Bruce Buchanan wrote:
it is the mutual relation of recurring biological, perceptual, neural and other regulatory cycles (endocrine, diurnal, etc.) in various relationships that build up the relations of before and after ...
I think Bruce points in the right direction. Our sense of a now and a past and future stem from our biological imperative (i.e., not to be avoided). Biological systems mature and die and exist in an ecology that systematically varies in time, as measured by the planet's movements in space. Just as our brains must represent the reality of the body's spatial relationships as a necessary condition of self consciousness, they must also represent as a necessary condition of self consciousness the reality of the natural cycles present in our bodies and in the environment.
Human consc. with its language-based emphasis on memory and expectations, is inextricably linked with a time sense. Although memory and expectation are timeless in their role as abstract mental events and exist only in the present in their role as finite brain events (having only a dispositional status when not *in consciousness*), their content extends into time past and time present. This has obvious survival value: assessment of the past and planning for the future. Additionally, memory and expectations have emotional aspects that bind us to time: the past is associated with nostalgia, joy, regret, etc. and the future with anticipation, anxiety, hope, etc.
The experience of timelessness spoken about in mystical experience is usually associated, I think, with a freeing of the sense of one's body construct (a spatial aspect). One supposedly moves away from being bound in the here and now (which for most of us is full of there and then) to a sense of timelessness and expansion of the self. This leads to speculation on the brain's construction of space and time and its mutability.
R. Prescott
jcs-online
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