Where time does not exist

Having been approached with the question "How can we perceive the notion of time without our cultural constraints?" in one of our earlier class sessions, I feel the best way I can begin my answer is with a personal recollection:

Seven years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school, I was in an accident that put me in an unconscious state for nearly four whole days. During that period (which according to family was a near-death struggle for me), I became a part of something I will never forget: white silence. -That's it. No sparkling lights. No divine answers. No heavenly consciousness. Just white silence. And what's more, there was no notion of time. I simply was a part of the white silence when I awoke from my coma.

Now, seven years later, I look back to that experience and wonder two things: 1) Why is it that what I heard was silence, but what I saw was whiteness? - Wouldn't it be more logical for silence to be accompanied by blackness or some other indiscernible color? and 2) Would I have seen something beyond white silence - perhaps a tunnel of light or a doorway to heaven or even God Himself welcoming me into His kingdom - had my never waking from a coma been predetermined?

To resolve these wonderings (which I know to be held within a specific cultural context), I refer back to (and finally give an answer to) the posed question "How can we perceive the notion of time without our cultural constraints?"

The reason many people in the United States (and in many other parts of the world) are so deeply disturbed by the notion of death is that they attach their own particular concept of time to that inevitable fate. I think this explains the Christian need (as well as the Christian condemnation of Atheism) to portray only two real after-death scenarios: going to Heaven or going to Hell, because going to an eternity of nothing, where one has literally all the time in the (after)world to be aware of how bored he is, is more unimaginable than any hellfire damnation man could think of.

Perhaps, then, the only way to perceive the notion of time without our cultural constraints is to simply let go of time when it no longer becomes a relevant matter. After all, time does not exist when we are dead. Heck, it didn't even factor in when I was unconscious.

And amen for that!