What would happen if you witnessed life as a rewind?

Life moves forward, doesn’t it?

From the past to the future.

From birth to death.

What if all that was reversed?

Years ago, I came across a mind-bending idea while reading Stephen Hawking’s The Theory of Everything. Hawking discusses a thought experiment: if we were to witness the collapse of a universe, when it would start contracting instead of expanding, will we experience time backwards? He writes, “People in the contracting phase would live their life backward. They would die before they were born and would get younger as the universe contracted.”

That idea has stuck with me for multiple reasons, though the scientific feasibility was found to be next to none, even by Hawking later on.

Take a theoretical example. In forward time, a person stabs a man to death on the road, is caught and spends his life in prison. In backward time, the person would walk out of prison, pull the knife out of the man, would look at the weapon absorbing the blood from the man, and then walk away. There are innumerable facets to this thought experiment. Let’s explore some of those.

Karma

How would karma work? The effect would come before the cause. So, justice would be served first and the crime would have to be committed later. Good things in life would necessitate the acting out of good deeds.  

Memory

What would you remember? The future would be stored as recollections in your brain and the past would be mysterious and uncertain. You would remember the results before the actions happened.

Ambition

Would you experience yourself becoming less ambitious? Or you could be moving from retirement into hustle, and then into a pre-planning phase.

The World

You would see trees shrivelling into seeds, rain water being sucked up by the clouds, buildings being deconstructed.

Knowledge

Interestingly, the flow would be from knowledge to innocence. All the accumulated wisdom would be dismantled to lead to a state of complete ignorance.

There are countless scenarios that could happen. The list would literally be as huge as the possibilities in the universe.

The Point of it All

So why am I even exploring this idea? What is the point of considering a non-possibility for this universe?

Think of it, whichever way time flows, the human mind will experience emotions. What are emotions? They are instant reactions to events happening. You would still experience love, hate, disgust, envy, and finally, the dissolution of all.

That is the point. The past and the future, in whichever sequence they occur, are not relevant.

There is only one thing that matters – your present moment.

That is the essence of all wisdom and all spirituality. The experience of the present is all there is. That is, until you realise that the past, the present and the future were simply manifestations of one underlying reality.

So does the flow of time really matter?