Of past, future and other delusions of moving.

Oh your god. How time passes when one is busy. We have founded a company, as I mentioned before and we actually found a store that would like to sell our clothes. Some kind of »topshit« store in Slovenia. Naturally, we had to prepare the production and also produce it all. Hence, the month that flew by in what felt as a moment. And that somehow brings me to what I want to write about today. A moment. 

It all begun with the book A new earth.  Some hippy dippy book about, how we are enslaved by our own egos and how by freeing ourselves from it, we would create a better place to live in, hence A new Earth. Book is great. Maybe because I had been going on and on for quite some time thinking about ego and what it is, where does it show, how one develops it and how to free oneself from it? The book caught my attention when I was looking for answers. I will talk about ego in my next blog. It is a touchy subject and it needs to be addressed with care to avoid any misunderstandings. Today something else struck me while devouring the last pages. The sentence:  “All that ever has been or will be is now, outside time, which is a mental construct.” Especially the first part of it. The “All that ever has been or will be is now!”  

Please, take a moment and try to imagine, what this simple sentence is saying. All that ever was or will be is NOW.  I know you are still not getting it. Take another one. What does it say about The past? That there is none. And what about The future? There is none.  There is no past and no future. But try to grasp this. Not with the logical thinking, that will of course say: “Sure, the past is gone and the future has not yet came to be. What is new to that?!” The past is a memory and the future is a plan. This is true, we know that, but these are mental constructs. They are logical conclusions of the fact of state. We imagine the past and the future as a place in time. The constants like places we live in or things we did or plan to do, they exist in our head-maps of everything we experience as points we can pin down. In reality the past is not a place to go to. It is not a milestone in history or a deciding moment. Those are non-existent. The past is non-existent. It echoes in present, yes. But it is not here. When you leave the house and call out to your father, I will be back soon, you are lying. You will never be back. Of course you will be back in space, but not time. You will come forward. When you go back home, you are in fact going forward home. Not just literally, also physically. Things are changing in between. All the time! Things and its constituents like molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, etc. they are in their constant movement. Nothing stays the same. Meaning, when you decide not to pay a visit to your old uncle, saying you will go to him tomorrow, you just lost a chance to meet your uncle as he is. Not because he or you might not be here tomorrow (which could easily be a valid case), but tomorrow that uncle is not going to be the same. He would appear to be, but in fact, he is changed. He went through his now, too. So when you go back home, you are not entering the house you left, but a completely new constellation of atoms, that appear the same. All there ever was is now. We say we know past is gone, but we are keeping it alive in our heads. Those are the lessons we learn from, emotions we evoke, deeds we regret, actions we praise, reminders, pointers, assumptions we deduct. That is ok. It is how we grow. But they are in fact gone. All there was is now. It sure makes one wonder about the meaningfulness of ordinary.

However, that is not the only aspect to it. If one tries to imagine the concept of now. I mean, NOW. How short was it? In physics they talk about time-space continuum as a loaf of everything that happens. In order to define the change (that is also the attribute of time – entropy) we can slice it up. In this way we get sequences that could easily be defined as moments. They consist of everything that occurred in the Universe; every single thing; every single change of position. We, then, talk about what has happened. We talk about memory. About the past. What is a definition of moment´s “slice-ness”? When are the defining stages when nothing is happening? When is that phase when universe stands still, so a new NOW can begin? Are we really that arrogant, we even begin to imagine being able to define the word NOW? Like it exists!? The constant movement is defined by never ceasing change of position. Otherwise it would not be constant. There are no slices in the universe, that are not drawn artificially. There is always a slice that can be divided further. Into infinity! We can imagine it, but not really, can we? So when we talk about time-space continuum, we talk about memory. A construct. It is not a loaf of everything. It is actually an idea.

When we look up to evening sky, we see the light of stars that are actually long gone, but we see them in our NOW. It is not as if we travel back in time, although we are in fact witnessing the birth of Universe every single moment. For there will always be a new source of light from big bang that will reach our eyeballs. Until it all becomes black. Then we look beyond. Yes, we are looking at the past from now-ish point of view. And that we do all the time, which kind of destroys the whole concept of the past and the future.

What is more. NOW seems to be an absolute. Whatever is happening now is a part of the same “slice” in the space-time continuum. However, we are experiencing them differently. Remember Einstein´s relative theory. Same events happen at different times according to one´s perspective. The experience might be different, the light seems to not go off at the same personal time, but they both happen in the same NOW. Only the notion of experience delays.

Maybe it is just me, but I am truly overwhelmed by feeling this vastness of NOW. Now is in fact every single moment. There is no future and no past we come from and go to, respectively. The continuum is just a construct. All that is, is now. And it always was - the now. On 19^th of April 1385, at exactly 10:10 that was now then. It happened and it passed into a new NOW. Or did it? The now is more a sliding pass through that never passes. There is no NEW now to go to. It happens. Inevitably! It glides into a new constellation without marking the starting point of change. The NOW is actually evolving, not passing.

I understand now that one cannot describe NOW. One can only feel it. It is as pure as awareness, before it constructs any thought. When thought is created, now is gone. Well, it is not, in fact. But the now-then is. So there are no moments. Moments have value only in one´s memory…or video. And they always represent only one-sided point of view that, honestly, never fits the actual events. We tend to romanticize and dramatize everything, just to feel special.

I have been sure all my life that I´d understood the concept of time´s attributes. Past, present, future, moment, now… and I did. I understood them. I even wrote a thesis on time, space and color describing their illusionistic nature. What changed during this reading today was the feel. The big understanding happened. And I just wanted to share this with you. It might be nothing to anyone, but it was something to me. I finally felt the meaning of the passing and emerging. It all feels now, as if looked through a telephoto lens in a fast forward. A mighty and stretched image on the left accelerates to focus in the middle with a big crunch and then disperses in disfiguring oblivion on the right side. This makes this moment so important. While everything else in the Universe is changing and reforming, you are here, paying attention to a small fraction of the whole and you witness its change. Only you desolated. What could be more important than that? The same is with previously mentioned old uncle. While you have decided not to visit him on some day and visiting him the next, he too has been sliding through his NOWs, witnessing the present as it showed itself to him. He saw the world change, while being one at the same time.

So we shouldn´t try to be a change, we are one already. Constantly. Why wanting more, when what we have now is all there is. When we get more, we have more. And then that will change. We should not ask for a change, it comes. Some things in universe do not need our participating to make themselves happen. They happen all the same. We should not react, nor should we act. We should act with. Go along. That way we give birth to trust. And with trust comes the recognition that you too will pass, but you´re taken care of on the way. There was a reason to see the change. No one has seen the universe the way you did. We are nothing else than witnesses that have no purpose. We simply are. In the NOW. That is never gone. But always changing.   

And there is that.