What Is Psychological Time and What Is Its Relationship to Our Behavior and Mental Well-Being?

“He who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” — George Orwell, 1984.

The concept

Time is a word that is thrown around often, but it is not often seen as something that has a deep psychological meaning. In everyday speech we say that we ‘waste time’, we ‘spend it’, or that we ‘don’t have enough of it.’

But what is time, anyway?

To answer the question, let’s consult the Oxford dictionary first. There it is written that:

Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.

Every pupil knows that we count time with seconds, minutes, hours, or even centuries. What most people don’t take into consideration is that a century in the context of mankind is but a blink of an eye, and mankind in the span of the universe is just a flash.

Time flows, it moves, it changes things, yet we cannot grasp or keep it. As said by Harvey MacKay:

“Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back.”

That is why we have created a word (a concept) to restrain and manage this elusive movement of existence. But let’s be wary – we don’t manage “time,” we only manage our relationship to it.

Time as an institution

According to the British philosopher and public speaker Alan Watts, time as we understand is not a natural “physical” phenomenon. Instead it is a human creation, a convention, a mental model, an interpration. In his lecture series on “Time and the Future” the philosopher stated:

Time is a social institution and not a physical reality. There is, in other words, no such thing as time in the natural world the world of stars. And waters and mountains and clouds and living organism. There is such a thing as rhythm, rhythm of tides, the rhythm of biological processes. But time (as a social institution) is in the same way that language is, that number is, that concepts are. And all measurements; inches, meters, lines of latitude and longitude, all those things are social institutions, conventions.

Convention (translated from Latin ‘convenere’) means “to agree with.” Thus, we agree that “time” exists as a physical reality, that it actually “is” the same way as a flower is. This way of thinking and perceiving time makes everything simpler, clearer and easier to manage.

Psychological time

The invention of the clock is a remarkable thing. It helps us to meet at the corner store at the exact same time as both parties have planned rather than monitoring the sun’s position sky-wise or tracking the alignment of the stars. Not everyone is well versed in interpreting the movement of celestial bodies, and what should one do on a cloudy day? No, no, no. The clock is a wonderful invention, but, as most of us have already noticed, it is also a terrible master. As said by George Harrison:

“Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.”

Time’s nature is relative. For some it flies by, for others it moves slowly. Some feel like they spend it, others say they waste it, while the third group believes that they invest it. All of these phrases say nothing about what time is in its actuality, but they show how we relate to it, how we respond to it psychologically.

Psychology is a great power if we know how to tap into its processes. It affects how we see the world, how we model it conceptually, and how we relate to it on a phenomenological basis.

Thus, we can firmly say that time is a creation of the human mind. It is the product of thinking, perceiving, and relating.

Thought, just as time, has two handles. It is both the benefactor of our superior prowess to adapt to environmental changes, and the cause of much of our suffering. As noted by the great Indian thinker, philosopher and public speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti:

Thought has created marvelous things: the great cathedrals, the marvelous architecture, the great songs, poems, music, the extraordinary technology, the bomb, the atom, it is all the result of thought. The enormous accumulation of armaments to destroy each other, is the result of thought. And all the knowledge accumulated by the scientists is the result of thought. If you are not thinking you cannot go to your home, you cannot speak language. So thought has an extraordinarily important place. But we are enquiring, observing, the cause of this misery of man, apart from the world of physical convenience, communication, telephone, transportation… — we are not talking about that, that is obvious. But is thought the essence of our misery? And if so, how can we put it to an end?

For Krishnamurti, physical and psychological aspects of time are not the same. While the former relates to the changes taking place in the “outter”, the latter has to do with the changes happening “internally.” Thus Krishnamurti asks: can we live without time psychologically? Can we be satisfied with “what is” instead of striving for what we thing “ought to” or “should be”?

In another passage he engages his audience by inquiring into various psychological states (such as violence, anger, jealousy) and shows how putting-off our liberation from them we don’t just ignore them, but we also perpetuate their existence. There, he says:

I am violent. When I say ‘I’, I mean all humanity. You are violent. Human beings are violent. Isn’t it important to find out whether it can end immediately? Isn’t it important? Not say, ‘I must become non-violent’. When you become non-violent that means a period of time. During that period you are sowing the seeds of violence, which is so obvious. Like man saying, ‘I am trying to be non-violent’. So, is it possible to end violence or greed, whatever you will, anger, immediately — the whole entirety of violence?

The distinction between “what is” and “what ought to be”

According to the thinker, the “future” is a hiding place, an illusion, a get-away. Either you see the thing for what it is and in the process of getting to know it deeply you evaporate it, or you escape from it by creating a time lapse which is nothing more than an excuse for one to continue being as he or she is.

Facing the fact of our shadow is a hard. It is much easier to accept the fact that we are “great,” “marvelous,” or “good,” but to face our “envious,” “malevolently,” or “grandiose” sides is another experience altogether.

We are who we are, and there is nothing to do but to see it. Without sight there can be no change. “I want to change” without “I want to know who I truly am” has no meaning. Thus, to stop being angry or violent we have to realize that we actually ARE so, without creating a division or distance between the “I” and the “it.” Yes, I am angry. Yes, I am grandiose. Yes, I am violent. But in knowing that I have a chance to put an end to it, once and for all.

What are your dark-sides? What should come to an end on your front? What are you not wishing to see? If you feel like it – leave a comment down below. Peace. ✨

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