“If times past and future exist,” St. Augustine once quipped, “I would like know where they are.” Where are they indeed? As a matter of experience, we live in an everlasting now. Past memories and future plans exist only as traces of present consciousness. But our behavior suggests that we don’t really understand this.

If we each have $10 of attention, we probably spend about $9 thinking about the past or the future. To begin meditating is to score a front row seat to this mental theatre. And the projector keeps running the same reels. Recently I gave a speech at a friend’s wedding. The days before were spent, in large part, imagining the event over and over and over again. There is no OFF switch.

“The power of memories and expectations is that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present,” wrote philosopher Alan Watts. “The present cannot be lived happily unless the past is ‘cleared up’ and the future is bright with promise.”

But it’s hard to relax if we’re caught in this habit of looking forward and back, oscillating between the two like a neurotic squirrel torn between two acorns. We become anxious. Our awareness of the present takes on a dull, muted quality. And the sumptuous steak dinner before us is inhaled in a fog as our brain charts tomorrow’s air travel for the seventeenth time.

The future is, I think, the more alluring acorn. Most of us, after some reflection, can accept that the past is gone. But the future? The future is like a giant blank space that the mind is programmed to populate. Even in the midst of perfect creature comfort, we ceaselessly plot and scheme. But what if the blank space is not actually blank? What if the future already exists?

Time is not what we think it is. According to Albert Einstein, the past, present and future exist in parallel. Every experience – every “where” and “when” – resides in a frozen block of spacetime. In this framework, a Neanderthal picking his nose 50,000 years ago is just as real as you reading this article. The death of the sun – billions of years away – also has a permanent place in this solid chunk of cosmos.

Astrophysicist Brian Greene, translating Einstein’s theory of special relativity, asks you to imagine Chewbacca lounging on a planet 10 billion light years from Earth. You aren’t moving in relation to the Star Wars icon, and, because of this, you both define the present equally. (Einstein showed that relative velocity affects the passage of time.) Your “now” equals his “now.”

Then Chewie stands up and walks away from you at 10 mph.

Since Chewie is moving in relation to you, your “nows” no longer line up. Chewie’s relative velocity of 10mph, amplified over 10 billion light years, shifts his “now” to Earth’s past. His present slice of reality moves to include the Civil War. Then the beast turns around and walks towards you at 10 mph. If Chewie were wearing a magic headset that could transmit instantaneously, he could radio Earth 150 years from now. That is, if we haven’t turned the planet into Venus by then.

“If you buy the notion that reality consists of the things in your freeze-frame mental image right now,” begins Greene, “and if you agree that your now is no more valid than the now than someone located far away in space who can move freely, then reality encompasses all of the events in spacetime. […] Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as really being out there, as really existing, too.”

All times exist. Our experience, however, does not reflect this deeper reality discovered by Einstein. Events are illuminated by human consciousness in a seemingly orderly fashion. Why this is so remains, incredibly, a mystery.

Why should we think on this? It has the power to shatter our preconceptions, to halt our vacillations over past and future, to open the door to a higher truth. If all times are frozen like ice, then why stress over them?

When St. Augustine mused over the past and future, he knew he would never find them. Each of us is forever bound to our present experience. But when Chewie takes a walk in a galaxy far far away, his stride transcends hundreds of Earth years. Our past and future become his present. Too bad we can’t get in touch.

Print Sources

Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2004. Print.

Watts, Alan. The Wisdom of Insecurity. New York: Pantheon, 1951. Print.