The Eternal Now — Timeless Awareness in the Midst of Time
The mystical recognition of eternal presence — the awareness that is present in every moment yet not itself in time — is universally reported by mystics as the most characteristic and transformative of all contemplative experiences.
Every mystical tradition describes an encounter with a dimension of reality that is not temporal — that is always and eternally present, 'now' in a way that has no before or after. Meister Eckhart's 'eternal now' (Nunc Stans): 'God is where He was — in the eternal now.' The Buddhist recognition that nirvana is 'the unconditioned' — beyond arising and passing, beyond before and after. The Sufi 'waqt' (present moment as the locus of divine presence): the Sufi lives entirely in the present. The Hindu teaching that Brahman is 'sat-chit-ananda' (being-consciousness-bliss) — the eternal self-luminous awareness that is present in every moment of experience as its silent witness. What all these teachings point toward is a dimension of awareness that is available in every present moment — not by reaching for it but by recognizing it as what is already and always here: the awareness itself that is reading these words.
The present moment always will have been.
Philosopher Julian Barbour's The End of Time argues, from a rigorous analysis of general relativity and quantum mechanics, that time may not be a fundamental feature of reality but a derived phenomenon — that the universe's fundamental laws are actually time-symmetric and that 'the present moment' is in some deep sense all that really exists, providing modern physics' version of the mystics' eternal now.
Universal Wisdom