TIME AND DETERIORATION
Dialogue 9P: The key to your teachings appears to be in the understanding of time. The
human mind, that is, the structure of the brain cells, has come to its present state
with an inbuilt sense of time—as the yesterday, the today and the tomorrow. It is
along this axis that the mind sustains itself. You appear to explode this process,
to break through and, therefore, give the mind a new state of time. How is the
time cycle to end?
What is your concept of time? The Buddha talks of the endless cycle of births
and deaths, which is the yesterday, the today and the tomorrow, and the
liberation from this cycle.
K: What is time? Is it the movement of the past through the present to the future,
not only outwardly, but also inwardly from yesterday, to today and tomorrow?
Or, is time that which is involved in covering physical and psychological
distance?—to achieve, to fulfil, to arrive. Or, is time an ending?—as death. Or, is
time the memory of pleasant and unpleasant experience? A time to learn and a
time to forget—all these involve time. Time is not merely a concept.
P: We know time as a sense of duration, as clock time.
K: Time is duration, a process, a continuity and an ending. There is not only
physical time, that is, time by the watch, but also psychological, inward time.
Time by the watch is very clear—going to the moon requires clock time. Is there
any other time?
P: We see time by the clock, the sun setting and rising. Psychological time is not
different from that. If physical time has validity, my stating that I shall be
tomorrow also has validity, not only physically but also psychologically. All
becoming is related to the tomorrow.
K: All becoming is not only clock time, but also the desire to become.
P: The latter is possible only because there is a tomorrow.
K: Do you think that if there was no physical time, there would be no
psychological time?
P: I question the distinction that you draw between the two—physical and
psychological time.