no its THEN, we have lived our lives and made our choices, we're just reflecting upon them, that is NOW.

It's not quite right to say that time is an illusion: our CONCEPT of time is an illusion -- we think of time as this sort of "line" on which "now" is a point, with the future to one side and the past to another. This is purely conceptual: we don't actually EXPERIENCE time that way, what we experience is always now-ness, with memory accumulating and the future living as ideas about possibilities. The way I like to talk about time is to say that time is inconceivable -- i.e. ungraspable. We cannot form a mental representation or image of what time is, the mind spins around in circles trying to grapple with it... so some people conclude that time is an illusion. Yet clearly there is change, and change occurs with a sort of regular rate, and we remember previous changes, and we anticipate future changes. So to say we're dealing with an illusion is too strong an assertion. What we're dealing with is a phenomenon which defies conceptualization. Now I say that there are LOTS of things which defy conceptualization, and yet we're very prone to rely on our defective concepts of these things. That's what I'd like to see get corrected more often: to stop relying so heavily on concepts of things which are inconceivable.