[Serious] Is the Past Real?

[Belacqua]

Personally, I ponder the nature of time often and yet I really don't have a firm position. My symathies lie with presentism because I feel the past is truly gone and to the extent it exists it is in presents ghosts. Then as time goes on those ghosts fade while the set of possible paths that could have led to this moment increases. Then I think, certainly there is the way things actually happened so in some sense the past exists in some immutable way...from a god's eye view so to speak...regardless of whether from an objective reality (i.e. there are past objects) or an Akashic record.

Anyways, I was just curious what others thought about time.

There are a number of different traditions (including, I think, some physicists) which say that everything exists all at once. They say that time is an artefact of how we perceive things. Time is among the mental phenomena, like color, rather than being in the noumena. 

I don't understand this at all. 

I do remember that Ernst Cassirer concludes: "We are not so much in time as time is in us." 

If this is true, then I guess it means that the past, present, and future are all equally real. That the present only seems more real to us because it is the part we are aware of most, but that this is like looking at a broad landscape through a soda straw.