What is time?

FROM http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time

"The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

“It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he answers, “Beats me. Are we done?”) “The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.” "

The article continues.....

"Einstein, for one, found solace in his revolutionary sense of time. In March 1955, when his lifelong friend Michele Besso died, he wrote a letter consoling Besso’s family: “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Rovelli senses another temporal breakthrough just around the corner. “Einstein’s 1905 paper came out and suddenly changed people’s thinking about space-time. We’re again in the middle of something like that,” he says. When the dust settles, time—whatever it may be—could turn out to be even stranger and more illusory than even Einstein could imagine. "

I frequently think about the nature of time, and the relationship between our consciousness and time/space.

Is our consciousness within time space, or is time/space within our consciousness?

I have concluded that time and space is within our consciousness.

When we embrace the reality that time and space are within our consciousness then the nature of the questions that we ask, and the answers we find are different.

Does time flow forward or backward? If the realm of time is within you, then what is forward and backward?

How does time relate to now? In now, does time exist?

Is time more than a mere thought form in the consciousness of now?

Do we need to determine the reality of time if we realize that in one reality it exists, on another it does not? Can't we just work with time where it appears real, and release the thought of time where time does not exist?

In the same way that light is neither a particle or a wave, time both exists and does not exist.

Time is the ever present now, in many forms.