Q: How does consciousness shape our perception of time?

A: This is kind of an illogical question, because perception can’t exist without consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t merely shape perception; it composes it, it makes it possible, it gives rise to it. So, it’s not like you can say the perception would have been different somehow if not for consciousness, in order to say consciousness “shaped” it in some way.

But to try to answer meaningfully anyway, I’d say that time may be an “illusion” that’s made possible by consciousness, or by the particular mode consciousness takes in this world. Julian Barbour, for example, writes about how the illusion of time may arise from timeless reality-states in his books. And then there is the idea in physics/philosophy of the “block universe,” in which past, present and future all exist timelessly in a four-dimensional “block,” and it’s only the mechanics of our brains, given to us by evolutionary processes, that make it appear as though we’re moving forward in time, which facilitates decision-making to more effectively propagate our genes.

(Yes, you could argue that “the process of evolution” itself implies the the progression of time, but really the idea is that further-up/”later” slices of 3D space in the spacetime block are determined by, or consistent with, further-down/”earlier” slices according to the laws of physics, so the “mechanics” is the same, only no actual time or change is involved.)

A physics PhD student I’ve talked to believes in block universe because, according to general relativity (which has been verified with perfect precision countless times in various ways), there is no possible way to reconcile one single “now” across places/possible situations in the universe, and therefore, more than one now—I suppose some continuum of nows—must simultaneously exist.

Another possibility is that true, or truer, time is non-linear, and we only perceive it linearly while we’re incarnated. According to some spiritualists, we can see and/or travel across time while “on the other side.” And also according to many spiritualists/mystics, there are multiple timelines in the universe/multiverse, and we can switch between them, or they can merge, diverge, be created, be destroyed, etc. (This is actually supposed to be what’s responsible for the Mandela effect, and I don’t believe the Mandela effect is simply a set of typical misremembering, because of careful analysis of various stories I’ve read, and even personal experience: see Richard A. Nichols III's answer to Have you personally experienced a Mandela Effect change? Will you share your experience with us?.)

One possibility is that time, in whatever form it actually exists, is fundamentally made up of/created by/an aspect of consciousness. This does seem to imply that, on some level at least, all beings are the same consciousness, because otherwise we couldn’t have one single coherent sense of time in the universe, but that’s precisely what I believe. Time in this scenario would also be an integral aspect of everything else that exists, and everything else that exists would also probably be made up of/created by/an aspect of/a projection of consciousness. So, consciousness perceiving time is consciousness witnessing itself, which is what I think the whole universe is. I also imagine that consciousness (at least on the highest, most unified level, if not also on the individual level) has a lot of, if not total, control in how it relates to the rest of the universe, and hence in how perceives, or “shapes the perception of,” time.

A more mundane answer to this question is that state of consciousness, or brain state, can alter how we perceive time, in known ways. For example, time flies more quickly when you’re having fun; it goes super slowly when you’re bored or watching the clock; it passes by faster in the long term when you’re older; and, in my experience, time slows way down whenever I’m in the air while jumping. Also, it’s a known effect of psychoactives like LSD, salvia divinorum, etc. that small amounts of time can be stretched out to impossibly long spans, or can even literally seem to be eternal.

I’ve also once read of a trick you can do that involves looking at an LED clock in a certain way and doing some certain thing with your consciousness to make it distracted or something, which supposedly makes the clock’s time freeze for an impossibly long amount of subjective time. This idea came with a theory and drawing of how the person is angled relative to time and how that angle can change or something. Sorry I don’t remember any of the details or know if the trick actually works.