It is becoming more and more obvious that knowledge, that which one has accumulated through centuries, has not basically changed man in his behaviour towards other human beings. I think that can be taken for granted by those who have gone seriously into this matter. And, if I may again remind you, this is not an amusement this morning, an entertainment, something you listen to for an hour and forget all about it and return to your own life. We are very serious and we have been discussing, talking over together, the question of suffering, love and the whole movement of thought as knowledge.
Unless one understands the whole problem of time, man will never be free of fear. Time is fear. And one has to go into this question of what is time. Because we live by time, we act according to time, all our thinking is based upon time as the remembrance of something past, acting in the present, constructing a future according to our conditioning, which is essentially time.
There is not only the chronological time: yesterday, today and tomorrow by the clock, which is necessary if you want to catch a train or a bus, and there is also the psychological time. The time to achieve psychologically, to gain, to become, to change, to achieve an ideological status of a mind, to change from one conditioning to another conditioning, to radically transform that which is conditioned to something that is not conditioned. That movement is called time. There is not only the becoming into something which is time, but also there is all the unconscious movement as time.
Time ends, action begins. I wonder if you see this. It isn’t a thing that you come to curiously one morning, on a lovely morning like this, and forget and go away. We are concerned with the total movement of life, we are concerned with our existence, with our misery, with our fears, with our pleasures, with our agonies and not run away from them. And that demands a mind that is really serious, not curious and not argumentative or opinionated - a mind that’s inquiring, that is wanting to find out. And to investigate you must have freedom to look - not to look with conclusions, with opinions, then you cannot possibly examine.
So we are talking over together a very serious matter, which is: can there be freedom, total freedom from psychological fears? And to go into it very deeply, one must not only understand what is time, but also what is action, because action breeds fear, stored up as memory and that memory restrains, controls, shapes action. So if you would be free of fear, you must understand that fear is time. If there was no tomorrow, only now, fear as a movement of thought ends. So there are fears, conscious as well as unconscious, open fears and secret hidden fears in the recesses of one’s own mind, which have never been explored, never been opened. Fear, like sorrow, is a dark cloud that affects all our action.