When we ask the question, “Is time real?” we are stepping into one of the deepest mysteries of human thought. It’s a question that has haunted philosophers, mystics, and scientists alike. And depending on where we stand, depending on the lens we look through, time shows us a different face.
Think of time like a vast, shimmering lake. From one angle, it seems still. From another, it ripples. From another still, it stretches beyond the horizon. Each perspective is real, and yet none captures the whole.
Let’s begin with science, because for many people, science feels like the surest ground. Physics, especially since Einstein, has changed the way we understand time. Most of us grow up thinking of time as a river flowing from past to future, carrying us all forward at the same speed. But relativity tells us something far stranger. Time bends. Time stretches. Time does not flow the same for everyone.
If you were to sit here on Earth, and I were to travel into space at near the speed of light, when I came back, I would have aged far less than you. This is not just science fiction; it is reality, proven in countless experiments. Even GPS satellites orbiting our planet have to adjust their clocks, because time runs differently for them than it does for us on Earth. Time, then, is not absolute. It is woven together with space itself, into spacetime.
And some physicists go further still. They suggest that all events - past, present, future - exist together in a kind of great tapestry. Imagine a book. When you read it, you experience the story one page at a time, as though it were unfolding. But the whole story is already there, every page bound into the spine. In this view, our sense of time flowing is like the turning of the pages. The universe itself may be a finished book, a block of spacetime where all events coexist.
This is sometimes called the block universe. It is unsettling, isn’t it? Because it means that the future may already exist, waiting for us, just as much as the past does. We simply haven’t reached that page yet.
Others disagree. They say no - the future is open, not yet real. Only the present exists. This view is called presentism, and it feels intuitive, because it matches how we live. You can’t touch the past. You can’t touch the future. Only this moment is real. But here is the difficulty: relativity shows that there is no universal present. What is “now” for you may not be “now” for me if we are moving differently. And so the picture becomes cloudy.
Still others offer a compromise - the growing block universe. In this model, the past and present are real, but the future is not yet. The block grows as new moments come into being. Yet even here, the mystery remains: what exactly is the flow of time? Why does it feel like movement at all? Physics, with all its power, has no final answer to that question.
And so, to deepen our understanding, let us turn East, to traditions that have meditated on time for thousands of years.
In Hindu philosophy, particularly Advaita Vedanta, time is seen as part of māyā - the illusion that veils the eternal. The soul, the Atman, is not bound by time. It is one with Brahman, the timeless ground of being. All change, all becoming, belongs to the realm of illusion. What is real does not change. What is eternal cannot be measured by hours or years.
Buddhism carries a similar message. The Buddha taught that clinging to past and future is part of our suffering. When the mind projects itself backward in regret, or forward in worry, it leaves the present moment, the only moment that truly exists. To awaken is to step out of this illusion and into the eternal now.
This isn’t just philosophy; it is practice. Monks sitting in meditation, focusing on their breath, are training themselves to dwell in this timeless awareness. They are seeking freedom from the tyranny of psychological time - the endless chatter of memory and anticipation that binds us to anxiety.
Western philosophy too has wrestled with time. Kant declared that time is not an objective property of the world, but a framework of the human mind. Just as we cannot see without space, we cannot perceive without time. But time itself may not exist independently of us. Parmenides, in ancient Greece, said change is an illusion, that reality is one and unmoving. Heraclitus, his opposite, declared that all is flux, that nothing stays still. These two voices - timeless being and endless becoming - echo still in our debates today.
Even in Christianity, time has a special role. Augustine famously asked, “What is time?” and confessed he could not say. He argued that time itself is part of creation. God stands outside it. All moments - past, present, future - are present to God eternally. When we speak of “before” time, we are already trapped in a mistake, for time itself is what was created.
Jewish mysticism offers another angle. In Kabbalah, time is not only linear but cyclical, layered, symbolic. The festivals of the Jewish year are not merely commemorations of past events but re-entries into eternal patterns, windows into divine mysteries. Here, time is sacred recurrence, where the eternal breaks through the temporal.
And then there is Gnosticism, that radical current of thought. The Gnostics believed that the material world was the creation of a blind and ignorant being, the Demiurge, who trapped divine sparks in matter. Time itself was part of this prison, binding us to cycles of birth, decay, and death. For the Gnostic, true liberation was to awaken, to pierce through the illusion of time, and return to the Pleroma - the timeless fullness of the divine.
Isn’t it striking how close this sounds to some strands of modern physics? Physicists suggest that past and future still exist, that time might not be fundamental, that flow is an illusion. The Gnostic, speaking in mystical language, says the same: time is the veil, not the reality. To awaken is to see beyond it.
And yet, science and mysticism converge again in the human mind. Neuroscience shows that our experience of time is astonishingly fluid. A moment of danger stretches into slow motion. A moment of joy seems to fly by. A year filled with novelty feels longer than one filled with routine. Time expands, compresses, distorts, depending on how we live it. So much of time, it turns out, is created within us.
Psychology adds another layer still. Carl Jung, the great depth psychologist, saw human life not just in terms of linear time, but as a spiral. Again and again, we encounter similar challenges, but each time on a new level, a little higher, a little deeper. The past is never gone; it lives within us, as complexes and memories. The future, too, pulls us forward, not just as an empty space to be filled, but as a goal, a destiny, a wholeness drawing us onward. Time, in Jung’s view, was not just chronological but symbolic.
He spoke of kairos - sacred time, the moment of transformation. The alchemists, whom Jung studied deeply, described stages of inner change - blackening, whitening, reddening - not in hours or days, but in archetypal phases of the soul. Similarly, myths of the hero’s journey speak not of minutes or years, but of thresholds - departure, initiation, return. Time here is the language of the soul, not the ticking of a clock.
Nature mysticism, too, sees time as spiral and cyclical. The seasons turn, the year is a wheel. Birth, death, rebirth. Day follows night, and night gives way to day. Time here is rhythm, dance, a great breathing of the cosmos. The spiral is a sacred image, symbolizing how life loops around, never returning to the same point, yet always circling a centre.
And so, when we return to our question, Is time real? we see that the answer depends. Measured by clocks, time is real enough; we use it to catch trains, to grow crops, to live our days. But the flow of time, the sense of past and future vanishing and appearing - that, many argue, is an illusion. For the physicist, time may be already laid out, fixed. For the mystic, time may be the veil that hides eternity. For the psychologist, time is elastic, shaped by mind. For the spiritual seeker, time is a spiral of transformation.
Einstein once wrote to a grieving friend that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. The Gnostic would say the same: time is part of the prison. The Buddhist would say: let go of past and future, and awaken to now. The psychologist would say: your mind creates the passage of time. And the mystic would whisper: behind time lies the timeless, waiting.
Perhaps the deepest wisdom is not to deny time, but to hold it lightly. To honour it when it helps us - when it keeps us grounded, organized, connected. But also to see through it when it binds us - to remember that beyond the ticking clock, beyond the aging of the body, beyond the cycles of history, there is something eternal. A still point. A presence.
T. S. Eliot once wrote of “the still point of the turning world.” Maybe that is the truest image of all. The wheel of time turns, but at its centre there is a stillness untouched by motion. To live well is to know both - to move with the seasons, but also to touch the eternal. To measure hours, but also to awaken beyond them.
And perhaps, at the end of our lives, we will see what the mystics and the physicists have hinted at - that time was never the whole story. That behind the veil of hours and years, there is something timeless, always present, always waiting.
