Time does not exist. It is nothing more than a concept. This sounds absurd but it is really quite easy to demonstrate. What does exist is change. Things change constantly and this constant change occurs in the present. The past and the future are merely concepts, ideas, formed to make sense of this constant change.

Let’s start with the past. The past cannot exist because it is never here. Memory might be understood as evidence of the past, but memory is something that exists in the present. Memory is a trace, a record, of change. And these traces exist in the present.

Similarly, the future does not exist. What does exist is the understanding that things always change. The future is a concept that allows us to anticipate and negotiate how things continue to change. Our concept of the future uses the past, or present traces of change, to inform how change continues. This, of course, is extraordinarily useful for everyday living.

Thus both the past and the future, collectively labelled ‘time’, are things that exist in the present and they are things that exist only as abstractions in our mind.

The notion that somehow time ‘flows’ from the future to the present then onto the past now makes no sense. The present exists but the past and future are just concepts. How can a concept flow into reality and then back into a concept? This would mean that if the concept of the future disappeared then so would the present, since the future could no longer flow into it!

So time does not exist. But change does. Change exists. Philosophers, both western and eastern, and both ancient and modern, have affirmed this.

Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm’s book “The Ending of Time” refers directly to the understanding that time is just a concept. The book’s title suggests some kind of science fiction novel that tells the story of a future dystopian apocalypse! But if one has understood that time is just a concept, the title communicates that something happens when this concept, so pervasive in our everyday life, loses importance. To Krishnamurti, the ending of time brings a freedom that is very similar to Spinoza’s blessedness. ¹

To say that ‘change’ exists still subtly implies time, because to know that something changes one has to compare what something is, to what it used to be. What word might be used to describe what is left when one ceases to use the word time? Perhaps ‘aliveness’ or ‘energy’.

1. Krishnamurti distinguishes between psychological time and chronological time. Both are concepts, but psychological time is the part of the concept that embroils our mind ↩