J. Krishnamurti on "time"

Freedom From the Known

Freedom From the Known Chapter 9

I AM TEMPTED TO repeat a story about a great disciple going to God and demanding to be taught truth. This poor God says, `My friend, it is such a hot day, please get me a glass of water.' So the disciple goes out and knocks on the door of the first house he comes to and a beautiful young lady opens the door. The disciple falls in love with her and they marry and have several children. Then one day it begins to rain, and keeps on raining, raining, raining - the torrents are swollen, the streets are full, the houses are being washed away. The disciple holds on to his wife and carries his children on his shoulders and as he is being swept away he calls out, 'Lord, please save me', and the Lord says, `Where is that glass of water I asked for?'

It is rather a good story because most of us think in terms of time. Man lives by time. Inventing the future has been a favourite game of escape.

We think that changes in ourselves can come about in time, that order in ourselves can be built up little by little, added to day by day. But time doesn't bring order or peace, so we must stop thinking in terms of gradualness. This means that there is no tomorrow for us to be peaceful in. We have to be orderly on the instant.

When there is real danger time disappears, doesn't it? There is immediate action. But we do not see the danger of many of our problems and therefore we invent time as a means of overcoming them. Time is a deceiver as it doesn't do a thing to help us bring about a change in ourselves. Time is a movement which man has divided into past, present and future, and as long as he divides it he will always be in conflict.

Is learning a matter of time? We have not learnt after all these thousands of years that there is a better way to live than by hating and killing each other. The problem of time is a very important one to understand if we are to resolve this life which we have helped to make as monstrous and meaningless as it is.

The first thing to understand is that we can look at time only with that freshness and innocency of mind which we have already been into. We are confused about our many problems and lost in that confusion. Now if one is lost in a wood, what is the first thing one does? One stops, doesn't one? One stops and looks round. But the more we are confused and lost in life the more we chase around, searching, asking, demanding, begging. So the first thing, if I may suggest it, is that you completely stop inwardly. And when you do stop inwardly, psychologically, your mind becomes very peaceful, very clear. Then you can really look at this question of time.

Problems exist only in time, that is when we meet an issue incompletely. This incomplete coming together with the issue creates the problem. When we meet a challenge partially, fragmentarily, or try to escape from it - that is, when we meet it without complete attention - we bring about a problem. And the problem continues so long as we continue to give it incomplete attention, so long as we hope to solve it one of these days.

Do you know what time is? Not by the watch, not chronological time, but psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action. An idea is for self-protection obviously; it is the idea of being secure. Action is always immediate; it is not of the past or of the future; to act must always be in the present, but action is so dangerous, so uncertain, that we conform to an idea which we hope will give us a certain safety.

Do look at this in yourself. You have an idea of what is right or wrong, or an ideological concept about yourself and society, and according to that idea you are going to act. Therefore the action is in conformity with that idea, approximating to the idea, and hence there is always conflict. There is the idea, the interval and action. And in that interval is the whole field of time. That interval is essentially thought. When you think you will be happy tomorrow, then you have an image of yourself achieving a certain result in time. Thought, through observation, through desire, and the continuity of that desire sustained by further thought, says, `Tomorrow I shall be happy. Tomorrow I shall have success. Tomorrow the world will be a beautiful place.' So thought creates that interval which is time.

Now we are asking, can we put a stop to time? Can we live so completely that there is no tomorrow for thought to think about? Because time is sorrow. That is, yesterday or a thousand yesterday's ago, you loved, or you had a companion who has gone, and that memory remains and you are thinking about that pleasure and that pain - you are looking back, wishing, hoping, regretting, so thought, going over it again and again, breeds this thing we call sorrow and gives continuity to time.

So long as there is this interval of time which has been bred by thought, there must be sorrow, there must be continuity of fear. So one asks oneself can this interval come to an end? If you say, `Will it ever end?', then it is already an idea, something you want to achieve, and therefore you have an interval and you are caught again.

Now take the question of death which is an immense problem to most people. You know death, there it is walking every day by your side. Is it possible to meet it so completely that you do not make a problem of it at all? In order to meet it in such a way all belief, all hope, all fear about it must come to an end, otherwise you are meeting this extraordinary thing with a conclusion, an image, with a premeditated anxiety, and therefore you are meeting it with time.

Time is the interval between the observer and the observed. That is, the observer, you, is afraid to meet this thing called death. You don't know what it means; you have all kinds of hopes and theories about it; you believe in reincarnation or resurrection, or in something called the soul, the atman, a spiritual entity which is timeless and which you call by different names. Now have you found out for yourself whether there is a soul? Or is it an idea that has been handed down to you? Is there something permanent, continuous, which is beyond thought? If thought can think about it, it is within the field of thought and therefore it cannot be permanent because there is nothing permanent within the field of thought. To discover that nothing is permanent is of tremendous importance for only then is the mind free, then you can look, and in that there is great joy.

You cannot be frightened of the unknown because you do not know what the unknown is and so there is nothing to be frightened of. Death is a word, and it is the word, the image, that creates fear. So can you look at death without the image of death? As long as the image exists from which springs thought, thought must always create fear. Then you either rationalize your fear of death and build a resistance against the inevitable or you invent innumerable beliefs to protect you from the fear of death. Hence there is a gap between you and the thing of which you are afraid. In this time-space interval there must be conflict which is fear, anxiety and self-pity. Thought, which breeds the fear of death, says, `Let's postpone it, let's avoid it, keep it as far away as possible, let's not think about it' - but you are thinking about it. When you say, `I won't think about it', you have already thought out how to avoid it. You are frightened of death because you have postponed it.

We have separated living from dying, and the interval between the living and the dying is fear. That interval, that time, is created by fear. Living is our daily torture, daily insult, sorrow and confusion, with occasional opening of a window over enchanted seas. That is what we call living, and we are afraid to die, which is to end this misery. We would rather cling to the known than face the unknown - the known being our house, our furniture, our family, our character, our work, our knowledge, our fame, our loneliness, our gods - that little thing that moves around incessantly within itself with its own limited pattern of embittered existence.

We think that living is always in the present and that dying is something that awaits us at a distant time. But we have never questioned whether this battle of everyday life is living at all. We want to know the truth about reincarnation, we want proof of the survival of the soul, we listen to the assertion of clairvoyants and to the conclusions of psychical research, but we never ask, never, how to live - to live with delight, with enchantment, with beauty every day. We have accepted life as it is with all its agony and despair and have got used to it, and think of death as some- thing to be carefully avoided. But death is extraordinarily like life when we know how to live. You cannot live without dying. You cannot live if you do not die psychologically every minute. This is not an intellectual paradox. To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.

Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it means to live. We don't know how to live, therefore we don't know how to die. As long as we are frightened of life we shall be frightened of death. The man who is not frightened of life is not frightened of being completely insecure for he understands that inwardly, psychologically, there is no security. When there is no security there is an endless movement and then life and death are the same. The man who lives without conflict, who lives with beauty and love, is not frightened of death because to love is to die.

If you die to everything you know, including your family, your memory, everything you have felt, then death is a purification, a rejuvenating process; then death brings innocence and it is only the innocent who are passionate, not the people who believe or who want to find out what happens after death.

To find out actually what takes place when you die you must die. This isn't a joke. You must die - not physically but psychologically, inwardly, die to the things you have cherished and to the things you are bitter about. If you have died to one of your pleasures, the smallest or the greatest, naturally, without any enforcement or argument, then you will know what it means to die. To die is to have a mind that is completely empty of itself, empty of its daily longing, pleasure; and agonies. Death is a renewal, a mutation, in which thought does not function at all because thought is old. When there is death there is something totally new. Freedom from the known is death, and then you are living.

http://www.jiddu-krishnamurti.net/en/freedom-from-the-known/1968-00-00-jiddu-krishnamurti-freedom-from-the-known-chapter-9

I like this.

I think it is a good supplement to the material in the New Yorker article on the Houston-Rice University time researcher posted by Chris.

I think I first read it around 1977, when I was 21.

This and the rest of the chapter of the book "Freedom From the Known" where a huge influence on my life for quite a while.

It is possible that the whole of the "dharma" is included in this excerpt.

One thing I like about it is that it is pointing to a "practice" that can be reduced to a sensitive observation of what is actually going on right now. That's it. Not trying to be a buddha or to get anywhere at all, not coming up with or developing any theories, and not coming to any conclusions -- ever. Just a hugely open awareness of .... this. Now.

Just stumbled on this older post I hadn't read before. I enjoyed the article!

Mike said: "One thing I like about it is that it is pointing to a "practice" that
can be reduced to a sensitive observation of what is actually going on
right now. That's it."

But this is where the whole discussion of maps and techniques and effort and all that comes in right? Because, yes, that's nice and simple. But ask your average guy on the street - let alone your average meditator - if they can actually sustain attention on right...NOW... for long periods of time and the answer will range from "huh?" to "kinda" to "I read about it in a book" to "on a good day maybe".

Which is why there are a million books and teachers and pointers and so on trying to help keep your mind focused while meanwhile a thousand monkeys dance in your brain, you fall asleep, your leg hurts, the phone rings, you remember the fight with your sister, the dog has to go out, what was that thing on the shopping list, god I'll never learn to meditate, was that bliss? this sucks, etc etc.

I guess Chris deleted a post on being careful about reprinting long excerpts but anyway I will.

Ona: I'm not sure what you are saying in your response. However If one reads more of this book by Krishnamurti he gives a lot of great advice for staying with "now" that is really helpful.

but you do get that:

thousand monkeys dance in your brain, you fall asleep, your leg hurts, the phone rings, you remember the fight with your sister, the dog has to go out, what was that thing on the shopping list, god I'll never learn to meditate, was that bliss

is all just "now," right? I mean, that is the point here, that "now" is a movement that includes everything. I mean this kind of "choiceless awareness" practice is all the stuff that happens all the time not just when one is attempting to meditate. I think the greatest thing for me was when I realized that watching myself daydream and not paying attention and spacing out and getting irritated at stuff was the stuff I was supposed to be looking at and stuff I could look at ... without a choice. I hope that makes sense. Take away the idea of there being anything special about the practice time or the practice and just keep a light track of all the stuff you are really doing, thinking, feeling. For real. Include everything even the parts when we are aren't paying attention.

So it's not really even a "focus" it's just a gentle acknowledgment of what is really going on, even if that is being out of focus and in a trance.

Let the monkeys in, let them dance, watch each step. Let your sister in, let your feelings about your sister in, notice if you can where in your body you feel the feelings about your sister and about that time another monkee will start to do the hustle to "I will surivive" so you look at that as long as it lasts and then go to the bathroom and wash up and forget to put the towel back and yell at the dog and berate yourself for yelling at the dog and watch more monkees dancing and just keep moving with all of it. If you resist watch yourself resist -- everything is included as long as it it there.

...but you do get that:
thousand monkeys dance in your brain, you fall asleep, your leg hurts, the phone rings, you remember the fight with your sister, the dog has to go out, what was that thing on the shopping list, god I'll never learn to meditate, was that bliss
is all just "now," right? I mean, that is the point here, that "now" is a movement that includes everything. ...
So it's not really even a "focus" it's just a gentle acknowledgment of what is really going on, even if that is being out of focus and in a trance.


-michaelmonson

yes, I do. but I'm not sure it's that easy for most people to get at all. I was just talking to a friend who's been meditating just a few months, and he was ranting about how he was having such "sucky" meditating today. He doesn't see enough of the details of the play of the mind yet to be able to rest in that "now" no matter what's going on. I think it's a skill you learn. You've meditated a long time, so it's fairly natural for you.

I remember a specific sit once (since you like personal examples) where I suddenly realized there was no time, (there was just now). It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was a complete shock. I remember a sit where I suddenly realized I was having "monkey mind" but it didn't matter - I was still meditating. I was just stunned for the rest of the day. I was baffled. The thoughts were just coming and going by themselves, and didn't change my focus or attention. Ditto falling asleep or other distractions.

which is where I don't like to throw out effort-driven techniques for people for whom they are super useful - and there are a lot of people or times in people's practice where that kind of structured effort is really helpful. when later it's not necessary, that's cool, but that doesn't mean it doesn't help others where they are.

make sense?

(somehow that comes out being argumentative, but I don't intend it to be, just trying to clarify my own thoughts on the matter)

Huh, I think "now" is kind of a problem, actually. Thinking of paying attention to "now" I think can create a kind of a stress, an attempt to sort of freeze time to these tiny little static increments which is actually not possible.
Better, maybe, to just attempt to pay loose attention to what you do, what you think, what you feel as a moving thing. For some reason it works best for me if I have some kind of "anchor," which for me is usually the changing feelings in my chest area. If I can notice how those feeling change, as they change, then I'm paying attention, right?

And, this sort of practice is all about everything, not just the set aside meditation time. The sitting time is just the same, it's just that what happens will be different because one is "meditating" and a certain senstivity to certain details may be available because one is sitting quietly, but maybe not.

By the same token, one can use "noting" while not meditating to help with this: "bending over," "stress in stomach," "pissed at that person," "anxious" "confused" "wind" "itch" and on and on.

During my recent foray into real serious Mahasi-style vipassana seated work, I found that for me anchoring on the rise and fall of abdomen was great for getting better at concentrating and for getting more and more sensitive to subtle sensations. but, once I got good at that, I found that the real continuty happened once I shift away from the rise and fall and just let me self notice in great detail all the stuff that happened as it happened -- as a moving thing. To me the best description of it is this -- imagine a fast and complicated jazz piano piece and imagine being able to distinctly "hear" each individual note as it is being played. that is how I approached all the thoughts, images, and sensations happening to me during seated meditation. The better I got at it the more detail I could notice and the more detail I could notice the wider and more expansive my attention became and the less I missed until the continuity and momentum and attention all comes together just right. (fruition)

but, for me, the same thing can happen while just living, especially, for some reason, with uncomfortable situations and feelings. If I get uncomfortable, even if it is almost too painful, and just stay with the feelings like the jazz piano piece and stay and stay .... there is fruition and release sometimes and life changes and insight happens.

As I continue to sit with my local zen group and eventually have instruction and an interview with the official "teacher" woman, I'm curious how my attempts to integrate all this into my ideas about "zazen" will be received.

... If I get uncomfortable, even if it is almost too painful, and just stay with the feelings like the jazz piano piece and stay and stay .... there is fruition and release sometimes and life changes and insight happens.



-michaelmonson

I find that too, if you can stay with the "notes" as they fly by - there is hardly time for anything to be uncomfortable or painful. To stick with the jazz piano piece metaphor, if they guy's playing really slowly, there's time to think about each note. But if he's playing fast, there's only time for the note to hit the ear before the next note is already hitting the ear, and in that kind of instant-moment-ness there's nothing but hearing. No thinking, analyzing, pondering, reacting, just a stream of notes pouring by.

I think I like the jazz piano metaphor.

Yes, but you got to be ready and willing for it to be as painful as it is for as long as it is which for me, often, might be a really long time (anywhere from a mintue or two to a day or two)

though I wonder if the pain lasts so long sometimes because I am holding back some on the awareness and it isn't until I am able and willing to be utterly open and aware that relief happens. or maybe not.

Yes, but you got to be ready and willing for it to be as painful as it is for as long as it is which for me, often, might be a really long time (anywhere from a mintue or two to a day or two)
though I wonder if the pain lasts so long sometimes because I am holding back some on the awareness and it isn't until I am able and willing to be utterly open and aware that relief happens. or maybe not.




-michaelmonson

Yes, I've had many sits that were just godawful painful (and I am using the word generically to include fear, grief, and other mental distress as well as physical pain).

When it was nearly unbearable I'd chant "include, include, accept, accept" or "it's just fear, arising and passing away by itself" or just focus on the breath and try to let it flow by.

The fact is, what's the worst that could happen? It hurts like hell? You already feel that. You are familiar with the pain. It's a known quantity. Might get worse? Might last longer?

Just since you like the personal accounts, here's a few including some nasty hard sits and thoughts on time:

"11:50 - huge "attack" of energy while just working at my desk - massive tumult of energies in chest. heart surged with pure longing, massive grief, desire, agony for my HGA (Holy Guardian Angel/inner guru, who tends to seem to disappear during dark night periods). I shrieked and wept ragged howls. neighbors running a power sander, thank goodness, so they didn't think I was being murdered. just sat with it in the brief moments when I had the coherent sense to do so and towards the end. did qi gong grounding afterwards after as I was feeling faint." (if you're feeling mappy, dark night)

next day:

"8:30 - 45 min
feeling really rocky. tension and pain building in heart and throat. realized it's still more grief. massive cry, and completely just in the cry, like a child. weird vision of Christ crucified, which seemed to embody my agony, and I've never really understood that image in any way before, strong vibrations in chest and mouth, gasping. finally eased, wiped the snot off my face, sat quietly for 30 minutes, mild levels of flow of gentle mental bubbling, general tranquility." (more dark night)

that afternoon:
"if the heart held grief, the throat seems to hold rage. fuck this. sigh. I guess that will all come boiling out like an angry pirate's tirade at some point soon. feeling very sullen and passive aggressive. " (desire for deliverance, I'd guess)

a few days later:
"alternating intense soup stream/head thrumming with tranquil periods, both sat with. Even yawned, got sleepy and daydreamed a few times, all sat with. Every once in a while still completely baffled that one can meditate in that way - while sleepiness arises, while a daydream or monkey mind wanders by. Just kind of bizarre. I think that's the first time I've watched a yawn." (equanimity, I'd guess)

next sit:

"immediately into soup stream, surged several times into the most intense all-encompassing vibrations, every cell in my body electric with the most incredible orgasmic energy. and still just sitting with it. it seems it's not only what i experience, what I'm looking at, that is arising and passing away, but my self too, me who is looking at it. and that this present moment actually contains all time - there is no "past" - if I so much as recall anything "past" that's happening now, and so everything in my life seems not linear but built within one moment. sorry dorky, I know. but it was intense. a powerful sense of wonder and bafflement, like all this is just barely grasped, not solid, just a flicker of some understanding that will unfold further. last ten minutes a rising emotion, wept and wept, the way you weep when you come home after too long away. no grief, just heart song." (minor insights)

Ona.

Wow.

The scale of experience you describe is vastly more intense, deep, dramatic and powerful than anything I've ever gone through. And, I have a feeling these desciptions might not be the most intenses periods you've ever had and, that this sequence is not uncommon. Am I right?

My practice feels pretty boring in comparison. I wonder if the kinds of things you describe is in my future? ( I have to admit that I hope not) Or are we all just so different and I'll just continue to have more subtle pedestrian experiences and states while yours might tend to be more intense? We'll see.

I'm glad you shared though, this is the kind of thing that I think is important to know about each other. When someone says "practice" it can really mean very different experiences, can't it?

I mean I've read a lot of accounts of the A&P from people that were huge and wild and I know I had such a thing but mine was more of a buzzy, unitive experience where I just knew that my body was connected to the world and that my brain was full of shit. I think Daniel Ingram saw an angel on a white horse or something.

Mike - having spoken in person to a variety of meditators with different backgrounds, it seems to really be a wide range of experiences, and depend very much on the individual. For whatever weird reason my practices have always been intense in general, and that particular sort of pattern of intensity in meditation went on for a year or so while I was doing an intensive self-retreat while semi-unemployed and working from home. Having settled down into a more "normal" life of sitting once a day, my meditations tend to be quite a bit more mellow now.

I know many people who *never* had that kind of emotional intensity at all, whose experiences in meditation always tended to be quite subtle and "refined". I even know people who practice devotional or mystical practices that involve deities and spirits and visions and such, but still have very subtle and "quiet" meditative experiences, and those subtle and quiet meditative practices have unfolded into profound insights nonetheless. Looking back I would say there's not really any benefit to that kind of intensity, and it just happened that way because that's how my personal history and things in my life came together at a certain point.

I posted that because the last bit was the part I was referring to earlier in the thread about realizing something about time and now-ness; and the first bit showed sitting through fairly intense pain/suffering stuff *can* be sat with, no matter how agonizing it seems at the time. And that even if one is semi-unsuccessful in sitting "perfectly" during difficulties (as I was, floundering along doing my best but certainly not meditating "really well") it still works itself out eventually, so doing your best in the face of challenges is all you can do, and good enough.