Question: Where do we get the sensation of time? Why is this sensation very precise, really down to the minute or second in one person and in another person a sensation of time doesn’t exist at all?

Answer: It depends upon the development of the desire to enjoy. If I want enjoyment, then I divide my desire into fractions of a second to fill every fraction of a second with fulfillment, with pleasure. And so the feeling of time is important to me.

Life never feels long because I can fill it with many pleasures, with a wide range of variables: food, sex, family, money, respect, and knowledge. And then 80 years of life is only a short time for me, even a thousand years would not be enough do to everything.

Question: Sometimes we perceive time as a negative phenomenon: With time things go bad, crumble, and our bodies get old. But on the other hand, time can be beneficial because it heals, appeases, and completes. How do you perceive time: as a good or bad phenomenon?

Answer: Time depends on what I fill it with. And first of all it is necessary to understand how I can manage time, and not to let time manage me. I don’t agree with such sayings like “time heals all wounds” and you need to accept things with more serenity, as if this time is something found outside of me. This is the sort of attitude of weak people who don’t know how to manage their time. With this attitude toward time we invite a lot of unpleasantness upon ourselves.

Time should be under our control and we must rise above it. And this doesn’t mean prolonging life to 100 years thanks to successes in biology or genetics. For then even 200 years will not be enough for us and life will seem as if it is too short.

A person who lived 500 years ago didn’t feel that the 30 years of his life were shorter, but rather, were even longer than a person who lives 80 years today. So I don’t think that it is worthwhile for us to advance in this direction. We simply need to rise above the concept of time, and this is what managing it is.

Time depends upon whether I get more or less pleasure. Changes in my desire for pleasure create a sensation of the passing of time for me. But if I were to feel some pleasure regularly with an unchanging desire, then I would not feel myself alive at all. I would lose not only the sensation of time but the sensation of life in general.

This is because no changes would occur in me, and without changes there is no feeling of being alive. Life is not just some kind of feeling, but rather a difference between one state and another. If the states don’t change, then that state continues all the time and I don’t feel myself as existing.

It follows that the feeling of time is an internal concept, emotional and completely subjective. All that I must do is change my senses (the tools of perception), the whole inner program that operates in me today as in every living body. If I rise above this program and begin to function differently, not for the need to fulfill my desire for pleasure, not to live from what comes to me, but to fulfill myself by myself and to manage my fulfillments, then I become the master of time. For this we only need to rise above our egoistic desire, to stop depending on it.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 4/17/14

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