Osho : What is psychological time? Mind is psychological time. Mind is time. If you don’t have any mind and you are simply silent with no thought moving within, there is no time for you, not psychological time. The clock will go on moving, but for you the inner clock stops – time stops, the world stops. That is my dimension, the dimension of meditation.
As you go deeper into meditation time disappears. When meditation has really bloomed there is no time found. It happens simultaneously: when the mind disappears time disappears. Hence down the ages the mystics have said that time and mind are nothing but two aspects of the same coin. Mind cannot live without time and time cannot live without mind.
Time is a way for the mind to exist. Mind creates future through desire, through dreaming. The future does not exist, it is only in imagination, and mind creates the past. The past also does not exist, it is only in the memory. The past is no more, the future is not yet, but both exist in the mind. And because of the past and the future you have the feeling of time.
Time is not divided into three parts as it is usually divided. Mystics divide time into two parts: the past and the future. Time has only two tenses: past, future. And what about the present? Mystics say the present is timeless because the present is mindless.
When you are utterly in the present, herenow, there is neither mind nor time. You transcend time and mind both, you enter into eternity. You are beyond time. You are in a totally different world – transformed, transmuted, transported.
When I talk about time I mean this time that is created by the mind. Mind clings with the past and clings with the future. It is not ready to renounce the past, it is not ready to die to the past, because it is in the past that it can have its roots.
And it is not ready to renounce desiring, dreaming, because it is in desiring and dreaming that it can live. It needs space; it creates a very false space for itself: tomorrow, which never comes. Mind knows of yesterdays and tomorrows, and nothing of today.
Hence all the Buddhas have insisted, ”Live in this moment.” To live in this moment is meditation, to be simply herenow is meditation. Those who are simply herenow this very moment with me are in meditation. This is meditation: the cuckoo calling from far away, and the airplane passing, and the crows and the birds.
And all is silent, and there is no movement in the mind – you are not thinking of the past and you are not thinking of the future. Time has stopped, the world has stopped. Stopping the world is the whole art of meditation. And to live in the moment is to live in eternity. To taste the moment with no idea, with no mind, is to taste immortality.
Time is mind. Time is death. Going beyond time is going beyond mind and beyond death. But if you want to know about chronological time you have to ask a physicist; that is not my concern. Psychological time is my basic concern. That’s my whole work here: to help you get out of psychological time.