I think the problem of time is that as mobile organisms our experience is a sequence of perceptions, which we are constantly sorting, ordering and judging, as a necessary function of having to intentionally navigate our environment. Consequently we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which physics codifies as measures of duration.

The reality being that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

There isn't any literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

So time is an effect, similar to temperature, pressure, color, sounds. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't call them dimensions of time, because they are only foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, not the sequence of thought.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests the present. As process and present, it goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

With a wave, the energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

In a factory, the product goes start to finish, while the production line points the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

Individual lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness goes past to future, while perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past.

Though it is the heart and gut processing and circulating the energy driving us, while the central nervous system sorts the information precipitating out.

Which suggests consciousness functions as a form of energy, always seeking, pushing probing. Even its own forms, definitions and limitations.

There is a strong tendency to explain existance in terms of the forms it expresses, rather than the processes driving them, from religions to math.

Our minds can't really process the energy, so they create these flashes of perception, like a movie camera takes a series of stills, from which we reconstruct the acting of motion. Though the sequence isn't neessarily causal. Yesterday doesn't cause today, the sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights. So trying to explain one event in terms of our perception of the prior event is about like trying to explain ourselves in terms of a favorite grandparent. We live in this ocean of energy and information, from which we can extract and sense only a tiny fraction. Yet we then judge it like we have some objectivity. Which is an oxymoron, given perception is necessarily subjective, otherwise it is a whiteout of too much input and any signal is lost to the noise.

Logically a spiritual absolute is that essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. That we are aware, than whatever we might be aware of.

Our conscious state is largely imaginary, as we are constantly dreaming of possibilities and consequences, more than sensing the immediate world around us. Possibly because the executive function of complex consciousness is to constantly process information, in order that our future responses will be better informed.

We are the life form most able to escape the present, though sometimes it means we are just slow. Try swatting a fly.