Like when is“this” happening? Now, in this present moment, of course, but when is “this” really happening?
You’re right. The question is loaded. The question assumes that time is measurable duration. It doesn’t take into account that the moment could be timeless. That is to say the moment has no duration because this is happening in real time.
Real time is this moment experienced in here and now real time. Let’s take it one step further. What if this moment is compressed timelessness? Emptiness is timeless. Contracted emptiness time.
Real time is time without any movement. It doesn’t change with each tick-tock of the clock. Watch the hands move around the clock. The only time that exists in this movement is the moment.
The moving hands stayed in the moment. You can see where the hands were, where they are headed and their current position all in the real time of the same moment. The moment never changes because real time has no duration.
How long does this moment last? Yet another loaded question that assumes time has duration. This moment is the same moment that has always been from the beginning of time. There’s never been another moment. The question seems to assume that we go from moment to moment like going from frame to frame in a movie.
What happens at the end of time? This moment ceases to exist. Vanishes without a trace of it ever having happened.
Emptiness has no memory. Is an utterly empty slate. A void to be filled with time, space and form.
This moment came into existence when the primal void devolved. Time involves loss. The loss makes time temporal. Because time is temporal it keeps moving forward leaving the past behind yet without duration.
The now is unfolding as it leaves the past behind and consumes what remains of the future. Time feeds on itself until it is fully consumed. Not until fully consumed will this moment along with the past, present and future moments will be irrevocably gone.
A childhood photograph is the captured past that is remaining continually in this present moment. “That’s they way I was but no longer am.” The aging that has taken place between then and now doesn’t mean it’s possible to leave this moment to experience the past.
I am experiencing the photograph and comparing the difference in real time and even though the gap between when the picture was taken and the way things are now is continually widening. Yet this moment has not changed one iota.
Likewise putting a date on a calendar to plan for a coming event never leaves this moment. The future never arrives outside of the same moment that the date was set.
The earth turned on its axis and moved forward as it circles the sun. The planning took note of that fact and marked it off on the calendar. Time-wise it all stayed in real time.
If time travel into the future or past was possible, it would never leave or exist outside of this moment. There is no way to go back in time nor leap forward to a future point and leave leave this moment behind.
If the big bang marked the start of the material universe it is a temporal universe that will last until the end of time. This moment is still the very same moment that happened at the birth of the universe. Looking back into the past to see the way the universe once was doesn’t change the fact this moment hasn’t been altered.
The aging that happens between birth and death occurs in the same moment as did birth and will death. We will die in the same moment we were born.
There is only one real time moment and “this” is it.