Past and future are something that arise in relation to the experience we make between what we observe from our inner perspective, and what we then encounter in an unadulterated way with our outer senses. It is precisely at this intersection that we give them substance as we translate our intangible experiences into consciousness in a way that makes their impermanent content accessible and possible to be perceived by our physical senses. We do this by seeing them when they have become fixed and they are mediated through something else. Time arises when we perceive mental states and their expressions as they are, as an ever-present undercurrent regardless of where or by whom it is that experiences them. We no longer see it as something that arises and disappears with a particular person or event. But as something that everything is associated with all the time when we formulate it and fix it as a content that we relate to as consciousness, and yet is something that experience perceives as something substantially other than the underlying flow that affects us all the time. We then begin to see our mental contents as something that has been constantly manifested and continues to appear all the time, creating a relationship between them as experienced states of past occurences, in the present as we encounter them, and as future emergences of them since they have always appeared.