According to Osho, time is a horizontal line—A to B to C—where life moves toward death; eternity is vertical, a deepening from A to more A. They meet only in a rare, ripe moment of meditation, when your innermost core awakens. Then you stand at a crossroads, and the timeless penetrates the temporal, transforming ordinary duration into living presence.
Time is like a road you walk, eternity is like going deeper inside, and when you become very quiet within, they meet in the now.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved master, you once said, "the moment is rare when eternity penetrates time." can you speak more on this?
Vadan, the question seems to be simple but the answer is very complex. And the complexity becomes multidimensional, because the answer can come only from your own experience, not from outside. Just as the question is arising in you, the answer has to also be part of your interiority. But I will go into a little detail, to explain what I mean when I say that the moment is rare when eternity penetrates time. Time is that in which we live -- it is horizontal. It is from A to B to C to D; it is in a line. Eternity is vertical. It is not from A to B and from B to C. It is from A to more A to still more A. It goes on upwards. The moment is rare because it happens only when meditation has reached ripening, maturity, when you have touched your innermost…
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…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, AND AN ASTRONOMER SAID, MASTER, WHAT OF TIME? AND HE ANSWERED: YOU WOULD MEASURE TIME THE MEASURELESS AND THE IMMEASURABLE. YOU WOULD ADJUST YOUR CONDUCT AND EVEN DIRECT THE COURSE OF YOUR SPIRIT ACCORDING TO HOURS AND SEASONS. OF TIME YOU WOULD MAKE A STREAM UPON WHOSE BANK YOU WOULD SIT AND WATCH ITS FLOWING. YET THE TIMELESS IN YOU IS AWARE OF LIFE'S TIMELESSNESS, AND KNOWS THAT YESTERDAY IS BUT TODAY'S MEMORY AND TOMORROW IS TODAY'S DREAM. AND THAT THAT WHICH SINGS AND CONTEMPLATES IN YOU IS STILL DWELLING WITHIN THE BOUNDS OF THAT FIRST MOMENT WHICH SCATTERED THE STARS INTO SPACE. WHO AMONG YOU DOES NOT FEEL THAT HIS POWER TO LOVE IS BOUNDLESS?
You ask: “Are lust, anger, greed, and attachment merely shadows of time?”
Only desire is the shadow of time. You can call desire the shadow of time or time the shadow of desire. It is more accurate to say that time is the shadow of desire. If desire drops, time drops. If time drops, desire too drops. But your effort has to be to let desire drop—because at the very root is desire, the wanting: something is needed! As I am, I am not content; I must become something else! There is the seed of desire. What I have is not enough; I must get more! The world as it is will not do; it should be otherwise, in accord with my dreams. My mind is not delighted. If there is even a trace of discontent, desire has arisen. In the expanding of that desire, time also arises. It is better to say desire and time are two sides of the same…
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] Man can live on two planes: either in time or in eternity. Time is constantly changing it is movement, it is flux. Heraclitus is right about time when he says you cannot step in the same river twice. No moment in time cones back -- it is gone and gone forever. Everything that lives in time is temporary, everything that is born in time is bound to die. Our body belongs to time; one day it was not there, one day again it will not be there. Our mind also belongs to time. Mind is created by experiences, knowledge and all that is given by the society, the older generation -- the parents, the teachers, the priests. Mind is also going to die.