K: What is time, actually?
Actually, what is time?
Time is hope.
DB: Psychologically. K: Psychologically.
I am talking entirely psychologically for the moment.
DB: One tends to keep on thinking.
K: Of course. We have understood that.
K: Hope is time. Becoming is time.
Achieving is time.
Now, take the question of becoming:
I want to become something, psychologically.
I want to become non-violent – take that for example.
That is altogether a fallacy.
DB: We understand it is a fallacy
but the reason it is a fallacy is that there is no time of that kind.
K: No.
Human beings are violent,
and they have been talking a great deal
– Tolstoy, and in India – of non-violence.
The fact is we are violent.
DB: Yes.
K: And the non-violence is not real.
But we want to become that.
DB: Yes, but it is again an extension of the kind of thought
that we have with regard to material things.
If you see a desert, the desert is real,
and you say the garden is not real
but in your mind is the garden,
which will come when you put the water there.
So we say, we can plan for the future
when the desert will become fertile.
Now, we have to be careful – we say we are violent,
but we cannot by similar planning become non-violent.
Why is that?
K: Why? Because the non-violent state
cannot exist while there is violence.
DB: Yes.
K: That is an ideal.
DB: One has to make it more clear, because in the same sense
the fertile state and the desert don't exist together either.
I think that you are saying that in the case of the mind,
when you are violent, it has no meaning.
K: That is the only state. DB: That is all there is.
K: Yes, not the other.
DB: The movement towards the other is illusory.
K: So all ideals are illusory,
psychologically.
The ideal of building a marvellous bridge is not illusory,
you can plan it,
but to have psychological ideals.
DB: Yes, if you are violent and you continue to be violent
while you are trying to be non-violent...
K: It is so obvious. DB: It has no meaning.
K: There is no meaning,
and yet that has become such an important thing.
So, the becoming,
which is either becoming 'what is'
or becoming away from 'what is.'
DB: Yes, 'what should be.'
K: I question both.
DB: If you say there can be no sense to becoming
in the way of self-improvement.
K: Self-improvement is something so utterly ugly.
So we are saying that
the source of all this is the movement of thought as time.
When once we admit time psychologically,
all the other ideals,
non-violence, achieving some super state and so on,
become utterly illusory.
DB: Yes. Now, when you talk of the movement of thought as time,
it seems to me that
that time which comes from movement of thought is illusory. K: Yes.
DB: We sense it as time, but it is not a real kind of time.
K: That is why we asked, what is time? DB: Yes.
K: I need time to go from here to there.
If I want to learn some engineering,
I must study it, it takes time.
That same movement is carried over into the psyche.
I say, I need time to be good.
I need time to be enlightened.
DB: Yes, that will always create a conflict
between one part of you and another.
So, that movement in which you say, I need time,
also creates a division in the psyche
between, say, the observer and the observed.
K: That is right. We are saying the observer is the observed.
DB: Yes, and therefore there is no time is what is meant,
psychologically.
K: The experiencer, the thinker, is the thought.
There is no thinker separate from thought.
DB: Yes. All that you are saying seems very reasonable.
I think that it goes so strongly against the tradition,
or what we are used to,
that it will be extraordinarily hard for people
to really, generally speaking, to...
K: Most people, they want a comfortable way of living.
Let me carry on as I am, for God's sake, leave me alone.
DB: Yes, but that is the result of so much conflict
that people are worn out by anything.
K: But in escaping from conflict or not resolving conflict,
conflict exists, whether you like it or not.
That is the whole point.
Is it possible to live a life without conflict?