What is time? | Krishnamurti

So, we will now examine time. What is time? And I do not mean the clock, or the sunrise and sunset, the beauty of the sunrise, the beauty of the sunset, nor do I mean light and darkness. So what is time? Please, if one can truly understand this, understand the nature of inner time, one will find within oneself a wonderful sense of no time at all. But we will get to that. Time is the past, isn't it? Time is the future, and time is the present. All this cycle is time. The past – your background, the thoughts that come to you, all that you have gone through before, your experiences, your conditioning as a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, and so on; or you put all these absurdities aside and say: I will live my life this way, and this is also the past. And so the past is the present, isn't it? Without the past, you would not have arrived here: through your background, your conditioning, your mind that has been programmed as a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, and so on. We have been programmed for two thousand years. And the Hindus for three or five thousand years. Like a computer, they repeat and repeat and repeat. The past is the present then; what you are in the present is the result of the past. And tomorrow, or a thousand tomorrows, is the future. And so the future is what you are now. Isn't that so? Did you understand? I shouldn't ask you that, it concerns you. The future is now then. And now contains all time. And this is also a fact, an actual reality, not a theory. Your state, what you are, is the result of the past. And your state tomorrow will be what you are now. If I am violent now, I will be violent tomorrow. Tomorrow then lies dormant in the present, now. That is, unless I make a radical and fundamental change. Otherwise, I will remain and continue to be what I have been until now. We have come a long way in evolution, and we have evolved and evolved and evolved. We have evolved into what we are now. And if you continue this game, you will be violent and barbaric tomorrow as well. So, all time is in the now – this is a fact, and a reality – so can there be a total transformation now, in all our actions, our way of living, our thinking, and our feelings? Without being an American, an Indian, a Buddhist, without all of these. But if one does not make a radical, psychological change, one will remain exactly as one was in the past. Is there then any possibility for one to make this psychological change, at all? You know, when you walk your whole life heading north, following a certain direction; or you walk without any direction, and just roll everywhere, as most people do; if you are heading north, and someone comes and tells you very seriously, and you listen to him seriously, not just with your ears, but also listen deeply; and when you hear him say: The path you are pursuing, north, will lead you nowhere, there is nothing at the end of it; but go east, or west, or south. So you listen and say, I will do that. At that moment you say that, you have changed your direction, and there is a transformation. The speaker puts things very simply. But the problem is very complex, and it is: for one to deeply realize that one has walked this path for centuries, but nothing has changed at all. We are still violent, savage, etc. If one truly grasps this, not intellectually or verbally, but deeply, then one will turn in another direction. And at that moment, there is a radical transformation of the brain cells themselves.