Time and the Eternal Present

On a recent psilocybin mushroom trip, the concept of "time" was a major theme that carried on for the duration of my experience. As can happen during miserable experiences such as being ill, undergoing a difficult physical experience, or waiting for the work day to end, during my trip past and future seemed completely irrelevant and were nothing more than elusive concepts. My trip however, was not a miserable experience--far from it in fact--but was a wonderful, beautiful, profound experience.

Being only my second trip with psilocybin mushrooms, I've had to follow the advice of other people whom I respect and who are far more experienced than I with psychedelics for dosage recommendations, set and setting pointers, and various other details. One of these recommendations which I chose to follow was to record my trip using a digital voice recorder. This seemed a brilliant idea to me as I frequently wish I could record thoughts I have while driving or otherwise unable to take the time to write them out. Given the fact that the psychedelic experience is notoriously easy to "forget," the recorder seemed like it would prove invaluable.

But as I hit the peak of my trip, I found myself talking to the recorder, trying to capture the experience so my future self could appreciate it more. Not only was this at the expense of the appreciation of the trip that I was undergoing at the time, but it also proved to be a barrier preventing me from going further. At one point, I was lying under the Milky Way and some entity (whether of my own invention or external to me is irrelevant) tried to "show me" the raw experiential beauty of the Universe but my ego kept trying to capture and record all that I was experiencing. The entity, which was pulling me upward in an effort to show me, continuously told me that until I could let go and allow myself to just experience this journey in the present that I would not be able to see what it is that I needed to see. Each time it would try and show me, I would tell myself, "Okay, here we go, you've got to remember this." It was as if my ego would try and explain this situation to itself. It kept trying to capture everything, to articulate it into language to process it, to remember it, but the entity kept telling me that this experience could not be captured, could not be experienced other than in the present, yet each time it tried to show me, my ego would not let go. And so, after a while, the entity gave up. "You are not ready," it said.

After this, my trip went on with minimal interaction with anything I would classify as an entity, but I kept the recorder with me. I spent the majority of my trip lying under the Milky Way on a blanket at my family's tree farm in upstate New York watching the Perseid meteor shower. At one point, I remembered how afraid I had been in the darkness prior to starting my trip and was amazed that I felt absolutely no fear at all. I thought about it and I realized that in the present, fear does not exist. Fear REQUIRES past and future in order to exist; if you are completely in the present, you could never be afraid. What I realized was, all of fear is based off of some past memory and some future expectation. If all that exists is the present, then there can be no such thing as fear. I am not arguing that fear can not be experienced in the present, just that it requires the past and the future in order to be experienced at all.

I was completely unafraid during my trip because I was COMPLETELY in the present. I could not fear some animal jumping out of the woods and eating me because 1) that could only be an event that happened in the future and 2) the basis for this fear only existed in my mental past.

As I tried to fathom the future, I struggled to imagine anything other than the present. The notion of "Monday" seemed comically absurd to me. There is no Monday, there is only right now! Going to work at some point in the future was an absolute absurdity, a figment of my imagination. The experience that I was having at that very moment was the only experience I would ever have, it was eternal. I experienced the present so powerfully--for the first time in my life (or at least what I remember :-)--that I completely forgot who I was. I don't mean that I forgot my name, or was confused or something. I completely forgot who I was. My name, my memories, my body, my relationships, all didn't exist in the present, they had no meaning. I couldn't remember a thing about my childhood and was completely unable to come up with a single idea or memory that could satisfactorily identify me as me. I just was, that's all. Eventually, I came up with a few vague concepts that I knew that I had formally identified myself with: the street I grew up on, my own name, the image of my girlfriend, my major, but these things held no meaning, they all lived in my past and the past after all, did not exist anywhere but in my mind!

Just as the past exists only in the memories of my mind, the future also exists only in my mind, the only difference being that we call the ideas of the future dreams rather than memories. In really examining these two concepts, they are more difficult to differentiate between than initial inspection would lead one to believe. How should one think about the past? It is traditionally regarded as some point in linear time that happened prior to "now." But you cannot hold the past in your hand, it is not right in front of your eyes like the present is. It can only exist in the memories of the mind and memories can fade or change through time. The trout caught by the fisherman always grows in time. And since the past only lives in memories, it must be mutable and therefore cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth."

As with the past, the future too only exists in the mind in the form of dreams. The traditional definition of "future" would be some point in linear time beyond "now." And like memories, these dreams are completely mutable and, though they can contain as much truth as the past, also cannot be thought of as holding any "objective truth." Really, the only difference between the past and future is the arbitrary distinction of being either prior to or beyond the present. The problem is, it is always the present. It is the never the future just as much as it is never the past. Past and future, far from being opposites are in fact, the same thing. As with all dualities they merely represent different sides of the same phenomenon.

As my trip wore on and lost its intensity, my experience of the present slowly dissolved so that I was able to incorporate more and more of my memories into my experience, but I continued to think about this notion of time. One of the biggest lessons that I took out of the whole experience was that all we have is the present. Memories can live inside us, and can be experienced in recollection, but they interfere with and limit our experience of the present (this may be a "good" thing or a "bad" thing). But just as one can live in the past, so too can one live in the future with similar consequences. Someone living in the future might put off their present situation in order to make a better future for themselves, but that person runs the risk of always putting off the present for some idealized future that never comes. After all, when has it ever been tomorrow?

Just as I experienced that fear cannot exist without the past AND the future, so it is with fear's opposite: hope. And just as fear can be dangerous, so too can hope. The notion of hope removes us from the present. It causes us to put off our present for some desirable future. But just as I mentioned above, it is never the future, it is never tomorrow. And if all that we have is today, then lets live for today.

Some think of this world as Hell, or a purgatory, a staging ground for a future eternal bliss, but if you are living your life for some paradise lying beyond this world, than you're missing the paradise right in front of your eyes. No god put us here to suffer and toil and labor for some future salvation. Salvation is yours if you open your eyes and live in the present. God's Paradise is among us here and now. We were not banished from Eden, it is not hidden in some ideal past or future, but it is hidden in the one place that modern man would never look: the present.