Time and the 'Self'

Time.

According to the thermodynamic arrow of physics, time is an objective arrow, an ordered system. And ordered systems have a tendency to fall apart, including our bodies. ‘In the end it all falls apart.’

This sense of time as an objective and independent, external force, one to be feared, leads us to order our lives in a way that makes sense to this objective arrow. As we get older we become more acutely aware of time in this manner. As we experience more years, the concept of a year feels shorter, until eventually we may find ourselves totally justified in our  judgement that ‘life is short'. This need to organise and conceptualise time in a linear way that makes sense to us from a human perspective helps us accomadate a comfortable illusion that everything is synchronius. We like to talk and read in the past tense, the present tense is too uncertain. Our brain constantly strives for continuity, even when that continuity may not necessarily be there. We want to have agency over time, and so we like to plan days and have expectations, meal times are comforting, as are routines. To have agency over time would be to prolong life, after all.

Distortions of time are concerning, forgetting more so. but what if these distortions could be liberating?

Cognitive neuroscience has found that patients experiencing schizophrenia and psychosis often experience temporal distortions. Patients often report that time has disappeared. Without order and rule, the timeless subject's ego is in a state of flux. The disruption of continuous time can shatter the illusion of order and synchrony that humans are so heavily wedded to. This is similar to the ego dissolution subjects who take psychadelic drugs often report. The loss of ‘self’ these subjects report are another example of the disruption and dismantling of time dissolving the notion of our ‘self’ as an independent entity. 

These states are akin to how a young child experiences the world, when their concept of time is not fully formed, and not mature or regimented enough to take away from the all-encompassing expereince of touching, seeeing and tasting things for the first time. To lose the concept of time is to experience things for the first time, through a new lens. 

Flow states are another example of how we can disrupt time and how, time symbiotically disrupts our experience. Thinking of the last time you were in a flow state, when you concentrated so hard at the task at hand that all other worries seemingly fell away. Flow states are rewarding precisely because they involve the forgetting and disregard of the human concept of time. These states allow our ego to momentarily fall away.

A view of the internal ‘Self’ at-one with experience-inducing external stimuli; entirely connected to the world we operate in, blurs the boundaries between our internal experience (effect) and the world around us which produces said experience (cause). Adopting a view of internal experience as inseparable from the network of external experience-stimuli in which we exist, disrupts the idea of objects of cause occurring outside of the isolation of internal experience we typically regard as our person. 

Adopting this view, we may see ourselves as simply a moment in time, rather than something to be governed by and at odds with. We may see our existence as a continuous moment in time as the experience is the here and now. We don’t reminisce on the past or plan for the future, instead we experience the world for what is here now, at one with the reality of external stimuli that exists in this very moment. 

But a wish to dominate time, a preoccupation with the pat or look to the future is an inherent part of the human experience. It is an inherent aspect of survival and knowledge sharing; phenomology informs our epistemology.

Our sense of self may be wedded to our experience of time

Links between the disruption of time and disruption of a sense of self- the concept of time allows us to have a concept of self. Like psychosis and schizophrenia, certain psychedelic experiences include a supposed liberating loss of self of sense that accompanies a loss of a sense of time. It’s the idea that feeling infantile experiences in the same way a child experiences the world, without harsh deliniations or concepts of time, life isn’t structured around time, this can