According to Osho, time is psychological and elastic: in secure, routine “permanent” states it seems to crawl while you live it, yet in memory it feels as if it rushed by. In risky, moment-to-moment awareness, each instant feels intense and fast now, but later remembers as vast and long. Depth of presence stretches retrospective time; surface living compresses it.
Safe and same feels slow now but short later; vivid and uncertain feels fast now but long later.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, if we remain aware within the present—if we don’t think of the next moment and attend only to this one—could it not happen that, after a moment, the next contact that comes will again pass us by?
But where is it now? It isn’t here yet, is it? The moment this moment passes, that moment will become the present. Then you can make full contact. You can only make contact when it... Whenever it comes, it will come as the present; there is no way for it to sneak past. It has to pass right in front of your house; there is no back alley from which a future moment can slip by. Every future moment has to become the present. And if you are aware in the present, you need not worry. Now no moment of time can pass you by without asking. Yes, the reverse can happen: if you are anxious about the future, the present moment can pass by. You won’t even notice. It will have to come into your hands—and you be aware. Hence someone once asked... There was a Sufi fakir, Bayazid.…
Please Osho, what is time?
TIME has two meanings. One is chronological time, the clock's time. I cannot say much about it. You have to ask a physicist; only he can say something about it. That is not my dimension of work. If you ask the physicists, Albert Einstein and others, they will say time is the fourth dimension of space. But that does not make much sense, the mystery remains. The mystery remains as mysterious as it was before Albert Einstein. Saint Augustine is reported to have said, "I know what time is if nobody asks me; if somebody asks me then I don't know." Time is a mysterious quality. Everybody lives in it, everybody feels it, everybody knows it, and yet it is inexplicable. The physicist has come to a certain understanding -- that it is the fourth dimension of space -- but that too does not demystify it. In fact it becomes…
Beloved Osho, from birth onwards, time seemed to me to go faster and faster. But since we left america, just over two months ago, it feels to me like whole lifetimes have passed. Osho, what have you done to time?
"And thirdly, I have a suggestion for you. Your palace is beautiful -- I have been watching it being built; you have made every possible effort to make it absolutely safe -- just one thing is wrong with it." The owner of the palace asked, "What is that?" The beggar said, "You do one thing: you go in and tell your people to remove the door, and make a wall. Then you will be absolutely secure, one hundred percent... because these seven lines of guards are not one hundred percent sure." The king said, "You seem to be mad! If I enclose myself only with walls -- no way to go out, no way to come in -- it will become just a grave." The beggar said, "That's what you have made it -- a grave with a door, nothing much. Just look at me: there is no grave. And…
Beloved Osho, I've been here with you now for two weeks, and find myself not thinking or talking about the place and the people I was with before. If feels as if I have been here for three months or more, so many things have happened. How come that time loses all its meaning when we are with you?
Time is a relative phenomenon. It is nothing absolute, so in different contexts it will have different meanings. You are in pain -- time will look longer. Your tooth is hurting -- seconds will look like minutes, minutes will look like hours. It depends how much the tooth is hurting! In pain you want to finish it, finish this pain, somehow to get rid of it. You don't want to prolong it, so time seems to be long. Christians have never been able to explain why their hell is eternal, and they cannot explain it because the grounds on which they have made it eternal are foolish. If it is punishment, then it is absolutely impossible to prove that somebody has committed so many sins that his punishment is going to be eternal. Bertrand Russell, one of the genius minds of our times, wrote a book, WHY I AM NOT…
Osho, could you say something about what is going on in Delhi?
I’ll tell a little story. When Lanka’s former ruler Ravana was on his deathbed, Rama sent Lakshman to learn statecraft from him—saying, “Son, we may have won, but we have no experience of running the administration here; go and ask him how to run things.” Lakshman went there and said to Ravana, “You are dying now—tell us how to govern here.” Ravana said, “Half the politics I handled, half Kumbhakarna did. Had you gotten in touch with Kumbhakarna as well?” Lakshman said, “Yes—he said: eat to your heart’s content and then sprawl on the sofa with your eyes closed. This is the best method.” “Tell me,” Ravana asked, “are you going to unleash dictatorship, or will you run things by democracy? Which method will be suitable?” “What will go down well with the people?” “Nothing,” said Ravana. “When you impose dictatorship, the people will yearn for democracy; and when you…