Inward Revolution Bringing About Radical Change in the World

psychological evolution, at all? Do you understand my question? The speaker is
not putting that question, you are putting it to yourself. We have to explore this
very crucial question, because we are going to deal with death, which is part of
time.
And time involves the whole process of thought. Thought is time, and as we
pointed out the other day, thought breeds, sustains fear. To understand the
extraordinary thing that we call death—and it must be extraordinary, the ending
of which we are so frightened—one must really comprehend for oneself what
time is and why thought has invented time apart from chronological time. Is there
a psychological, inward becoming, transforming, changing? If you admit time, a
sequence, a process, then you will have to accept time as a means of
achievement. Right? And what then is change, psychological change? We are not
talking about biological evolution. As we pointed out, there is a tremendous
evolutionary process of vast accumulated knowledge to go from the bullock cart
to the jet plane. To accumulate knowledge involves time. Apart from that, is
there a process, a gradualness, a continuity of change? Or is there a psychological
revolution in which time doesn’t exist at all? The moment you admit process,
gradualness, you will have to have time; on that all our traditions are based.
Practice, method, becoming, and not becoming, the whole of that structure
involves time, promising that at the end of it you will have enlightenment, you
will understand. Can there be understanding through time at all, or is it a
perception that is immediate and therefore there is immediate change?
Please, as we said, we are working together, we are examining together,
sharing together this problem. We are asking if it is possible to break the chain of
continuity, the movement from what is to what should be. Or is there a total
mutation of what is not involving time? To find that out one must totally discard
all the traditional approaches through gradualness, through practice, through
sustained effort, because all that involves conflict. Please, do understand this
very simple fact: where there is conflict there is division, the division between
the thinker and the thought, between the observer and the thing he wishes to
achieve, which is the observed. In that division there must inevitably be conflict
because there are other factors involved in it; there are other pressures, other
happenings that change what was cause into effect, and the effect becomes the
cause. All that involves time, doesn’t it? When you go to your guru—if you have
one, I hope you haven’t—he will tell you what to do, which involves time, and
you accept it because you are so greedy, you want to find something which you
hope to find through time. You don’t question, you don’t investigate, you don’t
discuss it with your guru; you accept and you are caught in the field of time,
which is bondage.
Now, can the mind investigate the fact that where there is psychological time,
a movement from what is to what should be, it involves conflict; and that where
there is conflict the mind must be distorted; and that a mind that is distorted can
never find what is true? That’s a simple fact. If I want to see very clearly, I must
have eyesight that is clear, unclouded, without any distortion; and there is
distortion when there is effort, and effort means time. This is not logic. It may
sound logical, reasonable, healthy, sane, but it is not logic. It is direct perception