BENGALURU: Sorrow is the result of a shock, it is the temporary shaking up of a mind that has settled down, that has accepted the routine of life. Something happens—a death, the loss of a job, the questioning of a cherished belief—and the mind is disturbed. But what does a disturbed mind do? It finds a way to be undisturbed again; it takes refuge in another belief, in a more secure job, in a new relationship. Again the wave of life comes along and shatters its safeguards, but the mind soon finds still further defences, and so it goes on. This is not the way of intelligence, is it?
No form of external or inward compulsion will help, will it? All compulsion, however subtle, is the outcome of ignorance; it is born of the desire for reward or the fear of punishment. To understand the whole nature of the trap is to be free of it; no person, no system, no belief can set you free. The truth of this is the only liberating factor — but you have to see it for yourself, and not merely be persuaded. You have to take the voyage on an uncharted sea.
Time is thought, and thought is the process of memory that creates time as yesterday, today and tomorrow, as a thing that we use as a means of achievement, as a way of life. Time to us is extraordinarily important, life after life, one life leading to another life that is modified, that continues. Surely, time is the very nature of thought, thought is time. And as long as time exists as a means to something, the mind cannot go beyond itself—the quality of going beyond itself belongs to the new mind which is free of time. Time is a factor in fear. By time, I don’t mean the chronological time, by the watch—second, minute, hour, day, year, but time as a psychological, inward process. It is that fact that brings about fear. Time is fear; as time is thought, it does breed fear; it is time that creates frustration, conflicts, because the immediate perception of the fact, the seeing of the fact is timeless...
So, to understand fear, one must be aware of time—time as distance, space; me which thought creates as yesterday, today and tomorrow, using the memory of yesterday to adjust itself to the present and so to condition the future. So, for most of us fear is an extraordinary reality; and a mind that is entangled with fear, with the complexity of fear, can never be free; it can never understand the totality of fear, without understanding the intricacies of time. They go together.