Time, Motion & the Mind.

Time is very strange concept. We seem to understand what we mean by time, yet from a certain point of view, the entire concept seems to break down. In this piece, I will argue that time does not really exist in the conventional way we usually think about it, and that the past and the future are simply mental abstractions, with the present moment being all, and containing all that exists. This philosophical idea is referred to as Presentism. Much of eastern thought such as what is found in Buddhism and Zen point to this idea. In my view, presentism is actually common sense to all of us on some level, but we have become programmed to think of the past and future as physically real things, mostly because of their utility to our day-to-day life. I agree, that marking the motion of life with seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years is useful, particularly when it comes to planning, but I think it is important to remember that they are simply units of measurement, rather than a concrete reality. To me, time is a highly fascinating subject of discussion, although it is very difficult to explain.

For a moment, let’s imagine the entire universe (or what we know if it) to the best of our ability. Let’s also imagine that clocks and calendars, in all their forms, do not exist. What we see here is that the existence in its entirety all exists in one single and eternal moment. There is however one factor that complicates things, and that is motion. The universal is in constant motion, fluctuating, morphing and rearranging. When we concentrate on this, it is tempting to think that the universe was one way in the past, another way in the present, and will be another way in the future. Yes, it is true that the universe is consistently changing, but it is all occurring in the now.

It is the human psyche that is capable of creating the abstractions of the past and the future. We observe, live in, and experience the present moment, and that leaves an imprint on our memory. Therefor, when we refer to the past, we are simply referring to memories. We also have an imagination, which is responsible for conceptualising the future. To put it simply, our memory creates the past, and our imagination creates the future. Both, of course, exist purely within the human mind, and are not actually part of the outside world. I am not knocking the utility of referring to and learning from “the past” or our memories, or the utility of planning for “the future”. These are useful concepts for humans, but I believe it is important to maintain the awareness that the present moment is all that we can actually experience. There is a certain perceptual freedom that comes along with presentism, at least that’s what I have noticed since I began to see the world in this way, and I hope that it can be shared, at least partly through this piece.