Don’t be too conditioned by the past. This is remaining in a kind of bondage. Somebody hearing the word God simply falls on his knees and starts praying, and somebody else cringes. Both are conditioned, nobody is free. If you shudder, if you hesitate, then the word God has immense power over you, negative of course – but it has great power, as much power as it has on the people who go to the churches and the temples. You are conditioned in the negative way, they are conditioned in the positive way. But conditioning is conditioning; whether negative or positive it does not make you free.

Be free. And by being free, free these beautiful words too. Hence I go on using the word God. But to me God is synonymous with love, love is synonymous with life, life is synonymous with existence – these are synonyms. And we have to claim these beautiful words back from the priests and the politicians.

The second question:

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 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: spatio-time.

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.