• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Present moment, does it exist?

Spirit of Light

Spirit of Light

Be who ever you want
Is it possible that the present moment does not exist?

In the moment you start to think, "this is the present moment" it is no longer the moment you started to think it was :confused:

Is "present moment" an illusion?
 
U

Unveiled Artist

Veteran Member
Conscious thoughts said:
Is it possible that the present moment does not exist?

In the moment you start to think, "this is the present moment" it is no longer the moment you started to think it was :confused:

Is "present moment" an illusion?
Click to expand...

I think so. You'd have to think in one millisecond to be close. In my view it means just be aware of what you're doing now without judging this moment and thought from a past action or worry about a future occurrence.

So, for example when you're cooking just be aware of what you're doing in that moment regardless if you messed up the dish last night or trying to make a perfect dish for the future.

I'd say it's a cliche. The past helps many make decisions and the future motivated people to fulfill those decisions.

For me the question is WHICH past thought/action I want to live and WHICH future possibility I want to be or go. This is assuming you're not where you want to be or achieved your life goal. Some religions you're where you need to be just haven't awaken yet.
 
Secret Chief

Secret Chief

nirvana is samsara
I believe that ultimately there is only the eternal now. Of course, this understanding won't help you if you're late for the theatre.

Maybe you just need to think more quickly. :D
 
mikkel_the_dane

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Polymath257 said:
Define the term 'exists'. All too often, that word is the crux of discussions that go nowhere.
Click to expand...

Glad this is in discussion and not debate. :)

In general it seems that for some aspects of the common everyday world we share there is in practice some build-in range of understandings of what some, but not all parts are.

But since I am me, define "define" as we agree on it. ;) No, not really. :) It seems that we can get away with having different understandings in some, but not all cases.
 
mikkel_the_dane

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Conscious thoughts said:
Is it possible that the present moment does not exist?

In the moment you start to think, "this is the present moment" it is no longer the moment you started to think it was :confused:

Is "present moment" an illusion?
Click to expand...

Honest answer. If you analyze everything down to really strictly rational and so on it is in a sense an illusion/unknown, that none the less works in some sense. Make of that what you want.
 
Nimos

Nimos

Well-Known Member
Conscious thoughts said:
Is it possible that the present moment does not exist?

In the moment you start to think, "this is the present moment" it is no longer the moment you started to think it was :confused:

Is "present moment" an illusion?
Click to expand...
Everything is in the past so to speak, but obviously some things are almost instant and others we don't think to much about.

But for instance, it takes the light from the sun 8 minutes to reach Earth, so in theory the sun might have burned out 5 minutes ago, but we wouldn't know it for another 3 minutes or when we say that the sun have gone down it already did 8 minutes ago, but we just don't know it. :)

So everything we see or react to in our life are in theory things in the past.

Even the brain is sort of weird, if the science is correct:
Your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it, according to researchers. By looking at brain activity while making a decision, the researchers could predict what choice people would make before they themselves were even aware of having made a decision.

The work calls into question the ‘consciousness’ of our decisions and may even challenge ideas about how ‘free’ we are to make a choice at a particular point in time.

“We think our decisions are conscious, but these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg,” says John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, who led the study.
 
Suave

Suave

Simulated character
Conscious thoughts said:
Is it possible that the present moment does not exist?

In the moment you start to think, "this is the present moment" it is no longer the moment you started to think it was :confused:

Is "present moment" an illusion?
Click to expand...

With the discovered link between space and time, they can no longer be thought of as two separate things. Instead, space and time are fused together into what now is known as space-time. This fusion of space-time means the difference between past, present and future is only an illusion. Rather than thinking of time as continuous ,it's useful to think of time as a series of snapshots from moment to moment. If we conceptualize each moment or snapshot in our universe lined up one after another, we would see every moment that has ever happened or will ever happen, every location in space as well as each and every moment in time. Events I think of as happening now in various regions of space can be thought of as a now slice. When taking motion into account, I and somebody else could disagree with what exists on the now slice of time. A far away extraterrestrial being and I who are stationary relative to one another will share the same now time slice. When this distant extraterrestrial turns and starts moving away from me, he now would be in a new time slice that would be in the past from my prospective. When this distant extraterrestrial is moving towards me, he would now be in a new time slice that would be in the future from my prospective. Just as how we think of all of space is out there, the past, present, and future is out there now all existing together.

 
Suave

Suave

Simulated character
Polymath257 said:
Define the term 'exists'. All too often, that word is the crux of discussions that go nowhere.
Click to expand...

"In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimensionof time into a single four-dimensional continuum. Spacetime diagrams can be used to visualize relativistic effects such as why different observers perceive where and when events occur.

Until the turn of the 20th century, the assumption had been that the three-dimensional geometry of the universe (its spatial expression in terms of coordinates, distances, and directions) was independent of one-dimensional time. However, in 1905, Albert Einstein based his seminal work on special relativity on two postulates: (1) The laws of physics are invariant (i.e., identical) in all inertial systems (i.e., non-accelerating frames of reference); (2) The speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the motion of the light source."

The logical consequence of taking these postulates together is the inseparable joining together of the four dimensions, hitherto assumed as independent, of space and time. Many counterintuitive consequences emerge: in addition to being independent of the motion of the light source, the speed of light has the same speed regardless of the frame of reference in which it is measured; the distances and even temporal ordering of pairs of events change when measured in different inertial frames of reference (this is the relativity of simultaneity); and the linear additivity of velocities no longer holds true."

PHYSICS AS SPACETIME GEOMETRY | mail.atlasvastgoed.nl
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top