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In psychoanalysis, Freud’s “fundamental rule” is to say whatever comes to mind as it comes to mind , dubbed “free association”. Free association does not happen easily for most people—it takes time to get comfortable. But it is considered a developmental accomplishment to be able to be both open with and receptive to and with oneself.
Usually we censor ourselves; part of the value of free association is noticing when we do and don't hold back what's on our minds. What we do and don't get hung up on changes over time, and observing and understanding those changes is tremendously valuable in terms of self-knowledge and the ability to reflect on what's happening psychologically while it's happening.. so called "reflection in action".
The therapist (analyst) in turn listens with “evenly hovering attention”, which resembles what many have come to know as mindfulness. You get to know the present moment, your present moment, intimately. The two together form a powerful dynamic, which sinks in over the course of long-term therapy into deep self-reflective knowledge and experiential awareness.
Perhaps change is more elemental than time. Maybe time is an illusion. If linear, narrative time is at least partly a psychosocial convention, a social construction and consensus reality , then there does not have to be a universe that is billions of years old. It’s arguably fictitious, but based in reality. The reality is that the moment changes, and there is a pattern to this process of change which can be tracked linearly and nonlinearly.
The Language of Change
Time is the language of change. Change is parsed into units with words and measurements — seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia, eons. Time is a bookkeeping tool, a way to count change.
The moment has a certain width, a stationary window with changing images. Stack up these moments in mental registers, and these images can be put together into a temporal map in one’s mind that is a line. The anatomy of the present moment is different for everyone, depending on your intrinsic temperament, your life experience, and perhaps even the way you explore your own relationship with and experience of the present moment.
It is within the present moment, and only within the present moment, where we can actually encounter ourselves, different parts of ourselves, conflicts and concordances, where we can in real time meet ourselves. The present moment is a mirror. This can happen only if there is room for that to happen. If we are too single-minded too much, we’re excluding ourselves from that broader self-awareness.
Time Technology
Clocks of various sorts are among the oldest and most important of human inventions. Timekeeping is required for people to coordinate and plan together, as well as for one's own planning. Where to meet, when to meet, and what to do at the same time. Plans come together at specific times.
Time seems to move in only one direction, from past to future. This is called “the arrow of time” but it could be called “the arrow of change”. In physics, entropy is always increasing, on average, although pockets of order grow; ultimately there is a net loss of order. Keeping track of time is at the root of music, math, language, and story— all of which have a cadence or meter. They can all also go in circles or circles nonlinearly.
The cycles of nature give time an inherent musical quality, the celestial symphony: the sun comes up, we go about daily routines, with repetition and variation. Nonlinear experience, creativity, being open-minded, making associations that aren't obvious—that heightened state of mind can be hard to embrace because most of us grow up with the clock as an iconic image, and linear time can become a prison.
Still Moments Run Deep
When immersed in the moment, in a flow state, the linear sense of time often seems at a standstill or even stops existing. The moment is “timeless”, part static and part ever-changing. Metaphorically, as time and space become interchangeable near a black hole’s event horizon, time transforms into a spatial experience in the present moment.
During such moments, the stream of consciousness is much more evident. Self-reflection takes on a different character as participant-observation with oneself. You can try and trace back, for instance, experience to its wellspring. Where do thoughts and feelings enter one’s awareness? The contours of introspective experience are multisensory and non-trivial to consciously grasp. If you can hold the moment as the frame, then you can move your attention around in the flow of the moment and understand yourself deeply thereby.
Freedom in the Moment
This is all relevant because every single move you make, every decision and choice, every distraction or diversion, takes place within the moment. It’s the only time when you have any say at all over what happens. While past and future extend out beyond the present moment, that happens in one's imagination and thought only during the present moment.
A tugboat moves an oil tanker with tiny nudges over and over again. The conscious mind is the tugboat; the inertia of the unconscious mind and the world is the oil tanker. The tiny changes can reverberate, amplify (especially with repetition), growing in significance over time. What we can influence in the moment has to do with experiential patterns.
This is another reason linear time conception evolved, perhaps — to allow us to better simulate reality and influence outcomes. This is an aspect of what we call executive function. Executive function exercises itself exclusively within the present moment, which is paradoxically both stable-consistent as well as ever-shifting, slipping by as we hold on to it. Being able to move fluidly between linear and nonlinear experiences is a powerful skill. They work synergistically.
Let's Do the Time Warp
Learning the layout of the present moment takes investment of effort. It can provide insight and leverage but is harder in some ways to grasp than linear time. The influence in the moment can make all the difference as we stretch ourselves experientially, turning our perceptions inward to explore the fine and complex structure — the depth, breadth, and width — of the present moment as it passes through the defining, changing shape of conscious and unconscious mind. The way we pay attention, what we pay attention to, and how we pay attention, the fleeting ability to make a conscious decision before the moment slips by — that is all the power we ever have.
