Consciousness in Time

The Eddy Network Podcast Episode 250

Jul 02, 2025

Time is not a clock. Time is the record of motion, action, and the process of creating effects.
Consciousness is not a thing. It is the presence of mind and body in time.
Time is generational memory.
Consciousness awakens us to awareness and remembrance.
What happens to our consciousness if time no longer exists?

T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets

Burnt Norton

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

…

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

…

Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

William Shakespeare

Act 5, Scene 5, Macbeth says,

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

William Faulkner

“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
“I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn't even lie.”

Time Description

The Past is “generational memory” represented in cultural traditions.

The Present in the contemporary world is “the eternal present”, realized as moments of spectacle.

Future is “the time of effects”.

Time as the Eternal Present

The Simulacrum of Time

“There is no past, nor future. Only the now.

All that once was considered in time has vanished into a simulation.”

Baudrillard and Symbolic Exchange - @arcypanjin

“A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history is no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn’t have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.” - Elias Canetti

The Spectacle of the Real

Simulations can become a simulacra, a virtual reality, a hyper-reality, a replacement reality of the world of meaning. They are a kind of diversion, a deflection from reality that commands our attention. This is the nature of the spectacular event.

The culture of the spectacle, of the event that captures our attention for the moment, has become the driving force in the culture of news, entertainment, sports, and consumerism. The spectacle deflects us from the real toward the hyper-real through the intensification of the historical moment as beyond history, as a singular moment in time that we must become immersed in to be alive or to be "informed." Not just a different version of the story, or different narrative, or a different perspective; but a different reality. This spectacle is a simulacrum. An iconic image event that simulates a representation of values or meaning, regardless of whether the reality of the event was about the moment being represented.

Written after posting:

Consciousness in Time.

I’m scratching a surface the size of the universe and eternity. I have been for a long time.

If you know me, you know that I am not a follower and that I was not made for the conformity, whether spiritually, socially, politically, or intellectually, to the modern world. It is a world oriented toward power and conformity to it. The egos of the powerful are small and fragile. They cannot abide by difference they cannot control. This is the modern world.

My heroes are discoverers. They wandered off the map given to them to find new pathways across a landscape beautiful and unknown.

I am following a map of reality that seems like a thousand maps randomly taped together. Of course, the map is not the terrain. Yet, the terrain is more than where I reside and work. It is where you do.

For this reason I travel, and talk to random people as I travel, and invite them into conversation about their part of the map. It is why The Eddy Network Podcast exists. Each conversation is a map of a specific person in a particular place.

I do not assume that there is one map or one guide or one answer. I simply desire to learn what they believe is important for us to know. Repair the map by bridging the gaps in the map.

So here is a beginning of an attempt to bridge a gap presented to me 13 years ago that I describe as The Spectacle of the Real. It is a gap between reality and our perception of reality, and one between Consciousness and Time, and one that describes the obstacle to peace, happiness, and fulfillment.

My map of discovery is big and the gaps are being bridged because I continue to drive off the map. The signals are out there in the terrain. It seems as good a time as any to declare that I feel like Roy Batty because “I see things you people would not believe”. One of my heroes of discovery.

This now is part of what I see.

Ed Brenegar

Writer, Speaker, Podcaster, Social Catalyst

Website - https://edbrenegar.com

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