When time is illusion, meaning is real.
Recording 6th January 2026: Q&A with Bernardo Kastrup on Time
"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know.
If I wish to explain, I know not" - Saint Augustine
In this session, Bernardo guides two powerful thought experiments which, despite his protestations, place him on a par with any spiritual teacher I've encountered. I was delightfully and deliciously disoriented, and Nour felt much the same: "I realised that the idea of time I had in my head was slowly being taken apart."
She shares more thoughts below, and it would be lovely to hear yours in the Telegram group.
Time is many things
Bernardo also gave an overview of the many competing perspectives on time in physics, philosophy and psychology.
Part of the confusion is that the word refers to several different things. But in Analytic Idealism, because everything is mind, all these "things" are still "qualia"; properties of consciousness such as "what it feels like" to have an experience like seeing red or tasting chocolate.
According to Schopenhauer, however, time is not like other states which represent something 'out there'. Rather, it is produced internally (endogenously) to bridge the inner and outer. It is part of how perception of an outside world is even possible.
Main positions in philosophy
Some philosophers believe that the future and past are real, but that we only access one slice at a time, like a bread loaf. This dovetails with Einstein's block universe theory.
In contrast, "presentism" contends that the past and future don’t exist. You can’t find either, you can only ever find this moment now. This position, however, is problematic in its circularity.
There is a third position which Bernardo favours, which takes elements of both of the above: The past and future are as real as the present, but both only exist in the present.
The crystal of eternity beyond space and time
What really exists out there is a web of semantic associations, of archetypal associations, which do not have space or time except in our perception of them.
As dissociated alters, we cannot know this directly, because to know it would be to merge with it, and thereby end the dissociation.
We can, however, get an intuition for how this can be. Bernardo's first thought experiment aimed to reveal how structure and meaning require neither space nor time.
Something and nothing are not different
He then guides a second contemplation that reduces all existence to one moment, then takes that away too.
The conclusion is that everything exists, not in time, not in space, but in you.
Reality is like a magician, pulling the hare, the hat and himself out of the same emptiness
Bernardo contends that this insight is available to everyone, without the need for a degree in physics or an advanced practice in meditation.
But first, your mind may go blank, and more than one person mentioned a giddy nausea.
I recommend re-listening and contemplating it with care.
Meaning, Suffering & Care
When the nausea subsides, the liberation of this view can replace it.
We ended the session with how this perspective on time can reduce unnecessary personal suffering.
For Bernardo at least, the depressive load of life lacking in meaning has disappeared. In this view, everything in life exists forever, it all has eternal meaning.
Additionally, this view can remove death anxiety.
Finally, this understanding of time also contains the potential for increased empathy and mutual care, which we'll explore in a future session.
Time continues next week
There were so many great questions that we're going to continue the discussion next week, 13th of January, and again on the 10th of Feb with guest Dr Julia Mossbridge:
Amir Giles
Reflections on the session from Nour
"I realised that the idea of time I had in my head was slowly being taken apart. I didn’t even notice at first that I was still holding onto this idea that time flows, or that we are flowing through time, past comes and ends, present happens and ends, future evolves. Three things, all just as real as each other. But maybe none of it is flowing at all.
The idea that there is only the now is an idea that I’ve come across in meditation courses, it is comforting, at first at least. And then even that didn’t hold. The moment we talk about the now, or try to understand it, it disappears. So if the “now” itself doesn’t really exist as something fixed or objective, then what exactly are we standing on?
Something that made me unsettled but in a good way was realising how much of my experience of time is stitched together from memory, expectation, and my own internal narrative. Bernardo said, the quality of a memory is a compound experience (I never heard this described better than this!) it’s not actual perception. Memories don’t just represent the past, they reconstruct it. Time starts to feel less like something external that happens to us, and more like something endogenous, something that comes from how experience organises itself to avoid cognitive overload.
And even then, when we try to explain it, language brings time back in. Words like “happening” or “at once” already assume time. That circularity was inevitable , and mischievously, annoying.
There was this sense of a possible breakthrough, like a glimpse of what it might feel like to really realise this. I haven’t experienced that, in fact, I’m not sure I’m ready to. There’s a fear in seeing something too clearly, in changing how I think about physical time, biological time, relativistic time, psychological time, thermodynamic time, cosmological time, philosophical time. It might be my brain, the same brain that studied super symmetry (SUSY) and string theory at university, this brain is not ready for that shift yet. But I know there will be a TIME when I experience it."
It would be wonderful to hear your reflections also, along with the rest of the group in Telegram.
Going Beyond Einstein: Linking Time And Consciousness
"Many physicists maintain that the passage of time is purely a feature of mind, beyond physics itself, while others argue that it points to some new physical paradigm, perhaps associated with the marriage of relativity theory and quantum theory. Certainly, the status of time in any final theory of physics remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that a theory that encompasses time and mind will have to go beyond Einstein’s Block Universe."
Thoughts on time from Bernardo and Dr Timalsina:
St Augustine:
"For what is time? Who can readily and briefly explain this? Who can even in thought comprehend it, so as to utter a word about it? But what in discourse do we mention more familiarly and knowingly, than time? And, we understand, when we speak of it; we understand also, when we hear it spoken of by another. What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not: yet I say boldly that I know, that if nothing passed away, time past were not; and if nothing were coming, a time to come were not; and if nothing were, time present were not. Those two times then, past and to come, how are they, seeing the past now is not, and that to come is not yet? But the present, should it always be present, and never pass into time past, verily it should not be time, but eternity. If time present (if it is to be time) only cometh into existence, because it passeth into time past, how can we say that either this is, whose cause of being is, that it shall not be; so, namely, that we cannot truly say that time is, but because it is tending not to be?"
Time Stamps
0:00:00 Introductions
0:08:00 4 main perspectives from physics
0:11:40 3 main perspectives from philosophy
0:17:30 Perspective from cognitive psychology
0:20:20 Space-time are unified idealism
0:24:00 Time is a label for several qualia
0:29:50 Time straddles inner and outer
0:34:50 Time doesn’t really exist
0:40:00 Mind at Large doesn’t experience time
0:46:00 Why is there asymmetry in the universe
0:51:00 Could time be multi-dimensional?
0:53:00 Thought experiment: beyond time & space
1:04:00 The crystal of eternity
1:11:00 Thought experiment 2: beyond the now
1:17:40 Plank scale is the limit of causality, not experience
1:25:00 Structure does not require extension
1:29:00 Nothing = no extension
1:31:30 How causality emerges (cat seen through a fence)
1:41:00 Why meaning doesn’t need time or space
1:50:00 Experiential states which react are called a complex
1:53:00 How this perspective can reduce suffering