's happening? I want to offer a working model. It isn't doctrine. It's a proposal built from converging evidence.
During embodied life, the brain constrains the soul's experience of time. The brain is the soul's clock. It regulates attention, filters sensation, and anchors consciousness to the external world's rhythms. That constraint is mostly helpful. Without it, we'd lose track of the shared world around us.
But the constraint has a cost. It means our experience of time is always filtered. We never experience duration in its raw, unconstrained form. Bergson's durée, the soul's native time, is always mediated by the brain's clock.
At the moment of death, the constraint begins to fall away. The brain slows, then stops. And the soul, partly released from its bodily anchor, begins to experience time closer to its native mode. Duration becomes richer, denser, more expansive. What the clock measures as seconds, the soul experiences as hours.24
I want to be clear about what this model does and doesn't claim. It doesn't claim the soul enters a timeless state. Timelessness would mean no sequence, no "before and after," no unfolding story. What the NDE data describe is the opposite: rich, sequential, narrative experience. The model claims the soul enters a differently paced temporal state. Time still flows. Events still happen in order. But the rate of subjective experience relative to the external clock changes dramatically.
This is why the A-theory of time matters for the book's thesis. On the A-theory, the present moment is real. Things really happen, one after another, in genuine succession. The dying soul's experience of pursuit, dialogue, and decision is a real unfolding. On a strict B-theory (the "block universe" view), all events exist timelessly. The soul's "extended experience" would reduce to a static block of content with no genuine flow. That's not what NDErs describe. They describe living through something. The A-theory gives that description its full weight. Garrett DeWeese develops this connection between dynamic time and the reality of causal succession in chapter 2 of God and the Nature of Time.25
Insight. The working model flips the usual assumption. We tend to think of the NDE time-dilation as something strange happening to the soul. The model suggests something different: the dilation is the soul returning to its natural state. The constraint was the brain. Remove the constraint, and the soul's native experience of time unfolds. The strange thing isn't the expansion. The strange thing is the compression we live under every day.
This model is consistent with substance dualism (see Chapter 8). If the soul is a genuine substance, not merely a function of the brain, then it has its own capacities. One of those capacities is the ability to experience duration. The brain doesn't create that capacity. The brain constrains it. Death loosens the constraint.
The model is also consistent with what we know about the philosophy of time. On the A-theory, the soul's extended subjective experience is metaphysically real. The dying soul isn't remembering duration. It's living it. One moment follows another in genuine temporal succession. The clock at the bedside measures something real. But it doesn't measure everything real.31
I should be honest about a limit. We can't measure the soul's subjective time from the outside. We can measure brain activity, heart rate, and clinical time. But we can't hook a stopwatch to the soul.
What we can do is listen. NDErs give us the closest thing we have to an inside report. And what they report is consistent, detailed, and resistant to reduction.
Consider what we're actually dealing with. Four independent lines of evidence point in the same direction. The philosophical tradition from Augustine through Bergson and James says the soul has its own time. The psychological literature says time-perception bends under changed brain states. The NDE data say time-perception bends radically in the dying. And the theological case for divine temporality says God himself engages the soul in real time. No single line settles the question. But the convergence is powerful.26
The evidence is convergent, not direct. We reason from what we know across several domains. That's how we reason about most things that matter. No single line of evidence settles it. But the lines converge on the same conclusion: the moment of death holds more time than the clock can measure.
The book's thesis says every dying person meets Christ at the moment of death. The most obvious objection is: there isn't time. A person dies in seconds. How can anything meaningful happen in seconds?
This chapter's answer is that the objection confuses two kinds of time. From the bedside, the person dies in seconds of clock-time. But from within the dying, the soul may have hours, days, or longer in subjective time.27 The encounter doesn't need to fit inside clock-seconds. It fits inside the soul's duration. And the soul's duration, released from the brain's constraint, can hold as much experience as it needs to hold.
That means the encounter has room. Room for pursuit. Room for a life review. Room for Christ to show himself, speak, listen, and wait. Room for the soul to respond, resist, be drawn again, and finally choose. The encounter is not a flash. It is a meeting. And it takes the kind of time that meetings take.28
Consider what this means for the people this book cares about most. The infant who dies at birth. The person with severe cognitive impairment. The villager who never heard the name of Christ. The grandmother who went to church every Sunday but whose heart was locked against God for reasons only she knew. Each of them dies. Each of them, on this book's thesis, meets Christ. And the meeting doesn't have to happen in a fraction of a second. The soul's own time gives the encounter room to be real.
The details of what happens inside the encounter belong to Chapter 16 (Boros's hypothesis) and Chapter 19 (the dynamics of the encounter). The philosophical grounding for the A-theory and the B-theory debate belongs to Appendix H. The deeper case for psychological time belongs to Appendix I. The relativity objection and the block-universe challenge belong to Appendix N.
This chapter has done one thing. It has established that subjective time and clock-time are not the same. A moment short by the clock can be long by the soul's own measure. That single distinction makes the whole book possible.
From the bedside, the dying loved one slips away in moments. Inside that dying, the soul has all the time it needs to meet Christ.
Think about that the next time you sit beside someone who is leaving. The gap between her last two breaths may feel impossibly short to you. To her, it may be the longest, richest, most important passage of her life. You are watching from the outside, where clocks run. She is on the inside, where the soul keeps its own time. And there, by God's gift, there is room for everything that needs to happen.
↑ 1. The slow-motion effect during emergencies is well documented. See David Eagleman, "Human Time Perception and Its Illusions," Current Opinion in Neurobiology 18 (2008): 131–36. Eagleman's research at Baylor confirmed the subjective report while complicating its mechanism.
↑ 2. Augustine, Confessions, XI.14.17. The passage is discussed in Garrett J. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (London: Routledge, 2004), ch. 5, where DeWeese opens his medieval survey with Augustine's Confessions XI material.
↑ 3. Augustine, Confessions, XI.20.26–28.37. The three-fold analysis (memoria, attentio, expectatio) is the heart of Augustine's time-theory. For its bearing on the philosophy of God's relation to time, see Richard A. Holland Jr., God, Time, and the Incarnation, which also cites Confessions XI.14.17.
↑ 4. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889), ch. 2. Bergson expanded the argument in Matter and Memory (1896). The distinction between durée and spatialized time remained central to his entire philosophical project. For the relationship between Bergson's work and the philosophy of psychological time, see Appendix I.
↑ 5. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), ch. 15 ("The Perception of Time"). James's "specious present" has become a standard term in the philosophy of temporal experience.
↑ 6. Chess Stetson, Matthew P. Fiesta, and David M. Eagleman, "Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event?" PLoS ONE 2, no. 12 (2007): e1295. The falling experiment showed that subjective time-expansion during fear does not increase temporal resolution in real-time but is a retrospective effect of denser memory encoding. Eagleman's conclusion complicates the mechanism but does not remove the subjective report.
↑ 7. See Marc Wittmann, Felt Time: The Science of How We Experience Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), ch. 6, on meditation and temporal perception. Wittmann documents how experienced meditators report significant alterations in the passage of time.
↑ 8. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), ch. 4. Csikszentmihalyi identifies the distortion of temporal experience as one of the defining features of the flow state.
↑ 9. Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001). Strassman's clinical subjects routinely reported experiences that seemed to last hours within a few minutes of clock-time. Note that the DMT hypothesis for NDEs (the claim that endogenous DMT released at death produces the experience) remains unproven. See the discussion of the DMT hypothesis in Chapter 10.
↑ 10. Wittmann, Felt Time, chs. 1–3. Wittmann's central thesis is that the brain actively constructs temporal experience through interoceptive (body-state) signals. Change the body's state, and you change the experience of duration.
↑ 11. For the full survey of temporal anomalies in NDEs, see Chapter 10. The key studies are Pim van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands," The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–45; Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's, 2021); and Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010).
↑ 12. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005). Storm's NDE occurred in 1985 during a perforated duodenum in a Paris hospital. His account includes extended hellish imagery, a cry to Christ, rescue, and a lengthy dialogue with beings of light, all experienced as lasting hours.
↑ 13. George G. Ritchie with Elizabeth Sherrill, Return from Tomorrow (Grand Rapids: Chosen Books, 1978). Ritchie's NDE, occurring in 1943 at Camp Barkeley, Texas, was one of the earliest well-documented modern cases. Raymond Moody credited Ritchie's account as one of the inspirations for Life After Life (1975).
↑ 14. On the life review as an illustration of extreme time-dilation, see Chapter 11. The life-review element is documented across the major prospective studies and in Greyson's After, chs. 2–3.
↑ 15. Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010), ch. 2. Van Lommel emphasizes that NDErs consistently distinguish between what they experienced during the event and what they thought about it afterward. The distinction matters because it resists the post-hoc reconstruction explanation.
↑ 16. On cross-cultural and cross-age consistency, see Long, Evidence of the Afterlife, ch. 9 (children's NDEs). Long's NDERF database contains cases from dozens of countries and multiple religious backgrounds with consistent temporal features.
↑ 17. Storm, My Descent into Death, chs. 1–4. The sequential, narrative character of Storm's account is especially difficult to reconcile with the post-hoc reconstruction hypothesis. He describes a journey with distinct stages, conversations with distinct content, and instruction he received in a sequence he can reconstruct.
↑ 18. Michael B. Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), chs. 3–4. The Reynolds case is detailed in Chapter 8.
↑ 19. William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), pp. 130–31. Craig's argument is that our experience of tense—the felt difference between "this is happening now" and "this already happened"—is a properly basic belief: innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof falls on anyone who claims the experience is illusory. This is the same epistemic standing we should grant the NDEr's report of extended duration.
↑ 20. The dying-brain hypothesis is stated most carefully in Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993). For a more recent version, see Kevin Nelson, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain (New York: Dutton, 2011). Both argue that oxygen deprivation, endorphin release, and random neural firing can produce the full NDE phenomenology without positing a separable soul.
↑ 21. Sabom, Light and Death, chs. 3–4. See the fuller treatment in Chapter 8.
↑ 22. Greyson, After, chs. 1–3. Greyson catalogs the "common core" features of NDEs (out-of-body experience, tunnel, Being of Light, life review, temporal alteration) across five decades of research. For the systematic treatment, see Chapter 7.
↑ 23. Greyson, After, chs. 9–10. Greyson's longitudinal research documents personality changes lasting decades after the NDE. The changes include reduced fear of death, increased empathy, decreased materialism, and deepened spiritual awareness.
↑ 24. The model sketched here is consistent with the substance-dualist account of the soul developed in Chapter 8 and critiqued against physicalist alternatives in Chapter 9. The brain-as-constraint model has precedent in Bergson's Matter and Memory (1896), where Bergson argued the brain acts as a filter for consciousness rather than its generator. The philosopher David Chalmers has noted the family resemblance between Bergson's filter model and contemporary discussions of the "hard problem of consciousness."
↑ 25. The A-theory of time holds that the distinction between past, present, and future is metaphysically real. The dying soul's experience of one moment following another is genuine temporal succession, not an illusion. The case for why the book's thesis specifically requires the A-theory is developed in Appendix H. For the relativity-based objection and the reply, see Appendix N. Craig's defense of A-theory from the phenomenology of temporal experience and from the dissolution of McTaggart's paradox is at Time and Eternity, pp. 130–31 and 148–51. See also DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 2.
↑ 26. The convergence argument draws on four independent lines: (1) philosophical (Augustine, Bergson, James on the distinction between psychological and physical time); (2) psychological (Eagleman, Wittmann, Csikszentmihalyi on time-perception variation under altered states); (3) empirical (NDE reports of radical time-dilation, documented across multiple prospective studies); (4) theological (divine temporality and the soul's native capacity for duration). No single line is decisive. The convergence is.
↑ 27. How much subjective time? Conservative estimates (the most well-documented cases): hours. Less conservative (Storm, Ritchie): what felt like days. The life-review data suggest still more. The book's claim that the moment of death can hold "weeks or months" is consistent with the cumulative evidence, though it does not require the most expansive readings. For the case-by-case catalog, see Appendix B.
↑ 28. The dynamics of what happens inside the encounter—pursuit, life review, dialogue, decision—are developed in Chapter 16 (Boros's hypothesis of the Endentscheidung, the final decision) and Chapter 19 (the encounter's phases). The biblical foundations for the encounter are in Chapter 15 (biblical theology of time and eternity at the moment of death).
↑ 29. On intra-operative awareness and temporal distortion under anesthesia, see George A. Mashour, "Consciousness and Anesthesia," in The Neurology of Consciousness, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2016). The phenomenon illustrates the broader point: alter the brain's processing, and you alter the experience of time. The dying process represents the most radical alteration of brain function there is.
↑ 30. Boros, The Mystery of Death, II.8. Boros develops the concept of "ontological indigence" as the soul's condition in embodied life: unable to fully access its own depth, constrained by the body's structures, only partially free. Death removes the constraint. The soul, for the first time, encounters itself whole. This "total self-encounter" is simultaneously the encounter with Christ, since Christ is the ground of all personal being. See the full treatment in Chapter 16.
↑ 31. Craig's defense of A-theory from the phenomenology of temporal experience is at Time and Eternity, pp. 130–31; his dissolution of McTaggart's paradox under presentism is at pp. 148–51. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 2, develops the causal theory of dynamic time that underwrites the reality of temporal succession. See Appendix H for the full case.