What is time, and how does it manifest in our life? Henri Bergson and the Existentialist philosophers of the XXth Century spent their whole careers reflecting on this concept, with Heidegger trying to tie “Time” with different “modes of being” (more on that in a future post - if I remember).
One of the most important contributions Bergson made was being able to snatch “Time” away from theoretical physicists. For Bergson, what scientists measure as “Time” is one thing, but what we experience as time is very different. Physicist Sean Carroll, for example, thinks “Time” is just a function of entropy after the Big Bang. In other words, time is the universe expanding. Without entropy and the Big Bang, stars and planets wouldn’t move away from each other, and we’d feel everything stayed the same. Hence, time can be understood as the speed at which the universe expands.
Bergson introduces the notion of duration, which is subjective and very different. By looking at experience and the phenomenological grasp we have on reality, he posits that time can dilute itself or shrink depending on our experience.
He also understood memory as a dynamic process, a connection between reality and experience. What’s beautiful in Bergson’s approach is that nothing is static: everything is moving and dynamic. Rigid time is translated as “duration” and our experiences are coded in a pool of memories that are ever-changing. So how do human beings go about doing anything?
This is Bergson’s cone of memory. Basically, all our experiences, codified as memories, are floating about inside the cone, ever-changing, interacting with each other and with “present” experiences. At a given time T, subject S will download a specific configuration of these memories and use them in the present to guide his actions.
This means that two different “present” times, T1 and T2, might benefit from completely different memories altogether. Imagine you go to a restaurant: there’s liver on the menu. At this T1 time, you might download memories M1 about how you don’t like liver, how you’ve had it in the past and how friends said it was unsavory. So you pass: nothing beats a chicken parmigiana!
However, at another point in time, T2, you’re invited to your girlfriend’s house to have dinner. Her parents serve you a huge slab of liver; you’re taken aback but can’t refuse because you want to make a good impression. You try it and find it delicious.
Your cone of memory is now constituted by different liver-experiences, with all of them floating about and crashing into each other. What happens next time you see liver on the menu? You’ll decide your actions by downloading a specific set of memories and choose either to give liver another go or not.
Memories and Altered States of Consciousness
How does the realm of psychedelics impact Bergson’s idea of time and his cone of memory? I haven’t found anything on the subject, so I’ll posit an idea here: entheogenic experiences produce an inversion of Bergson’s cone.
By “psychedelics” I’m referring to traditional, plant-based medicine that induces altered states of consciousness and can have a profound impact on the individual. Following Terrence McKenna, we can divide psychedelics in two, major branches: (1) the DMT and Psilocybin based and (2) the Peyote-type of compounds (we don’t have time to get into it here, but you can read Food of the Gods for more information).
What’s interesting about entheogenics, and the reason why I’m leaving out other altered states of consciousness, is the nature of the experience, which has been widely documented. Ground-breaking researcher Rick Strassman, for example, conducted successful DMT research in the ‘90s and wrote The Spirit Molecule, an intriguing book that was unfortunately turned into a trippy documentary hosted by Joe Rogan.
The inversion I’m talking about hinges on the profoundly transformative experience people may live (they don’t always) during an ayahuasca ceremony or a magic mushroom retreat. What’s different -and fascinating- is the ontological approach we find in all the verbal reports we find around these ceremonies. “Altered states of consciousness” doesn’t mean a lot: technically, if you’re drinking coffee, you’re living in an altered state of consciousness.
The difference is what absolutely anybody who’s ever been drunk can attest to: when you’re drunk or intoxicated with coffee or too much sugar, you report that you’ve moved away from reality, into a “drunken stupor” or a “tired yet active” caffeinated state. Nobody would say the world is more “real” after drinking a pint of whiskey!
However, as Strassman and others have pointed out, subjects coming out of the psychedelic experience report having experienced something more real than reality, a kind of “awakening” to the “real” nature of things. What on earth is going on?
You know you’re drunk, because you’re comparing your Bergsonian experience at time X with your whole pool of memories floating about in your memory cone. I know I’m not supposed to be drunk, because here’s all these years of sober experience to show me what un-drunken reality is. Even the most raging alcoholic would agree the “real” world is the sober one, with alcohol making us diverge from this real experience.
This is what’s fascinating about the psychedelic revolution we’re living: verbal reports post-experience almost always establish these two facts: (1) the person having gone through a trip systematically rates this experience as “one of the most important and transformative of their lives”, tantamount to religious enlightenment; (2) they all describe feeling they came into contact with something more real, with religious believers saying they talked to god and even rabid atheists saying they came into contact with the Big Bang’s creative energy.
How is this possible? You have 20 or more years of experiences and memories, yet this one ceremony of ayahuasca was enough to upend all your certainties! What’s the mechanism at work, here?
Flipping Bergson On His Head
The psychedelic experience works as a transcendent phenomenological marker, in the sense that it’s an experience outside the realm of time. This is difficult to explain to people who’ve lived sober all their lives: a psychedelic trip does not adhere to science-time parameters, just like a religious experience doesn’t, either. Charles Taylor, in his book A secular age, goes through a lot of trouble to explain how “time” has evolved as an ontological concept. We’ve already talked about circular time and kairos; to these we could add the idea of sacred time. “Sacred time” doesn’t abide by the same rules as “scientific time”: as Taylor explains, when you go to mass on Easter you live a “sacred time experience” that is closer to Jesus’ crucifixion than to Spring, 2022. You can also get this feeling if you go to the sacred city of Varanasi (Benarès) in India. I found myself stumbling through the streets, in the middle of a sickening heat adorned with cow droppings everywhere, running across groups of people carrying dead bodies to burn in the Ganges river. I remember asking somebody for the time and directions, since I was looking for a lassi shop that opened at 4. The person I asked seemed to be in some sort of trance. He couldn’t care less what “time” it was: he was on his way to burn Grandpa’s corpse and free him from the cycle of Samsara forever! Why on earth would he give a darn about a yogurt drink?
These transcendental experiences (in the sense that they’re out of scientific time) work as a new and inescapable analytic filter from which all the person’s experiences will be filtered. What’s more, as anyone who’s lived through an epiphany can confirm, the transcendental experience doesn’t fade or lose any of it’s power as scientific time passes by. Trust me, when you’ve had a conversation with the Egyptian god Horus, not only is this something you’ll never forget, but you feel as if the conversation is recent every time you think about it!
From a therapeutics standpoint, it’s obvious how these experiences can help people overcome PTSD and addiction: the trip is so lively, so meaningful to the person, that it can transform people literally overnight. By inverting Bergson’s cone of memory, the subject has built a new meaning-creating structure that informs his life thereafter.
These plants are really mysterious, magical, even. I personally feel it’s nothing short of a tragedy that our puritanical yet alcohol-infused society won’t allow research on the subject. Psychedelics represent the most important psycho-technology we’ve got at the moment, now that we’ve reduced the internet to people screaming on twitter and pictures of cats.
Thanks for reading this longer-than-usual post: sometimes it’s difficult to get the ideas out there!
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