Consciousness is both our greatest treasure and our heaviest burden. It allows us to feel alive, to perceive beauty, to remember, and to hope. Yet at the same time, it ties us to the measurements of time and the boundaries of space. We count days and years, we feel distances stretch, and we suffer in the awareness of waiting. It is possible that what we call time and space exist as physical realities whether we are aware of them or not. But the experience of them, the sense that they are long or vast, arises only because of consciousness.
This double edge becomes clear in ordinary experiences. When we sleep, time passes but is not felt. To wake up is to leap across hours without effort. By contrast, when we are awake and restless, every minute drags. The same length of physical time can feel immediate or unbearable depending on whether consciousness is engaged. That difference suggests that consciousness does not merely notice time, it gives time its very texture.
The same is true for space. A child waiting for a parent feels the absence as distance, even if it is only across a room. Two lovers separated by oceans feel space as pain. But when attention is fully absorbed in something close at hand, even great distances lose meaning. Consciousness not only perceives space but creates the horizon of nearness and farness that we live within.
Sleeping Through Time
Few things show the bond between consciousness and time as clearly as sleep. Hours pass during the night, yet we awaken without the sense of having lived them. To us, it is immediate. In sleep, the machinery of memory and perception is quiet, so there are no markers to measure duration. Without consciousness, time is not endured.
The contrast is striking when compared to conscious waiting. Anyone who has endured a hospital bed, a prison sentence, or even a long line at a government office knows how awareness stretches minutes into hours. It is not the clock that changes, but the experience of living each passing moment. Consciousness fills time with weight.
This explains why science fiction often imagines spacefarers in hibernation. In films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, travelers to distant planets are put to sleep for the voyage. Physically, they may still age, but psychologically, they leap across decades as if across a single night. To remain awake would mean to live through every hour of isolation and delay. Hibernation removes not the physical reality of time but the conscious endurance of it.
Space as a Conscious Horizon
Time is not the only measure shaped by consciousness. Space also becomes meaningful only through perception. A room feels large or small depending on the body inside it. A road seems long or short depending on the one who walks it. Consciousness makes distance something lived rather than merely measured.
This is why certain phenomena in physics feel so disturbing. Quantum entanglement suggests that two particles can be related in a way that ignores distance, even across galaxies. Our consciousness expects space to matter, expects signals to take time to cross distance. When those expectations are broken, we are left unsettled. The laws of physics may allow it, but our awareness struggles to comprehend it because space as we know it is a framework of conscious perception.
Even in daily life, the felt sense of space changes with consciousness. In a crowded city, personal space becomes tight, and we feel pressed. In a quiet mountain meadow, horizons open, and we feel vastness. The landscape does not change, but the horizon of perception shifts. Consciousness creates the stage on which distance, nearness, and orientation become real.
The Burden of Awareness
To live as a conscious being is to bear the burden of space and time. Waiting, aging, and distance all acquire their heaviness through awareness. Sleep and anesthesia briefly free us from this weight, but as soon as consciousness returns, so does the prison of duration and extension.
This is evident in the idea of punishment. A prison sentence is severe not because of the walls, but because the conscious self must endure the passing years. If one could sleep through fifteen years and wake at the end, the punishment would lose its sting. The torment comes from awareness stretched thin across time.
The same applies to illness or immobility. A bedridden person who remains fully conscious may find every hour unbearable, filled with waiting and limitation. If consciousness were diminished, the suffering might lessen, because time would no longer feel long. To be conscious is to feel time not only as a measure but as a weight pressing on the soul.
Imagining Freedom Beyond
It is natural, then, that humans have imagined beings free from this burden. In religions and philosophies, God, gods, angels, and the departed are often pictured as existing outside of time and space. They are free from waiting and distance, dwelling in a realm where before and after, here and there, no longer apply.
Eternity, in this view, is not simply endless time. It is the absence of time. To exist in eternity is not to live forever in a long sequence but to live in a state where sequence itself has vanished. For those who hope to meet their loved ones again after death, this imagination offers comfort. It pictures a realm where distance does not separate and years do not divide.
Even without religious faith, we feel something similar when contemplating the size and age of the universe. To imagine billions of years or light-years stretches the mind until it breaks. We sense that we are reaching beyond the limits of consciousness. In those moments, awe rises, as if we stand at the threshold of a reality greater than the prison of space and time.
Glimpses in Life
Yet we do not need to die or become angels to taste this freedom. Within life itself there are moments when time dissolves and space loses weight. In artistic creation, when the mind is fully absorbed, hours pass without being felt. In prayer or meditation, time may seem to open into stillness. In love, the presence of another person can make minutes feel eternal and distances disappear.
These are moments of flow, when consciousness is transformed rather than suspended. We remain aware, but not in the usual measuring and counting way. Instead, awareness aligns with activity or devotion so fully that the sense of duration and distance falls away.
Such glimpses are often described as gifts. They cannot be forced, and when they come they feel like grace. To be lifted, even briefly, beyond the prison of awareness is to sense the possibility of transcendence. These glimpses do not abolish time and space, but they open windows through which something greater shines.
Consciousness as Qualia of the Universe
This leads to a radical thought: perhaps time and space, as we experience them, are not just physical realities but qualities that arise with consciousness. They may exist as processes independent of us, but without awareness, they would not be felt as distance or duration. Consciousness shapes raw existence into lived experience.
This would explain why beings without consciousness, such as stones or perhaps even plants, do not suffer the passing of time. They undergo change and decay, but they do not feel waiting. A tree grows and withers, but there is no sense of boredom or longing. Consciousness alone turns the neutral passage of processes into the burden of duration.
In this sense, consciousness is the bridge between physics and meaning. It does not invent the universe, but it gives the universe the texture of nearness, farness, past, present, and future. To be conscious is to turn being into experience, and in that transformation lies both beauty and suffering.
The Window Beyond the Prison
The paradox remains. Consciousness burdens us with space and time, yet it also grants us the power to glimpse what lies beyond them. Without awareness, there would be no suffering from duration, but also no joy, no art, no love, and no sense of eternity. With awareness, we are confined, yet we are also opened to transcendence.
Faith, art, and love act as windows in this prison. They allow us to sense a reality larger than the walls. They do not remove consciousness, but they reshape it, lifting it toward what lies beyond. Through these openings, we find meaning in the very burden we carry.
To live as a conscious being, then, is to walk a path of weight and wonder. We feel the heaviness of time and the vastness of space, yet in rare moments we also taste their dissolution. Perhaps true freedom is not to escape consciousness, but to live within it while keeping sight of those windows. Through them, the light of transcendence enters, turning the burden into a calling.
Image by NoName_13
Tom’s Blog 