The time right now is 5:36 PM. For most people, the concept that a number can symbolize time is common knowledge. That is probably because society has built a regulated system to measure time all over the world. Although it is not 5:36 PM everywhere on this planet at the same moment, the number symbolizes times that it has been 5:36PM in the past and in the future simultaneously. But can time mean more than just a number? Actually, time is much more complex than how we can measure it. It is important to know if it really exists, and if so what it consists of. These questions extend into three different branches we call: the past, the present, and the future.
The past is what we identify with as events and thoughts that have occurred to us or others previously in life. If the past exists, then we think that it cannot exist at the same time as the present or future. However, this is a huge misconception that many people make. In reality, the past can only exist if the present and the future also exist at the same time. In a way, the past is the present and the future all at once. This is because before it turned into the past, it was once a future and once the present. After the moment in which it existed passed, the moment did not die; it exists in a different category. It gets grouped as memory in your brain, which will always exist at all times. This means that the past is a memory which can influence you in the present, and therefore can change your future. This shows that the past, present, and future all depend on each other and allow each other to exist. It also shows some sort of cycle that time goes through. This agrees with the theory of Monism which means that every part of life is really part of one large entity. The past, present, and future are really all just one thing that only gets categorized into different things in our brains. Like everything else in life, it is all just part of one all-encompassing thing that only gets separated and categorized in our minds.
The present is composed of the instantaneous actions or thoughts that occur at each moment that make up the past and the future. Commonly we think of the present as a moment of time that is independent of the past and future, and only exists in itself. However, the present does not really exist at all. Imagine time as a line that stretches from left to right infinitely on both sides. Where would the centre of the line be? Everything to the left of the centre (zero) would be negative, and everything to the right would be positive. The negatives represent the past and the positives represent the future. Zero then represents the present, but where would it be? Well if there is no zero, then there can’t be a positive and negative because it won’t be relative to anything. Therefore, zero is actually everywhere. This means that the present does not really exist as a moment in time, because that moment will always be the past or the future only. The present is actually a combination of the past and the future happening at once and creating more of itself infinitely. Imagine a point and name it zero, then imagine a line stretching infinitely to the left and a line stretching infinitely to the right from zero. Then fold the line on itself at point zero. Every positive value will be cancelled out by its equally negative value, creating zero infinitely. That is what it means to combine the past and the future at once to create the present infinitely. This shows that time is cyclical and the present only exists as a reaction between the past and the future.
The future is an expectation of certain events or thoughts to occur. Some believe that a person’s future is predetermined and that external forces control their everyday lives. This would imply that the future exists outside the past and present. But how can the future exist if we haven’t created it yet? It can’t because it only activates in combination with the past and only then does it exist. The future can only exist as an expectation of something to occur or as an idea. This agrees with the theory of Idealism which means that reality consists of ideas. The future is not really a physical thing but it still exists to each one of us as an idea. This means that things always exist as ideas and we give meaning to them by remembering certain physical attributes to relate what it actually is to us. However not all ideas can be related with physical attributes like time for example. This shows that everything around us is really only an idea and that it only exists after we become conscious of it.
The past, present, and future make up a certain concept of time that we are all familiar with. The concept that time is always changing states, and that all of its states are really only part of one because they depend on each other’s existence. The past exists as a memory and the future exists as an expectation; in combination creating the present infinitely in a cycle. This is just an idea however, since time has no physical attributes. It only exists to us because we are able to think about it, and in a grander scale everything exists because we are able to think about it.
-Reem Kamal-Al-Deen
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