BENGALURU: Time is chronological and also psychological. Time as growth is the small becoming the large, the bullock cart evolving into the jet plane, the baby becoming the man. The heavens are filled with growth, and so is the earth. This is an obvious fact, and it would be stupid to deny it. Time as distance is more complex. “It is known that a human being can be in two different places at the same time - at one place for several hours, and at another for a few minutes during the same period.” Thought can and does wander far afield while the thinker remains in one place.
“I am not referring to that phenomenon. A person, a physical entity, has been known to be in two widely separated places simultaneously. However our point is time.” Yesterday using today as a passage to tomorrow the past flowing through the present to the future, is one movement of time, not three separate movements. We know time as chronological and psychological, growth and becoming. There is the growth of the seed into the tree, and there is the process of psychological becoming. Growth is fairly clear, so let us put that aside for the time being. Psychological becoming implies time.
I am this and I shall become that, using time as a passage, as a means; the what has been is becoming the what will be. We are very familiar with this process. So thought is time, the thought that has been and the thought that will be, the what is and the ideal. Thought is the product of time, and without the thinking process, time is not. The mind is the maker of time, it is time.
“That is obviously true. Mind is the maker and user of time. Without the mind-process, time is not. But is it possible to go beyond the mind? Is there a state which is not of thought?” Let us together discover whether there is such a state or not. Is love thought? We may think of someone we love; when the other is absent, we think of him, or we have an image, a photograph of him. The separation makes for thought.
“Do you mean that when there is oneness, thought ceases and there is only love?” Oneness implies duality, but that is not the point. Is love a thought process? Thought is of time; and is love time-binding? Thought is bound by time, and you are asking if it is possible to be free from the binding quality of time. “It must be, otherwise there could be no creation. Creation is possible only when the process of continuity ceases. Creation is the new, the new vision, the new invention, the new discovery, the new formulation, not the continuity of the old.”
Continuity is death to creation.
“But how is it possible to put an end to continuity?”
What do we mean by continuity ? What makes for continuity?.
What is it that joins moment to moment, as the thread joins the beads in a necklace? The moment is the new, but the new is absorbed into the old and so the chain of continuity is formed. Is there ever the new, or only recognition of the new by the old? If the old recognizes the new, is i t the new? The old can recognize only its own projection; it may call it the new, but it is not. The new is not recognizable; it is a state of non-recognition, nonassociation.