" To use the symbolic language of Bodkin’s scheme, he would then be abandoning the conventional estimates of time in relation to his own physical needs, and entering the world of total neuronic time, where the massive intervals of the geological timescale calibrated his existence. Here, a million years was the shortest working unit, and the problems of food and clothing were as irrelevant as they would have been to a Buddhist contemplative lotus-squatting before an empty rice bowl under the protective canopy of the million-headed cobra of eternity. "

― J.G. Ballard , The Drowned World