The Eternal Now

We observe the "Arrow of Time" moving from past to present to future. In the egg that breaks, but does not unbreak. In the man who grows old, but does not "ungrow" young. In the degredation of the observable, we witness a one-way street. It is a reality of the unit we observe. And this, it seems, is what we base our "linear" conception of time. From Past to Present to Future.

St. Augustine remarks that the future only exists in the now, when it is experienced (observed), and for that fleeting micro-moment it is the now, and the "second" it is witnessed it is the past. But the future, to Augustine, does not exist. There is no "unfurling" of time. And the past only exists in the mind in which it was observed. One cannot retrieve but a sliver of "it" as stored in the observer's memory. Nonetheless, it cannot be actually retrieved. What he propounded is an eternity of now... or the Eternal Now.

My brother Dan sent me an interesting book for my birthday. "The Fabric of the Cosmos." And in its early pages, our author speaks to the "arrow of time". I do not know what lay within the coming pages, but the early pages speak to the traditional concept of time. The linear Past, Present, and Future. It occurs to me that the egg that breaks, the man who grows old, the degredation of the observable unit, when removed from its context seems to speak to this one-way street modality. But one wonders the following: if we were able to observe all that is in its collective whole, would we find that the degredation to the exact degree of on unit or in fact portion of the unit is not balanced, as a leger must be, by the equal generation of some other unit to the same degree? That is to say: if we observe a lawn from our porch, we see a static, green layout. In fact, we know that it is in a perpetual state of degradation and generation concurrently. The blade grows, exists, then ceases to exist. but we do not observe the blade. We rather observe the entire lawn.

If it is observation which creates past, present, and future... that is from a unique and singular and necessarily singular perspective of the observer, this is hardly a foundation on which to estimate the existence of time in three dimensions.

I don't know what will come in the remaining pages of the book. But I sense that what I see "degrade" in the observed units (myself included), is countered in generation somewhere else in the Cosmos. This speaks not to a one-way street at all. It speaks to two curves: degredation and generation. They create an X in the aggregated macro of degredation an generation. And if one draws a horizontal line through the intersection of these two curves, I suspect we might call it rightly "The Eternal Now".