Is Time Really Moving, Or Are You?
Why your mind turns time into a straight line.
The Idea
I almost walked right past it.
A light projection hovered above the water at Vivid Sydney. I didn’t quite know what I was looking at, so I sat down and waited to see what would happen.
The longer I watched, the more it pulled me in.
It moved through space, showing planets, stars, and geometric patterns that shifted and folded until it arrived at a black hole.
It was at this point, staring at a portal-shaped pattern of light that looked like something out of Dr Strange, that a question I’ve been carrying my whole life surfaced again.
If I can watch time passing, what part of me is doing the watching?
The Science
Sir Roger Penrose is a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 2020. He has spent decades studying the relationship between the brain, consciousness and the physical world. And what he concluded is this.
The brain produces many things. But it does not produce consciousness. Consciousness is simply awareness, the part of you that experiences, feels, and knows that you exist. And awareness cannot be simulated or replicated, not by a computer, not by technology, not by anything science can currently explain.
Therefore, consciousness isn’t contained inside the brain. It exists beyond it.
And if it exists beyond the brain, it isn't limited by the body either.
If this is true, then we don’t begin at birth, or end at death. We may be timeless.
Which brings me to time.
Most physicists believe that past, present and future all exist simultaneously. Not one after the other, but all at once. It’s called the block universe, that states every moment you have ever lived, and every moment you haven’t lived yet already exists.
Your mind processes these moments one piece at a time because it has to.
If everything arrived all at once, it would be impossible to make sense of them. So it puts them into a sequence instead - what is past, present, and future.
But that's not strictly how time works, it’s just how the mind carries it.
If time isn’t the straight line your mind makes it, and if consciousness exists beyond your body, then the question of whether you have always existed becomes a very real one.
Not the person you are, but the awareness that sits behind everything you think and feel and know. Does that part of you really have a beginning and end? Maybe it was here long before this life, and will continue long after it.
Where It Shows Up
You may have watched Quantum Leap, a show from 1989 that follows a physicist whose consciousness gets pulled out of his body and sent back in time, leaping into different people's lives across different moments in history. Decades later the same idea showed up in The OA on Netflix, where a woman has near death experiences and discovers she can move between dimensions, existing outside the rules of time and the body entirely.
You may have had that feeling of having been somewhere before, when you know you haven't. Charles Dickens explored déjà vu in his 1850 novel David Copperfield as a feeling, he said, of having been here before in a remote time. Of knowing perfectly what will be said next, as if you suddenly remembered it.
Scientists have studied it and found that the experience is real, because it can be measured. What they haven't found is a complete explanation for where it comes from. But the possibility that it's a trace of a life already lived hasn’t been ruled out.
You may have seen YouTube videos about near death experiences. They all describe the same thing, that time stops existing and people seeing every moment of their life all at once. They share an overwhelming sense of love and connection to everything and everyone. And may be experiencing time the way the block universe says it actually is.
And then there are those visitations from friends and family members who have passed away. You know this if it’s happened to you. They don’t feel like ordinary dreams, they are lucid, calm, and strangely certain, as if a loved one has stepped through the distance death creates to let you know they are okay.
The Subtextt
Beneath the feeling of your life moving in one direction is an idea that changes everything. The mind is turning time into a straight line, but your consciousness is never bound by it.
And because it isn’t, it moves through a timeline that never stops.
From inside the line that the mind creates, everything looks final.
Outside of it, nothing is.