Time

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…

Osho, just one small thing: what’s the significance of the forty-eight minutes in this?

It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. Here it’s not a matter of minutes at all; just pausing for a while is enough.

A friend has asked: Here you keep time for us, so we know when ten minutes are up; at home, how will we know?

It doesn’t matter. Whether it turns out to be eight minutes or twelve instead of ten, there is no difference. Continue by estimation. In five or ten days your estimate will become steady. Our difficulty has arisen because we have made false substitutes; therefore the inner clock is not able to function. Otherwise, there is a biological watch within, and it does work. Why do you start feeling sleepy at eleven or twelve at night? If you get up at six in the morning, or at four, why does sleep break then? If you eat at twelve or one, why does hunger come exactly at one? What is the reason? There is a biological time; inside, a natural process is going on. Just as seasons change—there is no clock and no calendar anywhere—yet they change on time. Evening comes, morning comes; the sun rises and sets on time. In the…

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…