Time Is Inexplicable – In Gita Verse 7.26 O Arjuna, as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, I know everything that has happened in the past, all that is happening in the present, and all things that are yet to come. I also know all living entities; but Me no one knows.
Krishna says that as I am formless I am beyond the time. For him there is no future, no past, not even present.
TIME has two meanings. One is chronological time, the clock’s time. I cannot say much about it. You have to ask a physicist; only he can say something about it. If you ask the physicists, Albert Einstein and others, they will say time is the fourth dimension of space. But that does not make much sense, the mystery remains. The mystery remains as mysterious as it was before Albert Einstein.
Time is a mysterious quality. Everybody lives in it, everybody feels it, everybody knows it, and yet it is inexplicable.
There is another meaning of time, – psychological time – which has significance, more significance than chronological time.
What is psychological time? Mind is a psychological time. Mind is time. If you don’t have any mind and you are simply silent with no thought moving within, there is no time for you, not psychological time. The clock will go on moving, but for you the inner clock stops – time stops, the world stops. That is the dimension of meditation.
As you go deeper into meditation time disappears. When meditation has really bloomed there is no time found. It happens simultaneously: when the mind disappears time disappears. Hence down the ages the mystics have said that time and mind are nothing but two aspects of the same coin. Mind cannot live without time and time cannot live without the mind. Time is a way for the mind to exist.
Mind creates the future through desire, through dreaming. The future does not exist, it is only in imagination, and mind creates the past. The past also does not exist, it is only in the memory. The past is no more, the future is not yet, but both exist in the mind. And because of the past and the future you have the feeling of time.
Time is not divided into three parts as it is usually divided. Mystics divide time into two parts: the past and the future. Time has only two tenses: past, future. And what about the present? Mystics say the present is timeless because the present is mindless. When you are utterly in the present; herenow, there is neither the mind nor time. You transcend time and mind both, you enter into eternity. You are beyond time. You are in a totally different world – transformed, transmuted, transported.
This time that is created by the mind. Mind clings with the past and clings with the future. It is not ready to renounce the past, it is not ready to die to the past, because it is in the past that it can have its roots. And it is not ready to renounce desiring, dreaming, because it is in desiring and dreaming that it can live. It needs space; it creates a very false space for itself: tomorrow, which never comes. Mind knows of yesterdays and tomorrows, and nothing of today.
Hence all the Buddhas have insisted, “Live in this moment.” To live in this moment is meditation, to be simply herenow is meditation. Those who are simply herenow, this very moment with me are in meditation. This is meditation: the cuckoo calling from far away, and the airplane passing, and the crows and the birds. And all is silent, and there is no movement in the mind – you are not thinking of the past and you are not thinking of the future. Time has stopped, the world has stopped.
Stopping the world is the whole art of meditation. And to live in the moment is to live in eternity. To taste the moment with no idea, with no mind, is to taste immortality.
Time is mind. Time is death. Going beyond time is going beyond mind and beyond death.
Krishna says that because of your desire you are in time, you cannot live in the mystery. The mystery never ends, it cannot end. That’s why it is called a mystery, it cannot be known ever. It will never become knowledge, that’s why it is called a mystery; something in it is eternally elusive. And that’s the whole joy of life. The great splendor of life is that it keeps you eternally engaged, searching, exploring. Life is exploration, life is an adventure.
In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 4.38, blog I wrote Life is not an object, it is the very core of subjectivity. When you experiment you are different; when you live you are one. So the religious man says, “Unless you are one with life, you can never know it.” People who have gone beyond the time that have a taste of Immortality, no time.
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