This is what it means to be cast out of the Garden of Eden: to live in an Eternally Perfect Now, but to only be able to perceive a corrupted and decaying present.
I was reading Anathem at the time, which should explain the opaque nature of the sentence, but doesn't do much to decipher it, which is why I'm writing this post here.
I'll start with another quote, this time by Einstein:
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Dr. Einstein was referring to the fact that we cannot perceive time as it actually is. What we see as time's orderly march from the past into the future is in fact an illusion created by our own perceptual limitations. This illusion is so pervasive,so dominating, that it is virtually impossible to escape. Like the Matrix in the movies, we are in a prison of our minds.
Modern physics tells us that time is a dimension, just like space. Backing up a bit, a dimension is an axis of movement. For example, I can move left or right, forward or backward, or up or down. Each pair represents an axis of movement, or dimension. Note that the dimension exists independent of the motion. I can be sitting perfectly still, and all three dimensions still exist.
For a long time, we believed that time was something different. We could move through it, but only at a predetermined pace, and in only one direction. Time was seen as an immutable process. When Einstein developed his Relativity theories, he made a very strange discovery. Not only were energy and matter two phases of the same thing, that's what E=mc
As physicists advanced Einstein's work, the puzzle grew, because in the sub atomic world, there were particles that demonstrated a certain freedom in the temporal dimension. Even more disconcerting, the law of cause and effect, inextricably bound up in the orderly progression of time, was voided as particle size got smaller. As the evidence mounted, they were forced to a very unusual conclusion: Time as we knew it was an illusion.
In the real world, all of time is Now. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all arbitrary designations of time, based on our flawed perception of the reality.
If your brain isn't hurting, you aren't paying attention.
The universe as we perceive it is chained to the orderly progression of time, which is ultimately measured against a property called entropy. Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system, and according to the laws of physics, entropy in a system always increases. In fact, entropy will continue to increase until the entire universe is reduced to complete disorder and ceases to be. The direction of increasing disorder is also the direction we perceive as time's motion. Think about that for a moment; our perception of time is directly and inextricably linked to the decay and death of everything.
And that brings us to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden.
While man was in Eden, living and walking with God, there was no death or decay. When he was cast out, cut off from God, he was chained to an inevitable death. Entropy is simply another name for the curse God laid on the earth as a result of Adam's sin. Our inability to see the true nature of time, to see the world as it really is, is a function of that curse.