As I have written before, time seems to be the greatest paradox our minds have to grapple with.

The great Western interpreter of Eastern wisdom, Alan Watts, once remarked:

Paradox is just the truth standing on its head to gain attention!

Well I don’t know about you, but I can certainly affirm that the paradox of time and mind has got my attention!

Eastern sages (and some of the Christian mystics as well, as we will see,) taught that we live in the eternal Now. In this regard there is no past and no future. We can only know the present.

Our memories, we believe, hold impressions of our past, but when we recall those memories, we experience them now, in the present. In fact we reconstruct our memories and they are accordingly unreliable. Moreover they lack the experience of Now. If I recollect meeting you yesterday I can’t duplicate the physical experience of shaking your hand or enjoy the visceral experience of sharing a glass of wine with you.

Similarly we anticipate futures. I can anticipate what I might do tomorrow. That is but a conjecture of the future. When tomorrow comes and I can finally experience this conjectured future, I find that instead of experiencing the future I am just experiencing the present as always. I can only know the Now. What’s more, just like my experience of the past, my imagined experience of the future is also severely limited compared to what I experience in the present..

Putting it simply even a thousandth of a second ago is in the past. Equally a thousandth of a second from now is still in the future. Between the “no more” and the “not yet”, lies the eternal present. This is the timeless time zone within which everything that has happened and ever will happen, occurs.

The American psychologist, Keith Floyd once wrote:

…it’s beginning to seem as if there is no time left in which anything could possibly be happening except for Now.

The great philosopher, Paul Tillich, in his book The Eternal Now, commented:

The riddle of the present is the deepest of all riddles of time.

In Buddhism it is taught that the greatest obstacle to enlightenment is attachment. The sage, therefore, works to achieve detachment.

According to Alan Watts:

Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant or to hasten the departure of things unpleasant. To do this is to move in time with life, to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment, In short it is to be detached from past and future and to live in the eternal Now. For, in truth neither past nor future have any existence apart from this Now; by themselves they are illusions.

In the modern creation myth of the cosmologists, The Big Bang Theory, matter is purported to have been created out of a singularity some 13 odd billion years ago and that was when time began. In this sense there was no time before the Big Bang. Somehow in this profound alchemy, the space/time continuum came to be.

When in awe or in need of explanation for the inexplicable, Mankind has traditionally looked to the heavens. It is understandable then that the ancients looked to the skies when they pondered time and indeed to find ways to measure time.

The original basic measure of time was the day. Initial attempts to measure the “day” focussed on the hours of daylight. It soon became apparent that the period of daylight varied with the seasons.   So it became evident that a better measure was the period it took for the earth to rotate once about its axis including both daylight hours and the night time as well.

The next measure of duration was the month which was related to the approximate 28 days of the lunar cycle. Inaccuracies manifesting from these calculations resulted in the need for the calendar to be revised on a number of occasions.

Beyond this was the year, which measured the duration of the earth’s journey around the sun.

Time seemed to be about astronomical cycles. Its nature seemed to require observation of sunrises, phases of the moon and the eternal march of the seasons. In this little temporal playground we learnt that this came after that, or there was an “arrow of time” or sometimes a “wheel of time” which meant things reoccurred in some sort of regularity.

(The concept of time has inexorably been linked to motion, whether it be the motion of the earth, the moon or the sun or the motion of a pendulum, or the vibration of a Caesium atom.)

And this was helpful if we were perhaps planting crops or provisioning for winter. But this does not help us deal with our personal, temporal awareness.

On the surface it seems that the present moment is only one of many, many moments. Each day of your life appears to consist of thousands of moments where different things happen. Yet if you look more deeply, is there not only one moment ever?

Eckhart Tolle, the spiritual teacher and author asks:

Is life ever not “this moment”?

This one moment – Now – is the only thing you can never escape from, the one constant factor in your life. No matter what happens, no matter how much your life changes, one thing is certain: it is always Now.

Since there is no escape from the Now, why not become friendly with it?

But the Ego is not disposed towards this course of action. The Ego is always disposed to show how special it is. When it comes to time, the Ego can never be satisfied with Now because it is disposed to aggrandise itself in its imagined future.

Ken Wilber wrote, in one of the most profound texts about the human condition, The Spectrum of Consciousness;

Now Eternity is to time what Infinity is to space. That is, just as all of infinity is completely present at every point in of space, so also is all of eternity completely present at every point of time. Thus, from the viewpoint of Eternity, absolutely all time is NOW. Just as to the infinite, all space is HERE. Since all time is NOW, it follows that the past and the future are very much illusions and that the only Reality is the present Reality.

If we look close enough we will also find similar ideas about time in the Christian tradition. The14th century German theologian, Meister Eckhart wrote:

There are more days than one. There is the soul’s day and God’s day, A day whether six or seven ago, or more than six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in the present Now-moment. The soul’s day falls within this time and consists of the natural light in which things are seen. God’s day, however is the complete day, comprising both day and night. It is the real Now-moment. The past and future are both far from God and alien in this way.

Thus we find that because in the light of Eternity, past present and future are simultaneously contained in this Now-moment, Christ could claim that “Before Abraham was, I am,”

We can postulate that time is an artefact required to have us deal with the world because we don’t have the capacity to cope with everything happening at once.  Human sensory capacity is limited by our physical bodies and our capacity to accommodate sensory stimuli. This is an inevitable conflict between our immanent spirituality and our base physical state. We see it in other manifestations of our constricted ability to perceive the universe. For example the portion of the electromagnetic wave spectrum we are able to visually detect is quite limited. There is a huge amount of the electromagnetic spectrum where the frequency is either too long or too short for us to “see”. Consequently we can’t see infra –red light or X-rays. Our auditory perception is also thus restricted. Bats and dogs can detect higher frequencies than are available to our auditory perception just as whales no doubt can detect lower frequency sound waves than we cen. We have these perceptory filters to ensure we are not overwhelmed by the phenomena of the physical world.

Even among humans we find considerable variation about what we give attention to. More sensate people seem compelled to pay more attention to the physical world than intuitive people. Intuitive people, as a result, seem able to devote more mind space to dealing with the abstract.

It seems likely that whilst everything is happening at once, we only have the capacity to detect the Now, just a snapshot of all that is going on in the universe. Thus, so far a time is concerned, that is all we can access. But, as the sages attest, this Now is not just a moment in time, it is the gateway to all of Eternity!.

The third century Greek philosopher, Plotinus declared;

There is all one day, series has no place: no yesterday; no tomorrow.

Now these unconventional ideas about time are not merely the province of mystics and religious sages, they have the support of quantum physicists.

Erwin Schrödinger, the experimentalist physicist who helped develop quantum theory argued that Reality existed only in the mind and the Newtonian notion of serial time needed to be replaced. He wrote:

I venture to call Mind indestructible since it has a peculiar time-table; namely Mind is always Now. There is really no before or after for Mind. The present is the only thing that has no end. We may, or so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind by time.

All this leads me to believe that there was no “creation event” like the Big Bang Theory proposes or Genesis suggests. All time is encompassed by Now. That is why there is no future or no past because they all exist contemporaneously.

Just as we exist in a physical Infinity but can only be aware of the physical universe that our limited sensory perception can reveal, we also exist in a temporal Eternity and all we can access is Now. But this Now we are perceiving embodies all the past and all the future.

As for creation, there was no one Creation event that started everything. Creation is forever and ongoing. We are in fact living Creation! Whatever you believe the shaping force of the universe is, whether it be God, Brahman, Unitary Consciousness or whatever, rest assured it is still and always doing its work! And in the scheme of things our contribution is through Mind and our experience of it is through Now!

The thirteenth century theologian and mystic, St Thomas Aquinas wrote in Summa Contra Gentiles:

God does not move at all, and so cannot be measured by time; neither does He exist “before or after” or no longer exist after having existed, nor can any succession be found in Him … but has the whole of his existence simultaneously.

The German Catholic priest, theologian, philosopher and mystic, Meister Eckhart, whom I quoted above, proclaimed:

The Now-moment in which God made the first man and the Now-moment in which the last man will disappear, and the Now-moment in which I am speaking are all one in God, in whom there is only one Now. Look! The person who lives in the light of God is conscious neither of time past nor of time to come but only of one eternity.

These concepts are not exclusively Christian but seem embedded in most of the major belief systems. For example one could say that the primary aim of all Buddhist practice is simply to awaken to the Eternal Present.

The ninth century master of Zen Buddhism, Huang Po said:

Beginningless time and the present moment are the same …You have only to understand that time has no real existence.

In D T Suzuki’s translation of the Gandavyhu Sutra ( which is the last chapter of the Avatamsaka Sutra, one of the most influential scriptures in East Asian Buddhism, written some 500 years after the death of Buddha) he writes:

In the spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present or future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense.

Colloquially, when we urge someone who procrastinates to take action we often say, “There’s no time like the present”. When we come to understand the lessons of the sages, the mystics and indeed our quantum physicists we should begin to understand that in fact that there is no time but the present and peace of mind comes when we learn to live in the eternal Now!