I do not believe in time.

At least, not in the way that we are taught to think of it in the west.

I don’t t believe time is a thing that moves, or passes, or runs out. I believe it’s a language we use to describe change in a vibrating universe.

Seconds, minutes, and hours are simply measurements of motion. If nothing ever moved, if nothing ever changed, there would be no way to measure anything at all. There would be no before or after. Only stillness.

So what we call time is really our way of tracking the shifting play between matter and energy. Even the scientific definition of a second is based on vibration. A second is defined by a precise number of oscillations of a cesium atom. In other words, time is not a substance. It is a count of movement, the measurement of change that occurs because of the movement.

When people say that time is running out, what they are really saying is that they don’t trust that the change they are hoping for will arrive as fast as they want it to.

This a fear which lives in their minds. It’s not reality.

Neuroscience shows us that our brains do not actually experience time as a flowing river. They construct it.

Your past is not stored like a film reel you can replay or a file you can open. Neurophysiologist, Karl Pribram, proposed that memory is stored in patterns of electrical oscillations distributed across the brain, in a way similar to how a hologram stores an image. A hologram doesn’t contain a picture in any one place. Every piece contains the whole, revealed when light hits it at the right angle.

Memory works the same way.

When you remember something, your brain does not retrieve a recording. It reconstructs a pattern. And the reconstruction has missing pieces gaps. Do you know what it fills in the gaps with? Your imagination, your beliefs about the incident, the thing you’re most focused on about it. That’s why two people experiencing the same event will remember it differently.

Memory is not a fixed archive. It is a living story that changes every time you touch it. This explains why the stories my father told about his youth grew a little with each telling. The past was not being retrieved. It was being rewritten each time he told it, not because he did that on purpose, but because that’s the way they human brain works.

And the future?

The future is a prediction your brain makes based on memory, pattern, and imagination. It doesn’t exist as a place. It exists as a story that you tell yourself based on your past and pattern recognition.

So if the past is a story and the future is a story, what remains?

Now.

No matter when you are, it’s always now. You cannot arrive in the future because when you get there it is now. And even if you could visit the past, when you arrived it would also be now.

We never leave the present. We only let our attention leave it.

Whenever we say we do not have enough time, what we are really saying is that we are trapped between memory and prediction and no longer living where our life is actually happening.

This is what Yoda was gently pointing out to Luke on Dagobah in the Stars Wars trilogy when he said, “Always in motion is the future.” Luke was looking ahead and looking behind but never where he was. He was never in the living moment where the Force could be felt.

Jesus said the same thing in different language. He said to consider the sparrows and the lilies how they don’t fret over the future. He told his followers not to worry about tomorrow. And in another place he said that whoever puts their hand to the plow and looks back is not ready for the kingdom of heaven. In other words, do not cling to the past and do not rush toward the future. If you want to know the divine, be here–now.

The present is where life is.

The only place you can ever act from is now. The more you fear you will not have enough time, the more you abandon the only moment that belongs to you. And the more you live in regret, shame, or longing for what was, the more you miss the quiet miracle of what is.

Abraham Lincoln said it is not the number of years in your life that matters, but the life you live during those years. Life is lived one day at a time, one moment at a time.

When we live rushed and anxious, we are living by the laws of scarcity. When we slow into presence, we begin to live by the principles of a deeper kingdom, a kingdom where there is no scarcity, no lack, a kingdom not bound to the illusion of time.

Thank you to my friend, Joyce, who recommended the Holographic Universe to me. It resonated before I completed the first chapter! Some books do that!

Taking My Time by Becker, Ashton and Dente