The nature of the past – Lent 2025: Day 40

“My past is nothing more than a box of tools that can serve me in the future.”

“I was never young; I have always been my age. The past is an illusion; it survives only in your memories, which, being analogue rather than digital, degrade over time. Only the strongest memories survive, distorted in the retelling."

The present is illusory; it passes you by in a fraction of a second (neuroscientists and philosophers reckon it’s somewhere between a fifth and a two-hundredth of a second. Bernard Carr calls this the 'specious present'). 

"There is only the future. Of which we know not. The past, though it shaped you, is no longer relevant.”

Events that have happened to you – and the way you dealt with them – are of practical use when confronting new challenges in life. You learn skills. You acquire experience. But dwelling on how things could have turned out differently is a train of thought to avoid completely. It happened; learn your lesson, acquire the new skill, and move on.

So far, I have been pondering on the past as it affects your ego, your body, your physical self.

But there is another type of past, another sort of memory; not memory of something that happened – but a memory of being in the moment. Qualia – the basic units of consciousness – the observed, felt, experience of being there return from the past, and unlike event memories, which distort, the sensations of qualia memory are identical to the qualia as they were originally experienced within your consciousness. Like dreams, which don't lie, but about which you can lie, qualia memories are true.

As a result, the past as presented in my qualia memories is more important to me than events-based ‘practical past’.

And lying in hospital (much like my experience with Covid in December 2023), gives me an opportunity to examine these. Two come back to me; both concern being driven at night in our family car to the houses of my parents’ friends, typically on a Sunday, back in the 1960s. London’s traffic was lighter then. The street-lights differed from borough to borough; Acton’s were mushroom-shaped and of a bluer colour than those of Ealing. Balham – again, different. I could feel the precise sensation of looking at the quiet streets at night, passing familiar landmarks along the way, the railway bridge with the coal-merchant, and a model locomotive hauling a rake of coal trucks in the window. An evening train, all lit up, crossing Wandsworth Common. Road signs, pubs, hedges– and the cars; Standards, Humbers, Singers, Rileys, Wolseleys; passing parks, and shops – all closed. Below: Google's Imagen 3.0 has a pretty good go of bringing back those qualia memories.

Elthorne Park, Hanwell, not far from home; the bandstand; the swings, the backs of houses on Townholm Crescent. Most fascinating for me was the far end of the park, where the lawns and paths gave way to bushes and rough land before dipping down to the Grand Union Canal. Beyond that, Warren Farm, and then Osterley. But as a child with a pronounced squint, my eyes could not focus on infinity, and my recollection of the distant fields beyond the park's boundaries were of a magical land that touched the ocean. I could see aircraft on the flightpath coming in to land at London Airport (renamed London Heathrow in 1966), but my eyes' resolution could not distinguish very well at that range. In the early sixties, airlines, charters and air cargo flew a mix of jets, turboprops and piston planes; was that an Avro York or Airspeed Ambassador? Was that a Tupolev Tu-114 or a Boeing 707?

There can be no time without memory. And there can be no memory without consciousness. And so it is that the past only exists in the present through memory, which itself is entirely contingent on consciousness. And so without conscious observers around to subjectively experience time, everything is happening simultaneously, from Big Bang to the heat death of the Universe and all points in between. This is how Big-C Consciousness, which I would take as the Divine, perceives the Cosmic Entirety.

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