Psychological time is the subjective experience of past, present, and future that shapes how we perceive ourselves and our possibilities—yet it is not a window onto objective reality but rather a construction of human consciousness. Practically everyone you know carries this invisible architecture. Regardless of their circumstances, this experience contains at its base an unexamined assumption that time is real, objective, and flowing. The following article is a very brief account of my metaphysical position on the nature of time and space. Long story short, space is an emergent property of the physical world, and time is is a fabrication of the surface-level conscious mind. When we begin to realise this, problems become fewer, and anxiety for an apparent future dissolves.
I see people from many different walks of life in my practice, including entrepreneurs, senior leaders, small business owners, stage performers, students, managers, professional and amateur sportspeople, and former prison inmates. They all come with a question to which they are seeking an answer, and they assume I may have that answer. I don't necessarily. Regardless of their ambition or trauma, their question appears to be rooted in the same fundamental assumption…
They believe in time.
Yesterday is behind them, and tomorrow is on the way. Whatever now is, it seems to be ticking by, measured by the movements of the hands on the clock face or the flashing intervals of light-emitting diodes on a printed circuit board. The calendar gives them a ten-thousand-foot view of the ever-depreciating year. They have memories of previous experiences, and they replay them in their mind. These memories represent who they are. After all, if they had no memories, they would have no identity. Is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves not made up of ideas, concepts and experiences gathered throughout our lives? These things represent who we believe ourselves to be.
Sometimes, my clients believe that whatever happened yesterday, last week, last year or ten years ago, will happen again–it is inevitable. Life has taught them that this is how things play out, out there in the world of which they are a part. In many cases, they feel like life has been thrust upon them without their choice. Other people or circumstances caused these things to happen to them. Why else would these things be happening? If they had a choice, they certainly wouldn't consciously choose them. Over and over, they rehearse the problems of yesterday.
For those who are ambitious and full of creative energy, the future is just as valid for them as the past is for those who suffer. Perhaps the past is equally valid, but these past experiences do not dictate future ones. They are the operative agent and they will decide how tomorrow will look. On the surface and from the outside, onlookers see them as materially successful and imagine there is no dysfunction. However, often there is, it's just they do an excellent job of disguising it. They have arguably found a healthy way to cope with the challenges of life and the realisation that one day they will run out of time.
We live in time, along a line from birth to death, and we have only a limited amount of time to live our lives. The past exists insofar as we experienced it. The future is something to either dread or look forward to, or a combination of both. To varying degrees, we believe what we call the present is created by the past–pushed out by it so to speak–and the future is created by what we do in the present. However, upon closer analysis, if we are to question these fundamental assumptions, we may realise that our concept of time is merely a social convention.
Clocks count–that's it. They do not measure anything. Memory is open to influence and is not concrete or even remotely reliable. Time is a creation of the conscious mind and does not exist outside of human thinking and imagination. Clocks are designed to tick-tock at a consistent pace, merely allowing us to gauge our interactions with the objective world and with one another. We follow this rhythm just as musicians follow the rhythm of a song. And just as the music plays now, not in the past or in the future, our lives exist only now. You cannot return to the past and experience it, because if you could, it would be now, and your memories of the future time from which you travelled would be in your past as far as you are concerned.
Likewise, if you could travel to the future, you would hardly know. At best, you might experience a gap in experience, but then you might disregard that as amnesia or assign some other plausible explanation. Tomorrow never gets here, because when it does, it is now. All clocks do is count; they do not measure the passing of anything because nothing is passing. Change is what we notice, but that too does not indicate the passing of time, but rather the peeling away of indefinable layers, the disintegration or the transformation of matter into similar or completely different forms. Unlike a movie that speeds past our eyes too quickly for our brain to recognise the gaps in the frames, it now has no frames. Quantum physics recognises that the future is merely infinite potential, and when the potential collapses, we can then define it. Matter does not exist in and of itself. Instead, according to analytic idealism, all matter is the outward appearance of mental states.
All of this happens right now in an infinite ever-unfolding present moment, no past, no future. The pattern of intervals of the clock and calendar that we have assigned to our existence is merely an abstract convenience. Life happens now, and only now. Thoughts and ideas of yesterday and tomorrow are in our imagination. So, be careful what you spend your time imagining, for it might just come true should you be persistent and committed enough.
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