Your zettelkasten, having a perfect memory of your "past self" acts as a ratchet so that when you have a new conversation on a particular topic, your "present self" can quickly remember where you left off and not only advance the arguments but leave an associative trail for your "future self" to continue on again later.

Many thoughts and associations occur when you're having conversations with any text, whether it's with something you're reading by another author or your own notes in your zettelkasten or commonplace book. For more conversations on this topic, perhaps thumb through: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27conversations+with+the+text%27

If you view conversations broadly as means of finding and collecting information from external sources and naturally associating them together, perhaps you'll appreciate this quote:

No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum (Secker & Warburg)

(Reply to u/u/Plastic-Lettuce-7150 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ae2qf4/communicating_with_a_zettelkasten/)

• for: the lack project, sense of lack, the reality project, sense of self, sense of self and lack, poverty mentality, sense of time, living in the future, living in the present, human DOing, human BEing
• key insight
  • we construct different types of experiences of time, depending on the degree of sense of lack we experience
  • it means the difference between
    • living in the present
    • living in the future
• paraphrase
  • it's the nature of lack projects insofar as we become preoccupied with them
  • that they tend to be future oriented naturally
  • I mean the whole idea of a lack project or a reality project is right here right now is not good enough
    • because I feel this sense of inadequacy this sense of lack
    • but in the future when I have what I think I need
      • when I'm rich enough or
      • when I'm famous enough or
      • my body is perfect enough or whatever
    • when I have all this then everything will be okay
    • and what of course that does is that future orientation traps Us in linear time in a way that tends to devalue the way we experience the world and ourselves in the world right here and now
    • it treats the now as a means to some better ends
    • Now isn't good enough
      • but when I have what I think I need everything is going to be just great
  • So many of the spiritual Traditions taught
  • especially the mystics and the Zen Masters
  • they end up talking about what is sometimes called
    • the Eternal now
    • or the Eternal present - a different way of experiencing the now
  • As long as the present is a means to some better end
    • this future when I'm gonna be okay
  • then the present is experienced as
    • a series of Nows that fall away
    • as we reach for that future
  • but if we're not actually needing to get somewhere that's better in the future
  • it's possible to experience the here and now
    • as lacking nothing and myself in the here and now
    • as lacking nothing
• it's possible to experience the present as something that doesn't arise and doesn't fall away

!- Gedanken : future self question to present self

Cohen, A.-L. (n.d.). Perspective | ‘Mental time travel’ is one of many imaginative ways we can cope with the pandemic. Washington Post. Retrieved March 8, 2021, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/covid-cope-imagine-mental-transport/2021/03/05/a5fc6dde-7b85-11eb-a976-c028a4215c78_story.html