Most of us think in terms of time. Man lives in time. Inventing the future has always been his favorite means of salvation.
We think that changes in us can occur over time, that the inner order in us will be created gradually, day by day. But time brings neither order nor peace, so we must stop thinking in terms of gradualism. This means that there is no tomorrow for us when we find peace. We must find peace, tranquility immediately, in the present moment.
When there is real danger, time disappears, doesn’t it? The action takes place immediately. But we do not see the danger of many of our problems, and therefore we invent time as a means to overcome them. Time is deceptive because it does not help us make a change in ourselves. Time is a movement that man has divided into past, present and future. And as long as he shares time, he will always be in conflict.
Is teaching a matter of time? Millennia have not taught us that there is a better way than to hate and kill each other. It is very important to understand the problem of time if we want to change this life, which with our help has become so monstrous and meaningless.
The first thing we must understand is that we can observe time only if we have that freshness, that clarity of mind that we have already spoken about. We are in turmoil because of the many problems facing us, we are lost in this turmoil. So, if a person gets lost in the forest, what does he do first of all? It stops, doesn’t it? The man stops and looks around. But the greater our confusion and the stronger the feeling that we are lost in life, the more we rush from side to side, we seek, we ask, we demand, we beg. So, let me give you a hint — first of all, you must stop, completely stop internally. And when you stop internally, psychologically, your mind will become very calm and clear. And then you can really consider this matter of time.
Problems exist only in time; they do not occur when we are continually receiving a challenge. When we take on a challenge in part, in fragments, or try to run away from it — in other words, when we approach it with less than full attention — we create a problem. And this problem will exist as long as we do not treat it with full attention, while we hope to solve it somehow later.
Do you know what time is? Not chronological, by the clock, but psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action. The idea, as it is quite obvious, serves for self-defence. Action is always instantaneous. It is neither of the past nor of the future. To act, you must be in the present. Action is so dangerous, so uncertain, that we rely on an idea that we hope will give us some confidence, help us avoid risk.
Check it out for yourself. You have an idea of what is right and wrong, or a worldview about yourself, about society, and you intend to act according to this idea. Therefore, the action takes place in relation to the idea, in an effort to follow it as accurately as possible, and this inevitably causes conflict. There is an idea, a certain interval and an action, and this interval includes the whole sphere of time. This interval, in fact, is a thought. If you think that you will be happy tomorrow, then you have an idea that you will achieve a certain result in time. Through observation, through desire, and through the extension of this desire, the thought is reinforced by the next thought, saying: “Tomorrow I will be happy, tomorrow I will succeed, tomorrow the world will be beautiful.” Thus thought creates an interval, which is time.
Now, we ask, can we stop time? Can we live so fully that there is no tomorrow? For time is sorrow. Yesterday, or for thousands of yesterdays, you loved, or you had a friend who left, and this memory remains, and you think about this joy and this sadness, look back, wishing, hoping, mourning.
So thought, returning to the past, again and again gives birth to what we call sadness, and creates an interval of time.
As long as there is an interval of time created by thought, there must be unceasing fear. Therefore, a person asks himself the question: “Can this interval cease to exist?” If you say: “Will it ever stop?” then this is already an idea, something that you want to achieve, which means that a new interval has appeared in which you are like in a trap.
Now let’s try to understand the issue of death, which for most people is a huge problem. You know death is always there for you. Is it possible to approach it holistically so that you don’t create this problem at all? In order to approach her in this way, all faith, hope, all fear in relation to her must cease. For otherwise you will approach this extraordinary phenomenon with a conclusion, an idea, in advance not existing anxiety, and thus your approach will be time bound. Time is an interval, a gap between the observer and the observed. This means that the observer, which is you, is afraid to meet what is called death. You don’t know what it is. You have all kinds of hopes, theories about her; you believe in reincarnation, or resurrection, or in something called the soul, the atman, a spiritual entity that is outside of time and which you call by various names; but have you found out for yourself the question of the existence of the soul? Or is it an idea you’ve been given? Is there anything permanent that goes on beyond thought? If thought can think about it, then it is in the realm of thinking and therefore cannot be permanent. Nothing is permanent in the realm of thought. It is extremely important to realize this, for only then will you be free to see, and in that freedom there is great joy.
You cannot be afraid of the unknown because you don’t know what it is and therefore there is nothing to be afraid of. Death is a word, and a word, an image is what causes fear. So, can you look at death without the image of death? As long as there is an image, a representation from which a thought arises, this thought must always give rise to fear. Then you either try to overcome the fear of death with your mind and resist the inevitable, or you come up with countless beliefs to protect yourself from the fear of death. In this way a gap is created, a gap between you and what you are afraid of. In this space-time interval there must be a conflict, which is fear, anxiety and self-pity. The thought that creates the fear of death says, “Let’s delay it, let’s avoid it, keep it as far away as possible, let’s not think about it,” but you think about it. When you say: I won’t think about it, you are already thinking about how to avoid it. You are afraid of death because you want to delay it.
We have separated life from death, and this interval between life and death is fear. This interval, this time is created by fear. Life is our daily torment, resentment, sadness, confusion with occasional glimpses, when we, like through a window that opens, see the sea full of beauty. This is what we call life, and we are afraid to die, which would mean the end of this suffering. We are willing to cling to the known so as not to be face to face with the unknown. The known is our home: our environment, our family, our character, our work, our knowledge, our words, our loneliness, our gods, all those small things that form an endless cycle in itself with its own limited pattern of bitter existence.
We think that life always takes place in the present and that death is something that awaits us in a remote time. But we have never asked ourselves whether this struggle of everyday life is life at all. We want to know the truth about reincarnation. We want proof that our soul will continue to live; we listen to the statement of the clairvoyant and the conclusions from psychological research, but we never ask how to live, live with delight, charm every day.
We have come to terms with life as it is, with all its pain and despair, we are used to it and think of death as something to be avoided. But death is something as extraordinary as life, if we know how to live, you cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you are not dying psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. In order to live fully, holistically, discovering more and more charm every day, you need to die for everything yesterday; if it is not, you live mechanically, and the mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.
Most of us are afraid of dying because we don’t know what it means to live, we don’t know how to live, and therefore we don’t know how to die. As long as we are afraid of life, we will be afraid of death. A person who is not afraid of life is not afraid of complete defenselessness, because he understands that internally, psychologically, there is no security. When there is no certainty of security, there is an endless movement, and then life and death are one and the same.
A person who lives without conflict, who lives in beauty and love, is not afraid of death, because to love means to die. If you are dying to everything you know, including your family, your memories, everything you have felt, then death is a cleansing, renewing process; then death brings purity, innocence, and only innocent, pure people have passion, and not those who believe and want to find out what will happen after death. In order to really figure out what happens after you die, you have to die. You must die not physically, but psychologically, die inwardly for everything that you hold dear and that upset you. If you die even for your one pleasure, the smallest or the greatest, you will die naturally, without any no effort or argument, you will know what it means to die.
To die is to have a mind completely empty of its own content, of its daily aspirations, pleasures and torments. Death is a renewal, a mutation in which thought does not function at all, since thought is the old. When death comes, something completely new arises. Freedom from the known is death.
And only then do you live.
