Time Is an Illusion

This is a trivial question, but it's something that I think about a lot. It's not hard for me to understand how there could be no matter in reality. And it's not hard for me to understand how there could be three-dimensional space. But time is something that I just can't get my head around. I think it's easier for me to... If I have some intellectual way of understanding it, it's easier for me to proceed at all. Okay, I'm going to give you an intellectual response and an experiential response. In the hope that both of them together will. So the intellectual response. When you have a dream at night, you dream that you take a road trip across the states and it takes you three weeks to drive. And that seems very... The time that the road trip takes seems very real from the point of view of the person taking the trip in the dream. When you wake up, you realize that the dream didn't take any time. It didn't happen in your own mind. It just happened like that. Sometimes it took you a long time to think of all the things that happened. No, but when you wake up, you look at your clock before you go to sleep. It's two minutes to midnight. You fall asleep, you dream that you spent three weeks driving across America. You wake up, you look at your clock and now it's one minute to midnight. The three weeks in the dream state doesn't take up any time in the waking state. So what I would suggest is that the three weeks in the waking state... So we've gone up from the dream state up to the waking state. What takes three weeks in the dream state doesn't take any time in the waking state. What I would suggest is that what takes three weeks in the waking state doesn't take any time in consciousness. What about memories? It seems very true to me that things happen in the past. Let's go to the experiential answer now. Would you agree that you are experiencing what we call now? Would you agree that the now is not the past or the future? It's now. Try to step out of the now for a moment and actually experience the past. I know you can think about the past, but we know that we can think about things that are not what they seem to be. Thinking about the past is obviously not evidence of the past. To find evidence of the past we have to go there and experience it. Experience must be the test of reality. No, no, no. Other people's evidence is not certain evidence. You've got to find your own evidence. Nobody else is going to convince you that time exists other than yourself. So try the experiment now. Just leave the now for a moment and visit the past. Have you ever experienced the past? No, the question was have you ever experienced the past? Have you ever thought about the past? Have you ever actually left the now and experienced the past? Has anybody ever experienced the past or the future? The past and the future has never been experienced by anybody, ever. Nor could it ever be experienced. In other words, time is never experienced because time involves that. To define time you have to use the idea of time. Time is the duration between two events, which is like saying time is the time between two events. It's not a satisfactory definition, but it's not possible to get a satisfactory definition of time. Because it doesn't really exist. It's a model of our experience that accounts, for instance, for what we call memory. But it's just a model. It's a valid model, a necessary model, but not a model that reflects the nature of reality. If you didn't refer to memory, let's say you were now, just to experience the now, but without referring to memory, which is the same without referring to thought, we've already established you don't have any experience of time, but without reference to thought, would you even have any knowledge of time? Could it be that your knowledge of time is connected to the activity of thought, given that you only have knowledge of time when you're thinking? So are you sure that the time you think about is independent of thought, or could it be created by thought, given that it is only present, apparently present, when thought is present? In other words, are you sure that we think about time because it exists, rather than considering the possibility that time exists, or rather seems to exist, only because we think about it? Because that is actually consistent with your experience. Experience, first of all, says I have no experience of the past. Nobody has ever, could ever experience the past. It's something that's just out of our experience. There's no empirical evidence for that. Our second observation is that our knowledge of time is correlated with thought. Normally we think the arrow of causation goes from time to thought. Time is responsible for our thought about time. Could it be the other way around? Could it be that thinking is responsible for the appearance of time? It's actually consistent with our experience. That's what our experience tells us. When we stop thinking, there's no experience of time. It's all just a story? I wouldn't draw conclusions so quickly. Just ponder. I've showed you two things about your own experience that are undeniably true. One, you have no experience of time. Two, your knowledge of time is correlated with thought. The presumption that time causes thought is a presumption that cannot be substantiated in experience. It's our experience that actually the arrow of causation goes the other way. Thinking creates the appearance of time. So just consider deeply those two facts. They're facts of experience. Just consider them and don't draw conclusions. I'm not trying to convince you that time doesn't exist. I'm trying to first of all show you two facts of experience that you may not have been aware of. Which suggest that time is not what we think it is. And then to encourage you to ponder your experience of time, past and the future, with reference to these two facts of your experience. And just be open as you ponder it. See where this consideration takes you. Don't draw conclusions too soon. Be open. You already are open. Otherwise you wouldn't ask the question. But don't be too quick to say memory is evidence of the past. There are other possible interpretations of memory. But I think that's enough to talk today. Thanks.