“All significant people come ahead of their time, but Krishna came too far ahead. Perhaps only in some future period will we be able to understand him; the past could not do so.

And remember, we begin to worship those we fail to understand in their lifetimes. We worship those who perplex and defeat our ability to understand them. We either praise or slander them, but both praise and slander are kinds of worship. We worship friends with praise and we worship enemies with slander. It is all the same. One who defies our judgment, we call him a god or God-incarnate. It is really difficult to accept one's ignorance; it is easier to call him a god or God-incarnate. But these are the two sides of the same coin. Such a person is God-like in the sense that we don't understand him, just as we don't understand God. This person is as unknowable and as mysterious as God himself. Despite our best efforts he, like God, ever remains to be known. And all such people become objects of worship.

It is precisely for this reason that I chose Krishna for discussion. He is, in my view, the most relevant, the most significant person in the context of the future. And in this regard, I would like to go into a few things.

With the exception of Krishna, all the remarkable people of the world, the salt of the earth like Mahavira, Buddha, and Christ, stood for some other world, for a life in some other world. They set distant things like the attainment of heaven and liberation as goals for man's life on this earth. In their day, life on this earth was so miserable and painful it was nearly impossible to live. Man's whole past was so full of want and hardship, of struggle and suffering, that it was hard to accept life happily. Therefore all the religions in the past denied and denounced life on this earth.

In the whole galaxy of religious luminaries Krishna is the sole exception who fully accepts the whole of life on this earth. He does not believe in living here for the sake of another world and another life. He believes in living this very life, here on this very earth. Where moksha, the freedom of Buddha and Mahavira, lies somewhere beyond this world and this time -- there and then -- Krishna's freedom is here and now. Life as we know it never received such deep and unconditional acceptance at the hands of any other enlightened soul.

In times to come there is going to be a considerable reduction in the hardship and misery of life in this world and a corresponding increase in its comfort and happiness. And so, for the first time, the world will refuse to follow those who renounced life. It is always an unhappy society that applauds the creed of renunciation; a happy society will refuse to do so. Renunciation and escape from life can have meaning in a society steeped in poverty and misery, but they hold no appeal for an affluent and happy society. A man can very well tell an unhappy society that since there is nothing here except suffering and pain, he is going to leave it -- but he cannot tell the same thing to an affluent society; there, it will make no sense.

Religions believing in renunciation will have no relevance in the future. Science will eliminate all those hardships that make for life's sufferings. Buddha says that life from birth to death is a suffering. Now pain can be banished. In the future, birth will cease to be painful both for the mother and for the child. Life will cease to be painful; disease can be removed. Even a cure for old age can be found, and the span of life considerably lengthened. The life span will be so long that dying will cease to be a problem; instead people will ask, "Why live this long?"

All these things are going to happen in the near future. Then Buddha's maxim about life being an unending chain of suffering will be hard to understand. And then Krishna's flute will become significant and his song and dance will become alive. Then life will become a celebration of happiness and joy. Then life will be a blossoming and a beauty.

In the midst of this blossoming the image of a naked Mahavira will lose its relevance. In the midst of this celebration the philosophy of renunciation will lose its luster. In the midst of this festivity that life will be, dancers and musicians will be on center-stage. In the future world there will be less and less misery and more and more happiness. That is how I see Krishna's importance ever on the ascent.

Up to now it was difficult to think that a man of religion carried a flute and played it. We could not imagine that a religious man wore a crown of peacock feathers and danced with young women. It was unthinkable that a religious man loved somebody and sang a song. A religious man, of our old concept, was one who had renounced life and fled the world. How could he sing and dance in a miserable world? He could only cry and weep. He could not play a flute; it was impossible to imagine that he danced.

It was for this reason that Krishna could not be understood in the past; it was simply impossible to understand him. He looked so irrelevant, so inconsistent and absurd in the context of our whole past.

But in the context of times to come, Krishna will be increasingly relevant and meaningful. And soon such a religion will come into being that will sing and dance and be happy. The religions of the past were all life-negative, defeatist, masochistic and escapist. The religion of the future will be life-affirming. It will accept and live the joys that life brings and will laugh and dance and celebrate in sheer gratitude.

In view of this immense possibility for a good life in the future I have chosen to talk about Krishna. Of course it will be difficult for you to understand Krishna, because you are also conditioned, heavily conditioned by the misery of life in the past. You have, up to now, associated religion with tears and not with flutes.

Rarely have you come across a person who took to sannyas out of life's joys. Normally, when a man's wife died and his life became miserable, he turned to sannyas as an escape from his misery. If someone lost his wealth, went bankrupt and could not bear it, he took to sannyas in sheer despair. An unhappy person, a person ridden with sorrow and pain, escaped into sannyas. Sannyas stemmed from unhappiness and not from happiness. No one comes to sannyas with a song in his heart.

Krishna is an exception to the rule. To me he is that rare sannyasin whose sannyas is born out of joy and bliss. And one who chooses sannyas for the joy of it must be basically different from the general breed of sannyasins who come to it in misery and frustration.

As I say that the religion of the future will stem from bliss, so I also say that the sannyas of the future will flow from the joy and ecstasy of life. And one who chooses sannyas for the joy of it must be basically different from the old kind of sannyasin who left the world simply out of despair. He will take sannyas not because his family tortures him, but because his family is now too small for his expanding bliss -- and so he adopts the whole world as his new family. He will accept sannyas not because his love turns sour, but because one person is now too small to contain his overflowing love -- and he has to choose the whole earth as the object of his love.

And they alone can understand Krishna who understands this kind of sannyas that flows from the acceptance of life, from the juice and bliss of life.

If someone in the future says he took sannyas because he was unhappy we will ask him, "How can sannyas come from unhappiness?" The sannyas that is born out of unhappiness cannot lead to happiness and bliss. The sannyas that arises from pain and suffering can at best lessen your suffering, but it cannot bring you joy and bliss. You can, of course, reduce your suffering by moving away from the situation, but you cannot achieve joy and bliss through it. Only the sannyas, the Ganges of sannyas that is born out of bliss, can reach the ocean of bliss -- because then all the efforts of the sannyasin will be directed towards enhancing his bliss.

Spiritual pursuit in the past was meant to mitigate suffering, it did not aim at bliss. And, of course, a traveler on this path does succeed, but it is a negative kind of success. What he achieves is a kind of indifference to life, which is only unhappiness reduced to its minimum. That is why our old sannyasins seem to be sad and dull, as if they have lost the battle of life and run away from it. Their sannyas is not alive and happy, dancing and celebrating.

To me, Krishna is a sannyasin of bliss. And because of the great possibility and potential of the sannyas of bliss opening up before us, I have deliberately chosen to discuss Krishna. It is not that Krishna has not been discussed before. But those who discussed him were sannyasins of sorrow, and therefore they could not do justice to him. On the contrary, they have been very unjust to him. And it had to be so.

If Shankara interprets Krishna, he is bound to misinterpret him; he is the antithesis of Krishna. His interpretation can never be right and just. Krishna could not be rightly interpreted in the past, because all the interpreters who wrote about him came from the world of sorrow. They said that the world is unreal and false, that it is an illusion, but Krishna says this world is not only real, it is divine. He accepts this world. He accepts everything; he denies nothing. He is for total acceptance -- acceptance of the whole. Such a man had never trod this earth before.”

“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 even more mysterious. We have never thought of space and time as one; now physicists say that they are not two. They use a single word for both: spatiotime.

But that is not my world, science is not my world. There is another meaning of time, and whenever I use the word 'time' I use it in that other sense -- psychological time -- which has significance, more significance than chronological time.

What is psychological time? Mind is psychological time. Mind is time. If you don't have any mind and you are simply silent with no thought moving within, there is no time for you, not psychological time. The clock will go on moving, but for you the inner clock stops -- time stops, the world stops. That is my dimension, the dimension of meditation.

As you go deeper into meditation time disappears. When meditation has really bloomed there is no time found. It happens simultaneously: when the mind disappears time disappears. Hence down the ages the mystics have said that time and mind are nothing but two aspects of the same coin. Mind cannot live without time and time cannot live without mind. Time is a way for the mind to exist.

Mind creates future through desire, through dreaming. The future does not exist, it is only in imagination, and mind creates the past. The past also does not exist, it is only in the memory. The past is no more, the future is not yet, but both exist in the mind. And because of the past and the future you have the feeling of time.

Time is not divided into three parts as it is usually divided. Mystics divide time into two parts: the past and the future. Time has only two tenses: past, future. And what about the present? Mystics say the present is timeless because the present is mindless. When you are utterly in the present, herenow, there is neither mind nor time. You transcend time and mind both, you enter into eternity. You are beyond time. You are in a totally different world -- transformed, transmuted, transported.

When I talk about time I mean this time that is created by the mind. Mind clings with the past and clings with the future. It is not ready to renounce the past, it is not ready to die to the past, because it is in the past that it can have its roots. And it is not ready to renounce desiring, dreaming, because it is in desiring and dreaming that it can live. It needs space; it creates a very false space for itself: tomorrow, which never comes. Mind knows of yesterdays and tomorrows, and nothing of today.

Hence all the Buddhas have insisted, "Live in this moment." To live in this moment is meditation, to be simply herenow is meditation. Those who are simply herenow this very moment with me are in meditation. This is meditation: the cuckoo calling from far away, and the airplane passing, and the crows and the birds. And all is silent, and there is no movement in the mind -- you are not thinking of the past and you are not thinking of the future. Time has stopped, the world has stopped.

Stopping the world is the whole art of meditation. And to live in the moment is to live in eternity. To taste the moment with no idea, with no mind, is to taste immortality.

Time is mind. Time is death. Going beyond time is going beyond mind and beyond death.

But if you want to know about chronological time you have to ask a physicist; that is not my concern. Psychological time is my basic concern. That's my whole work here: to help you get out of psychological time.”