When I was on my first trip on LSD, one of those moments, my friend suggested that I should try meditation, as I see his face is beaming purple I agree to whatever he puts me at this point. I scrolled through the options from his phone and I notice a funny meditation topic as I point out ot him "Huh, how to live in the present?" (Note in this time, I was experiencing ego death), ok for context, I would like to introduce how drug-induced ego death can happen. As I quote Psychedelics: The scientific renaissance of mind-altering drugs by Big Think, 2020:
One is they fit a certain receptor site: the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. And they look a lot like serotonin if you look at the molecular models of them and, in fact, LSD fits that receptor site even better than serotonin does and it stays there longer. And that's why the LSD trip can last 12 hours. What happens after that we don't really know. It's an agonist to that receptor. So it increases its activity.
And this, you know the neuroscientists say lead to a cascade of effects which is shorthand for don't really know what happens next. But one thing we do know, or we think we know, is that it appears that one particular brain network is deactivated or quieted. And that is the default mode network.
This was discovered not very long ago by a researcher in England named Robin Carhart-Harris who was dosing people with psilocybin and LSD and then sliding them into an MRI machine, to take an FMRI a functional magnetic resonance image. The expectation I think was that people would see an excitation of many different networks in the brain. You know, that's what the kind of mental fireworks sort of foretold, but he was very surprised to discover that one particular network was down-regulated and that was this default mode network.
So what is that? Well, it's a tightly linked set of structures connecting the prefrontal cortex to the posterior cingulate cortex, to the deeper older centers of emotion and memory. It appears to be involved in things like self-reflection, theory of mind, the ability to impute mental states to others, mental time travel, the ability to project forward in time and back, which is central to creating an identity, right? You don't have an identity without a memory and the so-called autobiographical memory, the function by which we construct the story of who we are by taking the things that happened to us and folding them into that narrative.
And that appears to take place in the posterior cingulate cortex. So, you know, to the extent the ego can be said to have a location in the brain it appears to be this, the default mode network. It's active when you're doing nothing. When your mind is wandering. It can be very self-critical, it's where self-talk takes place. And that goes quiet. And when that goes quiet, the brain is sort of as one of the neuroscientists put it, let off the leash, because those ego functions, that self idea is a regulator of all mental activity and kind of, you know, the brain is a hierarchical system and the default mode network appears to be at the top.
It's kind of the orchestra conductor or corporate executive. And you take that out of the picture, and suddenly you have this uprising from other parts of the brain and you have networks that don't ordinarily communicate with one another suddenly striking up conversations. So you might have the visual cortex talking to the auditory system, and suddenly you're seeing music, or it becomes palpable. You can feel it or smell it and, you know, synesthesia. So you have this temporary rewiring of the brain, in the absence of the control of the regulator. And this appears to have, you know, a beneficial effect in terms of jogging the brain out of bad patterns.
So what occured to me at that time, based on my memory, there was not much difference between past, present, and future. As my friend asked "What?? Isn't that the most important thing? And I said simply "No, there isn't much difference between the past, present, and the future." As if it's too obvious for me to even explain it, it's like explaining why 2+2 = 4.
But now as I just talked about it with my friend who has done mushroom recently, I asked him if he got the ego death sensation andI explained to him what ego death is, as we talked about it the fact that I said that "There isn't much difference between the past, present, and the future." It just occured to me that there's some grain of truth to it.
Let's start by the past as it is easiest to comprehend, the past has happened, you met your friends, you had experiences with your parents that has spent a lot of time with you and introduce you ideas or even sometimes in some household, what is good and bad, or maybe you were partaking in religion in your early age and it undeniably shape syour thought. This can easily be self-reflected by answering the question.
Do you love your parents?
Do you think you'd be a different person had you were raised without your current parents?
I asked these questions to my friends and I never got a person who answered that they think they would be the same person had they were raised with a different parents. So apparenty, our experiences shaped the way we think and how we navigate our life in the present. Our tragedies, our past good experiences that gives us motivation to meet our friends and the exposure of certain informations that helped us make decisions in the present.
So about the future. I think we at least intertwine ourself, in a a behavioral sense, to "look forward to something", as I explained on The Artist's Ego Death: Ego Death is Always Metaphorically Spiritual:
If we were to follow the pleasure principle, as I were to quote Memory Reconsolidation, Cristina M. Alberini, 2013:
With the pleasure principle, Freud postulated that certain aspects of mental life are guided by pleasure-seeking behaviors originating from the unconscious. The principle of pleasure, which supposedly governs mental functions, was also viewed by Freud as a principle of non-displeasure.
Pleasure and displeasure appeared to be linked, a system of displeasure being triggered and existing in parallel with that of pleasure. Thus, the Freudian pleasure principle is essentially a non-displeasure principle, encompassing those physiological processes that maintain bodily homeostasis.
Is essentially speaking that in a roundabout way, life is inevitably spent doing what one loves doing or finding pleasure with. In the other hand, the Drive Reduction Theory states that:
Drive Reduction Theory states that needs which are currently not satisfied constitute behavioural drives working towards their satisfaction (Hull, 1943).
Similarly, based on need-related changes in neural activation patterns, it has been argued that unfulfilled needs cause primordial emotions that dominate the stream of consciousness (Denton, McKinley, Farrell, & Egan, 2009). More generally, self-regulation researchers consider unfulfilled needs special forms of desire which—because need satisfaction has a very high reward value for the individual—are especially likely to hijack cognitive capacity, at a cost to other currently to-be-pursued goals (Hofmann & Van Dillen, 2012).
I believe that Drive Reduction Theory and Pleasure Principle Theory are basically the two sides of the same coin. By avoiding unpleasant feelings, we chase and get pleasant feelings. The same way some people are "bothered" when they are not doing the things they would like doing that gives them a great sense of happiness. This could be a context of longing for a romantic partner or job that doesn't give a sense of fulfilment.
When Hofmann says "More generally, self-regulation researchers consider unfulfilled needs special forms of desire which—because need satisfaction has a very high reward value for the individual—are especially likely to hijack cognitive capacity, at a cost to other currently to-be-pursued goals." I agree with him as a mean that most of the time, we are driven by the unconscious that sort of get us into a habit that we have formed in the past that gives us a sense of pleasure, it hijacks our cognitive capacity for the sake of satisfaction/pleasure to be fulfilled, almost mechanical in nature. The unconscious is really much more stronger than the conscious.
We can only be aware of this when we pay attention to it. The same reason when we are asked about how we spent our time and regret about it is that we may think that it could be spent in much better ways but we know we didn't. Cognitive dissonance will give us reasons that "it was necessary."
This is where I propose, if we really pay attention to what we want out of our life, what really gives us a great sense of satisfaction out of imagining it happening, I think happiness is almost mechanical in nature, will follow. Activities and remedies that we enjoy doing that bring us closer to our desired self. [Otherwise our brain will most of the time go into autopilot and do whatever the next great dopamine kick thing is. Rendering us wandering with regret out of late epiphany that we wasted our time.]
There's really little difference between the past, present, and the future. The experiences of the past and the essence of the emotions that came along with it affects your present. Your opinion about the future also shapes on how you potentially walk the future. As how Albert Camus puts the relation between one's opinion about life and how one treats life in his book, the myth of Sisyphus:
But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble." Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
[...]
In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man' s attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body' s judgement is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us toward death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
The future is always a metaphysical plane, but how one sees the future, inevitably affects on how one treats the present. There's really is little difference between the past, present and the future. As both the path and future greatly influences the present, must we say that there is a great difference between the past, present, and the future? Of course I'm only talking about in a sense on how one's view life and how one's opinion about the past and the future AND the emotions that are tightly bound to it can greatly influences the present. But that's the essence of living itself, the feelings of those emotions, without it, we don't have any motivation nor even any will to live.
There's Little Differences about the Past, Present, and Future means that we acknowledge tha past and people from the past that has given us a nice experience and influence how we shape our thoughts, and about the future, you will probably become the person that you think about the most.