October 3rd ~ Time is thought, and thought is the process of memory that creates time as yesterday, today, and tomorrow, as a thing that we use as a means of achievement, as a way of life. Time to us is extraordinarily important, life after life, one life leading to another life that is modified, that continues. Surely, time is the very nature of thought, thought is time. And as long as time exists as a means to something, the mind cannot go beyond itself-the quality of going beyond itself belongs to the new mind, which is free of time. Time is a factor in fear. By time, I don’t mean the chronological time, by the watch-second, minute, hour, day, year, but time as a psychological, inward process. It is that fact that brings about fear. Time is fear; as time is thought, it does breed fear; it is time that creates frustration, conflicts, because the immediate perception of the fact, the seeing of the fact is timeless…
So, to understand fear, one must be aware of time-time as distance, space, “me”, which thought creates as yesterday, today, and tomorrow, using the memory of yesterday to adjust it self to the present and so to condition the future. So, for most of us fear is an extraordinary reality; and a mind that is entangled reality; and a mind that is entangled with fear, with the complexity of fear, can never be free; it can never understand the totality of fear without understanding the intricacies of time. They go together.
This comparison of chronological time and psychological time is relatively new to me. We often confuse the two. It reminds me of a PBS nova episode where chronological time was not used much around the world until a Train organization manager impacted the world. Trains in the US up until the mid 1800’s would arrive when they arrived. Then this manager decided to create train schedules. It was quite elaborate but very quickly, trains began arriving when they said they would arrive. The world took notice and adopted this system of scheduling.
The other is psychological time. The two times are related. At first, what I thought Krishnamurti was saying is chronological time is important. It is. We have schedules to meet. Life wouldn’t run very smoothly if we arrived when we wanted to, although some cultures still do this. But psychological time is very important to us, he says. We fight wars over it. Our conditioning from one generation to another gets passed on because of it. We are thinking about the past or future and usually miss the present. Capitalism wouldn’t survive without it. We are ultra competitive because of psychological time.