Extraordinary states of consciousness must therefore also affect space and time.
Le Guin’s splendid “Hymn to Time” - “Time is being and being / time, it is all one thing, / the shining, the seeing, / the dark abounding.” - Wittmann writes:Īltered states of consciousness very often go hand in hand with an altered perception of space and time… Ultimately our perception and our thoughts are organized in terms of space and time. In a sentiment that calls to mind the closing verse of Ursula K. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.) Discus chronologicus - a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, included in Cartographies of Time. Weaving together the phenomenology of perception, clinical research in psychiatry and neurobiology, patient case studies, philosophy, literature, and landmark experiments from psychology labs around the world, Wittmann examines the extremes of consciousness - near-death experiences, epilepsy, intensive meditation, psychedelics, mental illness - to shed light on the abiding enigmas of what consciousness actually is, how body, self, space, and time intertwine, where the boundaries of the self are located, why the dissolution of those boundaries might be the supreme wellspring of happiness, and how consciousness of time and consciousness of self co-create each other to construct our experience of who we are. Nearly a century after Woolf and many turns of the cultural wheel after Whitman, the German psychologist and chronobiologist Marc Wittmann - a pioneer in the research on time perception - takes up these enormous, elemental questions in Altered States of Consciousness: Experiences Out of Time and Self ( public library), translated by Philippa Hurd. Looked at, it vanishes.” Far ahead of modern science, she understood that our experience of selfhood and the “soul” is largely rooted in our experience of time - that self and time are entwined in a shared elasticity. Midway in time between Whitman and Bernhard, Virginia Woolf distilled the paradox into its central problem: “One can’t write directly about the soul. Thus we can never talk about self-observation, we are talking as someone we never are when we are not observing ourselves, and thus when we observe ourselves we are never observing the person we intended to observe but someone else.”
A century after Whitman, the Austrian poet, playwright, and novelist Thomas Bernhard addressed this in his exquisite meditation on the attendant paradox of self-observation: “If we observe ourselves, we are never observing ourselves but someone else. And yet the most paradoxical feature of consciousness might be precisely the elusiveness of the self in an identity composed of porous, ever-shifting multitudes. This is the thought of identity,” Walt Whitman wrote in contemplating the central paradox of the self. “There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.
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