For the trees here, there is no time. For the birds singing here, there is no time. For the stars and for the sun and for the earth, there is no time. Time exists because of human desire. If humanity was not on this earth there would be no time: there would be no past and no future.

So don’t think that the past, the future and the present are parts of time; they are not. The past and the future are parts of a desiring mind. Time consists only of the present, the herenow. Time consists only of eternal moments, the eternal moment. Your desire creates the future. Your memory creates the past. They are parts of your mind. Don’t desire, and the future disappears. And when there is no future, how can you be tense? How?

There is no possibility of being tense if there is no future. And if there is no past – if you know that it is simply memory, the dust collected on the way – how can there be any anxiety? With the past, anxiety enters. With the future, plans, imagination, projections, tensions exist. With the past dropped, the future not opened, you are here, now. No anxiety, no tension, no anguish.

Non-ambition means accepting yourself as you are. That doesn’t mean that there is no possibility of growth. No, on the contrary, when you accept yourself as you are, the transformation sets in. You start growing, but the dimension differs. Then the dimension is not in the future, the dimension is in the eternal.

Know well this distinction. You can move in two ways: if you move into the future, you are moving into the mind – a fiction, a dream world. If you don’t move into the future, then a different dimension becomes open for you. From this very moment you are moving into the eternal.

The eternal is hidden in the moment.

If you can be here right now, in the moment, you have entered the eternal. If you go on thinking of the future and the past, you are moving in the temporal. The temporal is the world, and the eternal is nirvana.

Buddha is reported to have said again and again that if you can be in the now, there is no need of any technique to meditate. It is enough. It will do all that is needed. But how can you be in the now if you are ambitious?

The ambitious mind cannot be in the now. It can be anywhere else, but it cannot be in the now. The ambitious mind always moves away from the present. It is thinking of that which is to come, it is thinking of tomorrow. It is thinking of an afterlife, it is not interested in the life that is here. It is interested in something that should be. It is not interested in the is; it is always interested in the ought, in the should. That interest is non-religious. A religious mind, a religious consciousness, is interested in existence as it is. The first sutra is: Kill out ambition totally, so that you can be here and now, so that you can enter the eternal.

The second sutra:

Kill out desire of life.