Living in the Now

I’ve written previously about time. In one sense time is an illusion. Both the future and the fast don’t exist except in our imagination. There is no reality except the present, but the past and future mould us. Our previous experiences largely dictate how we act now due to preconceptions, habits and conditioned behaviour. The future moulds us due to our expectations, hopes and fears. All these are fantasies.

In reality there is just the present. In every quantum* the whole universe is destroyed and a new one created. How the new universe differs from the previous one is an aspect of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which I’ve also discussed here.

Advanced mystics have a consciousness that exists only in the present. This consciousness is like a point that has no dimensions. They can travel to any time, past or future and to any place whether in this universe or in the countless parallel universes. This mode of reality is available to everyone. It is living in the now, totally aware. People go to huge lengths for a glimpse of this existence. Surfing, rock climbing and any of the extreme sports are designed to bring about a state of consciousness, of living in the now. When you are hundreds of feet up a mountain and only your wits stand between life and death, you have to be alert. Fantasising about the past or the future is a luxury you cannot afford.

I’ll discuss this more later.

*A quantum is the smallest possible unit of measurement. Dimensions may be viewed as multiple instances of an object. For example, a flat plane could be envisaged as a number of lines stacked on top of each other and a cube as a number of flat planes stacked up. This is illustrated here. The time dimension is simply a number of cubes each existing for a moment of time. This is similar to how a movie is shown where each frame is a moment of time which varies slightly from the previous one. These are shown one after the other giving the effect of time.

A line can also be considered to be made up of a number of points strung together. A point is a shape with no dimensions. This may sound absurd but it’s no more absurd than a line, which only has one dimension, or a plane that only has two. In actual practice a point has the smallest possible size: a quantum. A quantum is dimensionless as it is not time nor space and from it everything else is built.