All Times Are Now

Einstein's special theory of relativity, developed in 1905, had a consequence that Einstein himself found deeply unsettling: it abolished the universal present. In Newtonian physics, there is a single "now" shared by all observers — events are either simultaneous or they are not, and this is an objective fact independent of who is looking. Relativity destroyed this. Two events that are simultaneous for one observer are not simultaneous for another moving relative to the first. There is no universal "now" — only local nows, dependent on the observer's frame of reference.

The deeper implication was drawn out by the mathematician Hermann Minkowski in 1908: if different observers disagree about what is simultaneous, but all observers agree on the spacetime interval between events, then what is truly real is not space and time separately but spacetime as a single four-dimensional structure. In this "block universe" — also called the "eternalist" view of time — the past, present and future all exist equally as regions of the spacetime block. Time does not flow. The universe does not evolve from past to future. All of it simply is — a four-dimensional object in which what we call "now" is just our local position in the block.

Einstein wrote to the family of his lifelong friend Michele Besso, who died in 1955 shortly before Einstein himself: "Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." This was not poetic comfort — it was Einstein's genuine belief about the nature of time, derived from his own physics.

Quantum mechanics complicates the picture further but does not restore the classical flow of time. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics describes all possible outcomes of quantum events as equally real in branching timelines — a structure that resonates with Seth's probable realities. The timeless formulation of quantum mechanics (the Wheeler-DeWitt equation) describes the universe without any time variable at all — the equation that should govern quantum gravity contains no t. At the deepest level of physical description, time may not exist.

Mystics across every tradition have reported, through direct experience rather than mathematical derivation, essentially the same thing that Einstein concluded from physics: the present moment is not a fleeting instant but the only reality — a reality that contains everything. The mystic does not discover this by thinking carefully about time; they discover it by becoming so fully present that the ordinary sense of time as a flow from past to future temporarily dissolves.

Meister Eckhart — the 14th-century Christian mystic — wrote: "The now in which God created the first man and the now in which the last man will disappear and the now in which I am speaking — all are the same in God, and there is nothing but one now." This is not a metaphor. Eckhart is describing a direct perception available in the depths of contemplative experience: a now that does not pass, that contains all moments, that is the ground of all that ever was or will be.

The Buddhist concept of the eternal now is embedded in the teaching of dependent origination: each moment arises in dependence on all other moments — past and future are not separate from the present but co-arise with it. The Tibetan teaching of rigpa — the nature of mind — describes a state of awareness in which the divisions of past, present and future are recognised as constructs of the thinking mind, not features of awareness itself. In rigpa, all times are equally present — not as a concept but as direct experience.

Seth's treatment of time is one of the most practically developed accounts of simultaneity available in any tradition. For Seth, the block universe of physics and the eternal now of mysticism are not merely philosophical positions — they are the actual structure of consciousness, with specific implications for how reincarnation works, how the "past" can be changed and why the present moment is the only point of real creative power.

"Your past lives are not behind you," Seth told Jane Roberts. "They exist simultaneously with this life. The Roman soldier, the medieval monk, the 20th-century housewife — these are not sequential. They are all happening now, at what you would call different points in history, all expressions of the same entity experiencing itself from multiple angles simultaneously." This is a radical departure from conventional reincarnation thinking, which imagines lives strung like beads on a thread of time.

The practical implication Seth drew from simultaneous time is the most important: if all times are now, then the "past" is not fixed in the way we assume. Not in the sense that events can be literally changed — but in the sense that our relationship to past events, the meaning we draw from them, the emotional charge they carry — all of this is continuously being re-evaluated in the present, and this re-evaluation has genuine effects on the entity's experience of those events across the simultaneous timeframe. Healing a trauma in the present genuinely affects the past — not by changing what happened but by changing what it means and therefore what it is.

The understanding that all times are now is not merely a philosophical position — it has direct and practical implications for how a life is lived. The most important is this: the present moment is not a thin slice of time sandwiched between the past and the future. It is the only place where reality is actually happening. The past exists as memory and as the permanent record of what has occurred. The future exists as probability and intention. But the actual living of life — the place where experience is generated and where genuine choice is made — is always and only here, now.

This understanding dissolves two of the most common sources of human suffering: regret about the past and anxiety about the future. If the past is equally real to the present — if the moment of joy you experienced five years ago is not gone but simply exists at a different point in the block — then it cannot truly be lost. And if the future exists as a field of probable events rather than a predetermined outcome, then anxiety about it is a response to something that does not yet exist in the form feared.

The present moment always will have been. This is the deepest practical teaching of the simultaneity of time: whatever you do now, whatever you experience now, whatever love or beauty or understanding you find now — it becomes permanently real. Nothing can take it from you. The past is the one thing that cannot be changed, which means it is also the most secure thing there is. What you make of this moment joins the permanent record of what has been — and that record is as real as anything that exists.