Santosh Kumar Pokharel, Nepal
I was asked to submit an essay on “future,” and I have brooded long over how to begin. The future does not exist for me here in my present—I can never grasp its essence within this moment. Nor can I retrieve the past; it will not come back. Yet somehow, both may exist in my Now. This is the paradox that first seized me: we speak of the future with the certainty of travellers discussing a destination. We plan for it, we fear it, we eagerly await its arrival—as though it were a place toward which we journey. But what if the future is not a place we are going? What if it is merely a shadow, cast by the light of a single, eternal moment?
In my view, philosophical essence of “future” should dissolve when we consider that time is not a universal stream flowing in a single direction, but a function of space itself. The hands on a clock do not measure the passage of an independent entity called “time”; they measure our movement and position within the vast architecture of the cosmos. Time and space are not separate; they are an inter-woven fabric. To speak of time is to speak of a relationship between objects in space.
This becomes clear when we look to the heavens. A year on Earth is a complete orbit around the Sun. But on Mercury, a year is a mere 88 Earth days. On Neptune, a single year spans 165 Earth years. If a human lived on Neptune, their perception of a lifetime—of a “past” and a “future”—would be drastically different in magnitude. This relativity proves that time has no fixed, objective value. It is a local metric, a yardstick that changes depending on where you stand in the universe. The “future” that feels so imminent to us is, from the perspective of another planet, a completely different calculation. This suggests that “future” is not a thing in itself, but a variable experience of location.
If time is relative and a function of space, then the notion of a linear path from a “past” to a “future” becomes an illusion. What we call the past is merely the memory of a form that has ceased to be for our perception and in our local space. What we call the future is the anticipation of a new form coming into existence for our witnessing. Both are merely the bookends of manifestation, observed from a single vantage point: the Great Present.
Consider our own essence. If we are, as the ancients suggest, a timeless Soul—a conscious entity—then we are not subject to the local metrics of planets. In the realm of consciousness, there is no orbit around a sun. There is no yesterday or tomorrow. There is only now.
If this is true, then our deepest identity has never moved. It has never aged. It has never awaited a single thing. The Soul witnesses the body’s birth and death, the planet’s formation and dissipation, as events unfolding within its eternal awareness. It does not run towards the future, nor does it flee the past. It simply watches, because it knows—instinctively—that both the birth and the death are happening within itself. These events are not transitions from one time zone to another. They are appearances and disappearances on the screen of the Present.
This is the truth revealed by the concept of reincarnation. A soul does not “go” into the past or the future to find a new body. It simply manifests again, here, in the ever-present now. Past life regression does not transport a person backwards; it allows them to access a different set of memories—the memory of another form that arose and ceased—all within the current moment of their consciousness.
Therefore, the “future” is not a destination waiting for us down a corridor of time. It is the inevitable manifestation of new forms within the infinite embryo of the Present. Our linear assessment of life, from birth to death, is simply the cognitive tool our intellect uses to navigate this spatial reality. We create the categories of “was” and “will be” to make sense of the continuous flux of forms appearing and vanishing around us. The birth of universes, their manifestation, and their cessation in this infinitely expanding Emptiness is merely a continuous process, and this Continuum is ever happening Now.
For you see and cognize all that happens around you in the Now. Your memories of past events reside in your consciousness, accessible only in this present moment. Time is a continuum, just as Space is a continuum. There is no past, no future, but a Great Present. The planets will turn, the stars will burn out, and souls will come and go, all within the silent, timeless witness of this Great Present.
The future, then, is not a place you go. It is a state of being that is always appearing, always manifesting, in the only moment that has ever truly existed: the Now.
February 17, 2026. Kathmandu Nepal.
