It's about time that time was drawn into discussions of consciousness.
Surely I am not the first to conceive of the notion that the "now" we experience on a daily basis is a constructed now--a product, in fact, of consciousness. There is real "now", of course, in fact that is all there is. By definition, such a "now" can only be identified with eternity, the "now" of the eternal return. Our lived "now", however, is somewhat in a time-delay from that eternal (actual) present of sheer energy reactions and I would suggest that is because we live somewhat through memory. The constructed self of language restricts us from the immediacy of experience in the penultimate present.
As Heidegger as written, "for the most part we *are* our own having-been" (1927 lecture "ein eigener positiv ekstatischer Modus der Zeitlichkeit"). This present-pastness is the time of our personhood-in-the-world. To enter the actual present in nonselfconscious awareness is an experience both of anamnesis and forgetting, as Heidegger puts it: "The ecstasis of forgetting something has the character of disengagement vis-a-vis one's ownmost having-been, indeed in such a way that this disengagement- in-the-face-of closes off what it faces. Because forgetting closes off having-been--such is the peculiar nature of that ecstasis--it closes off itself to itself." "Ecstasis" mean more than rapture, of course, meaning as it does out of place (histanai) or out of time (stasis).
In our habitual reality, even our perceptions are not immediate, delayed as they are through such re-cognition. (Experiments by Libet and others give some empirical credence to this notion.) We exist in instant-replay.
Our "lived reality" (Husserl) or our "dasein" (Heidegger) or our "duration" (Bergson) or our habitus (alchemy) is a continuum of remembered past and anticipated future. We may well live in this continuum, forever held back from the actual present, which "remains" anticipated but always deferred.
In this sense, we always already "live in the past" and "life [really] is what happens when you're planning something else."
(nixon@geneseo.edu)
"A man needs a little madness, or else he dare never cut the rope and be free." (Nikos Kazantzakis, _Zorba the Greek_)
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