Okay, I’m going to break your brain now.
Sorry, not sorry.
Because this is something you really need to understand.
Particularly if you believe that the present moment holds the key to a more spiritual mode of being.
Countless starry-eyed seekers have been captivated by the power of the Now…
But did you know that the idea of a universal present moment actually died at the hands of Albert Einstein over a hundred years ago?
The Now isn’t what we thought it was…
And the interpretations of our most sacred experiences can never be the same again.
From the ancient belief that the world we see exists in a single moment…
To Roemer’s discovery of the speed of light…
To Einstein’s paradigm-shaking unification of time and space…
To its devastating (and unrecognized) impact on traditional spirituality…
This post is going to get a little nerdy.
…but it’s also got pictures!
If you take the time to read it, you’ll understand Einstein better than 99% of the population.
And you’ll never look at reality the same way again!
The World in a Moment
The present moment is a fascinating thing.
And there are some very cool ways of moving our consciousness that reveal the present moment to be so much more than our everyday awareness would suggest…
There are whole traditions built around those techniques.
And around all of the profound things that we can discover within ourselves when we keep our attention in the here and now.
But as profound and obvious as those experiences feel, they also preserve a very shallow and archaic understanding of time.
And, ironically, promote a very self-centered perspective of reality.
What?? You ask…
How can traditions based on selflessness and freedom from ego possibly promote a self-centered view of reality?
Well, as you probably guessed, it’s all about “the present moment.”
And what that really means…
Take the following sentiment:
The past is gone. The future, yet to come. Only the Now is real…
Surely you’ve heard that?
It’s a popular way of looking at things.
And a very natural way to think.
And unless you have a graduate degree in physics, or watch a whole lot of nerdy documentaries, it’s probably what you believe.
So that’s where we’re going to start:
Only the present moment is real.
In this view, reality is something like a movie.
…or even better, like a slide show.
With each moment in time like a single cell in the stack of slides.
Many moments lost to the past… Many moments still to come…
And one moment—right Now—that shines brighter than all the rest.
And YOU are right in the middle of it.
Now, the cool thing about this slide show—aside from the fact that it’s as big as the entire universe!—is that we all get to watch it as we live it…
We get to look out at the world and see it unfold—right Now—all around us.
Or, at least, that’s what we used to think…
Once upon a time we thought we were seeing the whole world, all in real time.
Meaning, we thought that the world that we see was contained in a single moment in time.
In nerdy terms: we thought that the speed of light was infinite.
And so the world was vibrant. And alive. And immediate.
And we were seeing it live, and in action.
We knew what was real, because we were looking right at it.
Or so we thought…
Celerity
As it turns out, light moves really fast…
But not infinitely fast.
On the scale of infinity, the speed of light is actually pretty slow… poking along at a measly 186,000 miles per second.
But on a human scale, that’s fucking ridiculous!
And so it makes sense that we started out assuming it was infinite.
But we really weren’t sure until 1676, when Ole Roemer determined light’s actual speed by observing the moons of Jupiter.
Nerdy side-note: the c we use to designate the speed of light—as in E=mc2—comes from the Latin celer, for fast.
Now, in some ways, a finite speed of light doesn’t seem like such a big deal…
I mean, so what? Life goes on.
But philosophically, it starts to change the way we think about reality.
Suddenly, we aren’t looking at the world in a single moment anymore…
The light that reaches our eyes took some time to get there.
And so when we look out at the world, we are actually looking into the past.
And the further away we look, the further into the past we see.
Kind of weird… And kind of cool…
That the things we see may no longer even be there. (ie. in the present moment.)
But it doesn’t change things too much.
It may give us a moment of contemplation to think that many of the stars we see in the night sky are Now gone…
That any one of them could have ended in a fiery blaze long, long ago.
But life goes on… The past is gone…
The present moment is what’s real.
And even though light takes a while to reach us, we can still use it to find the present moment.
If we want to get all precise about it, all we need is a clock and a mirror…
We start the clock with a flash of light, and then wait for the light to bounce off the mirror and come back to us.
Light travels the same speed to the right as it does to the left…
So if we divide the time in half, we know the exact moment that the light reached the mirror…
Even though we couldn’t see it yet, in the moment that it happened.
So really, it’s no big deal.
Even if we can’t see the present moment, we still know it’s there.
And we still know what’s real and what isn’t.
Or, at least we thought we did…
For about 229 more years…
The Death of the Now
The really weird thing about light isn’t the speed at which it travels…
Infinitely fast… Or just mind-bogglingly fast… It’s not such a big difference.
The weird thing is that the speed of light doesn’t change.
And that really fucks with people when they first stop and think about it…
Nobody was more surprised than Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, when they first discovered it in 1887.
But it’s true nonetheless.
In every other aspect of life, motion is relative.
Throw a ball… Shoot an arrow… Jump in a plane and go…
If you follow after fast enough, you can catch up.
But light is different.
The speed of light is constant.
No matter how fast you go, you never get any closer.
And no matter how fast you move, light always moves away from you at the exact same speed.
Now, if that starts to mess with your head, and gets you thinking of weird scenarios trying to find a loophole, just leave it be for now…
It’s only weird because of how you think about the present moment.
That’s why we’re doing pictures. Pictures make it way easier.
If we picture shining a light, both from the ground and from a moving plane, it looks like this…
Obviously the speed of the plane isn’t to scale with the speed of light.
(That would be one really fast plane!)
But other than that, there’s nothing strange about it.
The greater the speed, the greater the angle of the worldline. And the light-like lines stay the same.
As for us, our motion is relative.
You think that I’m moving… I think that you’re moving…
And both of us are right!
If motion weren’t relative, then that wouldn’t be the case.
And life would be very, very difficult…
Try to take a drink while driving on the freeway… and your coffee would hit your throat at 70 miles per hour!
Get out of your seat in an airplane… and you’d be smashed to the back of the cabin at more than 500!
But of course that doesn’t happen…
You can throw a ball back and forth in the aisle of a plane and it’s just like playing catch on the ground.
Because you and the ball and plane are all moving along together.
And besides, who’s to say who’s “really” moving anyway?
You might be “sitting still” right now as you read this. But to someone floating out in space, the Earth itself is in motion!
One point of view is just as valid as another.
But getting back to light…
A couple pictures back, we used a clock and a mirror to find the present moment.
I just assumed that we were doing that on the ground.
But we could do the same thing on a plane…
Put the mirror at one end, and stand at the other. Flash the light and start the clock. And you can determine the precise moment that the light reached the mirror.
There’s no reason to make a new picture for that, because it would look exactly the same.
At least, it would to the people on the plane…
For someone standing on the ground, it would look a little different. Since the plane itself is in motion…
From that point of view, it looks like this:
The clock starts with a flash, and stops when the light bounces back.
Divide the time in half, and there you go: the moment the light hit the mirror.
You can even extend the line outward in both directions.
And make that moment as big as the whole universe.
Still not so strange, right?
It’s exactly the same as the earlier picture. Just slanted a bit because we’re looking at it from a different point of view.
The mind blowing part comes when we put the two together…
Enter Einstein.
Motion is relative.
Flash the light on the ground, and find the present moment.
Flash the light on the plane, and find the present moment.
The speed of light is the same for everyone.
But the present moment isn’t.
From your point of view, the present moment is everything on the dashed gray line.
From my point of view, the present moment is everything on the dashed blue line.
Our Now’s intersect…
But they aren’t the same moment.
So which “present moment” is the real one?
Surely that’s an important question…?
Our whole view of reality is predicated on the idea that only the Now is what’s real!
Or, at the least, more real that the future or the past…
Right Now, this very moment, there are people flying in planes and driving in cars all around you.
And none of their Now’s match yours.
They don’t even match with each other…
Different speeds and different directions: different present moments.
So which one is real?
All of them.
Come 1905, we all stopped living in the same Now.
Even if we didn’t know it.
But let’s take it even further…
Let’s say that you’re on the ground, and I’m on the plane, flying away from you.
When you think of me, right Now in the plane—you’re actually thinking of me in the past.
My past anyway… Your present.
And when I think of you, right Now on the ground—that point in time has already passed for you.
Your past. My present.
Each of us says that the other is “living in the past.”
And both of us are right!
Brain breaking yet?
Don’t worry, the pictures make that easier too.
Just follow the arrows…
When you say Now at b, you mean me at y.
But when I say Now at y, I mean you at a. Which is in the past for b…
From my point of view, when I say Now at y, I mean you at a.
But when you say Now at a, you mean me at x. Which is in the past for y…
Both of us think that the other is “living in the past,” and both of us are right.
Now, the reason both of us are tilted to the past is because I’m flying away from you…
If I were flying towards you, our present moments would both be tilted into the future.
(Hint: just look at the picture again, but turn it upside down.)
Right Now, for me as I’m flying towards you, you are living an experience that hasn’t happened yet for you!
And vice versa.
Even the time order of spatially separated events is relative.
(a happened before y | a is simultaneous with y | y happened before a)
But we’ll leave that one alone for the moment…
The point here is that none of us share the same Now.
Well, not very many of us anyway.
We just don’t notice it because we never move very fast, and we aren’t very far apart.
But it isn’t the distance that causes the discrepancy.
A lot of people get caught up thinking that it’s all about the time it takes light to pass between us…
But that isn’t correct.
It’s relative motion that makes us disagree on the present moment.
Distance just magnifies the effect.
The greater the relative motion, the greater the angle between our present moments…
And the greater the distance between us, the larger the gap where our Now’s intersect each other’s worldlines.
So, even if I was on the opposite side of the universe, as long as we weren’t moving relative to each other, we’d still share the same present moment.
It’s called the relativity of simultaneity.
And it has a profound impact on the way we view reality.
We can no longer claim that the present moment is the only thing that’s real.
Or even “more real” than the future or the past.
In a very real way, every moment is just as real as every other.
And we can draw that too…
Imagine that, right Now, in a galaxy far, far away—there are other beings walking around on other planets.
Or even flying around in awesome space ships.
You may not have any way to reach them. And the light from their cities may not reach the Earth for another billion years or more.
But that doesn’t matter.
You still know that other planets are out there—right Now—even if you can’t see them yet.
They are real. In this moment. Elsewhere in the universe.
And yet, if they are moving relative to you… Getting a tiny bit closer, or a tiny bit further away… Even by a few measly miles per hour…
Then their Now is not the same as yours.
And that makes things even weirder…
Because surely if they are “real” to you in your Now… then you are just as “real” to them?
And certainly you are real to YOU…
(You are real… right?)
And yet, YOU—right here, right Now—are not a part of their present moment!
If they don’t understand the relativity of simultaneity…
If they think that the present moment is “more real” than the future or the past…
Then in their minds, YOU—right here, right Now—are less real than you were when you were 5 years old.
Or 15… Or 80… Or a hundred years to dust…
Time is relative.
The present moment is relative.
Unless you are a solipsist, and believe that everyone and everything in the universe is just a figment of your own imagination…
Then every moment in time is just as “real” as every other!
The Birth of Spacetime
If you’ve made it this far, then you already understand Einstein better than 99% of the population.
And we’ve still barely scratched the surface!
But there’s still one last point that you need to understand…
Lots of people like to say that Einstein discovered that “time was the fourth dimension.”
Or that he discovered that “space and time were inseparable.”
But both of those ideas were around long, long before Einstein.
(A solid rule of thumb: anytime somebody explains Einstein, and your head doesn’t completely fucking explode and your whole world change… then at least one of you didn’t get it!)
What Einstein actually did was unify space and time.
He showed that, not only are they inseparable—they are really just two aspects of a single, more beautiful symmetry.
A thing that we didn’t even have a word for…
Hence the term: spacetime.
To picture that, we don’t really even need a new drawing…
But I’ll do one anyway, just to make it easy.
Think about that distant alien, in a galaxy far, far away…
Or even just someone here on Earth, driving by your window…
And about how their Now sits at an angle relative to yours…
Well, the line that they call a single moment… ie. what they call space.
Is, to you, not just an expanse of space…
But also window in time.
Space is just relationship—a distance between two points.
Time is as well. Though we call it a duration.
But a line in spacetime is both, depending on who’s looking at it.
It’s a stunning insight!
One that completely redefines our understanding of what’s real and what isn’t.
Roemer’s discovery—cool as it was—pales beside Einstein’s.
It’s not such a big deal to not be able to see the present moment…
Because space is still space. Time is still time.
And the Now is the same for everyone.
But there’s no coming back from Einstein.
Not for physics. Not for philosophy. Not for humanity.
And not for the spiritual traditions…
Spiritual people love to gush about the power of the Now…
And the experiences that they’re talking about really are amazing!
But what does it mean to remain in the present moment, when the present moment is subjective?
If all moments in time are equally real, and consciousness is connected to all things, then why are we not equally aware of all of them?
What does it mean to reach Enlightenment in a reality where time is relative and consciousness is evolving?
These questions may not seem like a big deal, so long as we confine our beliefs to our own self-centered view of the universe…
But our confidence is misplaced.
We may feel the silent Witness within us…
Immerse ourselves in formless absorption…
Become One with everything that arises in the present moment…
And the answers to those questions may feel apparent.
Just as it’s “apparent” when we look to the night sky, and conclude that the stars revolve around the Earth.
But once we open our perspective to include the perspectives other people…
To the worlds of those around us…
Those comforting sacred stories begin to crumble into nothing.
The old spiritual philosophies cannot survive the world that Einstein revealed.
The real question is…
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About Zach Herbert
I teach people to do cool things with their consciousness, and break their brains with beautiful ideas.
Professional heretic. Unlikely mystic. Host to rebels, misfits and independent thinkers.
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Zach Herbert says
FYI I’m moderating the comments more heavily on this post. Not trying to be a dick… But I’m getting a lot of feedback from folks who didn’t read the whole thing (or haven’t yet grasped the concept). And I don’t want to muddy the waters for people who are struggling to learn the idea.
Just to reiterate: the weird implications of Special Relativity have nothing to do with the time it takes light to reach our eyes. Or that we are seeing visual images of the past. Drawing #3 represents our knowledge as it was in the late 1600’s. Einstein’s ideas (#’s 6-10) are hundreds of years beyond that understanding, literally and figuratively.
So… if your head hasn’t exploded… and it doesn’t seem like a big deal… or if you think there’s an easy and obvious answer to the questions surrounding spirituality and consciousness… then I would humbly suggest that you dig deeper.
Special Relativity isn’t an easy thing to grasp. (That’s actually why I wrote this post… If I’d have had this when I first started, it would have saved me months of confusion!)
But it really is worth the effort!
Having said all that… if you have questions, feel free to post them!
David says
You summarize relativity very well and it was a great primer after not having studied it for a few years. Now my question to you, is how does this discredit consciously becoming aware of the present moment as it is relative to you?
By the logic of relativity, nothing exists simultaneously in the same spacetime continuum. While the effects are severely more pronounced and noticeable on a macro scale, they obviously still exist on a micro scale. Yet we live on a whirling blob of matter that isn’t technically solid but appears so and we have conversations exchanging vibrating frequencies and manage to make meaning of it all.
I guess a better question is how does your interpretation of past, present and future differ from describing those time periods as an infinite, consecutive string of present moments?
Also, if you there are any good books on relativity that you would recommend to someone who is a computer scientist but not a scholarly physicist I would be grateful.
Zach Herbert says
It doesn’t affect our experience itself.. We can still abide in the present moment, and transcend our thoughts and move into states of nondual unity, etc… The techniques still work, and the personal benefits of those experiences are still real. But our interpretations of those experiences are forced to change.
When we believe that the present moment is the only thing that’s real, it makes it easy to over-inflate the scope of our realizations. (“I’m one with everything because I’m one with everything I’m aware of in the present moment.”) But the relativity of simultaneity forces us to acknowledge the finite nature of our consciousness.
Now, finite doesn’t mean small. But it does mean that there’s a boundary. And that makes everything much more interesting…
If we’re connected to “everything,” or if we’re connected to “nothing but ourselves”–both of those make things easy. All or nothing. Either way is not so interesting. But “connected to some things but not others”… Well, that gets very interesting! Because now we have to start exploring the why’s and the how’s. And we’re forced to confront how little we really know.
It’s just like entanglement in quantum field theory… If everything was entangled with everything else, that would be easy. There’s nothing mysterious about that. We just chuck locality and call it a day. The real mystery is that some things are entangled and others are not.
So the point is not to discredit time as a relativistic tapestry of consecutive present moments… The point is to reopen the investigation, and show that the ancient spiritual traditions don’t have shit nearly as nailed down as they thought!
As for books, I’ve found that the most interesting ones tend to be graduate level textbooks and university press publications on the philosophy of physics. (They actually dig into the ideas and assumptions, rather than just filling 300 pages with math.) Here are a few of my favorites:
Quantum Nonlocality and Relativity by Tim Maudlin
The Force of Symmetry by Vincent Icke
Concepts of Simultaneity by Max Jammer
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Physics by Marc Lange
annelmac60 says
I’m thoroughly fascinated and totally confused. This topic has piqued my interest for many decades and I don’t think my brain will be able to fully wrap itself around it in this lifetime. Despite that, I always enjoy attempting to digest it all. Thanks for the revisit.
Zach Herbert says
Just stick with it! Eventually it’ll click!! 🙂
Zach Herbert says
From an offline conversation, where I was asked: Would this mean that you should be able to experience someone else’s future or past in your present? Maybe not physically, but spiritually?
……………………………………
Not within special relativity, no… Which doesn’t mean you can’t do it! Just that Einstein has nothing really to say on the topic.
I think that it’s very important, when trying to have a conversation between spirituality and science, to not let either side diminish the other. (And don’t go fishing for endorsements either!) Just because Einstein’s insights don’t endorse spiritual experience, doesn’t mean they aren’t real!
He isn’t telling us what DOESN’T exist… He isn’t even telling us what CAN. He’s telling us what DOES. But there’s always room for more!
A good rule of thumb is to always take the more expansive (and elegant) perspective. And in the case of TIME, Einstein is vastly more elegant and expansive.
When old fashioned spirituality talks about Time, it starts playing the denial game. “The past isn’t real.” “The future isn’t real.” “Time is an illusion…”
Which is basically just saying “We can’t really account for or understand any of that stuff, so we’re just going to pretend it all away.” It’s the same thing as materialism saying that about spirituality in general… “We can’t account for or understand it, therefore there’s no such thing.”
But you can’t prove a negative… So we don’t have to care about either side trying to make the universe SMALLER. The smaller perspective is almost always wrong. But we’d better perk up and listen whenever EITHER side makes the universe bigger! And that’s what Einstein did… He made it WAY bigger and way more elegant. (And then backed it up with 100 years of fantastically accurate experiments!)
Spirituality can pretend that time is an illusion. It can pretend that the universe is as tiny and clumsy as it wants. But it’s just a “head in the sand” tactic. It can’t prove the negative. And Einstein has clearly demonstrated the positive. The universe GOT bigger. Whether spirituality wants to admit it or not.
The goal of this site, and of explorers everywhere, is to make it bigger still!
Derek says
Hi Zach. I was linked to this article of yours through a few degrees of separation from another article you just posted today. I read the full article and yes, I completely understand what you are saying and you make very valid points about the experience of the present moment itself. And I don’t think anyone would necessarily disagree with you on that.
However, my understanding of “the Present Moment” that most spiritual teachings refer to is not what is taking place IN the moment, but rather that AMness……that very essence of Pure Being itself. It’s the same for me as it is for you, as it is for that squirrel outside, as it is for the tree, etc etc. In other words, what is the one thing that we all share in common? Is it not Pure Being itself? Call it consciousness or call it whatever. But, yes, as you say, our EXPERIENCES of that one AMness; our EXPERIENCES of this one Presence are different. Yet, isn’t there SOMETHING here that is unchanging for you as it is for me that allows our experiences to be?
So, I don’t think (at least the spiritual texts that I have come across) they are referencing the idea that we all experience one common same time/space representation of “The Present Moment”. Which would mean, my experience of this ISness is a laptop in front of me and therefore shouldn’t that be yours as well? Or the people in Outer Space who see Earth from a different perspective? No of course not. But, we all do share one thing in common….and that ‘thing’ is unchanging for all of us.
And if you consider the notion of multi-dimensionality, then there could even potentially be multiple versions of each of us experiencing different versions of…..the present moment. But, it’s not what is being experienced IN the moment (aka space/time). It’s what the moment actually is….prior to experience. This one eternal moment experiencing infinite perspectives simultaneously (which we can’t see because of the limitations of the human experience). This is what the sages are referring to as Pure Awareness. We hear about in Near Death Experiences. While the experience of the moment changes and is clearly different for each of us……”something” is already here that does not change
Just wanted to add my take
Zach Herbert says
Yep! The spiritual traditions are definitely talking about that “AMness.” I actually follow this article up with another one that digs into the experiential side that you bring up here. But it also points out where those classical ideas go bad when you try to extend them into a philosophy of time. (Which all of them attempt to do!)
The spiritual traditions are correct; there IS something else at hand here… But Einstein is correct as well. And the more you examine the two together—the depth and presence that we experience within, and the relativity of simultaneity without—the more you realize that the two can’t both exist as advertised.
That AMness might appear eternal and unchanging—and utterly obvious!—to anyone who observes it. Just like it was utterly obvious to the ancient astronomers that the sun and stars revolved around the earth… But if the evolution of physics has taught us anything, it’s that “obvious” rarely pans out the way we all expect!
Anyway, there’ll be much more to come in future articles… You’re probably gonna like where it goes! 😉
Derek says
“That AMness might appear eternal and unchanging—and utterly obvious!—to anyone who observes it. Just like it was utterly obvious to the ancient astronomers that the sun and stars revolved around the earth… But if the evolution of physics has taught us anything, it’s that “obvious” rarely pans out the way we all expect!”
Can’t say I disagree with the second article you shared here. Yes, many spiritual teachers just say “Be here now” and it’s pretty blatantly obvious that life requires movement. So, I don’t jive with those teachers. Yet, that still does not negate the fact that no matter what we do…a starting point (like you mention in the second article) is essential to be here….now. Including OBE practices, which I have a lot of experience with. If you’re not calm and present at the start, you can’t let go during an OBE and OBE’s require you to let go and surrender into the moment when the buzzing in your ears starts and the sleep paralysis comes on. If anything, presence is the most important aspect of having an OBE and from there…..you move out. But, it all starts with presence.
But, in your quote above, you seem to still be conflating this idea of AMness with something within the time/space spectrum, hence your notion of evolution of physics, as though this AMness will eventually be something physics finds the source of. Do you really believe that? I ask that seriously?
If I’ve learned anything from NDE research over time, there IS no science when we leave these bodies. Because there is no time in the non physical. What we learn from these experiences is that the entire multi-verse including the experience of space/time, exists within this eternal energy Source…..presence. Not even a present moment, because it implies another moment. Just unconditional holding. How could science possibly explain this timelessness?
So, point being, science is a wonderful tool to explain how our physical universe works. And I use science plenty, especially when it comes to the physical body and I love how physics often matches up with spirituality. But, they are still lost in the game. The idea that science is going to understand the eternal which is timeless (and yes it is eternal), is like a movie character literally trying to understand the nature of the projection of the projector. Because we already ARE that.