The Only Time Is Now, Even Physics Says So

First, Some Context

Precisely a year ago, I was walking on the streets of Lisbon, Portugal, with the person who has since become my life partner. We spent the whole weekend together to get to know each other better. We talked about super profound topics for two days (he’s an exceptional life coach) and, around the end of the weekend, he said he was really pleased we’d been talking about so many spiritual concepts. “Well,” I replied, “this is the real, tangible stuff: our happiness, our values, our relationships, our role in the world, not the car we bought last week or the second house we’d like to buy on the seaside. Those are intangible and fluffy. What really makes a practical difference in people’s lives is all those things we refer to as spirituality.”

That’s how I see spirituality: very tangible, practical tools that help us live more fulfilling lives and have more meaningful relationships. At Wise Humanity, in fact, we often refer to our courses as toolboxes.

As an M.Sc. in Physics with a past 20-year career in engineering corporations, I wouldn’t be able to teach anything today that has no tangible, practical applications, or that contradicts physics and reality.

Funnily enough, yet unsurprisingly, if you ask me, the most advanced and counterintuitive discoveries of physics are consolidating the most mind-bending spiritual concepts.

I’d like to talk about time here and, if you’re interested in learning more about these topics, I totally recommend two books:

• Worldwide best seller The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and

• The Fabric of the Cosmos by physicist Brian Greene.

They bring mindfulness and physics together very nicely.

So, a couple of weeks ago, at our Wise Humanity Course, we were talking about the power of being present in the present, mindfully present in the now, and we discussed the nature of time according to contemporary physics.

We’re all well aware that human beings don’t perceive reality as it is. For example, colours and odours are just in our head, still objects are actually made of particles that move at extremely high speed, what looks full is actually mostly empty, etc. (Watch Donald Hoffman's TED Talk, Do we see reality as it is? if you're interested in the topic of perception vs. objectivity.)

But when it comes to time, things get even more complicated. Physics has really just started unveiling all we ignore about time and how our traditional perception of its flow is flawed. Something that escapes most of us is that time does not flow and the whole of space-time already exists in its entirety, including what we refer to as “future.”

Let’s take a step back. Intellectually, we can visualise that space already exists in its entirety. While we know we’ll never be able to go or even see a place in space that is very, very far from us, we can at least intellectually grasp that that place in space is there, it exists right now. Well, it’s the same thing with time. All time coordinates already exist right now. A moment in the past, as well as a moment in the future, already exists right now, similarly to this very moment in the present.

Practical Implications

Without going into technical details, time does not flow and the whole of space-time already exists in its entirety, right now, every point in space and every moment in time. Past, present and future are actually already there, right now.

Both concepts are hard to digest when we look at them from our human experience.

In Einstein's words:

"The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

In other words, the future is as real as the past and the present, and most research on how we perceive time is now focused on understanding why we perceive it as a flowing phenomenon and why we remember the past but don’t remember the future (yes, this is the language used in today’s physics).

Reality itself is actually timeless. It is an eternal now.

And this has huge, deep, practical implications. I’ll only focus on a few of them in this blog post.

First of all, not only is it essential for our wellbeing to live in the present, there’s just no past and no future, there’s no flow of time: the human concepts of past and future are just an illusion.

The only time where we should focus our attention and energy is, therefore, now. Past and future do not exist and, therefore, have no power. We give them that power in our heads.

It is useful to use conventions such as “past” and “future” to go through life, but it’s harmful to attach more meaning to them.

Every time we're afraid of the future or feel sad, guilty or oppressed by our past, we are creating those uncomfortable feelings ourselves. Those feelings are natural and can tell us a lot about our mental maps, so the point is not resisting or forcefully ignoring them. The point is allowing and listening to them, and learning from them, now.

This is also why it doesn't make sense to feel guilty or agonise about a past decision. Every decision we take (in the past, present or future) is always the best decision we could have taken in that moment, with the mental maps we hold and all the information we have in that moment. If we could have taken a better decision, we would have.

The concept of "learning from our past mistakes" is also generally incorrect. When we say things like "I never learn from my mistakes," it's like we're waiting for the past to magically teach us something , like the events should teach us something. But that’s not how it works. It’s not the events teaching us. We learn in the now, when our mental maps and situations are ripe for us to learn, when we’re ready to understand the lesson. We only learn in the present by doing the work in the present.

In Eckhart Tolle’s words:

• “Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”

• “Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the now.”

• “Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the now.”

So much negativity is caused by too much past or too much future. People’s unhappiness is precisely due to not living in the now.

Reality is only in the now. This is where things happen. This is where we can act and have impact. This is where we enact our values. This is where we can change.

Whenever you have a problem, pause and

narrow your life down to this moment.

This way, the “problem” disappears. There are no “problems;” there are only problematic situations. Some need acceptance and some need actions. But nothing is a problem. Problems are labels, and labels need time to survive.

Labels need a past or a future to exist.

Disarm the past and the future. Empower yourself in the now: invest all your attention, energy and emotions in the now: it's the only time that exists and the only place where things happen.

Bring back all that power into this moment. This moment is your friend.

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For the first time in twelve very adventurous months, COVID and Brexit are keeping me apart from my partner, which, incidentally, also means that we won’t be able to celebrate our first anniversary together. Like many have experienced, it’s tough to spend the dark winter days locked down at home alone, far away from your loved ones, missing the moments you spent together, and uncertain about when you’ll be able to hug each other again.

But if I narrow down my life to this very moment, my life is beautiful. I carry my partner’s love here with me now. My family’s and my friends’ love are here with me. My life, right in the now, doesn’t lack anything to be perfect.

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