Time and Its Beautiful Illusion

The ordinary man gropes forward, believing only what touches him now; the man of higher consciousness looks around and beholds the entire horizon. For him, cause and effect are one. The act and the consequence, the fall and the redemption, are woven together in a single moment of truth.

By Featured Writer, Patrick Okoi.

We speak of time as if it were a river, flowing forward, carrying us from birth to death, from beginning to end.

But what if that image is wrong?

What if time isn’t moving at all?

What if it’s we who move, drifting through something fixed, like travellers in a painting convinced the scenery shifts because they do?

The irony is exquisite: we swear we “live in the present,” yet the present, upon inspection, doesn’t actually exist.

It’s the fleeting instant when what hasn’t happened turns into what can never happen again. We chase it with clocks, calendars, countdowns, trying to hold what’s already slipping away.

The past, we say, is gone. The future, we admit, has not yet arrived. The present, this supposed midpoint, is merely the edge where one nonexistence becomes another. It’s a mathematical phantom we mistake for reality.

Still, we worship it. We measure life by it. We grow anxious about “running out of time,” though no one has ever touched it, seen it, or even found where it begins. To say time passes is to declare that reality itself evaporates before it can be grasped.

What could be more ironic? The one thing we’re certain governs our existence might be nothing more than a perceptual trick, a shadow cast by our consciousness.

The ancient Indian sages, centuries before Einstein, called it the ‘Eternal Now’, a plane beyond the illusion of before and after. To them, everything exists simultaneously: birth and death, sunrise and sunset, spring and winter.

Imagine looking at Earth from space: New York and London are both there, both real, both steady. A man flying between them says he “left” one and “hasn’t reached” the other, but from above, both cities coexist in a single vision.

The same is true for time. We say, “Spring is gone, winter not yet here.” But that’s only because our eyes are low. From a higher vantage, both are present, eternal, part of one vast pattern.

That’s why prophecy, in this light, isn’t magic - it’s perception. The prophet, the seer, the one who knows before it happens, perhaps he simply sees more of the map than we do. He stands on the hilltop while we crawl through the valley.

The ordinary man gropes forward, believing only what touches him now; the man of higher consciousness looks around and beholds the entire horizon. For him, cause and effect are one. The act and the consequence, the fall and the redemption, are woven together in a single moment of truth.

And yet, there’s tragedy in such a sight. Imagine the aviator, high above, watching two trains on the tracks below, destined to collide. He sees what’s coming, but he cannot intervene. That’s the paradox of higher consciousness, clarity without control. The seer sees too much and yet can do nothing. The irony tightens: the more one escapes time, the less one can change what time contains.

So maybe we’ve been wrong all along. Maybe there is no “past,” no “future,” only layers of one endless existence, like pages already written, though we can only read one at a time. Time isn’t something that passes; it’s something we pass through. And every moment, every memory, every destiny, already exists, waiting for the eye that can see it whole.

We call it time. It calls us eternal. And in that quiet reversal, our greatest irony - we find both our blindness and our brief, shining glimpse of the infinite.