BENGALURU: What is death, what is immortality and what is continuity? In the understanding of all that we have to really delve very, very deeply into the nature of time and thought, which we have been doing from the beginning of these talks.
Time, we said, is the past, modifying itself in the present, and the future is the present having its roots in the past, continuing, which is the future. Right? So the future is now. That is, we have evolved according to the biologists, scientists — we have been on this earth as human beings, evolving for 40, 50 thousand years.
During that long interval of time, during that duration, we have accumulated a great deal of information, knowledge, experience and technologically we have advanced in the most extraordinary way but inwardly, psychologically, subjectively, we are very primitive, barbarous, and we have not fundamentally changed;
we are violent, brutal, competitive, terribly aggressive and so on.
And unless one deeply understands, not merely theoretically, but the nature of time, when and what is time.
Is time a continuity? — I am this, I will be. When is time? You understand? Is there time in the very act of doing? Is there time in the very action of life? You plant a seed in the ground and it grows, flowers, bears fruit and dies and while that seed is growing, moving, living, there is no concept of time. It is only we human beings who have the concept of time. And when we are doing something completely, holistically, without any sense of fragmented outlook or behaviour, the doing — in that act of doing there is no time. Haven’t you noticed all this?
As you are sitting here and listening unfortunately, or fortunately, to the speaker, as you are listening very attentively — which I hope one is doing — this attention has no time. Right? It is only time comes into being when you say, ‘What is he talking about? I don’t quite understand’, — or I make a tremendous effort to understand — then time comes into being. But when there is actual listening, seeing very clearly, then there is no time at all. And understanding this we are going to enquire together, the speaker means together, all of us together, into the nature and the depth and the beauty of death.
When one uses the word beauty, what do we mean by that word? What is beauty to you? Because we are saying beauty is truth, like love is truth. What is beauty? A beautiful person, a beautiful painting, a great mountain that is immovable, full of snow, valleys, shadows and the deep blue depth of a vast valley.
The great paintings, the ancient sculptures and when we look at them we say how marvellously beautiful they are. Is beauty something in the beholder, in the observer, in the seer? Or is beauty when the observer is not? Because in our life, daily life there is so little beauty.
We want to have a beautiful body, beautiful face, and you do all kinds of things to bring that beauty about, exercise, so-called yoga!
—Jiddu Krishnamurti