There is a bit more to "now."
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. It is the basis of culture and the resulting civilizations, as narrative. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go, future to past.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.
Suggesting consciousness functions as a form of energy. Which would explain this love/hate relationship it has with order and structure. Both building it up, then being confined by, fighting and breaking it down.
The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.
The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, information, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle.
Remember it's the energy that's conserved, not the information generated. That the information changes is time. Without the ups and downs, it's a flatline.
Our biological lives are a form of structure this sentience manifests. Like waves, rising and falling.
While religion is how society compartmentalizes questions of mortality, it has a tendency to coalesce in ways that don't address such issues.
For one thing, the logical fallacy of monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The creeds, codes, heroes, narratives at the core of every culture are ideals.
Though the universal is the elemental, so a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, going past to future frames, rather than the narratives playing out on it.
Science looks to the elements. Art looks to the ideals.
Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, while Ancient Israel was a monarchy. Rome adopted Christianity for the monotheism, to validate the Empire rising from he ashes of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules.
While the pantheistic basis for the Trinity, the young god born in the spring, to the old sky god and the earth mother, was shrouded by the Holy Ghost, as the Catholic Church was not into renewal, or women, for that matter.
So it was more of a political factor.
The West is deeply committed to the primacy of the node over the network, from atoms to individuals, that has caused some deep philosophic issues, among which are degrees of emotional isolation and compartmentalization that are not as foundational as they are made out to be. That it might make more sense to think of this consciousness as the same beingness looking out through different eyes.
One is the node, oneness is the network.
The ways we attract and repel, like so many magnets, would be one aspect. That we are biological wireless devices, sorting through the same sea of signals, pushing and pulling.
The ones that resonate and synchronize with our prior knowledge, as we harmonize across the larger space. Centripetal and centrifugal.
Like galaxies, energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
