.
Neither time nor space exists for the man who knows the eternal.
Space and time are real for the man who is yet imperfect and space is divided for him into dimensions, time into past, present and future. He looks behind him and sees his birth, his acquisitions, all that he has rejected. That past is being continually modified by the future which is ever being added to it. From the past man turns his eyes to the future where death, the unknown, the darkness, the mystery, await him.
.
Fascinated by these he can no longer detach himself from them. The mystery of the future holds for him the fulfillment of all his desires, which the past has denied to him, and in his dreams he flies to that brilliant horizon where happiness must exist, where he must seek it.
.
No one will ever pierce the infinite mystery of the future - impenetrable in its evanescent illusion - neither magician, prophet nor God! But on the contrary it will be the mystery which will engulf man, which will not let him escape, which will break the mainspring of his life.
.
Life is not to be approached through the past, nor through the mirage of the future. Life cannot be approached through intermediaries, nor conquered for another.
.
That discovery can only be made in the immediate present - by the individual for himself and not for others - by the individual who has become the eternal "I". That eternal "I" is created by the perfection of the self - perfection in which all things are contained, even human imperfections. Man, not yet having achieved that condition of life in the present, lives in the past which he regrets, lives in the future where he
hopes, but never in the present which he ignores. This is the case with all men.
.
Balanced between the past and the future, the "I" is poised as a tiger ready to spring, as an eagle ready to fly, as the bow at the moment of releasing the arrow.
.
This moment of equilibrium, of high tension, is "creation." It is the fullness of all life, it is immortality.
.
The wind of the desert sweeps away all trace of the traveller.
.
The sole imprint is the footstep of the present. The past, the future... sands blown by the wind.
.
~ J. Krishnamurti
taken from: From Darkness to Light
1929
.