Time is an illusion

This seems pretty nonsense to say. Even in physics time is central to dynamics. Things happen in time, how can it be an illusion.

Well that is one view. But there is another.

Forget everything and look again. How does the world look?

We have sensations and experiences and they are happening.

Exactly. Experience does not happen in the past, or the future it just happens.

Our first experience of the world is just things happening. The things I can see and hear and feel and smell etc.

This does not happen "in" time. It just happens.

So where does the sense of time come from?

This is through comparison with memory, imagination and thoughts. I can say the car was there (memory and thought), it is here (experience and thought), and soon it will be other there (imagination and thought).

Joining all these is thought which combines these things into a story or narrative which has a past, present and future. I believe other languages have different takes on time. This is story telling. It is dropping the stories and look again that was the first instruction here.

Looking again at how things seem, they are childish. We forget the complex adult world and have fresh eyes free from responsibility and the demands of the world. All the stories. How does it really look?

The key thing to observe is that everything that we experience is HERE. You can't experience what is over there. When someone relates a story of their holiday you are not THERE. In fact they are not THERE  anymore. Both of you are HERE and thinking and imagining a story of what happened. But all that mental creativity of imagining things far away is all done HERE. Those imaginations of the distant place are actually HERE.

And that is the crux of this. When you climb a mountain do you think you have travelled to the mountain, or has the mountain come to be HERE. Examining experience it is the latter. We are always HERE so how can we travel? All that work to travel really just brings the mountain HERE. We might say we take the HERE to the mountain, but that is ridiculous right? HERE is by definition here, it can't go there.

This is so weird to see like this, when brought up in a world of stories about here and there and all the places in the world. We look at an atlas or a Maps app and imagine what it is like in all these places. We think stories about these distant places. But we overlook that for our whole life we will only ever be HERE. How can we be anywhere else?

In exactly the same way we can only ever be NOW. Things happen in the NOW. Things don't happen in the Past or the Future. These periods of time are imaginations. Fantasy tricks we play where we imagine that for a second we could live at some other time. But note all these fantasies themselves must be NOW, else we wouldn't be there to experience them.

Film is an amazing technology because it works like our brains. When we go to a film set in a future world or a historical drama we don't really think we went forward and back in time. So why when we are thinking about our life do we think we can time travel? We can't  it is always only ever NOW.

This has quite major implications of how we think about ourselves. It means everything we think we know about ourselves is wrong. All this is just imagining and thinking about the Past or the Future. Our true self is HERE and NOW.

This is how we get lost. We get sucked into all the stories about who we are, what we are expected to do, and be and what is needed from us and what we think people think about us and our histories and our cultures and lives and parents and friends and the NEWS and ... one massive library of stories.

And yet all along it all exists within the HERE and NOW. This Present is the true self.  It is the only place and time we have always been our whole lives!

We can stop for a second and watch our breath. This is happening right here and now. It is real, and unquestionable. We know we have been breathing our whole life from the moment we first cried out in our mother presence at our birth. Yet this truth of our lives we almost never note. Even less so do we note the even bigger truth of our lives that we have only ever stood HERE and NOW.

What is possibly extraordinary is that this HERE and NOW in its purest core is not just our HERE and NOW. There is just one HERE and NOW. And that means that not just me but everyone exists in the same HERE and NOW.

That last paragraph was a bit of step backwards, because we already established that "I" have only ever been in the HERE and NOW and all the stories I have are not me. We might already be beginning to see the HERE and NOW as the true self. In which case if  am the HERE and NOW then so is everyone, and those ideas I have about other people, like the ideas I have about myself, are just stories.