The second question:

Question 2

PLEASE OSHO, WHAT IS TIME?

Mado Maestracci,

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. That is not my dimension of work. 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.

Saint Augustine is reported to have said, "I know what time is if nobody asks me; if somebody asks me then I don't know."

Time is a mysterious quality. Everybody lives in it, everybody feels it, everybody knows it, and yet it is inexplicable.

The physicist has come to a certain understanding -- that it is the fourth dimension of space -- but that too does not demystify it. In fact it becomes even more mysterious. We have never thought of space and time as one; now physicists say that they are not two. They use a single word for both: spatiotime.

But that is not my world, science is not my world. There is another meaning of time, and whenever I use the word 'time' I use it in that other sense -- psychological time -- which has significance, more significance than chronological time.

What is psychological time? Mind is 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 my dimension, 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 mind. Time is a way for the mind to exist.

Mind creates 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 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.

When I talk about time I mean 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.