There Is No Universal "Now"

When I was a child, I would lie on my back on Mount Pinos in the mountains above Los Angeles and watch the Milky Way smear herself across the sky. On new moon nights, astronomers would set up telescopes at the lookout point and let anyone look through them. They described what they were showing us like they were reciting poetry.

I loved it. They explained that the light entering my eyes had left its source thousands of years ago. Some of what I was seeing no longer existed. I was looking at the past and calling it the present.

I didn't have the language for it then. I just felt it, a loosening of the ordinary sense that “now” meant something stable and shared.

It took me decades, a manic episode, a spiritual experience I still can't fully explain, and eventually an Italian physicist named Carlo Rovelli to understand that the feeling was not wrong.

Time Is Not What We Think It Is

In his book The Order of Time, Rovelli makes an argument that is either unsettling or liberating depending on where you're standing: time as we experience it may not exist at the most fundamental level of reality.

This is not metaphor. It is one way the equations can be read.

He begins simply enough. “Time passes faster in the mountains than it does at sea level.” Not as poetry. As fact. Clocks run faster at altitude. Time itself moves differently depending on where you are.

At the quantum level there is no universal now. There is no single present moment that applies everywhere. Rovelli goes further than Einstein. In the equations of quantum gravity, time disappears entirely. The most fundamental description of reality we have does not contain a variable called time.

What produces the experience of time, he argues, is thermodynamics, specifically entropy. We are large, warm creatures with incomplete information about the world. The direction in which disorder tends to increase is what we call the future. The arrow of time is not built into the universe. It is built into the relationship between the universe and observers like us.

The present moment is not a universal fact. It is local. Perspectival. And blurry at the edges in ways we can't perceive from inside ordinary experience.

The now I felt lying on my back in the dark was real. But Rovelli would say something harder to sit with: now is not something the universe contains. Not as a universal fact. Not as part of its structure. Only as something a particular kind of creature, in a particular place, assembles from incomplete information about a world that is, at its most fundamental level, timeless.

What the Contemplatives Already Knew

Here is where something strange happens.

Rovelli arrives at the dissolution of time through physics. He is not a mystic. He is a scientist doing science. And yet what he describes begins to rhyme with something contemplative traditions have been pointing toward for a very long time.

Rovelli dissolves time from the outside. He looks at the equations and finds that time, as a fundamental feature of physical reality, isn't there. What we call now is local, perspectival, constructed by the position of the observer and the particular way thermodynamics operates at our scale. There is no evidence of a single present moment for the universe as a whole. We generate one.

Consider what he finds when he looks most closely at the elementary laws: “The difference between past and future, cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention...in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no difference.” The physicist and the sage, it turns out, are standing at neighboring edges of the same question.

The contemplatives dissolve time from the inside. Ramana Maharshi didn't look at equations. He asked a different question: who is it that experiences time passing? Follow that question back far enough and you find something that was never in time to begin with. Not eternal in the sense of lasting forever. Prior. The awareness in which past, present, and future all appear—and in which they dissolve. Beneath the sequential self that moves through time like a bead on a string is something that does not move. Something not in time at all.

They are not saying the same thing. Rovelli is describing the physical universe. The contemplatives are describing the nature of the knowing subject. But both point toward the edge of what can be cleanly described.

Rovelli says: look at the equations, time is not fundamental. The contemplatives say: look at what is looking.

What Happens When Time Loosens

I know this territory from the inside, though I came to it through a door I did not choose.

During the manic episode that produced Table Manor, time behaved strangely. This is documented in psychiatric literature—mania disrupts temporal processing, the ordinary sequential organization of experience. What I lived was something different from the clinical description. Everything felt simultaneously available. Past and present collapsed into each other. I was not moving through time. Time was moving through me, or perhaps more accurately, the thing I had always taken to be time revealed itself as something more like a weather system, a pattern that arose and passed rather than a track I was running on.

Inside it—mixed with chaos and fear—was a perception I have never been able to fully unfeel: the present moment is not a thin slice between past and future. It feels more like the whole field of experience at once. Everything else is a story in my mind.

What I Notice

Most of my suffering happens inside time. The rehearsal of past events. The anticipation of future ones. The gap between what is and what I think should be.

When time loosens—in meditation, in grief that is fully felt, in genuine presence with another person, occasionally in the dark looking at ancient light—the suffering doesn't disappear. It stops feeling like a verdict. It becomes weather rather than verdict.

Rovelli calls what remains when time dissolves the elementary fabric of reality: granular, vibrating, relational, not requiring time to exist. The contemplatives call it awareness, presence, the True Self. The names are different. The pointing is the same.

What remains when the sequential self loosens its grip is not nothing. It is something that feels more fundamental.

The Light Is Still Traveling

The light I watched as a child on Mount Pinos is still traveling. Some of those stars are still burning. Some are already gone. From where I was lying, all of it looked the same—present, immediate, alive.

That's the thing about now. There is no single now in the universe. Only local ones, generated by us. Lying on a mountain, floating in space. A body on a rock receiving light that left its source before written language existed—already in the past, and in my present, at the same moment. What I experienced as the present sky was a collage of different pasts arriving simultaneously, organized by my nervous system into something that felt immediate. The stars were already gone. I was in that flow.

Rovelli says that is not an error. It is a window into the nature of things. The universe does not have a single present. It has overlapping, local, perspectival nows, each real within its own frame, none of them absolute.

And the awareness in which all of these local nows arise, what is that? Where is it in time?

I don't fully know. But I have lain on my back in the dark and felt, briefly, that the light entering my eyes and the awareness receiving it were not two different things.

That feeling is not physics. But it is not nothing either.

Maybe it is what remains when we stop insisting that now is a fixed point we are standing on and discover it is more like the water we are swimming in.