I find two concepts deeply mysterious and puzzling. One of them is the nature of consciousness, and the other is the nature of time. Both have been investigated by philosophers (particularly by sages in India) for at least a couple of thousand years, and Western philosophers and physicists have struggled to make sense of them for the last few centuries.
Both time and consciousness are necessarily related. To perceive the passage of time, there has to be a sentient entity that is conscious. In deep sleep or under general anesthesia, there’s no perception of time.
(Aside: I was quite intrigued to learn that while general anesthesia works quite well, the precise mechanism is not well understood by scientists.)
What is time? That’s a pretty dumb question, most people would say. But it’s one of the deepest mysteries that humans have ever attempted to answer.
The operational definition of time is that it is whatever a clock measures. All processes take time; nothing happens in an interval of zero duration. Nothing happens which does not involve time.
Something similar can be said about space: everything occupies a non-zero amount of space. That is intuitively obvious but it is extremely difficult to understand what space is.
However, this much is accepted as true: that space and time cannot be prised apart. Time and space are not independent entities. There’s only one thing called space-time. That idea evolved in the early 20th century due to Hermann Minkowski’s 1908 geometric formulation of Albert Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity, which merged three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time into a four-dimensional continuum.
Our untutored intuition is quite comfortable with Newtonian notions of time and space. We know that two observers would agree whether or not two events happened simultaneously because in classical Newtonian physics, there is a universal “now” that ticks at the same rate everywhere.
But Einstein’s special relativity demonstrated that observers moving relative to one another disagree on which events occurred at the same time.
For instance, if two observers pass each other on the street, one walking toward the Andromeda Galaxy (which as we know is 2.5 million light years away) and the other walking away, their differing velocities shift their planes of simultaneity by several days when projected across intergalactic distances. For one observer, a space fleet launch in Andromeda may already have happened; for the other, it has not yet been decided. This is known as the Andromeda paradox.
Each observer has a frame of reference that is unique to him, and neither frame of reference is privileged. That’s a claim of special relativity.
What is a frame of reference? It is a coordinate system and a set of physical reference points that an observer uses to measure and describe the position, orientation, velocity, and acceleration of objects.
A privileged frame of reference is one in which the laws of physics take on a uniquely baseline form compared to all other frames. In such a frame, absolute rest exists: an observer could claim to be stationary rest relative to the universe itself, while all other motion is measured against it.
Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity directly rejects the existence of any privileged frame of reference. It has two core postulates.
One, the Principle of Relativity: The laws of physics are identical in all inertial (non-accelerating) frames of reference. No internal experiment can distinguish between being at rest and moving at constant velocity.
And two, the Invariance of the Speed of Light: The speed of light in a vacuum, c, is identical for all observers, regardless of the motion of the source or the observer.
Because every inertial (meaning non-accelerating) observer measures the exact same speed of light and the same fundamental laws of mechanics and electromagnetism, no inertial frame is privileged or more fundamental than any other. Quantities that were once assumed to be universal—such as elapsed time, spatial distance, and simultaneity—become relative to the observer’s frame. That’s relativity in a nutshell.
We should give a nod to the most famous equation in all of physics. It’s known to everyone even minimally educated in physics: E=mc2, the equivalence of mass and energy. The derivation is surprisingly simple; even I know how to derive it.
I got sidetracked. Back to the question of what time is. Does time exist? Yes, it most certainly does. It is now right now. It could not be otherwise.
Therefore, the past and future also exist in that sense. But in what sense do the past (what’s already been) and the future (what is yet to be) exist? That question is a bit more challenging.
Einstein, in a condolence letter to the family of a life-l0ng friend, Michele Besso, in March 1955 (just a few weeks before he himself passed away) wrote, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For people like us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Einstein, I venture to claim, was not just a pretty clever cookie but also a bit of a Buddha. Buddha, as we know, is not a name but a title which means “an awakened one.” Siddhartha Gautama is the historical Buddha who lived around 2500 years ago. He gained enlightenment and became a Buddha. Gautama also pondered the nature of time and concluded that it’s an illusion. (See note 1.)
It’s time I got back to the question that I am investigating here. If the past, present and future are equally “real”, why do we have this persistent (persistent means persisting through time!!) illusion?
Time, as noted before, is something that clocks measure. It passes at a constant rate for everyone: one second per second. For the couch potato in his living room (don’t look at me!), it passes at one second/second. To an astronaut in a spaceship moving away from earth at, say half the speed of light, there would be the well-attested phenomena of time dilation and length contraction. Time would pass at different rates.
Those two are consequences of Einstein’s Special Relativity. If you think special relativity is hard, wait till you encounter general relativity. That’s serious stuff, I tell you.
But the clock on the spaceship would tick at one second per second, just like the clock in the living room on earth. The spaceship clock ticks more slowly when observed from a stationary frame. The astronaut will age exactly one year with every calendar year. But during that same duration of one year on the spaceship, the couch potato would age, maybe 10 years, by a factor which is the Lorentz factor. Look it up, if you care.
I’m running out of time.
Let me get to my point. So, time is mysterious. The past, present and future are equally real. We perceive the passage of time. There’s a direction to time—from the past to the future, not the other way around. We time-travel into the future at one second/second. We can travel to the future in some other inertial frame. If you travel fast enough, you can in one year of fast travel arrive in an arbitrary future time on earth—say 1,000 years in the future.
How can that be? Perhaps it’s a block universe. The idea of a block universe arises from what is formally known in philosophy as eternalism. It is the view that the four dimensions of space-time form an unchanging, static 4D structure. In this framework, the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously and possess the exact same ontological reality.
Just as locations in space (such as Mumbai, Tokyo, and New York) all exist concurrently whether you are in them or not, moments in time (such as 2001, today, or 2150) all exist eternally within the spacetime fabric.
I have run out of time. I will continue it sometime in the future. I promise to explain what it is about time that bugs the hell out of me. For now, it’s time to listen to music, no?
Let’s start with Pink Floyd’s Time from their Dark Side of the Moon album.
But wait, there’s more. I am partial to the theory of a recurrent universe, and indeed, an infinitely repeating universe as the Vedanta posits. So another song that is adjacent to that. It’s Al Stewart’s “One Stage Before.” It has reflections of repeated lifetimes.
Thank you, good night, and may your god go with you.
NOTES
[1] In the final chapter of Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha (available on this blog), Siddhartha tells Govinda that time is not real. He explains that our perception of time as a linear progression from past to present to future is an illusion that conceals the unity and perfection of the universe. Remember that the protagonist of Hesse’s novel is also named Siddhartha. He should not be confused with the historical Gautam (Gotama) Buddha.
In the novel, Siddhartha says to Govinda:
“When the exalted Gotama spoke in his teachings of the world, he had to divide it into Sansara and Nirvana, into deception and truth, into suffering and salvation. It cannot be done differently, there is no other way for him who wants to teach. But the world itself, what exists around us and inside of us, is never one-sided. A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.”
The key ideas are:
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- The Dissolution of Dualities: Because time is an illusion, the dividing lines separating this world from eternity, suffering from bliss, and good from evil are also deceptions.
- Simultaneous Perfection: In conventional thinking, a sinner is seen as someone progressing over time toward becoming a Buddha or saint. Siddhartha counters that the sinner is already a Buddha right now, in this very moment. Every stage of existence, potential, and realization exists simultaneously in the eternal present.
- The River as Reality: Just as river water is simultaneously at the source, at the waterfall, in the ocean, and falling as rain—having no past or future, only presence—all life is fundamentally whole and complete as it is.
- Reverence for What Is: Siddhartha uses the example of a stone: it is already everything—not merely destined to break down into soil or reincarnate into an animal or human, but already imbued with the divine essence of all things. Therefore, true wisdom does not come from striving toward an imagined future state of perfection, but from loving and accepting the world as it exists here and now.
