The Ego and the Illusion of Time

This is a consolidated transcript from a past lecture that had accompanying slides. My hope is that the core ideas continue to resonate, despite their somewhat clumsy presentation in this format. Enjoy! -Dalton

We have culturally formed the habit of thinking of time as a mostly linear, constant flow that pushes us from past to future. But so far as your direct experience of life is concerned, there is no past or future. The past is memories which you experience now; the future is imagination, which you experience now. It all radiates out from now.

We generally think of a past creating the present creating the future, but this model is out of alignment with how your consciousness directly experiences reality. It is the present which creates the past. You experience the present moment, and then that moment is stored in memory. Like an echo, the present creates the past. If the present is the ship, the past is the wake. The wake doesn’t direct the ship; it’s the byproduct of the ship’s actions.

As for the future, you sit in the present and make plans, you imagine, you envision, and then you act—in the present moment—to bring your vision into reality. The present creates the past and future in the mind, but so far as you literally experience reality, outside of concepts, time is always now.

Is This Distinction Practical?

Often, I hear the objection: this “eternal present moment” doesn’t seem very practical. We have calendars to keep and alarms to set. But this counterpoint is rooted in a misunderstanding. I’m not saying that the earth doesn’t move or that clock hands don’t rotate. Oscillation, flow, and rhythm are immutable laws of the universe. But it all happens now. You set your calendar now, you plan tomorrow now, you think about yesterday now. At each moment, it is always now.

To say that the flow of experience is time is like saying your yard is made up of inches, or that sound is made up of decibels. You’re confusing the measurement of a thing with the actual direct experience of it. The measurement is a cultural idea we made up to communicate; it’s not the thing itself.

Understanding that time is an illusion is actually very practical, depending on the kind of life you wish to live. A higher perspective allows for a higher level of activity. If you want to live subconsciously, with anxiety, depression, stress, and infinite busyness, then sure, hold onto your previous conception of time. But if you want to gain higher faculties like peace, intuition, and readily available flow states, it’s extremely useful to dissolve the illusion of time.

Living in the present moment does not make you unable to understand a clock or calendar. You are still completely competent in scheduling and organizing; you just aren’t emotionally and mentally stretching time anymore. Ironically, living in that state actually makes you more efficient, because your focus and energy are on the now, not wasted on the past or future.

How the Ego Imprisons Us in Time

First, we must recognize that the ego lives in time. It creates stories in time, it stretches time, and this is part of what causes so much stress. The concept (your thoughts) is out of alignment with the percept (your experience).

This is partially a byproduct of the languages we speak. The ego forms stories using language, and in English, we have past, present, and future tenses. These grammar rules are a way of defining our experience, not necessarily a true representation of life itself. The way we speak influences the kinds of stories our egos can write. If you’re the kind of person who uses words like “always,” “never,” “should have,” or “need to,” there’s a high chance you have a lot of stories you’re holding onto.

Let’s make this more concrete. Our ego develops itself by judging what you do: this is good, this is bad, I’m always this, I never do that. It then looks for evidence for these judgments in your memories. But just because you find evidence in your memories doesn’t make it true.

The Past: Holding, Hurt, and Depression

In memory, you had an experience that caused you emotional pain. Say, someone broke up with you. That’s what objectively occurred. But what you interpreted it to mean was that you’re not worthy of love, you’re not enough, you don’t deserve happiness. By creating this story, the ego imprisoned this emotional energy within time. That sensation of holding, of weight, of pressure, is with you now, not in the past.

So long as you place your hurt in the past, you’ll never heal. You need to address what you’re holding on to in the present. The ego relates to the past through hurt and trauma, and the action is holding. This weight and pressure is depression, suppression, repression.

The Present: Desire, Resistance, and Stress

So far as suffering is concerned, the ego relates to the present through wanting, through desire. This is felt as resistance, stress, and judgment. You want money, you don’t want hunger; you want love, you don’t want noisy construction outside. The more attached you are to these desires, the more you’ll resist life, and the more you’ll struggle. The degree to which you resist what is is the degree to which you suffer.

The Future: Fear, Avoidance, and Anxiety

The primary experience of suffering that the ego creates in relation to the future is fear, which is experienced as anxiety because we are trying to avoid something. Once you have a story about who you are, the ego projects it into the future. If your subconscious story is that you’re not worthy of love, you’ll create an image in your mind of a bad future—dying alone, getting rejected again—and the fear of that image coming true stresses you out. You’re trying to get away from a bad future.

But you can’t create a good future if you’re still stuck running away from a bad one. We have to dissolve that bad future and begin living in a creative, present, generative state.