Conscious Time

“The distinction between past, present and future
is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Albert Einstein

“Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future,
and time future contained in time past.”
T.S. Eliot (poet, Burnt Norton)

By Michael and James Hall,
Authors of the popular Audible book, "The Sword of Damocles, Our Nuclear Age."

On this Halloween, when shadows lengthen and imagination stirs, we’ve chosen to highlight our story about time itself—one that lends the season an added sense of mystery and adventure. What follows is a glimpse into our forthcoming book, "Heaven and Earth," a work that will explore universal consciousness and the many threads that weave it together.

The nature of time is fascinating. When we glance at a calendar, a clock, or a watch, we think we are looking at time. But we are not. What we see are only the instruments we’ve built to measure it. A clock does not create time—it simply carves the day into hours and minutes with its steady rhythm. A calendar does the same on a grander scale, arranging years into months, weeks, and days. These tools are grounded in the motions of our solar system—the turning of the Earth, its orbit around the Sun, the cycles of light and shadow.

And yet, for all their usefulness, these measures—spread across 38 human-made time zones—are deceptive. They are just scaffolding. They are our attempt to tame something which we do not fully understand. Which leads us to ask: is time truly what the clock says it is, or is it something far stranger?

We have always wondered over the question of how time itself began, and whether it will ever end. Modern cosmology tells us that time, as we know it, may have had a “zero point” at the Big Bang, when space, matter, and energy all came into being together. But was there truly a beginning, or is our universe just one cycle in an endless rhythm of expansion and collapse? Some theories suggest that time could one day run down in a “heat death,” when the cosmos reaches maximum entropy and no further change is possible. Others imagine a rebirth, a cosmic heartbeat in which time resets and begins again. In this way, cosmological time stretches our imagination to its limits, forcing us to ask not only where the universe is going, but whether time itself is a temporary stage in a drama far larger than we can yet conceive.

Not all cultures have seen time as a straight line. The ancient Greeks distinguished between chronos—the measurable, linear time of clocks and calendars—and kairos—the sacred or opportune moment, when something of lasting significance breaks into the ordinary flow. Many traditions echo this duality. In myth and ritual, time is often cyclical, tied to the turning of seasons, the return of festivals, or the eternal recurrence of cosmic events. In these moments, time is not counted but inhabited—a threshold where the ordinary gives way to the timeless. Cultural and mythic time reminds us that human beings have always lived in two temporalities at once: the steady march of days, and the charged moments when meaning seems to stand outside of time altogether.

There was once a so-called “age of certainty” about such things. In the 17th century, the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton gave the world a vision of time as absolute. For him, time was like a great cosmic river, flowing steadily and uniformly everywhere, independent of the events it carried along. This vision became the foundation of classical physics, and for centuries it seemed unshakable.

Yet absolutes were shattered. Along came Albert Einstein in the early 20th century, a young patent clerk turned revolutionary thinker, who revealed that Newton’s river was not steady at all. Time bends. Time stretches. A moving clock ticks more slowly than one at rest. A clock deep in a gravitational field runs more slowly than one high above the Earth. These effects, called time dilation, are not abstractions. They are measured realities. Astronauts in orbit age a little less than those on Earth. GPS satellites must be corrected for relativistic shifts, or our navigation systems would fail. Einstein showed us that space and time are not separate threads, but woven together into a single fabric: spacetime.

And here, Einstein’s insight finds an echo in human experience. Across cultures and centuries, people who have faced near-death experiences describe something uncanny: a sense of timelessness. As their bodies falter, they report a shift—as if their very being vibrates at a higher resonance. Past, present, and future dissolve into a single, eternal moment. They speak of entering a realm where time no longer flows, but simply is.

It is not unlike Einstein’s suggestion that as a body approaches the speed of light, time itself slows toward stillness. Science and testimony, though speaking in different tongues, both hint that time may not be the fixed arrow we imagine, but something fluid, fragile, and perhaps illusory.

As physics advanced, the mystery deepened. In the mid-20th century, the brilliant American physicist Richard Feynman—known as much for his playful wit as for his Nobel Prize–winning insights—introduced a daring new way of thinking about particles. In 1948, his “path-integral” approach showed that particles do not follow a single path, but all possible paths at once, each contributing to the outcome we observe. It was as if nature were sketching every possible doodle on the page before settling on the one we see. This bold idea inspired speculation: do these paths represent different histories? Different universes?

Later, in the late 20th century, the British physicist Julian Barbour, a quiet but radical thinker, offered an even more startling thought: perhaps time itself does not exist. Perhaps the universe is made of countless timeless configurations he called “Nows.” What we call the flow of time is simply our experience of moving from one Now to another. In Barbour’s vision, time is not a river at all, but a gallery of still paintings, and our consciousness is the act of walking from frame to frame.

Digital art by James Hall

So is time truly an arrow pointing forward? At the cutting edge of physics, a provocative idea called retrocausality has entered the conversation. Retrocausality suggests that the arrow of time may not be strictly one-way—that future events could, in some sense, influence the present or even the past. While still speculative, this concept has gained traction in quantum foundations as a possible explanation for puzzling phenomena like entanglement. In interpretations such as the “transactional” view of quantum mechanics, influences ripple both forward and backward, like echoes bouncing in a canyon, creating a picture of reality that is profoundly time-symmetric.

And then there is consciousness—the most intimate clock of all. Perhaps the only true fundamental in the universe. Physics can only be part of the story. The philosopher Edmund Husserl, writing in the early 20th century, described how the mind weaves memory, perception, and anticipation into a seamless flow, creating the sense of a “present” that is more than a single instant. Neuroscience confirms this: our awareness lives in a short temporal window—the specious present where past impressions and future expectations overlap.

This is why moments of joy seem to vanish in an instant, while moments of boredom stretch endlessly. And when we place this alongside the timeless states described in near-death experiences, we begin to see that consciousness may not simply ride along time’s arrow, but help shape its very direction.

In recent years, even the mystery of the undefinable has entered this conversation. For decades—if not centuries—people have reported phenomena in space, in our skies, and even beneath the oceans that defy our understanding of established physics. The study of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), now increasingly associated with the possibility of non‑human intelligence (NHI), was once dismissed offhandedly by officialdom. Today, however, it is treated with sober attention by both scientists and governments, opening yet another doorway into the riddle of time. Longtime defense and intelligence consultants such as Hal Puthoff, a Stanford‑trained physicist who has spent decades at the edges of advanced research, have suggested that whatever breakthrough in physics might underlie these craft, it may not be about speed alone. It may be about time itself—and even consciousness.

Some theorize that when these objects perform their impossible maneuvers—darting, stopping, turning as though inertia were an afterthought—their pilots, if they are biological beings, may not be experiencing time as we do. Perhaps the craft are not merely outrunning our physics, but reshaping their relationship to spacetime itself—folding it, bending it, or stepping outside its flow altogether. And if, as some suggest, consciousness is woven into the very operation of such vehicles, then the boundary between mind and matter, between thought and motion, may be far thinner than we have ever imagined.

It is as though the enigma of time—long haunting our calendars, our clocks, our physics, and our philosophies—now whispers to us from the unknown as well. A reminder that the universe may conceal not only hidden laws, but hidden ways of being, where time and consciousness are not separate threads, but interwoven strands of the same mysterious fabric.

Another frontier in the study of time comes from the language of information. Some modern thinkers—such as Henri Bergson in the early 20th century, Aldous Huxley in the mid‑20th, and more recently Rupert Sheldrake, Dirk K.F. Meijer, and Hal Puthoff—have suggested that consciousness may not be produced by the brain at all, but only received by it. In this view, the brain is less like a factory generating thought and more like a radio tuned to a signal, or software running on deeper hardware. Consciousness, then, could be a fundamental field of the universe, with the brain acting as its receiver and interpreter. If this is so, the flow of time may be tied not only to entropy and physical change, but also to the continual growth and reception of information from this wider field. Each moment becomes not just a tick of the clock, but a new transmission—an unfolding message in the story of the cosmos.

And then there is entropy—the slow unraveling of order. Our bodies age, our memories fade, and much of our perception of time comes from this lived experience of change and decay. Time is not only measured by clocks and equations, but by the stories written into our own lives. Every living organism carries within it a set of biological clocks—circadian rhythms that rise and fall with the turning of the Earth, cellular cycles that govern growth and repair, and molecular oscillators that keep the body in tune with day and night. These rhythms are so deeply embedded that even a single cell, isolated from the body, can still “tick” with its own temporal order. In this way, life encodes time from within, measuring its passage not only through aging and decay, but through the constant dance of hormones, metabolism, and neural signals. Biological time reminds us that the arrow of time is not only cosmic and universal, but also intimate and embodied—woven into the pulse of our hearts, the cycles of our sleep, and the unfolding story of our lives.

What began as a simple, universal flow has become one of the deepest mysteries in science and philosophy. Time is both a measure of change in the universe and a phenomenon inseparable from the way conscious beings experience and interpret that change.

It is the thing we live by every day—and yet it may be far stranger, and far more mysterious, than we can imagine.

In the end… our study of time feels less like solving a puzzle… and more like walking through a hall of shifting mirrors… each reflection revealing a different truth.

Newton saw a steady river, flowing everywhere at once.
Einstein showed that river bending and stretching into a fabric.
Feynman revealed it branching into countless possible paths.
Barbour replaced the river altogether with a gallery of frozen “Nows.”
Retrocausality suggested the current might flow both forward… and back.
And consciousness reminded us that we are not merely passengers… but participants—weaving memory and anticipation into the very sense of a present.

Entropy etches its signature on our bodies… while near‑death experiences whisper of timeless states beyond decay… where past and future dissolve into a single eternal moment.

Taken together, these visions remind us that time is not a simple arrow… but a mystery with many faces—at once physical and experiential, measurable and ineffable.

It is the rhythm by which we live… the story written into our days… and yet it may be far stranger, more fluid, and more wondrous… than we can ever fully imagine.

As authors, we intuitively know one thing. All things are connected in some shape or form. MH JH

Bibliography:

Barbour, Julian. The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910.

Davies, Paul. About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Einstein, Albert. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. Translated by Robert W. Lawson. New York: Crown, 1961.

Feynman, Richard P., and Albert R. Hibbs. Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954.

Meijer, Dirk K. F., and Hans J. H. Geesink. “Consciousness in the Universe Is Scale Invariant and Implies an Event Horizon of the Human Brain.” NeuroQuantology 15, no. 4 (2017): 41–79.

Newton, Isaac. Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. 1687. Reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934.

Puthoff, Harold E. “Advanced Space Propulsion Based on Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering.” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 55 (2002): 137–144.

Sheldrake, Rupert. The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1995.

Tipler, Paul A. Modern Physics. 3rd ed. New York: Worth Publishers, 1999.

Wheeler, John A., and Richard P. Feynman. “Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation.” Reviews of Modern Physics 17, no. 2–3 (1945): 157–181.