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title: The emptiness of time

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# The emptiness of time

One of the key methods for awakening in Mahayana Buddhism is realizing the *emptiness of time*. The question here is, why should realizing something within your own mind tell you anything reliable about *reality*?

Suppose you invented some concept -- call it *X*. You have no evidence, either direct, or indirect, for *X*. In fact, you can't even give a proper _definition_ of it. Given this, would it ever occur to you to genuinely wonder whether *X* causes some actual phenomenon? Of course not.

It turns out that *time* is such an *X*. It's not so hard to see that you've never *experienced* time: you're only ever experiencing *now*, which by definition doesn't include other times. It's a bit harder to understand why you have no *evidence* for time, but we'll give a brief outline. Consider Bertrand Russell's hypothesis here:

> *There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past.*

You can change "five minutes ago" to be arbitrarily close to now and it still holds. There is no way to distinguish this hypothesis from the standard one without resorting to fundamentally untestable assumptions. Memories, along with the rest of reality, are precisely equally good evidence for a real past as a false one. In this sense, there is *no evidence* for time.

And as for a definition, the best physicists can come up with is "what a clock measures."

This is all easy to understand, but hard to *grok*. When you do, the illusion that causes you to hypothesize "time" in the first place completely collapses. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that this is not an event that happens in time. To realize that you are literally making up time from whole cloth is to realize that you *never did* experience any such thing.

If you are now wondering (as you likely are) something like "well how do you know *that* isn't just a trick of your brain?," the key move is to turn the question around. There is (in a [very precise sense](https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2019/05/guest-essay-radical-skepticism-revived.html)) literally *no* evidence for brains. So *why* are you asking this question in the first place? What, exactly, is causing that insistent, nagging question? Become very curious about this. It's all part of the same fantastic trick.

I know there *seems* to be a kind of symmetry here, where each side claims the other is missing something, but this symmetry can be decisively broken in a way that is completely airtight. It is possible to see, in a non-inferential way, why you dreamed up the whole astonishing show, and how (and why) you convinced yourself that it was "real." And since _time_ lies near the base of that castle in the sky, it's a good brick to pull on.