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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Eternal Now Illusion: Presentism in Kastrup and Wilber

How Introspective Thought Experiments Collapse Time—and Why They Fall Short as Metaphysics

Frank Visser / Grok

The Core Thought Experiment: Shrinking the Present to Nothing

Bernardo Kastrup's guided meditation offers a stark illustration of radical presentism—the philosophical view that only the present moment exists, with past and future having no ontological status. He begins with physical stillness: if the body never moves and the visual field remains uniform (e.g., pure white light), spatial extension seems to vanish, leaving only undifferentiated qualia. Extending the logic to time, Kastrup argues that the past exists solely as a memory experienced now, and the future solely as an expectation experienced now. Neither is ever directly present.

He then performs an infinite subdivision: the “present” shrinks from years to hours to minutes to seconds to fractions of a second, until it becomes a durationless point—a vanishing limit. At this zero-duration “now,” all of reality—the entire history of the universe, personal regrets, future anxieties, the Big Bang itself—must exist in a non-extended nothingness. Time, space, and causality become cognitive illusions or “tricks” perpetually generated in consciousness. Kastrup's conclusion is deliberately provocative: “nothing ever happens,” “something and nothing are the same thing,” and this realization, once glimpsed, is irreversible and transformative.

Ken Wilber arrives at a structurally similar insight through the classical distinction between nunc fluens (the flowing, passing now of ordinary temporal experience) and nunc stans (the standing, timeless now of eternity). In Wilber's reading, ordinary consciousness, by fixating on past regrets or future anticipations, reduces the authentic eternal present to a mere fleeting succession of moments. By dissolving egoic boundaries and fully inhabiting the present, one accesses nunc stans—the timeless ground where past, present, and future coincide without flow. This aligns with perennial mystical traditions (Advaita Vedanta, Zen, Plotinus) and fits into Wilber's developmental model as a higher stage of consciousness revealing Spirit's timeless nature beneath apparent change.[1]

Both thinkers thus converge on an extreme presentist position: the extended flow of time is illusory; genuine reality is confined to a timeless, non-successive now.

Shared Strengths: Phenomenological Insight and Mystical Resonance

These exercises succeed powerfully on the phenomenological level. They highlight how the experienced “now” is psychologically constructed: the specious present (a term from William James) spans roughly 0.5-3 seconds and is held together by short-term memory and anticipation. Neuroscience confirms that temporal flow arises from distributed brain processes rather than direct perception of an objective timeline. By stripping away change and extension through stillness and conceptual reduction, Kastrup and Wilber evoke a direct intuition of timelessness that many practitioners find liberating—dissolving dualism, egoic anxiety, and the illusion of separation.

The arguments also resonate deeply with ancient non-dual traditions that use similar pointers (neti-neti reduction, koans, the “eternal now”) to provoke awakening. For those seeking contemplative insight rather than literal metaphysics, the exercises offer genuine value: they can shift perspective from linear suffering to a felt sense of wholeness.

Critical Pitfalls: Where Presentism Overreaches

Despite their subjective potency, these presentist arguments encounter serious philosophical and scientific difficulties.

1. Phenomenology Does Not Equal Ontology

Introspection reveals how time feels constructed in consciousness, but it does not prove that objective temporal succession is unreal. Modern physics—special and general relativity, the thermodynamic arrow of time, quantum measurement sequences—treats time as a real, asymmetric dimension intertwined with space. Empirical confirmations (time dilation in particle accelerators, GPS corrections, cosmic microwave background evolution) strongly support an extended, mind-independent timeline. Privileging experiential qualia over this evidence constitutes a form of verificationism that analytic philosophers have long rejected.

2. Self-Undermining Structure

The very act of describing the reduction—“shrinking the present,” “following consequences consistently,” “dissolving boundaries,” “realizing the eternal now”—presupposes temporal succession: before and after, process, unfolding insight. If time is literally non-existent, no sequence remains in which the illusion forms or the realization dawns. This mirrors longstanding objections to J.M.E. McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time and to Zeno-style paradoxes of motion and divisibility.

3. Smuggling in Change

Kastrup acknowledges that boredom can arise even in an unchanging white field, yet boredom is itself a qualitative transition—a form of change that requires duration. Wilber's developmental progression toward timeless realization similarly depends on stages unfolding over time. Both thinkers inadvertently rely on the very temporal framework they seek to dissolve.

4. Pragmatic and Scientific Shallowness

These exercises produce no falsifiable predictions and do not engage intersubjective evidence. Historical truths (evolutionary biology, geological records, human records) require truth-makers beyond present qualia. Presentism struggles to account for them without ad hoc additions (abstract past properties, ersatz times). Pragmatically, realizing “nothing happens” rarely alters ordinary causality—hammers still hurt hands, clocks still tick—and can risk quietism or derealization in vulnerable individuals.

Conclusion: Pointers, Not Proofs

Kastrup's stark collapse of time into nothingness and Wilber's developmental ascent to the eternal now illuminate the constructed, mind-dependent character of temporal experience and invite profound contemplative shifts. As meditative pointers toward non-dual awareness, they carry real spiritual force.

As literal metaphysics, however, radical presentism falters. It overextends phenomenology into ontology, undermines itself through temporal presuppositions, and disconnects from the multi-perspectival evidence of science and everyday pragmatics. True depth emerges not from reducing time to an illusion that “nothing ever happens,” but from integrating the apparent reality of change and succession with the timeless intuition of presence—without collapsing one into the other. The eternal now may be glimpsed in consciousness, yet time endures as a fundamental feature of the world we inhabit and investigate.

NOTES

[1] Ken Wilber, No Boundary, Center Publications Los Angelos, 1979. p. 69:

But when it is seen that the past as memory is always a present experience, the boundary behind this moment collapses. It becomes obvious that nothing came before this present. And likewise, when it is seen that the future of expectation is always a present experience, the boundary ahead of this moment explodes. The whole weight of there being something behind us or in front of us quickly, suddenly and completely vanishes. This present is no longer hemmed-in, but expands to fill all time, and thus the "passing present" unfolds into the eternal present, which the Christian mystics call nunc stans. The nunc fluens, or passing present, returns to the nunc stans, or eternal present. And this present is no mere slice of reality. On the contrary, in this now resides the cosmos, with all the time and space in the world.