What is the nature of time?
I'm not referring to the rotating arm of a clock or changes in the pixelation on someone's Apple Watch. Nor am I discussing the age of the Earth as determined by paleontologists and evolutionary biologists, or the relationship between energy and matter that quantum physicists are attempting to understand (although, if you ask anyone familiar with the issue, they're all quite perplexed).
I’m talking about our direct experience of time. What is its nature? What do we actually know about our own intimate sense of time?
Let’s Investigate
Firstly: Being careful, quiet and attentive, it is immediately clear that I don’t have any first-hand evidence that the past or the future truly exist.
That is to say that I cannot (nor have I ever been able to) directly experience the past or the future—I can think about them both, but I never actually enter either of them.
Explore this for yourself right now.
Notice that you have never actually experienced the past or the future.
Try to step out of the present, and into an experience of the future or the past.
You can’t.
See that this ever-present now is all we truly know. It is all there truly is.
All the time travel we appear to embark on (into the future or back into the past) never actually takes us further than this immediate and ever-present moment.
The now just doesn’t go anywhere.
What is the future and the past?
Investigating closely, it is apparent that what I call the past is a bundle of appearing thought forms labelled as memory/recall/reflection, and what I call the future is a bundle of thought forms labelled as visions/imaginings/plans, and so on.
So these memories—referencing the past, and imaginings—referencing the future, are all just thoughts taking place here and now.
No time without thought
If I put these thought forms (memories and imaginings) to the side, it is clear that all I truly know is the seamless intimacy of ever-present experience.
This insight is immediately obvious, and yet profoundly different to the way I typically make sense of life—which appears like something I am moving through: from past, to present to future.
Seeing time this way reorients me away from this illusory story of a separate special someone moving through time, to the reality of time as particularly labelled thought forms in an unwavering ever-present now.
Eternally Now
It isn’t even accurate to say that it is always now, because that would imply that ‘this now’ is a fragment of an infinite number of ‘nows’ moving along a line of time.
This ‘now’ is the only one there is. There is no other now.
—an ever-present now. An eternal now.
Where do thoughts come from?
Can thoughts come from anywhere if all there is, is this eternal, ever-present now?
There is nowhere for anything (thoughts, perceptions, sensations, feelings) to arise from and go to, as this would imply that there is somewhere other than this eternal ‘now’.
So no experience actually ‘arises’ in the now or ‘departs’ from the now. Where would these arisings come from and where would they go?
This is another part of time’s illusion. Nothing enters and exits or comes and goes—as if having been somewhere before and upon departing, goes somewhere after—like an actor having been behind the curtain, arrives on the theatre stage and then retreats backstage again after the scene.
What could possibly be backstage to an eternally, ever-present now?
Nothing.
The actor never actually leaves the theatre stage, but rather, as they appear to be leaving, swop attire, transforming into the character needing to be played in the next scene.
This ever-present now, right now, is the substrate and substance of all appearing things.
An Edge
If time is an illusion created by thought in the form memories (appearing to represent the past) and imaginings (appearing to represent the future), what is the nature of change? More specifically, does change have a reality independent of thought?
Things appear to be changing—moving between two or more states. But what evidence do I have that experience actually changes if all I know is this ever-present, eternal now.
If I remove the beliefs of past and future that thought super-imposes onto appearing phenomena, then I remove the arrow of time, and therefore any sense of directed change (ie changing from past, to present, to the future).
But with this direction removed, change seems to remain, be it a directionless change.
The nature of this directionless change is something I can’t quite see clearly yet.
If anyone is seeking to understand the nature of this mysterious directionless change, please get in touch. I’d love to investigate this with you.
Take care,
David
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