For laypeople that even bother to consider it the concept of malleable time seems extremely bizarre. Yet cosmologists have grown quite comfortable with it. The fact that the dimension of time is pliable and subjective might be a clue pointing towards a potential resolution to the cocktail party problem.

Books like Stephen Hawkings’ “A Brief History of Time” provided more clues. Mass or more precisely the gravitational force associated with mass can also change time. Like speed, increasing gravity can alter the passage of time. As I read a theoretical description of a spaceship traveling across the event horizon of a black hole, a gravitational abyss so massive and strong that even light cannot escape it, I started to get what I believed was a glimmer of insight.

A distant observer sees the spaceship simply being swallowed by the black hole. On the spaceship, however, time would stop and for the ship’s passengers crossing the event horizon takes all eternity even though they would not perceive it that way. In effect an event that happens in an instance from one perspective lasts forever from another.

Might this not be a near perfect analog for what happens at the moment of death? To earthly observers gathered around a dying man he quickly passes over the event horizon of death. These observers continue to perceive events in earthly time as the body is buried and decays just like the dirt scenario suggests. For the deceased, however, at the moment of death he is freed from his corporeal environment and all its physical implications including time. The moment of death is both an instant and an eternity. Stated another way, it is an eternity played out in an instant. The potential for boredom dissipates as one begins to truly appreciate this collapse of time.

There is even anecdotal evidence to support this vision of death. We’ve all heard stories about people seeing their whole life flashed before them during a near-death experience. As time dissolves an entire lifetime can be relived in a single moment. We all accept that death frees us from the three physical dimensions of space. Why wouldn’t it follow that it also frees us from the fourth dimension of time? With everything we know about physics we have to reject the implied rigidity of the cocktail party question concerning the passage of time.

Think about it this way. The totality of time which under the right conditions can be experienced in an instant has taken 14 billion years and still counting to pass because of our limiting human condition. The comforting vision that I have come to is not that the afterlife is so much like this world but that this world is so limited compared to the possibilities of the next once we are freed from this physical existence.

My cancer is in remission right now but I know that ultimately this issue will once again become an urgent matter. For me at least I feel as if I finally have a reasonable resolution to the cocktail party problem. A belief in an afterlife shouldn’t be hindered by the fact that our human condition can only perceive time in such miniscule pieces. The objection concerning an eternity of boredom disappears once we are freed from our corporeal existence and its associated limitations with experiencing time. In effect the two choices differ only in terms of where we choose to observe death. To those left behind the dirt option is the equivalent of the observers watching as that spaceship slips into a black hole. The dying person is, however, a traveler on that spaceship experiencing the collapse of time and an eternal afterlife.

Now if I can only figure out what parts of our consciousness go along for the ride…