211 TIMECONSCIOUSNESS IN VERY LONG LIFE Manfred Clynes, Ph.D. Counting is not time – there is no time to count. In the following essay, I will leave immortality to the Good Lord, and will try to be absolved of some hubris by dealing with individual life of only a few million years long. I hope not to disappoint readers through this, at least not for their first million years. What is time? We have been all too much influenced by physicists, who have described it as a dimension: an infinitely thin straight line, or somewhat curved if you consider Einstein, along which events move. What happens is that t moves from t1 to t2, two points along that line – the beginning and the end of the event. Time as an infinitely small point goes from its place at t1 to the place t2. And we additionally have been brainwashed to consider it going from left to right. Under quantum level conditions, at the scale of Planck’s constant, time may even reverse for very short instants. To ask “how fast does it move along that line?” is a meaningless question for the physicist. Yet the relative rate at which time goes depends on the coordinate system; the frame of reference. What is missing from this view is the present. In physics as in human life, time converts potentiality to actuality. Einstein was uncomfortable too in banishing the present from his theory (or not encompassing it). But I have yet to find a physicist