Consciousness and its metamorphoses: temporality and ownership of experience

This article is an attempt to conceptualize such structures of the experience of consciousness as temporality and subjectivity in their interconnectedness. The article questions the assumption that the location of experience in time and the belonging of experience to a particular subject should be interpreted as invariant characteristics of the experience of consciousness. The author investigates the counter-assumption according to which these characteristics are not assumed to be necessary for any state of consciousness. This assumption is tested using phenomenological analysis of such extraordinary states of consciousness as the psychotic experience of schizophrenic patients and the meditative experience of advanced practitioners. The similarity of these states of consciousness is that both can be characterized in terms of the deformation of the subject’s experience of living time and self. Clarifying the parameters that make up the habitual experience of the subjectivity of everyday experience, the author hypothesizes that the key factor in temporal-personal changes are shifts in the subject’s affectation, the ultimate values of which lead to the elimination of subject-object dualism and temporality of the experience of consciousness. The arbitrariness of these shifts is understood as the main condition for the traumatization of these changes in the experience of consciousness. At the same time, the article raises the question of the phenomenological status of the state of non-dual and atemporal consciousness, which, due to its deprivation of any intensional content, is likened to the state of dreamless sleep and conceptualized in modern cognitive sciences as “pure consciousness”. The resulting state of consciousness is proposed to be thought of as a “zero point” of consciousness, over which, due to affectation, the usual structures of temporality and subject-object dichotomy are superimposed.