Time Is Psychological, Not Chronological

2.9 Sanjaya said:

Arjuna then said to Krishna, 'Govinda, I shall not fight,' and fell silent.

2.10 Krishna, smilingly spoke the following words to the grief-stricken Arjuna, as they were placed in the middle of both armies.

2.11 Bhagavan said:

You grieve for those that should not be grieved for and yet, you speak words of wisdom.

The wise grieve neither for the living nor for the dead.

2.12 It is not that at anytime in the past I did not exist; so did you and these rulers exist,

And we shall not ever cease to be hereafter.

2.13 Just as the spirit in this body passes through childhood, youth and old age,

So does it pass into another body; the man centered within himself does not fear this.

Even though it is written here in the past tense, I feel Krishna should always be addressed in the present tense. He is still relevant to each of us today. We cannot say, 'Krishna was' but 'Krishna is'; not 'Krishna said' but 'Krishna says'.

Once again, having lamented about what he is being forced to do, and not wishing to do what he is expected to do, Arjuna, like a petulant child sits down saying, 'I am not going to fight.' It is as if Arjuna is waiting to be persuaded.

He is seeking an explanation.

Krishna says to him gently and smilingly, 'While speaking learned words, you are mourning for what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor for the dead.'

Again, Krishna addresses the issue directly, 'O Arjuna! You speak as if you are intelligent, enlightened. You speak the words without having experienced them. Therefore, your words do not carry conviction.

Your emotion, your being, shows that you are not enlightened, that you have not understood, that you have not experienced. A truly enlightened person will never worry for the living or the dead.'

If you worry for somebody living or dead, you cannot be an intelligent person. What is death and life after all? There are thousands, rather millions, who have lived and gone.

Someone once asked me, 'Why is it that natural calamities happen? Why is it that so many people die in wars and calamities? Why is God doing these things and why is God being mean?'

I told him, 'To give you an honest answer, I do not know. But if you insist on an answer, I can give you an answer the next time God calls for a conference. I can ask Him to give me an answer!'

These questions have no answer in Existence. The question is asked from a very low level, from your logic, but God is beyond your logic.

You can never have an answer for these questions.

For example, a small ant asks the elephant, 'Why are you as dark as I am? How is it that we both have the same color skin?' Will the elephant be able to answer? The elephant will not even know that it is being asked this question. He will not even be aware of the ant or it's question!

Likewise, it is important to understand the rules of Existence, of the Divine.

Only the ignorant worry about people who are living or dead. A truly intelligent person does not bother about death.

Often people ask me, 'How was the universe created? Was it by Brahma, as Hindu scriptures say? Or was it created in six days by a nameless God as the Old Testament would have us believe?'

I say to them what Buddha said thousands of years ago based on his personal perception. 'The universe,' Buddha said, 'has neither been created nor will it ever be destroyed. It always has been.'

The universe created itself. It is the creation that embodies the creator and results in what has been created. The universe is the ultimate expression of the non-dual advaitic experience, in which the experience merges with the experiencer and the experienced.

Our questions regarding the 'right' and 'wrong' of what happens around us arise only when they threaten us in some manner or another. These questions, these issues about the morality of the universe, spring forth when our ego is threatened, when our identity is threatened, when our life is threatened.

Every person stricken with an incurable and fatal affliction such as cancer, would invariably ask the question, 'Why me?' If it is a young child, then certainly the parents, relatives and friends are bound to question the justice and fairness of God.

What do we know about the fairness of God? What do we know at all about God? All we know and care about is our own welfare. All we wish is to be secure in the comforts of our own wellbeing and that of our near and dear ones. Any concern about the rest of humanity is only after one's own comfort zone is managed.

The creator is also the destroyer. What is created will be destroyed. We have no agreement with God that when we are born we will be assured of so many years of life along with the knowledge of the timing and nature of our death. We are born into this world with no awareness of why we are here. We will also die with no awareness of when and how. The truth is that simple. We have no birthright to all this information. Birth itself is not our right!

When you truly realize your Self, when you are enlightened, you will be aware of when you will die and how you will die. It will then make no difference to you whether your body is alive or dead. Living and dying are no longer issues in which you feel you need to play a part. They are progressions of nature and being enlightened, you flow with nature.

We are just playing with words when we talk about karma and destiny, saying that they are responsible for everything that happens to us and for everything that we do.

Let me tell you this: We are responsible for what happens to us. We are responsible for what we do. It is a misrepresentation of nature's law to blame nature for what happens to us.

Earthquakes and tsunamis occur because man has plundered nature. Looking for oil and minerals, we have drilled holes tens of thousands of meters into the bowels of the Earth, on land and in the ocean. We have ruthlessly destroyed forests and hills. We have drilled holes through the ozone layer in search of our comfort zone. Then we wonder why nature misbehaves. Nature only behaves, She never misbehaves.

Nature does not guarantee that the person who creates havoc and destroys is the one to suffer in that body. Nature is patient and all knowing. Nature's law strikes without fear or favor. What one generation does to destroy nature may visit upon another generation. From nature's standpoint we never die. We just disappear and reappear. In whichever scene we reappear, we still bear responsibility for what we have done in an earlier scene.

That's why questions of why a ten-year-old should die or contract cancer have neither meaning nor relevance. The ten-year-old is only the reappearance of someone who has been here before and probably will reincarnate to be here again. We are not normally aware of what one has done before and what one is therefore responsible for.

Some people question, 'Is it fair that we are held responsible for what we did in another lifetime and are not even aware of now?'

Who said anything about fairness? What do we know of fairness except what we determine what is fair out of our own selfishness? It is possible to be conscious of what one has done in previous births; it is even possible to have a conscious birth, coming into this world fully conscious and aware. Before that happens, we need to drop our ego and merge with nature. We need to surrender our existence to nature. When we do so, nature responds and opens up.

Sanjaya says Krishna was smiling as He uttered these words. Krishna must have been laughing at Arjuna. 'You fool, you pretend to be wise and quote the scriptures. Who do you think you are quoting the scriptures to? What can you understand of what I, Myself have said?'

Krishna continues: 'Never was there a time when I did not exist or you and all these kings, and never in the future shall any of us cease to be.'

With this verse begins the essence of the whole Gita.

This is the gist of the whole Gita. This is atmagnana, Self Realization. If you can understand this one verse, you can become enlightened straightaway and enter into eternal bliss.

Krishna says there was never a time when I, you and all the kings did not exist. If you think our souls will also die with our bodies, you are wrong. We were there before our birth and this death and will remain after death. It is not true that any of us will not be in the future.

In Zen Buddhism there is a beautiful meditation technique to achieve enlightenment.

You are asked to meditate on the face you had before your birth. The koan or sutra, a technique for meditation says, 'What was your face like before your father and mother were born?'

Upon meditating on this koan you realize that you existed in the past, exist in the present and will exist in the future. Your face and body may change but you continue to exist. Then why do we think we will die and why do we fear death? If what Krishna says is true, why are we worried about this life and about death? You need to first understand the concept of the past, present and future to enable you to understand what Krishna says.

Let me explain this concept first.

Time is like a shaft continuously moving from the future on the right into the past on the left. The future is on your right and the past is on your left. The future is continuously moving into the past; every moment and every second it is turning into the past. The present is the point where the future and the past meet. Your mind as such is nothing but movements between the past and the future.

You cannot have any thoughts if you stop thinking about the past and the future. Your thoughts consist of nothing but the constant movements between past and the future. The more your thoughts shift from past to future or future to past, the higher the frequency of thoughts. The less you shift from past to future or future

to past, less the number of thoughts. Try to think of something in the present, you will find that you cannot. You can think of it only by taking it into the past or future. You are either worrying about the future or remembering the past.

The higher the frequency of thoughts, the more you are caught in the physical and material world.

For example, if you have 100 Thoughts Per Second (TPS), it means you have jumped 100 times between the past and future back and forth in one second. If you have 80 TPS, it means you have jumped that many times between these two dimensions. The higher the frequency, the more you will be away from the present. The higher the frequency of thoughts, the more worries and problems you have. If the number of thoughts reduces, you fall into the present moment.

When your frequency of thoughts is high, you are in the physical body or the annamaya kosha. When the frequency is a little less, you move into a higher energy layer called praanamaya kosha. When your TPS is say 60 (here the reference is just proportional), you move into the mental layer or manomaya kosha or the next layer – pleasure layer or the vignanamaya kosha; you come a little close to the atman. If you fall in the present moment, you are in the inner most layer, that is the anandamaya kosha; you are atman or the soul*.*

The past, present and future, all the three put together are eternal, nithya or atman. Only when you come to the present moment do you experience atman – your true Self, but as of now you are constantly shuttling between the past and future.

The Upanishads talk of these five body layers. The vignanamaya kosha is where the TPS is still less, say 40. When your TPS is very low, say 20, you come to the anandamaya kosha.

When the number of thoughts reduces, you will not even be aware of the passage of time. For example, when you are with someone you love, even two or three hours will seem like a short while. On the contrary, when you are with someone whose company is boring, even a short time seems very long. You will keep glancing at your watch and wondering why time does not move!

Time is more psychological than chronological. That is why, in our scriptures or Vedas, we have the word kshana to describe the unit of time. Kshana does not denote one second, but is defined as the gap or time interval between two thoughts. The larger the kshana, or the gap between two thoughts, the more in the present we are. Each person's kshana will be different depending on how busy their mind is! Normally, our kshana will be in the region of microseconds because we are continuously flooded with thoughts.

When our TPS is lower, we will naturally be in ecstasy, in bliss. When our thoughts are less, we will not know how much time has passed and we live in heaven. When the number of our thoughts is high, we are in hell. Hell and heaven are nothing but the number of thoughts that we entertain, that's all. That is why I say heaven and hell are not geographical places, but psychological spaces.

With a higher frequency of thoughts, you are in hell, caught in the physical layer; you think you are the body. When the frequency of thoughts reduces, you think you are the mind and just emotion and bliss prevail. When the thoughts become zero, you realize you are atman - Self; you are there in the past, present and future. Only a man whose TPS is zero can realize what Krishna says - You will be there forever. The past, present and future are just words; you exist throughout.

But right now the frequency of thoughts is very high. You do not have the patience or the energy to understand who you are, your base and your nature. The moment you fall into the present moment, you experience that you were there in the past, are in the present and will be in the future. Krishna says, 'You were there in the past, you are in the present and you will be in the future; you do not die.'

When He says that, He means that you are nithya atman, eternal consciousness; you are beyond your mind and body. But you are restless and know only this space of moving from past to future, that is why you are unable to believe that this space of the present exists within you. You are away from the present moment, away from the eternal consciousness, therefore unable to see the truth of eternal consciousness*.* The higher the TPS, the farther away you are and from there, you cannot see it clearly. When you come down in your TPS, you can see and experience your nature more clearly, more deeply.

When Krishna says, 'You are the eternal atman', He means that as a being, you are beyond time, but as of now, you are caught in the mind between the past and the future.

He says beautifully, 'There was never a time when I, you and all these kings did not exist. If you think that our souls will also die along with our bodies, you are wrong. We existed before our birth and will remain after our death. It is also not true that any of us will not be in the future.' We will be in the future as there is no death of our being or consciousness. Whatever dies, can never live. Whatever lives can never die.'

Here, your deep consciousness says that something is living in you. This quality you attribute to your body and mind. Do not misunderstand your consciousness to be your body and mind.

You are not the body or the mind. As long as you are caught in the past and the future, you think that you are the body and mind. The moment you come down to the present moment, you experience that you are beyond the body, beyond the mind.

Krishna does not mean that we existed in the form that we are here now or that He was present always as Krishna in the form we imagine Him to be, with a flute in His hand and a peacock feather on His head. He means that our spirits which are eternal, always existed and will always exist. In our spiritual state, that of our atman, we are divine, one with the universal energy, Brahman.

The gist of the second chapter is that you are atman, that you are divine and that you are God.

Even as the spirit resides in this body, the body passes through its seasons of childhood, youth, middle age and old age as the seasons of nature do in each year. Finally, it passes through death, and then reappears, just as trees shed leaves in autumn and produce new leaves in spring.

Transition of the spirit through the body as it ages is no different from the transition of time through the seasons. One does not grieve as one enjoys the pleasures of childhood, youth and middle age. Why then should one grieve the onset of old age and then death?

At death the spirit passes from one body into another body. It has three kshanas to achieve this, each kshana being a time period between thoughts. A person who is in a high thought frequency state, a high TPS (thoughts per second) state, has a much shorter time to shift from one body to another compared to another person whose TPS is low, whose frequency of thoughts is low.

A person in a no-mind, no-thought state has infinite time, as the time between thoughts is infinite. His spirit is at liberty to stay free without taking another body as long as he chooses, or more correctly, as the universe chooses.

All enlightened Masters are in this category. When the spirit leaves the mind-body system, it becomes one with the universal energy.

Imagine a number of circles drawn on a whiteboard. Think of the whiteboard space as the universal energy. Individual body-mind systems are represented by the circles drawn on the whiteboard. The white space enclosed in the circles is the spirit and this is the same energy as the white space outside the circles. The space within is atman, and the space outside is brahman.

When a body mind dies, when an individual dies, all that happens is that these perimeter lines get erased, that is all. The space within the circle merges with the space outside the circle. White merges with white. Energy merges with energy.

When the spirit, the energy, is ready to move into another mind-body system, it enters another circle. It is a continuous, ongoing process and a natural process. One

who understands this process and accepts it is an integrated person. Krishna refers to him as a 'dheera', one who is firm, centered and aware.