Why does it feel like you live forever when you live within the moment?

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Experience has taught me that it’s because you’re actually turning the parts of your brain off that make sense of and store your experiences. When meditating, eventually you’ll start having experiences unconnected from your daily living existence and therefore won’t have much of a reference or language for.

The brain has a tough time holding onto these and many many many people report meditative amnesia. The same dynamic is at play when dreaming, the most common advice, keeping a dream journal, is specifically geared at activating those parts of the brain that compress and store memories for later retrieval.

Turning off this part of the brain is either a consequence or result of that intensely vivid perception of the event. Later, you have easy recall only the highest-level aspects of the experience that your mind was able to hold onto. Not that the whole thing is just gone, smells can often bring them back.

Think about the brain in terms of energy and processing power and attention span, and it all makes a lot more sense.